Notes for: Derrick FOSKETT
Wednesday, Jul 31, 1946
Major D Foskett and Miss J Lightburn
The engagement is announced between Major Derrick Foskett RAMC, only son of Dr and Mrs S Foskett of Killinghall, Harrogate, and Joan, only daughter of Mr and Mrs J E Lightburn of Ingatestone, Essex
Friday, Apr 29, 1949
FOSKETT:LIGHTBURN - On April 23rd 1949 at Ingatestone, Essex, Derrick Foskett, MA, MB, Bchir, MRCP to Joan Lightburn.
Doctor (St Thomas' approx 1938) then MRCP (1950?) then FRCP (1980s)
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Obituary - Daily Telegraph 04 Feb 2008
Captain Derrick Foskett , who has died aged 93, was an army doctor who was captured on his first patrol in the desert, and then escaped for five months in Italy before being retaken by the Germans.
After setting up a regimental aid post on an escarpment outside Tobruk, he came under heavy fire from Rommel's advancing army in May 1942, and received an order to hold out to the last man and then to pull back immediately. He managed to commandeer a truck but next morning it was ambushed. It prompted him to tear off his Red Cross armband, pull out his revolver and shout "Come on, men, follow me", before rushing into a wadi. A private who was present wrote a letter from his prison camp to Foskett's parents, saying that their son had probably been captured; it reached their home after his trunk had arrived, labelled "Deceased Officer's Kit".
Over the next six days Foskett walked unknowingly though a minefield, and gradually became separated from his men. He was seeing mirages when an Arab boy brought him food and water, but after a night in a cave, he emerged to be taken by a German patrol.
He was sent first to Tobruk, where he came under RAF fire in the hospital, then to Caserta, where he learned Italian and read Anna Karenina twice. When the Italians surrendered he and some friends decided to ignore orders to remain in camp. He cut through the wire only to come under fire from Germans waiting in the dusk. Next morning he found himself free and unwounded, but in a shrub outside the commandant's house, where two boys urinated over him. Eventually he staggered away to a farm, which gave him food and civilian clothes.
Instead of trying to meet the Allied armies in the south he headed north, travelling along mountain tracks at night while drinking from streams and being sheltered by peasants on poor farms. But when he reached the Pescara river he developed flu, which prevented him from swimming across, and returned to recuperate at a mill where he had stayed earlier; it was there that a German patrol found him hiding up the chimney at 3am.
Foskett was transferred to several more camps in Germany and Slovakia before being asked to help distribute Red Cross food parcels as the war ended. Accompanied by a well-connected German officer who spoke excellent English, and with a Gestapo pass which opened all doors, he toured the broken country in his British uniform. Commandeering an abandoned German staff car, he offered a lift to two female interpreters fleeing the Russians before arriving in Brussels with "PoWS GOING HOME" painted on the car. The son of a medical missionary who later became a GP in Yorkshire, Derrick Foskett was born at Ootacamund, India, on August 18 1914 and educated at Haileybury and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He spent a year at Harrogate General Hospital before becoming surgeon to the passenger ship Hector, which was requisitioned in China by the Royal Navy on the declaration of war.
He was offered a commission as a surgeon-lieutenant but, after meeting a friend in the Poona Horse at Bombay, switched to the Army and joined the RAMC. He narrowly escaped a bomb which destroyed his local garage at Kingston, and was in a ship that was hit on the way out to Bombay, from where he was posted to Basra before being sent to North Africa.
After the war Foskett worked for the World Health Organisation, treating tuberculosis in Tunisia, and returned home to become a consultant in respiratory diseases at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading. During his long retirement he enjoyed long walks with a sandwich in his pocket and binoculars at the ready to watch birds.
Derrick Foskett married, in 1949, Joan Lightburn; she died in 1992, and he is survived by a son and two daughters.
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Joint executor of his mother's will in 1963 together with his uncle Bartholomew Foskett
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Obituary (part) BMJ
Derrick Foskett was born in India, the son of a medical missionary who later became a general practitioner in Yorkshire, and was educated at Haileybury and Selwyn College, Cambridge.
During the second world war he was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was captured on his first patrol in the desert. He later escaped from a prison camp in Italy and was free for five months before being retaken by the Germans. At the end of the war he was asked to help distribute Red Cross parcels, and he then, accompanied by a German Officer with a Gestapo pass, toured the defeated German countryside in his British uniform.
After the war he worked for the World Health Organization treating tuberculosis in Tunisia then continued working with tuberculosis back in England at Peppard Chest Hospital, South Oxfordshire. When this closed he moved to Battle Hospital, Reading, as a chest physician. .