British Celebrities In The British Military, Post Them As You See Them.

[ManInJapan]

Sir Cedric Hardwicke served in the British Army in WWI. I've found no details as yet.

 

Ralph 'Pranger' Richardson.

 

Quoting from Wikipedia:

"At the outbreak of war Richardson joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant pilot. He had taken flying lessons during the 1930s and had logged 200 hours of flying time, but, though a notoriously reckless driver, he admitted to being a timid pilot.[67][68] He counted himself lucky to have been accepted, but the Fleet Air Arm was short of pilots.[68] He rose to the rank of lieutenant-commander. His work was mostly routine administration, probably because of "the large number of planes which seemed to fall to pieces under his control", through which he acquired the nickname "Pranger" Richardson.[1] He served at several bases in the south of England, and in April 1941, at the Royal Naval Air Station, Lee-on-Solent, he was able to welcome Olivier, newly commissioned as a temporary sub-lieutenant. Olivier rapidly eclipsed Richardson's record for pranging."

 

The photo is of Richardson in the wonderful film 'Battle of Britain' where he plays the British diplomat Sir David Kelly, based in neutral Switzerland. Most memorable is his angry rebuffal of the German ambassador offering Hitler's 'peace terms':

""Don't threaten or dictate to us until you're marching up Whitehall ... and even then we won't listen".

Sorry, my two replies above were merged into one for some reason and also omitted Ralph Richardson's photo.

[Salvage Sailor]

English actor (and notorious drunkard) Oliver Reed

 

 

Compulsory army service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC).

 

Hannibal Brooks (1969)

 

Lion of the Desert (1981) with Rod Steiger

 

 

...and another actor who played a role with Michael Caine (covered earlier on this topic)

 

Nigel Davenport

 

From Wiki:  

Davenport was born in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, son of Arthur Henry Davenport and Katherine Lucy (née Meiklejohn). His father was an engineer, educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge before being employed as an engineer for the Midland Railway, and was later a lecturer in engineering, a Fellow, and the bursar at his alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge;

 

Arthur Davenport had served for four years in the Royal Engineers during World War I, and was awarded a Military Cross. Nigel's great-uncle, Major Matthew Fontaine Maury Meiklejohn, was awarded a Victoria Cross during the Second Boer War.

 

He grew up in an academic family and was educated at St Peter's School, Seaford, Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Oxford. Originally he chose to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics but switched to English on the advice of one of his tutors.

 

In the 1950s Davenport undertook National Service with the Royal Army Service Corps as a disc jockey on the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Hamburg

 

 

 

Michael Caine

 

[patches]

Reginald Denny, he was in the RFC in WWI, apparently sees no action.

[patches]

On 4/21/2024 at 11:40 PM, patches said:

Reginald Denny, he was in the RFC in WWI, apparently sees no action.

In one of my favorites, the 1948 Cary Grant comedy Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House as Mr Simms the Architect.

[Salvage Sailor]

 

John Mayall, pioneering British blues musician, passed away today at 90 years old

 

Three years of National Service including duty in Korea

 

"Back From Korea", John Mayall

 

"Serving your country they tell you is fine
Give you a gun and go kill
But when you come back for civilian work
Sorry your job has been filled..."

 

"They're speaking of the glory of the uniform
Smiling and shaking your hand
But when you get released
They turn their backs on you
Something I don't understand
What does it mean to the ones that stayed home
That you came back from Korea"

 

 

 

John Mayall was born in 1933 and grew up in the town of Cheadle Hulme, outside of Manchester. His parents divorced when he was a boy. The best-known exploit of Mayall’s childhood was that he built a treehouse out of window frames and tarps in a sturdy oak behind his mother’s house, outfitting it with a bed and paraffin lamp. This, he said, “became my room, my world.” (In 1970, he wrote a song about it, “Home in a Tree.”) His father made a hobby out of jazz guitar and, the young Mayall, at age 12, had likewise begun to play the instrument, along with the piano. By the late 1940s, he had become besotted with jazz, Hoovering up 78 rpm records. And then he stumbled on the blues—the genre that would transfix him for the rest of his days.

