Henry Bentinck, 11th Earl of Portland

Henry Noel Bentinck, 11th Earl of Portland, Count Bentinck und Waldeck Limpurg (2 October 1919 – 30 January 1997) was a British Army officer, peer, and intellectual.

Bentinck was born in 1919. His father Robert Charles Bentinck, 6th Count Bentinck (1875–1932) died when Bentinck was only twelve. He was a descendant of the Honourable William Bentinck, 1st Count Bentinck (1704–1774), younger son of William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland, and half-brother of Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland. His mother Lady Norah Ida Emily Noel, eldest daughter of Charles William Francis Noel, 3rd Earl of Gainsborough, died when he was 19.

He was educated at Harrow and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, but left after only a term amidst press headlines - "Count missing from Sandhurst". He worked as a cowboy in California for a year, returning to England in 1939 and marrying Pauline Ursula Mellowes in 1940. He registered as a conscientious objector, but after the death of a close friend he joined the family regiment, the Coldstream Guards, as a private soldier. He was soon commissioned as an officer and served with distinction in Italy at Camino. He was wounded twice, and then was a prisoner of war until 1945, when he was able to rejoin his regiment in Trieste.

After the war he was a producer at the BBC. From 1952 to 1955 he worked as a jackaroo on a sheep station in Tasmania.

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