Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, and Senior Commander Mary Williamson, Auxiliary Territorial Service, 1946

Photograph, Germany, 1946.

Bernard Law Montgomery was born in London in 1887. He attended the Royal Military College Sandhurst, where he was nearly expelled for fighting with hot pokers. He graduated into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and was sent to France during the First World War (1914-1918) where he was shot through the right lung by a sniper, and nearly died.

Montgomery became one of the most prominent and successful British commanders of the Second World War (1939-1945). He is most famous for his victorious command of the Allies against General Erwin Rommel in North Africa, and during the invasions of Italy and Normandy.

Montgomery took the surrender of much of Germany's armed forces in May 1945. He then became the first commander of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) and the British member of the Allied Control Council, with wide ranging responsibility for the governance of occupied Germany.

This signed photograph was taken at Gatow Airport on his departure from Germany to take up the position of Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1946. After shaking hands with the senior British officers and foreign dignitaries who had assembled to say goodbye, Montgomery then surprised everyone by insisting on shaking hands with all the lower rank personnel who had also gathered to see him off.

Here he is shaking hands with Senior Commander Mary Williamson of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, who, at that time, was serving as a staff officer on the secretariat of the Control Commission for Germany (British Element) in Berlin. Williamson was awarded a military MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in recognition of her services the following year.

One of 102 photographs relating to personalities and individuals serving the Auxiliary Territorial Service, 1939-1949 (c).