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the Navy Network

Keep an eye on the Telegraphs obit page you will be surprised by some of the stories told !

Lily Lambert McCarthy
Nelson collector who was honoured for her wartime work and gave her collection to the Royal Navy Museum.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../22/db2202.xml


Lily Lambert McCarthy
(Filed: 22/04/2006)

Lily Lambert McCarthy, who has died aged 91, was an American millionairess decorated by the British for her war work, and also a generous benefactress of museums and libraries in England and the United States.



As a teenager she became fascinated by Nelson after being given a leather-bound first edition of Southey's biography by her father, who had purchased the admiral's portrait by Füger.

This led her to start buying Nelsonia in England during the 1920s, when prices were low; her last purchase, an engraving of the admiral's funeral car, was made just before her death on March 3.

Lily Lambert McCarthy's collection required its own room wherever she lived, including her Paris apartment during her husband's ambassadorship to the OECD: French officials, she noted, were "truly diplomatic" when they dined with them.

With the austere Admiral Sir John (Black Jack) Frewen, whom she met at an English dinner party, she campaigned against the demolition of some handsome 18th-century warehouses in Portsmouth which eventually became the Royal Navy Museum.

Eventually she gave her vast collection to the museum. But when the Navy announced that the aircraft carrier Ark Royal would fetch it from New York, she objected, saying that Nelson would have not have known what a carrier was. The frigate Lowestoft, namesake of the ship in which Nelson had been a lieutenant, was diverted from Hong Kong to the United States.

Lily Lambert McCarthy also gave her 1,000-volume collection to Portsmouth Central Library and another Nelson collection to the Mariners' Museum at Newport News, Virginia.

In 1972 she was appointed an honorary CBE at a ceremony hosted by Lord Carrington in the Admiralty Board room.

Born Lily Lambert in New York on September 3 1914, she was the youngest child of an American pharmaceutical millionaire who had made his fortune marketing his father's invention of Listerine, an antiseptic mouthwash named after the chemist Lord Lister.

While briefly attending Foxcroft, a Virginian finishing school, she preferred books to ponies, and particularly enjoyed reading in her small panelled cabin aboard her father's three-masted schooner.

On the outbreak of war in 1939, young Lily founded and ran the Princeton branch of the British War Relief Society, although the model of a British lion in her office window at first provoked rotten eggs and poison-pen letters.

When growing numbers of Royal Navy seamen filled Asbury Park, a derelict New Jersey resort hotel, while their ships were being repaired in East Coast dockyards, she organised them into cleaning and maintenance teams, ordered furniture from Macy's on her father's credit, and bullied suppliers for gifts of Christmas puddings.

At five o'clock each morning she advertised the availability of British sailors to work on farms upcountry, taking care to match individuals so that highlanders went to families of Scots descent, and Plymouth sailors to families of West Country origin.

She became the queen bee of the "stone frigate" HMS Asbury, and was appointed an honorary OBE in 1946.

In 1971 Lily Lambert McCarthy bought Court Lodge, a Tudor house at Ewhurst, West Sussex, which her ancestor, John Wesley, had often visited. While she expanded her collection to fill the old dairy, which became a "Nelson room", her husband helped to found an historic gardens trust in Sussex.

After returning to America to be nearer her grandchildren she published Remembering Nelson (1995), a scholarly catalogue of her collection at the Royal Navy Museum. Admired for her grace and ability to inspire others, she was said to have "a hint of Katharine Hepburn at her most languidly imperious".

Lily Lambert married, in 1934, William Fleming, whom she divorced in 1940, and John McCarthy in 1944. She is survived by three sons and two daughters.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../27/db2701.xml

Rear-Admiral Bob Timbrell


Naval officer who rescued some 900 troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940.


Rear-Admiral Bob Timbrell, who has died aged 86, was a young Royal Canadian Navy officer still at the gunnery school on Whale Island, Portsmouth, when he was summoned from his class and told to take a boat to Dunkirk in May 1940.



Aged 20 he was given command of Lord Astor's motor yacht Llanthony with a crew of six Newfoundland woodsmen, two London bus mechanics and an RN petty officer whose equipment consisted of a First World War pistol, an uncorrected magnetic compass and a minefields chart.

Having taken on board barrels of fresh water for the troops waiting to be evacuated from the beaches, Timbrell immediately ran into a broken-down Thames pleasure steamer laden with troops, and towed her to Ramsgate.

After reaching the beaches on his second trip, he was taking 16 men at a time into Llanthony's two small dinghies when a German shell exploded by the port bow, severing both anchor cables, breaking the fuel lines and stranding the ship. Timbrell had dug the propellers and rudder out of the sand when a sergeant, with eight guardsmen, offered help in return for a lift.

The sergeant commandeered a tank in the town and drove down the beach and into the sea until its engine stopped; it was then used as an anchor to winch up Llanthony while her engines were repaired.

