When war hero Jack Sherwood- Kelly embarked on a rescue mission at the height of the Russian civil war it set him on a collision course with his political master Winston Churchill and ignited a controversy that ended his chequered military career. Steve Snelling charts the rise and fall of one of the British Army’s most swashbuckling frontline commanders.
GREAT WAR | AT WAR WITH CHURCHILL
The pitiable newspaper article made for wretched reading. Beneath the 1922 headline ‘My Grim Struggle Against Cruel Poverty’, Colonel Jack Sherwood-Kelly, hailed as one of the bravest men in the British army, recounted a saga of battlefield heroism traduced by political scandal and a fall from grace as spectacular as it was shocking. “I am down and out, ” he confessed, “straitened financially, physically ill and newwarly crazy with worry.” Such was his humiliation at being taken to court for failing to pay his gas bill and the subsequent offers of charity, he felt ashamed to leave his home for fear of being recognised. He wanted nothing to do with hand-outs, well-meant though they were. “It is as a fighting man that I should like to be employed, ” he wrote, “but I am prepared to take on any job that I think I can do well…
