Colonel Sir Robert Alexander Farquar MacRae

COLONEL SIR ROBERT ALEXANDER FARQUAR MACRAE (1915-99)

former Lord Lieutenant of Orkney; born April 14, 1915, died November 15, 1999. Colonel Sir Robert Macrae, who had a distinguished military career before entering local government and becoming Lord Lieutenant of Orkney for 18 years, from 1972 onwards, has died in Balfour Hospital, Kirkwall, at the age of 84. Sir Robert was active in public life until shortly before his death. He was vice-chairman of Orkney Hospital Board from 1971 to 1974, and of the island's health board from 1974 to 1978. He was also an honorary sheriff and a Justice of the Peace. Colonel Macrae, who lived at Grindelay House, Orphir, near Kirkwall, had family roots on his paternal side going back in Orkney as far as the sixteenth century. He was born in Purley, Surrey, at a time when his mother was en route for India to meet up with his father, Robert, who was Inspector-General of Police for Bihar and Orissa provences. He had a lengthy military career following an education at Lancing College, near Brighton, Sussex, and at Sandhurst, being commissioned in the Seaforth Highlanders as a second lieutenant in 1935. Like thousands of others from the regiments which made up the 51st Highland Division, he was captured at St Valery in June 1940, while the soldiers, mainly from the Highlands and Islands, held the rearguard to allow the Dunkirk evacuation. He spent five years in prisoner of war camps, mainly in Southern Germany, including Dachau, arriving back in Britain on VE Day, after liberation by the American forces under General George Patton. After the war, Colonel Macrae served as second-in-command of the Black Watch during the Korean War in 1952 and 1953, participating in the first and second Battles of the Hook. Later, he was with the regiment in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency. Promoted to colonel in 1963, he retired from the Army in 1968, having been created a Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Orkney in 1946. He took up farming in his native islands, latterly at the large cattle and sheep livestock-rearing Binscarth Farm on Orkney's mainland. He entered local government in 1970 as councillor for North Ronaldsay on the old Orkney County Council until 1974 and then served another four-year term with the successor authority, the single-tier Orkney Islands Council. He was awarded the MBE in 1953, for his Korean services, and was knighted in the 1990 New Year Honours List. For his efforts at heading the appeal to save the fabric of the twelfth-century St Magnus Cathedral - the finest surviving building of the Viking age in Britain - he was made a Commander of the Order of St Olaf by Norway's King Olav V in 1977. Just days before Colonel Sir Robert's death, he had participated in a Royal British Legion Remembrance Day Dinner in Kirkwall, Orkney. In 1945, he married Violet MacLellan, from Dumbarton, whose father ran an engineering business in Glasgow. She was known to friends as Toby and pre-deceased him in 1997. The couple had two sons [HERALD OBITUARY BY BILL MOWAT] http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/col-sir-robert-mac...