Stephen Olver was among the last of his generation of men who served British India in their youth and shifted the focus of their careers to the British Foreign Service and international affairs in middle age. He was employed in turn by the Indian police, the Indian Political Service and the newly formed Pakistan Foreign Service. Transferring to the British Diplomatic Service in 1950, he ended his career 25 years later as High Commissioner in Nicosia.
Stephen John Linley Olver was born into a clerical family in India in 1916 and was educated at Stowe. From there he went, in the threatening atmosphere of the early 1930s, to the University of Munich, and then into the Indian Police.
Olver spent nine years in the police service in India; his experiences ranged from mounted units to the CID. In 1944 he transferred into the Political Service, the crème de la crème of the British administration of pre-independence India. He stayed with it to independence in 1947, employed in the capital, in Quetta and Sikkim, and in a diplomatic capacity in Bahrain.
On independence Olver moved into the Foreign Service of the new nation of Pakistan. It was manifestly an interim appointment, as Pakistani officials found their feet, and in 1950 Olver followed many other old Indian hands into the British Foreign Service.
After three years in Whitehall, Olver was appointed to the staff of the British Military Government in West Berlin. He went accompanied by his new Italian wife, Maria, whom he had met when she had tried to teach him Italian in Karachi. They arrived in a city racked by East-West tensions and marred by tragedy, where in June 1953 Soviet tanks crushed the East Berlin uprising. Berlin was a first experience of European diplomacy that Olver never forgot.
In 1956 Olver was transferred to Bangkok and in 1961, after a tour of duty in London, to Washington. By now he was 46, responsible for consular matters in an embassy — by far and away Britain’s largest — preoccupied with political and economic issues and above all with international security concerns. He arrived in 1961, the year of the Bay of Pigs debacle, and left in 1963, the year of President Kennedy’s assassination.
His next appointment was as head of the Security Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, an unremitting grind of a job for which his police experience had given him some preparation. He moved in 1967 to The Hague as deputy to the ambassador.
In 1969 Olver landed a mission of his own, as High Commissioner to Sierra Leone. The army had taken power there in a bloodless coup in 1967, and another was unsuccessfully attempted in Olver’s time in the country, in 1971. Neither much marred the atmosphere of what was in those far-distant years still a happy country, with civil war still a distant prospect.
In 1973 Olver moved to his last Diplomatic Service appointment, in Cyprus. He had a scant two years there but they were filled with events of major importance. Archbishop Makarios was re-elected as President in early 1973 but overthrown in 1974 by a coup of Greek officers in the National Guard. In response Turkey landed troops in the north of the island, where, more than 40 years later, they still remain. Tension between the two communities ran high.
As British High Commissioner Olver represented the most significant third power in the divided island, with a concern in particular for the British sovereign bases in the south and for the British expatriate population. A lifetime of experience fitted him ideally for this particular job and he did well in it, a success recognised when he retired from Cyprus and from the public service in 1975 and was appointed KBE. He had been appointed MBE in 1947 and CMG in 1965.
In the later years of their 58-year marriage the Olvers enjoyed a long retirement in a series of homes in the south of England, delighting in sport, painting, bridge and travel.
He is survived by his wife and a son.
Sir Stephen Olver, KBE, CMG, diplomat, was born on June 16, 1916. He died on June 22, 2011, aged 95
Lieutenant-Commander Bill Henley
Wartime naval aviator who was decorated for sinking a U-boat attacking a convoy with depth charges from his ‘Stringbag’ biplane
As ships and aircraft go, the escort carrier and the Fairey Swordfish were perhaps the least glamorous combo of the Second World War. The 18,000-ton HMS Campania had been launched as a refrigerator ship intended for the mutton trade from New Zealand before being requisitioned by the British Government, eventually to emerge from Harland & Wolff’s Belfast shipyard as a small aircraft carrier early in 1944.
The biplane “Stringbag” as flown from Campania’s decks by Bill Henley of 813 Naval Air Squadron was a design that appeared to owe more to the technology of the First World War than the Second, with its open cockpit, fabric-covered wings and fuselage, and an operating speed of little more than 100 knots.
