Working with communities in Bahr el-Ghazal, Southern Sudan

Obituary

Ranald Boyle, DSC, diplomat and merchant banker, died on 17th September aged 78. He was born on 19th August 1921.
After an active war in which he was badly wounded during the Dieppe Raid and went on to serve in Motor Torpedo Boats in clandestine operations in the Mediterranean, Ranald Boyle spent eight years with the Sudan Political Service, based at Gogrial in the south of the country. There he established excellent relations with the Dinka, the Nilotic swamp people of the region, who regarded him with great affection. Though he left the political service before Sudanese independence, he continued to be a tireless campaigner for the peoples of southern Sudan, both through his own foundation and through letters to the press.

Ranald Hugh Montgomerie Boyle was educated at Wellington College and Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated in history before joining the Royal Navy as a rating in 1941 he went to sea in the destroyer Fernie, patrolling the Channel, but early in 1942 was found to be colour-blind and was sent to the Admiralty with an RNVR commission. There he worked on the staff of Captain Hughes-Hallett of Combined Operations, who was planning the naval side of the forthcoming Dieppe Raid. In August he went to sea in the destroyer Calpe, which was the headquarters ship for the raid. In the disaster that ensued - 6000 men were flung ashore without adequate air or naval gunfire support - Calpe was left picking up the pieces as the raiders were cut to ribbons on the beaches by enemy shell and machine gun fire. To do so she had to stand in perilously close to the shore in an attempt to re-embark those who managed to escape from the slaughter. In doing so she attracted heavy fire from the shore batteries and came under fierce air attack. Boyle was severely wounded in the head and leg when Calpe was raked from stem to stern by the cannon shells of a diving Fokker-Wulf 190. After his recovery he had a spell of duty at home bases before being sent in January 1944 to the Mediterranean to join the African Coastal Flotilla, whose MTBs were by then based at Bastia in Corsica. Boyle was involved in clandestinely landing and picking up agents and raiding parties, and retrieving escaped prisoners of war from Italy and the South of France, often under the noses of the coastal defences. It was dangerous work calling for pinpoint navigation on dark, moonless nights, with the ever present likelihood of running into enemy coastal convoys escorted by destroyers and E-boats. As the conducting officer, Boyle went on many daredevil missions behind enemy lines and was awarded the DSC. Among his fellow officers he had the reputation of a man never happier than when he was doing something dangerous. The end of the war saw him in the Far East, where he was in charge of a Japanese PoW camp in Hong Kong.

After demobilisation he joined the Sudan political Service and, after attending the Middle East School of Arabic Studies in Jerusalem, became a District Commissioner in the south of the country. In addition to his Arabic he learnt Dinka and was trusted and greatly admired by the local people, to whom he became known - and is still remembered to this day - as Tim Atiep ("Shady Tree", a symbolic title signifying, on several levels, complete acceptance by the Dinka). But as the era of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium drew to an end he resigned from the service in protest at what he saw as a Foreign Office yielding to Egyptian pressure to sign an independence agreement which gave political power in Sudan to the Arab elites in the north of the country. Over the years he campaigned in the columns of the Times and other newspapers against what he regarded as an historical injustice and the cause of civil war and famine in southern Sudan to this day. After a period with the Iraq Petroleum Company as a political liaison officer in the Trucial States, Boyle joined the Overseas Civil Service and was posted to Kenya, where he remained until independence in 1963. In 1964 he joined the Diplomatic Service and served as Political Agent at Qatar from 1964 to 1969. His next posting was as Head of Chancery in the British Embassy in Khartoum. He resigned from this in 1970, again in protest against the failure of British foreign policy on Sudan. But before he left he paid a visit to the south of the country to see his old friends the Dinka. In Gogrial, the Sudanese District Commissioner, a northerner, was much put out at the reception with which Boyle, as a mere foreigner, was honoured, complaining that he had never been accorded such dignity. The Dinka replied that, unlike the DC, Tim Atiep had made the effort to learn their language and understand their customs.

On returning to Britain Boyle joined Hambros Bank where his knowledge of Arabic enabled him to set up a Middle Eastern desk. In 1975 he became a director of Hambros Holdings. In 1981 he became senior representative (London) for the Arab Banking Corporation and in 1982 established himself as a consultant, becoming an adviser to the Emir of Qatar. He finally retired in 1996. Besides campaigning on behalf of some Sudan in the newspapers, Boyle sought other ways of drawing attention to the plight of its people. He lobbied members of the Government and conducted his own mission to Khartoum, supported the work of Baroness Cox and the Anti-Slavery Society and spent a month on a consultancy for the Save the Children Fund South Sudan Programme. Boyle married, in 1957, Norma Gray and is survived by her and by five sons and two daughters. The Times 12th October, 1999

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