Captain, Royal Engineers
Born: June 16th 1922
Died: January 6th 1945
Age at Death: 22
Killed in Burma, January 6th 1945
House Prefect 1940
1st 15 1939-1940
3rd 11 1940
Born on 16 June 1922 in India to Violet Phillips (née Gordon, great-niece of General Charles Gordon, the iconic Victorian hero killed at Khartoum) and Major Herbert Phillips, Kenneth, known to all as David, joined the College in 1936, becoming House Prefect and a member of the 1st XV. He played soldiers continually as a little boy. Not content to wait for his 18th birthday, when he could become a soldier in the main army, he did a spell in the Home Guard while awaiting his call-up papers with the Royal Engineers. He then volunteered to go to Burma. Phillips was killed in an ambush while on reconnaissance near Budalin in January 1945, in the first of five days of bitter fighting to capture the town from the Japanese. His younger sister Josephine later recalled the moment when David’s death was confirmed:
I was in my darkened bedroom early one morning when I heard my mother coming up the stairs, sobbing, ‘Oh God, it’s all over.’ I took the telegram from her hand. The War Office regretted that her son, Captain K.D.G. Phillips, R.E., had been killed in action at Budalin, Burma, on the 6th of January 1945. She clung to me, saying ‘I always knew I was going to lose him. I’m so glad I’ve got you, you are so like him.’ Like him, perhaps, but never in a million years would I have his courage.
His commanding officer, Major Prichard, wrote to his parents:
Our memory of David will always be of a keen officer, bounding with energy, who, not being content with life in a depot, asked to be sent to a theatre of operations.
His family received many letters from College staff. Josephine’s favourite was from David’s housemaster’s daughter, Anne Corbett, who recalled:
Everywhere that David was, all was gaiety and laughter, and that is how I shall remember him.
He is buried in the Taukkyan War Cemetery in Myanmar (Burma).