Colonel Peter Storie-Pugh

Obituary for Colonel Peter Storie-Pugh

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, 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 PD 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.