[1] He was working at a lumber camp in Finland at the outbreak of World War II, and joined a Territorial Army battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders as a private soldier.
When the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, he was seconded to the 5th (Ski) Battalion Scots Guards.
[1] In April 1940 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery,[2] and served in Libya during the siege of Tobruk, later to become the subject of some of his drier reminiscences.
He was a deputy lieutenant for Dunbartonshire and for twenty years was the chairman of the British Sailors' Society.
His wife's sister Marjorie Ray Duncan had married the 6th Earl of Verulam in 1938.