I found the attached memoir by General Tuker among his papers in the Imperial War Museum. It is not dated but as he refers to himself as ‘Lieutenant General Tuker’ in the title it was probably written after he retired. Like many of his writings it has a slightly disjointed narrative thread but nonetheless gives some interesting insights into what tours of duty on the North-West Frontier were like and his own critical views of how operations there were conducted.
As I record in my book Gurkha Odyssey it was the lessons that Tuker inculcated into his Battalion for the campaigns of the NW Frontier – its forward policy and his mantras of secrecy and surprise that were to reap subsequent dividends in the Western Desert. Tuker’s thinking had already caught the eye of forward thinking soldiers in Delhi such as Auchinleck and ensured that Tuker would be the Battalion’s Divisional commander in North Africa.