During his engineer's career in prewar Egypt, he developed a deep friendship with the Belgian expatriate Vladimir Peniakoff – later to be known as Popsky, creator and leader of a World War II SAS special unit nicknamed Popsky Private Army (PPA) – with whom he toured the Libyan and Egyptian desert: the same desert that would see few years later the two friends facing each others as enemies when World War II broke out.
Pamela Matthews died on 5 December 2005 and is buried beside Popski in Wixoe, Suffolk.
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He married Pamela Firth on 2 April 1948 (she went on to marry T. S. Matthews, former editor of Time magazine, after Popski's death).
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Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Peniakoff DSO MC, a Belgian of White Russian descent, was called "Popski" by Bill Kennedy Shaw, the Intelligence Officer of the Long Range Desert Group, because his signallers had trouble with the spelling of his surname.