As a white suburban kid growing up in England after the war, listening to the blues brought Mayall face to face with the genre’s outsized personalities and the harsh conditions they often sang about. As Mayall told the Guardian in 2021, “So-called ‘race records’ told the story of the vile lynchings and racial injustices in the south that were a black man’s reality in the early 20th century. Not many other people I knew were all that interested in this music, but it was something I was really passionate about.”

In 1956, Mayall had returned from national service in Korea to attend art college in Manchester, forming his first band, the Powerhouse Four. This was followed by the Blues Syndicate, which traveled to London in 1961, whereupon Mayall met Korner, who encouraged him to move south. Mayall threw himself into the London blues scene, forming his Bluesbreakers and becoming a mainstay at such clubs as the Marquee. If the blues-infused Rolling Stones were on a trajectory of international pop stardom, the Bluesbreakers were musician’s musicians, all about integrity—the spirit of the blues. They were the perfect band for record-collecting blues trainspotters, a group that would never be tainted by huge commercial success: the stuff of the purist, not the tourist.

Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were a clearinghouse for generational talent. Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds and joined the band; his playing was featured on its debut LP, released in 1966. When Clapton left, Peter Green, later to found Fleetwood Mac, joined. And when Green left, Mick Taylor, later of the Rolling Stones, joined. Mayall was to British blues guitarists what Leo Castelli was to New York painters; his group was the blue-chip gallery you wanted to show your work in. The bassist Jack Bruce met Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, then went on to found Cream. Other future rock stars who were Mayall alumni: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, later of Fleetwood Mac, and the well-traveled drummer Aynsley Dunbar. In these Bluesbreakers incarnations, and in many more that would follow, Mayall moved between guitar and keyboards, with spotlight moments to demonstrate his prowess on harmonica. Even so, Mayall’s chief talent may have been his uncanny, unselfish capacity for spotting it in others.

In the late ’60s, Mayall expatriated to California, moving into a house in Laurel Canyon that became affectionately known as The Brain Damage Club, based on the kind of personalities and diversions one could find there. The house burned to the ground in the 1979 Kirkwood Bowl-Laurel Canyon Fire, which consumed all of Mayall’s archives, along with the trove of vintage erotica his father had amassed. (“My father was a pornography collector,” Mayall would unabashedly say. “A totally irreplaceable collection.”) Throughout the ensuing decades, there were more concerts, tours, collaborations, and albums, as Mayall became invariably known as the Godfather of the British Blues. In 2005, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. A 35-disc boxed set of Mayall’s work was released in 2021. Three years later he was inducted, at age 90, into the Rock & Roll Hall of fame. Mayall married twice; he had six children and several grandchildren.

 

John Mayall - 2005: Awarded the OBE 

A cornerstone of the Mayall songbook was “Room to Move,” powered by his propulsive, almost orgiastic harmonica. But if one song defined him, it was perhaps “All Your Love,” a mambo-inflected Chicago blues classic by Otis Rush, which was the Bluesbreakers’ calling card and an early showcase for Clapton’s fretboard pyrotechnics. (Peter Green recast “All Your Love” as “Black Magic Woman,” which became a 1968 single for Fleetwood Mac and a subsequent signature for Carlos Santana.)

In February of 2020, on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, Mayall, shockingly spry at 86, sang “All Your Love” with gusto at the London Palladium as part of an all-star tribute concert organized by Mick Fleetwood to celebrate Green’s music. (Green died about five months later.) It would be difficult to conjecture how many times Mayall performed that number and others like it—typically three-chord, 12-bar blues songs.

When a reporter once asked John Mayall about his unwavering fidelity to the blues, the music that took him from a tree house in a Manchester suburb to concert stages around the world, Mayall responded, “There’s nothing else I can play.”

[patches]

Roy Dotrice Actor, his most familiar role as Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's Father in the Academy Award Winning Amadeus. Dotrice was a RAF Bomber Crewman, shot down early May 1942 on a Mine Dropping mission off couast of Schleswig Holstein , Held at Luft Stalag VI.

