Brigadier Cornelius Joseph Tobin

Brigadier Cornelius Joseph Tobin CBE; born October 28, 1910, died April 21, 1998

THE seeds of the brusque, efficient approach that ''Joe'' Tobin had to life were sown in the Lake District, where he had several fights a week with those pupils at Patterdale school who mocked him in his clogs and kilt.

Cornelius Joseph Tobin was born near Peshawar on the North-west Frontier, the son of a gunner from Cork and a mother who hailed from Fife. He spent his first five years in India before returning to defend his dress and his honour in a Cumberland primary.

After leaving Carlisle grammar school at 16 he took an unorthodox route to a high military echelon by going to sea with the Eagle Oil Shipping Company, which later became part of Shell. He went through the Panama Canal 14 times, and through the Magellan Straits eight times.

At 20 he gained his second mate's ticket at Glasgow, but enlisted as an RA surveyor because of the Depression, before studying at the Royal

In 1935 he joined the 2nd Company of the Indian Army and, having passed the obligatory Higher Standard Urdu within a year, he was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the 2nd Punjab Regiment, in which capacity he helped tame unruly tribes in the Khyber Pass.

In 1938 he moved to Lucknow, where he revelled in year-round pig-sticking, jackal hunting, and the shooting of quail, jungle fowl, and ducks, in between helping the local constabulary keep the peace.

During the war he served in Burma as a Colonel in HQ 33 Corps, his reward being a mention in dispatches in 1944 and the conferring on him of the CBE in 1945. Having been promoted to Brigadier (the youngest ever in the Indian Army) he was seconded as Director of Supplies and Industry in Burma, his job description being to ''keep the population above the level of

disease and unrest''.

Brigadier Tobin was later appointed to the War Office and became a brevet colonel. During the Korean War he was appointed senior ordnance officer with the British and Commonwealth forces and later director of work studies at the war Office.

When he retired in 1961 he became a true captain of industry; managing director and chairman of the British subsidiary of US Industries and engineering. From there he joined the Thomson Organisation and he retired as chairman of the Lloyd's insurance broking company, Bateson and Payne, in 1975.

Retirement was not, of course, to slow such an active man down. When the Silloth Shipping Company wanted to trade in the Mediterranean it called on ''Joe'' to be second officer. When he was not sailing or playing golf he would be acting as president of the Ordnance in India Association, a post which he held from 1978 until his death. From his home at Carsethorn on the

Galloway coast he was also president of the Galloway and Upper Nithsdale Conservative and Unionist Association.

Colleagues remember him often lamenting that the British Empire was a thing of the past. ''He was a first-class bloke with a marvellous sense of humour,'' said Captain Norman Kells, the secretary of the Ordnance in India Association.

''He was gruff, but he was like that to see people's reactions and he was chuckling underneath it all. He always decried the fall of the British Empire, and was none too happy about it.''

Brigadier Cornelius Joseph Tobin is survived by his wife, Phyllis, a graduate in horticulture, whom he married in Rawalpindi in 1941, their three children, and two grandchildren.

THE HERALD  12th May 1998