Lt Gen Sir Brian Horrocks, a hero of the North Africa campaign and Operation Market Garden, was given a second send-off on Monday, 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, Last Post and Reveille were sounded by a bugler as 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 tracked down and made aware of the casket’s existence.
Unlike so many military funerals, this was not a mournful marking of the death of a young soldier but the commemoration of a great man who had lived a long life that was, in the words of the army chaplain the Rev Nicholas Sharp, “filled with lots and lots of purpose”.
In stark contrast to the many years Lt Gen Sir Brian spent under enemy fire, only a gentle breeze and birdsong could be heard as the general’s remains were lowered to their final resting place.
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 Lt Gen Sir Brian when he portrayed him in the 1977 film, A Bridge Too Far, was present. So too was Sarah Clarke, the current Black Rod, and Sir Michael Willcocks, who held the role from 2001 to 2009.
Lt Gen Sir Brian was Black Rod from 1949 to 1963.
Among the members of the Prince of Wales’s Royal Regiment saluting Lt Gen Sir Brian were Colour Sergeant Johnson Beharry, who became the first living soldier in nearly half a century to receive Victoria Cross for his actions in Iraq in 2004 - for twice rescuing comrades during ambushes - and the regimental colonel Major General James Martin.
Maj Gen Martin told The Telegraph the regiment was “incredibly proud of his legacy” and that the service marked “the remarkable completion of the circle of a British hero and a military legend.”
“As far as we’re concerned in the PWRR, we’re laying one of our own to rest and it’s a huge privilege and an honour to be here,” he added.
Lt Gen Sir Brian’s 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 that morning, wreaths were laid at a memorial opposite the church.
During the service, congregants were reminded of the remarkable life of Lt Gen Sir Brian.
He was wounded and captured fighting in France in 1914, spending four years as a prisoner. He then volunteered to go 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 personally aided dozens of men onto 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 and 14 months of recovery before returning to duty.
He missed D-Day but served in the Battle of Normandy and the liberation of Belgium, although his most well-known action was probably commanding XXX Corps in its ultimately doomed race to Arnhem during Operation Market Garden, a moment immortalised by Mr Fox in A Bridge Too Far.
To his grandchildren, however, he was simply a devoted grandfather. 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 Lt Gen Sir Brian first joined in 1914 and at whose feet the regimental colours were buried.
Lt Gen Sir Brian’s death in 1985 was originally marked at the time by a service at Westminster Abbey attended by representatives of the Queen and the Government, including Michael Heseltine, the defence secretary at the time.
His ashes were neither scattered nor 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 onto the remains for three decades before assistance from the Royal British Legion finally led them to the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, the successor to Lt Gen Sir Brian’s Middlesex Regiment.
Colonel John Powell, the regimental secretary, then spent several years trying to track down the family before turning to the services of a professional firm, which was able to locate the general’s grandchildren.
It was then that a fitting service could be organised for Lt Gen Sir Brian.
