Lt Cdr David Harris MBE
Tributes paid to former HMS Victory commander
HMS Victory's white ensign was flown at half-mast in tribute to Lieutenant Commander David Harris, who has died aged 65.
The former commanding officer of Nelson's flagship lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on March 8 and tributes have since poured in.
More than 150 people went to his funeral at St Ann's Church at Portsmouth Naval Base last Friday.
And in a wider show of respect the ensign was lowered on HMS Belfast in central London, where the Alverstoke resident had also worked.
Close friend Peter Warwick, chairman of the heritage charity The 1805 Club, said: 'It was tremendously sad to lose David.
'If you wanted to call anyone a gentleman you would call him that, and you would underline the gentle.
'He had a passion and enthusiasm for so many aspects of Portsmouth dockyard, and he was well-loved by everyone who worked with him.'
Lt Cdr Harris, who was married to Ishbel, had a navy career spanning 34 years which saw him trained as one of the navy's last shipwrights.
'That earned him the nickname 'Chippy',' said Mr Warwick.
'He served in submarines but the highlight of his career from a heritage point of view had to be commanding Victory.'
In 1993 Lt Cdr Harris became the general manager of Flagship Portsmouth, the new service trust set up to run the historic dockyard.
Alison Henderson, also of The 1805 Club, said: 'David was truly an officer and a gentleman, someone who will be deeply missed in Royal Navy and naval heritage circles.
'He was a meticulous treasurer for the club and was great friends with Colin White, who we have also sadly lost recently.'
After his time in Portsmouth Lt Cdr Harris became deputy director of the heritage warship HMS Belfast.
He was then appointed director of operations for the newly-formed Greenwich Foundation, and then became director of the Coastal Forces Heritage Trust in 2007.
He had been treasurer of The 1805 Club since 2001 and co-wrote The Nelson Almanac with Anthony Cross.
Born May 29, 1944; died March 8, 2009
Colin White
Naval historian who drew on previously ignored letters and journals written by and about Horatio Nelson.
Colin White was one of the country’s leading experts on the life and achievements of Britain’s greatest admiral, Horatio Nelson.
The field of Nelson hagiographies is crowded. There are more than 100 biographies, the first appearing in 1801, but it is only comparatively recently that historians have incorporated proper references and footnotes, cataloguing their primary sources and carefully selecting secondary sources for their accuracy. Of White’s several publications, two major works stand out, both based on original research. They are Nelson — The Admiral and Nelson — The New Letters.
He led the Nelson Letters Project, set up in 1999 by the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, which found, to the surprise of many, more than 1,400 unpublished letters from 33 locations around the world. Some emerged from the archives of Nelson’s contemporaries. One fifth of the “pressed letters” from 1803-05 and held in books by the British Library had never been published, even in the magisterial seven-volume collection by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas of 1846. Pressed letters are copies made using an early method in which moistened tissue paper was pressed by a special machine to the ink of the original and read from the back. White also drew on personal, intimate and detailed orders to his captains, found in three scruffy working books and covering most of his campaigns, that were previously ignored by editors.
Much is private, was secret or fills inexplicable gaps. White was the first to admit that the new material did not challenge the existing view of Nelson’s style of leadership, but, he said, it “does enable us, as it were, to watch over Nelson’s shoulder at critical moments in his career in a sustained and detailed manner not possible before. Suddenly the ‘Nelson touch’ springs to life and we can get a sense of what it was like to be present at one of Nelson’s briefings and share his thoughts. And to admire afresh Nelson’s urgency, humanity, wisdom and skill.”
Colin Saunders White was born in 1951. He was educated at Southampton University and obtained an MA in war studies at King’s College London. He worked at the Royal Naval Museum from 1975, becoming in 1995 deputy director and head of museum services. His The Nelson Companion (1995) is a bestseller in its third edition.
For the bicentenary of the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, White was appointed chairman of the Official Nelson Celebrations Committee charged with co-ordinating the Trafalgar Festival, and for this he was presented in 2006 with the Longmans History Today Trustees Award. In 2001 he was seconded to the National Maritime Museum as director of its 2005 initiatives including an exhibition, Nelson and Napoleon, publications and special events.
The Desmond Wettern Media Award “for being the most visible spokesman of Britain’s maritime interests” followed his remarkable tally of some 300 public lectures that he gave during 2005. In 2006 White was awarded the Distinguished Book Prize by the Society for Military History for Nelson — the New Letters.
