Name
Diana Mary Cooper
Conflict
Second World War
Date of Death / Age
25/10/1945
23
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Nurse
W/552169
Voluntary Aid Detachment
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
KRANJI WAR CEMETERY
7. B. 20.
Singapore
Headstone Inscription
None
UK & Other Memorials
Hitchin Town Memorial, Hitchin Roll of Honour 1939 – 1945 (Book) St Mary’s Church, Hitchin
Biography
She was born on the 22nd March 1924 and served in the SQ Herts Voluntary Aid Detachment with the Service Number W/552169. She did basic first aid and nursing at Chalkdell Hospital, Hitchin in 1938. Later she did nursing at the North Herts & South Beds Hospital. In April 1944 she answered an appeal by Lady Mountbatten, whose husband Lord Louis Mountbatten was Supreme Commander Southeast Asia, for V.A.D.s to serve in India and beyond. The recruiting was arranged through the Red Cross and St. John's Joint War Organisation. 250 of them left the Clyde on the troopship ‘Strathnaver’ in June 1944. The ship took them through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal arriving in Bombay on the 15th August 1944. She then went by ambulance train to Calcutta and went initially to the Lorreta Catholic Convent at Entali then on to 91st IGH(C) hospital at Sylhet in Assam. Early in 1945 she was posted to the 3rd Neurosurgical unit at Comilla in Bengal. Immediately after the Japanese surrender she was posted to a Casualty Clearing Station in Johore, Malaya to assist the British ex-prisoners-of-war who had been so shamefully treated by the Japanese. Many of them had to be nursed locally before they were fit enough to travel home.
On the day of her death she was travelling in a jeep and it overturned and she suffered extensive head injuries. She died four days later in the Johore ABIGH(C) hospital 47 BGH where she served. She was buried in Plot 7, Row B, Grave 20 in Kranje War Cemetery, Singapore. The crest on her headstone is that of the British Red Cross Society. Another V.A.D. nurse, whose home was in Cambridge, was killed in the same incident.
She was the daughter of Walter and Dorothy Cooper of Hitchin.
Acknowledgments
David C Baines – ‘Hitchin’s Century of Sacrifice’, Mrs Audrey Thorne, her sister, Mrs Greta Underwood, V.A.D. colleague, India Office MN 10068/2 - DEC 3. Paper 1995 by Hilda Nield former Asst Liaison Officer of the Joint Organisation, Mrs A. Hope, photograph of grave taken Dec 1995
