He was born in Chingford in 1922 and attended Clacton County High School and Queen Mary, University of London, where he studied Modern Languages.
[1] It was later revealed that he should have been sent on a course to learn the language beforehand but never was due to a bureaucratic error, and as a result the men were "quite unmanageable" until the convoy reached Naples and a Red Army officer boarded.
[1] Experiences with convoys during the war inspired Keeble to apply to join Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service, and he was accepted in 1947,[3] and posted to Jakarta as acting vice-consul despite the normal requirement for applicants to have a university degree.
His main task while serving there was to decipher coded messages arriving from the British ambassador at The Hague, something the staff did with only pencils and cipher books.
According to him this later proved key, however; when Leonid Brezhnev was introduced to the British diplomatic staff he expressed amazement at Keeble's height (5 ft 9 in) telling him it did not do justice to his country, but "the situation was rapidly restored by the red Daimler".