Two NPBHS soldiers fought in forgotten campaign
Wednesday, 11 March 2026
A New Zealand Remembrance Army researcher has found two former students of New Plymouth Boys’ High School were part of a forgotten campaign on India’s north west frontier.
The New Zealand Remembrance Army founder Simon Strombom said one of their researchers, and trustees, military historian Mark Brewer had discovered the campaign, which had been forgotten.
“And it involved New Zealanders, two were from Taranaki. And both from New Plymouth Boys’ High School.”
William Norman Leech was wounded and Alister Morphett Sutherland died of enteric fever in a campaign along India’s north west frontier with Afghanistan.
Strombom has put a poppy on Sutherland’s “memorial” headstone in Manaia.
It’s early days, but the “rough plan” was to put Sutherland’s name on the gates at Boys’ High at Anzac Day next year, Strombom said.
“And Mark wants to talk to the Ministry of Culture and Heritage because it's not on any national war memorial.”
Both Leech, who died in 1983, and Sutherland, went to the Royal Australian Military College Duntroon for officer training during World War I, he said.
They missed that war, but went to India after they had finished their training.
New Zealand contributed troops to help quell a Pashtun insurgency along India’s north west border with Afghanistan in Waziristan from 1919 to 1921, Brewer discovered.
Lieutenant Sutherland had been attached to the 21st (Empress of India’s) Lancers, a cavalry unit in garrison in Meerut, Delhi.
Their presence in the city was critical to countering simmering tensions and the influence of agitators, Brewer found in his research.
Sutherland who was “extremely popular with all ranks” died of enteric fever in Delhi on 28 August 28, 1920.
A telegram was sent to his father Major Thomas Sutherland of the Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles in Manaia.
He was later described as “one of the best potential battle leaders New Zealand ever bred,” Brewer wrote in his account of the campaign.
Leech, who contracted malaria during his time in India and was later shot in the heel, wrote an account of his journey to Waziristan that was published in the Taranaki Herald, in August 1920.
A notice in the Hāwera and Normanby Star in March 1921, said Leech had returned home from India and would soon go to Christchurch to work with the New Zealand Defence Force.
The rediscovery of the campaign’s Taranaki connection comes just two weeks after Remembrance Army researchers found the unmarked grave of All Black number one James Allan in Hāwera Cemetery.