Sir Hamish Forbes

At Oflag VIIC, Lt Forbes picked up escaping tactics early, discovering that lax drill at parades made counting difficult for their captors, and provided cover for escapes. With colleagues Mike Edwards and James McDonnell, he first practised techniques on the commandant's wine cellar, opening the door by removing the hinges.

He dug his first tunnel at Laufen, enterprisingly muffling the noise of breaking through a foundation brick wall using the sound of the camp orchestra playing the Anvil Chorus from Faust. But a suspicious German officer ordered the orchestra to halt, with Forbes continuing for a few beats. He recorded in his memoirs of 1996: "Guards and dogs rushed in, and we tunnellers were caught in flagrante delicto."

Escape seven at Oflag VIB, near Warburg, saw the lean 6ft frame of Forbes improbably given documents describing him as a Danish ballet dancer. He shuffled towards the gate dressed in an orderly's clothes, the distinctive mole on his face covered by a plaster. But at the gate, this was pulled off by a German guard, and the ruse was uncovered.

Shifted by this time to a jail in Paderborn, Forbes and a companion painfully secreted pieces of purloined hacksaw blades and, after lights out, successfully cut their way out of the cells, only to be discovered by a German officer paying a latrine visit.

The tenth attempt involved Forbes and Rhodesian Wally Saul as members of a "work party" under the charge of a "German NCO" leaving in broad daylight. They travelled by night for eight days, enjoying their hoarded hard tack, and digging up fresh potatoes. This escape proved a high point for Forbes, he recording in his diary the "wonderful feeling to hear the animals calling to each other, being free and in the wild".

But a mix-up in train times saw them picked up by a German posse at a rural railway station, and taken to a local jail where he and Saul were separately and severely interrogated, so much so that Forbes passed a message to a German girl also interned there to contact his mother after the war, to give her the fate of her son.

Back at Rothenburg, and after 25 days in the "cooler", Forbes noticed the guards in early 1945 becoming friendlier. With Jaime Russo and Freddy Gray, Forbes took his opportunity one evening when a group was forced aboard a lorry. "We merely faded into the background," he recorded. They cut across country in a night, just in time to join the American 1st Army for breakfast - a dozen fried eggs each.

Asked in later years why he was a constant escaper, his modest response was: "Because it was my duty to do so." He wrote up his escaping history at the behest of his children, some 25 pages of typing interrupted with remarks such as: "Eight pages without a break. Time now for a drink."

He once used his sardonic humour on a Prime Minister, when he commanded the Nepal representation at the 1945 victory celebrations in Hyde Park to find that an order specified that only divisional representatives were to be presented to the King. In his contingent were three Nepali generals, so Forbes telephoned Clement Attlee direct. The Prime Minister professed to know nothing about arrangements, and even less about Nepal, to which Major Forbes countered: "It's that place top right of India." Forbes won, and the three generals received a royal handshake.

Hamish Stewart Forbes, second son of Col James Forbes and his wife, Feridah Taylor, was born in London on February 15, 1916, into comfortable circumstances, enjoying a town home in Cadogan Place, education at Eton and summers shooting on moors above Newe and Allargue in West Aberdeenshire. Forbes was bright, and won a scholarship to Laurenceville in the US following a tip-off by Nancy, Lady Astor.

Following his education and until the outbreak of war, and a commission in the regular army, Forbes worked with Eno's, the health-salts company, and the sugar broker Czarnikow.

Descended from William Forbes of Dauch, and through him to Duncan Dominus de Forbes of 1271, he enjoyed the whimsy of another lineage which claimed a pedigree right back to Rhydderch Hael, Brythonic hero of Strathclyde and the original Old King Cole.

His personal passion was heraldry, and he bore the right of the arms of Lord Pitsligo, attained in the '45, following a recognition by the Lord Lyon that the line of Newe was heir-male to the Jacobite Pitsligo.

His interest in heraldry and genealogy, plus his wide connections, made him an ideal secretary of the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem, at their priory headquarters in Clerkenwell. Heir to the baronetcy of Newe held by his third cousin, Col Sir John Forbes of Newe, 6th baronet, Major Forbes succeeded as 7th baronet in 1984.

A lifelong painter and sculptor, he garnered materials in every prison camp for brushes and oil paints, in one case producing a self-portrait on one side of a bedboard, with a likeness of Mike Scott, a work now in the Imperial War Museum.

He painted wherever he travelled, in pencil, oil and watercolour. He painted members of his family, sculpted bronzes of his wife Mary and their dogs, made a stone and cement carving of his coat-of-arms and illustrated his heraldry on the gates of the twentieth-century castellated home he and Mary built at his beloved Newe. Into his late eighties, he worked several times a week at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop several miles away at Lumsden.

His greatest years were as patron of the Lonach Highland Society, founded in 1823 by his ancestor Sir Charles, 3rd baronet. Lonach is now the last remaining Highland friendly society (there once were around 60 throughout the world) which still has its members annually marching in full Highland attire - kilt, doublet, plaid and long sporran, armed with pikes - sampling Highland hospitality at half a dozen stops before the games commence. The day after, sober Lonach Highlanders attend the annual Kirk service, and Forbes would be out of uniform, wearing the kilt jacket made for his father in London in 1904, the brown tweed now faded to a genteel purple.

Sir Hamish and Lady Forbes settled with gusto into life in Strathdon in north-east Scotland, he taking a chairing role in affairs of Lonach throughout the year, and proving himself difficult to emulate, copy or follow, an unassuming man working for the good of his community with self-effacement. When in 1991, Lonach was invited to the Braemar Gathering for the Queen to inspect the colours, he retaught himself to ride a horse and, mounted on Wizard, led 150 Highlanders over the mountains from Donside to Deeside.

Five years later, with Lonach the sole representatives of Scotland at the 1100th anniversary celebrations commemorating the founding of Hungary in 896, Sir Hamish led 120 Highlanders and a pipe band to Budapest and a dozen venues over 10 days. His idiosyncratic orders to his troops became the stuff of Magyar legend: "Lonach Highlanders - order pikes. Stand at ease. Assume a lazy posture."

His funeral on Monday in Strathdon will feature a guard of honour from the Lonach Highlanders, and much heraldry, including a hatchment of his arms painted by the advocate Mark Dennis.

Sir Hamish, divorced from his first wife, Jacynthe Underwood, married secondly Mary Rigby MBE. He died on Monday and is survived by Lady Forbes and his children, Serena, Jane, James and Christian and grandchildren.

He is succeeded in the baronetcy by his son James Forbes of Newe and Edinglassie, Younger.

GORDON CASELY