Page 247 - They Also Served

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Ian Carmichael 1941.
Ian Gillett Carmichael was born in Hull
in 1920. Training as an actor at RADA,
he made his stage debut in 1939, but
his acting career was interrupted by the
Second World War. He initially served
as a trooper in the RAC before being
selected for officer training in late 1940.
Like so many of his generation, he looked
back fondly on his time at Sandhurst,
even though his tank basic training took
place in soft-skinned trucks. He recalled
in his autobiography: ‘If you were the tank commander, you stood in the back of the truck shouting “Driver, left” and “Driver, right” as he progressed along the king’s highway unable to go anything but straight on’.
Commissioned in March 1941, he joined the newly formed 22nd Dragoons. Three years of home service followed, during which time Carmichael acted in numerous reviews and lost the tip of a finger to a slamming tank hatch. By now, he was a staff officer in the 30th Armoured Brigade and landed in Normandy ten days after D-Day. Taking part in the Rhine Crossing (Operation Plunder), he then spent the final weeks of the war on mopping-up operations in Holland. After service in occupied Germany as part of the ’30 Corps Theatrical Pool’ entertaining the troops, he was demobbed as a major in September 1946.
Working at first in stage roles, he graduated to films in the early 1950s, starring in the Boulting Brothers comedies Private’s Progress (1956) and the trade union satire I’m All Right Jack (1959) alongside Peter Sellers. Moving effortlessly into television roles, he played Bertie Wooster alongside Dennis Price as Jeeves and then starred as Lord Peter Wimsey in the adaptations of the Dorothy L Sayers crime novels. After later appearances in TV favourite Heartbeat, he was awarded the OBE for services to entertainment in 2003. Living in a village on the North York Moors, Carmichael never forgot his 22nd Dragoons comrades and was a stalwart of the Helmsley Remembrance Parade. Ian Carmichael, who appeared in 30 films, died in 2010.
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