Captain, Indian Army
Born: July 12th 1919
Died: December 19th 1941
Age at Death: 22
Killed on active service, December 19th 1941
House Prefect 1937
Boxing 8 1936-1937
Shooting 8 1937
2nd 15 1937-1938
It was always likely that John Paton would choose a career in the military as he was the son of an army officer, Ramsay Paton, and grandson of Sergeant Major William Paton, one of the heroes who saved the guns from the Afghans at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880.
Born on 12 July 1919 in Farnham, Surrey, to Marianne Paton (née Bowring), John represented the school in the Shooting VIII and Boxing VIII, fighting as a ‘slight but plucky’ paperweight with an excellent straight left. He also won prizes for English and Geography.
In 1938 he trained as an officer at Sandhurst. On passing out he joined the 13th Frontier Rifles of the Indian Army, which, as Britain’s war in Asia began in 1941, found itself attacked by Japanese forces in Malaya.
On 18 December Japanese forces ambushed three of his battalion’s armoured carriers while they were on patrol. Paton was part of the force detailed to retrieve them, but was mortally wounded in the fighting, and died in hospital a day later. On the day of his death, when his Sikh orderly had remonstrated with him for exposing himself to danger unnecessarily, he had laughingly replied that the Japanese had not made the bullet that would kill him. Describing the incident, his commanding officer wrote afterwards:
Paton was put on a stretcher, wonderfully brave and cheerful, so much so in fact that I did not realize how seriously he had been hit.
Paton is buried in the Taiping War Cemetery in Perak, Malaysia.