Yorkshire regiment padre on what it means to keep soldiers' spirits up in Catterick Garrison and Kosovo

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post at Kosovo’s Camp Bondsteel, he talks about his route to becoming a padre, shares details of his spiritual and pastoral work - and of what he keeps in his “bag of morale” when times get tough.

“Soldiers have had chaplains for centuries. Look at the Bayeux Tapestry and you’ve got Bishop Odo encouraging the troops,” says Rob.

“I suppose the Chaplains’ Department, as it is now, really dates back to the Great War and the experiences of chaplains being embedded with troops. Wherever the unit goes, the unit chaplain goes.

“From a Christian perspective, it’s a very incarnational ministry, it’s very in the flesh, on the ground with these guys.

“I am in a tent with 40 other lads and apparently I snore, really loudly. Tough - suck it up.”

Discomfort did not seem to faze Rob’s family. His father, Imre, came over from Hungary after he was involved in the 1956 uprising, leaving student life in Budapest to flee, via Austria, to the UK, where he landed in Halifax.

Imre later met Rob’s mother, whose family had moved from Ripon, North Yorkshire, in Dunstable, where they worked at the Vauxhall plant.

Rob himself was ordained as Anglican minister in 2001 and became a priest in 2002 in St Albans, serving as a curate.

He then moved to Teesside and spent 18 years as a parish priest in Hemlington and South Thornaby.

In 2017 he went to visit a friend who was a chaplain with the Royal British Legion in Germany, which was when the idea of becoming a padre was first suggested to him.

“I had done 22 years as a parish priest, pretty much. I wasn’t exactly disillusioned but there used to be some Sundays where I sort of felt ‘I don’t really want to do this’.

“It’s a difficult one to put your finger on. Maybe I was being pushed in a particular direction, you know, by a higher power.

“But I realised when I hit my 40s, and certainly when I came into the department - so I’d started doing ministry as a chaplain to the cadets - that I’d spent most of my life with old ladies.”

In 2018 he was commissioned as chaplain to the Cleveland Army Cadet Force and he then applied to be a reservist chaplain.

“If you’re going to have a midlife crisis, join the Army,” says Rob, who now lives at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire with his wife, with whom he has three children, after being asked to be chaplain for the 1st Battalion of the Royal Yorkshire Regiment (1 R YORKS).

“I was over the moon because half of my cadet detachments in Cleveland were cap-badged by the Yorkshire Regiment as their local regiment,” he says.

Rob officially joined in December 2018 and had a “whirlwind” first year as, in 2019 it was the centenary of King George V granting the “Royal” prefix to the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department in 1919 to mark their contribution in the First World War.

Also that year, he was one of 10 chaplains to participate at the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall.

However, Covid-19 proved to be particularly tragic. A cadet who Rob knew, Benji Catchpole, took his own life aged just 15.

“I then, in the midst of that, was ministering to his family, his unit and did his funeral, which is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” says Rob.

The experience led Rob to help with raising awareness of mental health issues in the military through Army Cadets Healthy Minds and the British Army’s own OPSMART programme.

While Rob operates outside the chain of command, he is on-hand to offer support to anyone from the commanding officer - at 1 R YORKS that is Lieutenant Colonel Ed Lyons - down to newly recruited Privates, should they need it.

“It’s the best job in the world,” he says, praising the “real family feel” of his unit.

Troops will come to speak to him about all sorts - camp life, relationships, careers, and “sometimes they’re asking ultimate questions, spiritual questions,” he says.

He adds: “Lots of conversations start, ‘Padre, I’m not religious, but…’”

The idea is that people of all religions, denominations and non-believers can access support.

“We say that we’re chaplains to all faiths and none. At the moment, the Chaplains’ Department is broadly Christian,” says Rob. “We’ve had Jewish chaplains since the end of the 19th century, so we’ve been multi-faith for over 100 years as a department. And I think I’m right that we’ve now got one commissioned Imam for the department.”

Rob’s time with 1 R YORKS is a two-year posting which started in December last year, so by late 2025 he will likely be preparing to move on to another unit.

Meanwhile, Rob’s eldest son, Ben, a drummer, is joining the reserves as a musician.

Indeed the Padre himself, dressed in his camouflage uniform - dispensing at camp with the customary clerical collar - to an untrained eye could be mistaken for any other soldier.

“I’m from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church, so smells and bells and vestments are my stock in trade,” he says. “But in the field, travel light.”

The same goes for the venue of Sunday morning’s Holy Communion service in Kosovo in mid-October.

With the smell of cooked breakfast still lingering, the Yorkshire battle group’s mess tent in Camp Fortune, their temporary patch of Camp Bondsteel, fills with soldiers hoping not for seconds, but some spiritual nourishment, as the austere space doubles as their church.

And Biblical parables, it seems, provide handy parallels for a military tour.

In one example, Rob tells the congregation: “Jesus, as our recce patrol, has identified for us the obstacles and the dangers that we all need to face when we go through life.”

But if the words of wisdom in his sermon don’t work, Rob always carries another source of comfort - an “MTB bag of morale, which contains Haribo and Werther’s Original and Maoams and all that stuff.

“It doesn’t matter whether they’re 18 or 48, when the bag of morale comes out they all look like they’re six.”