For his next trip Timbrell was given command of a flotilla of Scottish trawlers, whose skippers all seemed to have been at sea before he was born. One of the boats hit a mine and disappeared in a flash, leaving flotsam but no survivors.

On the next crossing Timbrell's guardsmen, whom he had persuaded to stay with him, drove off air attacks and surprised two E-boats with a Bren and two anti-tank guns.

Returning for the last time to Dunkirk, he was greeted by a drunken soldier staggering down the beach as he dodged the German shell fire; the man insisted on paying for his passage with a case of brandy purloined from a French inn, then fell asleep in the wheelhouse.

Timbrell returned to Portsmouth with a sorry-looking Llanthony - her boats were smashed, her funnels riddled with bullet holes - and stopped a bus outside the dockyard gates.

Looking at the dishevelled and dirty crew, still with their anti-tank guns and brandy, the conductor asked: "Are you just back from Dunkirk, sir?" The civilian passengers were still on board as the bus took them to Whale Island.

Sub-Lieutenant Timbrell was personally responsible for the rescue of some 900 troops from Dunkirk, and was the first Canadian of the war to be awarded the DSC.

The son of a British railway engineer in Canada, Robert Walter Timbrell was born at Tavistock, Devon, on February 1 1920 and went to West Vancouver High School, British Columbia.

At 15 he became a cadet in the training ship Conway on the Mersey, and then a midshipman, RCN, in the monitor Erebus and the cruiser Vindictive. He served in the battleships Barham and Warspite and the battle cruiser Hood in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic.

After the Dunkirk evacuation Timbrell was in the destroyer Margaree when she was run down in rough seas by a freighter, and was rescued with a handful of survivors.

For the rest of the war he specialised in anti-submarine warfare duties on convoy, serving in the RCN ships Annapolis, Ottawa, Qu'Appelle and Micmac, first as second-in-command and later staff officer to various escort commanders. He was mentioned in dispatches for his part in the destruction of U-621 in the Bay of Biscay on August 18 1944 and of U-984 two days later.

After the war Timbrell commanded the frigate Swansea and then the cruiser Ontario, when she took Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip from Prince Edward Island to Sydney, Nova Scotia.

He was vice-commandant of Royal Roads Service College, British Columbia, and, after a staff course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, was appointed captain of the new destroyer St Laurent.

Three years on the staff of the Supreme Allied Commander at Norfolk, Virginia, was followed by command of the aircraft carrier Bonaventure when she ferried Canadian troops to Cyprus in the mid-1960s.

Timbrell had two years as commander of the Canadian Defence Liaison Staff in Washington, and then at Maritime Command (1971-73); but these were unhappy years for an RCN officer in Canada's unified forces who was made to wear a gaudy green uniform.

He came into conflict with the Chief of the Defence Staff, and retired a year after being appointed Companion of the Canadian Order of Military Merit in 1973.

In retirement Timbrell was president of the Dominion Marine Association until 1985, when he left Ottawa to settle in Chester Basin, near Halifax.

He returned to Dunkirk in 2000, aboard the British destroyer Somerset, for the final commemoration of the evacuation. Llanthony, which had been restored to her original condition, was unable to make the ceremonies because of bad weather. "Timbrell," said one contemporary, "was a no-fuss sort of fellow who never tooted his own whistle. "

Bob Timbrell died on April 11. He married, in 1946, Patricia Jones, who survives him with their daughter; a grandson is now a sub-lieutenant in the RCN.

From today's Telegraph.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../09/db0902.xml

Rear-Admiral Sir David Scott(Filed: 09/05/2006)

Officer who helped launch the Man Who Never Was and headed Britain's naval mission in Washington


Rear-Admiral Sir David Scott, who has died aged 84, helped to launch the "Man Who Never Was" intelligence operation and later supervised a £1 billion programme to improve Britain's nuclear deterrent.


In 1973, when Scott was appointed Deputy Controller, Polaris, responsible for the submarine-launched nuclear deterrent, Britain had decided to update the effectiveness of the Polaris warhead by building the Chevaline; this was to blow apart in space to become two live warheads, four decoys and numerous balloons, thereby presenting the Russians with 96 simultaneous targets.

Scott skilfully steered the project through the secrecy, political infighting, spiralling costs and, particularly, the safety fears until 1980, when Margaret Thatcher, in order to embarrass her Labour predecessor James Callaghan, revealed that the costs had risen to £1 billion.

Two years later the Commons Public Accounts Committee denounced the expenditure of so much money in secret; but Scott emerged with an enhanced reputation.

William David Stewart Scott was born on April 5 1921 and educated at Tonbridge before going into the Navy in 1938. He was at sea in the battleship Revenge when war broke out, and took part in "Operation Medium", the bombardment of Cherbourg in 1940 which aimed to disrupt German invasion plans.

Joining "the trade" in 1942, Scott was briefly second-in-command of H 33 before becoming first lieutenant of Seraph.