A man of deep Christian faith, great personal warmth and humour, his brilliant public speaking, aided by his penchant for amateur theatricals, created a memorable tour de force before royalty and the assembled grandees of the maritime world at the 2005 Trafalgar Night dinner in the Painted Hall at Greenwich.
He is probably the only person with the distinction of having been promoted from ordinary seaman RNR to hon. captain RNR, in one step. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries and was vice-president of the Navy Records Society. He was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Portsmouth and was its visiting professor in maritime history.
He was appointed director of the Royal Naval Museum in June 2006.
Colin White, historian and director of the Royal Naval Museum 2006-08 was born on August 28, 1951. He died of cancer on December 25, 2008, aged 57.
Lieut. Douglas Hunt
Naval officer who landed agents in Holland from his MTB and engaged enemy forces in the English Channel.
Lieut. Douglas Hunt, who has died aged 91, won two DSCs while serving with Coastal Forces during the Second World War.
In April 1943 Hunt took command of MTB 245 in 22nd MTB Flotilla, operating in the English Channel. Over the next few months he undertook 33 minelaying operations, with the aim of curtailing the enemy's ability to counter the planned Normandy landings. He was often so close to the Dutch shore that he could see the tulip fields.
On one occasion he spent several hours searching the North Sea before picking up the entire crew of a USAAF Flying Fortress. One of the men he rescued was Lt-Col Louis G Thorup, who had just led a 1,000-bomber raid on Germany; Hunt and Thorup became lifelong friends.
Hunt was also involved in two fierce, if inconclusive, battles with small enemy craft close inshore; on both occasions his boat suffered damage and had to be sent to be repaired by Brooke Marine at Oulton Broad.
In the New Year of 1944 he repelled an attack by a Messerschmitt fighter, which eventually flew off with smoke trailing from a wing. Hunt did not notice until after the engagement that there were bullet holes around him on the bridge and in one of his boat's torpedoes.
After receiving instructions to land agents on the Dutch coast, in early April 1944 Hunt engaged with an enemy convoy off Terschelling, pressing home his attack to close range, only to be frustrated when both his torpedoes misfired.
On the night of September 8/9, Hunt was the senior officer of four MTBs involved in a fierce fight with a superior force of armed trawlers off Scheveningen. Two of his flotilla had already scored torpedo hits, and Hunt's MTB 245 was planing at speed towards its target when its thin wooden hull was smashed by a 3in shell.
The inrush of water through the hole in the hull doused the flames, but Hunt lost his rudder. He nonetheless insisted on co-ordinating the attack while steering by his engines; at 0315 he succeeded in torpedoing an armed trawler at 1,500 yards.
Then, although unwilling to abandon the action, Hunt transferred his ammunition to another MTB before being towed in his own boat to Felixstowe – stern first, in order to reduce the amount of flooding. By the time he entered harbour, only MTB 245's superstructure and a few inches of the hull were showing above water.
Hunt was awarded a DSC and Bar, receiving both at the same investiture.
Douglas Eric James Hunt was born on July 14 1916 and educated at St Paul's School. He went on to Christ's College, Cambridge, but came down after only two years because his services were required in the family's printing business, based at Ealing.
In 1939 he joined the Mounted Local Defence Volunteers, and his first instinct was to join the cavalry; but when he approached the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore Belisha, who was a neighbour near his home at Wimbledon, he learned that the cavalry was about to be mechanised. Instead, attracted by the daredevil image enjoyed by Coastal Forces, Hunt opted to join the RNVR.
He was supposed to join the battle cruiser Hood, but was prevented from doing so by a bout of measles. He was thus recuperating at home when, in May 1941, Hood was sunk in the North Atlantic by Bismarck with the loss of all but three of her 1,421 crew.
On recovery Hunt found himself in the battleship Renown, part of Force H. Although he hated the food, he thought Admiral Sir James Somerville and his flag captain, Rhoderick "Wee Mac" McGrigor, "marvellous men".
After being commissioned in November 1941, Hunt served in a variety of small craft until he got his first taste of action on November 9/10 1942 as a sub-lieutenant and second-in-command of MTB 83 in a night action off Terschelling. In the next few months he took part in several bloody skirmishes.
Twice there were attempts to send him to the Far East, but Hunt preferred to remain at home, where he was certain of action and there was the prospect of command of MTB 245.
