Pringle in 1981: his first question after an IRA bomb attached to the underside of his car exploded was “How’s my dog?”
Veteran of Malaya and Suez who became Commandant General Royal Marines and was seriously injured by an IRA car bomb
A veteran of the Malayan Emergency, the 1956 Suez landings and the 1960s counter-insurgency campaign in Borneo, Steuart Pringle had been in post as Commandant General Royal Marines for six months when he became the victim of an IRA bomb attack on his car on October 10, 1981, which caused him serious injuries. As he drove away from his home that morning, a bomb that had been attached to the underside of the vehicle exploded.
Pringle’s first concern was that a secondary device might injure those who had rushed to his aid. One of his first questions was, “How’s my dog?” Although his dog Bella was unscathed, the general was not. He lost one leg and the other was badly damaged.
These injuries forced an interregnum during which time Major-General Jeremy Moore took over the post. It was a period that also encompassed the Falklands conflict in the spring of 1982. Displaying great fortitude, Pringle struggled back to health and mobility, resuming his post and continuing as Commandant until 1984. Thereafter he led an active public and private life.
His tenure as Commandant General had opened in 1981 with the controversy surrounding the defence review ordered by the Conservative Secretary of Defence Sir John Nott. Despite Pringle’s efforts to persuade ministers, intended cuts to the naval budget were so severe that the complete disbandment of the Royal Marines after 317 years was proposed. But this defence review was overturned by yet another postwar demonstration of the utility of sea power — the Falklands crisis. The sea battle could not have been won without the ships that were to be sold or scrapped, and the land battle was largely won by infantry arms that were at that time most under threat — the Parachute Regiment, the Gurkhas and the Royal Marines.
Steuart Robert Pringle was born in Dover in 1928, the son of Sir Norman Pringle, 9th Baronet. He was educated at Sherborne and commissioned into the Royal Marines in September 1946, being awarded the Sword of Honour in his batch.
He was overseas for the next four years, serving in ships of the Mediterranean fleet during the troubled period of Jewish immigration into Palestine. This was followed by a posting as troop subaltern to 42 Commando in Hong Kong and in Malaya during the protracted jungle campaign to defeat communist insurgents.
Returning to the UK in 1952, he qualified as a signals specialist and was appointed to 3 Commando Brigade just in time to take part in the 1956 landings at Port Said in support of the ill-judged Franco-British and Israeli attempt to seize the Suez Canal and depose President Nasser of Egypt.
His frontline regimental service continued with two tours in Cyprus during the campaign by Eoka terrorists to further enosis, union with Greece, a long-drawn out, frustrating and eventually pointless conflict. Returning to the Far East in 1961 as Brigade Signals Officer, Pringle again saw action over the next two years in the Brunei rebellion as well as countering the Indonesian-sponsored insurgency in Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo). Both of these uprisings were manifestations of the opposition by the Indonesian president, Ahmed Sukarno, to the newly established Federation of Malaysia, and his ambition to bring North Borneo and even Singapore and the Malay peninsula under Indonesian domination.
Meanwhile, on his father’s death in 1961 Pringle succeeded him as 10th Baronet.
A change from campaigning was a year at the naval staff college where he won the Director’s Prize. Promotion to major followed with an appointment in 1964 to the central planning staff of the MoD. In 1969 he returned to the Far East as second in command of 42 Commando, taking charge of the Army and Royal Marines personnel in the assault ship Intrepid which went to East Pakistan to provide disaster relief after a cyclone in November 1970.
Having rapidly learnt how to ski, Pringle commanded 45 Commando, the Arctic warfare specialists based at Arbroath in Scotland, for more than two years. Besides Norway, the Commando undertook two Northern Ireland tours, based in Belfast.
Pringle’s subsequent posts included a year at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1977 and, after promotion to major-general, command of all commando forces in 1978. After serving as chief of staff to the Commandant General, he relieved his superior officer in that appointment. He was appointed KCB in 1982.
On leaving the Royal Marines, he was chairman and chief executive of the Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust until 1991. The trust was given 80 acres of the Georgian dockyard containing 47 scheduled ancient monuments, in varying states of maintenance to turn into a “living museum” with a meagre capital grant of £11.35m. Pringle and his trustees quickly determined the principle that the dockyard should combine living, working and museum aspects, and he set himself to achieve this.
The dockyard reopened to the public within a year of the Navy moving out, but the inadequate capitalisation severely hindered progress (an independent valuation concluded that at least £60 million would be needed) and the trustees seriously discussed shutting the gates and returning the keys to the Government. But Pringle persevered, and succeeding chairmen have built on the foundations he set in place.
Other charitable activities included his presidency of St Loye’s College for the Disabled and role as vice-patron of the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust.
