Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, better known as A. D. Wintle, (30 September 1897 – 11 May 1966) was a British military officer in the 1st The Royal Dragoons who served in the First and Second World Wars. He was the first non-lawyer to achieve a unanimous verdict in his favour in the House of Lords, and is considered one of London's greatest eccentrics. Early life The son of John Edward Wintle, a diplomat, by his wife Emma Teresa (née King), Alfred Daniel Wintle was born in Mariupol, East Ukraine. In 1901, the family went to live in Dunkirk; he was subsequently educated in France and Germany, becoming fluent in French and German. World War I At the outbreak of the First World War, 16-year-old Wintle was in Dunkirk and claimed to have "irregularly attached" himself to Commander Samson's armoured-car unit, witnessing Uhlans being shot on one occasion in Belgium. Wintle wished to see military action. In summer 1915, his father agreed to his son's early entry into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, from which he was commissioned in less than four months. Less than a week later, he was at the front. On his first night a shell burst near him, splashing over him the entrails of his sergeant (to whom he had just been introduced). Wintle later admitted to being petrified. As the bombardment continued, he dealt with his fear by standing at attention and saluting. As he later wrote, "Within thirty seconds I was able to become again an Englishman of action and to carry out calmly the duties I had been trained to perform". The incident was typical, both of a series of remarkable escapes and his pride at being an Englishman (as opposed to being born "a chimpanzee or a flea, or a Frenchman or a German"). He saw action at Ypres, the Somme, La Bassée and Festubert, supposedly capturing the village of Vesle single-handedly before handing it over to the New Zealanders (who were about to attack it in force). His luck ran out during Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 as he helped manhandle an 18-pounder field gun across a "crater-swamp". The gun-carriage wheel hit an unexploded shell; he woke up in a field hospital without his left eye, one kneecap and several fingers. At age 19, Wintle's right eye was so damaged that he had to wear a monocle for