John Anthony Aylmer: Irish Guards officer from family with deep Kildare roots

Born: October 7th, 1925

Died: January 25th, 2022

The death of John Anthony (“Tony”) Aylmer, aged 96, brings to an end a classic story of Anglo-Irish life, stretching back to the Anglo-Norman conquest of Leinster in the 12th century.

Resident in Co. Kildare from that time until the mid-twentieth century, the Aylmers had their principal residence for centuries at Donadea Castle, later at the Lyons estate and later again at Courtown House, Kilcock, where Tony Aylmer grew up.

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He was the younger son of Major John Wyndham Aylmer, one of a long line of Aylmer sons who had served for generations in the British Army (Major Aylmer himself had been born in India when Tony Aylmer’s grandfather was an officer there in the Indian Army of the Raj, and was decorated with the Military Cross in the first World War) and Edith Mary Lode, a daughter of a prominent London banker. During the Emergency in neutral Ireland from 1939 to 1945, Major Aylmer actually joined the Irish Army reserve in north Kildare, co-commanding the Local Defence Force units. In an historical irony perhaps typical of Ireland, he did so jointly with an ex-IRA commander.

In 1947, Courtown House was sold. Nonetheless, Tony Aylmer thereafter kept close contact with his heritage in Co. Kildare. In 1961 he married Shaunagh Guinness of Lodge Park, Straffan, whose brother, Robert, is the owner/operator of the Straffan Steam Museum, and latterly, according to local historian Seamus Cullen, “he [Aylmer] was involved with many local heritage groups in Kildare and was very generous with his time. He will be greatly missed by the many local historians with whom he developed a warm and lasting friendship.”

Interment of his remains took place in Cloncurry Cemetery, where members of the family had been interred for generations in the Aylmer Mausoleum, situated within the medieval church ruins there.

Despite the outbreak of the second World War in 1939, Tony Aylmer was sent to school at Wellington College, near Aldershot, a traditional route for boys seeking officer training subsequently at the Royal Military Academies of Sandhurst or Woolwich.

Aylmer recalled later in life how, as a 15-year-old, he and other schoolboys had helped feed soldiers returning from the Dunkirk evacuation with sandwiches served through the open windows of troop trains. However, the war reached his home also: on one memorable occasion, he and his family hid an RAF pilot who had escaped from the nearby Curragh camp, where the officer had been interned following a crash-landing. They hid him in the roof of their stables before helping him to escape to Belfast.

Aylmer joined up himself, aged just 17, in 1943, being commissioned just over a year later into the Irish Guards. Both his older siblings already in the British forces: his brother Michael, the eldest child, in the Army, where he was to reach the rank of major by war’s end, albeit in a different regiment; and their sister Blanche, who served with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (the so-called “WAAFs”).

German surrender

Aged 19, from late February, 1945, he found himself in battle in the closing and very bloody last months of Nazi Germany. On March 30th, the Irish Guards crossed the Rhine on a specially and hastily constructed bridge just downstream from Rees. During this operation, his company commander was killed, and he himself was injured; nonetheless, just weeks later he was to witness the German surrender near Cuxhaven.

Aylmer’s subsequent career saw him in four particularly crucial roles, starting when he served on the staff of the (Dublin-born) General Sir Alan Cunningham, the last high commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine. In this capacity he witnessed another historic occasion, the evacuation of the last British troops from what was then becoming Israel, at the port of Haifa.

Secondly, as an officer with growing seniority in a regiment of the Brigade of Guards, traditionally associated with major ceremonial occasions involving the British monarch, Aylmer was directly involved in both the funeral procession of King George IV in 1952 and in the procession to Westminster Abbey for the coronation of the present queen the following year.

Later, in 1963-4, he was military assistant to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India and by then chief of the UK’s Defence Staff, accompanying him at the funeral in 1964 of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Aylmer commanded a battalion at yet another end-of-Empire moment in 1966-67 in Aden, with the Irish Guards, which period of service should not be confused with that, during the same period and location, of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, under the very different style of command of the notorious Lieut Col Colin “Mad Mitch” Mitchell, which brought disgrace to the British Army and perhaps prefigured the conduct of the Parachute Regiment a few years later in Derry.

It was perhaps significant that when Aylmer became commanding officer (CO) of the Irish Guards in 1969, he is believed to have been instrumental in ensuring that Irish regiments of the British Army were not posted to Northern Ireland during the worst period of the Troubles. Significantly also, he was destined be the last surviving CO of the Irish Guards, and indeed the last Irish Guardsman, to have served in the second World War, giving his service a historic character.

In 1973, he joined the staff of Nato, at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Belgium, retiring from the British army in 1982.

At that time, and in the wake of the Northern Irish Hunger Strike protests and the bitter atmosphere accompanying these events, Aylmer thought it prudent not to retire to his native Kildare, and settled instead on the Isle of Wight, where in time he was appointed a deputy lieutenant (and thus one of Queen Elizabeth’s representatives there). He became actively involved in local charities, including the Prince’s Trust.

Aylmer was predeceased by his wife in 2010, and is survived by his children, Mary, Patrick and Rose, and grandchildren.