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Significant Scots
Sir Alexander Glen


Born April 8 1912; Died March 6 2004

Sir Alexander Glen, who has died aged 91, was an Arctic explorer and wartime Intelligence officer before going into the shipping industry, and eventually becoming chairman of the British Tourist Authority.

Glen had an unusual introduction to the Arctic in 1932. He thought he had accepted a friend's invitation to a debutante dance, then found that it was to go to Spitsbergen as one of the eight-man crew of a 45ft Peterhead fishing boat owned by a Cambridge law don. The expedition committed him to 4,000 miles of sailing and two months of surveying in the mountains; it left him fascinated by the Arctic.

The next year, Glen led a 16-man Oxford University summer expedition, which carried out valuable topographical and geological surveys of West Spitsbergen. In the winter he spent some months with the Lapps of northern Sweden. Then, the following summer, he returned to Spitsbergen for a few weeks in the company of Evelyn Waugh.

It was not a happy experience for the novelist, who did not like taking orders from an undergraduate. Waugh tried to make Glen (to whom he sarcastically referred in his diary as "the leader") feel out of place. But when Waugh talked to their companion, Hugh Lygon, about people and places the younger man could not know, Glen showed every sign of enjoying their conversations - and irritated Waugh further by roaring with laughter at jokes he only half-understood.

For 10 hours on each of the three days after their arrival, they carried supplies up a glacier made treacherous by a thaw. Glen shot a seal to roast over a wood fire but, when he announced that he was going to shoot another, Waugh gave him a lengthy lecture on the sacredness of human and animal life.

At one point, as the party crossed a stream, Waugh and Lygon found themselves swept into a raging torrent. Waugh briefly feared for his life, but they managed to crawl ashore. "If I hadn't joined the Church of Rome, I could never have survived your appalling incompetence," the writer spat at Glen.

The experience prepared the 23-year-old Glen to lead the Oxford University expedition of 1935. Against advice from older experts, he established a station on the ice cap of North East Land; it contained rooms and connecting tunnels which were occupied for about a year. The expedition carried out valuable research in glaciology as well as topographical and geological mapping. It also did important work on the propagation of radio waves in high latitudes, which contributed to the development of radar. Glen's account of the expedition was published in Under the Pole Star (1937).

He was awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1940 and, with other members of his team, the Polar Medal in silver in 1942. In addition, he received the Bruce Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Andree Plaque of the Royal Swedish Geographical Society.

Glen returned to Spitsbergen in very different circumstances when, on the staff of Rear-Admiral Philip Vian in July 1941, he was involved in the evacuation of Norwegian and Russian coalminers and trappers. This involved destroying coal mines, equipment and stores - although Glen and others believed that an occupying force was needed to prevent the Germans using the site as a base for attacking Arctic convoys.

Less than a year later, Glen took part in a series of flights by RAF Coastal Command Catalinas from the Shetlands which showed inconclusive evidence of German occupation on Spitsbergen. As a result, he went back with a joint British and Norwegian force in a Norwegian icebreaker; but she was sunk in Spitsbergen harbour by German Focke Wulfs, with the loss of 17 lives and several wounded. Among the dead was Lt-Col A S T Godfrey, Royal Engineers, who had been in Greenland with Martin Lindsay before the war.

The ship's survivors established themselves in rough buildings until they were resupplied by Catalina. A force of two cruisers and four destroyers, under a Norwegian commander, remained there until the end of the war.

Glen was awarded the DSC. He was also awarded the Norwegian War Cross, and was appointed a Knight of St Olav.

The son of a Glasgow shipowner, Alexander Richard Glen was born on April 18 1912. After Fettes, he read Geography at Balliol College, Oxford. Having returned from his Arctic expeditions, he worked in banking in New York and London, until he was mobilised in the RNVR in 1939. Precluded from an executive commission because of defective eyesight, he was trained as a meteorological officer; then, after some months in the cruiser Arethusa in the eastern Mediterrranean, he transferred to Naval Intelligence.

In January 1940 Glen was posted to Belgrade as assistant naval attache at the British legation, which was trying to influence the Yugoslavs to join the Allied cause. But when a coup d'etat transferred power from the hands of the neutral Prince Paul to the 17-year-old King Peter, German retribution was swift, and Belgrade was bombed within three days.

Glen and the rest of the legation had to leave in a hurry. After reaching Tirana in Albania after an adventuruous journey by road, they were treated chivalrously by the occupying Italians, who flew them to Foggia, in Italy. In an apparent act of goodwill, two months later they were sent home through unoccupied France and Spain.

Following his Spitsbergen adventure, Lt-Cdr Glen (as he had become) returned by motor torpedo boat to Yugoslavia, where he joined Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean's mission to the partisans.

In the confusion of Balkan loyalties, Maclean persuaded the British Government to support Tito's partisans, and Glen served with distinction in dangerous clandestine operations in Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria.

He accompanied Tito to his first meeting with Stalin. The Soviet leader leaned down from a dais to pick up the partisan leader by his armpits, saying, "Remember, I may be old but I am still very strong." Tito was unruffled.

Glen ended the war on the British staff in Athens. In addition to a Bar to his DSC, he was awarded the Czechoslovak War Cross.

After demobilisation, Glen was wondering how best to invest his family's trust money when a Norwegian shipowner advised him to join a syndicate which was buying H Clarkson & Co. The firm had eight employees at an old-fashioned office in Bishopgate, in the City of London; they worked on handwritten ledgers while seated on high stools.

But under Glen's chairmanship, from 1965 to 1973, Clarkson diversified to become a pioneer of package holidays in conjunction with Court Line, a charter airline.

Glen also became chairman of Clarkson's parent company, Shipping Industrial Holdings (SIH). When the holiday industry suffered a severe downturn after the 1973-74 oil crisis, SIH sold Clarkson to Court Line, which went bankrupt soon afterwards, leaving 120,000 holidaymakers stranded or out of pocket.

Glen was a director of British European Airways (1964-70), the Tote (1976-84) and the British National Export Council (1966-72). He was chairman of the British Tourist Authority from 1969 to 1977, having been offered the job by the trade minister Anthony Crosland.

He was also chairman of the Advisory Council of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1978 to 1984, during which time he organised a very successful public appeal.

Glen was appointed CBE in 1964 and KBE in 1967.

Bald, bespectacled, jovial and rather portly in later life, Glen had immense resilience of mind and body, and invincible optimism. In 1975 he published his memoirs, Footholds Against a Whirlwind.

Sandy Glen, who died on Saturday, married first, in 1936 (dissolved 1945), Nina Nixon; they had a son who predeceased Glen. He married secondly, in 1947, Baroness Zora de Collaert, whom he had met in Yugoslavia during the war; she died last year.


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