Dunkirk hero who saw off Rommel is finally laid to rest
Lt Gen Brian Horrocks’s passing was mourned back in 1985 but his lost ashes are to be properly buried
WHEN Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks died in 1985 he was honoured with a memorial service at Westminster Abbey, attended by representatives of the Queen and a list of officers and dignitaries that took up two full columns in The Daily Telegraph.
His body was later cremated and, his family believed, his ashes scattered. That was until earlier this year, when the regimental secretary of Lt Gen Horrocks’s former unit received a call telling him that the general’s ashes were still at a crematorium near Chichester. They had sat unrecognised and undisturbed for 37 years in its chapel of rest.
Unclaimed ashes are usually scattered after several years. In this case, however, an eagle-eyed veteran spotted the famous name and alerted Col (Retd) John Powell at the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.
Col Powell then set about tracking down Lt Gen Horrocks’s living relatives.
“We were very close,” his granddaughter Ilona Lazar said. “He was always upbeat and smiling and I loved spending time with [him]. He used to call me ‘Miss I’ and always took me to the local pub for scampi and chips and cider, which was a big treat ... people used to come up to him in the street to ask for an autograph.”
Lt Gen Horrocks’s ashes will finally be buried on Monday in a private ceremony at St Paul’s Church in Mill Hill. It has been organised by The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, a successor of Lt Gen Horrocks’s Middlesex Regiment, and there will be music from the regimental band.
He will be buried close to fellow Die Hards, as members of the regiment are known, and a set of Colours once borne by the Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge’s Own).
Lt Gen Horrocks was a veteran of the First World War, the Russian civil war and the Anglo-irish war, and went on to lead troops in the Battle of France, North Africa, Normandy, the liberation of Belgium, Operation Market Garden and the crossing of the Rhine.
It was an unlikely career, considering he ranked 162nd out of 167 cadets in his Sandhurst class, according to biographer Philip Warner. In his own words, he “was idle, careless about my turnout – in army parlance, scruffy – and, due to the fact that I am inclined to roll when I walk, very unsmart on parade”.
In August 1914, he was commissioned to the Middlesex Regiment and shipped off to France. Weeks later, on Oct 21, his platoon was surrounded and Lt Gen Horrocks was shot through the abdomen and leg and captured. He remained in captivity for four years during which he took up two hobbies: organising escapes and learning languages. He was never successful in the former, and was once rumbled 500 yards from freedom. In the latter, he succeeded, mastering French, German and Russian.
Upon repatriation in 1918, he put his Russian to good use. In early 1919, he was shipped to Vladivostok as Britain supported the Whites in their war against Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The after fighting in the Anglo-irish war of 1921 he competed at the 1924 Olympics in Paris in the modern pentathlon.
However, it was his Second World War service that cemented his legacy. In the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation, he waded chest-high into the sea with a torch to co-ordinate operations. Then, in late 1942, he faced Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at the Battle of Alam el Halfa in the deserts of North Africa.
Aware that Rommel had repeatedly lured British forces into an attack, Gen Horrocks planned an exclusively defensive action. He told Winston Churchill that Rommel’s dog would exhaust itself chasing the British rabbit, which would then turn on the dog and eat it. According to Warner, Churchill was unimpressed and asked the Allied field commander, Bernard Montgomery, to remove Lt Gen Horrocks. Montgomery, a lifelong friend, stood by Lt Gen Horrocks and Rommel was successfully seen off at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. Montgomery did not, however, allow his him to telegram “Rabbit ate dog” to Churchill, suggesting the prime minister had likely forgotten the phrase.
In 1943, he was hit by a strafing German aircraft, a single bullet piercing his lungs, stomach and intestines which ruled him out of the D-day landings but by August 1944 he took command of XXX Corps as it mopped up German resistance and pushed on to liberate Belgium before supplying the armoured spearhead for Operation Market Garden.
He was knighted in 1945 and his role in the doomed mission was immortalised in the film A Bridge Too Far by Edward Fox.
Lt Gen Horrocks’s career was extraordinary but his fame was cemented by a successful transition into television. He presented three programmes, including Men in Battle in which he explained the tactics behind several key battles.