Rum Ration
the Navy Network

From Thursday's Telegraph.

Officer who tackled smugglers, trained the fleet which went to the Falklands and later ran the Spastics Society

Vice-Admiral Sir John Cox
(Filed: 12/10/2006)



Vice-Admiral Sir John Cox, who died on October 3 aged 77, decided on his career when, as a small boy in China, he rowed out to a warship on the horizon to warn it that British embassy bungalows were being attacked by pirates.

He returned to the compound at Pei-tai-ho with a landing party of sailors, which restored peace. His reward for such initiative was two tellings-off: by the Commander-in-Chief, China Station, for putting to sea without telling anyone where he was going, and by his mother for the same reason.

Nevertheless the boy was entranced by the experience, and in 1946 he joined Dartmouth as a cadet. It was his bad luck to have been superseded as Flag Officer, Third Flotilla, in the month before the Falklands War broke, which deprived him of the chance to command the task force.

advertisementThe son of a diplomat, John Michael Holland Cox was born in Peking on October 27 1928. His father was interned by the Japanese in 1941, while he and his mother were evacuated to South Africa, where he went to Hilton College, Natal. His mother bred Great Danes for a living, and they were so poor that he caught snakes which he sold to the Durban snake park for pocket money.

Among early appointments Cox was ADC to the Commander-in-Chief, Allied Forces Northern Europe, based in Norway, and to the Governor of Victoria in 1955.

Cox commanded many ships, including the Ton-class minesweeper Dilston off Cyprus; he was mentioned in dispatches for preventing smuggling in 1957. His other commands included the minesweeper Stubbington; the RNR minesweeper Thames; the dispatch vessel Surprise; the frigate Naiad and the guided missile destroyer Norfolk. His staff and flag appointments were no less impressive. As cadet training officer at Dartmouth, he recalled a night leadership exercise up the Dart river, from which a motor cutter filled with cadets failed to return. After a search he received a phone call. "Sorry, sir, we missed a turning in the river, the tide went out and now we are in the middle of a field with cows looking on."

A spell as staff officer to London Division, Royal Naval Reserve, led him to become commander, sea training, at Portland, an appointment reserved for only the very best officers. Though robust and forthright, Cox's manner was always constructive. It was said that he was still taking notes when he was accidentally dropped into the sea while transferring between ships on a light jackstay.

His facility for languages, which enabled him to pick up Afrikaans, French, German and Mandarin, and his ebullient nature made him an ideal choice as naval attaché in Bonn in 1967. Ships' visits to Hamburg, Kiel and other ports were carried off in style. In the depths of the Cold War, Cox adopted a bluff, sailor-to-sailor approach to extract useful information from Soviet officers over tennis. He was also popular with a wide range of German friends, not least because of two pet deer he kept in his garden.

A large, bear-like man, he put his communication skills to use in the Royal Naval Presentation Team, then became director of naval operations and trade at the Ministry of Defence during the third Cod War with Iceland, and commander, standing naval force Atlantic, which consisted of Nato frigates and destroyers.

He was popular with sailors but fretted ashore at Portsmouth as chief of staff to the C-in-C, Naval Home Command. In 1979 he became Flag Officer, Third Flotilla, and commander, Anti-Submarine Group Two, responsible for the fighting efficiency and training of all the Royal Navy's carriers and amphibious forces.

He was a natural choice to command the task force to the South Atlantic in 1982, since he had made a strong impression on exercises with the US Navy. He was on gardening leave when the Argentines invaded the Falklands, and many assumed he would be recalled for that role. But, due to what some called "submarine nepotism", Sandy Woodward, a junior rear-admiral already at sea, was appointed. However, few failed to recall that the fleet which won the victory had been trained by Cox; and he was appointed KCB in 1982.

Although not an aviator, Cox made such an impression on the Fleet Air Arm that his last appointment as Flag Officer, Naval Aviation Command, was welcomed. In order to demonstrate his empathy with the returning heroes, Cox learned to fly, making his first solo flight in a Chipmunk in December 1982.

On leaving the Navy, Cox found some compensation in a new vocation helping the handicapped. He became director of the Spastics Society in 1984, when it was still an organisation of the parents of spastic children rather than, as it has now become under the name of Scope, a campaigning body for all disabled people.

