tional system until he went to King's
College, London, after a private
education which, under the late Hubert
Brinton, was undoubtedly of a high
academic standard but nevertheless
lonely in the extreme. The fact that in
his formative years circumstances kept
him well apart from the collegiate
tradition (as the title of of Sir Dennis
Walter's autobiography has it: "Not
always with the pack"), must have
contributed to his immense independence
of mind and perhaps also to the
intensity with which he held his views.
The Professor Colonel was as much the
antithesis of what some prejudices
associate with the military - what VS
Naipaul has called the English 'cult of
stupidity' - and others with
intellectuals' cacophony and cowardice.
By his own account, his early years in
London rapidly opened him to the
pleasures of friendship for which,
perhaps, his long pent up thirst lent
him an exceptional gift and it was
obvious when he spoke of those days how
great had been his enjoyment of the
parties and social life of that time.
But even at an age when it is no fault
to be a little frivolous his more
serious spiritual streak was already
present and he became a close friend of,
and was much influenced by, Canon
Alfonso de Zulueta, as a member of the
League of Christ the King.
When war came
it was no accident that he joined the
Foot Guards because, as he put it quite
simply, he joined the war to fight for
his country and the cause he believed in
deeply, not to give legal advice. With
good reason he took very great pride in
having been an Irish Guardsman and
seeing a considerable amount of active
service in North Africa, not
surprisingly given his quick and precise
mind as Signals Officer, and his loyalty
towards, and his delight in, his
Regiment was uncompromisingly stated in
the Brigade of Guards' tie which he wore
more often than any other, his Irish
Guards blackthorn stick, which he
carried for the rest of his life, and in
his box-spur Wellington boots which he
always wore with evening dress. Nor did
thirty years as a distinguished academic
ever change certain obvious Foot Guards'
turns of phrase such as his description
of any sort of reprimand or
dressing-down, in any circumstances, as
a "moderate hello". Indeed, it is
striking that in a man whose impish
sense of humour and delight in deflating
the pompous, whether people,
institutions or government departments
was a hall-mark in all circumstances and
all places, his Regiment - and indeed
Regimental Officers generally (I stress
the distinction, because his views on
the higher staff and so-called support
units could be as unprintable as they
were never the object of any barb. He
was kind enough to include in this
self-imposed taboo field delegates and
again the stress is on field, of the
ICRC and all those, as he put it, who
had had to get quite good at "dodging
large pieces of metal travelling fast".
(Letter, 1.8.82). There was, however, a
twinkle in his eye when he referred to
the Cavalry and Guards Club always and
only as 'The Pig and Whistle" and to the
Irish Guards Officers' Mess Tent in
North Africa as "Whites" - while he
delighted in his story of a field Court
Martial at which he was defending
officer in Tunisia which broke up in
confusion when a herd of goats suddenly
irrupted in the tent in which it was
being held. He admitted quite candidly
that all in all while deploring the loss
of friends he enjoyed his war (retaining
a respectful and chivalrous memory of
his enemies, saying of the Germans in
Tunisia "if that is how they fight in
retreat and defeat God help me when they
are in the attack") until circumstances
made him one of the first allied
Officers to arrive at a concentration
camp, which I believe was Bergen-Belsen.
****
Although he first told me of this nearly
thirty years after the event, his voice
quite clearly changed pitch, his eyes
still expressed outrage and anger, and
his bearing exuded contempt for what he
always referred to simply as the
"Schweinerei". The description of what
he saw, and of the first night he spent
unable to stop reading until daybreak
from the immense and disordered bundles
of files, marked him for life; as he put
it himself "when dawn came up and I was
still reading with disbelief at the
extent of the evil of which I could see
the evidence outside around me with my
own eyes, I was a changed man". I am not
certain whether his modesty prevented
him from realising that the manner in
which he told of his experience also
deeply marked me and, I am certain,
countless others of his pupils.
He was
much too good a lawyer to have allowed
his feelings of outrage and disgust to
have influenced him in his work as a
Military Prosecutor in the War Crimes
Trials between 1945 and 1949, and far
too shrewd in his understanding of human
beings to allow hate for one Nation, and
the desire for revenge against one
Nation to distract him from the fact
that for him was the self-evident
essential one: all men's almost
limitless capacity for evil and the
essential role that law, its
dissemination and punishment of
offenders could fulfil in "forcing back
the frontiers of that evil". His horror
and abhorrence of "Schweinerei" was
never confined by the comfortable
escapism through the scapegoats of
merely national or ideological hatreds.
Gerald did all he could to oppose,
denounce, and bring the law to bear
against all "Schweinerei", from
Stalinist crimes to Khmer Rouges
atrocities - to the Sabra Chatila
massacres in Beirut in 1982 - some would
say "although", but in fact precisely
"because" - he was a deep friend of
Israel.
