His father, by then working for an engineering firm in Malaya, was interned by the Japanese in Singapore’s notorious Changi jail until 1945. Meanwhile Bill Duff was commissioned in 1st Battalion Princess Louise’s (Kensington) Regiment. He served in the Italian campaign, and later in Sudan and Palestine, where his fascination with the Arab world took root. He returned to Oxford to study Arabic, and perfected his fine command of the language at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies at Shemlan in the Lebanon before joining what was then the Bank of Iran and the Middle East — originally the Imperial Bank of Persia and later, as British Bank of the Middle East, a subsidiary of HSBC.