He tried to strike a balance between the interests of parents and empowering disabled people; he changed the worthy in-house newsletter Spastics News into the more proactive Disability Now, and gave it editorial freedom. With the actor Lord Rix, of Mencap, and the directors of Mind and Barnados, Cox urged the society down the road which led to the Disability Discrimination Act, 1995.

However, he fell out with the more conservative leadership over its approach to the Peto method of treatment, and resigned precipitately in 1988. He then became director of Sound Alive, making and selling audio-guides for 140 museums and attractions, and aided Libertas, a charity promoting appreciation of the arts by disabled people.

For many years Cox was on the parole board of Wormwood Scrubs, an interest he shared with his wife, who was a prison visitor.

Though his gardening methods were unorthodox, he successfully grew roses and vegetables at Rake Hill, Hampshire, swapping fine wines with a farmer in exchange for pig manure.

Cox was passionate about sport and enjoyed being centre stage, but had a sensitive touch. When a pet dog was run over he drove 100 miles to break the news and grieve with its seven-year-old owner.

On marrying, in 1962, Anne Folkestone (née Seth-Smith), John Cox resigned from his club because it refused to let women through the front door. He is survived by her, their son, their daughter and two stepsons.

From last week's Telegraph.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../11/db1101.xml

Joseph Lynch, GC
(Filed: 11/10/2006)

Sailor who risked his life to save a comrade from drowning.


Chief Petty Officer Joseph Lynch, who has died aged 93, won the George Cross while serving with the Royal Navy on the cruiser Nigeria in the Falkland Islands in 1948; six years earlier he had been awarded the British Empire Medal.

On the night of February 26 1948 Nigeria was lying at anchor at Port Stanley. While disembarking from the motor cutter at the port boom, a rating, Leading Seaman Hughes, missed his footing on the Jacob's ladder and fell into the sea. It was dark, and the wind was blowing a fresh gale. The sea was rough, and its temperature was 42 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hughes managed to keep hold of the ladder but, as he was dressed in heavy oilskins, he was unable to pull himself up — nor could he make for the cutter for fear of the very cold sea and the danger of sinking in his cumbersome clothing.

advertisement
Lynch was sitting in his mess when he heard the pipe for the lifeboat. He ran up on deck, dressed only in a singlet and trousers. Sizing up the situation at once, he made his way along the boom, down the ladder and into the water alongside Hughes.

He persuaded Hughes to let go of the ladder and then got an arm around him. At that moment, the seaman lost consciousness, making it impossible for Lynch to do more than support him.

One of the ship's motorboats was lowered but, because of the heavy swell, it could get no closer than 20 yards to the two men.

Lynch slipped into the sea and, using the swell to help him, swam with the unconscious man to the motorboat. After a struggle the crew managed to haul Hughes into the boat — but Lynch, having nothing to hold on to, and determined not to hamper the crew's efforts, had swum back to the side of the ship.

Lynch found it impossible to reach the Jacob's ladder against the powerful swell and, seeing that Hughes was now safe, he swam out to the boat a second time and was taken aboard. After a short spell in Nigeria's sick bay both men recovered from their ordeal.

advertisement
Lynch was invested with the Albert Medal by the Duke of Gloucester on November 14 1951. After the AM was revoked by Royal Warrant, he was re-invested with the George Cross by the Queen at Buckingham Palace on February 20 1973.

Joseph Lynch was born on November 6 1912 in the Poulton area of Wallasey, in Cheshire (now Merseyside). He was educated at Somerville School at Wallasey, but left at the age of 15 to work as a shop assistant and fitter.
In May 1929 he joined the Royal Navy on a regular engagement. During the Second World War he served in the Atlantic and north-west Europe.

In 1942, while serving in the destroyer Wallace, Lynch was awarded the British Empire Medal. Wallace had been taken out of reserve at the outbreak of war and deployed on convoy protection duty in the Channel and the North Sea.

At that stage of the war the RAF was busy defending London, the south ports and their own airfields, and could provide only sporadic cover.

advertisement
It was dangerous work for the Navy, for however closely the ships hugged the coast the German aircraft had no difficulty in finding and bombing them.

During attacks by the Luftwaffe, the merchant ships took evasive action by changing bearing at short intervals while the destroyers engaged the aircraft with their Bofors guns.
In one such attack Lynch was at the port rail when he saw one of the merchantmen veering towards Wallace on a collision course.

In the few seconds available, he dashed to the starboard side and braced himself for the crash. Steam jetted from the destroyer's boiler with the force of impact. The moment that this subsided, Lynch made his way below.

