Captain John Robson - Telegraph On April 26 1945, Robson, then a lieutenant serving with the 12th Royal Lancers, was patrolling in an armoured car near Lendinara, northern Italy, with orders to carry out a reconnaissance on the approaches to the river Adige. He was in close country, there were enemy pockets of resistance everywhere, and he and his troop corporal decided that they must cover the last part on foot. In 1941 Robson went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences but left in the summer of 1942 and, after completing a short course at Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the 27th Lancers. He was posted to the 12th Lancers and, having joined the regiment in Algiers in October 1943, landed in Naples the following April. As they approached Venice, in the last days of the Italian campaign, Robson and a New Zealand company commander were told to secure the Hotel Danieli. The order came from General Freyberg, who had spent his honeymoon there. Robson commandeered a gondola and, as he wrote in his memoirs, "we were shot at by the fascists from the palazzos along the sides as we were punted down the Grand Canal." After the end of the war he went to Egypt and to Palestine, where he went out with the Ramle Vale Hunt. He retired from the Army in 1947 and worked for Samuel Osborn & Company, steelmakers and manufacturers of engineering tools, based in Sheffield. He subsequently became managing director of Samuel Osborn Overseas and, for 30 years, spent about three months every year travelling abroad on business. He retired in 1978 and farmed in Sussex and then in the Ashdown Forest. Robson was an enthusiastic sportsman. He was an expert falconer and also enjoyed stalking in Scotland. By 1955 he had hunted with 19 packs of foxhounds, 19 packs of beagles, 12 packs of otterhounds and various packs of harriers and staghounds. From 1974 to 1986 he was Joint Master of the Old Surrey & Burstow and, in 1995, when he hung up his hunting boots, he had ridden 71 horses since the end of the war. He published, in 1998, One Man in his Time, a biography of his friend David James, the politician, writer and adventurer. Robson was also the author of A Portrait of Jorrocks Country: The Old Surrey and Burstow Hunt (2001). He married, in 1955, Wendy Cox; she predeceased him, and he is survived by their two sons. Captain John Robson, born April 8 1923, died December 9 2011