In October 1942 it landed the American General Mark Clark on the North African coast for talks with the Vichy French, and brought him and his party back to Gibraltar, earning praise from Lieutenant-Colonel Bradley Gaylord, USAAF, who declared: "The boys in the submarine service convey a spirit which explains why they would sooner be in submarines than anywhere else."

Later the same month Seraph was involved in the surreptitious rescue of General Henri Giraud from the beach west of Toulon.

Since the general refused to be saved by the Royal Navy after the British bombardment of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Scott and the crew talked in American accents they had learned from watching films, while the boat flew the Stars and Stripes.

A US Navy captain was placed nominally in command, with a commission drawn up on a nude photograph torn from a magazine.

Off the Spanish coast in 1943, Seraph also launched a corpse disguised as a drowned Royal Marines officer, carrying secret papers which misled the Germans about where the Allies would land in southern Europe.

While Scott conned Seraph on the bridge, his captain, Bill Jewell, conducted a burial at sea. The event became the subject of five books and a film.

Afterwards Scott commanded the former U-1405, commissioned in the Royal Navy as Meteorite, and conducted experiments in the use of high test peroxide as a fuel; these were discontinued after spontaneous explosions.

In 1946 Scott was second-in-command of the destroyer Volage when another destroyer, Saumarez, struck a mine laid in the Corfu Channel by Albanians who denied it was in international waters.

As Volage closed to help, she herself was struck by a mine, which killed eight crew and caused panic on board. But thanks largely to Scott's calmness and superb seamanship, she was able to tow Saumarez to safety; Scott was commended for his courage and coolness.

As flag lieutenant to the C-in-C, Far East Fleet, he helped the frigate Amethyst to escape from under Communist guns on the Yangtze river by devising a special code, based on the ship's muster list, so that Amethyst could indicate she was making her break.

In 1953 Scott accomplished the first submerged transatlantic crossing by a diesel submarine using a snorkel, a feat which tested the crew's skill in maintaining depth just below the surface.

Nine years later he became a student at the US Naval war college, at Newport, then commanded a submarine squadron and the depot ship Adamant.

After the first of several appointments in the Ministry of Defence, Scott commanded the missile destroyer Fife on a circumnavigation of the world, then became head of the British naval mission in Washington, where he extended his American network to include politicians and Pentagon officials.

On his retirement in 1980 he became a director of Civil and Marine, an aggregates and engineering company.

David Scott was appointed CB in 1974 and KBE in 1977.

He married, in 1952, Penny Whitlock, who survives him with their son and two daughters.

From today's Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../11/db1101.xml

Captain 'Barehands' Bates
(Filed: 11/05/2006)

Electrical officer whose climb up a mast to repair a radar aerial helped to defeat Scharnhorst.




Captain "Barehands" Bates, who has died aged 89, played a vital role in sinking the German battleship Scharnhorst by climbing the mast of his ship to adjust its radar aerial.

On Boxing Day 1943 Bates was electrical officer in Duke of York, the flagship of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, when Scharnhorst slipped out of the Norwegian fjords to attack Russian convoy JW55B, off the North Cape.

It was blowing a force 8 gale in the bitterly cold permanent dark when Bates, whose action station was high in the ship under the tripod mast, reported the echo of Scharnhorst, which had been trapped by Fraser's tactical manoeuvring while being shadowed by the cruiser Belfast.

Bates's report enabled Fraser to close within visual range at 8,000 yards, enabling Duke of York to surprise Scharnhorst with a first salvo.

German near-misses were soon falling around the British ship when, with a sudden whoosh, the radar failed.

Bates and his two operators were thrown in a heap to the deck, and when he picked himself up the radar, though seeming to work, showed no echoes.

Puzzled, Bates climbed two-thirds the way up the swaying mast. Feeling about in the dark, with the aid of a small torch between his fingers, he found that the aerial was pointing skywards: the shock wave of a German 11-inch shell, which had passed though the tripod mast and under Bates's feet, had blown it out of alignment.

Bates returned the aerial to the horizontal and restarted the gyro-stabiliser so that within a few minutes the radar was working again, thus restoring to Fraser the advantage of a clear tactical picture in the prevailing low visibility.

When Duke of York's guns re-commenced firing in radar-control, 25 of 44 salvoes were near-misses, 16 of them within 200 yards; at least three hits were seen, one of them starting a fire on the after superstructure.

At about 18:20, Duke of York scored a direct hit, which penetrated Scharnhorst's starboard side and put a boiler-room out of action, thereby reducing the speed so that she was was sunk a few hours later.

Radar was still a complete mystery to most people, and the story of its restoration was therefore all but incomprehensible.

Afterwards the ship's company believed that Bates, a strong man standing six foot three inches tall and weighing 19 stone, had climbed the mast to hold together the radar antennae; but the public was told that he had repaired wireless leads.

He was awarded the DSC for great gallantry, determination and skill while his radar operators, Able Seamen Horace Badkin and Geoffrey Whitton, were awarded the DSM.

Nevertheless, Bates was exasperated after the war by the way he was regularly depicted as "Barehands Bates", holding live electrical wires together, in comics and on the backs of cereal packets.

