Jimmy Riddell

Scots Guard forever linked with film director Franco Zeffirelli

Born: 10 February, 1923, in Buckhaven, Fife. Died: 26 March 2008, in Dunfermline, aged 85.

JIMMY Riddell was a 21-year-old Scots Guardsman from Fife who had survived the North Africa campaign and the bloody four-month battle for Monte Cassino when, in June 1944, he found himself huddling in bushes near Sienna looking for retreating German army stragglers. Suddenly a young man around his own age emerged from a ditch with his hands in the air and shouted in a fairly posh accent: "Are you English?"

There was a long silence before the reply came: "Naw!"

The young man later recalled: "I closed my eyes and died a thousand deaths. My legs went weak and I could barely keep my arms up. A soldier, poking his gun out before him, thrust his face close to mine and, through a mask of simulated fury, hissed: 'We're no f***ing English, son, we're Scottish. Who the hell are you?'

"Franco Zeffirelli, Italian resistance. Thank you for liberating my country."

Neither man could know then that the latter would become one of the world's finest film and opera directors, or that he would seek out the Scot he considered "like a twin to me" 50 years after the war.

Riddell's life back in Scotland would be less glamorous, but no less well-lived, a widely-active member of the community in Ladybank, Fife. It turned out the two men were born two days apart.

In his autobiography, the native of Florence described that first meeting. He had spent the night in the ditch, hiding from German units, when he saw what he hoped were British army helmets in nearby bushes. "The first one I saw was Jimmy. What happened next was like a dream."

Since Riddell was attached to the intelligence branch of the 1st Battalion Scots Guards, it fell to him to "interrogate" Zeffirelli, but that mainly involved giving him a wee dram and kitting him out in full guardsman's uniform, complete with beret, gaiters and regimental badge.

Riddell realised that the Italian's good English, learned from an Inverness-born woman who helped bring him up in Florence and taught him Shakespeare, could be invaluable. The guards' interpreter had been blown up by a mine so they took on Zeffirelli until the end of the war, during which time he and Riddell were "like brothers, sharing everything, from danger to rations".

Riddell explained later: "Had he been captured in civilian clothes, they would have strung him up. We had to get him into a uniform. I don't think with the Japs it would have worked, but with the Germans you more or less got a fair crack of the whip."

Zeffirelli tried to trace his Scottish friend several times after the war but had wrongly assumed his surname was spelt Riddle. Then people thought he was teasing them because "Jimmy Riddell" is rhyming slang for "piddle". It was while the director was in Scotland in 1990, shooting the film Hamlet at Blackness and Dunnottar castles, with stars Mel Gibson, Glenn Close and Helena Bonham Carter, that he contacted The Scotsman and found Riddell's address.

The two men kept in touch by phone but met for the first time at Edinburgh airport in 1995. As a member of Ladybank and District Community Council, Riddell had invited the director to take part in a VE Day 50th anniversary ceremony at Annsmuir caravan park, near Ladybank. The park was once used to house Italian prisoners of war. They stayed in touch and Zeffirelli phoned his old friend in hospital shortly before he died.

The director drew on his experiences with Riddell and the Scots Guards in his partly-autobiographical 1999 film Tea with Mussolini, starring Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, in which a Scottish soldier liberating Florence barks, in language less colourful than the real-life original: "No! We are not bloody English, laddie! We're bloody Scots!"

James Riddell grew up and went to school in Colingshurt, Fife, and worked in a bakery, then a grocery store before joining up with the Scots Guards in 1942, serving first in north Africa. After the war, he returned to Fife, marrying Kathleen McCulloch of Cumrie, Perthshire, in 1957. He built up a successful haulage business, J G Riddell and Sons, outside Ladybank, transporting mainly sand and gravel throughout Fife, until he retired in 1995.

He remained an active member of the Ladybank community, its festive committee and its youth club and was honorary president of the Scottish Vintage Vehicle Federation due to his great love, vintage cars and lorries, especially his 1939 Albion fire engine.

He was also known as "the community mastermind." His daughter Sandra explained: "He was a man full of knowledge. If you wanted to know anything, people would say, 'Go to Jimmy Riddell. Somewhere in his brain he's bound to know that.'"

He is survived by his wife, three sons and daughter.