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Valentine Oakley-Brown was commissioned Second Lieutenant from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, into the 3rd Dragoon Guards on 7 April 1916, and served with the 3rd Dragoon Guards during the Great War on the Western Front from 30 November 1916.

He was killed in action during the 3rd Dragoon Guards’ celebrated charge at Honnechy on 9 October 1918. Here, accompanied by the Royals, the 3rd Dragoon Guards galloped for about two miles in squadron column extended, under heavy shelling, over ground swept by gun-fire, toward Honnechy. Half a mile in, the regiment had to close-in to pass under a railway bridge, and here, while still under artillery and enfilade machine-gun-fire and with bombs dropping from low-flying aircraft, they incurred many casualties. Extending on the far side of the bridge they galloped through Honnechy and seized the orchards to the east of the village.

A Staff Officer who was present described this advance as the finest thing he had seen in the war; it was also the regiment’s last action of the war and, perhaps most notably, the last ever cavalry charge by the British Army.

The Regiment suffered,  Lieutenant Oakley-Brown and two other ranks killed in action; one officer died of wounds; and three officers and 27 other ranks wounded. 90 horses were lost.

Oakley-Brown in buried in Busigny Communal Cemetery Extension, France.