Warwick Deacock
Commando, adventurer and alpinist who introduced camel trekking to the Australian outback
WARWICK DEACOCK, who has died aged 90, was a mountaineer, entrepreneur, conservationist and roving adventurer; after serving as a marine during the war, he became an experienced alpinist, emigrated to Australia, where he set up the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, and later introduced camel trekking to the Australian outback.
He was born in London on December 23 1926 and educated at Stamford School, Lincolnshire. He developed an early love of adventure, serving as a bicycle messenger during the Blitz, but his passion for wild places was sparked when his school was evacuated to Wales.
In 1943 he ran away from school to join the Royal Marines, where he gained his Commando Green Beret. He was later commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant and sent to the Far East at the end of the war. After being appointed OIC at Stanley Prison, Hong Kong, where suspected Japanese war criminals were interrogated, he commanded a motor launch assigned to hunt opium smugglers.
Having learnt to climb as a commando, after demobilisation in 1947 he spent three years interspersing mountaineering and sailing trips with various jobs, including long distance lorry driving. In 1950, however, he decided to join up again, as a regular officer in the Middlesex Regiment.
For most of the next decade his adventuring took place within the Army; he had attachments to the Parachute Regiment (during which period he climbed two virgin peaks in Alaska) and to the Foreign Legion in Indo-china. He served a tour as CO of the British Forces Ski and Mountain School in the Austrian Alps and helped to set up Adventure Training as part of the military curriculum of all three services.
In 1956 he joined the SAS and was involved in missions in the Malayan jungle during the communist insurgency before being sent to Oman. He was a leading member, in 1958, of the Joint Service Expedition which made the first ascent of Rakaposhi, in the Nagar Valley, Pakistan.
In 1959, by now having reached the rank of major, Deacock resigned his commission and, accompanied by his South African wife Antonia and his infant daughter, he emigrated to Australia. There he started the first Australian Outward Bound School on the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales, and introduced, with much success, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme.
With his young family Deacock then spent a year travelling around Australia in a VW van and worked as a grave digger in Queensland, a biscuit-creamer in Melbourne and a pub bouncer. He also continued his climbing, attempting, in 1963, to conquer Big Ben, the active volcano that dominates Heard Island in the southern Indian Ocean. The attempt was unsuccessful and Deacock and his companions only just escaped with their lives, having at one stage been reduced to eating raw penguin.
Undaunted, two years later he organised another expedition, and persuaded the explorer and mountaineer Major Bill Tilman to accompany him as sailing master of
Patanela, the 63 ft schooner Deacock had chartered for the eight week approach voyage. When the five man climbing team attempted to land on the island’s lava beach their inflatable capsized three times before they were able to get ashore. None the less, they reached the summit, due, in no small measure, to Deacock’s leadership skills.
Deacock’s next project was to set up Ausventure, a specialised travel agency, in conjunction with Mountain Travel, the firm his old friend the Gurkha Colonel Jimmy Roberts was creating in Nepal. In 1967 Ausventure organised the first ever holiday trek to Everest Base Camp. It was a great success, and pioneered the kind of adventuring for which Australian backpackers would become well known. Deacock went on to make numerous trips to Nepal, India and South America, and led two Australian mountaineering trips in the Himalayas in the 1970s. In 1988 he and his wife spent eight months trekking the length of the Nepalese and Indian Himalaya. He was Honorary Nepalese Consul General in Australia for 10 years.
Having first encountered camel travel during his time in Oman, Deacock became intrigued by possibility of doing the same in Australia. Afghan camels had been used for transport in the outback until replaced by trucks in the 1920s, but they still roam wild in the Australian deserts. With the help of Rex Ellis, who was re-domesticating the camels, Deacock organised desert camel treks. Deacock himself crossed the Gibson desert and the Simpson Desert by camel and in 1997 he made the first camel crossing of the Great Victoria Desert.
The same year he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to conservation and the environment.
In later life, Deacock and Antonia, an architect, moved from the Sydney area to a house she had designed at Maleny, overlooking the Glass House Mountains. After her death in 2012 he returned to the south, often staying in a yurt in the bush at Chakola.
He is survived by a son and a daughter.
Warwick Deacock, born December 23 1926, died April 3 2017