Mick had befriended a gull as a child when he was laid up with a badly cut foot on the island of Gigha.

The injury might well have denied him a career in peacetime British Royal Navy. Then came the war and he enlisted. The scar on his foot was ignored.

In 1944, having completed the training for a commission in the RNVR, he was transferred to the Indian Army and served with the Gurkas until Indian independence in 1947.

Transfer between armed forces was unheard of in wartime but of the 22,500 WWII RNVR officers 13 did. This was when Burma was rapidly consuming personnel and the Royal Navy became overstaffed after the Normandy landings.

Post war he gained a B.Sc. in agriculture at Edinburgh University and returned to Gigha to farm with horses and Ayrshire cows. He became a development officer with the Scottish Education Department after teaching farming in the Borders Region of Scotland. His task was to rationalise the land-based subjects both in content and assessment.

Retirement on the island of Islay has provided every opportunity to indulge his childhood pursuits, those of watching nature and photographing the birds, flowers, otters, deer and seals.

This produced the book 'I'll tell you about Harry' a herring gull. He found time to write his account of the war as he had seen it and included in 'The Signaller Wren' are the letters from a loyal wren he had met in the navy together with a great number of photographs and illustrations