 

Can't find Service Photo of him, but did find this.

https://www.metheringhamairfield.co.uk/roy-dotrice.html

 

 

[patches]

On 8/11/2024 at 1:16 AM, patches said:

Roy Dotrice Actor, his most familiar role as Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's Father in the Academy Award Winning Amadeus. Dotrice was a RAF Bomber Crewman, shot down early May 1942 on a Mine Dropping mission off couast of Schleswig Holstein , Held at Luft Stalag VI.

 

Can't find Service Photo of him, but did find this.

https://www.metheringhamairfield.co.uk/roy-dotrice.html

 

 

As Mozart's father Leopold Mozart in Amadeus.

[Tonomachi]

We can't forget comedian Benny Hill. I found this write up on the Internet:

 

Alfred Hawthorne "Benny" Hill was called up in 1942, and began his service with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, serving three-and-a-half years in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany.

Driver/Mechanic 14332308 Benny Hill didn't arrive in Normandy until 1 September 1944. He was a searchlight operator for the Third Light Anti-Aircraft Searchlight Battery which landed at the Mulberry floating harbours. From there they were sent to Dunkirk where a pocket of 7,000 Germans had been bypassed.

According to the Telegraph UK: "Hill later transferred to the Combined Services Entertainment Division, stationed in Germany and began entertaining, ending up in the production 'Stars in Battledress'.
 

[patches]

9 hours ago, Tonomachi said:

We can't forget comedian Benny Hill. I found this write up on the Internet:

 

Alfred Hawthorne "Benny" Hill was called up in 1942, and began his service with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, serving three-and-a-half years in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany.

Driver/Mechanic 14332308 Benny Hill didn't arrive in Normandy until 1 September 1944. He was a searchlight operator for the Third Light Anti-Aircraft Searchlight Battery which landed at the Mulberry floating harbours. From there they were sent to Dunkirk where a pocket of 7,000 Germans had been bypassed.

According to the Telegraph UK: "Hill later transferred to the Combined Services Entertainment Division, stationed in Germany and began entertaining, ending up in the production 'Stars in Battledress'.
 

Whats his Cap Badge, it's not the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

[Kia kaha]

On 8/18/2024 at 2:49 PM, patches said:

Whats his Cap Badge, it's not the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

The badge Benny is wearing is Royal Regiment of Artillery 

[patches]

Richard Attenborough, he was a Sergeant in the RAF, Aircrewman with the RAF Film Production Unit, where he went "flying on several missions over Europe filming from the rear gunner's position to record the outcome of Bomber Command sorties".

 

Maybe in 1945, I think with his brothers.

[patches]

Richard Attenborough's WWII Uniform and other personal sundry items.

[patches]

Douglas Wilmer

 

Yes Douglas Wilmer was in, An RA Officer, seconded to the Royal West African Frontier Force, served in a Anti Tank Company of one of the Regiments of the RWAFF, Gold Coast or Nigeria in East Africa in in 1940-41, sees action against the Italians, but got real sick, tuberculosis, and was medically discharged after a point.

 

Wilmer know for his playing Sherlock Holmes in the 1964-65 BBC T.V. Series, also played a a ton of stuff 

 

In two of his more eclectic roles.

 

The Moor Emir Moutamin in the 1961 El Cid.

 

 

And as Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, called Khalifa Abdullah, a real life  Mahdist Devotee and General, and successor to the Mahdi when he died  in the 1966 Khartoum, in both movies we might add co-staring with Charlton Heston.

 

As Colonel, later Major General Francis de Guingand in PATTON, de Guingand, he being Chief of Staff to Montgomery.

 

A superb Still of Wilmer in El Cid.

[patches]

On 8/10/2021 at 10:55 PM, patches said:

Joe Powell, now there's one, Powell, he played Sergeant Windridge in Zulu, Powell in WWII, first was in one of the battalions of the Grenadier Guard, but then volunteered for the Commandos, the Army's Commandos, No.4 Commando, he seems to have made all the operations his unit  was in, on the Boulogne Raid  Dieppe , D-Day, and Walcheren Island. 

