Terence Cave was born on 25 September 1923 at Aldershot, the son of RQMS (later Major (QM)) Arthur Cave of The Leicestershire Regiment, a career soldier who had originally joined the 7th Battalion at the outbreak of the First World War.

An only child, Terence followed the flag with the 1st Battalion to Egypt in 1925 during which period he made his only pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where on his mother’s knee he watched his parents take coffee with the Greek Patriarch in charge of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

In 1927 the family moved with the Battalion to India, and then to England on long leave in 1932 when Terence was placed in a Prep School in Hertfordshire, where he excelled at cricket and rugby, sports prowess which repeated itself when, with an academic scholarship, he moved up to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire in 1937. There his Catholic faith, already from his earliest years nurtured by his Irish Catholic mother and convert father, was cemented by the Jesuits and thus gave him a clear discernment for the remainder of his life.

His aspiration to go to St Andrew’s University to read Classics was scotched by the Second World War, and instead he enlisted in The Royal Scots in Blackburn in November 1941, as an Indian Army Cadet. Training at Aldershot was followed by advanced training at the Officer Training School at Bangalore in India. In October 1942 he was commissioned into The 2nd (King Edward’s Own) Gurkha Rifles and sent to the Depot in Dehra Dun, in northern India, where he met his future wife, whom he was to marry in 1947.

He joined the 1st Battalion (1/2 GR) and from 1944 saw service in Italy and then Greece. In Naples in April 1945 he was accepted for a Regular Commission in The Leicestershire Regiment, the transfer not being effected until early 1947 when he reported for duty at the Depot and then in 1948 as Mortar Platoon Commander of 1st Royal Leicesters, both units being at Glen Parva Barracks, his family living with his parents, his father being Depot Quartermaster.

Later that year he decided to try his hand at learning a language, and then in May 1949, as Intelligence Officer with the 1st Battalion, he set sail for Hong Kong on an unaccompanied tour. Later that year he was recalled to England to the School of Slavonic and East European Languages at London University, followed by six months living with family in Hungary. In February 1951 he qualified as an Interpreter in Hungarian, and passed his First Class exam seven months later. During the language course he had been on the strength of the Intelligence Corps, which at that time was not yet a fully-fledged Corps in the peacetime Army. Between 1951 and 1953 he was attached to Field Security in British Austria, which involved interrogating escaping Hungarians.

Thereafter he returned to service with the 1st Battalion at Iserlohn as Mortar Platoon Commander and then Adjutant there and in Khartoum for six months in 1955. From late 1955 to early 1957 he attended the Technical Staff Course at RMC Shrivenham, following which he served at the Defence Operational Analysis Centre at West Byfleet, where he worked on War Games and thus began his lifelong interest in the minutiae of the structure of forces and armies.

During that tour, when the Intelligence Corps was added as a permanent arm of the Army in 1958, he was amongst the first officers to transfer to it. A short period followed at the Intelligence Corps Centre at Maresfield, where he continued in his interrogation speciality, detached from where in early 1961 he spent a few months in the British-mandated territory of Cameroon when there was a minor insurgency. He was Military Attaché in Budapest 1962-65, then to Woolwich Arsenal as TSO2 at the Inspectorate of Armaments, after which he was posted to Rheindahlen, where for three years he was CO of the Intelligence & Security Group (BAOR).

A posting back to the UK and the relatively new Intelligence Corps Centre at Ashford as Chief Instructor (1969-70) was followed by his dream posting – Defence and Military Attaché in Prague. There was a year of language training to add Czech to his list of languages and then over two years of a thoroughly enjoyable job in the Czech capital. Terence was obviously a great success as an attaché and in the New Year’s Honours List of 1974 he was awarded the CBE.

He formally left the Army in January 1974. With his family he settled in Croydon, handy for the commute to London and his new job, as a civil servant, in the Defence Intelligence Staff in the MoD at Whitehall. During the thirteen years of this work, he studied the Warsaw Pact’s order of battle, and rose to be the head of department. In his lunch breaks in the MOD Library he expanded his interest in the First World War, which led him to involvement in Naval and Military Press republishing military classics, where he was an adviser on books that merited this (including Underhill’s “The History of The Royal Leicestershire Regiment 1928-56”).

He also visited France and Belgium regularly, and from 1981 until 2003 paid annual five-day visits, many in conjunction with the Western Front Association, of which he was a founder member. He was soon its Historical Information Officer, then Chairman 1984-85, Vice-President in 1994 and Patron from 2005 until his death. He was also a member of the Military History Society, and in 2013 his library was accepted by the University of Birmingham, which has a department that specialises in, amongst other things, First World War studies. On his retirement from the Army in 1974, Terence was able, at long last, to become actively involved in Catholic parish work. He became a member of the St Vincent de Paul Society and at Worthing he carried out several lay ministries. His long service to the Church was recognized in 2002 by the award of a Papal decoration, the Benemerenti medal – the Holy See’s version of the OBE. Two years after his wife’s death, he died at Worthing on 21 June 2015 aged 91 years, leaving three sons and two daughters, to whom the Regiment offers its sincere condolences and shares their pride at his wide-ranging and faithful life.