Soldier who spent his war in Colditz after being wounded in 1940 and later became an influential figure in the world of veterinary surgery
Before qualifying as a veterinary surgeon, Peter Storie-Pugh spent more than four years of the Second World War confined in Oflag IVC — Colditz Castle in Saxony. Incarcerated there because he was classified as a prisoner who would persistently try to escape, he worked to help others break out of the castle but was never able to get away himself.
While studying medicine at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he had joined the University Cavalry Squadron. On the outbreak of war he was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment and sailed for France with the 6th (Territorial Army) Battalion to join the British Expeditionary Force in early 1940.
During the German offensive into Belgium and northern France in May 1940 his company was ordered to hold the junction of the Albert and Arras roads on the eastern outskirts of Doullens, north of Amiens. The determined defence sustained by his weary soldiers forced a German armoured column to halt, then take to the countryside to bypass the junction. He was later awarded the Military Cross for his resolute leadership.
Storie-Pugh was reported killed in this action but, actually only wounded, he was later taken prisoner and evacuated to the French military hospital under German control at Bapaume. On recovery from his wounds and recognising that transfer to a prison camp was imminent, he escaped from the relatively lightly guarded hospital, only to be recaptured and sent to Oflag IX at Spangenberg Castle on the east bank of the River Weser.
Together with two fellow prisoners, he got away from the lower camp at Spangenberg below the castle by cutting through the wire and swimming along a river close to the perimeter. It was an opportunistic venture for which the three were ill prepared and they were caught by a group of German railway workers as they made for cover in the Harz mountains.
The railwaymen were friendly and good humoured, inviting their captives to join them in toasts of schnapps, but the Feldgendarmerie who came to collect them behaved brutally. Thrown into the back of the truck to return to Spangenberg, Storie-Pugh was slashed in the face by a bayonet and all three men suffered blows with rifle butts. On arrival at Spangenberg, they were hauled into a dance hall, paraded before those present and beaten.
Because of his previous form, Storie-Pugh was dispatched to the Sonderlager — high-security camp — at Colditz. One of only the second group of prisoners sent there, he arrived on December 2, 1940, and was confined until liberated by the United States Army in April 1945.
Remembered by another inveterate escaper, the mining engineer Jim Rogers (obituary August 18, 2000), as one of the most cheerful prisoners in Colditz, he soon became an eager participant in a series of escape plans. One particularly ingenious idea involved a manhole in the canteen floor through which prisoners could enter the drainage system to dig a vertical exit, thereby solving the problem of hiding the entrance and having space to distribute the earth from digging. This plan would almost certainly have got beyond the wall but for betrayal by a German sentry who had been bribed to look away from the exit point.
In September 1942 Storie-Pugh became the first British prisoner to be sentenced to solitary confinement in the newly constructed cells after being caught on a reconnaissance of an escape route through the castle lofts with Lieutenant Fritz Kruimink of the Royal Netherlands Navy.
His medical training allowed him to work as a paramedical assistant in the castle sick bay and, in the later years of their confinement, he estimated that because of the high morale among the prisoners, fewer than 15 per cent were beginning to show the psychological effects of imprisonment.
Appointed MBE for services during incarceration in Colditz, Storie-Pugh returned to his veterinary studies and the Territorial Army after his release. He commanded a parachute Light Battery of the Cambridgeshire Regiment, Royal Artillery, TA, until the unit was restored to the infantry role and, on promotion to colonel, became the Deputy Commander 161 Infantry Brigade TA, 1962-65. He was Commandant of the Cambridgeshire Army Cadet Force, 1965-70.
Peter David Storie-Pugh was the son of Professor Leslie Pugh, CBE, FRCVS and Paula Storie. His grandfather had also been a veterinary surgeon and his academic promise at Malvern and as a Foundation Scholar at Queens’ College, Cambridge, led him into the profession. He qualified MRCVS from the Royal Veterinary College in 1948 and took up a research fellowship in the Cambridge department of animal pathology in 1949. His PhD in 1953 was followed by his appointment as lecturer in the department of clinical veterinary medicine at Cambridge, a post he held for 30 years. He became a Fellow of Wolfson College in 1967.
A member of a wide variety of bodies concerned with farming, he served as chairman of the National Sheepbreeders Association. Elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1975, he became the president in 1977 and was twice elected president of the British Veterinary Association, in 1968 and in 1970.
The entry of the UK into the European Economic Community in 1973 provided a new focus for his interests. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Federation of Veterinarians of the EEC and became its first president in 1975. He held that post for four years during which time he worked closely with the European Commission in developing the EEC Professional directive for Veterinarians. For this work he was advanced to CBE for his work in this field in 1981.
