Dr Angus Mitchell CB, CVO, MC, Legion d'Honneur

"Dr Angus Mitchell CB CVO MC, civil servant and soldier. Born 25 August, 1924 in Ootacamund, South India.Died 26 February, 2018 in Edinburgh, age 93. Angus Mitchell was still a schoolboy when he volunteered for the army. By 19 he was a troop commander – younger than all his men – and at 20 displayed such audacious courage that he was awarded the Military Cross. He could have been at Oxford University but gave up a scholarship in favour of the maelstrom of war. It was a decision he never regretted. His contribution to the liberation of North-west Europe, which in one Dutch town he conducted single-handedly on a borrowed bicycle, was an “exciting experience”. In peacetime he was decorated as a Ridder – a knight in the Dutch Order of Oranje-Nassau – and many decades later was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in recognition of his actions.
Born in a hill station at Ootacamund, he was the son of John Mitchell, who worked with the Indian Civil Service, and his wife Sheila, a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the Great War who had survived the sinking of the hospital ship Britannic in the Aegean in 1916. Just four when he left India, he was bilingual in English and Hindustani but quickly forgot the latter after arriving in Britain. Left in the care of an aunt in Little Durford, Hampshire, he was educated by a governess before attending Highfield boarding school and Marlborough College, where he joined the Officers’ Training Corps and subsequently became a sergeant in the Home Guard. Then in 1942 he gained a scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford but also volunteered for the Territorial Army, aiming to join the Royal Armoured Corps. Deciding not to defer war service, he was called up in January 1943 and after going to The Royal Military College, Sandhurst, gained a commission with the Inns of Court Regiment (ICR). He sailed to Normandy in the aftermath of D-Day, after being made a troop commander in B Squadron at just 19, and was wounded a few weeks later when, standing in his customary position head and shoulders above the armoured car turret, he was hit by flying metal from a German shot to the periscope. He spent his 20th birthday in a Canadian Military Hospital near Bayeux and underwent surgery to remove the shards."
www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-war-hero-who-liberated-a-netherlands-village-single-handedly-on-a-bicycle-1-4720950