With headhunters in Malaysia fighting Chinese terrorists – a British Army major looks back at his life

War baby I was born in Crewe (in northwest England) in 1941. My father, Harold John Finch, was born in about 1910 and was in insurance. He was in the British Royal Air Force during the second world war and he divorced my mother when I was about five, so I didn’t know him at all. I met him once, many years later. My mother, Olive Elaine Finch, was a cashier in a butcher’s shop and we lived in Stoneleigh, in Surrey. I had one brother. He died some years ago.

Call to action I went to Glyn Grammar School, in Epsom, and then on to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for two years. I was in the Combined Cadet Force at school and it was a natural progression from that. I joined the army in 1960. I was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment and posted to the 1st Battalion, which was at Hamelin, in Germany. I was a second lieutenant. After 18 months in Germany, I was posted to Lydd, in Kent, and also spent a few months in Gibraltar before I applied for secondment to 1st Battalion, Malaysia Rangers, where I did some real soldiering for 2½ years.

Rumbles in the jungle Malaysia was formed in 1963 and I arrived in 1964. We spent most of our time living in the jungle. We started off in a place called Sungai Petani, where we were forming and training the battalion from nothing. These were mainly Ibans from Borneo, who are a tribe of fierce headhunters, quite literally: they go around cutting people’s heads off.

The first thing we did was go up to the Thai border at the north end of the Malay Peninsula to operate against the remnants of the Chinese communist terrorists, which had been operating in Malaya during the Emergency (a guerilla war fought in the pre- and post-independence Federation of Malaya, from 1948 until 1960) but had then run to Thailand. By then, I was a lieutenant. We spoke Iban the whole time.