"Utter Contempt"

Admiral Sir Walter Henry Cowan, Bart. was awarded the Distinguished Service Order last week for "gallantry, determination and undaunted devotion to duty as liaison officer with the Commandos." The Admiral stands 5 ft. 2 in., and this is his second D.S.O. He won his first on the Nile, 46 years ago, when Horatio Herbert Kitchener, later Earl of Khartum, was fighting the Mahdi. The Admiral is now 73.

In 1939 the weathered old sea eagle had been retired eight years. He told the Admiralty: "I want to die on a battlefield--not in bed." Said the Admiralty: "Too old." Eventually he was given an assignment deemed suitable for a superannuated sailor--as liaison officer to the Mediterranean commander Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham. Sir Walter, still alarmed by the risk of dying in bed, got Cunningham to assign him to the Commandos, to train Commando-men in handling small boats.

In one Commando show, at Bardia, Sir Walter fell in a ditch more than 62 inches deep. He verbally flayed a stalwart young officer who, mistaking him for Major Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies), tried to extricate him in the darkness. In Rommel's sudden thrust at Bir Hacheim in 1942, Sir Walter was captured. For 16 months he was a prisoner. Then Italy's collapse released him and gave him a chance to win his second D.S.O.

At Mt. Ornito in Italy Sir Walter laboriously helped a badly wounded colonel, far bigger than himself, across a thousand yards of rocky ground under heavy fire to an aid station. At the islands of Solta, Mljet and Brac off the Dalmatian coast his "utter contempt for artillery and mortar fire had a very valuable and steadying effect and won for him the respect and devotion of the men of the Commandos" --as well it might. Heirless Sir Walter was old enough to be their grandfather.

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