Sunday 01 March 2015

Sir Richard Catling

Sir Richard Catling, the colonial police officer who died on March 22 aged 92, played an important part in countering some of the most violent insurgencies of the retreat from empire in Palestine, Malaya and Kenya.

He joined the Palestine police in 1935, attaining the rank of Assistant Inspector-General during the uprising before being transferred to the Federation of Malaya Police, where he was Senior Assistant Commissioner during the Malayan Emergency.

In 1954 he was appointed Commissioner of the Kenyan Police, forging an immediate and unlikely friendship with Jomo Kenyatta, who had been sentenced to seven years' hard labour for his leadership of the Mau Mau insurgency.

On arriving in Kenya, Catling decided that the British had to talk to Kenyatta if they were to end the insurgency. So he went to the prison near Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, where the Kikuyu leader was being held and spent some time discussing the situation with him.

Kenyatta was the prison cook, and, as they held their discussions walking round the prison compound, he complained that the ground was infertile, making it almost impossible for him to produce fresh vegetables for the prisoners' meals.

Catling, most of whose family were Suffolk farmers, asked him if he had tried growing spinach; Kenyatta had never heard of it, and when Catling arrived back in Nairobi he sent the rebel leader some spinach seeds. Kenyatta would later joke that it was "the Commissioner's spinach" that kept him and his fellow prisoners going.

Kenyatta was not the only future African leader with whom Catling came into contact during his time as Commissioner of the Kenyan Police. A young Lt Idi Amin, one of a number of Ugandan troops in the 4th King's African Rifles sent into northern Kenya in 1962 to disarm Turkana rustlers, was shown to have tortured a number of the tribesmen, chopping off their penises before killing them.

Catling and Uganda's last colonial Governor, Sir Walter Coutts, asked the Ugandan prime minister Milton Obote to prosecute Amin; when Obote declined, Sir Walter is reported to have told him: "I warn you, this officer will cause you trouble in future." Amin deposed Obote in a coup in January 1971.

In June 1963, when Kenyatta was elected prime minister of the newly-independent Kenya, he asked Catling to stay on as Inspector-General of the country's police force. Eventually, complaints from Kenyan MPs led to his leaving the post, but Kenya's police force still operates under the standing orders put in place in August 1962, when Catling was Commissioner of Police.

Richard Charles Catling was born on August 22 1912 at Leiston, Suffolk, the son of a master butcher. He was educated at Bungay Grammar School and passed university entrance exams, but decided instead to seek his fortune in London, where he worked for a firm of textile merchants.

The young Richard Catling was a frequent visitor to the docks of east London, where he would watch ships coming in from exotic locations; he vowed that, one day, he would be on one such ship seeking his fortune abroad. Not long afterwards he ran into an old school friend who was off to join the Palestine police, and Catling decided to follow suit.

A small, wiry man, he had some trouble persuading the recruiting officer that he would make a good police officer. But in 1935 he arrived in Palestine, then administered by the British under mandate from the League of Nations; as a police constable, he learned both Hebrew and Arabic and swiftly made his way up through the ranks to work in both the Special Branch and CID.

In February 1944 the Jewish Irgun Zeva'i Le'umi rebel group, commanded by a young Menachem Begin, declared war on the British administration, attacking and blowing up government offices, military installations and police stations.

On July 22 1946, Catling, now a superintendent and second-in-charge of the Palestinian police CID, based at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, was in the British Army headquarters, which was also in the hotel, talking to a British officer. They heard a small explosion and went on to the balcony to see if they could see where it had occurred. Unable to make out what had happened, Catling set off to investigate.

He was walking back into the lobby when a bomb planted by the Irgun exploded, completely destroying the Army HQ and killing 91 people, including the officer to whom he had just been talking. Catling was knocked over by the blast, but suffered only a minor cut to his nose.

Catling held secret talks with senior members of the Irgun, at their request, to see if there was a way of resolving the situation. On two separate occasions he was taken blindfolded to an undisclosed location where three hooded men explained what the Irgun wanted. These meetings convinced him that there was no way of ending the uprising without the creation of a Jewish state.

When the state of Israel was established in 1948 Catling was transferred to Malaya, where the Communist insurgency led by Chin Peng had just broken out. As Senior Assistant Commissioner, he played an important role in the plan instituted by the British military commander, General Gerald Templer, to isolate the Communist rebels by winning the "hearts and minds" of the local population.

This was the first time that the phrase "hearts and minds" had been used in such a context; the methods employed - the local population being wooed away from supporting the rebels with improved living conditions, while police Special Branch and SAS soldiers isolated Chin Peng by arresting or killing his associates one by one - are now seen as the model for ending insurgencies. It also inspired Catling's actions when he was sent to Kenya in 1954.

He was knighted on his return from Kenya in 1964, and subsequently acted as an adviser to the Jordanian police during the early 1970s, when the government of King Hussein was embroiled in a battle with Palestinian guerrillas. He then worked as a security adviser until retiring in 1988. Sir Richard Catling was appointed OBE in 1951 and CMG in 1956.

He married, in 1951, Joan Feyer (née Lewis), who died in 1974.

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