This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

John Bridges
(Filed: 21/04/2006)

John Bridges, who has died aged 87, survived a suicidal march through two minefields in Tunisia to pursue a long post-war career as a BBC radio producer.

As a sergeant with the 6th Battalion, Grenadier Guards, he took over the intelligence role during the advance on a horseshoe feature in the Mareth Line during the night of March 16-17 1943.

To their surprise the Grenadiers found themselves not only under enemy fire but entering two minefields which were so heavily sown that they had to switch from single file to proceeding separately, in order to avoid being blown up together.

Bridges trod on one mine, which exploded at head height, and regained consciousness moments later to find his boot smouldering and his head aching. After wondering whether to retire from the action, he continued onwards, deciding that if he headed away from the gunfire he would risk stepping on more mines.

The Grenadiers' platoons reached their objectives in the smoky, pale moonlight, with one company commander encouraging his pack with a hunting horn.

But after Bridges had taken part in a sweep around the advanced battalion headquarters, which gained five prisoners, it became clear that a consolidation group, with heavy weapons, had been cut to pieces in a wadi crossing while trying to bring relief.

The famous German 90th Light Division then launched fierce counter-attacks on the depleted Grenadiers, who held on for several hours before being pulled back.

The battalion suffered its worst losses of the war - some 279 killed, wounded or taken prisoner - and the action was marked with a hastily erected cross, cut from Tunisian stone, which was placed on the site.

Kenneth John Bridges was born at Ware, Hertfordshire, on February 20 1918, the son of a baker and a church organist.

As a child he escaped unhurt when run over by a coal lorry, and had decided to become a writer at 12, the age at which he first glimpsed the scarlet uniform of the Grenadier Guards at the seaside.

On leaving school he found an excess of Kenneths in the Army so decided to call himself John.

He became a drummer, which led to his appearing on stage at the Old Vic to beat the drum for Ophelia's funeral cortege in the 1935 production of Hamlet; he once inadvertently brought the show to a brief halt when a cross he was holding wobbled over Laurence Olivier's head.

On the outbreak of war the Grenadiers were sent to France, where Bridges once tried to gain his bearings by climbing a windmill.

But he attracted the attention of a German 88 millimetre gunner when he halted the windmill's mechanism with his belt, making it the only motionless mill on the landscape.

After fighting in the rearguard of the retreat on Dunkirk, he narrowly escaped with his life when a rowing boat he had commandeered was sucked into the propellers of a ship.

He managed to scramble free and, wearing little more than a tin hat, climbed aboard another ship which was subsequently hit by a mine.

On reaching home, Bridges wrote a radio play about his experiences. The BBC agreed to broadcast it, though the production came close to being taken off the air during the performance because one actor swore continuously while being dunked in a bathtub to simulate the sounds of men swimming away from the beach.

Later in the war the Bridges boot attracted attention when he trod on Winston Churchill's foot at a briefing; the prime minister remarked that he "thought it was a bloody horse".

After being concussed by the explosion at Mareth, Bridges was sent to hospital at Tripoli, where doctors were unable to explain why he had gone blind. But he eventually recovered his sight, and joined the Psychological Warfare Branch, producing propaganda to be dropped on German troops in Italy.

After that, he was sent to the Peloponnese with the task of identifying the factions likely to emerge among the Greeks when the Germans left.

He completed the war as a WO1 in Palestine, where his front teeth were knocked out when he intervened in a fight.

Coming out of the Army, Bridges approached Laurence Gilliam, head of features at the BBC, as he was returning from a good lunch, and offered to work for him with no pay for six months.

Gilliam told him not to be stupid, and took him to the pub, where he met such future colleagues as Wynford Vaughan Thomas and Louis MacNeice.

He worked on Dylan Thomas's radio production of Under Milk Wood and also produced Country Magazine, for which he and his recording team were armed with wax discs as they toured the country.

A typical broadcast would begin in a village pub, with Bridges offering drinks to anyone with a good story. Challenged back in London to explain his expenses, which mostly consisted of bar bills, he agreed to cut his travelling costs by using the post vans of trains.

After divorcing his first wife, with whom he had a daughter, he married Faith Owen, with whom he had two sons, and started working on a wide variety of popular programmes.

For BBC Light Entertainment he produced Monday Night at Home, Saturday Night on the Light and the comedy programmes Listen to This Space and Follow this Space, which had sketches about the prime minister Harold Wilson's bedtime thoughts.

Bridges was also an early sponsor of the Cambridge Footlights team that produced Beyond the Fringe. One sketch involved unsuccessful attempts to pass £5 notes to strangers in the street. Another featured Jonathan Miller in the character of the newsreader Alvar Liddell, referring to a "f***ing fugue": it was not broadcast.

During the early 1960s he also wrote and produced the radio drama documentaries Battle of the Atlantic and Desert War, using Michael Flanders to great effect as narrator.

Among his later productions were This is Living, with Warren Mitchell, and The Petticoat Line, as well as a programme in the "Cricket Legends" series, for which he interviewed Sir Jack Hobbs, whose fan club, "The Master's", he helped to found.

After retiring in 1975 he continued to do some freelance work, which included helping to set up a radio station in Barbados, and married Ann Hart, who lived next to his grandmother.

Every year John Bridges was one of the veterans from the Horseshoe battle who meet on the morning of the Grenadiers' remembrance day service at the Mareth Cross. It was removed from the battlefield and now stands at the entrance to the Guards' Chapel at Wellington Barracks.on the web