HIDDEN HISTORIES
The story of the gay British MPs who risked everything by opposing Hitler has recently come to light in a new book. Ella Braidwood reveals their bravery
In late May 1940, Major Ronald Cartland was fatally shot as he attempted to make his way from the French town of Cassel to the beach at Dunkirk. Despite limited supplies, Cartland and his men had spent two days fending off the Germans, halting their advance along a key road to Dunkirk and helping secure the evacuation of some 338,000 men.
Aged just 33 when he died, Cartland’s death prompted an outpouring of grief from the highest echelons of British society. Winston Churchill himself wrote to Cartland’s mother Polly offering his deepest condolences after the loss of “so brilliant and splendid a son, whose exceptional abilities would have carried him far.”
A high-flyer, Cartland had become one of the youngest MPs in the House of Commons when he was elected as the Conservative candidate for King’s Norton in 1935, where he was known for being a defiant critic of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. A month before the outbreak…
