Commander Malcolm Burley MBE FRGS Royal Navy

COMMANDER MALCOLM BURLEY

Appointed MBE and awarded a fellowship as well as the Cuthbert Peek prize by the Royal Geographical Society for his leadership of the 1964-65 Combined Services expedition to South Georgia, Malcolm Burley contributed to the strong naval tradition of polar exploration which entwined the Admiralty with the Royal Geographical Society as early as 1818. In that year, Commander William Parry attempted to find a North West Passage and for the following century naval officers led expeditions to both polar regions, amongst which the disastrous John Franklin and Robert Falcon Scott attempts are perhaps the best known. Even Ernest Shackleton, nobody’s military conformist, was at one time a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve.
Inspired by a commission as the supply officer in the Royal Navy’s Antarctic patrol ship HMS Protector, Burley set up the 1964 expedition and, emulating Shackleton’s desperate journey of 1916 and following British cartographer Duncan Carse’s 1955 expedition, achieved a crossing of South Georgia. He was the first to ascend Mount Paget and Mount Sugartop while Mount Burley is named after him. In 1970-71 he led an expedition to Elephant Island, following in the steps of Shackleton. A cheerful, thoughtful and enthusiastic leader, he inspired successive Combined Services expeditions and was latterly involved with the British Schools Exploring Society.
Malcolm Keith Burley joined the naval college in 1945 when German bombing at Dartmouth had prompted a move to Eaton Hall, Chester. His subsequent seagoing career was unusually full of incident. After the applied hardships of the training cruiser Frobisher, he joined the cruiser Leander in the Mediterranean where, on October 22, 1946, he was a close witness to the tragic ‘Corfu Incident’ in which, during a demonstration by the navy that the Corfu Channel was international waters, the destroyers Saumarez and Volage were damaged by Albanian mines, incurring the death of 44 sailors. Burley was lent to Volage to list the personal effects of the dead.
An award of damages to Britain by the International Court of Justice has never been paid.
Promoted sub-lieutenant, he joined the cruiser Kenya for a two-year Far East commission. Subsequent to her attendance at the Colombo Commonwealth Conference, the Admiralty ordered Kenya to transport holy relics of the Lord Buddha from Ceylon to Rangoon; Burley’s memoir amusingly records the shifts Kenya made appropriately to accommodate both relics and huge numbers of worshipful companions.
During Kenya’s maintenance period in Singapore, Burley commanded a motor-boat patrolling the Johore river against communist terrorists. While alarmed by monkey ‘eldritch shrieks’ and ‘crocodile splashes’, mangrove swamps and dense jungle made enemy contact unlikely.
Kenya’s placid passage to Hong Kong was interrupted by the outbreak of the Korean war and orders to proceed to Japan. Month-long patrols followed, with frequent bombardments in support of United Nations forces against North Korean and Chinese. Burnley records Kenya’s role in General Douglas MacArthur’s masterstroke, the amphibious invasion of Inchon, loosing off 1200 rounds of 6-inch ammunition and surviving a duel with a particularly accurate shore battery. Subsequent operations followed the ebb and flow of the conflict.
He was able to visit Hiroshima and bring back a melted roof tile.
Burley’s first commission in the Protector started in 1960 and was repeated in 1964. He subsequently served as a supply officer in the large aircraft-carrier Eagle until 1967 and then as secretary to the admiral at Greenwich naval college followed by a staff post at Fleet Air Arm headquarters.
After his Elephant Island expedition he was appointed to the engineering school HMS Sultan at Gosport in the rank of commander. At this point he foresaw a series of less than exciting jobs in Whitehall and therefore decided to pursue a second career.
As bursar of Stowe School from 1973 to 1983, Burley was clearly a popular and respected round peg in a round hole, participating actively in sports and activities as well as devoting much attention to local affairs. From 1986 to the late 1990s he was estate manager for the Anchorage Estate, Iken, Suffolk.
Amongst his other awards, qualifications and abilities was the freedom of the City of London, some years as a naval diver, a glider pilot and a Royal Yachting Association-qualified Offshore Skipper..
He is survived by his wife Fiona Macdonald, a former WRAC captain, whom he married in 1965, and their three daughters.

Commander Malcolm Burley MBE, Antarctic
expedition leader and FRGS, was born
on September 28, 1927. He died on August 23
aged 82