Second send-off gives hero of two wars peace at last
Military funeral held for Market Garden general whose ashes were finally found after three decades
L‘As far as we’re concerned we’re laying one of our own to rest. It’s a huge privilege and an honour to be here’
t Gen Sir Brian Horrocks, a hero of the North Africa campaign and Operation Market Garden, was given a second send-off yesterday, following the discovery of his unscattered ashes more than three decades after his death.
In a military service at St Paul’s Church in Mill Hill, the general was laid to rest among members of his former regiment, the Middlesex Regiment.
For reasons unknown, his ashes were never scattered after his funeral in 1985 and it was not until earlier this year that his living relatives were made aware of the casket’s existence.
In stark contrast to the many years Horrocks spent under enemy fire, only a gentle breeze and birdsong could be heard as the general’s remains were lowered.
Members of the Middlesex Regiment and its modern successor, the Prince of Wales’s Royal Regiment, were in attendance, as were those linked to the later stages of what was an extraordinary life.
Edward Fox, the actor who befriended Horrocks when he portrayed him in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far, was present. So too was the current Black Rod, Sarah Clarke and Sir Michael Willcocks, who held the role from 2001 to 2009. Horrocks was Black Rod from 1949 to 1963.
Among the members of the Prince of Wales’s Royal Regiment saluting Horrocks were Colour Sergeant Johnson Beharry, who became the first living soldier in nearly half a century to receive a Victoria Cross for his actions in Iraq in 2004, and the regimental colonel Major General James Martin.
Maj Gen Martin told The Daily Telegraph the regiment marked “the remarkable completion of the circle of a British hero and a military legend”.
“As far as we’re concerned we’re laying one of our own to rest. It’s a privilege and an honour to be here.”
Horrocks’ remains entered the church to the Caledonian March played by the regimental band reverberating around its whitewashed 19th-century walls. He was preceded by three reverends and the regimental colours of the 1st Battalion, which then lay on the altar throughout the service.
St Paul’s, originally built by William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner, was chosen for the service because it was once linked to the Middlesex regimental depot.
May 16 also marks Albuhera Day, on which the regiment commemorates the actions of Middlesex soldiers in the Battle of Albuhera. Earlier, wreaths were laid opposite the church.
Horrocks was wounded and captured fighting in France in 1914, spending four years as a prisoner. He volunteered to go to far east Russia to participate in the Russian Civil War, before serving in the Anglo-irish War.
During the Second World War, he served in the Battle of France and helped dozens of men on to boats during the evacuation from Dunkirk. In North Africa, he successfully faced off against Erwin Rommel, before again being wounded so severely that he required five surgeries.
He missed D-day but served in the Battle of Normandy and the liberation of Belgium, although his most wellknown action was probably commanding XXX Corps in its doomed race to Arnhem during Operation Market Garden, immortalised by Fox in A Bridge Too Far.
Ilona Lazar, his granddaughter, told the service that while his men knew him as “the general who led from the front”, at home they knew him as “Poppy Gram”. He now rests close to Colonel Maurice Browne, who would have been regimental colonel when Horrocks first joined in 1914.
Horrocks’ death in 1985 was marked at the time by a service at Westminster Abbey attended by representatives of the Queen and the Government, including Michael Heseltine, then Defence Secretary.
For reasons unknown, his ashes were not scattered or collected and instead remained in the chapel of rest of a Co-op undertakers in Chichester.
Unable to track down any living relatives, they held on to the remains for three decades before the Royal British Legion finally led them to the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment.