Clan Carruthers: John L. Carruthers, Gurkha.

Major John Carruthers, born January 21 1934, died April 13 2018

The bulk of this blog has been supplied by one of our senior genealogists; Gary John Carruthers from Australia.

This piece looks at the line through Robert Carruthers to John Lawson Carruthers and is another fine example of robust genealogical investigation. It also follows or rather introduces the role Carruthers played not only in India during the time of the Raj, but highlighting their roles in Egypt, the Levant and the Far East.

Gurkhas

The Gurkhas are renowned as fearsome warriors who have been part of the British Army for almost 200 years. They were noted during the reign of Queen Victoria as a ‘martial race after the British East India company suffered huge loses at their hands while trying to move into Nepal’. After the peace treaty in 1815, part of the agreement was that Britain would have access to recruit from their former enemy’s ranks and so the Gurkha regiments were formed. Their motto “Better to die than be a coward” is proudly followed by these Nepalese Gurkha soldiers to this day, who are now an integral part of the British Army.

Their famous knife, the traditional 18-inch weapon known as the Kukri, was suggested at one time, that if drawn in battle the blade had to ‘taste blood’, otherwise it’s owner was required to cut himself prior to sheathing it.

The name “Gurkha” comes from the hill town of Gorkha, from which the Nepalese kingdom had expanded.

The ranks of the Gurkha regiment have always been dominated by four ethnic groups, the Gurungs and Magars from central Nepal, the Rais and Limbus from the east, who live in villages of impoverished hill farmers.

They keep to their Nepalese customs and beliefs, and the brigade follows religious festivals such as Dashain, in which – in Nepal, not the UK – goats and buffaloes are sacrificed.

Since then, the Gurkhas have loyally fought for the British all over the world, receiving 13 Victoria Crosses between them.

More than 200,000 fought in the two world wars, and in the past 50 years they have served in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Borneo, Cyprus, the Falklands, Kosovo and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They serve in a variety of roles, mainly in the infantry but with significant numbers of engineers, logisticians and signals specialists.

John Lawson Carruthers

John Lawson Carruthers, former Gurkha Officer is descended from Robert Carruthers, a Publisher in Inverness.

Gurkha Officer – Major John Lawson Carruthers Obituary 4th May 2018 

Obituary edited from the Daily Telegraph on 1st May 2018.

John Carruthers, who has died in Sabah aged 84, was Aide De Camp to the last British governor of Singapore and later a doyen of the British community in Malaysia, where for many years he represented Barclays Bank. Doyen is a term of great respect and means the leader or senior member of a body or group of people, in this case the British expats.

It was Sir William Goode, as governor from 1957 to 1959, who steered Singapore through political turbulence to self-government, statehood and the swearing in as prime minister of the youthful firebrand Lee Kuan Yew – who in turn asked Goode to serve briefly as Singapore’s first head of state. At Goode’s side on all major public occasions and in sensitive negotiations during the crucial 18-month period was Captain John Carruthers of 2/2 Gurkha Rifles.

Goode described Carruthers as “outstandingly competent, shrewd and reliable … with the happy knack of being able to take command of an unexpected situation”. Among other delicate assignments, the ADC had overseen with “no semblance of fuss” a visit by the Duke of Edinburgh; Carruthers’s own recollection of the famously brisk royal visitor was that he was “the fastest dresser I’ve ever seen”. Another memorable guest was the Australian prime minister Robert Menzies.

Carruthers sat in on a meeting in which Lee revealed plans to erase a colonial landmark by building over Singapore’s Padang cricket pitch, facing City Hall; waxing imaginatively about their nations’ shared cricketing heritage, Menzies achieved the rare feat of persuading Lee to change his mind.

A newsreel clip, often shown on Singapore television, captured Goode and Carruthers descending the steps of City Hall after Lee’s swearing-in on June 3 1959. As the crowd surged towards them from the Padang, Goode scanned the scene and made an apparently statesmanlike aside – which Carruthers recalled as: “What the hell have you done with the Rolls, John?”

John Lawson Carruthers was born at Alexandria on January 21 1934. His Carruthers ancestry was Border Scottish, but both parent families were part of the British mercantile community of the Levant. John’s paternal grandfather, Walter, and father, Hugh, were managers of the Anglo-Egyptian Bank, which became part of Barclays in 1925; Hugh was later local director for Barclays in Egypt and president of Alexandria’s cotton bourse. John’s mother Yolande, née Lawson, descended from several generations of cotton merchants at Smyrna in Turkey.

Military Career

After an eventful wartime childhood in Alexandria, John was dispatched in 1945 to Rottingdean prep school and then to Rugby, where he captained the 2nd XV. An interlude in France preceded Sandhurst and a commission in the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own ‘Goorkha’ Rifles (The Sirmoor Rifles) in 1954.