In September 1945 he took command of MTB 392, which was still under test by John Rix and Peter du Cane, of Vosper. After becoming senior officer of 31st MTB Flotilla, he retired in January 1946 to found the MTB/MGB Officers' Association. For the next 60 years he ran its reunions, displaying an encyclopaedic knowledge of names, faces and events. In 1999 he was appointed MBE in recognition of this work.
After the war Hunt's energy was directed into sport.
He had been the Old Pauline squash champion in 1939, and regained his title in 1947, holding it again from 1951 to 1957; he was the Old Pauline squash club's honorary secretary from 1938 to 1973. He also played at championship level in the Wimbledon and Surrey leagues.
When the family firm was bought by Wiggins Teape in 1973, Hunt managed the Ealing office of Guide Dogs for the Blind before retiring to Polsted Manor, near Guildford. He then devoted himself to playing real tennis at Hampton Court and riding to hounds on his favourite horse, Monty, with the Chiddingfold and Leconfield.
A diminutive man with a zest for life, Hunt always enjoyed a party. In his days in command of MTB 245, he liked to relax by going up to London where he would dine on oysters, visit the Coconut Club and enjoy the music of the bandleader Edmundo Ross.
For his 80th birthday he held a party at Loseley Park, Surrey, an event which he reprised every year subsequently; and at which each year the girls seemed to get younger, prettier and more numerous. The wake that followed his death on July 8 was held on what would have been his 92nd birthday.
His voluminous correspondence has been donated to the Coastal Forces' Association and his extensive library to St Paul's School.
Duggie Hunt never married; but while some foxes got away from him in the field, few pretty riders escaped his clutches.
Lieutenant 'Polly' Perkins
Motor torpedo boat captain awarded two DSCs who used an operation in Norway to harvest Christmas trees.
Lieutenant 'Polly' Perkins, who has died aged 88, was a motor torpedo boat captain with a reputation for courage, coolness in action and marksmanship.
From July 1942 to June 1943 Perkins commanded MTB 230. On one of his first patrols, in a faultlessly planned and aggressive operation off Texel, in the Frisian islands, he crept inshore of a convoy while the RAF bombed the shipping and MGBs attacked from seaward. Perkins himself fired a torpedo which hit a German auxiliary patrol vessel.
In another night action, on September 1 off Terschelling, his boat was one of only two MTBs not forced by engine trouble to return to harbour. In a confused battle, Perkins came under heavy attack from escorts guarding a convoy; but he penetrated the screen and fired torpedoes at two targets. The first hit the Swedish iron-ore carrier Thule and the second an armed trawler; both ships sank.
Perkins's boat was based at Lowestoft and, because he drove his men hard, was available for patrols more often than most of the other MTBs there. On one sortie, when his motor mechanic reported that the thrust block was red-hot, Perkins told him to keep it running by playing a hose on it.
On March 15/16 1943 Perkins found himself blinded by tracer and starshell and was forced to break off an attack to seek the safety of darkness. In one of the early uses of radar in coastal forces, Perkins then identified a target and fired his torpedoes at 1,000 yards. Twenty seconds later the hull of MTB 230 was jolted by a huge explosion as a large coaster blew up nearby.
For his actions between September 10 1942 and March 19 1943, when he was serving in the Nore area of the southern North Sea, Perkins was awarded the DSC for his gallantry. He was also mentioned in dispatches.
For 16 months from June 1943 Perkins served as captain of MTB 683. He was awarded a Bar to his DSC for his outstanding skill and determination in engagements off the Dutch coast on June 9 1944.
On December 18/19 1944, by which time he had been promoted to command the long-range MTB 766, Perkins was hiding in the fjords during an operation to land and recover agents in Norway.
He sent a rating ashore to obtain some Christmas trees for the forthcoming festivities. Three small saplings were brought on board but when the boat returned to Lerwick for a debrief on how the operation had gone, Perkins was persuaded to give up two of the trees to the senior Norwegian naval liaison officer.
One subsequently found its way to King Haakon VII and the other to the Norwegian prime minister, both of whom were in exile in London. Perkins dined out on his claim that this was the origin of the Norwegian custom of sending a Christmas tree to Trafalgar Square every year since 1947.
