Victor Alexander Gascoyne-Cecil
British soldier

Lieutenant-Colonel Victor Alexander Gascoyne-Cecil (21 May 1891 – 17 January 1977) was a British soldier.
The son of a Bishop of Exeter, Lord William Cecil and Lady Florence Mary Bootle-Wilbraham, and the grandson of a prime minister, the Marquess of Salisbury, he was educated at Westminster School and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
He joined the Hampshire Regiment during the First World War, was promoted to major in the Tank Corps, and was twice wounded. In October 1917 he took out a patent on a water heater. After the war, Gascoyne-Cecil's regiment was posted to British India. In 1922, he fought on the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, his regimental battalion was recalled.
On 25 November 1915, Gascoyne-Cecil married Fairlie Estelle Caroline, elder daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Watson of the Suffolk Regiment. They had two sons, Rupert Arthur Victor Gascoyne-Cecil (1917– 2004) and Anthony Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (1921–1998).
In 1949, Gascoyne-Cecil was appointed High Sheriff of Essex.
“Victor Alexander Gascoyne-Cecil” enters the record as british soldier. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Victor, Alexander and Gascoyne-Cecil can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 15, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q19560548. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1891, 1977, 1917 and 1922.
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