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Churchill’s Colonel: The War Diaries of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Barne, edited by his grandson Charles Barne, provide the diaries of the commanding officer of the 4th Hussars. The Hussars were Winston Churchill’s old army regiment, having served with them as a young officer in England and India. In November 1941 he was appointed as their honourary colonel.

As a 33-year old cavalry officer in 1939, Barne arrived in Palestine just days before war was declared and in the initial years of the conflict served in the Middle East and Western Desert, including at the Battle of El Alamein. Joining the Hussars from the Royal Dragoons as second-in-command in October 1943, he succeeded Bobby Kidd as commanding officer in November 1944. Barne’s diaries recount Churchill’s visits to the regiment at Cairo on December 3, 1943 and in Italy on August 25, 1944. On the latter occasion, the Hussars had been visited in a space of a week by their corps commander (Charles Keightley), army commander (Oliver Leese), army group commander-in-chief (Harold Alexander), and prime minister. This, as Barne notes in his diary, must have been “surely a record.” As commanding officer, Barne wrote to the prime minister as the honorary colonel with reports on the regiment and on a visit to London in June 1945 was invited to lunch alone with Churchill and his wife Clementine. The lunch was “extremely pleasant and interesting” and Barne departed “at 4pm rather worse for wear with brandy.” He stopped keeping the diaries in July 1945 and thus unfortunately did not record his four night stay with Churchill at Lake Como in September 1945, where the now former prime minister was taking a holiday. The 4th Hussars were providing the guard for Churchill and Barne made a 450-mile drive from Austria, which included a dangerous car accident, to join him.

Ironically, Barne had despaired at Neville Chamberlain’s resignation and Churchill becoming prime minister on May 10, 1940, writing “a gentleman has gone and a clever cad has replaced him. […] I only hope I live to eat this page.” He did live to eat the page as four years later he was indeed Churchill’s colonel and enthused in his diaries about him, writing “what spirit he has!”