Derek Cooper The romantic, colourful and heroic life - in the northwestern Europe of second World War, Ireland and the Middle East - of Derek Cooper, who has died a few days short of his 95th birthday, would have made great fiction, but was all the more remarkable for being fact.
A major in the British army, with strong Irish connections, he was sent from Germany after the War to Palestine, then administered by the British under a UN mandate. There, his action in defending Palestinians fleeing Zionist terrorism at Jaffa, in what was to become Israel, in May 1948, brought him both the award of the (British) Military Cross and also, thereafter, a lifetime's commitment to the Palestinian people and to Middle Eastern refugees generally.
This culminated in a special award made to him in the mid-1990s by the Centre for Refugee Studies at Oxford University.
John Baynes entitled his 1998 biography of Cooper, with perhaps understandable hyperbole, For love of Justice: the life of a quixotic soldier.
The implied comparison with Cervantes' anti-hero was well meant, but unfortunate, for Cooper had proved remarkably effective in bringing relief to countless thousands displaced by war or natural disasters from the 1950s onwards.
Cooper's first experience of relief work was actually in Austria, using his own Land-Rover to ferry refugees from the failed Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956, accompanied, as he always was on his relief missions, by his second wife, Pamela, formerly Viscountess Ruthven, a widow whose first husband had been killed during the war.
The couple had married after they had fallen hopelessly in love and Cooper had divorced his first wife, Pamela Tulloch, in 1951. The circumstances surrounding the divorce and remarriage were to cost Cooper his promising military career in those more strait-laced times.
The Hungarian operation had been organised by the Save the Children Fund (SCF) and in 1960 they called upon Cooper again to help with a refugee crisis in Jordan. This was followed in 1962-63 with relief work in Iran following a devastating earthquake which killed 12,000 people.
His stepson, the noted writer on Islamic affairs Malise Ruthven, told The Irish Times that his stepfather had "adapted the common sense of his military training to the problems of relief work", although he stresses that over the years Cooper "became much more professional, indeed something of a diplomat as well, as he often had to mediate between contending factions, especially in Lebanon in the 1980s".
In 1967, Cooper was co-ordinator of the British Aid to Jordan Fund when hundreds of thousands of Arabs were displaced as a result of Israel's Six-Day War. For his services to Jordan, King Hussein awarded him the Istiqlal Medal of Independence and the British government appointed him OBE.
He returned to Palestine in 1973 to write a report for Oxfam on Palestinian refugees' conditions, where he incurred the displeasure of the Israelis, who arrested him twice. He was expelled from Israel in 1979, after attempting to observe Israeli military "trials" of "suspects" on the West Bank.
These experiences led him, with others, including Noam Chomsky, to set up the International Committee for Palestinian Human Rights. Chomsky, says Malise Ruthven, was "extremely respectful" of his stepfather's work.
At about this time also, Cooper was involved in the setting up of Medical Aid to Palestine, a charity registered in the UK to circumvent Israeli bureaucratic attempts to prevent such aid reaching Palestine.
One of his allies in this venture was the Israeli dissident Israel Shahak, a survivor of Belsen, and founder of the Israeli League of Human Rights. Cooper had many friends among Israeli Jews who vehemently disagreed with their own government's policies.
After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Cooper returned to the Lebanon as Oxfam representative in Beirut where, under Israeli shellfire, he rescued small children from the Sabra refugee camp.
He came again in the late 1980s, ferrying medical supplies to yet more refugees at a time when westerners were prime targets for hostage takers, such as those who kidnapped Brian Keenan.
This latter part of the Coopers' life showed particular and extraordinary courage, for by then the couple were in their mid-to-late 70s and had been living in far from ideal circumstances in a series of rented houses in England.
Ireland ran as a constant seam through Cooper's life. From Bromley, Kent, he spent teenage summers with relatives, the Buck family, near Garvagh, Co Derry. The family of Pamela Tulloch, his first wife, whom he married in 1937, lived at Shanbolard estate near Clifden in Connemara. The couple had two children, one of whom is Jennifer, Countess of Altamont, of Westport House.
After his marriage to Pamela Ruthven, the new Cooper family moved to an estate at Dunlewey, near Glenveagh, Co Donegal, where Cooper, a very outdoor-loving man with a physical temperament, poured his energies into forestry and fishing helped by two Irish-speaking brothers from Gweedore, Paddy and Johnny O'Donnell.
The second Pamela Cooper's father, the Rev Canon Arthur Fletcher, had been Church of Ireland rector of Killaloe, and Derek Cooper's elder stepson is the Earl of Gowrie, who served as a minister of state in Northern Ireland some years ago.
The second Mrs Cooper died last year. Derek Cooper is survived by a son, the sculptor Michael Cooper, and by Jennifer Altamont.
George Derek Cooper, born May 28th, 1912; died May 19th, 2007