Perkins's MTB 766 was spared when a fire and explosion destroyed 12 boats and killed 63 men from coastal forces in Ostend harbour on February 14 1945, but during the incident he was blown into the water and narrowly escaped being sucked into burning petrol on the surface of the sea.
John Provost Perkins was born on New Year's Day 1920, the son of a Harrow solicitor, and was educated at Aldenham School, Hertfordshire, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, before joining the RNVR in December 1939.
He served in minelayers and motor launches before transferring to coastal forces, in which his first command was MTB 235. Perkins's personal view was that serving in MTBs was not all that hazardous: the Germans usually fired too high, which meant that they could not inflict serious damage, and there was little close fighting because the MTBs would approach their prey unseen, fire their torpedoes at close range and then quit the scene of action at high speed. But he deplored the MTBs' lack of silencers in the early stages of the war, and unhesitatingly raised his concerns with senior officers.
Another matter he raised was his irritation that as a 20-year-old volunteer he had to serve two years as a midshipman and sub-lieutenant, even though he had seen more action than older volunteers who were made lieutenants on joining up. He griped about this until the Admiralty changed its rules.
Perkins had strong views about many things: Lieutenant Peter Dickens, his flotilla leader and a career naval officer, was too strait-laced and had much to learn about the relaxed ways of the RNVR; Peter Scott's steam-driven gunboats were vulnerable and "full of pipes", and their reputation rested on Scott's propaganda. Meanwhile Perkins continued to fire his torpedoes in single shots long after it had become official tactics to "rather make sure of one, than miss with two".
After the war Perkins trained as a barrister and was called to the Bar. He soon realised, however, that he would not make his fortune there. Instead he became assistant company secretary at Rolls-Royce, before moving to the Manchester dye firm Clayton Aniline as its company secretary – he was later appointed joint managing director. By 1967 he had moved to CIBA laboratories at Horsham and in 1971 became managing director of CIBA-Geigy.
Perkins always enjoyed motor yachts, justifying ownership of a series of powerful craft by saying that he wanted to be "sure of being back in the office on Monday morning". After leaving the world of business he opted for a quieter life as harbourmaster of Brighton marina, although in 1979 he was asked to join the board and soon became its managing director; he organised the opening of the marina by the Queen in the same year.
Perkins's interest was in the nautical aspects of the marina and he retired in 1985 after falling out with the new owners, Brent Walker.
Perkins was an attractive, charismatic character. To those senior to him he could appear irascible, even aggressive, but he was always protective of, and loyal to, his staff. He once told his Swiss masters at Geigy: "Well, you weren't in the war!"
Polly Perkins died on June 1. He married, in 1952, Mary Catherine Grayson. She died in 2001, and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Captain Denis Jermain
Captain Denis Jermain, who has died aged 90, was an expert in two distinct disciplines of war at sea: coastal forces and anti-submarine warfare.
It was while commanding a motor torpedo boat in the 1st MTB Flotilla that Jermain devised a technique for sinking surface ships using depth charges. In October 1940, off the Dutch coast, he was in one of several MTBs which torpedoed two German trawlers. Jermain took prisoners off the sinking ships and completed their destruction by dropping depth charges.
Two months later his MTB was the only survivor of a flotilla which ran into a convoy off the Scheldt. Jermain's torpedo-firing mechanism failed but, selecting the largest target, he made a depth-charge attack while his gunners fired upwards at anyone who put his head over the merchant ship's gunwales.
This hazardous technique required his boat to cross only a few yards from the enemy's bows, and the bows of his MTB touched the enemy ship; but his carefully placed depth charges exploded amidships, sinking the 6,000-ton vessel.
For the first of these actions Jermain was mentioned in dispatches. For the second he was awarded a DSC.
Jermain was next sent to Bayonne, New Jersey, to complete and then ship to Suez new MTBs purchased under lend-lease. As senior officer of the 15th MTB Flotilla he was based at Tobruk, from where he conducted night patrols on the enemy's flank and landed agents. During the fall of Tobruk he gave covering fire by engaging enemy tanks while other small craft escaped.
On reaching Alexandria Jermain found that the fleet had sailed, and the staff gave him and his MTBs the task of guarding the interned French fleet of battleships and cruisers in case it showed signs of hostility.
As the siege mentality lifted, Jermain was given increasingly imaginative tasks, such as blocking harbours, landing more agents (few of whom returned) and using Royal Marines to board enemy convoys.
