US Edition Major Bruce Shand, who has died aged 89, was a gallant soldier, a wine merchant, a master of foxhounds and a discreet member of the Royal Household; late in life, however, he found himself thrust towards the public limelight as the father of the Duchess of Cornwall.
A bluff yet shy man who had a Wodehousian penchant for ending sentences with the word "what?", Shand proved adept at sidestepping attempts to question him about his daughter's relationship with the Prince of Wales, and advised friends to keep their mouths shut. But there were periodic rumours that Major Shand was becoming exasperated with the hostile publicity his daughter was receiving as the royal marriage drew to a close and after Diana Princess of Wales died. Some soldierly blunt words were said to have been offered to the Prince on several occasions before he married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005, an event at which Shand was discreetly present.
In March the Duchess repaid his stalwart support by carrying out an errand for him when she accompanied the Prince to the battlefield of El Alamein. This was to lay posies and cards at the graves of the two soldiers, who were killed by his side in his armoured car. The message declared: "The gallantry and sacrifice of two fellow 12th Lancers on 6th November 1942 will never be forgotten by me. Bruce Shand."
Bruce Middleton Hope Shand was born on January 22 1917, the son of Philip Morton Shand, a wine writer and architect whose family owned a Glasgow calico business. Morton Shand first married Bruce's mother, the daughter of an accountant in Hammersmith. When this marriage quickly broke up, he went on to wed again three more times, giving the boy two half-sisters, one of whom was the future Lady Howe of Idlicote, wife of the Tory politician Lord Howe of Aberavon. Young Bruce was sent to Rugby, which he cordially disliked, and from which he emerged having demonstrated few talents beyond an enthusiasm for riding.
After being sent to France to learn the language, he passed into Sandhurst with high grades, despite becoming imprudently drunk on the second night of the exams. The sergeant-major used to bellow at the cadets: "I have had men through my hands from the bogs of Ireland, the moors of Scotland and the claypits of Staffordshire - but none so idle as you gentlemen." Shand thrived on this, and was commissioned into the 12th Royal Lancers, to become a troop leader with "A" Squadron.
On the outbreak of the Second World War, the regiment landed in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Equipped with armoured cars, it was stationed at Fouquevilliers for six months, and moved up to the neutral Belgian frontier three times in response to threatening enemy troop movements before finally entering the country when the Germans invaded on May 10 1940. During the next 18 days Shand led patrols to Hazebrouck and St Omer to gather intelligence of enemy dispositions. By skilful and daring manoeuvre, he covered the withdrawal of a column of new lorries and guns under fire from four German tanks, and was awarded an immediate MC.
On being assigned the crucial task of covering the withdrawal at Dunkirk, Shand and comrades took their share of the heavy casualties while acting as embarkation officers during the bombing. In his dispatches, Field Marshal Viscount Gort wrote that without the 12th Lancers only a small part of the BEF would have reached the port, where Shand finally boarded a cement ship for Margate on May 31.
After the regiment reformed at Poole, Dorset, Shand went to Northern Ireland for a spell to help with training the North Irish Horse, then spent Christmas in command of HQ Squadron near Reigate, Surrey. In September 1941 he set off with the regiment's armoured cars and a tea-chest of books as part of 7th Armoured Division in Libya.
The following January the Eighth Army had advanced more than 300 miles in three weeks, and was at the extremity of its lines of communication when Rommel went on the counter-offensive. As the Germans advanced in considerable strength on Msus, Libya, the 1st/6th Rajputana Rifles was ordered to destroy the supply dumps there and withdraw.
Temporary Captain Shand was in command of a half squadron of 12th Lancers ordered to watch the threatened flank. The enemy advance was so rapid that the situation of the Rajputanas and about 100 soldiers of the Indian Pioneer Company became extremely precarious. Shand's small force came under heavy fire, but he handled it with great skill and coolness, and succeeded in covering the Rajputnas' withdrawal and in evacuating 20 armoured cars.
Loading the Indian Pioneers into his cars and two lorries he just managed to slip through the gap to the north before the Germans closed it. The recommendation that he be awarded a Bar to his MC described him as a cavalry leader of the first order.
Shand commanded "C" Squadron in the three days of fierce fighting at the battle of Knightsbridge, when the Lancers' task was to move behind the advancing armour, infiltrate the enemy lines and destroy their transport. Before the second battle of Alamein, Shand found himself being introduced to Winston Churchill, who prodded his medal ribbon with approval, commented on how thin he was, and asked if he were getting enough food and drink, before moving on.
