Colonel Michael Hall
Bomb disposal expert who was decorated for defusing a ‘particularly fiendish device’ in Malaysia
COLONEL MICHAEL HALL, who has died aged 81, was awarded a George Medal for disarming a highly dangerous bomb while serving in Malaya during the Confrontation with Indonesia.
Hall, then a captain in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was serving with the Ammunition Inspectorate at British HQ, Rasah Camp, Seremban, in Negeri Sembilan, near the west coast of the Malaysian peninsula. Under cover of darkness there were regular clandestine sea-borne raids of insurgents from Sumatra, only 20 or so miles across the Malacca Strait, in order to plant bombs.
On the night of October 28 1965, he and an ammunition technician went to Malacca in response to a call for assistance from the police. The bomb was lying on the floor of a garage near the centre of the town and he could see at once that this was a new and much more dangerous device than he had handled before.
It had been put together in a biscuit tin, which made it very difficult to identify the components, and he decided to adopt the hazardous course of cutting away sections of the tin and rendering safe each component as it was revealed.
Hall ordered the whole area to be cleared for a distance of 200 yards. The police inspector was briefed to take photographs of each stage of the procedure so that a record would exist if the bomb exploded while it was being dismantled.
Lying on their stomachs, during the next two and a half hours, working with infinite care and knowing that one false move would cause instant death, the two men took the device apart piece by piece.
It was found to contain 7lb of TNT, two Russian hand grenades and incendiary material, all protected by two anti-handling devices and a timing device. A further hour of intense, concentrated effort was required to make safe an extremely delicate antihandling device and to neutralise the timer.
The citation for the award to Hall of a GM paid tribute to his courage. It concluded: “Bomb Disposal personnel throughout the Far East now know all the dangers of this particularly fiendish device.”
Michael Drummond Hall was born at Walton-on-thames on February 11 1939. His father served in the Second World War as an officer in the Royal Fusiliers.
Always known as Mike, he was educated at Rutlish College, Merton, south-west London. He spent his National Service with the 11th Hussars and was commissioned after attending the Mons Officer Cadet Training Unit at Aldershot. Transferring to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, he trained as an Ammunition Technical Officer.
In 1962 he was posted to Malaysia during the Confrontation with Indonesia. In Sarawak, Borneo, working on his own, he disarmed booby-trap bombs which were being placed covertly along the front line, a one 1,000-mile-long border. In December 1965 he was Mentioned in Despatches “in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in the Borneo Territories”.
A brief deployment in Northern Ireland led to a staff job in London, during which time he was closely involved in the development of the first generation of Wheelbarrow, the bomb-disposal robot which is believed to have saved many lives.
In 1973 he was posted to BAOR, to command 7 Ordnance Field Park at Scheuen, near Celle. He moved with his family to Ottawa in 1979; based at the British High Commission, he was both assistant military attaché and defence sales officer with the Canadian Army.
At the height of the IRA bombing campaign he was at HQNI, Lisburn, acting as command ammunition technical officer, when he was seconded to Dubai to deal with the aftermath of a catastrophic explosion in which £20million worth of high explosives had been buried under a collapsed storage igloo at a depot in the desert.
Back at Lisburn, he was in his element, “blue-lighting” around the Province disguised as a long-haired civilian and with a change of fast car almost monthly in order to protect his identity. In 1985 he was promoted to colonel and appointed OBE.
His final appointment was command of the Central Ammunition Depot at Kineton, Warwickshire. After retiring from the Army in 1992 he became CEO of the College of Occupational Therapists and subsequently CEO of the Council for the Professions Supplementary to Medicine.
Ebullient, witty and gregarious, Hall was excellent company. He was highly efficient at DIY; plumbing, electrics and landscape gardening held no terrors for him. An enthusiastic yachtsman, skier and tennis player, he later added golf to his other sporting accomplishments.
Mike Hall married, in 1967, Micheline (Micky) Toomey, who survives him with their son and daughter.
Mike Hall, born February 11 1939, died April 26 2020