Lt General Sir Christopher Drewry obituary: Nato commander

It was the sort of humour that served a purpose in singling out the exceptional officers in a still large army generating thousands of reports each year. Drewry was soon recognised as one of the outstanding staff officers (if not the outstanding) of his generation.

That said, comparison to the old Generalstab and the German practice of staff officers rising in a separate stream from those in field service, was perilous. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander-in-chief in Italy in 1945, wrote after the war that the old Prussian staff college’s rarefied military intellectualism had been “inadequate in too many practical fields, such as intelligence, logistics … and anything to do with oil which soiled the fingers and hampered the tactician and strategist in the free flight of his ideas”.

The British Army, on the other hand, preferred its staff officers to alternate between headquarters and field service appointments to keep them grounded in the practicalities of soldiering. The obvious drawback in this, besides loss of continuity, was that the qualities required in the former were not the same as those in the latter, and not always to be found in the same officer. Drewry was one in whom they were, however, and he rose to high rank in both.

Christopher Francis Drewry was born in Derbyshire in 1947. His father, born in 1889, who had fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, was the Duke of Devonshire’s land agent at Chatsworth, and had married again after the death of his first wife. He died when Drewry was seven, contributing to his son’s lifelong introversion. In straitened circumstances, Drewry’s mother nevertheless managed to send her child to Malvern College in Worcestershire.

From Malvern he went straight to Oxford to read modern languages, graduating in 1968, fluent in French and German. He intended to join the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but, after acceptance, at his final interview he expressed an uncharacteristic doubt, asking: “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” His interviewer was admirably frank, telling him that the wind of change was blowing through the recently merged department, and that men of his background and education might not be as favoured as before. Drewry decided then and there to withdraw his application. On the rebound, he bumped into an old friend who suggested he join the army, and his regiment, the Welsh Guards.

At that time, the army’s graduate entry scheme did not require previous military experience, not even membership of the Officer Training Corps at university; only a few weeks’ basic training at Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot. Drewry decided to give it a go, and in March 1969 was commissioned into the junior regiment of Foot Guards, joining the 1st Battalion (1WG) — the Welsh had only the one — at Pirbright in Surrey. His company commander at once took the unusual but imaginative step of telling him to remove his badges of rank and join the three-month course for guardsmen training to be corporals. By the time 1WG moved to Germany the following year, Drewry was considered to be up to speed as a platoon commander. He always prized the experience of learning the junior leader’s trade at the “rough end”. Tours of duty in Northern Ireland followed, and appointment as aide-de-camp (ADC) to the General Officer Commanding London District.

Taciturnity in an ADC was unusual to say the least, but it was his efficiency that had commended him in a strong field of contenders.

When Drewry was at the Guards Depot, Pirbright, one day in 1972, the commandant (commanding officer), Lieutenant Colonel David Lewis, also Welsh Guards, detailed him at the last minute to escort his youngest sister-in-law, Miranda Worrall, daughter of a Coldstream officer, to the officers’ mess ball. They married in 1976. Lady Drewry survives him, along with their three children: Edward, who runs a translation business in Madrid; Marina, global chief executive of an events company in Dubai; and Charlotte, who works in events marketing in London.

The year after they married, Drewry became adjutant of 1WG, soon to move to Berlin. The new commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Charles (later Field Marshal Lord) Guthrie, who in 1973 had married Kate Worrall, Miranda’s elder sister, (obituary, November 11, 2022). “The marriage of Colonel David Lewis in 1970 to the first of the three glamorous Worrall daughters,” wrote his obituarist in The Guards Magazine in 2020, “set in train a record of excellence for the Regiment which, over the last twenty-five years, produced more one-star officers and above than any other single-battalion regiment in the British Army”.

Guthrie, an SAS man who would become chief of the defence staff, relied heavily on his adjutant to free him from detail, and Drewry’s capacity for handling the detail became legendary. He never had a “pending” tray, his “in” tray emptied as rapidly as it filled, and he did not redraft: his pen transcribed precisely his clarity of thought.

After his staff appointment with 6th Field Force, Drewry returned to 1WG to command a company, leading them in the Falklands conflict, where after the sinking of Sir Galahad carrying another company of Welsh Guards they were in support of the Royal Marines’ attack on Mount Harriet in the culminating battle before the Argentinians’ surrender. Subsequently he commanded 1WG in Germany, including a tour of duty in Northern Ireland for which he was mentioned in dispatches.

Promotion to full colonel followed, and appointment to the lead colonel’s job in the army — in the plans branch of the Ministry of Defence — followed by command of 24th Airmobile Brigade, and then return to the army plans branch as its director. Next came two demanding appointments as a major general, in Germany and the MoD, and then in 2000 promotion to the army’s lead three-star (lieutenant general) command: the (Nato) Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps.

At the end of his tenure with the “ARRC” in 2003 it was expected, because he had earlier been told, that he would be promoted to full general to command all the UK’s land forces. However, for reasons the Army Board never disclosed, another officer was promoted in his place. Drewry might instead have been promoted to be Nato’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR), a post that the British had held since its inception in 1951. In 2001, however, after years of lobbying, the Germans succeeded in taking the post (although the experiment would not last long).

Instead, Drewry was offered the Army Board appointment of adjutant general, recently downgraded to three stars. The role encompassed all matters relating to the soldier as an individual — including recruiting, personal training, terms of service and discipline — which Drewry concluded was not his forte, and also that the sideways move probably signalled that he was being ceilinged. He therefore resigned and returned to Derbyshire, where he lived reclusively (by army standards), devoted to his garden and village, of which he wrote a well-received chronicle — The History Of Wormhill in the High Peak.

Drewry never looked back, butmany contemporaries remained dismayed that the army had managed to lose one of its finest staff minds alloyed with true operational experience.

Lieutenant General Sir Christopher Drewry KCB, CBE, Nato commander, was born on June 25, 1947. He died of cancer on November 4, 2024, age 77