Having joined the regiment on the same day as a future field marshal, (Sir) John Chapple, and a future chief of the Cresta Run, Digby Willoughby, Carruthers served with its 2nd Btn in Hong Kong and Malaya before his ADC role in Singapore. Afterwards, promoted major, he was adjutant of a training depot in the northern Malay state of Kedah. In 1966, during the “Confrontation” between Indonesia and Malaysia, he commanded a company at Nanga Gaat, a forward base in the Sarawak jungle close to the Indonesian border.

Next came a staff job at GHQ Singapore and a posting in Brunei. But by the end of the decade defence cuts were forcing a reduction of Gurkha battalions from eight to four, and Carruthers was one many officers who chose to leave.

The 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Gurkha Rifles (The Sirmoor Rifles) was an infantry regiment of the British Indian Army before being transferred to the British Army on India’s independence in 1947. The 4th Battalion joined the Indian Army as the 5th Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles (Sirmoor Rifles), where it exists to this day.

As part of the British Army, he 2nd Gurkhas spent several years in the Far East, initially during the Malayan Emergency from 1948–1960. Following this, the regiment’s two battalions alternated between Malaya, Borneo, Brunei and Hong Kong, before receiving a regimental depot at Church Crookham in Hampshire.

In 1992, while serving in Hong Kong, the 1st and 2nd Battalions amalgamated to form a single 1st Battalion. This was followed in 1994 by the regiment being amalgamated with the 6th Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles to form the 1st Battalion, Royal Gurkha Rifles. It is the only Gurkha regiment which did not have Kukri on its cap badge. (See above).  

Carruthers in Barclays Bank

In 1970 he joined Barclays, which is a British multinational investment bank and financial services company, headquartered in London and after training in the West Indies and Singapore, he settled in Kuala Lumpur in 1977. There his duties ranged from arranging high-level meetings for visiting directors to pursuing late payers of credit card accounts. He was no technical banker, but his charm, discretion and sharp ear for political and business gossip gained him a reputation as a model representative. In an era when Malaysian officialdom often resented any British presence, Carruthers was universally well received – even by the martinet central bank governor, Tun Ismail Ali.

For some years, Carruthers’s territory also included Vietnam and Burma – whence he would return from “correspondent banking” visits with brown-paper parcels of dark cheroots, to be enjoyed with dinner guests on his veranda in the wooded suburb of Kenny Hill, serenaded by the night chorus of tropical insects.

Longevity in post made Carruthers a legend in the overseas banking world, while his modus operandi inevitably provoked suspicions of a sideline in British intelligence. He himself never gave the slightest hint in that direction, but he was certainly a master of the kind of fieldcraft that might have been familiar to Somerset Maugham. One colleague was surprised to receive a phone call on a confidential matter that began, in Carruthers’s unmistakable drawl, “Mon brave, ils nous écoutent, donc aujourd’hui on parle français.” (My brave, they listen to us, so today we speak in French)

In 1996 he moved to the Malaysian island of Labuan, off Brunei, to open a Barclays office in the “offshore financial centre” there. He retired in 1999 but happily made the island his permanent home and became the “grand old man” of its small expatriate community.

In his seventies he took up sailing – and astonished friends by embarking on seriously intrepid voyages from Labuan around the southern Philippines archipelago, where westerners rarely venture, and as far afield as Australia. He was also a keen golfer and a devoted attendee, on visits to England, of regimental reunions. In his last years of fading health he was well cared for at Kota Kinabalu in Sabah.

Marriage

John Carruthers married first, in Singapore in 1960, Judith Armstrong, who came from Bridgetown in Western Australia; they had a son and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1978 and he married secondly, in Kuala Lumpur in 1983, Rukiah binti Mohd Noor, with whom he had a son and from whom he was divorced in 2003. His four children survive him; his ashes were scattered in the South China Sea.

Lineage of John Lawson Carruthers: 

*Robert Carruthers (1799–1878) was a Scottish journalist and miscellaneous writer.

He was born in Dumfriesshire and was for a time a teacher in Huntingdon. He wrote a History of Huntingdon in 1824. In 1828 he became editor of the Inverness Courier, in which role he continued for many years.

He edited Alexander Pope’s works with a memoir (1853), and along with Robert Chambers edited the first edition of Chambers’ Cyclopædia of English Literature (1842–44). He received the degree of LL.D. from Edinburgh. One of his daughters married the sculptor Alexander Munro.

                                                                            

Walter Carruthers , m.                                                    Isabella Roddick

1772-1854                                                                              1776-

*Dr Robert Carruthers, publisher, m.                         Janet Roberts

1799-1878                                                                              1796-1874

Walter Carruthers, m.                                                     Mary Mcleod Ferguson

1829-1885                                                                              1836-1916

Walter Rose V. Carruthers, m.                                       Dorothy A Fowler

1865-1926                                                                              1867-1934

Hugh Warde, m.                                                                Yolande Elsie Lawson

1901-1990                                                                              1907-1995

John Lawson Carruthers, m. Judith Armstrong, m. Rukiah binti Mohd Noor

1934-2018

NB: Walter, although probably of the main line is not to be confused with Walter of Guileburn and his wife “TIBBY” Isabel BYERS.

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