MECHANICS and munitions had fascinated George Styles from boyhood. Membership of a rifle club in Crawley, Sussex, fostered his interest in cartridges of all kinds, and eventually he was to assemble a formidable collection. But it was his coolness, dedication to the safety of others and curiosity about the minds of the IRA bombmakers that led to him being awarded the George Cross for defusing two highly dangerous bombs in Belfast in two days in 1971.

He was involved in countering the terrorist bombing campaign in Northern Ireland from the outset of the Troubles in 1969. As the Army’s Senior Ammunition Technical Officer for the Province, he led the team of experts responsible for defusing IRA explosive devices in buildings and cars and for destroying by controlled detonation those impossible to dismantle. This contest with the terrorists could be won only on a day-to-day basis, as the bombmakers sought increasingly sophisticated designs to frustrate the Army’s countermeasures.

The Europa Hotel in Belfast, recently completed at a cost of £2.5 million and where VIPs were often lodged, became a priority target. Styles was called to the Europa on October 22, 1971, when a bomb of an apparently new design had been found in a telephone box in the lobby.

After clearing the area except for his immediate support team, he examined the bomb. It was not only of a new design but, as he was quick to realise, until the electrical circuit inside the device had been neutralised, the slightest movement would detonate the 15 lbs of explosive it contained and kill him instantly.

He made a plan to disarm the bomb in stages, each of which had to be meticulously thought out, executed and confirmed as successful before he could plan and carry out the next stage. It took him seven hours of thinking, planning and working on the bomb to render it harmless. Throughout this period, other than for brief refreshment pauses, his life was at immediate risk. Two days later he was again called to the Europa Hotel to deal with a much larger device, judged to contain 30 lbs of explosive with an even more complex anti-handling mechanism. A deliberately confusing system of duplicate circuits, clearly intended to defeat the disarming techniques he had used on the first bomb, was the first obstacle.

Styles worked out precisely how the anti-handling device was constructed, thus he was able to counter each threat in a sequence that would ensure that the bomb was defused. Success on this second mission came after nine hours work.

He was awarded the George Cross, which ranks with the Victoria Cross, for his courageous and dedicated resolution in defeating the anti-handling devices on the two bombs. In doing so he saved the Europa Hotel from destruction. Of far greater consequence, by unravelling the techniques designed to prevent the device from being disarmed, he protected the lives of subordinate officers and NCOs who would subsequently find themselves dealing with similar systems.

The extent to which Styles had come to understand the terrorists’ bomb-making expertise was apparent in a press interview at the time of the announcement of his award. “Each designer leaves his trademark,” he explained. “From the circuits he constructs one can see where he went to school, or by whom he was taught.” This information was of great value to the security services, although the IRA took care not to put the lives of their key bombmakers in danger by allowing them any part in placing the explosives. Not infrequently, it was discovered that the designers of electrical circuits used in terrorist bombs were perfectly respectable citizens, whose ideas intended for legitimate purposes had been stolen by the IRA.

In the year after Styles’s success with the bombs in the Europa Hotel, experts under his command dismantled more than 1,000 explosive devices in Northern Ireland and destroyed more than 1,000 others by controlled detonation.

Stephen George Styles was born in Crawley, Sussex, educated at Collyers Grammar School, Horsham, and commissioned into the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in 1947. He was seconded to The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, to gain infantry experience, and served with the 1st Battalion in the Malayan Emergency from 1949 to 1951. He was mentioned in dispatches, which he modestly claimed was in recognition of his bringing down a charging water buffalo with a single shot to the heart during a chance encounter in the jungle.

In 1966 his expert knowledge of explosives engineering was called upon for the demolition of a giant, 1,100-ton “Goliath” crane at Dungeness nuclear power station after it had served its purpose during the construction phase. Dismantling it piece by piece would have been lengthy and prohibitively expensive. At the same time it was essential, because of the proximity of the nuclear power station, for there to be minimum earth shock. Styles devised a system to collapse the structure into an area of shingle, to absorb the shock, and prolong the period of impact by a sequence of charges to break the rigid joints of the crane while it was actually falling. His system proved entirely successful.

After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972 he continued his close interest in IRA bomb-making methods throughout the rest of his service career and, with the help of a journalist, published Bombs Have No Pity in 1975. He argued for a redesign of commercial detonators to preclude their use in improvised explosive devices, which he proved to be feasible. He was, however, defeated in an initiative to introduce legislation to make the design mandatory by the Chief Inspector of Explosives with the response: “You don’t need laws to beat terrorists, you need more policemen.”

Styles retired from the Army in 1974 and served as a director of various companies and as a consultant. But most of his time was taken up by rifle and game shooting, and cataloguing his collection of rare and specialist cartridges.

He married Mary Rose Woolgar in 1952. They had a son and two daughters.

Lieutenant-Colonel George Styles, GC, explosives specialist and engineer, was born on March 16, 1928. He died on August 1, 2006, aged 78.