H.E. Hebbert collection

Henry Eric Hebbert (1893-1980) was born in Dalhousie, a hill station in the Punjab, on 20 September 1893. He was educated at private schools in Reigate and Crowthorne in Berkshire before attending Wellington College. He proceeded to the Royal Military College, Woolwich, where he received a Sapper's Commission in August 1914. He went to France in early 1915 with the 12th Division of the Royal Engineers, and was later given the command of the 21st Division, ending the war as a Lieutenant Colonel. After the war Hebbert was second in command, and subsequently in charge of, a program for training Sapper Officers in Cambridge. He spent four years at Cambridge as a member of Gonville and Caius College, taking an Honours Degree in Engineering and an M.A. In 1924 he took up a position with the Sudan Public Works Department, first in Khartoum, and then at Port Sudan as Divisional Engineer in charge of the Red Sea Province, extending from the Egyptian border to the Eritrean frontier. He became Director of the Post and Telegraph Department, giving him responsibility for the whole of Sudan, and retired in 1945. Hebbert married Anne Mathews in 1933. During World War Two he served as a full Colonel with the Yugoslav partisans, retiring to his family home in Somerset in 1946. He died on 15 March 1980.

Photographs, slides, journals, notes, panoramas, maps and plans relating to Hebbert's time in Africa, with some biographical material.

Presented by Mr R. Hebbert, June 2002.

Please cite as Cambridge University Library: Royal Commonwealth Society Library, H.E. Hebbert collection, RCMS 120

MSS Addenda, vol. I. Indexed

This collection level description was created by RAS using information from the original typescript catalogue.