John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming Churchill — Fighting Jack, Mad Jack — was born in Colombo in 1906, passed out of Sandhurst in 1926 and served in Burma, where he rode a motorbike across the country for fun. Then he left the army altogether. He edited a newspaper in Nairobi, worked as a male model, shot an arrow in The Thief of Bagdad, took second place in the military piping competition at the Aldershot Tattoo and represented Great Britain at the 1939 world archery championships in Oslo.
War brought him back. He went to France in 1940 with a broadsword on his belt, a longbow and the bagpipes, on the reasoning that an officer without a sword is improperly dressed. The story that he killed a German with an arrow is the one everyone repeats; Churchill himself said his bows had been crushed under a lorry earlier in the campaign. What is certain is the sword, which he carried for the rest of the war.
After Dunkirk he volunteered for the Commandos. At Vågsøy in Norway in 1941 he went up the beach playing the March of the Cameron Men on the pipes, then dropped them and threw a grenade. He fought at Salerno, and in 1944 led a Commando raid on the Yugoslav island of Brač where, with his men dead or scattered around him, he was found playing Will Ye No Come Back Again on the pipes and taken prisoner.
The Germans, assuming a relation of the Prime Minister, sent him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He tunnelled out, was recaptured, was moved to Tyrol, walked out again — and kept walking, a hundred and fifty kilometres, until he met an American armoured column near Verona.
Sent to Burma and arriving just as the atomic bombs ended the war, he is supposed to have said that if it had not been for those damned Yanks, they could have kept the war going another ten years. Afterwards he jumped with the parachute regiment in Palestine, took up surfing on the Severn bore in his fifties, and died at home in 1996, aged eighty-nine.
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