Captain Lionel Frank Savery MC

Lionel Frank Savery was an intelligence officer in Malaysia and Cyprus who supplied information to 2 PARA and earned the Military Cross. 

Savery was born in Cardiff on August 17, 1929 and educated at Cathays high school. His father was Ernest Savery, a cinema manager. 

He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1948, where he was posted to Hong Kong onboard a cruiser. He was encouraged to learn Mandarin and returned to England to attend a course at the School of Oriental and African Studies. With his training completed, he was posted as a Military Intelligence Officer (MIO) to Malaya. Having left to fly there in 1952 in an Avro York, the main hydraulic tank burst over Paris, and the pilot had to land at night without brakes. Thankfully, everyone was safe.  

As an MIO in Malaya, Savery was posted to Bentong, an area from which the Communist Terrorists were known to operate. Here, he encountered a soldier whose knee was shattered by an expanding bullet fired at close range. As the medical orderly was unable to stop the bleeding, Savery improvised a tourniquet using a knotted towel, an apple and a Sten gun magazine which held it tight. He had saved the man's life. He would go on to serve for three years in Malaya, during which he handled captured terrorists and briefed his Battalion on where the informants could be used. In recognition, he was awarded a Mention in Despatches on May 31, 1955. 

After returning home from Malaya, Savery was sent to Cyprus in 1956 to aid in the intelligence war against the guerrilla fighters of EOKA and their leader, General Georgios Grivas. Here he worked as a District Intelligence Officer based in the Páno Plátres area on the south coast, where abundant woods and caves provided bases from which the terrorists could launch attacks. Whilst he was still RA attached Intelligence Corps, Savery worked heavily with 2 PARA at this time. But the day after he arrived in the capital Nicosia, Savery narrowly avoided assassination when an Army Captain was murdered in a street he had just walked down.

Worse still, Savery's security card photograph, taken on his first visit to Police HQ, was smuggled into the hands of EOKA. With his identity disclosed, he decided to embark on a risky routine of aggressive patrolling, mostly by night. Savery was assisted in this task  by a faction of deserters who he turned against EOKA to provide invaluable information. With ex-EOKA men helping him, he captured 12 highly dangerous terrorists and their weapons in the process. His wife, Marisa, typed up his intelligence reports and was a special constable in her own right. But the level of danger was such that he had to change his number plates daily, and Grivas personally ordered his execution. Being an Intelligence Officer, Savery was privileged enough to read his own death warrant. But his luck ran out in June 1957 when he was severely wounded in a firefight with men he had tracked down. Shot in the thigh, he took morphine for the pain and this time applied a tourniquet to himself. For his valour he was awarded the Military Cross on July 23, 1957, but displayed his intrepid nature when he returned to Cyprus after a lengthy hospital stay. He received a second Mention in Despatches on January 29, 1957.

After returning to England he transferred to the Intelligence Corps but left the Army in 1963. He subsequently joined the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysian Police in Sarawak during the 'Confrontation' between Indonesia and Malaysia.

Later in life he worked as a labour adviser for the IPC division of the International Publishing Group. During his retirement he lived in a village in Somerset and was a member of his local Special Forces Club. He had married Marisa Hanscomb in 1954, and they had two sons. Lionel Savery died on January 4, 2012.  

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