His immense integrity and
absolute evenhandedness made it quite
natural for him to feel equally strongly
about conduct which he considered
dishonouring for his own country, as was
evidenced by his help to Count Nikolai
Tolstoy on the legal aspects of the
"Victims of Yalta", which he described
"although I have in the course of my
life had to read more about human
foulness than I care to remember ... as
... More editions ... as one of the most
appalling Schweinerei of the war"
(Letter, 6.8.1986).
Nor should it be
forgotten that the prosecution of high
ranking German regular soldiers - as
distinguished from prominent Nazis and
SS - was not by any means universally
popular in English military circles. But
he was unwavering in his belief that the
law should be upheld and strengthened
precisely by placing responsibility
wherever it lay on the basis of the
objective evidence and fair trial. Yet
there was nothing personally
sanctimonious in his assessment of his
own personal role, and even in such
circumstances he was fond of telling
stories against himself: he described
his cross-examination of Field Marshal
von Manstein, in which an important
point turned on whether the Field
Marshal had or had not personally signed
a particular order, and was met with the
withering reply: "You see, Colonel
Draper, I really do not remember,
Colonel Draper. For at that time,
Colonel Draper, I was not commanding a
Regiment, a Brigade or a Division, or a
Corps, or an Army, but a Group of
Armies: 1 had six hundred Colonels under
me, Colonel Draper". And at that, he
would always smile his most impish and
delighted smile - just before adding
that the Field Marshal was convicted and
sentenced to a long term of
imprisonment.
Whether there was or was not any link
between the disability which soon began
to afflict him and the awful living
conditions and immense overwork of his
period in Germany remains unclear but
certainly in the following years he was
in excruciating pain, which he bore
without complaint or self-pity. He who
had played scrum-half for the Sandhurst
rugby team, was left for the rest of his
life under a handicap, his back bent
forward and rigid, that would have
brought most other men's careers and
love of life to an end.
Characteristically he went on to realise
his greatest achievements, ever widened
his already wide circle of friends and
travelled prodigiously with an open
mindedness and a curiosity that enriched
him and those close to him beyond
measure. It should be remembered that
when he almost forcibly embarked on what
was effectively a brand new career for
him as an academic in 1956, at the age
of forty-two, suffering already from a
physical disability which was severe by
any standards, he not only achieved a
Professorship within twenty years but
became considered by many
the greatest
English-speaking (the French misuse of
"Anglo-Saxon" in this context never
failed to reduce him almost to tears of
laughter!) authority in his chosen
subject, the Law of Armed Conflict,
while teaching up to nine other branches
of law. Practically concurrently, it
should not be forgotten, he was for
twenty years a part-time Chairman of
Industrial Tribunals, member of the
United Kingdom Delegation to many
International Conferences, including all
the Red Cross Conferences and those
concerning the Geneva Conventions and
their Additional Protocols, as well as
continuing his legal practice at Hare
Court in cases as well known as the
Irish Peers' Case and as esoteric as the
Revision of the Constitution of the
Mothers' Union. Throughout, he regularly
contributed what are usually known as
'letters to "The Times" ' - but might
properly be called legal broadsides - as
often as not directed against a
Government decision or Authority acting
in a way which he felt was illegal,
legally unjustified, or merely shabby.
As Professor Adam Roberts put it:
"...there was something frightening
about the Draper Gun. I sometimes felt
... that he was a bit like a weapon
prohibited by the laws of war: liable to
blow up at any time and to fire off in
any direction!".
Of course, he was well
aware of, and on occasion hugely
enjoyed, with almost child like
provocation, his propensity for testing
how far he could go too far, and his
Quixotic streak gave him a well
developed taste for lost causes provided
he believed them to be right.
He
maintained a prodigious correspondence,
usually a wonderful rich blend of
friendship, scholarly observations,
anecdotes and fun — mingled, on
occasion, with sadness and depression at
'la condition humane' (I have over fifty
of these long, very carefully written
gems) and helped, as far as I can make
out, anyone and everyone who sought his
advice to the point of allowing himself
to be regularly, and knowingly,
plagiarised.
The late sixties when he
moved to Sussex University were not, by
all accounts, easy ones and
undergraduate attitudes of the time were
strongly anti-establishment and
anti-authoritarian. This never prevented
Professor Colonel Draper from continuing
to dress in his impeccable suits, as he
always had, and from lecturing bedecked
in his Brigade of Guards' tie and
carrying his blackthorn - invariably to
a full house. Once again the depth of
his historical perspective - he was a
considerable specialist on the Medieval
Universities - made present-day
so-called subversive undergraduates seem
really very tame to him in relation to
the Paris University of Villon, with the
student body electing and ousting its
Professors, as described by Wyndham
Lewis in whose book on Villon he
delighted and he was never a man to
pander to popularity in any way. He was
rewarded by intense respect, loyalty and
in many cases affection by the many whom
he quite simply taught to think.
