Army chaplain with a cool head and a notable smile who won an MC in Congo and let off an explosive at Darlington station.

When Tom Hiney was born in a Dublin Catholic orphanage one of the nuns described him as: “A little Napoleon; yet always with a wonderful smile.” She spoke prophetically because Hiney grew up to be a resourceful soldier and a popular army chaplain.

Unusually for a future man of the cloth, he also appeared twice in a court of law: once for causing an explosion at Darlington railway station and a second time for breaking and entering.

Far more significant, however, was his Military Cross. He won it in 1961 while serving in Congo during one of the most distressing insurrections since the Second World War.

In the early 1960s the murder, rape and pillage that marked the civil war in the former Belgian Congo shocked a generation. Hastily granted independence with only superficial preparation by the Belgian government, the rule of law had collapsed in the country. A quickly assembled UN force was mandated to safeguard civilians of all nationalities and to restore order. The blue berets, alas, could not ensure protection. An early and unwisely small UN patrol was ambushed and shot or bludgeoned to death, leaving only three survivors.

The British army was not involved directly, but two West African brigades of infantry contributing to the UN force contained seconded British officers, including Hiney, then an acting captain in the Royal Leicestershire Regiment. He was sent to the central Kasai province, where areas had fallen under control of the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC), which was in revolt and trying to seize political power.

A company from his regiment had been sent to Port Francqui (now Ilebo) 215 miles to the northwest to rescue a group of Swedish UN officers abducted by ANC rebels, but the company’s two British officers had been tricked while negotiating and taken prisoner. Hiney was instructed to form a composite rifle company from his technicians and administrators and rescue the officers and the Swedes. His small convoy was ambushed some 50 miles short of Port Francqui on a narrow stretch of road surrounded by thick undergrowth.

He quickly got his men out of their trucks and returned the rebels’ fire, but the usual tactic of defeating an ambush, by circling behind it and attacking from the rear, was impossible due to the density of the bush. Shouting encouragement and orders to his men, Hiney systematically rolled up the ambush from south to north, killing or routing each pocket of rebels in turn, until only a Bren gun position at a roadblock across the road continued to fire. Accompanied by his orderly, Hiney crawled forward and silenced it with a couple of hand grenades. With the roadblocks now cleared, the convoy moved on to reach Port Francqui, only to discover that the two British officers and all but one of the Swedes had been shot by the rebels.

Thomas Bernard Felix Hiney was born in 1935 and adopted two years later by Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Hiney and his sister Margaret. Growing up he was told that his mother had died and learnt of his adoption only during a rare but heated argument with his adoptive father when he was 18. He was educated at Ratcliffe College near Leicester and Sandhurst, from where he was commissioned in 1956.

Initially stationed at Darlington, his high spirits led to him planning to throw a thunderflash among his fellow subalterns gathered on a detachment at the railway station. After igniting the fuse he was unable to open the carriage window and so threw the grenade into the nearby lavatory. The explosion blew off the door and wrecked the facilities. He was charged with causing an explosion in a public place and fined £40 (about £1,000 in today’s money). He would have been court-martialled as well, had the army district commander not had a sturdy sense of humour.

More seriously, after joining the 1st Leicesters in Cyprus engaged in fighting the EOKA (Greek Cypriot nationalist) terrorist campaign, he was charged with forcing entry into a Greek Orthodox monastery. He and his platoon had been searching for an EOKA arms cache but the expertise of a London barrister was required to have the maliciously drawn charge dismissed.

He subsequently served with his regiment in Germany and Hong Kong before secondment to the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces in 1964. Before long an attack of jaundice brought about his medical evacuation. Command of a company with his regiment in Libya and Malta followed before he left the army at the age of 32 in 1967 and embarked on training for the Anglican priesthood at Ridley Hall and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He was ordained in 1970 and served his curacy at Edgbaston before returning to the army as a chaplain.

Friends were surprised that he chose the Anglican priesthood. His explanation was that, after visiting a fellow Royal Leicester officer and his family in their married quarters, he wished to marry and have a family of his own. This was borne out when he married Muriel Vowles, whom he had met at a church function in 1969. She survives him along with their two sons: Thomas, who followed his father into the Anglican priesthood but is preparing to attend a seminar in Rome for his conversion to Catholicism; and Robin, who is the administrator of a home for sufferers of dementia. A daughter, Louise, predeceased him.

Hiney’s army chaplaincy gave him immense pleasure and eventually he became chaplain of the Royal Hospital Chelsea from 1991 to 2001. It is not known how many of the pensioners he encountered there were aware of his colourful past.

Thomas Hiney, MC, soldier and army chaplain, was born on December 12, 1935. He died after a stroke on January 16, 2020, aged 84

Reproduced with permission from The Times.