Year: 2008
Branch: Reading
George Thorne died on 7 April 2008 at the great age of 95. He, his brother Peter and his brother-in-law Lord Wigram had set a remarkable family record by being in their time the oldest surviving officers on the Grenadier list. Now only Neville Wigram remains.
George was one of the three sons (and three daughters) of General Sir Andrew ‘Bulgy’ Thorne, who won the DSO with two bars in the First World War. It was a hard act to follow, but George was to prove no less courageous a Grenadier than his father. After an interrupted career at Oxford he joined the Supplementary Reserve of the Regiment in 1933 while earning a fairly precarious living as a biscuit salesman. When war broke out he became ADC to General Alexander, no Mick evidently being available, and served with him throughout the Dunkirk campaign. He then commanded No 3 Company of the 1st Battalion until taking over as Captain of the King’s Company in the last few weeks of the war and eventually leading it past Churchill in the triumphant Berlin parade. In October 1945 he received the Military Cross. His citation recorded the ‘outstanding zeal, devotion to duty and undaunted courage’ he had displayed in every action since landing in Normandy with the Guards Armoured Division in June 1944. Special mention was made of his spirited leadership at Nijmegen in September (where he was wounded) and in a fierce fight at Kettenkamp, a month before the end of the war, in which over forty of the enemy were killed at close quarters (several by his own hand) and more than fifty taken prisoner.
He retired in 1946 to indulge his passion for farming and the country life, but he greatly enjoyed military gatherings of every kind and was a most faithful member of the Reading branch of the Grenadier Association, which he made every effort to support. Right to the end he was taking a keen interest in the 1st Battalion’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
George was a man of tremendous physical strength and endurance. He had been a heavyweight boxer and rugby player and could hit a golf ball with beautiful style to a prodigious distance. He was a fine shot, and at ninety years old was still casting a fly with a grace and economy of effort enviable in someone half his age.
He was happily married for sixty-five years to his wife Juliet, who pre-deceased him, and was devoted to his family. His understood human nature very clearly and was on easy terms with people of every rank and calling.
His son Ian, who also served as a Grenadier, wrote that George’s wartime experience ‘was of more significance to him, was more deeply ingrained in his memory, than anything else he did in the course of his long life.My father found his greatest fulfilment, I think, in the highly-charged intensity and stupefying dangers of battle. There was much in him of that rare warrior spirit which the Spartans defending at Thermopylae or King Arthur’s knights would instantly have recognized for their own. George Thorne was that rare being, a natural front-line soldier.’ He ‘had the powerful if unconscious gift of lending reassurance in the midst of great danger and stress.’ He had too ‘what Napoleon called “the courage of three o’clock in the morning” and never was this more in evidence than in the last years of his life, and particularly in the last few months, when his health was failing badly. A less heroic man would have given up and died a long time ago.’ Ian concluded: ‘Especially I hope that George is now in the company of Juliet his wife and in the fellowship of his comrades-inarms whom he had loved and, too many, had lost awhile, and whose knightly virtue, like his, was proved in the flame of battle.’