30 January 2025
by Allan Mallinson
In 1977 morale in the army was perilously low. The frequency of emergency tours of duty in Northern Ireland and endless support for civil ministries during strikes, the deteriorating barrack and married quarters accommodation, and pay that had been dramatically overtaken by inflation meant that soldiers were leaving in droves. In November, Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Llewellyn, commanding 1st Battalion The Royal Welch Fusiliers (1RWF) covering for striking firemen in Manchester, decided to speak out.
Based on Salisbury Plain, 1RWF were not long back from Belfast. On return, Llewellyn, together with the garrison chaplain and sergeant major, had been asked to address the commander-in-chief’s annual conference on the subject of pay and conditions of service. “Many of my soldiers were leaving their young wives at home to cope alone on inadequate finances. Some were even on supplementary state benefit,” he recalled in later years. “We got a standing ovation, so my feelings became well known. Although I got no overt encouragement, nor indeed comment, from the chain of command … one could ‘feel’ their tacit support.”
When the commander-in-chief General Sir Edwin (later Field Marshal Lord) Bramall visited 1RWF in Manchester a few months later, he warned Llewellyn specifically against speaking to the press. Llewellyn, however, was in something of a dilemma: “I told him that I’d already agreed to speak on BBC Radio Manchester’s breakfast programme the following morning,” he said, “but the reason I wanted to do so was to thank the people of Manchester who had so generously welcomed and hosted my soldiers during our stay, giving them meals and baths when off duty. Dwin Bramall gave that the OK but warned me to be careful.”
The political situation was indeed delicate. Harold Wilson’s second Labour administration had ended the year before with his resignation, by his own admission physically and mentally exhausted. His successor, James Callaghan, was struggling with stagflation and union hostility, and rumours persisted of a half-baked plot involving retired military officers to overthrow the Wilson government.
The BBC interview went as planned, Llewellyn thanking the people of Manchester, but at the end the interviewer asked him what he thought about the striking firemen who were already better paid than his soldiers. “It was an opportunity that I couldn’t miss,” said Llewellyn, “and despite Dwin Bramall’s warning, I said what I had to say”, that his married soldiers couldn’t live on £20 a week.
On BBC Radio’s (national) World at One later that day, the headline was “Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn, commanding fire-fighting troops in Manchester, says that the Army is being exploited”. Within the hour, the army’s director of public relations, Brigadier (later General Sir) Martin Farndale, rang him to say that he was not being muzzled but that he would be wise not to have any more to do with the press.
Fred Mulley, the defence secretary, demanded that the BBC hand over the tape-recording, but the broadcaster replied that it couldn’t find it. There was an ominous silence from the chain of command, but newspapers the next day were supportive, thanks to Farndale’s assiduous facts-and-figures briefings.
The Times published a thundering piece by Lord Chalfont, a former minister in Wilson’s government and at one time Llewellyn’s company commander: “Before anyone in authority starts a witch-hunt against Lieutenant Colonel Llewellyn, it should be clearly understood at the Ministry of Defence that what is needed is not an inquiry into what was or was not said in a radio interview,” he said. “What is needed is a fundamental change in the policies which have led to a very real crisis of morale in the armed forces.”
In fact, morale in the army shot up briefly: at last a senior officer had spoken up publicly. Although it did nothing to change the Callaghan government’s pay policy, it certainly caught the attention of Margaret Thatcher, who was waiting in the wings. Restoring parity for the armed forces became a Tory policy pledge, and in 1979 her newly elected government dramatically increased service pay. Had it not done so, it is questionable whether the armed forces would have been able to carry on the counter-insurgency campaign in Northern Ireland while at the same time meeting their Cold War commitments in Germany, or indeed retaking the Falklands in 1982.
Richard Morgan Llewellyn was born in 1937 in Devon and raised in Monmouthshire, whose status as a Welsh county was then still in dispute owing to the ambiguity of Henry VIII’s acts of union. His father, Griffith Llewellyn, was “dashing, popular and extravagant”, according to a daughter of his first marriage, the celebrated Countess of Ranfurly, confidential secretary to the head of the SOE in Cairo and author of the memoir To War With Whitaker — but he had lost the family fortune on horses and houses.