He found that one man had been killed outright; the stoker petty officer and two others had been scalded and dazed.

advertisement
Lynch assisted each of the injured men to the foot of the boiler-room ladder and into the hands of helpers. Back on deck, he heard the first lieutenant calling for two volunteers to check the bulkhead and the timber shoring in the vicinity of the point of impact.

Lynch went below again and found the damaged section of the bulkhead behind the boiler. He crawled underneath and, calling to a seaman to pass the baulks through to him, jammed these into place.
Throughout he was aware that he had no chance of escape from drowning should the hull give way and let in the sea. The hull held, and eventually Wallace limped into port. Lynch was invested with the BEM by King George VI at Buckingham Palace on March 16 1943.

Lynch spent nearly 25 years in the Navy, retiring as chief petty officer in 1953. After leaving the Navy he worked for Cadbury's as a production line manager before joining HM Customs and Excise as an executive officer in May 1954. He was based at Liverpool and, for several years, at Heathrow airport; he retired in 1976.

He was a founder member of the Albert Medal Association, a freeman of the Wirral and served as welfare officer of the Wallasey branch of the Royal Naval Association.

advertisement
Some years ago Lynch's Albert Medal was stolen while it was on display at Wallasey library. But it later came into the hands of a collector, who returned it to him; it is now in the Imperial War Museum.

Joseph Lynch married his wife Betty (née Bennett) in 1939; she and their son predeceased him.

From Tuesday's Telegraph

Lieutenant-Commander Tom Ladner
(Filed: 17/10/2006)

Royal Canadian Navy officer who was one of the 'three musketeers' in motor gun boats.



Lieutenant-Commander Tom Ladner, who has died aged 89, was known as one of the Royal Canadian Navy's "three musketeers".

Before the war he had proposed in a university debate that the dominion should withdraw from the Empire if Britain went to war. But when, while sailing off Vancouver, he and his friends "Corny" Burke and "Wimpy" Maitland heard about the declaration, they immediately joined the RCN. By war's end, Maitland had earned a DSC and Bar, the Croix de Guerre and two mentions in dispatches; Burke had a DSC, two Bars and four mentions; and Ladner a DSC, a Bar and four mentions.

Thomas Ellis Ladner was born on December 8 1916 in Vancouver, the son of the lawyer, MP and diplomat Leon Ladner and the grandson of a Cornish miner who had sought a fortune in the California and Fraser River gold rushes before turning to farming. The family settled at what is now Delta, British Columbia, and Tom was educated at Shawnigan Lake School on Vancouver Island and then at the Leys School, Cambridge, while his father was a Tory MP in Ottawa. He went to the University of British Columbia and then Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto.

advertisement

After initial training at HMCS York, Toronto, Ladner arrived at Victoria Station during one of the first daylight raids on London. He was commissioned at HMS King Alfred in Sussex, then was appointed to a former Canadian Pacific passenger ship which, as the armed merchant cruiser Forfar, was employed on the Northern Patrol. Early in December 1940 Forfar was hit by a torpedo from the German ace Otto Kretschmer's submarine U-99 off Ireland. Kretschmer fired four more torpedoes until Forfar sank at 06.57.

A lifeboat was destroyed by an explosion as Ladner tried to launch it, and he fell into the icy water wearing a lifebelt over his greatcoat. He managed to climb on to a Carley float, then paddle to a lifeboat into which he helped to haul others. Some 171 died. Ladner was one of 21 survivors.

Despite his inexperience, he was next ordered to bring an air-sea rescue launch into the Thames from Southampton while under fire from the air. He then joined the 8th Motor Gun Boat Flotilla in January 1942, carrying out night raids on the enemy coast from Harwich and Lowestoft as captain of MGB 75.

During one raid off Holland, his boat was so badly damaged that he could not make the open sea. He hid behind a buoy in the dark until "things had quietened down", then made his way back to Felixstowe on two engines with a large hole in his bow, taking a shortcut through a minefield to get his injured crew ashore quickly.

While their boats were under repair, Ladner and the other musketeers obtained two months' leave to spend Christmas in Canada before returning to be appointed to new, more powerful Dog-boats.

In February 1943 the trio sailed for the Mediterranean as what was known as "the cowboy flotilla", because its captains were Canadians. Ladner's 99 patrols in the Mediterranean took in the invasion of Sicily, a temporary evacuation from Augusta, Sicily, and landings on the islands of Monte Cristo and Pianosa.

