Colin de Mowbray crowned a remarkably eventful service in the Royal Navy with many years organising competitive round-the-world sailing. He brought an intense professionalism and a cheerfully mischievous spirit to both careers.
During the 1982 Falklands conflict he was second-in-command of the frigate Alacrity captained by Commander Chris Craig. With others she did her share of bombarding Argentine positions but on May 11 it was the efficient Alacrity that the Task Force Commander, Admiral “Sandy” Woodward, chose to circumnavigate East Falkland by night.
The objective was to cause as much harassment as possible and also — in an almost unspoken coincidence of thought between Craig and Woodward — to test, in the most dangerous way possible, for the presence of mines in Falkland Sound, the planned route for invasion shipping. Woodward remarked: “This was Victoria Cross material, but, strangely, only if it went wrong.”
Having woken the Argentine garrison with starshell for miles around, Alacrity found the Argentine naval transport Isla de los Estados and, in the only surface action of the war between British and Argentine ships, swiftly sank it with its cargo of aviation fuel. When the freighter Atlantic Conveyor was hit by an Exocet missile and was sinking and on fire, Alacrity went close enough to pull her liferafts away from an imminent explosion, saving many lives.
Colin John de Mowbray was born in 1945. He was a scion of an ancient family of nobility — a Thomas Mowbray appears in Shakespeare’s Richard II. He entered the Navy in 1963 and qualified as a helicopter pilot in 1969. Based at Singapore he flew with 847 Squadron Wessex 5s as a “jungly” pilot on Royal Marine commando operations. In the carrier Albion with 848 Squadron he took part in disaster relief in Bangladesh after the devastating 1970 cyclone.
His extensive and varied flying duties also included piloting her Wasp helicopter aboard the frigate Tartar; an exchange appointment with the US States Navy at Norfolk, Virginia, and from 1982 to 1985 command of 845 Squadron flying Wessex 5 helicopters, again in the commando role. In 1975 he placed by helicopter a sentry box with two Royal Marines on the islet of Rockall, often disputed territory.
Ashore, he was the staff officer responsible for inspecting helicopter flights of frigates and destroyers for the Flag Officer Carriers and Amphibious Ships and, unusually, was military assistant to the commanding general in Hong Kong. His final tour, for which he was appointed MBE, was to oversee a large expansion in the numbers, scope and activities of the Reserve Air Branch, necessarily needing three people to relieve him.
De Mowbray was a constant source of imaginative entertainments, some of which may not have amused his seniors. While CO of 845 Squadron he founded the exclusive “Junglies cocktail party” — now an annual event — and, having noticed how many there seemed to be, a party for all Fleet Air Arm people named Colin — a great success, “it obviated introductions”. In 1984 he invented the Fleet Air Arm’s five-man Unicycle Display Team, which, after manoeuvres akin to an air display, culminated in a spectacularly posed crash.
Having left the Navy in 1994, de Mowbray became expedition leader for three voyages up the Irrawaddy river in the Irrawaddy Princess. In 1995 he cycled round both islands of New Zealand in aid of his favourite charity, the Ocean Youth Trust.
Following in his mother’s footsteps and those of other relations, he had been elected to the Royal Cruising Club in 1964, having since 1958 established a reputation as an offshore yachtsman, and subsequently he found time to undertake several demanding voyages including the 1989 two- handed Round Britain race in his 30ft sloop Fidget.
Thus in 1996 he was selected to skipper the vessel Chrysolite in the Clipper Round the World yacht race, coming fourth out of ten competitors. Founded and chaired by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail alone non-stop round the world, the Clipper Ventures organisation has since 1996 conducted circumnavigation races every two years, currently in 68ft boats. Crews are volunteers from many walks of life, pay for their berths or obtain sponsorship and are required to undergo a challenging aptitude and training programme. Forty per cent in the current race started as novices.
De Mowbray worked for Clipper Ventures as race director and then as overall operations director for 14 years, travelling around the world while visiting the staging ports for each leg of the races. His management skill and cheerful leadership made him many friends in many nations. Knox-Johnston paid tribute to de Mowbray’s enthusiasm and breezy humour, and his contribution to Clipper Ventures and his continued involvement with the Clipper Race Yacht Club after he retired a year ago.
