WW1 Cap of Colonel V J Greenwoood MC 10th Royal Hussars (PWO)
This officer’s service dress cap, damaged in battle, belonged to Colonel Victor John Greenwood MC, a distinguished 10th Royal Hussar, who fought with his Regiment in France in World War I. As Captain and Adjutant of the Tenth Hussars, he was wounded at Monchy-le-Preux in April 1917, immediately after his Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hardwick DSO, was also wounded.
Captain Greenwood was left for dead in a cellar with a score of others. The stretcher-bearer, having been instructed to leave those with stomach wounds, glanced at the label attached to Captain Greenwood and passed him by. “Pick me up. Take me out,” ordered Captain Greenwood. He spoke with such vigour and firmness that it was impossible not to obey.
Half-way down the road to Arras, the nearness of a bursting shell made the bearers drop the stretcher and scurry for cover. When, a few minutes later, they came back, one said, “Well, Nobby the poor blighter’s dead now.”
“Dead be damned,” roared Captain Greenwood. “Pick me up. Take me on.”
The stretcher-bearers picked him up; took him on. It was not a voice to be disobeyed, even though it came from an apparently dying man.
Captain Greenwood had been lucky. He had been hit in the stomach by a flat fragment of a shell. There was a mass of blood, but the injury was superficial. Before many weeks were past, he was back in the line with the Tenth Hussars and he survived the war.
Born in 1888, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He joined the 10th Royal Hussars (PWO) in 1910. He was Adjutant from 1916 to 1919 and he commanded the Tenth Hussars from 1927 to 1931. He held the appointment of Regimental Colonel of the Tenth Hussars from 1939-1947. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1915. He had the remarkable distinction of serving continuously with the Regiment without a single break of any kind for a period of 21 years. He died on 26th March 1949.
Colonel Victor John Greenwood MC was a member of a remarkable military family. His father, Captain Charles Stanyforth Greenwood, served with the Tenth Hussars in India from 1878 until 1884 when he took part in the Regiment’s charge at the Battle of El Teb in the Sudan that same year. He retired from the Army in 1889.
His son, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Charles Greenwood, joined the Tenth Hussars in 1947 and assumed command of the Regiment in 1968. He was the last commanding officer of the Tenth Hussars and commanded the Regiment until amalgamation with the 11th Hussars in 1969. In all no less than six members of the Greenwood family served in the Tenth Hussars, a record no other family could equal.
