Departures of note

Douglas Valder Duff was born in 1901 in Rosario de Santa Fe, Argentina, the eldest son of a British consul. At age 13 he entered the naval training college HMS Conway and served in the Merchant Navy during World War I. In March 1917, his ship, carrying iron ore, was torpedoed and sunk; Duff, then 16, was the only survivor of a crew of 37. Seventeen months later, his passenger ship carrying American nurses and Serbian cavalrymen was also torpedoed, and he had to shoot several horses with his revolver to stop them from swamping his lifeboat. He later survived a third shipwreck and a broken leg from a U-boat attack, and after the Armistice he took part in rescuing White Russian refugees from the Black Sea, an experience he described as 'indescribable'.

After the war, Duff entered a monastery near Spalding, Lincolnshire, as Brother Lawrence, but left after two years, disillusioned by the monks' treatment of novices. He then served as a 'Black and Tan' in the Irish War of Independence, where he lied about his military background to shorten his training. He was involved in several firefights, including a large engagement with up to a hundred insurgents, and once claimed to have confronted IRA leader Michael Collins in Dublin but let him go after Collins said his armed bodyguards were nearby. Duff was horrified by the 1921 truce, which he felt let the IRA off the hook.

In 1922, Duff joined the Palestine Police Force, where he served for a decade. He was stationed in Nazareth, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and commanded patrol boats intercepting smugglers. He was involved in the 1928 Western Wall controversy, when his men removed a screen at the behest of a superior, and was later transferred to Megiddo Prison. He assisted the kibbutz of Mishmar Ha'Emek during the 1929 pogroms and contracted malaria, which plagued him for the rest of his life. He retired in 1932, though some sources say he was dismissed for ill-treating prisoners, and his name may have inspired the slang phrase 'to duff up'.

After leaving Palestine, Duff married nurse Janet Wallace and settled in Dorset, where he became a journalist and author, writing nearly 100 books, including adventure stories for boys and three volumes of autobiography. During World War II, he served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, was mentioned in dispatches for his service off the Libyan coast, and commanded a patrol ship netting the Suez Canal. After the war, he became a popular broadcaster and a regular panellist on the television show 'What's My Line?'. He died in Dorchester, Dorset, in 1978, survived by his daughters Jean and Elizabeth.