Page 241 - They Also Served

116
Derek Bond 1940.
The son of a commercial traveller and a
beautician, Derek William Douglas Bond
was born in Glasgow on 20th January
1920 and educated at Haberdashers’
Aske’s School in Hampstead, London.
After school, he worked briefly as a
reporter with the Golders Green Gazette
and as a clerk in the City before joining
Finchley Amateur Dramatic Society.
This set him up for a minor part in one
of the first television plays in which he
played a robot with the sole line of, ‘No!’ Graduating to a play at the Garrick Theatre, his output improved with a whole sentence, ‘All right, Snow White!’
Bond enlisted as a private soldier in the Goldstream Guards soon after the outbreak of war, but his education marked him out for officer training, and he was duly sent to Sandhurst. Opting to transfer to the Grenadier Guards, he was invited, with other hopefuls, to dinner by the adjutant, Captain E H Goulburn. After being plied with drinks and subjected to a grilling, at which most of the cadets managed to maintain a suitable air of sycophancy, Bond was asked, ‘So, Bond, you were an actor! Aren’t all actors sh*ts?’ After replying, ‘No more than regular soldiers, Sir!’ – his future was assured. After the evacuation of Dunkirk in May 1940, such was the threat of invasion that the cadets were deployed in the defence of Camberley. However, with only one Bren gun between 300, their effectiveness must have been limited. Finally, Bond was commissioned in July 1940.
Serving with the 3rd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, Bond saw action in Tunisia and, on 12th December 1942, was wounded in the leg by a machine gun bullet. Evacuated home and awarded the MC, he dined with future prime minister Harold Macmillan, who had commanded the same platoon until wounded in the Great War. During his convalescence, Bond was contracted to Ealing Studios but yearned to return to his battalion. Rejoining in Italy, he was almost immediately captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Germany.
235