The only misadventure John Swinton’s false lower leg encountered during 34 years of active military service after the war was when its owner’s eight-year-old son fired a .22 shot through it by mistake during a shoot. Indeed, Willie Swinton succeeded where Malayan insurgents and Greek-Cypriot terrorists had failed during John Swinton’s distinguished postwar military career.
The guardsman’s lower left leg had been severed by a mortar splinter in the last days of the Second World War, but his return to active service was not long delayed. The outbreak of the insurrection in Malaya in 1948 called for urgent reinforcements of infantry to counter the campaign of murder and extortion launched by the communist terrorists.
British infantry strength had just been halved by the disbandment of all 2nd battalions except for the Foot Guards, who kept theirs. A reformed 2nd Guards Brigade was hastily reassembled and shipped to the Far East for anti-terrorist operations in Selangor state in midwest peninsular Malaya.
As a company second-in-command responsible for administrative support, Swinton was spared too much flogging through primary jungle and later served as an operational staff officer at brigade headquarters, for which he was mentioned in dispatches in 1951.
He was allowed a more tranquil assignment as ADC to Field Marshal Sir (later Viscount) William Slim, the governor-general of Australia. Swinton rose to become a major-general and was appointed GOC Household Division and London District, responsible for military ceremonial in the capital.
New acquaintances were inclined to think Swinton a touch haughty, either on the grounds that his family dated from 886AD — when an ancestor, Edulf, Lord of Bamburgh, bent his knee to Alfred the Great — or, in later life, because his daughter, Tilda Swinton, was an Oscar-winning actress. She has said in interviews that she was expected to “marry a duke” and do little else. Instead, she won a place at New Hall, Cambridge, and joined the Communist Party, but she added that he was “wise enough to want me to be happy”.
While it is true that John Swinton had an old-fashioned, mannered way of speaking, the reason for his backward-leaning stance was less an aristocratic bearing and more about taking the strain off his left leg. His wound gave rise to a remarkable coincidence as his father had been injured identically by a shell splinter while serving with the same company of 2nd Scots Guards in the last days of the First World War.
John Swinton was born in 1925 into one of the few families who can trace its land ownership and lineage to before the Norman Conquest. His father was Brigadier Alan Swinton, MC, and his wife, Mariora (née Hankey). John was educated at Harrow.
His economy of speech might have had its origin in the solitude of his early boyhood fishing holidays on the Inner Hebrides island of Colonsay, lying off the opposite coast to his family home of Kimmerghame in Berwickshire.
He joined the Scots Guards while still a teenager in 1943, was commissioned in 1944 and lost his lower leg while fighting at Visselhovede, near Bremen, on April 18, 1945.
During his time as ADC in Australia he met and married Judith, daughter of Harold Killen, a prosperous sheep farmer, in 1954. She died in 2012. He is survived by their four children: Jamie, a communications consultant; Alexander (Sandy), who works for the Royal Bank of Canada as a wealth manager; and Willie, who commanded 1st Battalion Scots Guards from 2006-08 and now works in the private security business. Mathilda (Tilda) is an acclaimed actress who inherited her father’s strong features, rigorous nature and precise diction.
She has spoken warmly of being taken to point-to-point meetings as a child, where she learnt to pick winners. She was less enamoured of being sent to board at West Heath, where the future Princess Diana was a classmate in a “brutal” regime. Tilda once embarrassed her father by asking why their family sat upstairs in the kirk on Sundays while the children she played with sat downstairs.
Her father’s prosthetic lower leg played a central part in family folklore. He invariably took a spare prosthesis when away from home, but it was often left in hotels and it was once caught in the mainsheet of a yacht in which he and his elder son, Jamie, were competing in the round the Isle of Wight race, and cast overboard.
John Swinton surrounded by family while celebrating his golden wedding anniversary in 2004 with his wife, Judith, left, his daughter Tilda, centre with her hand on his shoulder, and two of his sons, Jamie, top left, and Sandy, top right. His third son, Willie, is not in the picture
Swinton’s military career progressed well. He commanded a company of 70 men at Trooping the Colour and served on the staff of 1st Guards Brigade in Cyprus during the Eoka (Union with Greece) Greek-Cypriot terrorist campaign in the late 1950s. Command of his old battalion 2nd Scots Guards gave him special pleasure, followed by distress at the decision to disband it shortly after he had handed over command to Lieutenant-Colonel (later Major-General Sir) John Acland. Swinton ensured that the future of every guardsman in his old battalion was cared for.
After commanding 4th Guards Armoured Brigade in Germany and the 1974 course at the Royal College of Defence Studies, he was promoted major-general. On leaving the army in 1979 he was appointed KCVO by the Queen.
The Turkish intervention in Cyprus in 1974 prompted him to play a practical joke on his friend Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, who had served with him in the Scots Guards, but had now left to work for Scottish & Newcastle Breweries. The nanny in the friend’s house received a telephone call to the effect that he was being recalled to the colours owing to the Cyprus emergency. As a result, Sir Hew’s wife called her husband via the Tannoy system at Bristol station. Swinton apologised after his friend’s boss, Sir William Younger, called Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the former foreign secretary, and by midday news of the impending “mobilisation” was broken to the cabinet.
In 1984 Gerald Maitland-Carew, who had inherited Thirlestane Castle in the Scottish Borders, asked Swinton to oversee its restoration. After seven years he handed over responsibility with the castle’s future secure.
While insistent on his annual fishing holiday on Colonsay, he gave his time to several organisations. He was lord-lieutenant for Berwickshire (1989-2000), chairman of Scottish National War Memorials and captain of the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland (Royal Company of Archers) from 2003 to 2007.
By this stage his daughter had come to the fore. It is not known how he viewed her emergence in movies for the avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman. However, he was proud when she won an Oscar in 2008 as best supporting actress in Michael Clayton.
Hours after her father’s death, Tilda Swinton accepted an award for her supernatural horror film Suspiria at a film festival in Spain. Her voice cracking, she said: “We are here to properly celebrate fantasy, but I want to tell you the truth. My father died this morning . . . I’ve been with him for the last week and he’s been asleep, but he’s been dreaming and I’ve been sitting there thinking about what he’s thinking about or what he’s fantasising about . . . he left this morning, just in time and I asked myself, ‘Do I go to Stiges to accept this award?’ And I thought, ‘Yes, because it’s for fantasy.’ ”
Major-General Sir John Swinton, KCVO, OBE, soldier, was born on April 21, 1925. He died on October 4, 2018, aged 93
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