Harold Raymond Kingsmill Bates, always known to his friends as "King", was born on November 3 1916, the first son of the rector of Horsington, Lincolnshire.

He was named after two uncles, Harold and Raymond, who had already been killed in the First World War. Young Bates was educated at St Michael's, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, and as a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford.

He never lost his love of church music. But after building his first crystal wireless aged 10, he joined the Merchant Navy as radio officer, and transferred to the RNVR in 1939.

Bates saw service in the Battle of the Atlantic and Mediterranean convoys in corvettes and destroyers, and was in the battleship Malaya at the North African landings.

Later, he witnessed the surrender of the Japanese from the quarterdeck of the battleship King George V in Tokyo Bay in August 1945.

As commander of a landing party, he was commended for his initiative and compassion in searching for and releasing large numbers of allied prisoners of war, some of whom were held in secret camps.

After the war Bates transferred to a regular long-service commission and served in the cruisers Jamaica and Cumberland.

For a generation he specialised in the radar control of guns and missiles, including a spell as the weapons and electrical officer in the cruiser Tiger, where he supervised trials of the Medium Range System Mark 3 (MRS3), a fully automatic radar control system for her guns.

MRS3 became widely fitted in the fleet and, working closely with Sperry's of Slough and the Short Brothers of Belfast, Bates extended its application to short-range missile defence, using the Royal Navy's Seacat missile system.

Claiming to be the only man who understood MRS3, he delighted in writing the handbook, which, unusually, was a model of clarity.

As a captain Bates was assistant director of Naval Intelligence, and then deputy director of the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, before retiring in 1969.

Bates then bought and ran a filling station and shop at Yarnbrook crossroads, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where he was assisted by an ex-chief petty officer, known only as "Mr Fido", who was vigilant in guarding the sweet counter from small boys.

Bates enjoyed a beer at the Long Arms opposite, from where he could view the forecourt and sally forth as necessary to serve customers.

Bates had a passion for motor cars, owning a Rover Speed 20 drophead coupé, a Jaguar XK120 and many later models of Jaguar.

He also bought one of the first Mini Coopers, which he had to drive with his large frame doubled-up. In his spare time he was usually head under the bonnet, stripping down engines and maintaining cars for family and friends - not always an easy task with his huge hands.

Sometimes described as "tall, dark and some hands", family legend had it that he inherited these from a miller grandfather, John White of East Redford, Lincolnshire, who was said to be able to throw a bag of flour further than any man in the county.

He preferred the company of woman and enjoyed being at the centre of things, never more so than at a good party. Latterly, with his second wife, he became an incurable traveller by cruise liner and by jet, usually to the Mediterranean.

In 1978 Bates returned to the county of his birth, and for the last two years lived in a Skegness nursing home, where the staff suffered his dictatorial and eccentric tendencies with tolerable good humour.

King Bates, who died on May 6, married Peggy Browning in 1942. She died in 1969 and he married, in 1987, Gwen Champion (née Hakes); she died in 2004.

A daughter also predeceased him and he is survived by a younger daughter of his first marriage. His son-in-law became a captain in the Royal Navy, and a grandson is a lieutenant-commander in the carrier Illustrious.

Lt-Cdr John Wellham

Pilot who braved heavy fire on his Swordfish during the attack on Taranto


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../26/db2601.xml

Lt-Cdr John Wellham
(Filed: 26/05/2006)



Lieutenant-Commander John Wellham, who has died aged 87, was the last surviving pilot of the Fleet Air Arm raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto.

On November 11 1940 Wellham was at the controls of Swordfish E5H in the second wave of the attack. He had taken off from the carrier Illustrious, loaded to maximum weight with an 18-in torpedo and a long-range tank.

Flying in formation at 7,000 ft, he saw from 30 miles away fountains of tracer fire over the Italian port. The element of surprise had been lost, and there was no possibility of a co-ordinated attack as the aircraft dived towards the harbour.



Wellham remembered meeting a barrage balloon at 4,000 ft and thinking that it must have broken off its moorings. As he manoeuvred violently around it he was hit by flak, and had the control stick wrested from his hands. Then, slamming it hard to right and left while opening and closing the throttle, he suddenly realised that he was heading vertically for the city's rooftops.

Levelling out with difficulty 100 ft above the sea, he glimpsed a battleship on his right, and instinctively swung his tail from side to side to reduce speed and keep the aircraft at the correct dropping height.

Most of the tracer passed overhead, but, after dropping its torpedo, the Swordfish rose into the stream of fire. Zigzagging wildly at low level, it crossed the breakwater and began climbing into the night sky.

Lieutenant Pat Humphries, the observer, shouted at Wellham through their voice tube: "That was a bit exciting. I think that you've bent the plane somewhat. Do you think she'll get us home?" "It wasn't my fault," Wellham replied indignantly. "It was those bloody Eyeties!"

