Brigadier Robert George Long, CBE, MC, DL (30 January 1937 – 19 September 2014) was a British Army officer who was the last Colonel of the Royal Hampshire Regiment.

He was educated at Sherborne School[2] before taking a National Service Commission,[3] and subsequently went up to Brasenose College, Oxford where he graduated with a Fourth Class Honours degree.

He applied for a secondment to the Malaysia Rangers, and served with them in Sarawak Borneo, prior to taking a post at the Royal Military College at Sungai Besi.

Shortly after returning to the UK in 1968 the 1st Battalion Royal Hampshires were sent, as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission, to the Kofinou district of Cyprus, which had been a flashpoint of Greek-Turkish confrontation.

In 1977 he took command of 1st Battalion Royal Hampshires in Ballykelly, and after a successful tour, including the Queen's Jubilee visit in August and considerable efforts to support the RUC, Long was mentioned in dispatches in 1978.

Long was instrumental in ensuring that Diana, Princess of Wales, who had been Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Hampshires, continued in that position in the new regiment named in her honour.

[13] Robert Long married, in 1966, Allison, the daughter of James Francis Firth, a Kenya coffee merchant and liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers.