‘Play up! and play the game!’ – To what extent has ‘Britishness’ been evident in British martial endeavours? wrote:Lieutenant Colonel A.D. Wintle is possible one of the most eccentric people to have lived – even when compared to the above. In World War One his first action resulted in him being covered with the entrails of his recently-introduced Platoon Sergeant as a mortar strike erupted around him. Petrified, he stood to attention, saluted and began singing the National Anthem, later writing: ‘Within thirty seconds I was able to become again an Englishman of action and to carry out calmly the duties I had been trained to perform.’ (Wintle, 1968) During the War he also captured the village of Vesle singlehandedly, stating after he handed it over to the official attacking force of New Zealanders that, while he had no recollection of his actions, ‘It does sound the sort of thing I'd do’. In Ypres he was escorting a gun carriage across land when a shell burst, killing the horse and hospitalising him, his first words allegedly being ‘Is the horse alright?’ While at said hospital he discovered that a trooper of his regiment was dying of Scarlet Fever in bed, so he shoved the doctors aside and said the following: ‘Now look here. It's against Kings Regulations for a Dragoon to die in bed. Now I order you to stop dying at once! And when you do get up, get your bloody hair cut!’. Trooper Cedric Mays recovered and lived to the age of 95.
In World War Two Wintle was imprisoned in the tower for threatening Air Commodore A.R. Boyle with a pistol after the RAF Officer refused to give him a plane to fly to France and rally the French Air Force to relocate to Britain. En-route to the Tower, the Private escorting him lost the warrant, so he declared the man incompetent and ordered him to remain there. The Colonel then travelled back to the office and looked for an Officer to sign a new warrant; finding he was the highest ranked officer present Wintle signed his own arrest warrant and returned to the train (Wintle, 1968) (TvTropes). His eccentricity didn’t stop here, as he was released with two of three charges dropped and an official reprimand for the ‘threatening with a gun’. After a deployment to Syria he was then sent to Vichy France undercover to report on the state of British PoWs. Betrayed, tried as a spy and imprisoned, the English Officer then proceeded to explain to his captors that it was his duty to escape – escaping shortly afterwards. After being recaptured, he went on hunger strike for thirteen days because of the ‘slovenly appearance of the guards who are not fit to guard an English officer!’ (Wintle 1968). This relented when they paraded in their best uniform, however he still frequently reprimanded them for being cowardly traitors until he escaped successfully by sawing through his cell’s window’s bars. Following this, as stated by the Commander of the prison on the Colonel’s ‘This Is Your Life’, ‘because of Wintle's dauntless determination to maintain English standards and his constant challenge to our authority’ the entire garrison of over 250 men defected to the resistance (Wintle, p242).
