Sir John Gorman, was a staunchly British Northern Irishman with an unflinching sense of service, which he demonstrated in winning the Irish Guards’ first Military Cross during a tank action in the Normandy campaign.

After the war he joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary before becoming a senior manager with British Overseas Airways Corporation, then head of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Finally he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly as the sole Roman Catholic member of the Ulster Unionist Party there, and served as Deputy Speaker until the Assembly’s suspension in 2002.

John Reginald Gorman was born on February 1 1923 at Mullaghmore House, Co Tyrone. Both sides of his family were Catholics and Unionists. His father, an RUC district inspector, had won an MC while serving in Palestine during the First World War and, as a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, had handed over the Phoenix Park barracks to Michael Collins after the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty — after which he moved north.

Having been educated by Loretto nuns at Omagh, John was sent to the Imperial Service College at Windsor. After war broke out in 1939 he attended Portrora Royal School, Enniskillen, which was then a firmly Anglican establishment and the Province’s leading public school. Despite the school’s religious ethos, Sir John never found his Catholicism a source of trouble or comment.

Commissioned into the Irish Guards in 1942, Sir John first experienced action as a tank commander during Operation Goodwood on July 18 1944.

At Cagny, five miles from Caen, Sir John’s troop was confronted by four enemy tanks, among them a King Tiger whose gun was aimed at one of their tanks. He had previously told his driver, Corporal James Baron, that if they were to encounter any of the feared Tigers, “The only thing we can do is to use naval tactics — if the 88mm gun is pointing away from us, we shall have to use the speed of the Sherman and ram it.”

The Sherman duly crashed through a hedge and careered down the slope at 40mph towards the King Tiger. With 75 yards to go before impact, the Sherman’s gunner, Guardsman Scholes, fired a high-explosive shell at the King Tiger, but it failed to penetrate the armour.

^{Sir John Gorman’s autobiography, published in 2002}

The British tank struck the King Tiger hard on its right track, and both crews bailed out. The Sherman’s front gunner, Guardsman Agnew, mistakenly took refuge in a ditch with the German crew; on realising his error, he saluted smartly and disappeared into a cornfield to rejoin his comrades.

Having led his men to safety behind a hedge, Sir John raced 400 yards to leap into a lone Firefly tank, where one crew member had been decapitated and two others were in shock. The vehicle was still workable so, after removing the body and wiping the blood from the gun sights, Sir John fired its gun to disable the Tiger and his own tank, before driving behind three more Tigers to score two hits. He then carried three burning men from another Sherman to an aid post.

For this action, Sir John was recommended for an Immediate MC and Baron for a Military Medal. Both men were presented with their medals in the field by General Montgomery.

Outside Brussels the regiment was greeted by jubilant crowds, and an elderly woman presented Gorman with a copy of Some Experiences of an Irish RM, which had been left at her parents’ house by another Irish Guardsman in 1914. But the war was not yet over, and Sir John, by now a captain, attended the briefing on the impending Arnhem campaign given by Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks, the Corps Commander. When Horrocks announced that the “honour of leading this great dash which may end the war” would be given to the Irish Guards, Sir John expostulated: “Oh, my God, not again!” Sir John and his troop crossed the Nijmegen bridge before the advance was called off. 

^{Sir John Gorman playing a fife (BELFAST TELEGRAPH)}

Having left the Army in the rank of captain in 1946, Sir John joined the RUC and became a district inspector in Antrim. There, in 1947, he came into conflict with the young Ian Paisley, who had objected to a proposed Roman Catholic pilgrimage to a holy well at Rasharkin. Gorman gave the procession an RUC guard on the Feast of the Assumption.

In 1955 he was moved, as district inspector, to Armagh where, shortly after his arrival, he and an Army officer, Major Brian Clark, helped to disarm a young fusilier who had gone berserk.Sir John suggested to Clark that their exploit was worth a medal — but only one. They tossed a coin for the honour and in due course Clark, on Sir John’s recommendation, was awarded the George Medal. Later, with the approval of the Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal D’Alton, Sir John uncovered an IRA bomb-making factory in the Catholic Cathedral, which led to the arrest of three armed gunmen hiding in the confessionals.

During the IRA’s border campaign in the 1950s Sir John acted as a liaison officer with MI5 and MI6, and in 1960 his security contacts put his name forward for the position of chief of security at BOAC. One of his first duties was to supervise the security arrangements for the royal tour of Pakistan, Nepal and Iran in 1961, at the end of which he was appointed CVO. He was later promoted the airline’s head of personnel, with a seat on the board. In 1968 he moved to become the airline’s manager in Canada, and, from 1975, in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

In 1979 Sir John returned to his native province to become deputy chairman and chief executive of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the country’s largest owner of public housing. He succeeded in cleaning up corruption and selling off council houses, and in 1986 became part-time director of the Institute of Directors in Northern Ireland, an office he held until 1995.

In 1990 he aroused controversy when he invited the Irish Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, to address an IoD meeting in Belfast, in Haughey’s capacity as President of the European Union. Prominent among opponents of the visit was the Unionist politician David Trimble. None the less, after David’s election as Ulster Unionist leader in 1995, Sir John joined the UUP, and in 1996 was nominated by his party as a member of the Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue, a body which had been set up in parallel with inter-party talks. He was subsequently chairman of the Forum, a position which he held until its last session in April 1998.

Following the Belfast Agreement of the same year, Sir John was elected as member for North Down in the new Northern Ireland Assembly, and served as a Deputy Speaker of the assembly from 2000 until its suspension in 2002. As the lone Roman Catholic in the Ulster Unionist Group at Stormont, Sir John, with his neat military moustache, cut a somewhat idiosyncratic figure (his opponents called him “Captain Mainwaring”). On one occasion television viewers in Northern Ireland were entertained by the astonishing spectacle of him urging the bemused Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to blow up IRA arms in “one big bang”.

In 2002 he published an autobiography, The Times of My Life.

John Gorman was appointed MBE in 1959, CBE in 1974 and was knighted in 1998. In 2005 he was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. He married, in 1948, Heather Caruth, who survives him with two daughters and a son. Another son predeceased him.

Sir John Gorman, born February 1 1923, died May 26 2014