PETER ANGUS McCALL:MAJOR ANGUS McCall, who has died aged 87, served with the Irish Guards during the second World War. Later, while serving in Palestine, he was awarded the Military Cross for "gallant and distinguished service".
On October 25th, 1948, his exploits made the front page of this newspaper: "In September 1947 with two platoons he drove a force of more than 100 Arabs who were trying to cut the Tiberius Road back over the border to Syria.
"On 6th February of this year he drove off armed Arabs who were attacking the Jewish settlement of Ein Eeten.
"His actions induced the Arabs to resort to negotiation and restore peace in the district."
After he resigned his commission, he was employed by Elizabeth Arden, a company where he worked for 30 years.
Born in Ennell Lodge, on the shores of Lough Ennell, near Mullingar, he was the youngest of the five children of John Olaf McCall and his wife Muriel, daughter of Hamilton and Florence Boyd-Rochfort, Middletown Park, Castletown Geoghegan, Co Westmeath.
His uncle, Sir Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, was racehorse trainer to Queen Elizabeth during the 1950s and 1960s.
Following in the family tradition, he won first prize on his pony Toby at the Mullingar Show in 1930, and was later apprenticed to the trainer Atty Persse of Galway, who trained the remarkable colt The Tetrarch.
He rode with the Westmeath Hunt. Later in life, fly fishing became his great passion.
He was educated at Baymount School, Co Dublin, and Canford School, Wimborne, in Dorset, England.
An athletic pupil, he enjoyed cricket and running and also won the public schools shooting competition for clays at Bisley in 1939.
Accepted into the British army officer training centre at Sandhurst, in 1941 he was commissioned into the Irish Guards.
After D-Day he landed in Normandy where as a young captain he commanded a company in the attempted breakout in July 1944 from the Normandy bridgehead south of Caen, known as Operation Goodwood, and was involved in some fierce fighting.
Shortly afterwards he was injured. Having spent time at home recuperating, he returned to action with his battalion in Germany in April 1945.
After he completed his military career, he went to work for Florence Nightingale Graham, owner of the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics empire and a patron of the turf.
He managed her outlets in Britain and Ireland, where he worked closely with Lesters of Cork, who held the Irish agency.
She found his Irish charm useful outside of the cosmetic business, too, and took him on racehorse buying trips around the world. He also escorted her at race meetings.
She kept her brood mares at his mother's stud, Tally Ho, and his uncle Cecil trained some of her horses.
But McCall disagreed with her policy of keeping horses with different trainers.
"She should have just kept six good horses with one decent trainer. She wouldn't listen, though, and wouldn't hear of cutting it back. It was such a foolish extravagance . . . quite ridiculous," he commented.
Another extravagance, in his view, was her purchase of Barretstown House in Kildare. He looked over it for her, and she entrusted him with its purchase and renovation.
He organised everything, from the staff and stud to the walled garden crammed with fruit and vegetables, including her favourite sweet pea.
"I was mesmerised by the costs," he later recalled, "and she only spent about a week or so there in the four years she owned it."
He helped to cover the costs, however, when he spotted the commercial potential of a cream which her chemist made up to be applied to the legs of her horses after racing.
He suggested packaging it in tubes for sale at cosmetic counters, and the Eight Hour Cream became one of Elizabeth Arden's best-selling lines.
McCall married Joyce Warren in 1951; they had a daughter, Sarah. He married Deirdre Jeffares of Kildare in 1981, with whom he retired to Naas. He frequently visited his mother in Mullingar.
He had always holidayed in west Cork, and after his wife Deirdre's death in 2007 he went to live there with his daughter.
Despite deafness in later years he was an amusing companion, with great charm and a fund of stories to entertain.
His daughter Sarah, granddaughters and two great-grandsons survive him.
Patrick Angus McCall: born November 29th, 1921; died September 25th, 2009