James Orr was private secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh for 13 years, between 1957 and 1970. His appointment came at a time when his employer had overcome the obstacles put in his way by the old guard at Buckingham Palace and had clearly defined his role.

It was a period of formidable industry, and Orr, who had been a police officer in Africa for 18 years, found himself pivotal to organising the fast-moving Duke’s increasing portfolio of interests, public engagements and global travel. For a man whose police work had followed set, regulated paths, it was another country, and the fact that he invariably rose to the occasion was a tribute to his organisational skills and sense of duty. He was down to earth, without causing offence, and also totally discreet.

In this he was a marked contrast to his predecessor, the extrovert Australian, Mike Parker who had been Prince Philip’s friend and confidant since the days when they were young officers in the Royal Navy. While Parker had an exuberant quarter-deck directness, Orr was by nature quieter, more deferential, and with a strong sense of protocol. He was never on the same sort of terms with the Prince as Parker had been, but his appointment represented a sea change which some members of the Royal Household regarded with relief.

He and Prince Philip had both been pupils at Gordonstoun. Seventeen years after they left the two men encountered each other again, on the quayside at Mombasa, where the Prince was about to board the Royal Yacht, Britannia, for the start of a four-month tour which was to take him round the world; to Australia to open the 1956 Olympic Games, and to parts of the Commonwealth which the Royal Family did not usually reach. Orr was then serving, not very happily, in the Kenya police force, having never found a suitable career niche in England. Prince Philip invited him aboard for a stiff gin and tonic, and after reminiscing about their school days they parted.

Britannia sailed on, but the tour’s serious side was overshadowed by the reporting of Mike Parker’s divorce from his wife Eileen, and the inevitability, in those more censorious times, that he should resign from his post in the Duke’s household.

At the end of the tour when Parker arrived at London airport he was met by the Queen’s Press Secretary, Commander Richard Colville, a man whose brevity when dealing with the media earned him the nickname “the Abominable No-Man”. Parker had hoped for support in dealing with the press, but Colville curtly told him: “I’ve just come to let you know that from now on, you’re on your own.”

Soon afterwards Orr received a letter from Prince Philip inviting him to be his private secretary. Orr arrived at Buckingham Palace when the Duke’s office was in a state of turmoil. Parker’s resignation was a severe blow to Prince Philip, the situation compounded when the Comptroller of the Household, Lieutenant-General “Boy” Browning, who had commanded airborne troops at the battle of Arnhem, had a nervous breakdown. Some at Court thought that he simply could not stand the Prince’s pace, but there were personal reasons too, involving strains in his marriage to the author, Daphne du Maurier.

The Prince liked to have familiar faces in his team, and Browning was replaced by Rear-Admiral Christopher Bonham-Carter, who, like Orr was an old acquaintance, having served with him in the Mediterranean Fleet.

Orr was one of the Prince’s longest- serving private secretaries, popular with the men and women he worked with. But the appointment ended after a staff reorganisation in 1970. He and the Prince remained on friendly terms, and on Orr’s 90th birthday Philip wrote him an affectionate letter, ruminating on the achievement, or otherwise, of their both reaching a great age, and recalling their schooldays; particularly Orr’s starring role as the Prince of Denmark in Gordonstoun’s production of Hamlet, in which the Prince had a much lesser role. Orr had previously played the lead in Macbeth, in which Philip was Donalbain, a part requiring only the learning of eight lines. Orr was a talented actor and among his circle of friends there were those who have said that he should have made his career in the theatre.

James Bernard Vivian Orr was born in London in 1917. Both his parents were Australian, one of Scottish and the other of Irish descent. The family settled in Buckinghamshire where his father was a general practitioner and also worked as an anaesthetist at Westminster Hospital. His mother died when he was a year old, during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

He was one of the earliest recruits to Gordonstoun, joining from Harrow, where he had never settled, and becoming, in his last year, Head Boy, or “Guardian”, in the Platonic idiom espoused by the school’s founder Kurt Hahn. Hahn had a sympathy with waifs and strays and misfits, and befriended Orr, who later recalled how Hahn hated success but loved an idiot, “like myself, for whom he had to battle a bit”. Hahn told him: “You look for faults, Jim. I look for pure gold and I usually find it.” They remained close friends until Hahn’s death in 1974.

From Gordonstoun Orr gained entry to Sandhurst but he failed to pass out. He was proficient on the purely military side but failed the written examinations. In 1939 he joined the British South Africa Police, serving in Southern Rhodesia. After the defeat of the Italians in the Horn of Africa he was attached to the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

When he returned to England in 1949 he found himself in an employment limbo and had to work as a salesman for a jam company. He regarded this as his nadir, and in 1954 joined the Kenya police which at the time was engaged in coping with the Mau Mau uprising.

After leaving Buckingham Palace he was, for 12 years, secretary of the Medical Commission on Accident Prevention, a registered charity inspired by the precepts of Hahn, founded and run by doctors. He retired in 1982 to indulge, among other pursuits, his passion for horse racing — a hobby which during his royal service had endeared him to the Queen.

Orr, who was made an Extra Equerry in 1970, had been appointed MVO in 1962, and advanced to CVO in 1968. He did not marry.

James Orr, CVO, private secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh, 1957-70, was born on November 19, 1917. He died on June 14, 2008, aged 90