Soldier who won the MC saving one of his men and was later Commander of British Forces in Hong Kong
It would be pointless to pretend other than that Roy Redgrave could give a startling impression on first acquaintance. His relationship to the Redgrave acting family — Sir Michael was his father’s half-brother — might lead one to expect a certain theatrical air, but he was distinctly mannered in stance and speech, especially speech. Those who thought he might be joking discovered he spoke in no other way and there was more than a touch of steel about him.
He won his Military Cross in most honourable circumstances — saving one of his men from death under fire. In the closing days of the war in Europe the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment, in which he was an armoured car troop commander, was providing part of the reconnaissance screen for the Guards Armoured Division during the advance from Bremen to the old Hanseatic port of Stade on the Elbe Estuary.
His troop was ordered to pause on the outskirts of a village until another troop caught up to allow the advance to continue. Redgrave climbed out and was using a rear wheel for a purpose for which rear wheels are sometimes used when two Panzerfaust rockets hit the car. From the ditch, he saw his second car reversing at speed into the village and his own on fire with the head of the radio operator moving in the turret. Despite some well-aimed bursts of Spandau fire, he climbed back on to the burning vehicle, got hold of the operator under his armpits and dragged him out on to the engine cover where Redgrave was hit in the leg. The pair rolled off the car into the ditch, from where he established that the driver of the car was dead and the radio operator had lost a leg.
After making the wounded man as comfortable as he could, Redgrave crawled back to the village via the ditch, brought out a half-track to recover the casualty, withdrew the rest of his troop under vigorous enemy fire and only then reported to the regimental aid post to have his wound dressed.
Roy Michael Frederick Redgrave was the son of Robin Roy Redgrave and his wife Micheline Capsa. He was born in the Athénée Palace Hotel, Bucharest, where his mother — the daughter of a Romanian general — checked in with just minutes to spare before her confinement. His early boyhood was spent at the Capsa country home at Doftana, some 60 miles north of the capital, where his father owned a company carrying out contract drilling for oil companies in Romania.
He was educated at Sherborne and enlisted in the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) in 1943 as a trooper. He volunteered in order to get into the war before it was over without any thought of becoming a professional soldier. Indeed, after the incident in which his armoured car was incinerated he characteristically remarked: “I had my whiff of war and did not ever want to smell it again.” But he found he liked the life, served in postwar Germany with the Royal Horse Guards patrolling the demarcation line between the British and Soviet zones of occupied Germany and became interested in the gathering of intelligence.
It is unlikely that after attending the Canadian Staff College course at Kingston, Ontario, Redgrave’s card was marked to suggest he might one day become a general. He was certainly enterprising but his refreshing disregard for the concerns of higher authority seemed likely to become a stumbling block. But his uninhibited approach and undoubted charm came to his aid as he advanced up the military tree at a brisk pace. He commanded a squadron of The Blues in Cyprus during the Eoka terrorist campaign and was mentioned in dispatches, served as the military assistant to the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and commanded the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment in London all without serious mishap. It was while commanding the Mounted Regiment that he acquired the nickname “Colonel Daffodil” due, so he recounted in his lighthearted autobiography Balkan Blue published in 2000, to the insistence of his wife’s miniature Pekinese named Daffodil preceding him on barrack inspection.
The post of Commander RAC of the 3rd Division in the rank of brigadier provided fresh opportunity to display his talent for staged productions. He revived the Tidworth Tattoo, Wiltshire, attracting huge crowds, and the Tidworth three-day event. His concern that the Army should maintain close touch with the local community and its interests was further demonstrated when, as commander of the Royal Armoured Corps training centre in Bovington, Dorset, he arranged for footpaths across the ranges — closed for half a century — to be opened to the public. His final two appointments in the Army were both exceptionally high profile and regarded as being among the plums of major-generals’ commands: Berlin and Hong Kong. In fact he was well suited to the former appointment as he spoke fluent French, German and Russian. News of his appointment was greeted by the Berlin press with a front-page photograph of him in uniform alongside one of his half-cousin Vanessa Redgrave posing naked — from the film Blow-Up. He took this in his stride and, in a Berlin then still divided by the hated wall and with tenuous lines of communication through East Germany to the outside world, proved a commandant well liked and respected by the Allied garrison and population alike. When the chimney of his Berlin house — the Villa Lemm — caught fire he put it out by climbing on the roof. The Berlin press gave the incident front-page coverage illustrated by a photograph of him together with another of a topless young lady with no relevance to him or to the incident.
