Colonel Adrian Dermot St Clair Rouse, died 3 July, 2025, aged 99, had a distinguished and unusually varied career in the Army.
He was born 21 September, 1925. He married, first, in 1953, Valerie Lilian Baird. The marriage was dissolved in 1970, and in 1984 he married Fallulah Jane Eyles (formerly Robledo, née Simpson), stepdaughter of Sir Maxwell Joseph, the founder and chairman of Grand Metropolitan.
Together they ran a business supplying flowers to the Ritz and other London hotels. She died in 1993. In 2000, he married Clare Delahunty, but they divorced, and for 17 years his partner was Gilly Becker, whom he nursed until she died of Alzheimer’s in 2020.
He is survived by two sons and two daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. A daughter from his first marriage, Vivian, is Baroness Inchiquin, wife of the 19th Baron Inchiquin.
Daily Telegraph: Aged 18, Rouse enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and after being granted an Emergency Commission in the Indian Army, he boarded Ontario at Glasgow docks in July 1944. “Off we sailed down the Clyde,” he recalled, “and looking at the green hills of Scotland, I thought: ‘Will we ever see them again?’ And we didn’t – not for a long time.”
He was posted to 8th Battalion, 9th Jat Regiment, where his first command was the mortar platoon. There were about 60 soldiers – half Hindu and half Muslim – and about 40 mules. He had never seen a mule before in his life and none of the soldiers spoke English. He had to learn Urdu, the common language; sitting in a tent on a hot afternoon with the sun streaming down, it was hard work.
He was posted as an instructor to the Infantry School at Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. At first parade one morning, all 2,000 men were drawn up in a great hollow square with the officers in front. They heard a clanking of chains and a group of deserters were brought in and marched in front of each rank of soldiers. They were halted in the middle of the square and their badges of rank were ripped off. It was, he said, like something out of a tale by Rudyard Kipling.
Adrian Dermot St Clair Rouse was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, on September 21 1925, the son of a civil servant working at the Home Office. The family moved to Richmond in Surrey; one night during the Blitz, there was a heavy raid. “A land mine came down on a parachute,” Rouse recounted in a BBC interview. “It demolished the house across the road, and our house was so badly damaged that we had to move out the next morning.” He had been studying at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, but completed his education at Kelly College at Tavistock in Devon.
In 1946, with the approach of Indian independence, he transferred to the Devonshire Regiment and the following year was posted as adjutant to 1st Gold Coast Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force. He was in Africa for four years before serving as adjutant at the Regimental Depot, Exeter.
When the Devonshire Regiment and the Dorset Regiment amalgamated in 1958, Rouse, then a captain, joined the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment (D and D).
Following Staff College, he spent two years in Kenya as brigade major of 70th Brigade during the latter stages of the Mau Mau rebellion. In 1959, after a year in command of a company of the 4th Battalion, the King’s African Rifles, at Jinja in Uganda, he attended the US Army Command & Staff Course at Fort Benning, Georgia.
He then commanded a company in Cyprus before being posted in 1962 as a staff officer to HQ Northern Army Group at Rheindahlen in West Germany. In preparing large-scale exercises, he had to deal with the ministries of defence of four countries and senior officers at all levels of Nato. It was a most exacting appointment and he was appointed MBE at the end of his tour.
In 1965 and 1966 he was on active service as second-in-command of the 1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment, in Borneo during the Confrontation with Indonesia. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in June 1967, he assumed command of 1 D and D, then stationed in Münster. The following year, the battalion was tasked at short notice to protect the Soviet Military Mission to the Commander-in-Chief, BAOR, from violent protests after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia – and a potentially dangerous situation was successfully defused.
A highly regarded commanding officer, with a fine military moustache, Rouse was a stickler for dress and discipline. Even at weekends he was seldom seen without collar, tie and regimental blazer, and he expected the same standards of his officers. On one occasion, his adjutant H Jones (who was later awarded a posthumous VC in the Falklands conflict) was wearing jeans in the Naafi when he was informed that his CO was approaching the front door. He lost no time in leaving the building by the back door.
Rouse served on the staff in Germany and the MoD before retiring in 1979 in the rank of colonel. He was in charge of the Army Security Vetting Unit until he finally retired in 1991. He listed his sporting interests as “big-game hunting in India and Africa, plus polo in pre-marriage days”.
Colonel Adrian Rouse, born September 21 1925, died July 3 2025
No comments:
Post a Comment