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40 Insights into the Lives of Famous War Veterans

Khalid Elhassan July 13, 2019 26 min

18. David Niven was a Sandhurst graduate

David Niven was a popular character actor, who won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in the 1958 movie Separate Tables. He also won acclaim for his roles as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days, as The Phantom in the Pink Panther, and as a squadron leader in A Matter of Life and Death. Born into Britain’s upper class, Niven’s antics in school got him expelled at age 10. That doomed his chances for getting into Eton, the elite private school his parents had hoped to send him to. So they sent him to the era’s dumping ground for unpromising scions of Britain’s elite, the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from which he graduated in 1930.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.