Jermain thought most of the schemes hare-brained, but they appealed to his youthful enthusiasm.
The maddest of these enterprises was Operation Agreement, a combined forces raid on Tobruk which was rehearsed in full public view in Alexandria and was betrayed by the transmission of a signal in low-grade cipher from Winston Churchill.
At the last minute an inexperienced senior officer was put in command, over Jermain, and the operation was a disaster; many men were lost, as were four boats of Jermain's flotilla.
In the recriminations that followed there were rumours that the MTBs had not shown sufficient courage, which Jermain stoutly contested: "How could we rectify the chaotic situation into which we were put? It is hard to show dash when loaded with troops and extra equipment and with petrol cans on deck."
Despite the fact that the commander in chief, spotting Jermain at the headquarters, shouted that it would have been better if none of them had returned from the raid on Tobruk, only a few weeks later Jermain was awarded a bar to his DSC for his bravery and devotion to duty.
Jermain cooperated closely with the RAF, and on one occasion spent four successive nights searching for an aircrew that had been downed in the sea in enemy-controlled waters. He eventually found them, and they were rescued.
Once the Eighth Army had begun to advance he carried out useful operations on its flanks. During Operation Retribution — when Admiral Sir Andrew "ABC" Cunningham issued his order "Sink, burn and destroy, let nothing pass" — Jermain nightly intercepted small craft carrying Germans bound for Sicily.
He found it most effective to range alongside and take off the crew and passengers without firing his guns to give away his position.
Jermain was twice more mentioned in despatches, in February and December 1943, on the second occasion after a brush with an Italian cruiser in the Straits of Messina.
Denis Jermain was born at Torquay on November 20 1917 and joined the Royal Navy in 1935. He served in the battleship Royal Sovereign and the cruisers Norfolk and Newcastle before joining MTBs on the eve of war.
After four years in coastal forces, Jermain was surprised to be appointed to command an American-built ship, the Captain-class frigate Manners. He arrived in Boston Navy Yard a few days before his 25th birthday and commissioned his newly-completed ship on December 17, sailing for trials and training in January 1944.
He escorted several Atlantic convoys, but on October 26 Manners collided with and sank the Norwegian manned corvette Rose. Jermain was cleared of any blame.
Then, on January 26 1945, Manners was hit by a homing torpedo fired by U-1051 in the Irish Sea. Both shafts were broken, and a second torpedo blew off about 20ft of the stern, killing many in the damage control parties.
Manners was so strongly built that, in Jermain's words, "not a drop of water entered and not a light bulb was broken". While she lay helpless to manoeuvre, Jermain's asdic team got the set working and detected the U-boat, which was some 1,500 yards away.
Jermain coolly conned an escort group into an attack that depth-charged the U-boat, which surfaced, only to be rammed and sunk.
Manners's hulk was towed to Athens for use as a floating power-station, while Jermain was appointed to a sister ship, Duckworth, the leader of an escort group that specialised in hunting snorkel-fitted U-boats, which were a threat to coastal convoys.
The U-boats would lie close to rocks or wrecks, where echoes were hard to distinguish, and came up to periscope depth only when convoys passed by. Jermain studied the charts and familiarised himself with the waters off Cornwall, and sank three U-boats in the space of a few weeks in February-March 1945. He was awarded a fourth and fifth mention in dispatches.
After the war Jermain taught young officers at the Royal Naval College and held other personnel appointments ashore.
He also held an unusually high number of commands at sea: the sloops Cygnet and Peacock (1951-52); the destroyer Lagos, during the First Cod War (1957-58); the frigates Rothesay and Yarmouth (1961-63); and the guided missile destroyer London (1967-69).
He ended his service as Commodore Superintendent Contract Built Ships.
Jermain was a quietly spoken man with a reputation for getting things done. It was no surprise that even the hard-to-please Admiral "Black Jack" Frewen, after an inspection of Yarmouth in 1962, concluded that Jermain's ship was "efficient, workmanlike and tidy with a good spirit and is well led".
In retirement Jermain obtained an HGV licence and ran a business transporting yachts on a low-loader.
As an active member of the Royal Yacht Squadron from 1975, he was an expert course-setter for several major races and coxed the committee boat with great skill until he was well into his seventies.
Denis Jermain died on October 26. He married, in 1945, Jean Eleanor Scott-Phillips, who survives him with their two sons. A daughter predeceased him.