20/05/2026
Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca and Jamaica Inn.
Her husband founded the British airborne forces, and carried three teddy bears into Market Garden.
His name was Frederick Browning.
He was born on 20 December 1896 at 31 Hans Road, Brompton, London, the first son of a wine merchant.
The house was later demolished to make way for an expansion of Harrods, allowing him to claim in later life that he had been born in its piano department.
He was educated at West Downs and Eton, and although he failed the Sandhurst entrance examinations in November 1914, the headmaster of Eton recommended him to the Army Council, and he was admitted that December.
He was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards on 16 June 1915.
He joined the 2nd Battalion at the Western Front in October, and acquired the nickname Boy there.
For a time he served in the same company as Major Winston Churchill, and gave Churchill his own greatcoat when he discovered Churchill had none.
He was invalided home with trench fever in January 1916.
He fought at Pilckem Ridge in July 1917, Poelcappelle in October, and Cambrai in November.
At Cambrai he took command of three companies whose officers had all become casualties, reorganised them under heavy machine-gun and rifle fire, and in two hours placed the front line in a strong state of defence.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, an unusual decoration for a lieutenant, and the French Croix de Guerre the following month.
In September 1918 he became aide-de-camp to General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the British Fourth Army.
Between the wars he was adjutant at Sandhurst.
At the 1926 Sovereign's Parade he rode his horse, named The Vicar, up the steps of Old College and dismounted in the Grand Entrance.
There is no satisfactory explanation as to why. After the Second World War it became an enduring tradition.
He competed in the bobsleigh at the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, as brakeman in the British five-man team that finished tenth.
In 1931 he read a novel called The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier.
He sailed to the River Fowey to see the Cornish coastline that had impressed him, heard that the author was convalescing, and invited her boating on his cabin cruiser Ygdrasil.
He proposed and she refused; then, after a friend's intervention, she proposed and he accepted.
They were married at the Church of St Willow, Lanteglos-by-Fowey, on 19 July 1932.
In May 1940 he was given command of the 128th Hampshire Brigade in the defence of Britain, and in February 1941 the 24th Guards Brigade Group, to defend London from the south.
On 3 November 1941 he was appointed the first General Officer Commanding of the newly created 1st Airborne Division.
He has been called the father of the British airborne forces.
He was instrumental in the parachutists adopting the maroon beret, and commissioned the artist Major Edward Seago to design the Parachute Regiment's emblem of Bellerophon riding the winged horse Pegasus.
He qualified as a pilot in 1942 and designed the Army Air Corps wings he wore from then on.
When Churchill and General George Marshall visited the division in April 1942, Browning told them he needed ninety-six aircraft; he was given eighty-three Whitleys and ten Halifaxes.
His paratroopers fought at Operation Torch in November 1942, and the German troops they faced called them the Rote Teufel, the Red Devils. General Sir Harold Alexander officially confirmed the name.
In March 1943 he took up a new post as Major-General, Airborne Forces at Eisenhower's headquarters.
That July, against his objections, the Allied invasion of Sicily included Operation Ladbroke, a glider landing to seize the Ponte Grande bridge.
The aircrew released the gliders too early.
Two hundred and fifty-two soldiers were drowned.
In December 1943 he took command of I Airborne Corps, and the following August he became Deputy Commander of the First Allied Airborne Army under Lieutenant-General Lewis Brereton.
For Market Garden, the drop timetable was staggered. Too few combat troops would be on the ground on the first day.
He thought the British drop zones were too far from the bridge at Arnhem.
He felt unable to challenge the airmen.
His intelligence officer brought him Ultra evidence that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were in the Arnhem area. He downplayed it.
Informed that his airborne troops would have to hold the bridge for two days, he is said to have responded that they could hold it for four.
He later claimed he had added that he thought they might be going a bridge too far.
On 17 September 1944 he landed by glider near Nijmegen with Major-General James Gavin's US 82nd Airborne.
In his pack he carried three teddy bears and a framed print of Albrecht Dürer's The Praying Hands.
Major-General Stanisław Sosabowski of the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade was removed from his command on Browning's critical evaluation.
In December 1944 Lord Mountbatten took him as Chief of Staff at South East Asia Command.
He was knighted in 1946 and made Military Secretary of the War Office that September.
He retired from the Army in April 1948.
That January he had become Comptroller and Treasurer to Princess Elizabeth, on Lord Mountbatten's recommendation.
When she became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 he became Treasurer in the Office of the Duke of Edinburgh.
He had been drinking since the war, and it had become chronic. In July 1957 he suffered a severe nervous breakdown.
He retired from the Palace in 1959.
In 1963, under the influence of prescription drugs and alcohol, he was in a car crash in which two people were injured, and was fined fifty pounds.
He retreated to Menabilly, in Cornwall, the mansion his wife had leased and restored in 1943, and which had inspired her novel Rebecca.
He died there of a heart attack on 14 March 1965.
His name was Frederick Browning, and Britain has nearly forgotten the Olympic bobsledder who founded its airborne forces, married Daphne du Maurier, and died at Menabilly, the house that had inspired her novel.
