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London Daily Telegraph

General Sir David Mostyn

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 29/01/2007

General Sir David Mostyn, who has died aged 78, was Adjutant-General from 1986 to 1988; as a young officer in the Green Jackets he played an important role in suppressing a rebellion in Brunei.

In December 1962 an insurrection broke out in the British Protectorate of Brunei, and 1st Green Jackets (1GJ), based at Penang, Malaya, moved at short notice to Singapore and embarked in the cruiser, Tiger. The ship was designed to accommodate no more than 400 troops, and, as the last of the 619 men filed on board, the captain was heard to exclaim: "For God's sake, let's sail before we sink!"

Off Sarawak, new orders arrived. Part of the force was to be off-loaded on the coast at Miri, a town which had no deep-water port. Mostyn, then a major in command of "B" Company, had to requisition a number of former landing craft from Shell to get his men and their equipment ashore.

At Miri, he learned that the rebels held the police and administrative post of Bekenu, 25 miles to the south. He was ordered to re-take the post with his company and two sections of the Sarawak Field Force (SFF).

Mostyn had good reason to fear that, if he attempted an amphibious assault and took his force 10 miles up the Sibuti river, the rebels would ambush him. So he sent just one platoon in a launch by that route with orders to lie up in the rushes short of Bekenu and provide flanking fire.

The main force was to land at a small coastal village, but their craft was laden with oil-drilling equipment and grounded on a sandbank 50 yards from the shore. The skipper claimed that they were in 4ft of water, but the first man off stepped straight into 7ft, and it took an hour to get him and everybody else on to dry land. The party, guided by a section of the SFF, set off on a night march through thick jungle and mangrove swamps. A report reached them that the insurgents were lying in wait for them, and they took a circuitous track, crossing a river using native dugout canoes and covering the last half mile along tree trunks laid over a marsh.

When they reached the outskirts of the town, "Mostyn's Marauders" had been going for 16 hours. Just before 10am on December 13 Mostyn gave the order to move in. The rebels were so cocksure that they were busy appointing new civil servants when they looked through the windows of the government offices and saw the riflemen emerging from a pepper plantation and advancing towards them.

They fired off their single-barrelled shotguns and then, as they tried to escape in a boat, they were confronted by the well-armed launch-borne platoon. By the end of the battle six rebels were dead, five had been captured, while about a dozen had escaped.

When Mostyn saw one of the wounded rebels being beaten up in an attempt to obtain information from him, he put a stop to it at once. The man was so impressed by this humane treatment that he revealed the location of their main camp.

"How many will there be for lunch, sir?" enquired a beaming, recently released government official. "We had no casualties," Mostyn replied. "So it will be 90."

He was mentioned in dispatches.

Joseph David Frederick Mostyn was born in London on November 28 1928. His father died when he was a few weeks old and he was brought up by his aunt and uncle, Tom Tyrwhitt-Drake, at the Shardeloes estate at Amersham, Buckinghamshire.

David was educated at Downside before going to Sandhurst, where he represented the RMA at rugby and was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in 1948.

He served in Germany, Greece and Cyprus before going to the Canadian Army Staff College in 1958. This was followed by two years at the War Office on the operational desk for the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa.

After a hectic tour covering a crisis in Kuwait, Aden, Rhodesia, a plebiscite in the Cameroons, Cyprus Independence and British Guiana, he was appointed MBE.

In 1962 Mostyn returned to his regiment – re-designated the 1st Battalion Royal Green Jackets (1 RGJ) – as a company commander and served in Malaya, in Brunei during the revolt of 1962 and Borneo during the "confrontation" with Indonesia.

Following a spell as an instructor at Staff College and a posting to the MoD as AQMG, he commanded 2 RGJ in BAOR and Northern Ireland. After a year running the Tactics Wing at the School of Infantry, Mostyn returned to Londonderry to command 8th Infantry Brigade. The success of this arduous tour was recognised by his advancement to CBE.

After tours as deputy director of Army Training, attendance at the Royal College of Defence Studies and a staff job at BAOR, he was promoted major-general in 1978 and appointed Director of Personal Services (Army). There he helped to win substantial improvements in pay and conditions of service.

