6ft 6in gambler – with no respect for rules or authority
IN A short life, the aristocratic David Stirling had tried and failed at being an artist, architect, cowboy and mountaineer. World War II was his salvation.
His mother was the daughter of Lord Lovat, the chief of Clan Fraser, and his father a distinguished general, an MP and master of a 15,000-acre estate.
The parents drummed good manners into their six children, but otherwise largely left them to get on with their lives. They grew up stalking deer, hunting rabbits, fighting and competing.
By the age of 17, he was 6 ft 6 in tall, a gangly beanpole, wilful, reckless but also exceptionally polite and socially at ease.
He was sent down from Cambridge after misbehaving on a lavish scale and spending more time at Newmarket racecourse than on his studies.
Stirling went to Paris to become an artist. He wore a beret and lived a louche, Left Bank life, but displayed little talent for painting. The same went for architecture, his next choice of profession, as well as his ambition to be the first person to climb Mount Everest, even though he suffered from vertigo.
As he nonchalantly frittered away his dissolute life, unpaid bills mounted — from his bookmaker, his tailor, his bank manager and even from a cowboy outfitter in Arizona, seeking payment for a saddle.
When war broke out in 1939, he joined his father’s regiment, the Scots Guards, but was the most contradictory of soldiers: ambitious but unfocused, steeped in military traditions but allergic to discipline. He skipped parades and was always getting into trouble.
With the inbred confidence that comes from high birth, he regarded rules as nuisances and was blithely unconstrained by convention. He showed no deference whatever to rank.
It was when he gravitated to the Commandos, the special operations army unit dubbed ‘Churchill’s cut-throats’ for its undercover work, that his leadership qualities finally surfaced.
He had an adamant faith in his own decisions and did exactly what he wanted to do, whether or not others thought his aims were sensible or even possible.
The SAS came into being in part because its founder would not take no for an answer, either from those in authority or from those under his command.
On a personal level, Stirling was a romantic, with an innate talent for friendship but little desire for physical intimacy. He had many women friends but relaxed only among men.
A warrior monk, he craved action and the company of soldiers, but his boisterous exterior belied a lonely man prone to periodic depressions and inner turmoil. When the fighting was over, he embraced solitude.