De Mowbray is survived by his wife, Vanessa, daughter of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Michael Pollock, First Sea Lord, and their son and two daughters.
Lieutenant-Commander Colin de Mowbray, MBE, naval aviator and offshore yachtsman, was born on April 12, 1945. He died of a heart attack on July 11, 2010, aged 65
Soldier who won the DSO on D-Day for coolly directing mine-clearing operations after being wounded in a mortar explosion
Allan Younger, always known as “Tony”, won one of the first DSOs on D-Day. Commanding 26 Assault Squadron Royal Engineers, his task was the clearing of mines and other obstacles to ensure the landing on Juno Beach of the 3rd (Canadian) Division forming, with the 3rd (British) Division, the assault landing force of 1st Corps under General Sir John Crocker.
Guiding his AVRE (armoured vehicle Royal Engineers) with its mine-clearing plough required him to stick his head out of the turret. This procedure endured only until a German mortar bomb blew away his radio aerials and burst one of his eardrums. Unable to communicate his orders to the rest of his squadron by radio, he dismounted and directed his AVREs to clear routes through the sand dunes on to the ground just beyond the beach — still being contested by the infantry in face of intense mortar, machinegun and small arms fire.
Despite the intense pain in his ear, he remained in charge until his squadron’s tasks were completed, including the removal of mines and demolition charges on the bridges leading into and through the village of Courseulles, on one route leading to Caen. He accepted evacuation only when his increasing deafness made it impossible to continue in effective control. He returned to resume command of 26 Assault Squadron in time to lead it during the operations to clear Walcheren Island and the Scheldt estuary in OctoberNovember 1944.
Allan Elton Younger came from a family of Royal Engineers, his father, grandfather and an uncle all having served with the Corps. He was educated at Gresham’s, RMA Woolwich and — after service in France, Holland and Germany — at Christ’s College, Cambridge. As a subaltern, he went to France with the 61st Field Company RE in the British Expeditionary Force. Tall, slim and invariably calm no matter what the situation, he became involved in the organisation (such as could be managed) of the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940.
Graduation from the short wartime course at the Staff College, Camberley, was followed by appointments first on the personnel then training staffs at the British headquarters in Rangoon until Burmese independence in 1948.
From then until the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, he commanded the Engineer Training Centre in Malaya, during the first two years of the communist insurgency in the Federation. Then he went to Korea in command of 55 Independent Field Squadron RE. In common with most British units hastily dispatched to Korea, his squadron was ill-equipped for the country’s harsh winters, but was able to make good the situation with American clothing, equipment and stores acquired in exchange for Scotch whisky — the US forces being “dry”.
Until the formation of the 1st Commonwealth Division — after much huffing and puffing in Whitehall and the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand capitals — in late 1951, Younger’s field squadron was on call to both Commonwealth brigades and occasionally to US units. He was able to respond only due to the generous provision of road and bridge-building materials by the Americans. He was awarded the US Silver Star in 1951 and pressure was relieved to some extent by the formation of a British divisional engineer regiment to serve the new division.
On return to England, he became the Chief Instructor of one of the three colleges of RMA Sandhurst before being appointed commanding officer of 36 Engineer Regiment in 1960, serving in the UK and Kenya and appointed OBE. In 1963 he was sent to the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth as the British exchange instructor, to be reminded of the very different staff procedures used by the American and British Armies he first discovered in Korea.
On return to England in 1966 he joined the mysteriously named Programme Evaluation Group. This was a team of one-star officers, one from each service, who Denis Healey, as Minister of Defence, used to seek out information he needed to determine one strand of policy or another. Known as the “whizz-kids”, they met with no little suspicion.
From 1967 to 1969 he was Chief Engineer at Headquarters UK Land Forces at Wilton and was promoted major-general two years later to become Chief of Staff at the Nato headquarters Allied Forces Northern Europe in Oslo.
He completed his service as the Senior Army Directing Staff member at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London and, after leaving the Army in 1975, became Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies until 1978.
He was a Colonel-Commandant Royal Engineers from 1974 to 1979 and published a memoir, Blowing our Bridges, in 2004.
He is survived by his wife, Diana, née Lanyon, and three daughters.
Major-General A. E. Younger, DSO, OBE, Chief of Staff AFNORTH, 1970-72, was born on May 4, 1919. He died on July 5, 2010, aged 91
