Viscount Montgomery
Son of British war hero ‘Monty’ who kept up a long friendship with Rommel’s son
THE 2nd Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, who has died aged 91, was an expert in UK trade relations with Latin America and a loyal defender of the military and personal reputation of “Monty” — his war-hero father, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
For many years David Montgomery ran his own trade consultancy, Terimar Services, which made introductions for British companies across the South American continent. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, he was a gregarious networker with a passion for dialogue and constructive engagement, for which he saw trade as a catalyst. He also spoke in the House of Lords on South American matters, incurring Margaret Thatcher’s ire when he opposed the Falklands campaign.
He inherited the viscountcy on his father’s death in 1976 and with it the mantle “of Alamein” which he fulfilled with dignity in later years as patron of the 8th Army and other veterans’ associations, and of the D-Day and Normandy Trust. He also made a very personal gesture of reconciliation through his long friendship with Manfred Rommel, the mayor of Stuttgart and son of the ‘Desert Fox’ who had been Monty’s greatest adversary.
The pair attended commemorative events together over more than 30 years; on the 50th anniversary of Allied victory at El Alamein in 1992 they stood side by side in Westminster Abbey and both read lessons. Montgomery later observed that “we were the same age, to within three months. We had a great deal in common … Our fathers are ever-present in our lives.”
David Bernard Montgomery was born on August 18, 1928, the only child of the marriage in 1927 of Bernard Law Montgomery (then a lieutenant colonel at the Camberley staff college) to Betty Carver, nee Hobart, whose first husband had been killed at Gallipoli, leaving her with two sons. As Monty’s career advanced in the early 1930s, David and Betty followed him to Jerusalem, Alexandria and Quetta, until David was dispatched at seven to Amesbury prep school in Surrey.
It has often been written that the happiest years of Monty’s life were with Betty, but in the summer of 1937 tragedy struck: mother and son were holidaying at Burnham-on-Sea when Betty suffered an insect bite on her foot which led to septicaemia and death. Thereafter David (though notionally under the guardianship of his eldest half-brother John Carver, a serving sapper officer) moved from place to place each school holiday until 1942, when Monty — en route to North Africa to command the 8th Army, and at the beginning of the meteoric phase, culminating in promotion to Field Marshal in September 1944 — appointed the Amesbury headmaster Tom Reynolds as guardian, with his wife Phyllis.
David went on from Amesbury to Winchester, which he adored, and lived with the Reynolds family until his father set up home at Isington Mill, Hampshire in 1948. But Monty stayed in constant touch with Tom Reynolds by letter, not least to insist that David was on no account to be left in the care of John Carver’s wife Jocelyn (whom he accused of not feeding the boy properly) or his grandmother in Ireland, Maud Montgomery (who was “quite hopeless with children”).
David himself recalled the positives of his situation: for example, that his popularity at school was boosted by consignments from Monty’s HQ of Moroccan oranges and American chocolate. He also acknowledged that his own “at times rather excessively wild behaviour” was a sore trial which his father “could well have done without”.
David did National Service as a lieutenant in the Royal Tank Regiment — having passed out top of his intake at Bovingdon and been presented with the belt of honour by his father. But he had no urge to be a career soldier, and went up to read engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge.
One of his friends there was the historian Alistair Horne, who recalled “an effervescent, dauntless companion, by dusk a daring member of the Night Climbers of Cambridge” — a club whose aims included placing chamber pots on the pinnacles of King’s College chapel.
Horne also observed that David never complained about his nomadic childhood and that “Monty must have been a hellish and often embarrassing father, as well as a difficult figure always to defend [but] David stuck up for him with unremitting loyalty, prepared to discuss his faults only among close friends.”
He married first, in 1953, Mary, daughter of the Scottish shipbuilder Sir Charles Connell. The marriage was dissolved in 1967 — provoking a rift with Monty, who temporarily cut David out of his will. But the breach was healed when David married secondly, in 1970, Tessa daughter of Monty’s comrade-in-arms General Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning and his novelist wife Dame Daphne du Maurier. Tessa survives him with a son and daughter of the first marriage.
The 2nd Viscount Montgomery of Alamein died on January 8, 2020.