Michael Crouch - Telegraph By 1967 Crouch was accompanied everywhere by an SAS bodyguard, and his residences were regularly subjected to rifle or machine-gun fire - though turning off the lights off and taking cover was usually sufficient. But he had one particularly narrow shave when an anti-tank missile destroyed the telephone he had just been using, catapulting him on to his wife and baby son; the boy (who had been given a Kalashnikov as a christening present by an Arab friend of the family) suffered only minor injuries. As soldiers helped to douse the flames, a BBC correspondent rang to say: "I hear there's been a bit of a to-do over your way." By now Crouch was exasperated by the Labour government at home, and appalled at being asked to sit in on an interrogation where two staff sergeants systematically beat a suspect in the kidneys to get a confession. Saying he felt sick, Crouch left the room and refused to return. In 1967 he was Resident Adviser (the senior civilian) in Mukalla when he received a telegram at 2am instructing him to evacuate all British personnel. Suspecting that any indication of a withdrawal would precipitate a general uprising, he carried on as usual, ordering dinner that night and sending two shirts to the laundry. The pretence was maintained until he and the others stepped into the helicopter. But no provision had been made for local Arabs employed by the British. "Her Majesty's Government and I had behaved with a mixture of incompetence and immorality," he wrote bitterly in his autobiography, An Element of Luck (1993). Michael Armstrong Crouch was born in London on May 5 1935. As the son of a doctor in the Sudan Civil Service and the grandson of an Indian Civil officer , he was brought up first in Sudan and went to Prince of Wales School, Nairobi. He did National Service with the Kenya Regiment in Southern Rhodesia. After Downing College, Cambridge, he was sent to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he failed his exams for the Colonial Service but had a valuable secondment to Horley rural district council in preparation for Aden. On retiring from the service at 32, Crouch was determined to move as far away as possible from anyone trying to shoot him, and settled on Western Australia as a good place to bring up three children. Turning down approaches from both the British and Australian governments to work "on the security side of the house," he became a personnel manager for a mining company and a teacher before managing a conservation foundation. After his marriage broke down he married Jenny Tyrwhitt, a friend he had not seen for 27 years. As well as his memoir, Crouch wrote a novel called Terrorist (2003); A Literary Larrikin, a biography of the soldier and author Tom Hungerford (2005); and completed a PhD on feminist history at the University of Western Australia, based on his grandmother's life as a colonial wife in India. In the early 1990s he started returning to Arabia when the newly established Yemen Arab Republic invited him back with other former civil servants; the Yemenis were keen to mine the recollections of colonial officers on the exact location of the Saudi border. On one stop an elderly Bedouin with a Kalashnikov across his shoulders asked the party why the British had left. "You tried to shoot us," he was told. At an official reception in Mukalla, a Colonel Aburahim Atik admitted to having tried to assassinate Crouch by throwing a grenade over a hospital wall which narrowly failed to kill him and his colleague John Shipman, as well as the future Field Marshal Lord Guthrie. "Old enemies make good friends," said the colonel, later adding that God had made his aim bad. Michael Crouch, born May 5 1935, died July 13 2013