Noted for his shrewdness and intellect, Pringle had great strength of character and an astringent sense of humour. A colleague wryly noted that “he was something of an acquired taste, especially for those who did not measure up to his standards”. He was a contributor to several defence-oriented journals and to the book Peace and the Bomb (1982). He was also the author of The Future of British Sea Power (1984).
His wife, Jacqueline Gladwell, whom he married in 1953, predeceased him in 2012. He is survived by their two daughters and a son; another son predeceased him.
Lieutenant-General Sir Steuart Pringle, 10th Bt, KCB, Commandant General Royal Marines, 1981-84, was born on July 21, 1928. He died on April 18, 2013, aged 84
Chindit who played a key role in Operation Thursday, a daring attack on an airfield deep behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1944
Peter Taylor was one of the dwindling band of surviving Chindits, the force formed and led by Major-General Orde Wingate that achieved deep penetration into Japanese-occupied Burma twice during the Second World War. Taylor distinguished himself during the second Chindit expedition, Operation Thursday in 1944.
The first Chindit expedition, Operation Longcloth, conducted in brigade strength in 1943 was led by Wingate in person. On the strength of a reputation built on his part in the campaign to restore Haile Selassie to the throne of Ethiopia in 1941, he had persuaded Lord Wavell, the C-in-C India, that operations against Japanese lines of communication in Burma would cause disruption out of all proportion to the size of the long-range penetration force involved. Opinion is divided on whether Longcloth achieved such results, as four of Wingate’s eight columns had disintegrated before his demolition of two bridges on the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway.
The second expedition, Operation Thursday, was a six-brigade operation mounted in early 1944. It began with 16th (LRP) Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, marching some 250 miles into Burma from the Indian railhead at Ledo to set up a stronghold in the jungle in anticipation of the other brigades being flown in by gliders and Dakotas. Fergusson was to attack Indaw airfield at the mid-point of the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway.
Taylor was with the last but one of the eight marching columns of Fergusson’s brigade stretching in single file over 60 miles. In the attack on Indaw, his column hit a large enemy force and — as planned in such circumstances — dispersed in pre-determined groups to rendezvous at a chosen point. This was found to be in enemy hands, so Taylor was sent with a sergeant and three men to find the remaining seven columns and give them the alternative RV.
Having found and given the message to the sixth, he encountered a line of men and mules he mistook for the seventh. They were in fact Japanese and he and his small team escaped only by a bluff of shouting orders to an imaginary larger force behind them. On rejoining his column, Taylor commanded a company until the exhausted 16th Brigade was flown out to India in May 1945, using aircraft returning from delivering one of the fly-in brigades.
Taylor was mentioned in dispatches for his part in Operation Thursday and served with the 16th Parachute Battalion in India until seconded to Force 136, the Far East arm of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). As a liaison officer to the Malayan Anti-Japanese Army of resistance fighters preparing to attack the occupying Japanese, he saw action in the Muar district of Johor before the war ended in August 1945.
Peter Edwin Taylor, son of Commander H. E. Taylor, RN, was born in 1920 in Madrid where his father was the MI6 representative under the guise of being the assistant naval attaché during and shortly after the First World War. He began his education on HMS Conway but switched to RMC Sandhurst in 1939 to be commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment that December.
After staff college in 1952 and a subsequent staff appointment, he volunteered to serve with the recently formed Federation Regiment in Malaya, comprising 40 per cent Malays, 40 per cent Chinese and 20 per cent other races, commanded by his cousin Colonel Mike Osborn, (obituary February 3, 2010). Although the communist insurrection was all but contained by then, the Federation Regiment proved operationally competent and Taylor was again mentioned in dispatches.
He returned to regimental duty for the amalgamation of his regiment with the East Yorkshires and went to Aden at the outset of the terrorist campaign that continued intermittently until 1967. He moved into intelligence work as a liaison officer between Military Intelligence in London and the headquarters of MI6. During this period he wrote a play for the BBC called The Second Chance based on his time with the Parachute Regiment in India.
In the mid-1960s he commanded the 1st Battalion of his now amalgamated regiment in Berlin, which he enjoyed by declining to go along with the over-anxious attitude of the staff to anything with the least whiff of military misdemeanour about it, pointing out that such concern is far removed from army life as it really is. He later returned to intelligence at Headquarters Rhine Army and then to a security post in Berlin. On leaving the Army in 1975, he worked for ten years with the Civil Service security-vetting unit.
He married Pamela Wood in 1953. She survives him with a son and daughter.
Lieutenant-Colonel P. E. Taylor, Chindit veteran, was born on October 21, 1920. He died on April 10, 2013, aged 92
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