Mostyn was GOC Berlin and Commandant British Sector from 1980 to 1983 and helped to make Hess's treatment in Spandau Prison more humane. On one occasion, during a rehearsal for the Queen's Birthday Parade, his horse bolted when the band struck up. Legend has it that the beast made three circuits of the arena before being brought under control; but the rider was a good horseman, and it seems likely that something less remarkable occurred.

Mostyn was knighted in 1984. He was Military Secretary from 1983 to 1986 and then took over as Adjutant-General. Serious recruiting problems for the Army were forecast and, as a member of the Army Board, he fought a vigorous campaign against the bullying that gave the Army a bad press in the 1980s. He also initiated studies that led to the wider use of women in the Army and the establishment of the Adjutant-General's Corps.

Before retiring in 1988 Mostyn's last duty was to take the Sovereign's Parade at Sandhurst on the 40th anniversary of his commissioning. He was ADC General to the Queen from 1987 to 1989, and Colonel Commandant of the Light Division from 1983 to 1986 and of the Army Legal Corps from 1983 to 1988.

In 1964 Mostyn inherited a small estate on the Devonshire-Dorset borders which became his home.

He was Special Commissioner Duke of York's Royal Military School; president of the Army Boxing and Swimming Association; and chairman of the Army Beagling Association. He was also prominent in other local organisations, including being chairman of the Lyme Regis Hospital Trust and director of Joseph Weld Hospice, Dorchester.

David Mostyn died on January 20. He married, in 1952, Diana Sheridan, who survives him with their four sons and two daughters.


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Post Obit - Rear-Admiral John Adams 
London Daily Telegraph.

Highly efficient captain in the Indonesian conflict who was eventually sacked for defending the role of aircraft carriers

Last Updated: 7:28PM GMT 09 Nov 2008

Rear-Admiral John Adams, who has died aged 89, was a highly successful captain of a commando carrier during the Indonesian confrontation in the 1960s, which confirmed him to be on course for the highest rank; but he was then sacked for maintaining that the Navy should not scrap aircraft carriers; his conviction, based on his own experience, was later proved correct.

Adams's command of Albion from May 1964 to January 1966 encompassed a model Cold War deployment in the Indian Ocean and the Far East. She arrived east of Suez with 848 naval air squadron and a strong force of Royal Marines. Off Aden he oversaw desert exercises, practising inserting and recovering the carrier's marines. Then, leaving a flight of four of Albion's Wessex V helicopters behind to deal with tasks beyond the capacity of RAF, he sailed for Singapore before being diverted briefly via Mombasa to protect the arrival of a ship carrying arms.

Albion arrived in the Far East Fleet during the throes of konfrontasi, the desultory struggle between Malaysia and Indonesia. He sent two flights of Wessexes to bases in Sarawak and Borneo to support marine and army patrols on the Indonesian borders.

The ship's programme now alternated between supporting the marines with Australian and British army units in the jungle and visiting other parts of the station before returning to Aden and ferrying a flight of RAF Belvedere helicopters to Singapore.

Adams's Albion had the knack of being wherever there was a crisis, however minor, which led to the carrier being nicknamed The Old Grey Ghost. The demand for her services and the wide range of her operations over thousands of miles of ocean had convinced him of the versatility of such ships by the time he was relieved of his command by Captain Godfrey Place, VC. Adams was appointed the service's youngest rear-admiral.

John Harold Adams was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne on December 19 1918 and was educated at Glenalmond College, Perthshire. He joined the Royal Navy as a special entry cadet in 1936, and after eight months training joined the battleship Royal Oak where, as midshipman in command of a picket boat, he recalled receiving 12 cuts on his backside for running his boat aground.

On the outbreak of war Adams was appointed to the destroyer Walker, and was off watch on the night of September 11 when she ran down her sister ship, Vanquisher, at speed off south-west Ireland. Thrown from his bunk, he rushed on deck to see that Walker had gone went right through Vanquisher and was jammed in her.