He then flew 150 miles back to Illustrious without difficulty. But, as he throttled back to landing speed, E5H became uncontrollable, flopping through the air and threatening to stall until he cut the engine early to thump on to the deck. As the plane was taken down into the hangar, Wellham heard a sailor say "F***, mate, look at that!" Looking over the aircraft's side, he saw that the port aileron rods were broken into two jagged pieces and, through the broken fabric, he noted several bent wing ribs.

The attack by 21 Swordfish torpedo bombers left Taranto in chaos. The Italian battleships Conte di Cavour, Littorio and Caio Duilio had been sunk, the seaplane depot set ablaze and a cruiser damaged, all for the loss of two aircraft and their crews. The battle sounded the death knell not just for the Italian fleet but for all battleships. The Japanese studied the attack carefully before launching their attack on Pearl Harbor 11 months later.

Wellham appreciated the laconic signal "Manoeuvre well executed" from Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, C-in-C Mediterranean; but the miserly scale of awards to air and ground crew left a lasting sense of resentment. Wellham himself was mentioned in dispatches six months later.

John Walter George Wellham, the son of a retired petty officer, was born on the Isle of Bute on January 2 1919. After his mother died in childbirth when he was six, he was brought up by his grandmother. The young Wellham was educated at Rothesay Academy, and his ambition to fly was ignited by reading Captain WE John's Biggles novels - and was fanned when he won, in a spot dancing competition, a flight in a Fox Moth.

He joined the Royal Air Force at 17, and flew with No 50 Bomber Squadron. After a near-fatal crash in a Hawker Hind in 1937, he was visited by a premonition that he would not die flying; he also conceived the notion that he was under the personal protection of a spirit called Joey.

Given the chance to transfer to the Royal Navy, Wellham thought that he had gained the best of both worlds. Taking with him his seniority in the RAF, he became a lieutenant, aged 20, much to the chagrin of his Dartmouth contemporaries. After practising deck landings at HMS Merlin at Donibristle and on the carrier Courageous, he joined 824 Naval Air Squadron in the carrier Eagle.

Wellham hunted for German raiders in the Indian Ocean until May 1940, when Eagle entered the eastern Mediterranean. During the battle of Calabria on July 9 1940 he made two torpedo attacks on the Italian fleet and had a bird's eye view of the enemy fleeing as the battleship Warspite's 15-inch shells rained among their ships. He was mentioned in dispatches.

Six weeks later Wellham was one of three Swordfish pilots who attacked the Bay of Bomba, approaching at sea level after a flight of several hours. They caught the Italian submarine Iride offshore and a depot ship, a submarine and a destroyer at anchor. Wellham's leader, Captain Ollie Patch, Royal Marines, sank Iride; while Wellham, with his observer, Petty Officer "Swampy" Marsh, and Lieutenant "Cheese" Cheesman attacked the others.

As Wellham flew close to the depot ship, it fired at him with all guns fully depressed; one bullet smashed his main spar, punctured the fuel tank and hit him in the foot. As he climbed away he saw a huge pall of black smoke tinged with flame rising hundreds of feet in the air. The Swordfish had sunk four ships with three torpedoes, and, although they did not know it until much later, they had thwarted an attack by miniature submarines on Alexandria.

Low on fuel, Wellham returned to his desert base and was awarded the DSC.

In March 1941 he flew off the carrier Eagle, which was at anchor in Alexandria, and crossed the desert in several stages to attack Italian warships at Massawa on the Red Sea.

Two destroyers were sunk, and Wellham attacked Tigre, forcing her to beach; the Italian ship was then shelled by the destroyer Kingston, which presented Wellham with a captured Italian ensign.

Wellham next commanded the desert-based 815 Squadron, operating in support of the Army and the Royal Air Force. He ended the Second World War in the escort carrier Biter on convoy duties in the Atlantic, and in the carrier Empress in the Far East.

After leaving the Navy in 1954 Wellham sold wallpaper and paints for Brighter Home Stores, installed bowling alley equipment for the American Brunswick company and was a sales manager for Vaux Breweries.

In his latter years he lectured and raised funds for the Royal Navy Historic Flight.

In 1995 he published his wartime autobiography, With Naval Wings, and co-wrote The Attack on Taranto.

John Wellham died on May 9. He married, in 1946, "Judy" Christie, who survives him with their son and daughter.

Originally Posted by LancashireHussar

Another from the archives, interesting reading.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../20/db2001.xml

Sub-Lieutenant Rod Dove
(Filed: 20/12/2005)

Sub-Lieutenant Rod Dove, who has died aged 84, won the DSO during a daring attack on Italian shipping by riding a human torpedo into Palermo harbour.


As the submarine Trooper surfaced in heavy weather off Palermo on January 2/3 1943, Dove and his crewman, Leading Seaman Jimmy Freel, climbed on to the casing wearing their cumbersome diving suits.

Dove recalled that it was the blackest night, with the Force 5 wind off the coast whipping up to make Trooper bounce like a yo-yo on a short string.