On capturing Ischia in the Bay of Naples, he took on board Lt-Cdr Douglas Fairbanks Jr, of the US Navy, and the novelist and war correspondent John Steinbeck. As they entered harbour Ladner noticed that among the cheering locals were US Rangers, there to cheer Fairbanks. Having harried German and Italian forces throughout the Mediterranean, the trio moved to Mjlet Channel, between Split and Dubrovnik, where they lay in ambush off the narrow entrance to intercept a German convoy of heavily armed coasters, tankers and landing craft. Conned by Maitland in MGB 657, who had "borrowed" a radar set from the Americans in exchange for whisky, they passed information in hushed voices and by hand signals, while the silhouettes of their boats were hidden against the wooded cliffs until the enemy was 300 yards away.

At 00.35 Ladner fired starshell to illuminate the convoy as the flotilla sped past in line ahead firing broadsides, which sank a small escort vessel and dispersed the convoy in disarray. In the ensuing close range battle, accompanying German E-boats failed to intervene because they were "unable to distinguish friend from foe", letting Ladner and his companions reduce the convoy to a collection of burning hulks.

The Canadians suffered no casualties in the battle, which was described in official reports as the "shrewdest blow that the enemy has suffered on the Dalmatian Coast". Ladner was awarded his first DSC for "gallantry and outstanding service in the face of the enemy, zeal, patience and cheerfulness in dangerous waters, and setting an example of wholehearted devotion to duty".

After the war Ladner joined his father's legal practice, and was later the driving force in the amalgamation of four other firms across Canada to form Borden Ladner Gervais in 2000. He was also the director of a number of companies.

As a young man Ladner had taken the ferry across Burrard Inlet to West Vancouver to ski at Hollyburn; later he put money into a lift company which was one of the original investors in a project to turn an isolated valley lacking all electricity into the ski resort of Whistler; he unsuccessfully tried to have Whistler chosen as the site for the 1976 Winter Olympics, but succeeded in obtaining the 2010 games.

A seemingly quiet man, so ordinary in appearance that he was once compared to a milkman, Ladner nevertheless had a sharp tongue and a good legal mind. In later years he pursued the Canadian government for $58.50 because his typewriter had been lost in action.

Tom Ladner married, in 1945, Janet Fleck, who predeceased him; he is survived by three sons and three daughters.

From yesterday's Telegraph.


Stephanie Batstone
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 27/10/2006

Wren signaller who flirted by flashlight with a sailor she thought she would never meet.


Stephanie Batstone, who died on October 17 aged 83, published her recollections of life as a signaller in the WRNS, describing how she cheered up a lonely young American seaman awaiting D-Day; her account of flirting by flashlight ranks as one of the more unusual romances of the Second World War.

She was 21 and just out of training when, in October 1943, she was posted to the Ganavan war signal station, near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Her duties were to help direct an American convoy, lying at anchor in the Firth of Lorne, which was waiting to assemble Mulberry harbours in the English Channel in preparation for D-Day.

One night Stephanie got "talking" to an American vessel by signalling with an Aldis lamp, also known as a "blinker", which was used to flash messages from ship to shore. She soon established that the shipboard signaller was a young seaman in the US Merchant Marine named Jack Campbell.

advertisement
As his Liberty ship, the decrepit Matt W Ransom, awaited orders to move, Campbell and Stephanie Batstone struck up a relationship across the darkened waters, five miles distant.

Their flashed-out conversations became increasingly emboldened as the days passed. "You could say anything to a man on a ship, several miles off," Stephanie later explained. "You knew you'd probably never meet them!" Neither revealed what was said by "blinker", but Stephanie later said that if one kept the light shining just a fraction longer, "it was a kiss, I suppose".

Then, one morning, with invasion in the air, Stephanie looked out to sea to find the anchorage completely empty. Later, after D-Day, when Allied naval forces were landing on the northern coast of France, she heard that Campbell's convoy had been sunk; she assumed that Jack had not survived.

Half a century later Stephanie Batstone published an account of her remarkable wartime flirtation in a memoir, Wren's Eye View — Adventures of a Visual Signaller (1994).

By chance, Jack Campbell's family read about her book, and in 2001 Campbell himself, still very much alive and then in his late seventies, flew from his home in America, with his wife, to meet the Wren he had known only as a distant blinking light. They were reunited on the sofa of a breakfast television studio.

