During the course of work I did recently for the Friends of Waikumete Cemetery, and towards the end of research into dozens of names linked with pre WWI and WWI-related burials at the cemetery, the name of Douglas Stark came up.
Looking into his story, I found that well-known historians, including Jock Phillips who took this image of a memorial in Kaiapoi said to have been modelled on Stark, accepted everything written in the well-known novel by Robin Hyde, Passport to Hell as factual "oral history" without checking -- and so, even have Stark's name incorrect on the Te Ara site, while Cenotaph have his wrong date of birth.
This was just the start of the swamp into which facts and information on Stark have sunk over time.
There was much more, so -- I put together a paper, called "Somewhere between the truth and otherwise ... Behind the name of John Douglas Stark." An online copy can be found here.
For a man who is said to have saved the life, let alone many others, of Gordon Coates, MP during the war -- I feel there should have been a closer examination of Stark's story, both the lies and the truth, before now. Instead, all we have, in the main, is myth ...
