Page 132 - Wish Stream Year of 2019

Famous Friday
Vaughan Kent-Payne
Every Friday, The Sandhurst Trust Facebook page features a former Cadet who has gone on to make a mark in life outside the Army. Here are four of them:
RICHARD TODD
(1941 King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry) Richard Andrew Palethorpe Todd was born in Dublin in 1919, the son of an Irish rugby interna- tional and RAMC Officer. After an early childhood in India, he attended Shrewsbury School before forsaking an expected Army career for the stage. After attending the Italia Conti Academy, he acted on the stage and as an extra in films. Todd enlisted soon after the outbreak of the War and entered Sandhurst in late 1940. On 29th Janu- ary 1941 he was one of 26 Cadets injured when D Block of New College was hit by a German bomb. In his memoires he describes seeing the bomb pass through the ceiling in front of him before he was blown out of the building, landing on a grass bank and suffering multiple lacera- tions. Five Cadets were killed, and Todd eventu- ally commissioned into the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in the Spring of 1941. That even- ing he tried to join several friends at the Café de
Paris in London but could not get a table. Later that evening the venue was destroyed in an air raid and fifteen newly commissioned subalterns were killed.
After early war service in Iceland, Todd was assigned as part of 7th (Light Infantry) Parachute Battalion preparing for the invasion of Europe. On D-Day, as a Captain, he parachuted into occupied Europe as part of the force sent to capture the Pegasus Bridge. After three months fighting in Normandy, 6th Airborne Division was withdrawn back to the UK to reconstitute but returned to the continent three months later as emergency reinforcements to halt the German offensive in the Ardennes. Short of transport as they advanced into Germany, Todd, as the MTO, was responsible for gathering a ragtag selection of commandeered vehicles to ferry the troops forward. After VE day, the Division returned to the UK for a few weeks before being sent on counter-insurgency operations in Palestine. Todd finally returned to the UK to be demobbed in 1946.
Returning to acting, Todd was offered a screen contract and starred in ‘For Them That Trespass’ (1949) before a part in the stage play resulted in a major part; the dying Scottish NCO in ‘The Hasty Heart’ alongside Ronald Reagan, for which he received a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. After appearing in a number of action roles, Todd was signed by 20th Cen- tury Fox and starred as Wing Commander Guy Gibson in the 1955 film ‘The Dambusters’. Two years later he starred as another action hero, Lieutenant Commander John Kerens in ‘Yangtze Incident’. In 1962, he played Major John Howard in the D-Day epic ‘The Longest Day’ and had the unique experience of re-enacting the cap- ture of Pegasus Bridge, alongside another actor playing the role of Lieutenant Richard Todd. He described it as ‘standing beside myself, talking to myself’. Ian Fleming wanted Todd for the role of James Bond but the scheduling of filming of ‘The Longest Day’ meant that the starring role in ‘Dr No’ was offered to Sean Connery.
By the 1970s, Todd’s film career was in decline, but he kept himself busy with television appear-
130 HISTORICAL