An Important Collection of Awards to the SAS and Special Forces

An exceptional campaign group of eight awarded to Major Nigel Crowe, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the Parachute Regiment and 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, Second in Command of the Argyll’s in Aden

General Service 1918-62, 5 clasps, Palestine 1945-48, Malaya, Near East, Cyprus, Arabian Peninsula (Lt. N. D. L. Crowe, A. & S.H.); Korea 1950-53, with M.I.D. oak leaf emblem (Capt. N. D. L. Crowe, A. & S.H.); U.N. Korea; General Service 1962, 3 clasps, Radfan, South Arabia, Borneo, with M.I.D. oak leaf emblem (Major N. D. L. Crowe, A & SH); Oman, Dhofar Campaign Medal; As Sumood Medal; Rhodesia, Defence Forces Medal for Meritorious Service, D.M.M. (Commdt. N. D. Langdale); General Service Medal (Major N. D. Langdale) some edge bruises but generally very fine and better (8)

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, An Important Collection of Awards to the SAS and Special Forces.

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M.I.D. London Gazette 7 September 1951 (Korea), and 23 January 1968 (Aden).

Nigel Douglas Langdale Crowe was born in Leeds on 1 August 1927 and was granted an emergency commission in the 1st Battalion, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, in September 1946. He served in Palestine as a platoon commander, and in Hong Kong and Korea in command of the Signal Platoon. He was promoted Lieutenant on a regular commission in 1948. During the Suez Crisis he served in the Canal Zone with 2 PARA, and in Malaya was attached to 22 SAS. Between March 1954 and June 1955 he served as ADC to the Commander-in-Chief Gibraltar, and returning to 1 A & SH in the rank of Captain, served with BAOR. He became Major on 4 December 1961 and served as second in command of 1 A & SH in Singapore and Borneo. During long periods of service in Aden he learnt Arabic, and as GSO2 of the Federal Regular Army of South Arabia made friends with Arabs at various levels of influence. His Arab contacts and Middle Eastern experience were to prove especially useful in 1967 when, as second in command to the forthright Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell, the Argylls entered the hitherto no-go zone of Crater town in Aden in response to the revolt of the Armed Police and the massacre of twelve British soldiers on 20 June.

On 29 July 1967 the Falkirk Herald reported: ‘Then at last light on 3rd July the code-word ‘Stirling Castle’ - home of the Regiment - was flashed. The Jocks’ blood was up for they had lost three men in the ambush. Led by their CO, Colonel Colin Mitchell, and pipers, they stormed down into Crater. Machine guns from the area of the Sultan’s Palace opened up and ... after a ten minute machine gun battle the terrorists were silenced. Within the hour the main assault reached its objective, the British-owned Chartered Bank in the centre of the city.’

The next part of the operation was to take over the Treasury building which contained the whole reserve currency for South Arabia and which was occupied by the Armed Police. Mitchell recalled in his controversial memoirs: ‘There was no way of knowing how they would react to our apperance so I decided to send Nigel Crowe with the assault platoon to see if he could charm them into submission. It was a dramatic performance ... Nigel, with his usual courage, stood out in the open street and negotiated in Arabic, pointing out that we were not going to kill them but intended to occupy the building. It was a tense moment but he gradually won their confidence, they opened the steel doors of the treasury and, although showing signs of extreme nervousness, accepted our occupation of the building.’ The British media reaction to the Argylls’ dramatic re-entry into Crater, to which it had been predicted that ‘British troops may never return’, was immediate and intense, the general view being that Mitchell’s positive action had brought to an end ‘a dangerous and humiliating state of drift, which the British Government permitted to continue for a fortnight ... The longer this lasted, the more credible did the terrorist boast become that Britain would likewise be driven out of the rest of Aden long before independence ...’

