Elsie was a doctor; Charles served in the army during the First World War, first on the Western Front in France and later in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).

[1] Chapple attended Haileybury College, his time there coinciding with the Second World War; on one occasion a German V-1 flying bomb landed near the school, damaging the buildings.

[8] At the time Chapple joined the Gurkhas, they were engaged in fighting in Malaya during the Malayan Emergency, against communist guerrillas attempting to overthrow British colonial rule.

[9] In 1962, he was sent to the army's Staff College, Camberley, in Surrey in preparation for higher rank, and then promoted major on 9 February 1964.

[13][14] During his tenure at the MoD, the army was faced with issues in Northern Ireland, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (1974), while the newly installed Labour government sought to make defence cutbacks east of Suez.

During his tenure, Margaret Thatcher's government embarked on a programme of centralisation of the armed forces and Chapple represented the army on the committee overseeing it.

[1] Appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the 1985 Queen's Birthday Honours,[20] Chapple became the inaugural Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Programmes and Personnel) on 2 January 1985 in the rank of lieutenant general.

He was appointed Aide-de-Camp General to the Queen on 6 October 1987[23] and advanced to a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) in the 1988 Birthday Honours.