William_Whitelaw_in_1963

October 30, 2018 by Alexander Meldrum

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William Whitelaw (1918 –) Conservative British Politician William Stephen Ian Whitelaw, 1st Viscount Whitelaw, KT, CH, MC, PC, DL (28 June 1918 – 1 July 1999), often known as Willie Whitelaw, was a British Conservative Party politician who served in a wide number of Cabinet positions. Most notably as Home Secretary and de facto Deputy Prime Minister, He was Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1991. Early life William Whitelaw was born at the family home, "Monklands", on Thurlow Road in Nairn, in northeast Scotland. He never knew his father, William Alexander Whitelaw (born 1892), a member of a Scottish family of the landed gentry, who was killed in the First World War when he was a baby. Whitelaw was raised by his mother, Helen (daughter of Major-General Francis Russell, of Aden), a local councillor in Nairn, and paternal grandfather, William Whitelaw (1868–1946), of Gartshore, Dunbartonshire. He was an Old Harrovian and alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, landowner, MP for Perth 1892–1895, and chairman of the London and North-Eastern Railway Company. His great-aunt by marriage, Dorothy, was the niece of former Prime Minister and author Benjamin Disraeli. Whitelaw was educated first at Wixenford School, Wokingham, before passing the entrance exam to Winchester College. From there he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won a blue for golf and joined the Officer Training Corps. By chance he was in a summer camp in 1939 on the outbreak of the Second World War and was granted a regular, not wartime, commission in the British Army, in the Scots Guards, later serving in the 6th Guards Tank Brigade, a separate unit from the Guards Armoured Division. He commanded Churchill tanks in Normandy during the Second World War and during Operation Bluecoat in late July 1944. His was the first Allied unit to encounter German Jagdpanther tank destroyers, being attacked by three out of the twelve Jagdpanthers which were in Normandy. The battalion's second-in-command was killed when his tank was hit in front of Whitelaw's eyes; Whitelaw succeeded to this position, holding it, with the rank of Major, throughout the advance through the Netherlands into Germany and until the end of the war. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions at Caumont; a photograph of Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery pinning the medal to his chest appears in his memoirs. After the end of the war in Europe, Whitelaw's unit was to have taken part in the invasion of Japan, but the Pacific War ended before this. Instead, he was posted to Palestine, before leaving the army in 1946 to take care of the family estates of Gartshore and Woodhall in Lanarkshire, which he inherited on the death of his grandfather. Go to Wikipedia for full History

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