Adams recalled a sailor holding on to a chum of his, whose legs had been wrenched off as the ships were separated. No doctor was aboard to offer aid so Walker's first lieutenant was forced to shoot the suffering man.

The rest of the crew was lucky that the weather was good, and both ships were saved after eight hours; but it was a grisly experience which Adams never managed to forget. Fuelled with adrenalin at the height of the crisis, Adams singlehandedly carriedVanquisher's safe, containing her confidential books, across to the deck of Walker; but next morning he found that he could not even lift it.

Later, when Walker was at Liverpool for repairs, he recalled watching German bombers roll in over the city, and "a shower of frozen mutton came down as the ship ahead of us in Gladstone Dock was hit with a bomb and blew all this meat from New Zealand up into the air."

As first lieutenant of the Hunt-class destroyer Cleveland in 1941 Adams saw action in the Western Approaches, the commando raid on St Nazaire and the Allied landings in North Africa and Sicily.

After a vicious engagement with E-boats off the Eddystone while escorting a Channel convoy, he was mentioned in dispatches for his good services.

In 1943 he qualified as a torpedo and electrics specialist at HMS Vernon, temporarily located at Roedean girls' school, and joined the staff of Captain (D) at Liverpool where he was able to pass on his experience to escorts preparing for North Atlantic convoys.

When the war ended Adams went on the staff course at Greenwich, commanded the destroyer Creole and served in several staff appointments, including the torpedo and anti-submarine warfare division of the Admiralty. He then was surprised to be appointed commander of the Royal yacht Britannia, taking Princess Margaret to the West Indies, the Queen to Portugal and the Duke of Edinburgh on a world tour. Afterwards he was appointed MVO.

From 1957 to 1958 Adams was director of the Underwater Weapons Material Department and then Captain (SM), 3rd Submarine Squadron, in the depot ship Adamant. Though not a submariner, he inspired confidence, and was reputed to know more technical details about submarines than many of his commanding officers.

Adams was Captain Superintendent, Underwater Detection Establishment, Portland, on the day MI5 officers arrived to tell him that a spy was operating there. Suspicion fell on retired Master at Arms Harry Houghton, a civil servant at the Portland base, and his mistress Ethel Gee, a filing clerk who gave Houghton access to secret documents. Surveillance led to the detection of a spy ring, which also included the Canadian businessman Gordon Lonsdale and Morris and Lona Cohen, who were masquerading as antiquarian booksellers.

Adams admired the way in which the Portland ring was allowed to continue until Gee was arrested with her shopping bag full of large amounts of film and photographs, including details of Britain's first nuclear submarine, Dreadnought.

After commanding Albion, Adams went in 1966 to the Ministry of Defence in the newly created appointment of Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), a few months after Denis Healey had cancelled the Navy's new carrier, CVA01. When Admiral Sir David Luce resigned as First Sea Lord, Adams found himself chairman of the Future Fleet Working Party, reporting to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Varyl Begg, a gunnery officer who believed that missiles would replace aircraft. Adams had both the Directors of Naval Plans and, to provide perspective, the Naval Historical Branch subordinated to him in order to reassess the role and structure of the Royal Navy. But when his working party recommended a "through-deck cruiser", which would deploy helicopters and vertical take-off fighters, Begg was adamant that he did not want this. Adams insisted that it was the logical outcome of his inquiry, and Begg exploded with rage. He publicly rejected Adams's report, and privately told him that he would never be employed again.

Adams was appointed CB and retired in 1968. But he was invited to the launch of the aircraft carrier Invincible in 1977, and his ideas for the shape and size of the fleet were vindicated over the next quarter-century.

He became the first director of the Paper and Paper Products Industry Training Board and, after several other more senior appointments in the industry, set up his own management consultancy. He was chairman of the governors of Cheam School for 13 years.

Adams was handsome, intelligent, hardworking and affable. His papers relating to his involvement in submarine warfare and the Admiralty's underwater weapons research are deposited at King's College, London. He also wrote The Adventure of Charlie the Cone, based on stories about a traffic cone that he used to think up to divert his children on long car journeys.

