Major RHD (Dick) Graveston died in September. He will be best remembered by a generation of Royal Leicesters who served with him in Borneo in 1963-64. There, Dick was the Battalion Air Resupply Officer who unfailingly kept our platoons and companies operating deep in the jungle resupplied with the necessities of life.

Dick Graveston was born in India, the son of an Officer in the Rajputana Rifles. Dick’s upbringing was typical of a past age of colonial service. At the tender age of 6 he was brought back to England to Prep School in East Anglia, spending his holidays with his uncle and aunt in Bury St Edmunds. He saw very little of his parents. In 1937 he went on to Wellington College where he developed his great love of all sports, but especially cricket, at which he played for his school for two years. He also played rugger and hockey and was a keen athlete.

On leaving Wellington in 1941 Dick immediately enlisted in the Royal Scots for basic training, a step necessary for him to gain a Commission in the Indian Army. Writing to his mother while undergoing this training Richard, as he had always so far been known, told her that the Army was calling him ‘Dick’. Writing back to him his mother said she’d called him Richard for 20 years and wasn’t going to change. The name Dick stuck however.

After basic training in early 1942, Dick was sent out to India via the Cape in a convoy of troopships and fast merchants carrying some 50,000 men and supplies to India and the East. Not surprisingly every effort was made to assemble a strong escort for this precious load, since German war ships still had access to the Atlantic. In fact some 35 war ships, including two carriers, were involved in providing the escort at one stage or another. On the day the convoy set out, news reached them of the fall of Singapore. They were heading eastwards and the war was not going well. The journey was to say the least hazardous, with Force 9 Atlantic gales and potential surface, submarine and air attacks. After calling at Freetown in East Africa, then Cape Town/Durban, the convoy steamed on to Bangalore having covered a total of 13,000 miles unscathed.

On arrival in India Dick was sent immediately for officer training and was then commissioned into the 1st/6th Rajputana Rifles, his father’s regiment. His Battalion became part of 4th Indian Division which was sent to North Africa, arriving at El Alamein just as Montgomery’s advance began. Dick took part with his regiment in the operations which cleared the Axis forces from North Africa by May 1943.

Dick’s battalion then landed in Sicily and then Italy, taking part in the fierce fighting for and capture of Monte Cassino. Dick was slightly wounded during that battle. Dick then served on through the rest of the Italy Campaign as Battalion Intelligence Officer and at the end of the war was posted back to India.

Back in India Dick was posted to the Indian Military Academy as an instructor and while there brought a team of cadets back to England in 1946 to play against Sandhurst. With the partition of India, Dick had to choose whether to stay with the Indian Army or look for a regiment in the British army. In the event he was given a commission in the Royal Leicestershire Regiment which, I always suspected, he chose because the Leicesters so loved their rugger and cricket. Dick was, by the way, an Army cricketer and was well up to county standard.

In 1950 Dick, now a Leicester, volunteered to go to Korea as Brigade Intelligence Officer and was among the first group of Commonwealth troops to arrive. He remembered having to borrow clothing and equipment from the Americans to cope with the extreme cold. After being a staff officer in 1951 and 1952 in Hong Kong, Dick returned to England and was posted as the Regimental Representative at Eaton Hall Officer Cadet School. At a reception in Leicester he met Ruth Pitcairn, the daughter of a redoubtable, highly respected and much decorated officer of his new regiment, Lieutenant Colonel John Pitcairn. They were married and Dick became Adjutant of the Regiment‘s TA battalion. Tours of duty in Malaya, Singapore and Germany followed.

It was in 1963 that Dick became the 1st Battalion’s Air Resupply Officer on active service in Borneo, where the British were fending off Indonesian territorial ambitions. Dick would receive, invariably by Morse code, weekly requests from platoons operating in and along the Malaysian-Indonesian border for resupply. These resupplies had to be by air as there were no roads to most locations, and delivery was achieved either by parachute drop or helicopter, weather and enemy fire from across the border permitting.

The Regiment’s system for requesting items to be delivered worked rather like a QM’s stores ledger, where each store is itemized. A pair of boots, for example, is catalogued as ‘boots – pairs – one’. The most unusual request Dick ever received was for ‘cards – birthday – love to Mother – one’. Note all this via Morse code on HF radio. Needless to say the card was purchased, was flown into the jungle and shortly afterwards a happy mother in Leicester received her soldier son’s greetings. That is just one example of the lengths to which Dick would go to serve his Battalion. In fact, despite bad weather, poor communications and occasional enemy fire, the Battalion was able to operate effectively in the jungle for six months thanks to Dick’s efforts.

After Borneo Dick served four tours with the Royal Air Force as Ground Liaison Officer in Singapore, England and Germany, work he much enjoyed. On leaving the Army in 1974, Dick was appointed as Bursar at the Liverpool City Council Boarding Prep School for ill behaved boys in North Wales, a job he did for ten years. Dick was of course in his element with these young people and very good at his job.

In full retirement Dick and Ruth moved to London, then to Aldeburgh and latterly to Woodbridge. In Aldeburgh Dick became Secretary of the Royal British Legion and was as always most conscientious and involved in all Branch activities.

So what of Dick Graveston the man? Dick was a charming and self deprecating man, a devoted family man and a loving father. He always put others first and was always ready to work for the comfort and welfare of his fellows. He would go out of his way to locate and visit a friend which he managed to do even in the desert campaigns in North Africa. He was an outstanding games player and what, in old fashioned language, was called ‘a good chap’ – high praise. This combination together with his relaxed and calm approach to life made him a most popular man. Dick had that great knack of just being himself and that was enough.

In addition he was invariably very smartly dressed, whether in uniform in 100 degrees in Singapore or in mufti. I have heard him described by a close friend as always looking like a Savile Row Tailor’s model. This, I should add, was intended as a compliment. Tall and slim, Dick never changed shape throughout his life nor lost his impeccable courtesy and manners. And all from a man who, from the age of six, saw sadly little of his parents. There was clearly some special quality in his character developed by his education and life that made him such a delightful companion.

AJGP