Stephanie Batstone, known to her family as "Bunny", was born on December 22 1922 at Croydon, the elder daughter of a quantity surveyor and a ballet teacher. She was educated at St Peter's girls' school, Coulsdon.

In September 1939 she began a nine-month course of secretarial training at Purley, and the following year took a job with a local firm of accountants. Because there was so little work for her, she was sacked in the spring of 1941.

Stephanie Batstone obtained a new post as a shorthand typist at Guy's Hospital, London, where she kept records of bomb casualties and typed up wage sheets. Although in a reserved occupation, she decided towards the end of 1942 to follow a friend's example and applied to join the WRNS. She was accepted as a visual signaller, despite being told that the job was closed to fresh entrants.

After training at HMS Cabbala, a naval establishment at Warrington, her first posting was to Oban, where she had her encounter with Jack Campbell; she served at the Ganavan war signal station from October 1943 to February 1945. She was later drafted to Northern Ireland, initially to Larne, and then, when the base there was closed in May 1945, to RNAS Eglinton in Co Londonderry.

After demobilisation in September 1945, Stephanie Batstone was employed in a number of posts, including that of assistant to the General Secretary of the Central Advisory Council for Training for the Ministry, at Church House, Westminster.

After reading Social Studies at Southampton University, she spent 18 years as a qualified almoner and medical social worker, working latterly at St Helier's Hospital, Carshalton, until her retirement in 1975.

Stephanie Batsone donated to the Imperial War Museum 74 letters written to her family in Surrey during her wartime service. They contain vivid descriptions of her living and working conditions, thoughts and feelings as a Wren, and of her leisure activities, which included working for the Red Cross and WVS, as well as references to civilian conditions in Britain.

She also published a collection of short stories, Change At Peckham Rye (1992), and was an accomplished amateur poet: one of her verses was published in a collection of war poetry alongside a contribution from the actor Dirk Bogarde.

Stephanie Batstone never married.

From today's Telegraph


Val Hempleman
Last Updated: 1:40am GMT 30/10/2006

Naval superintendent whose research into preventing 'the bends' saved the lives of countless deep sea divers.



Val Hempleman, who has died aged 84, kept the Royal Navy at the forefront of deep diving technology by establishing several world records and saving countless lives through his work on decompression tables.

As superintendent of the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory (RNPL) from 1968 to 1982, he worked to overcome "the bends" (the effects of gas entering tissue and bone on coming up from the depths).

In 1970 two of his young laboratory scientists, John Bevan and Peter Sharphouse, made experimental dives in a pressure chamber, which proved that a man could survive in the sea for 10 hours at a depth equivalent to 1,535 ft. This was 300 ft below what was believed to be the maximum.

advertisement
Ten years later two more scientists, Martin Garrard and Mark English, demonstrated that they could work at a depth of 2,165 ft. This led to their spending a week at a simulated depth of 1,772 ft using an oxygen-helium mixture. Other pioneers included John Florio and Petty Officer "Jess" Jessop, who completed the deepest oxygen-nitrogen saturation exposure for seven days at a depth of 200 ft.

In 1976 Hempleman became the first non-American to be awarded the Albert R Behnke Jr Award of the Undersea Medical Society. The next year he received the Queen's Silver Jubilee Medal and, on retirement in 1982, the Imperial Service Order. The culmination of Hempleman's career was when he presented a paper entitled Life at High Pressure to the Royal Society in 1983.

In 2003 the Health and Safety Executive recorded that no lives had been lost in tunnelling through caisson disease (tunnellers' term for the bends) since the introduction of his decompression tables.

The son of a sea captain on the New Zealand routes, Henry Valence Hempleman was born at Neasham, Darlington, on March 25 1922. He moved to Hull as a boy, and always considered himself a Yorkshireman.

Val won a scholarship to Hymers College, Hull, where he showed a precocious interest in science and, aged 13, blew up a shed containing his laboratory, pitting his face with shards of glass. He started to read Inorganic Chemistry and Physics at St Catherine's, Cambridge, and was called up to work as a scientist for the Royal Navy in 1942.

The wartime Navy was particularly interested in the problems of escape from sunken submarines and the effects of depth charges on men in the sea, and one of Hempleman's early experiments involved standing off the beach up to his armpits in water while explosions were set off near him. When he returned to university to finish his degree, the academic life had lost its allure.