Although probably one of his only
failures in this respect, I never forget
the intensity of supervision periods
with him which I attended from
Cambridge, nor the essays submitted
which he would hand back, generally
covered in a text of his commentary
rather longer than the original, with
infinite care and trouble, on one
occasion headed in block letters and in
red ink: "Courage! "Courage! Rome was
not built in a day!"
He intensely
disliked the political climate in
England at that time referring in a
letter to Socialism as "organised
boredom" (Letter, 4.10.1976) - although
I suspect that he didn't have much more
time for the disorganised greed which
followed: "Here, the dinner parties
continue, the insincere remarks are
exchanged and the worries about the
rising costs of pleasures" (Letter,
4.5.1980) and "The contemporary clamour
is for business and management training,
after an earlier education in plumbing
and computers" (Letter, 6.4.1986).
The
assessment of the Professor Colonel's
publications is a matter for the
editors, in the introduction to this
book. However, it is clear that
Professor Draper's contribution to Sir
Hersch Lauterpacht's Manual of Military
Law, Part III, "The Law of War on Land",
was very great, and he delighted in an
American colleague's assessment that it
was "typical of the British to produce
the best book on the subject, print it
on rice paper and tie it together with a
boot lace".
On and off, for the last ten
years of his life, he talked of plans,
to write a complete, systematic treatise
updating The Law of Armed Conflict to
include the Additional Protocols to the
Geneva Conventions and it is our loss
that this great undertaking, to which,
characteristically again, he was
planning to devote his retirement, was
never to be possible.
I believe,
however, that it is a fair conjecture
that he would have taken further an
analogy which, with his extraordinarily
expressive speaking voice, he enjoyed
pointing out in the context of the harsh
penance attributed in medieval
penitentials to "the Archers. Why the
Archers?". He argued that this was not
merely because the Archer, as a common
soldier, threatened the existing social
order by his ability to deal with a
mounted Knight, but because the archers,
with indirect fire at a distance, did
not engage in direct combat, and were
uncertain of how many they had killed or
maimed. By analogy, Gerald felt the Law
should be particularly severe with those
who, in a time of better organisation,
communications and technology, were
enabled to kill, maim and torture,
whether by action or failure to act, on
a hugely vaster scale by a signature on
a piece of paper, without leaving the
safety of their desks.
****
He sat for nearly
twenty years as a part time Chairman of
Industrial Tribunals, and although
privately often exasperated by the
nature of the cases and quality of
argument and witnesses he was obliged to
hear, by all accounts he was a model of
impartiality, courtesy and clarity.
Characteristically, however, he never
lost either his sense of fun or his
abiding respect for the importance of
precision in law. "I have just tried a
case in the industrial Tribunal at
Brighton, in which the two Lay Members
sitting with me expressed the erudite
opinion that the case was to be decided
by common sense. Anybody who has taken a
brief look at the Employment Protection
(Consolidation) Act 1978, as amended by
the Employment Act, 1980, the former
consisting of 160 sections and 17
Schedules, may beg leave to take a
different view. In fact I had come to
the conclusion which agreed with theirs.
I then suggested that if that was their
view I would, if so desired by the two
of them, set out in the Reasons for the
decision the words 'The case was decided
by the majority on the basis of common
sense and by the minority on the basis
of the Statutes and some 5 decided
cases'. Then they grew alarmed and
begged me to decide the case on the
basis of law. What a farce!" (Letter,
August 1982).
****
Yet it was perhaps at the
International Conferences, particularly
those relating to the Geneva Conventions
and the Red Cross, that the full extent
of his knowledge, gifts and powers was
most evident, for he blended the
authority of a Colonel of Foot Guards
with the clarity and precision of a
Professor of Law, while his deep
personal courtesy and interest and
understanding of human weaknesses and
foibles made him a natural and
formidable diplomat. He moved easily in
international, academic, diplomatic and
military circles, perhaps precisely
because in none of these fields was he
from a mould. Baroness Elles tells of
the impact of his authority even in his
absence when, as a recently created Life
Peer she was appointed United Kingdom
Delegate to the Third Committee of the
United Nations dealing with humanitarian
issues:" I was seeking to introduce an
amendment to the draft text, in
accordance with the advice received from
Gerald before leaving for New York. I
was not making much headway - possibly
my argument was not sounding very
convincing - so, as a last resort, I
called in aid the words of my mentor and
stated that the amendment was suggested
by the distinguished international legal
expert, Colonel Gerald Draper. The
reaction was electric. No longer did the
fate of the amendment remain in the
hands of the United Kingdom delegate -
myself. At once, the distinguished
delegate from Australia intervened
saying (in substance, if not verbatim)
that he had the honour of being a pupil
of Colonel Draper, held him in the
highest regard, and if that was
