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Major Angus Wall MBE
Late Welsh Guards
by Paul de Zulueta
Welsh Guards
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Major Angus Wall’s outstanding leadership of The Prince of Wales’s Company, Welsh Guards, in Crossmaglen, South Armagh, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (NI) earned him an MBE and the respect and affection of a generation of Welsh Guardsmen. South Armagh, known as Bandit Country, was no place for the faint-hearted. A resolute and ruthless IRA Active Service Unit (ASU) had gained the upper hand, and the British Army was on the back foot.
A month before the Battalion deployed in late September 1979, 18 soldiers from the Parachute Regiment had been killed and 20 seriously wounded in an IRA ambush at Warrenpoint. On the same day Lord Mountbatten and members of his family had been blown up in their boat off the Irish coast of. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Guthrie, later Field Marshal Lord Guthrie, who commanded the Battalion during the tour was determined to take the fight to the terrorists. In Angus Wall he had a company commander that he held in the highest regard. Guthrie was to remark how fortunate he was to have such ‘a tough and determined officer, cool under pressure under the most adversarial of conditions’.
Within a short period of deploying to Crossmaglen, The Prince of Wales’s Company had lost a Guardsman blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Angus knew that he had no business in command if his aim was to keep a clean slate. He responded to the tragedy with calmness and sensitivity but was quick to plan and execute several tactical initiatives to keep the South Armagh ASU off- balance. In this he was helped by a group of gifted officers and SNCOs in his company although they would point out that it was his leadership that brought the best out of them. One such initiative involved driving a heavily armed horse box into an illegal IRA vehicle checkpoint. The IRA used these to intimidate the local population and demonstrate they had control over movement. This and other technical initiatives, then in their infancy, to identify IRA firing points for their IEDs were successful despite political hindrance from Whitehall. For the remainder of the Welsh Guards tour, the South Armagh ASU decided they were now up against a formidable foe and retreated to their safe havens in the Irish Republic. The Welsh Guards suffered no more casualties.
Angus joined the Regiment in 1964 shortly before the battalion deployed to Middle East in the Aden Emergency. In Aden, Angus learnt his trade as a soldier in what was a gruelling tour of duty against a rebel communist insurgency. He made his mark as a young officer when he played in the second row in victorious Welsh Guards rugby team which won the Army Cup six times in the 1960s and early 70s. His time in the rugby team taught him leadership, resilience and an innate understanding of the Welsh character and temperament. Angus would point, however, to his time in the Guards Parachute Company as the most formative experience in his military career. The Guards Parachute Company was emblematic of all that was best in the Household Division where in union with each other as disciplined soldiers with a high esprit de corps, there was extraordinary strength.
Angus also had a fine leg for a riding boot as well as a rugby boot. While stationed in Berlin before the South Armagh tour, Angus found himself to be a pin up for the local fräuleins who said he bore a striking resemblance to Charlton Heston both in manner and appearance. Any hopes they might have had were forlorn as Angus was already married to Valerie, a dress designer and artist. They were together for 58 years until his death. Valerie designed a dress for the wife of one of Angus’s platoon commanders after the NI tour. They had a son, Nicholas, who built a career in IT.
At the NI tour’s end in Charles Guthrie wrote, ‘There is a danger that those who do know him well will underestimate his qualities’. It was a prescient comment. After Angus’s tour as a company commander, the Army sent him to do a desk job in Headquarters Wales, an appointment to which he was ill-suited and which did not play to his great strengths as a leader and trainer of men.
Angus was a good deal more fortunate in his other army appointments. His experience and record in the Guards Parachute Company won him the post as Infantry Liaison Officer to the Ecole de L’ Infanterie in Pau, South -West France. Not only was this a prestigious position but it was also an immensely happy time for Angus, his wife, Valerie and son Nicholas. They bought a house near Mont-de-Marsan which they kept for many years. Angus ended his career as Officer Commanding the Junior Non-Commissioned Officers’ Wing at Oswestry and finally as Regimental Adjutant of the Welsh Guards. It was during this last job that he found time to run the New York marathon with a team from the Scots Guards. For the last two hours of the marathon, he completed it in just under four, he ran side by side with a pretty girl wearing Union Jack running shorts. He later discovered she was from California.
Fluent in French and with many friends willing to help him in establishing a career in civilian life, Angus started work as head of corporate security for Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), the US biopharmaceutical giant, headquartered in New York but which operated worldwide. In essence he was their troubleshooter for Europe and the Far East including China. BMS has a reputation for researching, developing and manufacture innovative drugs and Angus soon found himself tracking down and exposing questionable practices in countries, particularly Russia and the Far East, whose ethics differ somewhat from the West. On one occasion in Moscow, Angus was due to meet a colleague in another pharmaceutical company who was about to expose fraud, but the colleague was shot dead in his hotel lobby before the meeting took place. When not travelling on business, he spent much of the time in Paris and Rome with high days and holidays spent at the family house near Pau.
Angus retired from BMS in 2017 and returned with Valerie to East Devon. Their son Nicholas lived ten minutes away with his family. Nicholas was to remark what a privilege it was to be with his father during his final days. Although Angus expressed little desire to have a memorial service, the Welsh Guards and former comrades from the Guards Parachute Company have organised a service in Devon. Angus never forgot the Guardsman he lost in NI and laid a wreath on his grave in South Wales along with former members of The Prince of Wales’s Company on the anniversary of his death. Angus died on 14th August 2025, aged 80. |
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