Background
Meynell was the son of an army officer and won a scholarship to Eton.
Meynell was the son of an army officer and won a scholarship to Eton.
Eton College; Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
He was commended to Cyril Connolly when he arrived there as a boy with character. After an initial amount of bullying, the two became firm friends as described in Enemies of Promise. He had passed out 13th at Sandhurst before he volunteered for the British Indian Army.
He was awarded the Military Cross in 1933 for his work in Chitral.
Godfrey Meynell was thirty-one years old, and a captain in the 5th Battalion (Queen Victoria"s Own Corps of Guides), 12th Frontier Force Regiment, British Indian Army during the 1935 Mohmand Campaign in British India. On 29 September 1935 at Mohmand, in the Nahaqi Pass within the Khyber Pass on the North West Frontier, British India (now Pakistan), in the final phase of an attack, Captain Meynell, seeking information on the most forward troops, found them involved in a struggle against an enemy vastly superior in numbers.
He at once took command, and with two Lewis guns and about thirty men, maintained a heavy and accurate fire on the advancing enemy, whose overwhelming numbers nevertheless succeeded in reaching the position and putting the Lewis guns out of action. In the hand-to-hand struggle which ensued, Captain Meynell was mortally wounded, but the heavy casualties inflicted on the enemy prevented them from exploiting their success.
Regimental records suggest that when the bodies of his men were mutilated by the enemy (as was their custom), Captain Meynell sought to defend those bodies even as he himself was dying.