Obituary: David Coutts, soldier and insurance company manager

David Coutts MC TD, soldier and insurance company manager. Born: 6 December, 1921, in Monifieth, Angus. Died: 20 October, 2011, in Edinburgh, aged 89.

Close fighting again.” What 21-year-old Lieutenant David Coutts failed to divulge was the full extent of his valour that night in Spinete, near Campobasso, southern Italy.

Having discovered the location and strength of an enemy party during the day, he returned by night, leading his fighting patrol in a bid to “clean up” the enemy. Despite the area being strongly held and the foe alert and armed with three machine guns, he killed three of the enemy fighters before pulling his patrol away, covering its withdrawal himself.

It was undoubtedly an audacious, well-planned attack but it apparently became just another grim episode, noted with his usual understatement, in his wartime log.

It was not until two months later, when he had reached Sorbello north of Naples, that a modest Coutts realised the significance of the incident and allowed his feelings to escape, writing: “Shaken to the core when I was called to the orderly room and told I had been awarded the Military Cross.”

His actions had been recognised with one of the highest honours for exemplary gallantry in the face of the enemy, the citation stating: “His resolute, bold and clear-headed action produced the information which enabled the Arty [sic] to neutralise the locality the next morning thereby greatly assisting the operations of the leading unit of the Brigade.”

Coutts, who was later wounded but returned to the fighting and went on to become a Territorial Army major, was an official battalion diarist whose fascinating handwritten log can still be seen in London, at the National Archives, at Kew.

He was born in Monifieth, the elder of two boys whose father, a captain in the Gordon Highlanders, had gone to fight in the First World War, aged 20, and been wounded at the Somme. Their father never spoke of his experiences and Coutts said, as a result: “I could never conjure up an image of it at all.”

That was all to change when, after being educated at Daniel Stewart’s College in Edinburgh, he too ended up going to war aged 20. He left school at 16, with no qualifications, because he wanted “to grow up”, and worked as a junior clerk for Norwich Union, studying English, maths, French and history at night school.

He joined the Officer Training Corps as a cadet in 1938 and, after the Second World War broke out, was promoted to sergeant at the age of 18, responsible for training other teenage soldiers.

In 1941, he joined the Royal Fusiliers and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion. The following year he was shipped to Madagascar to take part in the invasion of the island. His diary entry for 5 May, 1942, recorded their landing: “Horrid moments in rough sea when we were machine-gunned by French planes. Also when the LCAs [landing craft assaults] couldn’t get into the beach for rocks and we had to swim for it.”

The assault was successful but Coutts caught malaria before sailing to India, on by train to Burma and then to Persia and Palestine. He landed in Sicily in July 1943, then fought his way up through mainland Italy.

He took command of a newly-formed fighting patrol and began training them less than three weeks before the action for which he was awarded the Military Cross. His battalion had only taken over from the Canadians at Spinete 24 hours before his courageous attack and he was out on night patrol again the next day as the relentless task continued. His log for October 31 summed up the grim reality. Viewed almost 70 years on there is undeniable pathos in the entry: “Put cross on McIntyre’s grave.”

Most of his platoon were killed or wounded in January 1944. He suffered a mine wound to the forehead but recovered to take over the battalion less than a month later. By the end of the war the regiment had gone from 1,000 men to just 200.

He married his wife Marion during leave in September 1945 and finished his service on peacekeeping duties in Germany, being demobbed with the rank of captain in August 1946.

He resumed work at Norwich Union in Edinburgh, having turned down the offer of a regular commission, and in 1959 promotion took him to Kent, then Leicester in 1965. He returned to Edinburgh in 1974, a few months after his wife died of leukaemia, and married his second wife, Alison, the following year.

Coutts retired as manager of Norwich Union in the capital, in 1981 and moved to Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbrightshire, where he enjoyed golf – he scored two holes-in-one – snooker and his family, while quietly supporting friends and acquaintances who were unwell or lonely.

Having joined the TA soon after the war and received the Territorial Decoration for long service in 1962, he valued maintaining both contact with the life he had known as a young man and the friends he made during the war, who included the author Angus McVicar.

His love of writing and recording events also remained with him from that time and he was a prodigious correspondent. He kept up with contacts around the world, his letters often followed by personal visits made by sea to America and South Africa, particularly after he was widowed again in 1989.

He did not fly but preferred to take the long way round: a six-week mail boat journey to St Helena via Ascension, or two and a half weeks on a container ship. One of those who regularly visited him was a retired cargo ship captain on whose vessel he had travelled to revisit his experiences in Palestine.

Though he spoke little of his wartime exploits, their legacy was his determination to appreciate life and take each day as it came. Aptly, his funeral service was held 68 years to the day since his bravery in battle won him the Military Cross.

He is survived by his daughter Joan, stepsons David and Alan, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.