Lieutenant-Colonel D.A.D. Eykyn
11th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers

Lt-Col. Eykyn has shown outstanding leadership and enthusiasm as a commanding officer. It has been largely due to his leadership that his bn has been uniformly successful in their actions against the enemy; in fact he has never suffered a reverse.

(D.S.O. citation, 10 Feb 1945)

Born in British India on 11 August 1906, Duncan Arthur Davidson Eykyn was an officer in the Royal Scots since 1926. His father, Captain Gilbert Davidson Pitt Eykyn (1881—1915) had been commissioned a second lieutenant in 1899, served in the Boer War, and after a time with the Indian Army, joined the Royal Scots (Lothian Regiment) in 1905. He was killed in action at Second Ypres on 24 April 1915, while attached to the 4th Battalion, Alexandra Princess of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment. A staff sergeant remarked, “Our gallant little adjutant was one of the first to fall. When the order was given to charge, the Germans ran away like cowards, and refused to face our boys’ cold steel.” The younger Eykyn followed his late father’s military career in the Royal Scots. He served as battalion adjutant and rose to captain by 1937.

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