Early Life
Born to John Edward Pine-Coffin and Louise Pine-Coffin at Portledge, the Pine-Coffin family estate in Devon, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. His family had a long tradition of serving in the British armed forces; his father, a brevet major in the British Army, served with the mounted infantry in the Second Boer War (gaining the Distinguished Service Order) and died in 1919, whilst his uncle, Lieutenant Tristram James Pine-Coffin served in World War I and died in northwestern Russia in 1919.
During World War II, R. G. Pine-Coffin's brother, E. C. Pine-Coffin, served in Malaya as a lieutenant-colonel in the British Indian Army and was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942. R. G. himself had been commissioned into his local infantry regiment, the Devonshire Regiment, as a second lieutenant in 1928. He was promoted lieutenant in 1931 and captain in 1938. He was promoted major (war substantive) shortly after the beginning of the Second World War.
Read more about this topic: Richard Geoffrey Pine-Coffin
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