His fluent French and adequate German greatly helped in his dealings with continental colleagues. He was the first non-German to be awarded the Robert von Ostertag Medal by the German Veterinary Association in 1972. In retirement he lived in France but a serious car accident in 1998 left him incapacitated.
His marriage in 1946 to Alison, daughter of the late Sir Oliver Lyle, was dissolved in 1971. He married Leslie Striegel in the same year. He is survived by her, and by a son and two daughters of his first marriage and three sons and a daughter of his second.
Colonel P. D. Storie-Pugh, CBE, MC, veteran of Colditz and former President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, was born on November 1, 1919. He died on October 20, 2011, aged 91
WRAC head of personnel who later became the mainstay of the Conservative Research Department
Barbara Ridler was a femme formidable whose strong, steely character was softened by abundant charm. She was regarded with deep affection and respect in the two very dissimilar organisations in which she spent her career, the Women’s Royal Army Corps and the Conservative Research Department, an extraordinary outfit quite unlike any other in modern politics.
She was born in 1915 into the staunchly Roman Catholic Dodd family which had long been well established in the life of Liverpool. It is an indication of the esteem in which the family was held that at the age of 21 she was given the honour of launching a passenger steamship of which the city was particularly proud. She had earlier been welcomed into their circles as a member of the Royal Mersey Yacht Club, having acquired a marked interest in sailing.
Thanks to the Convent of the Holy Child in Harrogate where she was educated and to her own wide reading, she was well prepared to make her way in the world. That, as it turned out, was extremely fortunate because her father fell on hard times. Like so many others, he never really recovered from his experiences during the First World War when he fought at Gallipoli. His once flourishing solicitor’s practice in Birkenhead eventually collapsed. Barbara Dodd needed a job; the wartime women’s Armed Forces provided it. She also acquired a husband, Herbert Ridler, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1949.
Joining the bottom rung of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) in 1942, she was promoted steadily, reaching the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) in 1960. She swiftly established herself as a skilful administrator, ensuring the success of a number of signals units during the war. In peacetime her duties were steadily extended, eventually coming to include responsibility for welfare and training throughout the WRAC.
One of her most challenging assignments (1962-64) took her to the Far East as adviser to the British commander-in-chief, a martinet who tried her patience sorely. He piled duties upon her, including oversight of large military building projects designed (vainly, as it turned out) to provide for a permanent British presence in Singapore. She was cheered at this and other times by visits from the WRAC’s commandant, the then Princess Royal, daughter of George V, with whom she established a close rapport.
In combination with other senior officers, they thwarted an attempt to shorten the name of the WRAC to Women’s Corps. The ever cheerful Princess made light of her encounter with a hamster, hidden in the hand of a mischievous child, to whom Ridler had introduced her formally.
Her final military appointment was as head of the personnel department at the War Office. In 1970 she exchanged the ordered routines of army life for the hurly-burly of the Conservative Research Department. It had hardly changed since its creation more than 40 years earlier by Neville Chamberlain who put a senior MI5 officer in charge of it. Little conspiracies and love affairs thrived in its elegant, but badly rundown, premises near Parliament without disrupting its first-rate policy work and briefing services on which the Conservative Party leadership then depended.
As the Department’s establishment officer, Ridler made it her task to ensure that the place did not descend into total squalor. She employed as her shock troops a bevy of well-bred young ladies whom she recruited as secretaries to the policy experts, known as desk officers. It was said, with pardonable exaggeration, that no one who could not be found in Burke’s Landed Gentry (the Peerage was even better) need bother to apply. They loved their rescue work. A roll of banknotes was handed to one so that she could buy a new wardrobe for an unwashed desk officer (later an MP).
Ridler fought a determined rearguard action against the ever-increasing pressure to make politics a 24-hour business. A desk officer once asked her gingerly if his secretary could work beyond tea-time. “Stupid boy”, she barked, “Miranda has got a Duke coming to dinner. Of course she can’t help you.” After this enjoyable little encounter, she quietly arranged for someone else to provide cover.
She entered fully into the spirit of the place. A drunk once fell across the threshold. She peered intently at the prostrate form. “Despite appearances to the contrary,” she pronounced, “I don’t think it is a member of the Shadow Cabinet.” After this rather madcap existence, it seemed somehow appropriate that when, after her retirement in 1980, she went to Buckingham Palace to collect the OBE that she had been appointed, the wrong name was read out to the Queen.