John Adams, who died on November 3, married first, in 1943, Mary Parker (divorced 1961) with whom he had one son, who predeceased him. He married, secondly, Ione Eadie, whom he met in Britannia when she was one of the Duke of Edinburgh's Lady Clerks in 1961. She died in 1998 and he is survived by two sons and two daughters.


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Post Major-General Patrick Crawford. GM 
London Daily Telegraph. 20090324

Major-General Patrick Crawford, who has died aged 75, saved the life of a brother officer after a helicopter crash in the Borneo jungle, for which he was awarded a George Medal.

Last Updated: 7:37PM GMT 23 Mar 2009

In 1964, Crawford, then a captain, was the Regimental MO of the 1st/7th (Duke of Edinburgh's Own) Gurkha Rifles (1/7 GR), which was on active operations in Sarawak during the Confrontation over Borneo between British-backed Malaysia and Indonesia.

On April 20, he flew in a helicopter with Major Eric "Birdie" Smith, DSO, and six Gurkhas to visit a company which was operating north of the Indonesian border. The landing platform was in a small clearing in dense jungle on the top of a ridge that dropped into a deep ravine.

The helicopter began descending from about 100ft and was short of the platform when the engine gave a cough and cut out. It dropped like a stone and there was a splintering crash as it slammed stern first into the ground, hung for a second on its crumbling tail and toppled over the edge of the ravine.

It somersaulted down the steep slope before its descent was arrested by a tree stump which punched a hole in the cabin, crushing Smith's right arm and breaking his hip. Crawford, bruised and badly shaken, helped the Gurkhas to escape through the broken-off tail section and, ignoring a shouted warning that the aircraft could go up in flames at any moment, clambered through the wreckage to Smith, who was hanging by his shattered arm.

He got under Smith to support his weight and for almost an hour, in the stifling heat and semi-darkness of the fume-filled cabin, he worked on the man's injuries. He had no morphia or surgical instruments and was praying that Smith would faint from shock or loss of blood (he remained conscious throughout).

First, Crawford applied a tourniquet and then, using a clasp knife which had been hastily sharpened by one of the Gurkhas, he carried out an amputation of Smith's arm. He dressed the wound, held the man up until a stretcher party arrived and then helped to improvise a hoist to lift him through the doorway, which was at a very awkward angle.

Crawford, who had refused to take a moment's rest or even a glass of water, was completely exhausted but he insisted on staying at Smith's side while the stretcher was carried up the hillside. He then flew with him in the relief helicopter to Simmanggang and Kuching. In the operating theatres in both places he helped the doctors to perform tidying-up surgery. He was awarded the George Medal.

Ian Patrick Crawford, the son of a doctor, was born in London on October 11 1933. He was educated at Chatham House, Ramsgate, before studying Medicine at St Thomas's Hospital, London.

He was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) for his National Service and was on active service in Malaya and Borneo as MO to 20 Regiment RA and 1/7 GR.

An appointment at HQ Singapore District was followed by a spell as instructor at the School of Army Health. In 1972 he went to Australia as exchange MO and visiting lecturer at Queensland University. He advised the Australian Army on measures to avoid contamination by pesticides that were being used to get rid of locusts and did a three-month tour in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, working on improvements in water sanitation to reduce malarial outbreaks among the remote tribes.

The second of two stints at the MoD and an appointment at HQ 1 British Corps was followed by a move to the Royal Army Medical College, Millbank, as Parkes Professor of Preventive Medicine. The importance of preventive measures – the right clothing, good boots, a proper diet, clean water and adequate acclimatisation – was a passion with him. He acquired the nickname "drain sniffer" for his insistence on hygienic latrines.

After serving on the Defence Medical Services Directorate, he was appointed commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard Medical Team in 1986. He finally served as the Commandant and Postgraduate Dean of the Royal Army Medical College.

Crawford was appointed an Honorary Physician to the Queen from 1991 until he retired in 1993. In 1997 he became chairman of the governors for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Once settled in Sussex, he enjoyed golf and cabinet-making.

Patrick Crawford died on February 21. He married, in 1956, Juliet James, who survives him with their two sons and a daughter.


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