John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort
Field Marshal John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort VC, GCB, CBE, DSO & Two Bars, MVO, MC (10 July 1886 – 31 March 1946) was a senior British Army officer. As a young officer during the First World War he was decorated with the Victoria Cross for his actions during the Battle of the Canal du Nord. During the 1930s he served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (the professional head of the British Army). He is most famous for commanding the British Expeditionary Force sent to France in the first year of the Second World War, which was evacuated from Dunkirk. Gort later served as Governor of Gibraltar and Malta, and High Commissioner for Palestine and Transjordan.
Gort was born in London into the Prendergast Vereker noble dynasty, an old Anglo-Irish family, and grew up in County Durham and the Isle of Wight. The family peerage, Viscount Gort, was named after Gort, a town in County Galway in the West of Ireland. His father was John Gage Prendergast Vereker, 5th Viscount Gort, a descendant of Thomas Gage and Margaret Kemble, and descendant from the Schuyler family, Van Cortlandt family, and the Delancey family from British North America.
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