Many years earlier she had teamed up with another WRAC officer, Rachel Green. In retirement “the two colonels”, as they were affectionately known, entertained a stream of visitors at their flat in East Sussex. Among them was Tito Gobbi, a close friend who reinforced their shared love of opera and of Italy, which they visited annually. To the end her Conservative Research Department “girls” would bring their offspring to receive her benedictions.
There were no children of her marriage to Herbert Ridler. She is survived by Rachel Green.
Barbara Ridler, OBE, lieutenant-colonel in the Women’s Royal Army Corps and Conservative Research Department administrator, was born on October 3, 1915. She died on August 10, 2011, aged 95
German politician whose courageous wartime exploits were overshadowed by later allegations of bribery, treachery and corruption
Karl Wienand could perhaps have been one of the heroic figures of post-war West Germany’s return to democracy. A man who had survived terrible Second World War wounds, and made his way on crutches back from captivity in the Soviet Union, rose swiftly in the Social Democratic party (SPD) under Willy Brandt. But the time of his greatest influence, the mid-1970s when he was a key organiser, a kind of chief whip for the SPD in Bonn, was also the time when he began to be caught up in corruption, tax evasion and espionage allegations that dogged the rest of his career, and led to his disgrace. He became a kind of symbol of the often murky mixture of political networking, business money and treachery that ran as an undercurrent through that period of West German life.
Wienand was accused of having bribed another party’s MP to abstain in a crucial no-confidence vote in the Bundestag in 1972, which kept Willy Brandt in power. The MP, it appeared, had been in contact with both the East German secret police and the West German security services, and it later turned out to have been the East Germans who paid the bribe. Extensive parliamentary investigation at the time did not find proof of Wienand’s involvement in trying to sway the vote unduly, but nor was his name fully cleared.
Wienand, who had been active in fostering the SPD’s links with West German big business, was also accused of helping a businessman in his constituency to avoid paying tax. And damaging allegations of perjury and tax evasion were made concerning Wienand’s personal association with a charter airline, Pan International, which went bust after one of its aircraft crashed, killing 22 passengers. Wienand, who had repeatedly lobbied on the company’s behalf with aviation and other authorities, told a Bundestag investigating committee that he had no financial link with the company. But then evidence emerged of a lucrative consultancy arrangement, on which he had not paid tax. He was later ordered to pay more than DM100,000 (about £20,000) to the tax authorities.
In August 1974 Wienand was suspended from his senior SPD roles, The Times reporting that he had been “the centre of a complicated personal and political controversy almost continuously over the past three years”. His resignation from the Bundestag, for “health reasons”, followed later that year.
Wienand almost always protested his innocence, and he then pursued a career in business. But his troubles and embarrassments were far from over. In 1996 he was found guilty of having informed in the 1970s and 1980s for the East German security services, passing on in many meetings with an agent his knowledge of the internal workings and personalities of West German politics in return for payments believed to have been up to DM1.5 million. Wienand agreed that meetings with East German officials had taken place, but said he had known his contacts were working for the communist security services. He escaped prison as a result of ill health and was later pardoned by Roman Herzog, the President of Germany. But he was financially ruined by the fines imposed, and his disgrace deepened when he was implicated in 2000 in a funding scandal centred on the building of a Cologne waste disposal facility. He resigned from membership of the SPD in 2002, when his expulsion seemed imminent.
It was a pathetic end to a political career that at one time had seemed a great triumph over adversity. Wienand was born in the Rhineland in 1926 into an extremely poor household. His father, a communist building worker, was arrested when the Nazis took power in 1933, and died as war broke out. His mother, a cleaning lady, brought up the family on her own. Wienand joined the Wehrmacht aged 16, had a leg amputated after being wounded, and was also shot in the head and arm, but escaped Soviet captivity.
After studying law and economics at university in Bonn, Wienand joined the SPD in 1947 and became in 1953 the youngest MP in the new West German Bundestag. He rose rapidly in the SPD, winning the trust of leading figures, including Brandt and Helmut Schmidt. He specialised in military policy, and was closely involved too in Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, developing new relationships with the communist east of Germany and Europe. But he was most valued by the party leadership as an effective, behind-the-scenes fixer, sometimes doing the party’s dirty work, making all kinds of useful contacts, seen as discreet and loyal. Those contacts and networks, it later emerged, had gone well beyond the bounds of political necessity and often had much to do with a desire for personal enrichment.
His two wives predeceased him. He was father and stepfather to five children. One of his sons died in a road accident.
Karl Wienand, German politician, was born on December 15, 1926. He died on October 10, 2011, aged 84
