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Major Jim Gordon, MBE, soldier and personnel manager Born: 14 February, 1916, in Newstead, Roxburghshire Died: 11 January, 2003, in Borders General Hospital, aged 86
MAJOR Jim Gordon's long military career stretched from the days of the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force in 1940 and fighting the Japanese in Burma through to the partition of India and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the Fifties. Born in Newstead, Roxburghshire, and educated locally, his immediate ambition on the outbreak of war was to become an RAF tail gunner. Disappointed to learn there were no vacancies for "tail-end Charlies", he enlisted in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
Thus it was that he found himself in France in 1940 as part of the doomed British Expeditionary Force. Cut off from the Dunkirk beachhead by the rapid German advance, he managed to escape through Normandy and finally to St. Nazaire and an Irish ferry, the Royal Ulsterman.
Service in the UK and promotion to corporal was followed by officer training school at Bangalore and a commission into the Black Watch. But he was swiftly transferred to the Royal Scots Fusiliers in Burma, where he took part in operations against the withdrawing Japanese.
The regiment then moved to India for internal security duties in Delhi, where they remained until partition in 1947. It was during this period that Jim played a central role in one of the most poignant moments in the history of the British Empire when he commanded the final British military parade in India before partition, in front of the country's last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.
Following the regiment's return home and the loss of its 2nd Battalion, he joined the 5th King's African Rifles at Nanyuki in 1952. This outfit had been due to move to Malaya, but the advance party was recalled due to the deteriorating situation in Kenya with the Mau Mau uprising. As a company commander, he was responsible for protecting settlers in the Nyeri area and his company was frequently in action against Mau Mau guerrillas.
A second tour of duty in 5 KAR resulted in his serving in Kenya during the whole of the Mau Mau campaign and the achievements of his company were recognised by the number of awards its members earned; Jim Gordon himself was made an MBE.
Following a spell of a training company at Lanet, he returned to the UK to become training officer of the army's Junior Leaders Regiment.
A posting to the Far East followed, as Assistant Commandant of the Corrective Training Establishment in Kuala Lum-pur.
His retirement from the army came at the age of 50 - his extended short service commission did not allow him to serve longer - and he spent the next 12 years as personnel manager with the construction firm Crudens. Final retirement saw Jim and his family return from Edinburgh to live in the house in Newstead's Fortune Row in which he had been born.
He was predeceased by his wife, Bertha (Beryl), and is survived by his daughter, Barbara, and grandson, David.
In a newspaper interview several years ago, he said he had enjoyed a tremendous life. "Some incredible things have happened to me. Despite the hardship and death you see as a soldier during wartime, I enjoyed the army immensely," he said. "I saw some amazing things and met some equally amazing people. It was a great life."
One of his lasting and most horrific memories was of witnessing Britain's greatest maritime tragedy on 17 June, 1940, when the Luftwaffe bombed the 16,200-ton troopship, Lancastria, off the French port of St Nazaire, with the loss of over 3,000 British soldiers. "Somebody claimed to have seen a black Labrador dog swimming among the bodies - presumably some poor serviceman's pet." In his later years, Jim Gordon was a prolific and humorous letter writer to newspapers and also successfully turned his hand to writing short stories on his time in the army and had a book on Newstead published.
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