Although Carol Mather spent a quarter of a century in politics, first as a desk officer in the Research Department, then as the MP for Esher and a senior whip, many felt that, as with so many who fought in the Second World War, that he felt his wartime career the most interesting, if not the best time of his life. He wrote an account of it, When the Grass Stops Growing, in 1997, and it was certainly a remarkable war. He had joined the Welsh Guards when war broke out and was sent to Sandhurst. He did not complete the course, choosing as a keen skier to volunteer for the 5th Scots Guards who were due to be sent to Finland to help the Finns resist the Russian onslaught in 1940. Before the battalion could sail, an armistice was agreed and Mather returned to the Training Battalion of the Welsh Guards. He was commissioned in 1940.
Volunteering in October 1940 for the commandos, after training at the Irregular Warfare Training Centre at Lochailort in the western Highlands, he was posted to 8 Commando and embarked for the Middle East in January 1941. Amongst those on board were Randolph Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, and David Stirling, who was to become one of Mather’s heroes. In August 1941 he was posted to GHQ Liaison squadron, which had taken heavy casualties in Crete, and spent six months patrolling with them, before joining Stirling’s Long Range Desert Group. As a member of the nascent SAS, then known as L Detachment, and took part in their first raid, a successful attack on German airfields between Daba and Mersa Matruh, At Fuka thirty enemy aircraft were destroyed in a single night.
Mather’s parents were close friends in Lancashire of Betty Montgomery, the wife of the future Field Marshal, and the Mather boys had met Montgomery skiing at Gstaad. William Mather was running Montgomery’s TAC HQ and in October 1942 Carol Mather joined Montgomery’s staff as one of the Liaison staff who kept the Army Commander in close touch with events in the front line. However, Mather could not resist the temptation to take part in another operation with Stirling, who was planning to penetrate deep into Tripolitania and strafe enemy vehicles along the 500 mile road between the British front line at El Agheila and Tripoli. Mather with three jeeps was to tackle a fifteen mile stretch east of Tripoli. On 20 December they were taken prisoner by the Italians and Mather was transferred by submarine to a POW camp in northern Italy. After nine months in captivity, he made his escape at the time of the Italian armistice and with some six hundred others walked through the Apennines to rejoin the Allied forces at Campo basso, north-east of Naples. By November 1943 he was back in England, where he joined the 2nd (Armoured) Battalion of his regiment. Montgomery invited him to rejoin his staff as GSO III (Liaison) and in that capacity he landed in Normandy on D + 1 and carried out his daily task of reporting on operations throughout the Normandy campaign, the break out and the drive north. He won an immediate MC for a particularly dangerous piece of reconnaissance in Nijmegen the day after Operation Market Garden was launched. The town was still in German occupation and Mather came under fire, but completed his reconnaissance successfully.
Mather came very close to death on 9 January 1945 when taking part in an aerial reconnaissance of the forward area over Grave in an Auster. Attacked by a Focke-Wulf 90, the aircraft did not take evasive action. The pilot had been killed at the controls. Major Dick Harden took over the joystick, while Mather, badly wounded, operated the flaps and they engineered a crash landing in marshy ground. In all, as Montgomery discovered when visiting him in hospital, Mather had thirteen separate wounds. “Thirteen, thirteen. Excellent, excellent.” was his breezy comment, but his concern was shown by the care he took in letting Mather’s parents know the news. As he wrote to a friend, “Carol has had an operation and one kidney has been removed. His left forearm is badly shattered and there is a possibility that some of the nerve has been shot away; if this proves to be so then he might not have full use of his left arm. In any case he will be over 2 months in hospital, and then a long period of convalescence will follow.” It was the end of Mather’s war, although not of his friendship with Montgomery, of whom he told many stories, none odder than the way he despatched Mather after the war to recover his skiing boots that were on display in a hotel in Gstaad.
