Former Hong Kong defence secretary;
Born: December 21, 1920; Died: March 27, 2012.
Alastair Todd, who has died aged 91, was Hong Kong's Fettes-educated defence secretary who later became as an Anglican clergyman.
He was born in Belfast to Scottish parents. His father, James Eadie Todd, was a professor of history at Queen's University Belfast and his mother, Peggy, was a teacher and occasional BBC broadcaster.
After attending Fettes College in Edinburgh, he took a shortened wartime classics degree at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before being commissioned into the Royal Artillery. He was wounded as his regiment fought across northern Europe when a piece of shrapnel hit his throat, where it lodged for the rest of his life. He also survived wartime hepatitis.
He was demobbed in Hong Kong (where he contacted TB and polio), where he had flown in 1945 to join the colonial civil service. Initially a private secretary to the governor, Sir Mark Young, he became the director of social welfare and then defence secretary.
In the late 1960s the British colony was subjected to outbreaks of terrorism and intimidation orchestrated by China's Red Guards as part of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, and Todd worked hard to keep the situation calm.
In Hong Kong he married Nancy Buyers, and they had four children.
From the mid-1950s he began drawing closer to the Church of England and was heavily involved as a layman at St John's Cathedral, Hong Kong. In the early 1960s, he considered taking holy orders and completed a diploma in theological studies by correspondence with London University.
In 1971, at the age of 50, he gave up his government post to return to England and train for the ministry. He was appointed CMG for services to the Hong Kong government.
After Salisbury theological college, where he was not quite the oldest student, he became curate at St Mary's, Willingdon, East Sussex, and then vicar of St Augustine's in Brighton. He carried on working well into his 80s, and was a mainstay in the Willingdon parish.
Nancy predeceased him in 2008, as did his eldest daughter Clare, who died of cancer in 2000. Alastair Todd is survived by two sons and a daughter and eight grandchildren.