Each man worked with one hand, holding on to the submarine with the other, as they unscrewed the wire fastenings to push Chariot XVI out of its container and on to the deck, which was continually swept by waves.

As Trooper lay semi-submerged to allow Dove and Freel to clamber aboard their craft, a breaker suddenly picked up the chariot, lifting it over the casing and dumping it on the other side of the boat.

Both men managed to stay astride; but their limpet mines and magnets for attaching the warhead were washed away, though they did not discover this until much later.

Of the five chariots involved in Operation Principal, Dove and Freel's was the first to find its way under the defensive net and into the harbour. Although the net's lower folds, lying on the seabed, had demagnetised their compass, they reached their target, the 8,500-ton Italian troopship Viminale.

Working underwater, Dove improvised a rope sling to hang the 1,000-lb warhead to the sternpost of the liner and set the timer. Without a compass, he realised that they could not make a rendezvous outside the harbour, and they decided to scuttle their chariot and swim ashore.

He and Freel, who were wearing naval battledress under their Sladen diving suits, were making their way out of Palermo when they had the satisfaction of hearing their charges blow up, badly damaging Viminale.

Shortly afterwards, however, they were arrested by the carabinieri and handed over to the Italian navy who, for several weeks, threatened to shoot them as saboteurs.

While in solitary confinement at Forte Boccea in Rome, they located other charioteers captured at Palermo by singing mock opera - "Is there anyone here from the Navy?" to the tune of She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes.

When Dove tired of re-reading the same ancient magazines, he sketched the Dulwich College crest on the wall of his cell.

Later they were sent to a disused 14th-century monastery at Padula, Calabria, where various escape plans were either detected by their guards or vetoed by the senior British officer.

After the Italian capitulation in 1943, the charioteers were sent by the Germans to a Marlag outside Bremen, and there Dove learned that he had been awarded the DSO. As the war ended and the prisoners were force-marched eastwards before the advancing Russian army, Dove was strafed by the RAF.

On repatriation in May 1945 he found that his special pay for diving and chariot duties had been stopped from the time of his capture; and no appeal could get it restored.

Dove's parents, who had been told that he was missing, found out only eight months after his capture that he was alive when the story of his doings broke in the Daily Sketch.

Freel, who was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal for his part in Operation Principal, used the chaos in Italy during late 1943 to escape, and fought for several months with the partisans until he could join the advancing British Army.

Operation Principal was something of a Pyrrhic victory: Viminale had been damaged and a new Italian cruiser sunk. But the submarines Traveller and P311, with three chariots and their crews, were lost; six charioteers were captured and two others died. Only one chariot, along with its crew, was recovered.

Rodney George Dove was born on September 1 1921 in south London, where his father - a survivor of the fighting at Arras and an Army lightweight champion boxer - owned several butcher's shops. Young Rod, who gained a scholarship to Dulwich, joined the Navy in 1940 as a seaman.

He was trained to be coxswain of a landing craft but, after an accident in which he lost the middle two fingers of his left hand, he was sent to HMS King Alfred at Hove, where he came top of class in navigation and torpedoes and was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant, RNVR.

Dove volunteered for hazardous duties, without knowing what this entailed, and found himself training for service in human torpedoes or chariots, weapons which Churchill had ordered to be copied from captured Italian models following the successful attack on British battleships at Alexandria.

After experiments and realistic training (in which a colleague drowned) under the rigorous leadership of Commander "Tiny" Fell in Scotland, Dove deployed with Naval Party 450 to the Mediterranean for Operation Principal, a massed attack by human torpedoes against Axis shipping in Italian ports.

After his return to England Dove was sent by the Admiralty to be assistant harbourmaster in Batavia (now Jakarta). He liked the East Indies and, after being demobbed in Singapore, worked for the general traders Maclaine Watson.

When he retired on health grounds in the 1950s, he emigrated to Vancouver, where he joined Air Canada and worked his way from ticket agent to senior ground staff manager.

A lifelong bibliophile, Dove settled on the shores of Hay Bay, Lake Ontario, where he had to build a wing on to his house to accommodate his library. When he became blind he turned to collecting talking books and had the newspapers read to him every day.

Rod Dove died on October 30. He married, in 1949, Helenna Wehmann. They divorced in the 1970s, and in 1984 he married Ann Gifford. Both wives survive him with two sons and two daughters of the first marriage.

On repatriation in May 1945 he found that his special pay for diving and chariot duties had been stopped from the time of his capture; and no appeal could get it restored.

I find this unbelievable looking back at what these heroes went through I think the same thing happened to the merchant navy lads when the boat went down they where off pay even bobbing about in a boat waiting for rescue.

Ok you chaps we must get back to base for we will be off pay if we don't.

And the awards they recieved would that put them on par with say the heroes of the England football team or the pathetic MP's who award themselves knighthoods for doing a job that they get overpaid for not counting the obscene pensions!!!

Sir Peter Smithers
(Filed: 10/06/2006)

Tory MP, botanist and wartime RN intelligence officer who provided inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond.


