Page 126 - RSDG Year of 2021 CREST

132 EAGLE AND CARBINE
Captain Alwyne Farquharson of
Invercauld MC
(adapted from the obituary written for The Times by Allan Mallinson)
By the time that Alwyne Compton, as he was then known, joined the Royal Scots Greys as a cavalry officer, the regiment was preparing to exchange its eponymous grey horses for light tanks and join the 8th Army in North Africa. He was relieved to hand in his saddle.
Even more fortunately, by the time they went into action in July 1942 at Ruweisat Ridge in the Western Desert, stopping Rommel in his tracks, they had received the better-armoured American Grant tank. In the subsequent counteroffensive at El Alamein, Compton fought as a troop leader and then
pursued the Afrika Korps into Tunisia.
The following year he and his men were re-equipped with the American Sherman tank, better armed and better armoured, and took part in the Salerno land- ings south of Naples in September 1943. The Greys in which Compton was now prized as a resourceful junior commander, were in the fore-front of the Allied drive north, until the advance was halted towards the end of the year by strong German resistance on the Garigliano river close to Monte Cassino.
He was surprised when, in January 1944 he was told the Greys were to leave the 8th Army and return to England. General Montgomery, who had been put in charge of the landing forces for D-Day, wanted bat- tle-hardened troops to leaven his largely untried 2nd (British) Army. The Greys were one of the regiments he selected to do the leavening.
Although they did not take part in the assault on D-Day itself, the leading elements of the Regiment landed with the 4th Armoured Brigade on D+1 and were soon in action. Compton, by now an acting Captain and squadron second-in-command and liai- son officer, soon witnessed the disparity between the Sherman’s armament and the new Panther Mark V – one of the Greys’ 75mm guns hit a Panther’s frontal armour at 800 yards four times without effect. His only consolation was that each troop of four tanks had a specially adapted Sherman, the “Firefly”, whose long, high-velocity 17-pounder gun could take on the heavi- est German armour. It helped in the attack but perhaps less so in the defence, for the effect of the Panther V’s long-barrelled “75” was almost always catastrophic.
The Sherman crews’ black humour had it that the dif- ference between the Ronson cigarette lighter and their tank was that a Sherman lit first time.
Montgomery’s intention on D-Day was for the British and Canadians to land in eastern Normandy between the River Orne and Arromanches and take Caen, the key communications centre a dozen miles inland. This would cover the Americans’ left flank as they landed in western Normandy and the Cotentin peninsula to seize Cherbourg. However, the British 2nd Army failed to take Caen on D-Day. Indeed, it was still in German hands a month later. On July 10, therefore, in yet another attempt to capture the city, Compton and the Greys took part in Operation Jupiter, in which the 43rd Wessex Division were to take the villages of Eterville and Maltot and ground up to the River Orne, clearing the way for the 4th Armoured Brigade sup- ported by infantry to push west of the Orne. Compton was ordered to keep close touch with the infantry attacking Maltot. When stiff resistance held them up, he decided to go forward alone on foot several hun- dred yards to establish what exactly the problem was and what to do about it. The whole front was under heavy small-arms and artillery fire, but he managed to establish that five Tiger tanks, even more lethal than the Panther V, were the problem, although in doing so he was seriously wounded. He manged to crawl back to his scout car and send an exemplary report. He was then evacuated home. “By his outstanding devotion to duty,” ran the citation for his Military Cross, “Captain Compton was able to get back information which was of great value”
Alwyne Arthur Compton Farquharson was born in 1919, the eldest son of Major Edward Compton of Newby Hall in Yorkshire and Sylvia Farquharson, younger daughter of Alexander Haldane Farquharson of Invercauld in Aberdeenshire. After Eton he went to study land economy at Magdalen College, Oxford, but when war broke out abandoned his studies to join the Greys. Invalided out in 1945, four years later he married Frances Lovell Gordon (nee Oldham), an American widow and divorcee who had come to Britain in the 1920’s, joined Vogue as fashion editor, and then became editor of Harper’s Bazaar. They had met in Yorkshire while he was recovering from his wounds.
Frances died in 1991 and he married Patricia de Winton (nee Simms-Adams), a widow, who survives him with five stepchildren from his two marriages.
Compton’s Aunt Myrtle, who had inherited Invercauld and the chieftainship of Clan Farquharson, was killed in 1941 during the Blitz. When the war ended,