Cavalry officer who won the Military Cross in Palestine in 1947 and later trained three-day event horses
Fresh from war in northwest Europe with the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment, Michael Naylor-Leyland accompanied the Life Guards to Palestine where the League of Nations-mandated British authorities were struggling to keep the peace. The Arab population was resisting the flood of Jewish immigrants arriving from countries liberated from Nazi tyranny and the Army was caught in the middle.
Members of the Jewish minority routinely took their lives in their hands when travelling between settlements or from one Jewish district of Jerusalem to another. The situation was worsened by the Jewish Stern Gang massacre of Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin in early April 1947.
On April 15 a convoy of buses carrying Jewish academics, doctors, medical workers and students set off at 9am from west Jerusalem to the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus on the northeast outskirts. As it passed through an Arab area mines were detonated under the first and last vehicles and rifle fire opened on the buses trapped between them.
The commanding officer of the 1st Highland Light Infantry was first on the scene offering the protection of his battalion but this was declined. The Jewish passengers refused to leave their vehicles until Haganah, the embryonic Israeli defence force, arrived to guarantee their safety. This did not happen as more Arabs rushed to the ambush, adding to the fusillade of fire on the stationary convoy.
After several hours of stalemate, an armoured car troop of the Life Guards under Naylor-Leyland’s command was ordered to deal with the situation. The delay was owing to the necessity for the War Office in London to authorise the use of the armoured cars’ main armament of 37mm guns, which was refused.
Naylor-Leyland led his troop to the scene under cover of smoke fired from the vehicles’ self-defence dischargers. Once in position, he and his troop sergeant — in the Life Guards a Corporal of Horse — removed two engine covers and, using them as shields, made contact with the besieged passengers and then conducted them two at a time to the safety of waiting army transports.
Much propaganda was made of the incident by both factions in the Palestine dispute and reports of casualties varied considerably. The most reliable suggested that out of 28 surviving Jewish passengers only eight emerged unscathed. Naylor-Leyland was awarded the Military Cross for his initiative in rescuing the civilians while under fire and in disregard for his own safety.
Michael Montague George Naylor-Leyland, the second son of Sir Edward Naylor-Leyland Bt, was born in London in 1926. He was educated at Eton and received a wartime emergency commission in the Life Guards in 1944. He served with the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment, one of two armoured car units formed early in the Second World War from the Life Guards and the Royal Horse Guards. Aged just 19 he accompanied 1st HCR to the Netherlands for the final months of the war in 1945, seeing action in the Battle of the Rhine and subsequent advance into Germany. Shortly after the incident in Palestine when he won his MC, he returned to Germany to be ADC to Major-General Harry Arkwright commanding the 2nd Armoured Division, before rejoining his regiment in London.
Horses were already the driving interest in his life and for the remainder of his relatively brief military service he hunted in Leicestershire whenever he could. He attended the equestrian events of the 1948 Olympic Games and came away with two ambitions. First, to run the marathon course from Windsor to Knightsbridge Barracks, which he did, and second to compete in the Olympic Games, which, but for bad luck, he would also have achieved.
He was selected for the 1952 Olympics three-day eventing team but caught chicken pox shortly beforehand and so was unable to compete. Although naturally disappointed, he continued with his eventing career, winning a team gold medal at the European Championships in Turin in 1955 and an individual bronze.
Subsequently, he trained three-day event horses and had success bringing on a number of good ones. The best was Leadhills, which he bought as an unbroken 3-year-old and trained to take his daughter Joanna to the cusp of the British junior eventing team. Renamed as Beagle Bay, the horse was then ridden by Lucinda Prior-Palmer to win both Badminton and Burghley.
In the 1970s he was a judge at many of the major horse shows and a technical delegate at Badminton and at the Montreal Olympics in 1976.
He married Jacqueline Floor, daughter of Major Ides Floor, a veteran of the wartime Special Operations Executive, in 1953. She survives him with a son and a daughter. Another daughter predeceased him.
Captain M.M.G. Naylor-Leyland, MC, was born on February 21, 1926. He died on August 8, 2012 aged 86
Commander Bill King
офицер-подводник, потопивший много вражеских целей, а позже совершивший одиночное кругосветное путешестие