Mitchell and Crowe both fully expected the Armed Police mutineers who had committed the murders on 20 June to be brought to trial and punished. Mitchell therefore ordered Crowe to ‘make contact with the Armed Police’. He duly telephoned Superintendent Ibrahim at the Armed Police Barracks and told him to hand over all the mutineers of 20th June, and warned that if any resistance was met when the Argylls made their approach, the barracks ‘would be utterly destroyed’. Within a few hours, however, Mitchell learned that his political masters had decided that the Armed Police were to be left in Crater, for fear of stirring up further anti-British feeling, thus leaving the Argylls in the bizarre situation of policing an area where official policy appeared to condone the murder of British soldiers in the interests of a political settlement. Mitchell later commented: ‘With typical self-delusion, or perhaps it was just old English humbug, the Government continued to cherish the illusion that it could not only withdraw from Aden but at the same time establish a pro-British regime to leave behind it ... I was more and more convinced that the safety of the Argylls depended on our own Regimental spirit.’

To the irritation of some in authority in Harold Wilson’s Britain, the Argylls continued presence and domination of Crater amidst a mounting terror campaign by the inter-factional FLOSY (Front for the Liberation of South Yemen) and NLF (National Liberation Front) became the centre of considerable press interest and television coverage, their professionalism and Highland dash providing a welcome boost to flagging national pride. Crowe, aside from his intelligence work and the interrogation of suspects in the Chartered Bank, was featured in several articles, including one entitled My Night Patrol with the Argylls by Daily Record man Jimmy Allison. As the NLF gained the upper hand over FLOSY, Crowe took full advantage of the rivalry between the two factions by playing one side against the other for information which resulted in several valuable tip-offs, including the discovery, during a raid in October, of anti-tank mines, grenades and various spigot-firing devices all set up and ready for use.

By early November 1967, Crowe, or ‘the pistol-packin’ major’ as he had been dubbed by one journalist, was due for retirement. Colonel Mitchell wrote: ‘6th November was a somewhat poignant one for all as the battalion said goodbye to Nigel Crowe. He had joined us in Palestine in 1948 and had soldiered on through the years to receive no reward except nine bars [sic] to the two General Service Medals - which I always pulled his leg about saying it must be more than any other officer in the Army. He was a proper ‘bushwhacker’. At the time there was much speculation about his early departure and until now the reason he left us two weeks early has never been told. Abdul Hardi, who had become the first Arab Commissioner of Police, was scared stiff of the contacts Nigel had with the [openly divided] South Arabian Army. More than once when I asked his opinion he had replied, ‘Why ask me? Major Crowe has far better sources than I.’ As the pressure built up and Abdul Hardi was making his own bid for power, he became more and more worried. Eventually, on one of his clandestine visits to my Headquarters, he said, ‘It would be dreadful if anything happened to Major Crowe.’

‘He seemed blissfully unaware’, Mitchell continues, ‘that after his previous visit David Thomson [Battalion Intelligence Officer] had jokingly said to me, ‘The weapon that would make that guy yet another Arab martyr needed only a nod from you for the Jocks to execute the deed!’ I made it quite clear that I was not in the habit of having my officers threatened and that I would not feel responsible for the consequences of the retribution if a hair on Nigel’s head was touched. By this time, however, the struggle within the South Arabian Army had reached a stage at which even I though it somewhat risky to allow him to go on visiting SAA camps and houses and I therefore curtailed his movements. When the chance came to get him home early I put him on a plane which if nothing else gave him an extra fourteen days to arrange his official retirement from the British Army. He was an East of Suez man.’

On leaving the British Army, Crowe changed his surname to Langdale and joined the Rhodesian Armed Forces as a company commander in the 1st Battalion, Rhodesian African Rifles. In 1973 he left Africa to be employed as DAAQMG at HQ Northern Oman, and in 1975 became a squadron commander in the Sultan of Oman’s Gendarmerie. In 1977 he returned to Rhodesia to take up a battalion command with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

The group is sold with a good archive of original documents, letters, photographs and various items of memorabilia, including his Rhodesian Passport, Residence Permit and Certificate of Change of Surname.