By July Mather had returned to Montgomery’s staff, but he subsequently took a permanent commission, joining the 1st Welsh Guards in Palestine where he remained until the end of the Mandate in 1948. Mather served as assistant Military Attaché in Athens 1953-6, before moving to the War office as GSO1 Military Intelligence 1956-61. His final posting in the army was as Military Secretary to GOC-in-C Eastern Command 1961-2. He resigned his commission as a Lieutenant Colonel to take a desk officer’s position in the Conservative Research Department. Eight years of solid work was enlivened by his chairmanship of the Horton branch of the South Buckinghamshire Conservative Association, a brief foray into local politics on the Eton RDC, and an unsuccessful campaign against Sir Barnett Janner in Leicester North West in the 1966 General Election. His search for a winnable constituency was rewarded in the spring of 1969 when he emerged from 250 applicants to beat his fellow desk officer, Sir Anthony Meyer, to secure the Conservative nomination for Esher. In many ways the constituency and he were well matched, affluent, traditionally and uncompromisingly Conservative, but loyal to a fault, He fought hard on behalf of his constituents, whether against the destruction wrought by the decision to run the M25 through it or for the British Aircraft Corporation at Weybridge. He loathed much about modern Britain, the “violence, mugging, the effect of permissive legislation introduced by the Labour Government, abortion, relaxation of censorship, the homosexual Bill, all that lot”. He campaigned strongly for the reintroduction of capital punishment and for stiffer penalties for criminals and was a vigorous opponent of both the IRA and industrial militants. Although very much a new boy in the Commons, he voted against membership of the EEC in October 1971 and remained deeply unhappy about British membership. Briefly he became notorious when in the summer of 1974 he was one of a group of eight MPs who recommended to then shadow Home Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, that he should create a Citizen Volunteer Force to deter crime and preserve public order. Mather bitterly resented the way in which this was portrayed as an attempt to set up a right wing vigilante squad, but it did not prevent him from lending his backing to David Stirling’s to organise volunteers to run essential services in the event of industrial militancy in the autumn of 1974.
Although he refused to criticise his leader, he had called for “new blood” after the party’s defeat in February 1974 and it was no great surprise that when Margaret Thatcher took over, he was recruited into the Whips Office to look after the south-east. He had held office simultaneously on three key backbench committees, becoming secretary of the Northern Ireland Committee in 1972 and its Vice Chairman 1974-6, joint secretary of the Foreign Affairs Committee 1971-4 and Chairman of its United States sub committee in 1974, and Secretary of the Home Affairs Committee 1974-6. For his remaining twelve years in the Commons he was one of Margaret Thatcher’s most loyal supporters, playing a key role in bringing down the Callaghan Government, and his seniority in the Whips Office was recognised with his appointment as Vice Chamberlain of the Royal Household in 1981 and Comptroller from 1983, senior positions in the hierarchy of whips. He thought that his military service had bean ideal preparation for the Whips Office, and observed when panic overtook the party in the wake of the Crosby by-election in 1982, “The trouble with these young men is that they have never been under fire.” He was knighted for his services in 1987 and somewhat unexpectedly stood down from the Commons at the 1987 election.
David Carol Macdonnell Mather was the grandson of a Conservative MP and the son of Loris Mather, who chaired the family engineering firm, Mather and Platt, and his wife Leila. After Amesbury prep, he was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge and became an apprentice in the family firm. He might have returned to it after the war, but chose to stay on in the army, leaving the running of the firm to his brother. He had a wide range of sporting interests. A good horseman and a crack shot, he had hunted and played polo in his earlier days. Skiing and fishing were amongst his other interests, but he was also accustomed to sketch in pen and wash, and was an accomplished water colourist.
In addition to his wartime memoir, he also published a trenchant defence of Harold Macmillan against the charges made by Nikolai Tolstoy, Aftermath of War: everyone must go home, in 1992 and the loyalty that was a marked feature of his character was displayed also in the tribute he paid to David Stirling when he was under attack for his political activities in 1975, describing him as “the most unorthodox of a long line of brilliant and unorthodox British military leaders, to be rated alongside Lawrence and Wingate.” His own courage, moral and physical, was unquestionable, his loyalty and sense of duty impeccable.