John Gunn: Soldier who won the Military Cross in the Low Countries

On godforsaken Lüneburg Heath during the bitterly cold winter of 1951-52, I was a 19-year-old tank gunman-operator National Serviceman, and I just could not get the wireless signals to function. A Major arrived. He did not bawl me out. He got into the Centurion, expertly synchronised the signals, and patiently explained what I should have done. His only gentle rebuke was: "Don't flap!" I suppose that if you have fought from Palestine 1937 via Alamein, Salerno, and Normandy to the Elbe, winning an MC as a captain on the way, you do become a little impatient of flapping. Major John Gunn, who served the Scots Greys from 1937 until 1959, was among the bravest and the calmest.

Henry John Dymock Gunn was born in Bristol in 1917, where his father worked at a senior level for Imperial Tobacco. The family had its roots in Caithness, where the smallish clan Gunn had suffered at the hands of the Sinclairs, the Mackenzies and the Sutherlands, and Gunn's great-grandfather came south to be a Methodist minister in Chard, Somerset, where he married a Miss Wills. His grandfather, Henry Wills Gunn, became deputy chairman of Imperial Tobacco.

At Eton, where he boxed for the school team, Gunn was in the House of Charlie Hayes, for many years head of science at the school. Gunn had a technical bent, unusual in Etonian cavalry officers, and finished his military career at the School of Nuclear and Chemical Ground Defence, having previously spent a year at the Fighting Vehicle Research and Development Establishment.

Commissioned into the Royal Scots Greys, he was posted with his regiment to the Levant, where British and French forces had an edgy relationship in Syria. His near contemporary, the nonogenarian Colonel Aidan Sprot MC, himself a pivotal figure in the Greys, recollected to me that: "John Gunn was a most conscientious officer, and deeply popular member of the officers' mess, excellent in his relations with NCOs and men, partly because he was the acknowledged regimental expert on the vital area of wireless communications, so important for an Armoured Regiment in North Africa and Italy."

Towards the end of the war Gunn found himself involved in fighting in the Low Countries. During bitter fighting, he enhanced his reputation for resourcefulness and was awarded a richly deserved Military Cross. His citation noted: "Four POWs were captured who declared that the enemy had withdrawn on hearing the approach of tanks over such an unexpected route to a position of such advantage and our infantry advanced and occupied their objectives," and that "by his determined action over extremely difficult country and under heavy fire Captain Gunn enabled our infantry to occupy their objectives with the minimum of loss and reorganise their new position secure from counter-attack which might have proved serious."

Before retiring in 1959, Gunn served as a squadron commander, and in other senior capacities. As a horseman, he was second only in the regiment to his friend and commanding officer, Colonel Douglas Stewart DSO, who was, with Wilfred White and Colonel Harry Llewellyn, Britain's only gold medallist at the Helsinki Olympic Games of 1952, where they won the team event.

On the horse Memphis, Gunn rode in the 1947 Royal Tournament at Olympia and he was a major open competitor in the Cologne horse trials. In retirement, he was the doer of many good works, not least for the riding community in the Chippenham area of Wiltshire. For family and friends he was a proverbial "saint" for the way in which, for many years, he tended to his wife, stricken with multiple sclerosis.

Henry John Dymock Gunn, soldier: born Bristol 31 July 1917; married Elizabeth Phillips (died 1990; one daughter); died Didmarton, Gloucestershire 5 March 2009.