Harry Nicholls grew up in the Meadows district of Nottingham, one of a large family. His father was a bricklayer who had served in the First World War, and three of his brothers went into the Grenadier Guards, one into the RAF.He left school in 1929 for a job at an adding machine factory, then joined the Grenadier Guards himself in 1936. He was the battalion boxer, and not a flawless soldier. He was made lance corporal in 1937, lost the stripe for going absent, and had it back by 1939.
His battalion crossed to France that September. When the Germans attacked in 1940 the British army went into Belgium to meet them, and was then forced back to the line of the River Scheldt, north of Tournai.
The Germans crossed the river in several places on 21 May, and the 3rd Battalion’s company was ordered to counter attack.
Nicholls was commanding a section in the right forward platoon. At the very start of the advance, shrapnel hit his arm. He carried on leading his men. As the company came over a small ridge, the Germans opened heavy machine gun fire at close range.
Realising the danger to the whole company, he seized a Bren gun and dashed towards the machine guns, firing from the hip. He silenced the first, then the other two, though he was severely wounded again.
He did not stop there. He went up to higher ground and fired into the German infantry massed behind the guns, causing many casualties, until he had no ammunition left. By the Gazette’s count he was wounded at least four times, and he refused to give in. The citation says his action got the company to its objective and drove the enemy back across the river.
His own side reported him killed. In fact, German soldiers found him that night, gravely wounded and alive. Another prisoner, Guardsman H H Smith, dressed his wounds. When the VC was gazetted in 1940, the citation ended by saying he had since been reported killed in action.
That August, King George VI handed the medal to his wife, Constance, at Buckingham Palace. In September, word came through the Red Cross that he was a prisoner of war in Poland. The medal was returned.
In the camp, the German commandant presented him with the ribbon of the VC. In January 1945, with the Red Army advancing, the Germans marched the prisoners west.
American troops liberated him in May. In June, King George VI invested him with the same medal he had already handed to his wife.
The wounds did not heal with the war. He left the army in 1946, but dizziness from his head wounds cost him four jobs within months, including one as a boxing instructor at Butlin’s in Filey.
By December the army had granted him a thirty per cent disability pension. He took his family to Southern Rhodesia in 1947 and worked as a bank commissionaire in Salisbury. In 1952 he came home. His head injuries now stopped him working at all.
He died in 1975, aged sixty, in a Grenadier Guards Association flat in Leeds, from pressure on the brain caused by an old bullet wound at the back of his skull. He was buried with full military honours in the family grave in Nottingham.
His VC is at Wellington Barracks in London, and Bosworth Junior School, where he started, has a plaque to him.
The Gazette reported him dead in 1940. An old wound from the war made it true thirty five years later.