From the Telegraph.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../10/db1001.xml


Sir Peter Smithers, who died on Thursday aged 92, was a diplomat, politician and distinguished botanist; in the political arena he served as Conservative MP for Winchester from 1950 until being appointed General Secretary of the Council of Europe in 1964, a post he held for five years.

He was also a noted medievalist and student of the early 18th century, in 1954 publishing a life of Joseph Addison, the essayist and poet, for which he was awarded a DPhil by Oxford University; during his research he amassed an important collection of pamphlets, now in an American university.

Peter Henry Berry Otway Smithers (in earlier times he hyphenated Otway-Smithers) was born in Hampshire on December 9 1913, the eldest son of Lt-Col HO Smithers and Ethel Berry. His father was a considerable sportsman, but Peter owed much of his upbringing to his nanny, who taught him to love gardens, serving him the shoots of hawthorn hedges to nibble, and giving him poached blackbirds' eggs for breakfast. He was educated at Harrow, where the history master instilled in him a love of history and politics.



Peter left Harrow early, and studied for a year with the Tudor historian AD Innes. He then achieved a Demyship ("half" Fellowship with certain privileges) at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a First in Modern History.

Smithers found himself unimpressed by the lectures on Marxist-Leninism given by AL Rowse, since he considered Communism doomed to failure. He was drawn to Conservatism and, on coming down, applied unsuccessfully for a seat. Instead he was called to the Bar by Inner Temple in 1936, and a year later joined Lincoln's Inn.

At the beginning of the war Smithers was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and in 1940 went to sea in an auxiliary yacht, Radiant; but after he contracted measles he was forbidden further service, and feared a wartime desk job. This reached the ears of Clive Loehnis, Commander of the Naval Intelligence Division and later head of GCHQ; and Smithers, while laid up in Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, was called to the telephone and summoned for an interview by Commander Ian Fleming. This altered the course of his life.

Smithers was posted to the SIS Office in the rue Charles Flocquet in Paris, where he debriefed Dutch tugboat captains. At one point he lived in the Hotel Vouillement, and recalled air raids during which another resident, the painter Marc Chagall, would join them in the hall. When the Germans began to close in, Smithers escaped to the Chateau le Chêne, an SIS safe house at Sologne, in the Loire.

After Paris fell on June 14, the SIS team moved to Bordeaux, where Smithers was charged with arranging their escape to England. Having got his colleagues safely on board a ship, he was ordered back to Bordeaux to act as flag lieutenant to AV Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, in his negotiations with Admiral Darlan. In one afternoon Smithers and Ian Fleming commandeered seven merchant ships and supervised the departure of hundreds of well-off British refugees, many of them weighed down with jewels and wearing heavy mink coats despite the blazing hot weather. They also burned all the British papers in the consulate.

He finally returned with Alexander in a Sunderland flying boat. During the Battle of Britain Smithers was in England, rounding up German spies as they landed in Britain, having unravelled their codes.

He was nearly appointed ADC to the Duke of Windsor when the Duke was Governor of the Bahamas, in order, he presumed, to "keep a discreet eye on him and report if necessary". But Fleming, by now a friend, arranged a posting for him in Washington, where he served as assistant naval attaché.

While there Smithers was involved in the exchange of intelligence with the US Navy Department and charged with spreading disinformation, much of it circulated on the cocktail circuit. He also dealt with intercepted Japanese coded telegrams and recalled seeing black smoke emerge from the Japanese embassy after Pearl Harbor as the diplomats burned their documents.

He had arrived in America in the suite of Lord Lothian, the new British ambassador (who soon died); while in Portugal on the way out, he and Captain Eric Mills (who later built the US Battle Fleet) had been unable to find lodgings for the night. But they were assured of rooms in a house which proved to be occupied by scantily-clad young women. Mills shared a room with Smithers, the battleship plans safely under his pillow.

The collaboration between Fleming and Smithers provided inspiration for later James Bond books, and Smithers was part inspiration for Bond himself. Fleming once presented him with a pistol disguised as a pen, and used Smithers's wife's gold typewriter in Goldfinger. Smithers recalled that Fleming had been taught by Lord Suffolk how to kill a man in combat by biting the back of his neck, and noted that Fleming craved a life of excitement. When this was curbed by the authorities, he channelled it into fiction.

Subsequently Smithers was appointed naval attaché in Mexico, the Central American Republics and Panama. His role was to supervise the refuelling operations of German submarines and involved extensive travels in seven republics. In Mexico he met his future wife at the home of the American naval attaché in 1943.

They were married three weeks later. Dojean Sayman, who came from St Louis, Missouri, had previously been married to an American army colonel, Dennison Lane, and had a son at Eton. Her marriage to Peter Smithers was extremely happy, producing two daughters and ending only with her death a few months ago.

