SAS officer at the time of the dramatic Iranian Embassy siege in London who later became HM Chief Inspector of Prisons in Scotland
Clive Fairweather was second-in-command of 22 SAS Regiment during the dramatic operation to lift the Iranian Embassy siege in London in May 1980. Co-ordinating support for the operation from the regiment’s headquarters in Hereford, he made a significant contribution to the eventual rescue of the hostages taken by six gunmen campaigning for autonomy in Iran’s Khuzestan Province.
SAS troopers were seen live on television news bulletins abseiling down the embassy walls, and though the siege was successfully lifted, the publicity led to some concern within the Army about breaches in security, by the revelation of certain Special Force techniques and the possibility that lives had been put at risk by the screening of the assault in real time. Fairweather thought otherwise and argued that the Army should have taken the media into its confidence by revealing the plan in return for a temporary news blackout.
His claim did not win him many friends but it was typical of Fairweather’s maverick approach to soldiering, and his preference not to do things by the book. Earlier in his SAS career, while serving in Northern Ireland, he had caused consternation when he moved into an isolated cottage in South Armagh in order to escape the cramped conditions in the Army’s operating base at Bessbrook Mill. When warned about the security implications he told his superiors that he had installed a flock of geese as a warning system just as the Romans had done to guard the Capitoline Hill.
Later in his career, having left the Army, he was to employ the same sturdy independence while acting as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons in Scotland.
Clive Bruce Fairweather was born in Edinburgh in 1944, the son of a policeman, and was educated at George Heriot’s School where his scant regard for the rules marked him out as something of a liability. The headmaster asked him to leave in 1962, allegedly “for the sake of the staff and the pupils”. After joining the Territorial Army as a private soldier in the 15th (Scottish) Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, he gained his wings before passing the selection board for the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.
He was commissioned into The King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB) and served with the 1st Battalion in Borneo and the UK. After six years he applied for service with the SAS and having passed the gruelling selection process he undertook three tours of duty with the Regiment.
Among the highlights was a posting to Jordan where he advised the government on security matters and a training assignment in Dhofar. In Northern Ireland, Fairweather was involved in the investigation of the murder by the Provisional IRA of Captain Robert Nairac, a Grenadier Guards officer undertaking undercover surveillance duties for which he was posthumously awarded the George Cross. After serving as a staff officer in West Germany Fairweather returned to regimental soldiering in 1984 and was appointed commanding officer of the Scottish Division’s Depot at Glencorse Barracks outside Edinburgh where young soldiers bound for Scotland’s infantry regiments were put through their basic training. He quickly won the recruits’ respect by bringing a sense of compassion and fairness to ease them through their often arduous training.
In 1987 he took over command of 1st KOSB, based in West Berlin, and dealt with a bullying scandal involving sadistic initiation rites. Fairweather retired from the Army in 1991 in the post of Divisional Colonel in the Scottish Division based in Edinburgh Castle.
Never one to shirk a challenge, the following year Fairweather accepted an invitation from Ian Lang, Secretary of State for Scotland, to become HM Chief Inspector of Prisons. His damning reports on Scotland’s prisons made uncomfortable reading for politicians and prison governors alike. He opposed the practice of slopping out, was critical of privatisation and disagreed with moves to close Peterhead prison with its specialist unit treating sex offenders. It came as little surprise when he was not reappointed in 2002, a victim, many thought, of his own honesty and integrity. He successfully sued for constructive dismissal.
Latterly, Fairweather acted as Scottish fundraiser for the charity Combat Stress which provides help for servicemen suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A first-class shot and keen glider pilot, he was also a proficient pianist who had once wanted to pursue a career as a professional musician. He was appointed OBE in 1990 and advanced to CBE in 2002 .
His marriage in 1980 to Ann Beatrice Dexter was dissolved in 2003. He is survived by a son and two daughters.
