Much-loved Royal Star and Garter resident Jack Ovens dies, aged 108

A resident of Surbiton’s Royal Star and Garter home, believed to be the 49th oldest person in the country, has died aged 108.

Jack Ovens, known for his lifelong love of horses, first served in the Army nearly 90 years ago.

Born in Teddington in 1906, Mr Ovens served in the Royal Dragoons from 1926 to 1932, rising from Trooper to attain the rank of Corporal of Horse. He eventually oversaw 43 Army horses.

In 1929, he was posted to Secunderabad, India, and often recalled being impressed by the uniformed private armies of the Nizam of Hyderabad, as well as other wealthy maharajas of the time. He was subsequently recalled to the Army during World War II, retraining as a tank driver and serving in Egypt and then Italy. Mr Ovens was a resident of the Royal Star and Garter from August 2012 until his death on New Year’s Eve.

On his birthday last year, the home organised a party while one of the volunteers brought their own horse to the home in Upper Brighton Road. The next day Mr Ovens visited Imber Court in East Molesey to meet some of the Metropolitan Police’s horses.

Comments

Post new comment

  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <p>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Filtered words will be replaced with the filtered version of the word.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

By posting content on Surbiton.com, you agree to adhere to the following guidelines.

  • Your username and password must only be used by you, keep them safe. If a posting is made using your username and password it will be considered to have been posted by you. If you have a friend who wants to use our site and post messages on the site, show them how to register.
  • Be courteous at all times, inciting racial hatred, posting abusive, obscene, threatening, harassing, defamatory, libellous or sexually explicit material or any material that is found to be offensive is not acceptable and we may suspend your username and password.
  • Retaliating to offensive posts causes more problems for other users on the discussion boards. Just report such messages to us using the Feedback link which is available at the top of every page or the 'report this' link associated with individual postings. We will act on every report we receive.
  • Please respect other people's work and do not post material that infringes copyright.
  • Do not post information that you know to be confidential or sensitive or otherwise in breach of the law. You should only post material that you know to be public knowledge. If you have any doubts do not post it on the site.
  • Never attempt to gain unauthorised access to any area of the site. This is known as hacking and is illegal.
  • Content posted represents the opinions of the author, and does not represent the opinions of Surbiton.com or its affiliates and has not been approved or issued by Surbiton.com. You should be aware that the other participants are strangers to you and may make statements which may be misleading, deceptive or wrong.
  • Spoofing or posing as another user is unacceptable. Anonymous users' postings should always be considered with suspicion.
  • Help keep Surbiton.com a safe place for information and opinion. Please alert us of any anti-social behaviour as described above.
Please note that Surbiton.com does not monitor the comments posted and we are therefore reliant upon users reporting antisocial behaviour.