Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

57 he fell foul of the Navy selection panel. The Army, however, weren’t so choosy. As his obituary in The Guardian tells us, ‘The army, ignoring his feet, cheerfully accepted him into Sandhurst, where he captained the cricket team … .’ And that, and a similar reference in The Times , is the only reference to cricket in any of his broadsheet obituaries, or in his DNB entry. Harbottle went on to a distinguished, if slightly abbreviated, Army career. He entered Sandhurst from Marlborough College in 1935, and was commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry on leaving Sandhurst in 1937. Promoted to lieutenant in 1940 and captain in 1945, his war service was principally in Italy. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1945 for his ‘gallant and distinguished services’ in that country, and during the war he lost two fingers on his right hand. 82 (He was, perhaps fortunately, a left-hander.) Army service continued through the 1950s, with promotions to Major in 1950 and Lt-Colonel in 1959, and in the latter year he was awarded the OBE in the Birthday Honours List. Also in 1959 he became Commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Green Jackets, a post he held until 1962. In that year, as well as being promoted to Colonel, he also took on his most prominent overseas role since the war, as garrison commander of the British forces in Aden, then emerging as a highly sensitive anti-colonial flashpoint. He held this post for two years, and then returned to the UK for two years before – by now a Brigadier – moving to what was to prove a life-changing posting as Chief of Staff of the United Nations peacekeeping force in another trouble-spot, Cyprus. Here he developed a role for peacekeeping that differed from the more usual role of pacification: as he interpreted it, military peacekeeping involved mediation and conciliation, and not – or not just – intervening actively to curb aggression between two opposing forces. Under this view, the UN forces were to use their weapons only in self-defence. So successful was Harbottle in this role that, when his period of duty ended in 1968, the UN’s Secretary-General, U Thant, 83 wanted it to be extended. But his belief that it was a self-evident truth ‘that peacekeeping and peace- building were indispensable and invaluable instruments of peace’, and that ‘there was more to soldiering than fighting or preparing to fight’ 84 went down badly at the Ministry of Defence, and the Secretary-General’s request was declined. Whereupon, at the age of 51, Brigadier Harbottle retired from the Army. There followed a brief period as chief security officer on behalf of a mining company in Sierra Leone, which ended when, late in 1969, he was expelled from the country after being robbed of £1.5m-worth of diamonds by armed bandits at the airport in Freetown. As his DNB entry says, his 82 Some sources say three. His obituary in The Times on 7 May 1997 contented itself with ‘several’. 83 There is a photograph of Harbottle with U Thant in The Times of 16 June 1970. 84 Words taken from his obituary in The Independent , 14 May 1997. Runs Aplenty