Our furthest challenge has been fulfilled. On a December summer morning in far-flung New Zealand , a Thame Remembers cross was delivered to the grave of George Bertie Parker in Karori Cemetery, Wellington.
Sergeant Parker, born in Oxford in 1866, a pupil at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, and an athletics blue at Oxford, left the UK to serve with the British South Africa Company.
His career spanned the telegraph industry, gold mining, and organising the Matabele Police under Mr Cecil Rhodes, before venturing to New Zealand in 1909.
He enlisted with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1915, serving on the home front in a training unit, before dying from an unknown illness in 1917.