After graduating he worked for Burroughs Wellcome, but in 1948 was persuaded to join the recently formed Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory; thereafter his life was devoted to dealing with decompression suffered by tunnel-workers and divers.

Though he pushed the human body to its limit, his experiments were marked by his concern for safety, a lesson he had learned when a mercury thermometer broke in a pressure chamber he was using, nearly killing him with noxious fumes.

In 1952 Hempleman introduced a new theory of decompression, the first since the work of John Scott Haldane in 1910, and which now underpins all modern diving tables used by most of the world's navies. His theory enabled Lt George Wookey, breathing oxygen-helium, to reach 600 ft from the diving tender Reclaim in Sør Fjord, Norway, in 1956. The following year Hempleman subjected divers to "bounce dives", rapid descents to 500 ft and back, which left men itching but otherwise unscathed.

By the mid-1960s the Navy was shrinking, but the need for a deep sea diving capability, particularly in the North Sea, saved the RNPL from closure. Hempleman added an international dimension to his work, collaborating with laboratories in France, Italy, Hungary, and the United States as well as with that of Ichiro Nashimoto in Japan.

In 1966 he wrote the "Blackpool Tables" for compressed air tunnelling work, which became a worldwide industry standard. Until then, tunnelling contractors had been using an ad hoc mixture of tables and imprecise procedures, so that tunnel workers suffered a much higher incidence of decompression sickness than divers. Between 1974 and 1976 Hempleman also tested "Jim", a diving suit which enabled a man to go as deep as 1,500 ft.

Val Hempleman married, in 1951, Barbara Smith, a co-worker at RNPL. She survives him with their two sons.

Obituary of Lt Cdr Dick Raikes, from the Telegraph of 28/6/05, and reposted here:

Lieutenant-Commander Dick Raikes, who has died aged 93, took part in the Fleet Review for King George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935, and six years later launched the "Cockleshell heroes" on their raid in canoes against German shipping in the Gironde estuary.

His calm, cool personality, physical stamina and seeming ability to command his boat without speaking made a clear impression on the raid's leader, Major "Blondie" Hasler, when Raikes took his submarine Tuna to a remote part of the Argyll coast where Hasler and his fellow canoeists practised to reduce their launch time by half to just over 20 minutes.

Early in December 1942, Raikes threaded his way underwater through a fishing fleet and a minefield laid by the RAF before deciding to run a serious risk by moving the launch point two miles south into the mouth of the Gironde, from which his "magnificent black-faced villains" were to set off. When Tuna broke surface in the "beastly calm" water, Raikes was first on the bridge to check that he had a better view than the enemy. One canoe was damaged, and he regretfully ordered its two-man crew not to go on the raid, even though "the two brave marines were almost in tears".

As Hasler left Tuna, he asked Raikes to book lunch for them both at the Savoy on April 1. "Not bloody likely," replied Raikes, "but I'll do it for the second." They duly made the lunch, though Hasler and Marine Bill Sparks were the only two to survive the operation.

Richard Prendergast Raikes was born on January 21 1912, the son of an Indian Army major. Until his parents came home when he was 10, he was brought up in Wales and London by his grandparents and by three aunts, who hero-worshipped their seven brothers for having earned eight DSOs and four MCs in the First World War: two of them had died, one became a general, another an admiral. With the burden of family expectation on his shoulders, young Dick entered Dartmouth in 1925 to become Chief Cadet Captain and to be awarded the King's Dirk.

As a midshipman, Raikes served in the battleship Warspite, based at Malta, where he used to rise at dawn to exercise Lord Louis Mountbatten's ponies; he had to pay 2s 6d an hour to play polo before breakfast.

At Cowes in 1931, Raikes crewed for TB Davis in the J-class yacht Westward, when Davis and King George V became involved in a swearing match as they raced each other. Two years later he joined the submarine trade. As a member of the crew of the newly-built River-class Clyde he took part in the 1935 Jubilee fleet review off Spithead. The whole of the British Empire's Navy, except for its China fleet, including British battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, submarines and other ships stretched from Portsmouth for as far as the eye could see.

There were also ships from France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States; and the evening fireworks and searchlight display were organised by Raikes's uncle, Rear-Admiral Robert Raikes, Chief of Staff to the C-in-C Portsmouth.

