In the Herald this week two appreciations have appeared.Yesterday it was Ian McColl Queens Park-Rangers and Scotland a great sportsman and a gentleman.Ian was a long standing member and supporter of West out at Burnbrae

Today it is for Frank Coutts.Recently I corresponded with Frank on behalf of my uncle who had served with him in Bremen with the K.O.S.B..This particular action had been the subject of a series run by the Sunday Times.He responded to my e mails with his usual courtesy and demonstrated the bond that still exists even after all these years betwen men who have served together in the most difficult of circumstances



Brigadier Frank Coutts
Army officer and rugby player;
Born July 8, 1918;
Died October 20, 2008.

Brigadier Frank Coutts, who has died aged 90, was a former commander of one of Scotland's most famous Army regiments and one-time president of the Scottish Rugby Union.

Hearing news of VE Day as one of 600 men of the 4th Battalion of the King's Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB), lying exhausted halfway between Bremen and Hamburg, produced an epiphany for Coutts. "I was now responsible for 250 men," he remembered. "What was to become of them? Would they get their jobs back? Would I get work?"

Coutts did get work, taking a regular Army commission in 1946 and playing as much professional rugby as possible. Although international rugby had not yet resumed following the Second World War, he played in a memorable 27-0 victory over England at Murrayfield. In the first post-war Five Nations match on January 1, 1947, he was only a reserve, but was honoured to pipe his team on to the field at the Stades Colombes, Paris, only to see them defeated 8-3.

The Army and rugby were the twin strands of the life of Francis Henderson Coutts, who was born towards the end of the First World War, one of six children (and five sons) of church minister Rev Jack Coutts.

Frank, as he became known, was educated at Glasgow Academy (where "rugby football was the second religion") and in 1937 joined the Metropolitan Police after a year in Canada. Coutts mixed menial traffic duties with the harder-edged activities of keeping Oswald Mosley's unruly supporters in line, both later detailed in his first memoir, One Blue Bonnet.

Although a Glaswegian by birth, Coutts's family moved from Milngavie to St Aidan's Manse in Melrose when he was a teenager and he quickly adopted the Borders as his new home, supporting Melrose RFC and fighting with the KOSB.

Initially, however, Coutts enlisted with the 2nd Battalion of the London Scottish, then acting as an anti-invasion unit. He was finally accepted into the 4th (Border) Battalion KOSB in June 1941 but did not make it to the front line until November 1944, when he commanded an anti-tank platoon which landed on the narrow Uncle Beach in Flushing, Netherlands.

From late 1944 until the end of the war, Coutts's battalion was constantly in action and sustained heavy losses. He endured hand-to-hand fighting as the assault force pushed through the Netherlands and eventually into Germany. He and the KOSB's 52nd Lowland Division were the first British troops on German soil and the first into Bremen after its devastation by Bomber Command. After VE Day, Coutts joined a huge convoy moving east, across the Elbe and into what became the Russian zone of East Germany.

On returned to the UK, Coutts's experience and management skills were utilised in various training assignments involving National Service recruits at Berwick, Dumfries, Barnard Castle in Durham and at the Army's Scottish command in Edinburgh Castle (where he helped develop the fledgling Edinburgh Military Tattoo).

From 1956-59 he served in Malaya and Singapore as commander D Company 1 KOSB, whose job - in the Gurkha Brigade - was to hunt down Communist guerrillas while fighting off mosquitoes and leeches. More overseas action followed from 1962-64 during the so-called "Indonesian-Malaysia confrontation" over the future of Borneo, where as a general staff officer Coutts took part in the struggle against Indonesian-backed insurgents.

From 1970-1980 Brigadier Coutts held the honorary title of Colonel of the (KOSB) Regiment, later becoming a passionate critic of its threatened (and implemented) abolition to become part of a new Royal Regiment of Scotland. Although he retired in 1973, his position as colonel continued for a few years more, while he also kept busy as general secretary of the Royal British Legion Scotland and concurrently of the Earl Haig Fund.

Coutts's interest in rugby also revived during his retirement. He was elected vice-president of the Scottish Rugby Union in 1976 and became president the following year. Following the publication of One Blue Bonnet, he published a second memoir in 2006. In The Golden Thread, Coutts expounded some controversial views on the state of the nation, mainly Tony Blair's army reforms, the Scottish Parliament, rugby and the Kirk, of which he was an elder.

Coutts died at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. His wife, Morag, whom he married in 1948, died in 2004 and he is survived by their two daughters, Fiona and Sheena, and several grandchildren.

DAVID TORRANCE

This article was posted on 29-Oct-2008, 08:26 by Hugh Barrow.