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Captain The Right Honourable Robert Boscawen MC
Late Coldstream Guards
by Colonel H G R Boscawen
formerly Coldstream Guards
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 After Operation MARKET GARDEN, XXX Corps dug in to hold the ‘Island’ bridgehead between the Waal and Lower Rhine North of Nijmegen. On 2nd October 1944, 1st (Armoured) Battalion Coldstream Guards moved to Bemmel to support the weary 231st Infantry Brigade (50th Tyne and Tees Division). Robert Boscawen (known to many as ‘Bob’) commanding No.2 Troop, No.2 Squadron reconnoitred the orchards he was to occupy in support of 1st Bn Hampshire Regiment, far from ideal ‘tank country’.
At 2230 hours that night, heavy shelling enveloped Houtakker Farm and its orchards. A strong attack developed and the infantry and their 6-pounder anti-tank gunners disappeared. Bob Boscawen and his tank commanders could see little, and their radios were not ‘netted in’, but they manoeuvred, firing at muzzle flashes for two hours, and held their ground. ‘By the morning’, he wrote later, ‘we were grimy from cordite smoke, muddy, tired and cold. The scene in the orchard, when dawn broke, was a sordid one indeed, scattered death and bits of debris’. Bob was awarded the Military Cross, the citation concluding that ‘he fully realised that a desperate situation required desperate measures, and he accordingly took them with the most satisfactory result’.
Bob Boscawen spent much of his early life in Cornwall. He was at Eton in 1939, and his early service, in the School Corps enrolled into the Home Guard, included guarding the local pumping station with live ammunition. He joined the Army on leaving Eton, training as a Royal Engineer: while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Adjutant of the Officers Training Corps approached him in his search for technically competent officers for the armoured Divisions being raised, including that from the Household Brigade. Bob applied to the Coldstream, in which his Family had served since 1769, and attended the Sandhurst OCTU. In February 1943, Bob joined 1st (Armoured) Bn at Longbridge Deverell, near Warminster, in the new Guards Armoured Division and trained on Salisbury Plain, at Brandon (Thetford) and around Duncombe Park, in Yorkshire). In April 1944, the Division loaded onto 100 trains in strict secrecy: the destination was unknown until an ancient stationmaster chalked ‘Hove’ on a carriage, and the Battalion realised that the invasion of Europe was imminent.
Bob saw action commanding his troop on Operation GOODWOOD near Caen (18-20 July) where he witnessed many Shermans in flames, and took the Southern end of Cagny village (the Grenadiers occupied the Northern end). 1st Coldstream squadrons then supported 3rd Bn Irish Guards infantry in the ten days of confused fighting in the ‘bocage’ North of Vire. On 11th August, (Operation GROUSE) Bob’s troop fought all day to help the Micks cross their start line at Sourdevalle. The attack, overlooked by German tanks on high ground 1200 yards to their left, and opposed by a resolute parachute battalion, failed. In 1987, we visited Sourdevalle, behind the start line: ‘down that hedgerow’ he said, pointing, ‘we buried 100 Irish Guardsmen’, something he never forgot.
In September, the Guards Armoured Division raced for Brussels: the uproarious welcome and copious champagne liberated from the Wehrmacht also remained in Bob’s memory. The partridge-shooting season had just opened, and Bob and Ian Jardine bought .410” shotguns in Brussels in order to supplement the rations with game! Although initially ‘left out of battle’ during MARKET GARDEN he was involved in fighting on the road to Arnhem.
Christmas was spent defending the bridge across the Meuse at Namur, where an American soldier photographed him in his Troop Sergeant’s 17-pounder Sherman. Following the Rhine crossing, on 1st April 1945, No.2 Squadron rushed an intact canal bridge west of the Dutch border town of Enschede. Ian Jardine’s troop crossed the bridge, but demolition charges exploded, and three tanks were hit; Lieutenant Boscawen’s troop was close behind, but four 105mm flak guns opened fire from a flank at close range. Bob’s tank was hit in the petrol tank: he got two of his crew out and rolled into a ditch. Rescued by the Squadron Sergeant Major, Bob, badly burned, was evacuated for medical attention.
Sir Archibald Macindoe, pioneer of plastic surgery, treated Bob Boscawen in East Grinstead hospital for many months. Macindoe rebuilt his patients both physically and psychologically - in the ‘Guinea Pig Club’ - to face the world and achieve great things once again: Bob’s later successes, like those of many fellow patients, owe much to this great surgeon. Bob’s final Regimental duty was as a Gold Stick Officer at the Coronation. He maintained his Regimental connections, however, through the Nulli Secundus Club, and the Plymouth and Cornwall Branch of the Association, whose dinners were partly organised by Bill Daniel, his tank driver.
Robert Boscawen continued to serve his country, initially on the London National Health Service Executive and then in Conservative politics. In 1964 and 1966 he fought Elections unsuccessfully in marginal Falmouth and Camborne, before being adopted for Wells, Somerset, where he was elected in 1970 with 49% of the vote, and served his electors well until the 1983 Boundary Changes, when he was returned for Somerton and Frome. He stood down in 1992.
Bob preferred Committee work on pensions and health and did not seek Ministerial office. In 1981, Mrs Thatcher appointed Bob, and other distinguished Guardsmen like Stephen Hastings and Carol Mather, to the Whips Office to manage House of Commons business. One MP recalled being summoned to see the Whips ‘rather like Commanding Officer’s Orders’, the only concession being the order ‘you will have a glass of whiskey’ before judgement was passed! Bob was delighted to work with many former Household Division Warrant Officers in the Palace of Westminster, and reinstigated the annual reception where Guardsmen, MPs and Messengers alike, could meet the Major General and his staff. From 1986 to 1988 Bob was Comptroller of the Household: in 1990-91, he worked to ensure that sensible solutions emerged from ‘Options for Change’, including seeing that the Incremental Companies were properly established and entitled to carry Colours. In 1992, Her Majesty the Queen appointed Bob, who had disdained preferment and honours, a Privy Councillor on the advice of the Prime Minister, John Major.
Bob was an accomplished skipper who raced the Household Brigade Yacht Club’s ‘Windfall’ yacht Gladeye achieving notable success in the 1951 Fastnet, and later his own Silvio; he was Commodore of the Household Division Yacht Club in his turn. Bob was an accomplished gardener too, collecting ‘150 or so, or a little more’ types of Camellia in his Somerset garden. In 1949, he married Mary, Granddaughter of General Sir Alfred Codrington, 24th Colonel of the Coldstream, whose predecessor General Evelyn, 7th Viscount Falmouth, was his own Grandfather. Mary supported Bob capably and devotedly in his pursuits, and in raising a family for 63 years of marriage until her death in May 2013. They were a strong team, and leave two daughters and a son.
Robert Boscawen courageously overcame grievous wounds before serving his country in politics and Government for 22 years, determined to live life and look after people without fuss or being grand. He insisted that his book should be titled Armoured Guardsmen in order to tell the story of his troop rather than just himself. Shortly after Bob died in December 2013, Peter van Oudsten, Mayor of Enschede, offered the epitaph that Coldstreamers were the Liberators of Enschede: ‘We owe these Liberators great thanks,’ he wrote, ‘it is [thanks] to them that we nowadays live in a free country’.
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