There was enough money, however, to send the only son of his second marriage to Haileybury and Imperial Service College. On leaving, Llewellyn enlisted for National Service in The Royal Welch Fusiliers, the regiment of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. He was soon commissioned, and subsequently gained a regular commission. Active service in Malaya followed, and in Cyprus during the Greek Cypriot campaign to end British colonial rule and unite the island with Greece.
In 1964 Llewellyn married Elizabeth Lamond (Polly) Sobey, daughter of a Yorkshire mill owner who had won the Military Cross on the Western Front and served in north Africa and Italy in the Second World War. She had been Llewellyn’s commanding officer’s au pair in Germany when they met, and she survives him along with four of their five children: Huw, who works at the National Theatre; Robbie, a designer; Katherine, who lives in Wales; and Glyn, who followed his father into the RWF.
After attending staff college at Camberley, Surrey, where he amused fellow officers with quotations from Beatrix Potter in Welsh, Llewellyn was appointed second military assistant to the chief of the general staff, Sir Michael (later Field Marshal Lord) Carver — a man of the highest intellect and physical courage, but with little patience. Llewellyn thrived. After two years in London he returned to 1RWF as a company commander, serving in both Germany and Northern Ireland, before becoming brigade major (chief of staff) of the 39th Infantry Brigade in Belfast, for which he was awarded the MBE (Military).
Following command of 1RWF and then two years on the directing staff of the Royal College of Defence Studies, Llewellyn was promoted straight to brigadier rather than via the usual rank of full colonel to command the Gurkha Field Force in Hong Kong. He was subsequently appointed director of Army Staff Duties in the Ministry of Defence, responsible for army organisation and deployment, a springboard for some but quicksand for others. After two years he left on promotion to be general officer commanding Wales, and then in 1990 chief of staff of UK Land Forces.
The following year, however, Llewellyn had a Damascene moment. Always a man of strong faith (he had originally intended reading theology after National Service), while sitting on a bench in St James’s Park one day during a break from meetings at the MoD he felt the call to ordination. Still only 54, and despite further promotion prospects, he left the army two months later to begin training at Salisbury and Wells theological college, a seminary in the Tractarian tradition but then under the leadership of an evangelical, fellow Welshman Philip Crowe.
Llewellyn was ordained deacon in 1993 and was priested the following year, serving his title at Brecon St Mary, with a minor canonship at Brecon Cathedral. At the same time he remained colonel of the RWF, a largely honorary appointment but a demanding one nevertheless. He was possibly the only priest to have served as colonel of any regiment. 
In 1995 he became chaplain of Christ College, Brecon, the boarding school founded by Henry VIII to train older boys for ordination and give younger ones the rudiments of learning. While fully coeducational, by the 1990s it was noted rather more for hearty rugger. Llewellyn was a considerable pastoral asset, his credibility enhanced by mountaineering prowess, a good chest of medals and a penchant for mischief, including subversive snowballing.
Aside from the outdoor activities he had always enjoyed, in retirement Llewellyn became an accomplished landscape artist and portraitist. At Haileybury he had won all the art prizes, and while serving at the MoD had taken lessons at St Martin’s School of Art. His most ambitious work was a reredos of The Last Supper for the chapel at Christ College, the apostles based on members of the school community. He also continued as chairman of the Gurkha Welfare Trust in Wales and other military charities, and was a deputy lieutenant of Powys, the largest and most sparsely populated of the Welsh counties.
Some years ago he presented the “lost” BBC tape-recording to the regimental museum in Wrexham. The interviewer, realising the damage it might do to Llewellyn’s career, had given it to him at the end of the broadcast.
Major-General the Revd Morgan Llewellyn CB, OBE (Mil), Royal Welch Fusilier and Anglican priest, was born on August 22, 1937. He died of cancer on December 10, 2024, age 87.
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With grateful thanks to Allan Mallinson for his kind permission to reprint this obituary, originally published in The Times (13 January 2025)
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