In 1935 Clyde was sent to Palestine during the Arab general strike. Raikes spent several weeks fighting fires, evacuating a maternity home by a burning timber yard, and building an armoured train which, after two hours' shunting practice at Haifa station, he took over the railway system of north Palestine.

On several nights Raikes took this train to Samakh, near the Sea of Galilee, to keep open the line despite ambushes and derailments - "an enjoyable game of cowboys and Indians", he recalled. One night Raikes joined up with the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force and enjoyed riding on horseback at full gallop across boulder-strewn country by the light of a burning oil pipeline. He admired the Arabs and their love of a fight, and when the fighting was over he would carry their casualties back to their villages, where he knew he would be safe so long as he was unarmed.

Back on Malta as first lieutenant of the submarine Severn, Raikes's last years of peace were filled with dances, parties, moonlit picnics and running a stable of 11 horses for a Maltese friend, Mr Schembri. He also took part in trials to enter an enemy harbour at night while conning his submerged submarine from a tiny platform built around the periscope. In the warm Mediterranean, Raikes wore only a bathing costume, but the experiment was abandoned when, on entering St Paul's Bay, the sight of him apparently walking on water caused several local fishermen to cross themselves and jump into the sea.

Raikes passed his "perisher" course in 1940, and in September the following year he took command of Seawolf and was sent to Polyarnoe in the Arctic, where, despite a complete lack of Soviet co-operation, he remained for a year.

Strict censorship by the Communists prevented him showing any of the submarine's films on shore except for Snow White - but he was astonished to find in the Soviet base's small library a first and unexpurgated edition of Burton's Arabian Nights.

The cold was so intense that once, when he crash-dived, he did not realise that the depth-gauge had frozen until the boat began to creak and groan. The next 10 minutes were the longest in his life; the gauge plunged from 25ft to 250ft, and slowed to a stop only at 350ft, some 100 ft beyond the boat's safe diving depth.

On patrol in March 1942 Raikes sighted the German battleship Tirpitz: he was too far away to attack, but his enemy-locating report enabled the carrier Victorious to attack with her Albacore torpedo-bombers.

A few days later Raikes heard the propeller noise of a U-boat surfacing and carried out a snap attack with his stern torpedoes; there was an explosion and black smoke, but Raikes found no wreckage. The patrol ended with an amorous whale bumping Seawolf for an hour. Raikes was awarded the DSO.

From 1943 to 1945 Raikes was a member of the personal staffs of the C-in-C Coastal Command, Air Marshal Jack Slessor, and Air Marshal Sholto Douglas, and attended the Trend committee which oversaw the U-boat war. He then commanded the captured U-3514 and a group of similar U-boats during Operation Deadlight - the scuttling by the Royal Navy of surrendered boats.

By 1946, however, Raikes's health was broken, and he was invalided from the service. He decided to learn the hotel trade from the bottom up, taking a job as a waiter. When it became clear that he could not raise the cash to buy his own hotel, he was membership secretary of the Royal British Legion in Edinburgh, where his talent for writing was spotted by a guest on whom he had once waited, and who recruited him into the publicity department of Marconi, where he worked contentedly from 1947 to 1972.

Despite the wartime dangers he had faced, Raikes reckoned that he was most scared when invited to dinner by the Anchorites and found that he was expected to speak on behalf of the submarine service to a roomful of diners which including the Board of Admiralty.

Dick Raikes, who died on May 5, married, in 1938, Joan Margaret Edgington, who followed him wherever she could, once taking passage in Tuna from Holy Loch to Arrochar. She and a daughter predeceased him, and he is survived by their other two daughters.

NOTE: He was played by Christopher Lee in the 1955 film The Cockleshell Heroes!

Remembrance Day - British Military Tribute

From Monday's Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../04/db0401.xml

Surgeon-Commander Sidney Hamilton
Last Updated: 1:43am GMT 06/12/2006

Doctor in Repulse who tended tirelessly to the injured among the 800 survivors of his ship's crew.




Surgeon-Commander Sidney Hamilton, who has died aged 94, saved many lives in the battlecruiser Repulse when she and the battleship Prince of Wales were sunk in December 1941.

