Malcolm Dennison

His parents were both Orcadian - his father from the island of Shapinsay and his mother from South Ronaldsay. Malcolm was born in Blantyre, Nyasaland, where his father worked as manager of various tea and tobacco estates. Malcolm came to Britain in 1934 for schooling - his father died in 1935 - at the Hope School in South Ronaldsay, Parkfield School (Sussex), and Lincoln School, before going to Edinburgh University.

During the Second World War, he left university to join the Royal Air Force. After training in Canada, he served as a navigator with Bomber Command, based in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, and at the end of the war, was transferred to the Middle East to work for RAF Intelligence.

After retiring from the Air Force in 1952, he joined the School of Oriental Studies in Beirut. He then worked for an American oil company in Bahrain, but did not much enjoy the experience, and in 1955 he was recruited by Sir Bernard Borroughs to go to Muscat to serve as intelligence officer for the Sultan of Oman's armed forces.

He was badly wounded twice during the persistent tribal rebellions in the hill country of Oman. On both occasions he returned to Roeberry, his mother's family home in South Ronaldsay, to recover, but the injuries only partly healed, and he was to suffer pain for the rest of his life.

By 1959, the warring was largely over, thanks to the intervention of the SAS from Malaya. Brigadier Dennison's main task was to build up the sultan's intelligence organisation; a coup broke up the rebel central organisation and uncovered substantial arms caches.

Although the armed hostilities were over, the grievances which spurred the rebels had not been adequately addressed and in 1970 another coup saw the sultan overthrown in favour of his son, Kaboos. The political situation in the country was stabilised and peace restored. In 1975, the much-decorated brigadier was made adviser to the sultan.

Malcolm Dennison's precise role in these historic events is difficult to establish; he could only rarely be persuaded to talk of them, and his natural reticence made things even more opaque.

He retired in 1983, having been awarded the Order of Oman. There was only one possible place of retirement - Roeberry, to which he had retreated every year on holiday. His arrival in Orkney was quite dramatic, with himself and seven tons of possessions, mainly books, arriving in the Sultan of Oman's Hercules plane - the biggest aircraft to land at Kirkwall Airport. The event is now part of Orkney's folklore.

He enjoyed his retirement in Orkney, appreciating his friends, his catholic range of books, and his cats, and succeeding Colonel Sir Robert Macrae as Lord Lieutenant in 1990. He was made a Commander with Star of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for his role in the state visit of the King and Queen of Norway. As chairman of the Society of the Friends of St Magnus Cathedral, he helped to keep the building in good repair.

The alleged child abuse case in South Ronaldsay pained him greatly in his latter years, feeling as he did that the families, whom he knew, had been treated badly, and that the community he loved had been unjustly publicised. The constraints of his public position made life difficult for him, and he was gratified when the settlement, and public apology, were made.

Malcolm Dennison was essentially a private and even shy man, but to those who got to know him he was a convivial and compassionate friend. Despite his honours and distinctions, he was totally unaffected and unpretentious. Although suffering pain for much of his adult life, he was devoid of self-pity. He faced his last bout with cancer with typical matter-of-fact realism and courage. In Macmillan House in Kirkwall, we together planned his memorial service, and he told stories of his life. Tears welled in his eyes as he recalled friends in Bomber Command, more than half of whom were lost during the course of the war (``Give them a good plug,'' he said, ``they were very brave men'').

He was proud of the fact that Bomber Command dropped food parcels on countries enduring privation; a nice coincidence is that one of the girls who remembered the food parcels being dropped in her native Netherlands was Ria Plate who, as Church of Scotland minister in South Ronaldsay, conducted Malcolm's burial service on Tuesday.

He is survived by his sister Yvonne (Gibson) and brothers John and Olaf. His memorial service will be held in St Magnus Cathedral on Wednesday, September 18, at 2pm.