‘Blasphemy and Filth'

Hankey arrived at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in the autumn of 1901 while the fighting still went on in South Africa. The assertion that he was miserable at ‘the Shop’ is made in a memoir that Hilda retrieved in 1916 or early 1917, an extract from which she included in the second, posthumous, volume of A Student in Arms. ¹ In a biographical note to this volume, she observes that at Woolwich her brother was ‘a perfectly sound and healthy, well-grown boy’ and that ‘a friend who was with him at “the Shop” says he can remember no apparent trace of unhappiness, and is full of tales of his jokes and his fun.’ ²