Colonel of the month - February

Moving forward in time from the heroic and much-wounded Campbell, we come to an equally delightful character of WWII vintage - Col Eric 'Crazy' Hayes-Newington, "the oldest surviving officer of the 4th Bombay Grenadiers".

My source for this is the Daily Telegraph (of course) obituary, posted here.

As usual for a Torygraph 'moustache' obituary, it dedicates much of its first part to an account of the action in Burma in which he won the DSO:

Hayes-Newington sustained a wound in his shoulder, but this gave no pause to his vigorous leadership, and he himself slew three Japanese soldiers at point-blank range as they bore down on the tanks, shrieking.

So far so good. It then details his career up to that point, which involved the quintessentially colonial colonel activity of fighting in Waziristan - "a very active service which involved climbing peaks and
avoiding accurate sniping by tribesmen who regarded fighting as a normal
way of life".

After retiring from the Indian army he moved to Kenya, Lest anyone think that 'retirement' is a time for taking it easy, the Telegraph puts us straight:

When the Mau Mau insurrection broke out in the 1950s, Hayes-Newington joined the police, and was soon running the operations room at Nyeri.
During his 12 years' service he became Acting Superintendent of the Kenya Police, and on retirement was awarded the Colonial Police Medal.
In his late 70s he became Chief Game Warden ("Number One White Hunter") at Treetops Hotel, where he escorted Royalty, and appeared on a BBC Blue Peter television programme.

I remember that programme, which of course gave barely a hint of the man's daredevil courage and homicidal magnificence.

But what, I hear you ask, of personal eccentricity and field-sports, without which no portrait of a true colonel is complete?

Although very modest and reticent, he had a low threshold of boredom and if he felt that a dinner party was too dull, would begin eating his table napkin or do something equally unusual.
As a young man, "Crazy" had been a good hockey and soccer player, and he was always a first-class shot. He enjoyed riding a powerful Norton motor-bicycle, in spite of the practice being deplored by his seniors.
Invariably cheerful, with a dry sense of humour, he was an excellent organiser, and extremely good at putting people at their ease. Part of his younger days had been spent in Ireland, where he had become a skilled trout fisherman and a good horseman, and partly in Bruges, where he became fluent in the language. He skied, skated, won medals at cross-country running, played polo, and planned and built his own home in Kenya - where he developed a great fondness and affinity for elephants.

Present and correct on all counts, sah!