Page 104 - Wish Stream Year of 2017

Andrew Orgill, BA MA ALA Senior Librarian at Sandhurst 1987–2017
Sebastian Puncher, Deputy Curator, MA AMA
September 2017 was the date of the retire- ment of our respected friend and Senior Librarian Andrew Alan Orgill. As an oracle
of information, a diviner of databases and an all-round good chap, he assisted many a cadet, academic, and various other waifs and strays with the information they needed.
Andrew was in Grant’s House at Westminster School (1969 – 1974) and then graduated from University College London with a degree in Mod- ern Iberian and Latin American Regional Stud- ies in 1977. An MA in Library and Information Studies followed in 1983, then work in Whitehall libraries, where he met his future wife Karen. He joined RMA Sandhurst in 1987, a place in fact he had a prior connection to - his father was an Officer Cadet at the RMC OCTU during the Sec- ond World War. After joining, Andrew wrote two Bibliographies. The first, published in 1993, was “The Falklands War: Background, Conflict, After- math: An Annotated Bibliography”. The second was “1990-91 Gulf War: Crisis, Conflict, After- math - An Annotated Bibliography”, published in 1995. A review for the latter reads:
“This is a well-organised, well-produced and well-indexed bibliography. It is remarkably free
Andrew greeting Maj Gen Vasili Golubev, Commandant of the Kirov Combined Arms Military Academy, Russia, April 1990, RMAS Commandant, Maj Gen PW Graham
from error and particularly strong on military matters, where it is unlikely to be surpassed. It deserves a place in all libraries dealing with modem Middle Eastern strategic and military studies.”
(From British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Nov., 1996), pp. 248-249)
Praise indeed – no librarian could do more. Or could they? As librarian Andrew had the thank- less task of editing The Wish Stream in the days before computer assistance and all layouts had to be done by hand. Unsurprisingly he grasped with alacrity a secondment to act as adviser to the Sultan of Brunei to establish a new library for the country. He returned in 1999 and began working on books of his own – one in conjunc- tion with the Curator on the history of Sandhurst up to the Battle of Waterloo, and the other about the fortunes of a particular Royal Military College intake of 1882. His retirement will allow him the time to complete these projects. Andrew also contributed to the ‘Sandhurst: A Tradition of Leadership’ book (2005), various Wish Stream articles and implemented the Sandhurst Occa- sional Papers series in 2010 which continues today. In recent years he was awarded the Adju-
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