Yet this homely combination was to provide highly effective protection to the convoys that in the vile weather of Arctic winters plied the perilous Russian convoy route past the enemy-occupied Norwegian coast with its air bases from which constant attacks could be launched — as Henley’s part in the stalwart defence of convoy RA62 against air and U-boat attack as it sailed from Murmansk to Loch Ewe in December 1944 amply demonstrates.
The day before the convoy sailed, the ships of the escort had already left the Kola Inlet, determined to take the fight to the U-boats assembled outside, and on December 9 the frigate Bamborough Castle sank U387. But the lurking U365, under her bold and experienced skipper, Kapitänleutnant Diether Todenhagen, who was renowned throughout the Kriegsmarine’s submarine branch for his aggressive tactics, still posed a threat. This she demonstrated when on December 11 she hit the destroyer Cassandra with a torpedo, badly damaging her and compelling her to put back into Murmansk for repairs.
German aircraft based in Norway next took off in search of the convoy. But although nine Ju88s, configured as torpedo bombers, attacked RA62 on December 12, they obtained no hits on its merchantmen or escorts, and lost two of their number.
Then, on December 13, two Swordfish of 813 squadron, one piloted by Henley, took off from Campania for a night sweep over the convoy. Henley’s observer picked up a radar contact indicating a surfaced submarine, but at that point the aircraft’s radar failed. Dropping flares and depth charges at the point of the radar contact with no visible result, the two aircraft were turning to make course for the carrier when the other Swordfish with which Henley’s was in company, reported a radar contact. Returning to the air, both aircraft released more flares and these illuminated U365 clearly visible on the surface.
Henley immediately attacked straddling the U-boat with depth charges and rupturing its hull. U365 sank with all of her 50 crew killed or drowned. Henley was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross the following March for his contribution to the victory over the U-boats flying from both Campania and her sister ship Nairana. The citation for the DSC praised his “gallant service, endurance and devotion to duty”. Fleet Air Arm comrades in Campania recall Henley’s modesty and quiet charm — and his great sense of humour.
Born in London in 1923, Maurice William Henley went to school in Greenwich from where he joined the National Provincial Bank before being called up into the Navy, where he trained as a Fleet Air Arm pilot.
He remained in the Navy after the war and served with 809 Squadron flying the twin-engined Sea Hornet from HMS Seahawk, RNAS Culdrose, at Helston in Cornwall. Converting to jets, he subsequently commanded 893 Squadron, flying Sea Venoms at RNAS Yeovilton, HMS Heron, in Somerset.
When the Suez Crisis broke in the autumn of 1956, Henley was on honeymoon in Spain and had to rejoin his squadron, which had already embarked in the aircraft carrier Eagle, in a plane that had been left for him at Gibraltar. As commanding officer of 893 Squadron flying Sea Venoms from Eagle he was awarded a Bar to his DSC for leading his squadron in the Fleet Air Arm low-level ground attack operations that were conducted against Egyptian gun positions and ground forces in support of the militarily successful but politically ill-fated Anglo-French Suez campaign of November 1956.
Henley retired from the Royal Navy in 1968 as a lieutenant-commander and took a job with the young Glasgow-based airline Loganair as a pilot and instructor. For the next 15 years he flew routes to the Highlands and to the Western Isles, at the controls of Britten Norman Islanders and Trilanders and, later, Twin Otters.
He also did duty as an air ambulance pilot, a service then carried out by fixed-wing aircraft, now by helicopters. On one occasion a baby was actually delivered in his aeroplane in flight. He retired as senior pilot in 1983.
In his spare time Henley took an Open University degree in geography and geology. He was a member of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and chairman of its Glasgow branch.
He is survived by his wife, Hazel, whom he married in 1956, and by two sons and a daughter.
Lieutenant-Commander Bill Henley, DSC and Bar, naval aviator and civil airline pilot, was born on March 25, 1923. He died on June 11, 2011, aged 88