 

Here his is on D-Day, the soldier on the left carrying a wounded Tommy from one of the Line Regiments.

 

 

Powell with his Green Beret  and wearing his Grenadier Guard Cap Badge on it, as he was in the Grenadier Guard and army commando's wore commonly the regiment s badge they came from before joining the commandos.

 

Powell you'll see did a huge amount of Stunt Work in many major motion pictures, including The Longest Day, ah, they should of gave him a speaking role, one in the Lord Lovat sequences, now there's one you can say was in it In Real Life, just like Richard Todd,

Joe shortly before his passing at 94 years of age.

[patches]

Bernard  Cribbins in 2016 visiting with Paras.

[S.ChrisKelly]

Here's one to "pop your cork"...

 

The story here:

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9929473/amp/Robert-Maxwells-Military-Cross-Second-World-War-heroics-goes-sale.html

 

 

[patches]

Alan Badel

Alan Badel Stage and Screen Actor, in WWII he was a Infantryman 2/4th Battalion, South Lancashire, which became the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion of the 6th Airborne Division., He makes all Operations , D-Day, Rhine etc, on another couple of pafges on him, like his Wiki state that he loses some hearing in one of his ears from a Shell, presumbaly Enemy Shell, landing near by him., Explosion of it rather then shrapnel.

 

Here's his extensive write up on ParaData.

 

https://paradata.org.uk/content/4635922-sergeant-alan-badel

[patches]

21 hours ago, patches said:

Alan Badel

Alan Badel Stage and Screen Actor, in WWII he was a Infantryman 2/4th Battalion, South Lancashire, which became the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion of the 6th Airborne Division., He makes all Operations , D-Day, Rhine etc, on another couple of pafges on him, like his Wiki state that he loses some hearing in one of his ears from a Shell, presumably Enemy Shell, landing near by him., Explosion of it rather then shrapnel.

 

Here's his extensive write up on ParaData.

 

https://paradata.org.uk/content/4635922-sergeant-alan-badel

Here he is in one of my favorites, the 1966 Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren Spy movie Arabesque.

[patches]

Sir Alec Guinness

 

From his WIKI

 

the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in the Second World War, initially as a seaman in 1941, before receiving a commission as a temporary Sub-lieutenant on 30 April 1942 and a promotion to Temporary Lieutenant the following year, Guinness then commanded a Landing Craft Infantry at the Allied invasion of Sicily, and later ferried supplies and agents to the Yugoslav partisans in the eastern Mediterranean theatre.

 

And his write up on the U.S. Naval Institute on his actions off Sicily.

 

As the British Say, a slight Cock Up ,

 

Though not devastating nor with the possible tragic results that could of happened. 

 

World War II records confirm that Alec Guinness brought ashore the first invasion force at Sicily. However, things had not gone according to plan. Hours before the invasion, Guinness had maneuvered his landing craft alongside a troopship to pick up 200 soldiers from the 5th Battalion of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). Boarding the soldiers became extremely hazardous, owing to heavy seas that damaged the ship’s bow ramps. They became useless for transporting the troops to the landing craft. The soldiers had to jump into the LCI as waves lifted the craft alongside the troopship. In the confusion of getting the men safely on board, Guinness missed the signal to all ships that the invasion had been postponed by one hour. Once free of the troopship, he headed straight for land just left of the Cape Passero lighthouse. He was eight miles away from his landing beach point in his assigned quadrant passing other landing craft that were circling off the beach. He beckoned them to follow, but none did.

[patches]

One more photo pf Mister Guinness.

[patches]

You know that Guinness' ship we found was lost, odd that its not mentioned in main stream sites on him 

 

 

A very detailed account of his time in.

 

The U.S. Naval Institute again.

 

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2002/june/sicily-alec-guinness#:~:text=In the summer of 1942%2C,The greasy%2C rusty ship underwent