Reginald Stamp, Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars

The following notes are abridged from draft text for the forthcoming publication “They were a Wall – Wheatley in a World at War 1914-19”

Reginald Weller Stamp, born in Wheatley in 1884, son of Charles Frederick Stamp, grocer, born in Cheltenham, and Sarah Anne Harriet née Weller, born in Woodstock.  The family were living on High Street in 1891.  In 1901 Reginald was a butcher’s apprentice, boarding at 30 South Street in Oxford’s St Thomas’ parish.  The Oxford Chronicle of 18 June 1915 shows that he enlisted in the Hussars, also known as the Oxfordshire Yeomanry.  According to the Medal Rolls Index Cards his Regimental Nos. were 2815 and 285730.  He trained at Tidworth Cavalry Depot from July to December of that year and was assigned to France in January 1916.

Corporal  Stamp had to clean, jump, race, feed and constantly re-deploy columns of Hussar horses in the rear echelon.  Largely unused after 1914, until Cambrai 1917 and Amiens 1918, horses still needed care.

He was a horse-whisperer before he became an Hussar.  At 23, in 1907, he and one assistant had delivered 17 horses to Yokohama, by Japanese steamer, via Antwerp.  Immediately after training, he was made up to corporal.

Uniquely, of the nearly two hundred Wheatley men who served, Reginald Stamp’s active service correspondence survives and is held in the Wheatley Village Archive.  It consists mainly of letters from 1915 to 1919 to his fiancée Annie Hawtin, whom he married in June 1919 in Chipping Norton.  Reginald was buried in Wheatley Churchyard in 1944 and at the time had been living at 60 High Street, Wheatley.