AN SAS SKETCHER

A Post As A Mark Of Respect To An Old Friend:

EARLY 70s ANTI TERRORIST TEAM MEMBER

22 SAS Regiment has certainly had it’s fair share of characters with skills over and above soldiering.

We’ve had an ex monk, a doctor a dentist…a woodsman…and we’ve had a good few excellent artists and sketchers, all just in my time of just under 20 years from the mid 70s to the mid 90s.

One such artist and sketcher was a laddie named Roy T. He joined the Regiment before me and had a couple of Dhofar tours under his belt before I showed up. A great soldier and manager, I got to work with him many times over the years. Some of the sketches doing the rounds on the internet came from Roy. The sketch above is of a lad named Dave wearing a pair of tankies’ black overalls, desert boots, a 9mm Browning pistol in a leather holster, and an army issued respirator OVER an improvised NBC hood. His main weapon is the Ingram M10…Special Projects team weapon of choice before they managed to get their hands on the H&K MP5.

The Ingram was a dreadful weapon, dangerous and definitely not for anti terrorist tactics. In my early days I was using it until the Regiment was fully equipped with the MP5 in the mid 70s.

Roy was with us in the Iranian Embassy siege of 1980 in London. Needless to say days after, he came up with a witty sketch of the operation referred to as “The Joker.”

ROY’S SKETCH OF THE IRANIAN EMBASSY OPERATION OF 1980

These were signed by Roy and passed out to those members of B Squadron who took part in the operation. Years later when the world became computerized, it was copied many times sadly, and individuals would sell them with their own autographed versions. Today variants of the original can be seen online done by others, including Roy’s original.

NB: You can see clearly how in a matter of a handful of years the kit had changed dramatically from the original team member. Through lessons learnt in training, the mask was moved UNDER the hood in order to keep a tight seal to the face. However the original team member’s kit lasted just a few months before other items were quickly purchased by the Regiment.

ROY’S SELF PORTRAIT.

Roy would always sketch the incoming B Squadron SSM, It would take pride of place on the wall behind the SSM’s desk during his tenure. He did sketches of a few of the other lads too, and I was absolutely honoured that he would recently do one of me.