Well-known Angus farmer and conservationist John Compton MBE has died after a brief illness, aged 89.
Mr Compton was equally proud to have been made an honorary member of the Letham Feuars Committee, on retiring as county councillor for Letham.
Frustrated in his ambition to join the Colonial Service by his war injuries, he took every opportunity to visit his former Edinburgh flatmate, John Blower, who had gone to work in East Africa, and developed a deep and abiding affection for Kenya in particular, which he last visited in January this year.
Travel was a passion, along with gardening, sailing and for a time polo. The latter came about almost by accident, when he answered a phone call from Mervyn Fox-Pitt, who was really looking for Elizabeth, then district commissioner of Angus Pony Club.
Fox-Pitt was beginning to resurrect polo in Scotland. Mr Compton expressed an interest and found himself chairman of the fledgling Dundee Polo Club. His horse Crusader, on which he rode round Turin Hill, had to turn into a polo pony overnight.
Mr Compton’s family said he was never happier than when guddling in drains or shinning up a precariously balanced ladder.
He is described as having been a man of parts, multi-talented and ever ready to help others, and to offer both advice and practical help.
Mr Compton is survived by his daughters, Maggie Inglis and Alison Bell, who intend to celebrate what would have been his 90th birthday on New Year’s Day with a party for his friends.
Mr Compton was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in 1923, and educated at Blundell’s School in Devon, where he claimed to have learned the “finer arts” of poaching and drinking scrumpy.
He attended Edinburgh University but left his studies to join the war effort and became a Commando engineer.
He took part in the Normandy landings and was among the first Allied troops to land on Sword Beach.
Severely injured at the Rhine Crossing in 1945, he spent a year in plaster up to his neck before returning to Edinburgh to read agricultural botany.
It was there he met and married fellow agriculture student Elizabeth Cox, from Dundee, and in 1949 they bought West Mains of Turin.
Alongside conventional crops and fruit production, he grew horseradish, forced and field rhubarb, and flax.
He briefly ran a potato merchanting business with Eric Galloway, operating out of the old engine sheds at Forfar Station. Another sideline was eel fishing.
Eels were trapped on the Lunan, between Rescobie and Balgavies lochs, and shipped live to Billingsgate fish market by train from Forfar – to the horror of some railway porters.
Mr Compton served on the councils of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), Nature Conservancy Council, Scottish Wildlife Trust and Scottish Landowners Federation, on the visiting committee at Noranside when it was a borstal, and was chairman of the Tay River Purification Board (TRPB).
He was instrumental in securing the House of Dun for the NTS and also Barry Mill.
Awarded the MBE for his work with the TRPB, he was wont to say, with irreverence, that it was “for services to sewage”.
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