A few days after the Germans started to retreat on November 2, 7th Armoured Division was ordered to move to Kalda, south of Mersa Matruh. Shand's squadron arrived ahead of the rest, encumbered with some 100 prisoners.
As darkness fell and a slight mist rose on November 7, he was just able to make out a large body of vehicles approaching along the escarpment. By the time he realised that it was an enemy convoy, he was under fire.
His radio operator, Sergeant Charles Francis, slumped dead to the bottom of the car after being hit by a bullet that passed through Shand's cheek. With his mouth filling with blood, Shand ordered his driver, Corporal Edward Plant, to turn the car around, which then received a second blow, killing Plant. As he climbed out of the burning vehicle, Shand remembered being urged to jump on to another car, then he was hit in the knee and fell off. He awakened to a buzz of German voices. After his wounds were dressed, a German officer pointed out Rommel, a figure in a long overcoat who was walking towards a plane.
Shand was driven first to Tobruk and later evacuated in an elegant hospital ship which had once been the Tsar's Black Sea yacht. After a month in hospital in Athens, he was told that he had suffered no permanent damage and wastaken by train to Spangenburg Castle, near Kassel, where he joined some 300 British officers as PoWs.
On emerging from the sick bay he found that General Eisenhower had absolved officers from the duty of escaping because the Germans were unlikely to respect the rules of war. Shand took on such responsiblities as laundry officer and taking down BBC radio broadcasts. The camp was short of food in the later months of the war, but Shand received monthly parcels of books sent out from a shop in Piccadilly, and was able to devote several hours a day to reading history and biography as well as Thackeray and Trollope, for whom he developed a lifelong affection.
As the Allied forces approached in March 1945, Shand and his comrades were moved out of the castle and were marched for two days. Their guards, however, were elderly and tired easily, and he escaped from the column. He hid in woods for two days and nights, "dodging the hair-trigger adolescents of the Hitler Youth", as he said afterwards, until joining up with the American forces.
After being debriefed in Paris he flew back to England, where, in 1946, he married Rosalind Cubitt, the daughter of the 3rd Lord Ashcombe and a descendant of Thomas Cubitt, the builder of Mayfair and Belgravia and Bloomsbury; she was also (as their daughter Camilla was to be reminded, at least by newspapers) the granddaughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of King Edward VII.
Like many young men just out of the Army, Shand took some time to find a suitable job, working first for an educational films company then going into the wine business. With a friend, he first took over Block, Grey and Block in South Audley Street, a firm of old-fashioned wine merchants which supplied Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The firm eventually ran into difficulties, and he joined Ellis, Son and Vidler, of Hastings and London, with which he remained until his retirement.
In time he had a house in Kensington and another at the Sussex village of Plumpton, close to the racecourse, where he and his wife brought up their son, Mark, and two daughters, Camilla and Annabel. This gave him plenty of opportunity to indulge his passion for hunting.
As joint master of the Southdown Hunt in the early 1970s he was driven to declare that some of the people who went out with the hounds were distinctly unkempt. "Nobody can be expected to have a vast wardrobe by Christian Dior, but if they can afford to buy a horse they can afford to keep it and themselves clean. It's offensive to the farmers, you know. One or two have said to me: 'We welcome the hunt, major, but can't you tell some of those blighters to be less scruffy'."
At the same Shand served as Vice Lord-Lieutenant of East Sussex and worked his way up the Queen's Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard to become Clerk of the Cheque. It was a career, he joked, that involved dressing as if to fight the battle of Waterloo.
In his latter years Bruce Shand devoted much of his energy to nursing his wife; she died of the bone-wasting disease osteoporosis in 1994. He also produced Previous Engagements, a slim volume of war memoirs spiced with shafts of humour, and reviewed military books for Country Life.
Sir John Keegan writes: Bruce Shand, among his many talents, was a gifted writer of style and erudition. His memoir of his service in the Second World War is a brilliant picture of the experience of a regular cavalry officer in the campaign of 1940 and in the Western Desert.
It is also extremely funny, as Bruce so effortlessly was. As a convalescent in 1940, he was sent to a rest home for officers in the south of France run by a rich Englishwoman, one of whose companions was the widow of Marshal Joffre.
She kept a small dog called Chamberlain and took great pleasure in hearing the British nationals ordering it about - "Viens ici Chamberlain. Ne fais pas ça Chamberlain."
Bruce enjoyed the joke. So did all who heard his imitation. How greatly his friends will miss him.