The two warships were heading for the Gulf of Thailand after Pearl Harbor when they were overwhelmed by Japanese high-level bombers and torpedo planes. Hamilton was conducting his daily surgery as the air raid alarm sounded at 1100 hours; he went immediately to his action station, ordering his staff to close an armoured hatch and set out their instruments. As several casualties were brought in, he heard of others elsewhere in the ship, and went to treat some dozen burnt and scalded men. He had returned for more morphine when Repulse was struck by a torpedo; a few minutes later there were two more severe blasts, and the lights went out.

Fearing that she would capsize, he ordered clips to be taken off the heavy hatch, enabling his men to force their way up the vertical ladder through the pouring water. There was no panic as the injured were helped up to the quarterdeck, from where Hamilton saw a trail of heads bobbing in the ship's wake; he was horrified to realise that some had already been caught in the propellers.

advertisementAs the ship rolled on to her port side he was thrown into the sea, and his last sight of Repulse was the starboard propellers threshing the air, until her bows rose up "like a church steeple" and she slid under. All around him there were men in the water with blood streaking their oil-covered faces. The oil burned his eyes "as though someone was jabbing hot pokers into them," he recalled. Another survivor remembered the suction of 32,000 tons of steel sliding to the bottom as if someone was pulling his legs out by their hip sockets.

After an hour Hamilton was rescued exhausted from the sea by the destroyer Electra, with his clothes clinging to him like a second skin. The destroyer, which had a crew of 150, rescued 800 survivors. With Electra's doctor, Surgeon-Lieutenant William Seymour, and Repulse's dentist, Surgeon-Lieutenant WS Major, Hamilton sorted his patients between the dying, the surviving and those who might be saved. After cleaning them first so he could see their wounds he ensured that everyone was labelled ready for evacuation when Electra reached Singapore that night.

An eyewitness recalled that no praise was too high for Hamilton, who looked no more than a boy. He was mentioned in dispatches.

Sidney Gerrish Hamilton was born on November 14 1911 into a family of Bath businessmen and market gardeners. He went to Clifton before reading Medicine at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and became a houseman at the Royal London Hospital. He volunteered for the Navy on the outbreak of war.

After Electra had reached Singapore, Hamilton continued to care for his patients in the naval hospital there until he was appointed principal medical officer of the light cruiser Durban, which became the last warship to leave Singapore. She was hit three times by dive-bombers before limping in to Colombo, where Hamilton transferred her wounded to the hospital ship Karapara.

After going on to the United States Hamilton returned to England, then was appointed senior medical officer of the landing ship Llangibby Castle, which was hit by an 8-inch shell from a French shore battery during the North Africa landings in November 1942. The following year the ship returned to Britain after a collision and was converted to carry 18 landing craft and 1,590 troops to the Mediterranean.

In preparation for D-Day, Hamilton set up a casualty clearing station at HMS Turtle in Poole, Dorset and finished the war at HMS Hesperides, in the Azores.

After retiring from the Navy in 1946 he went into general practice at Woolacombe, Devon, and later at Thornton Heath, near Croydon. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the formation of the National Health Service, and was a founder of the Royal College of General Practitioners, though later he deplored the decline of traditional family medicine.

In 1955 Hamilton and his wife Ann, who was also a GP, contracted poliomyelitis; while he recovered she was paralysed from the chest down. Hamilton cared for her in an iron-lung for a year and, learning new techniques of care which he passed on to his other patients, enabled her to progress to a wheelchair for the next 23 years.

On retiring from general practice in 1972, he became one of the first westerners to study acupuncture anaesthesia in China, before spending four years as chief medical officer at the British High Commission in Delhi, where his wife led an active life as a diplomat's wife and charity worker.

Much of Hamilton's last years were spent travelling, especially to the shores of the Mediterranean, to further his interests in bird-watching and photography. Of these travels he kept meticulous records, but about his wartime experiences he remained reticent. After the war, though, he tried to establish the fate of patients from whom he had become separated at the sinking of Repulse, and he contributed his medical report about the sinking to Middlebrook and Mahoney's book Battleship (1977). He also left a tape recording of his memories at the Imperial War Museum.

A pious, austere man with an unpredictable sense of humour, Hamilton kept in his refrigerator dead snakes and birds that he had found out walking, and once sent his grandchildren out to the compost heap to see how yesterday's cold porridge had incubated.

He died quietly at home, shortly after an enjoyable drive to the Quantocks and back.

Sidney Hamilton married, in 1940, Ann Mallet, who died in 1978. He is survived by their two sons and two daughters; a son, a son-in-law and two grandchildren are doctors.