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Newlyweds did not meet again until war had taken its toll
She was a member of the Women’s Voluntary Service at the time and was sent to help scrub out the old Railway Hotel at Matlock so that it could be used as a canteen for the incoming troops.
“We were told we had to feed them all. Well, none of us were very good cooks but they all came to our canteen every day. They loved it. They were all so young and so grateful after what they had been through. One of the regulars was Peter.”
Amid the uncertainties of war, their romance blossomed and, in 1941, they became engaged. Meantime, Winifred had joined the WAAF and been posted to Northern Ireland to work in special operations on radar, decoding and ciphers.
In 1942, Peter obtained a 48-hour leave so they could marry in a church in Belfast. There was no time for family members to attend. Winifred’s bridesmaids were the girls from her hut – all 38 of them from the Gorbals.
“They were quite tough. They used to carry little daggers in their stockings but I’ve never had better friends.”
The newly-weds were destined not to see each other again for more than two years. While Winifred plotted enemy movements deep underground in Ireland, Peter fought with the Desert Rats under Montgomery in North Africa, his courageous actions earning him the Military Cross and two bars, until, in 1944, he returned to England to join the Normandy landings with the Royal Horse Artillery’s J Battery under his command.
“The Germans had retreated and they were packing up the guns to move forward when some Americans came along and asked for help,” said Lady Hilton. “They said there was a pocket of Germans still fighting and their men were being killed. Peter said he would help and followed them in his jeep with his driver, Corporal Skelly, a wonderful man.
“Peter knew there was a minefield outside Caen and asked the Americans for a plan of where it was, but they said they didn’t have one. ‘We just go’. So Peter shrugged and said: ‘OK, Skelly, we’ll just go’.
It was at that point that the Major’s luck ran out.
"They were nearly across when they hit a mine. The jeep was blown up in to the air and landed upside-down on top of my husband, crushing his head and face.
“Corporal Skelly was blown clear of the minefield but lay unconscious for about 48 hours. When the medical people eventually found Skelly, they could see no sign of Peter, so thought he must be dead. A message came through to us that he had been killed in action.”
“He searched all over the minefield until he found the jeep,” said Lady Hilton. “He could see Peter pinned under it. Nobody knows to this day how he had the strength but, somehow, he managed to drag Peter out from under the jeep and pull him across the minefield to safety.
“Then he wirelessed for the medical corps. They said Peter couldn’t possibly be alive because his injuries looked so horrendous but Skelly said he was still breathing and insisted they treat him. He went in the ambulance with him and would not leave his side until he saw he had been put on plane to England. He should have got the VC for what he did.”
Sadly, the Hiltons never had a chance to thank him for, a couple of days later, the brave Corporal Skelly was himself killed in action.
Meantime, word had got back to Winifred in Derbyshire that her husband was still alive and that an unconscious soldier, swathed in bandages, bearing a label which read “Hilton” had been sent to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital for treatment.
Winifred was desperate to see if it was Peter but she was heavily pregnant with their first son, Andrew, and had no means of getting to Birmingham from her home in Tansley, as there was no petrol for private use. Eventually, she begged and borrowed a WVS van and drove to the hospital with her mother-in-law.
“We went round every ward and every bed for two days, searching for him without success,” said Lady Hilton. “There were so many poor men with dreadful injuries, wrapped in bandages. We had almost given up when a hand came out from under a sheet and I said, ‘I think we’ve found him’. I recognised his thumb nails.”
“My mother-in-law used to say that her husband was better-looking after the accident than before,” said Lady Hilton. “Peter was fine. You would never have known apart from one of his eyes, which was nearly always closed because the muscles were damaged.”
Ironically, only three days before he was injured himself on that fateful day in 1944, Peter Hilton had come to the rescue of his father.
Richard Hilton, by then a major-general and second in command to General Montgomery at Normandy, was in a field hospital about to have his legs amputated after being severely injured by a shell from a Tiger tank. A message reached Peter, who rushed to the hospital to stop the operation.
“He told the surgeon, ‘You can’t do that; he’s a sportsman, a mountaineer and skipper of the St Barbara in the Americas’ Cup’,” said Lady Hilton.
“Well, the surgeon said he would have to sign to say he would take responsibility if the general died from gangrene. So Peter did and his father was flown home to England and his legs were saved, although he was out of the Army for the rest of the war until Mr Churchill asked him to take the surrender of Norway.”
That 1944 incident was not the first time that father and son had bumped into each other under extraordinary circumstances in the arena of war, though when they met four years earlier, it was an even stranger occasion.
“As the Army in India only granted home leave every 10 years, the boys did not see much of their father.
“When war broke out, Peter joined the Royal Horse Artillery as a gunner like his father and was at Dunkirk in 1940 when the French capitulated and our soldiers were forced to retreat.
“One day, someone said they wanted him to meet someone who was arriving with heavy guns to create a corridor for the troops to be evacuated to the coast.
“The man turned out to be his father but, as it was 10 years since they had seen each other, neither of them recognised the other until they were introduced.”
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