“Well, drive one another crazy and leave me out of it.” Ultimately he provokes such sexual hysteria in one of the nuns (Kathleen Byron) that in the film’s delirious climax she dons vivid make-up and attempts murder. His final parting with Kerr is touchingly tinged with unspoken regret, while the film’s penultimate close- up of Farrar’s rain-streaked face watching the nuns go is extraordinarily moving.Powell and Pressburger had signed Farrar to a three-film contract and he was impressive as the government backroom scientist with a tin foot in their excellent adaptation of Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room convincingly combining integrity and self-pity. Clothed only in khaki shorts for most of the film, he represents the world the nuns have forsaken: “Ever since you came here you’ve all gone crazy,” he tells the nuns’ leader Deborah Kerr. Later he starred as Detective Blake himself in two films, Meet Sexton Blake (1944) and The Echo Murders (1945). In Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942) Farrar was one of the Germans masquerading as British soldiers in an English village, chillingly ordering the execution of five children as a reprisal for an attempted escape; but he was more typically cast as an heroic commander of an air-sea rescue unit in Charles Crichton’s fine piece of wartime propaganda For Those In Peril (1944) and an intelligence officer fighting the Nazis in The Lisbon Story (1946).Farrar’s breakthrough from reliable leading man to star came the following year with his casting as the officer who brings home a German wife in Basil Dearden’s Frieda, and as the agent overseeing the Himalayan palace converted to a nunnery in Powell and Pressburger’s masterpiece Black Narcissus. Born in Forest Gate, London, in 1908, Farrar joined the Morning Advertiser on leaving school at 15 and worked as a journalist until deciding on a stage career in 1932.

With his wife he ran a repertory company until he entered films in 1937 with a role in the Jessie Matthews musical Head Over Heels, the first of several minor roles as he learnt the differences between stage and screen acting.
In the enjoyable Boy’s Own adventure tale Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938) he was Granite Grant, an agent on the track of the Black Quorum, “the greatest crime organisation of the century”. With his dark, saturnine good looks, distinctively clipped tones and what Michael Powell described as “the kind of physical appeal which is rare among British actors”, David Farrar was a popular leading man in the cinema of the Forties. He was particularly adept at conveying the weaknesses and human qualities in figures of authority and intelligence as in two of his finest films, Black Narcissus (1947) and The Small Back Room (1948), and he could be considered an early exponent of “anti-hero” roles. The fact that the Scottish police are held in such high regard in and out of Scotland is due to the calibre and lives of men like him.Tam DalyellJohn Henry Orr, police officer: born Edinburgh 13 June 1918; Chief Constable, Dundee 1960-68, Lothians and Peebles 1968-75, Lothian and Borders Police 1975-83; OBE 1972; Honorary Secretary, Association of Police Officers (Scotland) 1974-83; President, Scottish Rugby Union 1975-76; QPM 1977; Kt 1979; married 1942 Isobel Campbell (one son, one daughter); died Edinburgh 26 September 1995.. “Nuisance though it may be, and terribly expensive in terms of police time, it is vitally important that the police officers should appear in courts of law, to give evidence.

If undercover agents give evidence in court they do not remain undercover for long.”John Orr embodied all that was good about the police forces in Scotland, where he was the honorary secretary of the chief constables. Supported by his wife Isobel, also in the police force, Orr demanded that everything about the police be above board.In my last conversation with him, at the funeral of a West Lothian officer, Supt Donald Mackinnon (Orr made a point of attending the funerals of his ex-colleagues), we discussed the idea being floated of the security services’ becoming involved in police work “I am dismayed and appalled,” Orr said. The Scottish Office minister with current responsibility for law and order, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton MP, rightly described him as a “policeman’s policeman”. For a decade and a half he was the chief constable covering the West Lothian constituency and I can testify from my weekly dealings with him that he was fastidious about getting to the root of anything which purported to be a less than frivolous complaint about the police Nobody was more jealous of their good reputation. His contributions to police work earned him an OBE in 1972, the Queen’s Police Medal in 1977 for his impeccable oversight of royal visits and a knighthood in 1979.Orr’s philosophy of policing was that the police were part of the community, accountable to them and there to serve them.

In 1968 he was promoted to be Chief Constable of the Lothians and Peebles force, all of which was grooming for the office of first chief constable of Lothians and Borders police force – formed by amalgamating three forces, Edinburgh City Police, Lothians and Peebles constabulary and Berwick, Roxburgh and Selkirk constabulary, so making one of the largest police forces in Britain. It was part of him that he hated destruction, although he was ever mindful of the bravery of his colleagues who had risked and sacrificed their lives in Bomber Command.He returned to the Edinburgh City Police, rising through the ranks to become Chief Constable of Dundee at the age of 42 in 1960. During the war he was a navigator with Bomber Command, becoming a flying officer. The police input into the success of the games was enormous and that in turn was due to Orr’s intense personal interest.He had joined the Edinburgh City Police as a boy clerk in 1937, soon becoming a regular constable.

Hard but always fair, he was admired with the greatest respect by all those who met him in his capacity as a rugby administrator.”His sporting interests were wide. I saw him in action at first hand during the organisation of the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1970 and again in 1986. In 1939 he was in the running for Scottish international sides. Albeit that he played against Wales and France in 1947, the peak years had slipped by.His interest in rugby was on-going. He acted as chairman of the Police Athletic Association’s rugby section and in 1975-76 he served as president of the Scottish Rugby Union.