He was the first Commander of British Forces Hong Kong in recent times below the rank of lieutenantgeneral and not already knighted. This called for some aplomb in a highly prosperous community very conscious of style and position. No one could say that Redgrave lacked self-confidence or a certain style. He may have been rather different from what Hong Kong had grown used to in its local general but his appointment as KBE on giving up the job was widely welcomed.
In retirement he threw himself into a variety of work and travel. He was Grand Master of the Knights Templar for a time; he was chairman of the Hammersmith & Fulham Health Authority and the Charing Cross Hospital special trustees. He travelled to China, Tibet and Greenland and, in 1999, he and his surviving sister returned to their childhood home at Doftana to find it a dilapidated summer home for children but both recaptured the magic of their childhood in the Carpathians.
He married Valerie, daughter of Major Arthur Wellesley, in 1953, died last year. He is survived by two sons.
Major-General Sir Roy Redgrave, KBE, MC, Commander British Forces Hong Kong 1978-80, was born on September 16, 1925. He died on July 3, 2011, aged 85
Veteran of Arctic convoys who later commanded frigates and was deputy Nato commander in the Atlantic
As a junior officer David Loram spent most of his war in the waters north of Iceland, escorting merchantmen to Murmansk with vital war materials for the Red Army. On this most lethal of convoy routes, the many losses inflicted by German warships, submarines and aircraft were suffered under the fearsome gales and icing of winter or the complete lack of concealing darkness in summer.
While a midshipman in the cruiser Sheffield Loram experienced a hard-fought convoy to Malta before his ship was transferred to Scapa Flow to escort Convoy PQ5 which arrived unharmed at Murmansk on December 13, 1941. Sheffield subsequently hit a mine and while she was under repair Loram was transferred to the destroyer Foresight.
Foresight’s first convoy to the Kola Inlet was uneventful, but the return became notorious. The cruiser Edinburgh, carrying five tons of Russian gold, was torpedoed by a U-boat. Under appalling conditions of icing and snow squalls, Foresight and her sister ship Forrester attempted to tow the stricken cruiser back to Murmansk. At dawn on May 2, 1942, they were attacked by three large German destroyers. A salvo from Edinburgh immobilised one which was abandoned; the other two inflicted grave damage on both British destroyers. Forrester lost her captain when the bridge was wiped out. At one point both were stopped and on fire. Loram recalled stepping inadvertently on the ship’s badly wounded second-in-command, who said: “Get off my legs, Mid, and get on with the battle.” He died two hours later.
Foresight was ordered to sink the abandoned Edinburgh. Having unfrozen his last remaining torpedo with a steam hose, Loram fired it and had the presence of mind to take a photograph of the impact.
Returning to the Sheffield, Loram took part in the Battle of the Barents Sea against German heavy cruisers Lützow and Hipper, the Allied invasion of North Africa and a further six Russian convoys, during one of which rough seas ripped off the top of an armoured six-inch gun turret. While navigator of the destroyer Zealous, he concluded his Arctic experiences with another fiercely opposed convoy, ending his war with the cheerfully alcoholic “liberation” of Copenhagen.
As a young man Loram distinguished himself as Chief Cadet Captain at Dartmouth, captain of cricket and a hockey player at UK club level. He was a skilled performer on the Cresta Run, for five years a member, manager and captain of the navy’s team.
