Lieutenant Colonel John Alan Edward MULGAN MC (1933)

Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, attached to Force 133, Special Operations Executive
Born 31 December 1911 in Christchurch, New Zealand
Died 26 April 1945, aged 33
Buried at Heliopolis War Cemetery, Egypt.

John Mulgan was the elder son of Alan Edward Mulgan, a well-known journalist and author, and Marguerita, née Pickmere. In 1937 he married Angela Gabrielle, née Wanklyn.

He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 31 December 1911, and was educated at Wellington College and Auckland Grammar School, and at Auckland University College, where he took an arts degree in 1933.

He came to Merton to read English (with Edmund Blunden as his tutor), played rugby in the College XV, and took a first class degree in 1935. That year he joined the staff of the Clarendon Press in Oxford and was engaged in editorial work on English studies, though he also wrote articles for New Zealand papers on European affairs, and attended a session of the League of Nations as an observer for the New Zealand Government.

In 1938 he brought out a verse anthology, Poems of Freedom, and the following year his novel Man Alone was hastily completed and published: plates and stock were destroyed by bombing in London and the book was not widely read in New Zealand until its reissue in 1949.

Before the outbreak of war Mulgan held a commission in a territorial battalion of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry; he therefore served throughout the war with British units, including the Royal West Kent Regiment in North Africa, and Force 133 in German-occupied Greece. He was awarded the MC for his operations with the partisans in Thessaly and the Pindus mountains.

He took his own life on 26 April 1945 in Cairo, Egypt. At the time he held the rank of lieutenant colonel.