"Lieutenant-Colonel John Gaff , who has died aged 86, was in overall command of all bomb disposal units during his posting to Northern Ireland in the 1970s and was awarded a George Medal. In 1974 Gaff was posted to the Province as Chief Ammunition Technical Officer (CATO) and was the Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD) adviser to the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland during one of the most active periods of the insurgency. On March 21 he was summoned to the railway signal box at Dunloy Halt, where three armed men had placed a bomb; a second bomb was on the railway track. He assumed command of the operation and quickly defused the bomb on the railway track. The bomb in the signal box, however, proved more difficult to neutralise as its exact position was not known — and it was suspected that it was booby-trapped. For nearly eight hours Gaff investigated every inch of the site despite the great danger. Then he noticed a small bump under a piece of linoleum at the bottom of a stairwell in the signal box building. This turned out to be the pressure switch of the booby trap. It was a sensitive device, and Gaff had to place disruptive equipment alongside the pressure switch, knowing that the slightest pressure in the wrong place would detonate the device and result in his being killed or badly injured. After the booby trap circuit had been disrupted he found 70lb of explosive charge under the stairs. The successful neutralisation of the bomb, after nearly 15 hours of hazardous work, avoided damage to the signal box and kept open a vitally important railway line. Gaff was awarded a George Medal, in the words of the citation, “for the outstanding personal courage and devotion to duty which he demonstrated throughout his tour of Northern Ireland in an extremely hazardous and highly technical field of operations”. [SIZE=1.4em]John Maurice Gaff was born at Guildford on May 27 1927 and educated at the Royal Grammar School in the town. His sense of adventure was evident early on. Aged 10, he used up a week’s pocket money for his first trip in an aeroplane, a 30-minute flight in a De Havilland Dragon Rapide.[/SIZE] When he was in his teens he fashioned a primitive snorkel out of an Army gas mask, tied two bricks around his waist and, with a friend in a ferry boat holding the hose through which he was breathing, walked along the bed of the river Wey. In 1944 he volunteered to join the Army and, in 1946, after infantry training, was commissioned into the Queen’s Royal Regiment. Shortly after being posted to the 1/6th Battalion in Palestine, he transferred to the Parachute Regiment and joined 9 Parachute Battalion. On the day that his company motored into Haifa, the police station in the town was blown up, just seconds before they passed the building." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10541586/Lieutenant-Colonel-John-Gaff-obituary.html