The war over, Smithers resumed his historical studies, became director of a Leeds publishing firm founded by his grandfather specialising in legal, scientific and medical works, and embarked on a political career in Winchester. After three years on the Rural District Council, Smithers was elected MP for the City in 1950 and, when the Conservatives won power in 1951, he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State at the Colonial Office (Henry Hopkinson, later Lord Colyton), and then to the Colonial Secretary (Alan Lennox-Boyd), whom he had met during the war.

It was a critical period in the evolution from Empire to colonial independence, a process which was particularly controversial among Conservative backbenchers. Smithers played a key role as link between them and his ministers at the Colonial Office.

His wartime experience in the Caribbean and South America gave him a particular expertise in that area of foreign policy. He was successively secretary and chairman of his party's sub-committee on the West Indies.

In the following years he travelled extensively around the Empire and Commonwealth, serving on parliamentary delegations to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), India, Pakistan, Burma and Indonesia. In 1957 he attended the conference of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in New Delhi.

Tall, languid and given to wearing drainpipe trousers, Smithers had the smooth, assured air of the natural diplomat and was fluent in several languages. He greatly preferred overseas affairs to domestic politics, and, though always a dependable backbench loyalist, he was never at home with the rough and tumble of party controversy.

Smithers had a notable Commons triumph when, in 1962, he mobilised a formidable all-party coalition of MPs, distinguished Wykehamists, the Bishop of Winchester and the city council to force the government into a humiliating retreat from a plan to create a 4,000-acre reservoir under the city for the storage of gas.

Smithers was early among Conservative MPs in predicting that Britain's future lay primarily in Europe. He was a British representative at the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg from 1952 to 1956 and a former vice-president of the European Assembly of Local Authorities.

Television, still much in its infancy in the early 1950s, fascinated Smithers, and he produced a series of programmes on foreign affairs for the BBC which were based on films he had made in France, Germany and Spain. He also advocated the formation of a European television network.

He returned to Strasbourg in 1960, represented Britain at the Western European Assembly and was a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1960 and 1961.

In 1964 he became Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, which involved organising 18 governments, the Parliamentary Assembly and the European Court of Human Rights, which he considered "the best international court in existence then or since".

Smithers was knighted in 1970 and was a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He was recommended for a peerage by Harold Wilson, but this was vetoed by Edward Heath.

The early 1970s being a time of gloom for Britain, Smithers accepted a rare invitation from Willi Spühler, President of the Swiss Confederation, to settle in Switzerland and take Swiss citizenship. He later offered advice to Margaret Thatcher, who greatly respected his opinions, the more so since he was a little removed from the political scene.

Recently Smithers served on the committee of Claude Hankes-Drielsma's Nobel inquiry into corrupt corporate governance in Sweden; although by far the oldest of the team, his colleagues considered his brain the most agile.

Among his many interests Smithers was a keen amateur botanist. He grew more than 2,000 species of cactus at his Winchester home, which he transferred to Strasbourg on his appointment to the Council of Europe. He also collected tropical species for the British Museum herbarium. His interest in botany went back to his childhood, and just before leaving Harrow he had purchased a plant ledger. By 1993 he had made 32,147 entries.

The house which he built at Vico Morcote, overlooking Lake Lugano, was inspired by primitive Caribbean architecture and modern Japanese houses. He designed a famous garden there, with three open-air "rooms" densely but carefully planted. His philosophy as a gardener was: "It shall be a source of pleasure to the owner and his friends, not a burden and an anxiety."

He favoured rhododendrons, magnolias, tree peonies, lilies, wistaria and Allium, and he revived long-lost Nerines (his hybrid Nerines being registered at Exbury). He was particularly delighted when the Dalai Lama planted a Michelia doltsopa (one of his propogations) at the Thyssen house at Lugano.

Smithers loved to show his garden to knowledgeable visitors and found them impressed by the "spirit of the garden, the overall effect, the sense of unity without formality, the sense of unity in diversity, something which they never experienced before in a garden". He published an account of his work in 1979, Adventures of a Gardener.

Smithers combined this interest with photography. He had bought his first German Leica at Oxford in 1932 and took pictures of his plants. When these were seen by Claudine Laabs, a leading bird photographer, in West Palm Beach, he was urged to enter them for prizes, resulting in numerous one-man exhibitions of his work both here and abroad. He was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Gold Medal for his photographic work.

In later life Smithers opposed the Euro, and was forever attuned to changes in world politics. He continued to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, because its industry and agriculture were so ramshackle. He forecast that governments would lose control of events world-wide due to the acceleration of technology, which would make "powerful and dangerous instruments available to private syndicates and individuals". Thus, in 2002, he was reluctantly impressed by how Osama bin Laden had single-handedly compelled the world's only superpower to reshape its defence policy.

Smithers, who is survived by his two daughters and his stepson, had been impressed that Joseph Addison had died in June 1719, having expressed the wish to die in the summer, surrounded by the beauties of nature.

Peter Smithers was lucky to achieve a similar ambition, having written: "It would be nice to end life surrounded by the beauty which is my garden… As long as memory lasts my garden will remain with me, like my own past life, a delightful dream which once I dreamed here on this mountainside."