224847 John Freville Henry Surtees British Army 1st Btn. Rifle Brigade from:Cambridge I have inherited a book, in Dutch, on Holbein the Younger. The fly leaf has a note "from 95538 J.F.H. Surtees. POW no.1204 Oflag VII Germany. January 1940, to Major R Surtees, 13 Barrow Road, Cambridge, England.
Obituary published in the Royal Green Jackets Chronicle, Vol 31, Jan-Dec 1996: "John Freville Henry Surtees was born on 26th January 1919 and educated at Eton. Being unsure of his choice of regiment, he took the exams of both Woolwich and Sandhurst and came top in both. John joined 1st Battalion Rifle Brigade at Tidworth and was a carrier Platoon Commander with them when they, and the 60th and Queen Vics were set to reinforce and defend Calais.
On 25th, Brigadier Nicholson received the order to hold the Calais to the last, and that every moment the enemy could be held off was of the utmost importance to the safety of the BEF. They delayed the Germans until the following day and Winston Churchill wrote in his history of the Second World War that “Calais was the Crux”. The time gained by those who so gallantly defended Calais was to help with the evacuation of 300,000 British troops from Dunkirk.
John with his carriers was given the task of trying to defeat a strong enemy road block in the suburban area. The block had already overwhelmed the advance guard tanks and the attack by John’s platoon was also unsuccessful, but he managed to pin the enemy down and the block was outflanked.
Those who know the sand dunes along the beaches will understand the difficulty for the movement of carriers, and shortly after the road block incident, John’s carriers were to become stuck in the sand so he and his men took to the trenches in “C” Company’s earlier position. The battle lasted four days against impossible odds and eventually the town was taken by the Germans. John was captured but not before being wounded in the leg and moved to a German Field Hospital which had been set up in a Convent in the middle of Calais. John used to speak of the kindness offered to him by the nuns and the German guards alike.
He spent five years as a Prisoner of War and in that period made several ingenious attempts to escape and once managed to get away for five days before being recaptured. On his release from captivity in 1945, he was to learn of the award of the Military Cross for his gallantry five years earlier in Calais. He then joined 2RB as a Company commander, before becoming GSO2 Allied Liaison Branch in 1946/7. Then a short spell as 2i/c of a company at the Green Jackets depot at Barton Stacey until July of 1948 when he was invalided out of the army.
In civilian life he eventually became Chairman of wine importers Percy Fox and Co. He was Master of the Grocers Company in 1966/7 and a member of the Institute of Masters of Wine. He took a prominent part in government entertaining, and was appointed OBE."
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