Colonel Clive Fairweather, CBE, SAS soldier, was born on May 21, 1944. He died of cancer on October 13, 2012, aged 68
John Farmer
Àãåíò SOE, îðãàíèçîâûâàâøèé Ñîïðîòèâëåíèå â öåíòðàëüíîé Ôðàíöèè â 1944 ãîäó
Polyglot SOE man who armed and organised a large group of Resistance fighters in central France in 1944
The delivery of John Farmer into German-occupied France in April 1944 was a copybook operation. He landed by parachute in the centre of the lights laid out by the Resistance, while his companion Hélène (Nancy Wake, obituary August 9, 2011) came down 300 yards away, soon to be found, revolver in hand ready to shoot. But next day his Special Operations Executive (SOE) mentor in the north-west Massif Central was arrested by the Gestapo, leaving him in charge of a region he scarcely knew. Fortunately his French was fluent.
His assignment was to establish an SOE circuit — codenamed Freelance — to provide arms by airdrop to a large force of the Maquis resistance in the Auvergne. Another circuit, Benjoin, led by Major Frederick Cardozo (obituary October 13, 2011), was already working with this group yet the extent of the area of potential operations suggested two circuits would cope better than one. At first the local Maquis leader suspected Farmer of being a Gestapo trap of some kind, but after he and Cardozo had presented their plans together he agreed to accept help from them both.
The Maquis was expanding inexorably as, to avoid conscription for forced labour in Germany, young Frenchmen took to the hills, so Farmer began calling for arms and explosives as soon as he had established radio contact with London. By the eve of the Allied invasion of Normandy in early June, he and Cardozo had armed between four and five thousand resistance fighters.
Arming was relatively easy, but training was a daunting problem. On June 4 a radio message from London instructed Farmer to collect a new SOE agent from a safe house in Montluçon. The new man was Lieutenant Dussac of the US Army tasked to be the liaison officer between the Resistance and any US troops dropped in the region after D-Day. None were, but Dussac proved a proficient small-arms instructor and he trained the Maquis leaders so they — in turn — could train their fighters.
Just when Farmer was about to congratulate himself on achieving a great deal in a short time, the enemy took a hand in his affairs. On June 20, two weeks after the Allied invasion in the north, several German infantry battalions supported by aircraft, tanks and artillery began a co-ordinated sweep of his area. From 0700 hours until after nightfall the Maquisard camps and training grounds were straffed and shelled. The attack was not on the scale of that against the Maquis on the Vecors plateau on July 18, but it was launched with similar ferocity.
Aware that guerrillas should never try to stand against regular troops en masse, Farmer ordered rapid dispersal of the Maquis to the hills. He became separated from his radio operator and Hélène but she, a woman of phenomenal spirit, took command of the Maquis around her and killed a number of the enemy before leading them to safety.
Despite this setback Farmer regrouped his force, cycling hundreds of kilometres to find a new radio operator and request weapons to replace those abandoned in the dispersal. Once re-armed, he led the Maquis against the German garrison at Montluçon, containing it until Allied troops arrived. The Military Cross he received for his gallantry and resourcefulness in arming and organising such a large group of the Maquis was arguably the least he deserved. He also received the French Croix de Guerre and, in 1996, the Légion d’Honneur.
John Hine Farmer was the son of the Rev William H. Farmer who died in the Spanish influenza pandemic at the end of the First World War, leaving his mother, a professional violinist, in straitened circumstances. Finding life on the Continent less expensive than in England she lived for periods in Belgium and Switzerland, the young Farmer attending school in Munich, Fribourg and Godinne, Belgium, before going to Beaumont College, Windsor.
From 1936 to 1939 he worked in the Banque d’Angleterre in France. He enlisted in the Royal Artillery at the outbreak of war and served with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940. He volunteered for SOE in 1944 and was parachuted into France three months later. After demobilisation he joined the Diplomatic Service and was posted to Vienna, Rome and Paris.
He was president of the Swiss branch of the Royal British Legion from 1996 to 2009.
His wartime marriage to Alison Impey was dissolved, and he later married Frances Fisher, who predeceased him. His partner since 1992, Margaret Steele, died in 2012. He is survived by a son of his first marriage and three daughters of his second.
