Martin Willoughby Parr
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Martin Willoughby Parr (22 November 1892 - 15 June 1985), CBE (1944, OBE 1929), was Governor of the British administered province of Equatoria in the Sudan.
Martin Parr was the son of the Rev. Willoughby Chase Parr and Laura, daughter of Colonel Francklyn, Speen Hill Lodge, Newbury. He was educated at Winchester (Scholar) and Brasenose College, Oxford (Scholar) where he read Greats. He played Rugby football for Oxford University 1913-14, and had a half-blue for rifle shooting, 1913-14.
He was commissioned in the Highland Light Infantry at the start of the First World War in 1914 and served in France 1914-15 and in Palestine 1917-18, returning to France in 1918. He lost an eye during the Battle of Neuve Chapelle.
He joined the Sudan Political Service in 1919 and became Private Secretary to the Governor-General, 1927-33 and Deputy Civil Secretary, 1933-34.
He became Governor of the Upper Nile, 1934-36; and Governor of Equatoria, 1936-42. He retired from the Sudan in 1942 and lived the rest of his life in London.
He was Vice-President of the National Association of Boys Clubs, working particularly with the Crown & Manor boys' club in Hoxton. His obituary in The Times mentions "an early tendency to compare the Hoxton boys with his beloved Dinka tribesmen, initially somewhat to the disadvantage of the former". He was also on the Foundation Committee of the Gordon Boys' School, Woking (now called Gordon's School).
He was a prominent member of the congregation of the Temple Church, Vice President of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and Vice President of the Church Missionary Society.
He was an Alderman of the London County Council (Conservative) 1954-61.
He was unmarried.
[edit] References
- Who Was Who
- Obituary in The Times 28 June 1985
- Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934 M W Daly, Cambridge University Press (2004)
- Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918-1956, Yale University Press (1983)