In later life when occupying senior positions, Loram earned a welldeserved reputation as a difficult man to satisfy, but his long and significant career as a courtier argues a personality able to mix with all estates and kinds of men and women as well as a remarkable efficiency — at that level nothing must go wrong. Volunteers for naval aides-de-camp were called for by the Admiralty in early 1946 and Loram was selected to serve the celebrated hero of two world wars, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, whose gallantry is attested by his Victoria Cross and four DSOs and who was to become the Governor-General of New Zealand.
After a happy two years in New Zealand, Loram returned in early 1949 to specialise in signal communications. He was appointed as flotilla signals officer to the destroyer Chequers in Malta, the second-in-command of which was Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, whom Loram was asked to accompany on an unofficial visit to Damascus.
In 1952 he returned briefly to the signals school at Portsmouth. Recently promoted, he was appointed to the naval college at Dartmouth and while eating his breakfast opened a thin blue envelope from the Naval Secretary, a personage not in the habit of writing to young lieutenant-commanders. This was to tell him that he had been short-listed to become the first service equerry to the Queen. Royal equerries were habitually drawn from the aristocracy and families close to the monarch until the Queen decided to break with this tradition. In due course Lieutenant-Commander Loram found himself aboard the newly commissioned Royal Yacht Britannia, accompanying the Queen Mother and the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne on the maiden voyage to the Mediterranean and visits to Malta and Tobruk.
Royal duties at Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Sandringham, Balmoral and during state visits occupied the next two years. During time not “in waiting” Loram qualified as a helicopter pilot. He was appointed LVO.
Promoted to commander, Loram was appointed to captain the frigate Loch Fada which was one of three patrolling the Persian Gulf in a role familiar to many naval people, keeping the peace among the Trucial States.
This was followed in 1958 by his marriage to Fiona Beloe and a job on the staff of the Joint Services Staff College at Latimer. In 1961 he was appointed executive officer of the Far East Fleet flagship, the cruiser Belfast based at Singapore, circumnavigating the globe on return.
Back in England, Loram was promoted to captain and appointed naval attaché in Paris, requiring a crash course in French, which he never really mastered. There followed “the only appointment in my long career where I was less than happy” — command of the frigate Arethusa and the 6th destroyer squadron. The commission began badly: the work-up under the Flag Officer Sea Training was a disaster with a number of unhappy events including firing two 4.5-inch shells into Dorset farmland. Things improved with the Mediterranean deployment but for Loram it was a “disappointing command”.
As Director of Naval Operations and Trade in the MoD from 1969, Loram provided operational advice to government departments and ministers on the employment of the Fleet. His final sea command was the new guided missile destroyer Antrim which performed well in a series of Nato and national exercises as well as representing the RN at the 80th birthday celebrations of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, attended by Princess Anne.
Promoted to rear-admiral, Loram was appointed Flag Officer Malta and commander of all British forces in Malta. An activity of interest was the clearance of the Suez Canal after the October 1973 conflict between Egypt and Israel. His next tour in the rank of vice-admiral was commandant of the Latimer staff college followed by the important Nato post of Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, based in Norfolk, Virginia. During his tenure, he was responsible under the energetic direction of Nato’s Secretary General, Dr Joseph Luns, for breathing life into moribund Nato plans for the rapid reinforcement of Europe, this requiring much air travel.
He was appointed KCB in 1979 and retired in 1980, taking up the part-time appointment of Gentleman Usher to the Queen in 1982 until 1994 when he was appointed CVO, then Extra Gentleman Usher until his death.
His two army officer brothers were killed in the war. His first marriage, to Fiona Beloe, was dissolved in 1981. His second marriage, to Diana Keigwin, was dissolved in 1990. He married in 1996 Sara Stead-Ellis, and is survived by her and the three sons of his first marriage.
Vice-Admiral Sir David Loram, KCB, CVO, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, 1978-80, was born on July 24, 1924. He died on June 30, 2011, aged 86