John H. Farmer, MC, veteran of the SOE, was born on January 12, 1917. He died on October 29, 2012, aged 95
Physician in the destroyer Hurricane which rescued survivors of ships sunk by the U-boats in the Atlantic
Peter Collinson, a graduate of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, was appointed in May 1940 as Medical Officer of the destroyer Hurricane which had just completed construction at Barrow-in-Furness. After swift sea trials she commissioned for service in the Home Fleet on June 21 and was immediately involved in rescue operations in the Western Approaches — this was the worst month of the Battle of the Atlantic to date, with 58 ships sunk by U-boats and 22 by aircraft.
Between June 25 and 29 Hurricane rescued survivors from the Empire Toucan, Lenda, Leticia and Saranac to a total of about 110, many in acute distress. The first three of these ships were victims of the U-boat ace Günther Prien, famous for sinking the battleship Royal Oak in the supposedly safe anchorage at Scapa Flow.
Just after midnight on September 18, Collinson, in his secondary duty as cipher officer, decoded an Admiralty message ordering Hurricane to proceed “with utmost despatch” to rescue survivors from a ship 300 miles away. A later signal broke the tragic news that this was the City of Benares carrying among others 90 evacuee children to Canada as part of the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (Corb) programme to send young children to the Dominions away from the dangers of bombing at home. Hurricane arrived at the scene in the early afternoon, some 24 hours after the sinking, and was able to rescue 115 survivors including 15 children from 12 lifeboats. Of the 407 on board, 260 were lost. City of Benares had been the lead ship of Convoy OB213 and among the dead were the convoy commodore, his three staff officers and the ship’s master. Of the 90 children only 17 eventually survived, three small boys dying on board Hurricane. City of Benares had been torpedoed by U48, commanded by Korvettenkapitän Heinrich Bleichrodt, a highly decorated ace who survived the war. It had also sunk the steamer Marina in the same action and a muddle about whose lifeboat was whose resulted in Hurricane rescuing 20 from Marina but, as darkness fell, missing one of City of Benares’s lifeboats with about 40 on board including six Corb boys. They were rescued by the destroyer Anthony after eight terrifying days.
Assisted by some of the passengers, Collinson and his two naval sick berth attendants worked at this immensely distressing task without sleep for three days. Two older girls, Beth Walder and Bess Cummings, were seriously hypothermic, having clung on to the upturned keel of a lifeboat for 17 hours. They survived and both kept in contact with Collinson for many years.
Some of Bleichrodt’s crewmen reportedly wept when they heard the news, but the German high command argued that it was culpable to send children to sea in a war zone and that the City of Benares would indubitably have returned with war materials.
Besides convoy escort duty Hurricane’s remarkable rescues continued with 99 survivors of the whale factory ship Terje Viken (again sunk by Prien) in March 1941; three from the motor ship HenryMory and the master, 170 crew, eight gunners and 273 passengers from the City of Nagpur in April. The overcrowding and problems of medical care must have been acute.
When Hurricane was damaged by bombing alongside in Liverpool in May, Collinson was sent to the naval training establishment HMS Royal Arthur at Skegness until appointment in early 1943 as medical officer to the 3,500-ton assault troopship Royal Ulsterman which took part in landings on Sicily and at Salerno and Anzio. Royal Ulsterman returned to the Home Fleet in early 1944 to take part in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June.
His next posting was as Chief Medical Officer of a RN team at the Kilcreggan Hospital on the Clyde. Here he met his wife, Desne Service, a Wren, and married her in April 1946 after his demobilisation.
He became the third generation of Collinsons to work in his father’s practice at Wentworth, near Rotherham, continuing for 42 years until retirement aged 75 in 1988. His second son, Charles, also joined the practice, as the fourth generation.
Among other activities, Collinson was a police surgeon for the West Riding of Yorkshire, medical officer of the Lady Mabel College and a steward of the West Riding Medical Charitable Society. He is survived by his wife and their two sons and daughter.
Surgeon Lieutenant Peter Collinson, RNVR, physician, was born on October 26, 1913. He died on September 23, 2012, aged 98
