Lieutenant-Colonel Mervyn Butler
2nd Battalion, Essex Regiment
1st Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment

He never hesitated to go where he felt his duty called him and when he flew in some danger in a helicopter to make contact with the local authorities with whom he hoped he might organise a cease fire, but without avail … His Brigade has been completely cheerful and supremely confident and splendidly trained and his own inspiring efforts have shown him to be a leader second to none and in action upholding the very highest tradition of the British Army.”

(D.S.O. Bar, citation, 13 Jun 1957)

Born in Toronto, Ontario on 1 July 1913, Mervyn Andrew Haldane Butler was commissioned in the Prince of Wales’s Volunteers (South Lancashire Regiment) in 1933 after attending Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He served with the 1st Battalion during the Battle of France in 1940 and earned the Military Cross. Under heavy machine gun and mortar fire, he gathered as many soldiers as he could to drive the enemy out of their position. His name appeared in the newspapers again later that year when a British Army major sued his wife for divorce on the grounds of adultery with Butler, who later married the divorcee, Marjorie Millicent Dann, in 1941.

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