Ships
- HMAS Lithgow (J206) Captain from 14 June 1941
Alfred Victor Knight was born on 20 February 1897 at Dover, Kent, the son of William Knight, a grocer’s manager, and Annetta Louisa, née Howgego. He attended St Mary’s School, sang in the choir at St Mary’s-in-the-Castle, and picked up knots, splices and signalling in the local Scout troop. In 1912, aged fifteen, he joined the Roberts Steamship Company of Liverpool as a cadet and served his apprenticeship in the tramp steamer Batiscan. On 21 April 1915 he was appointed a midshipman in the Royal Naval Reserve.
His first wartime ship was the armed merchant cruiser HMS Victorian, on North Sea blockade duty with the 10th Cruiser Squadron. He moved to the destroyer HMS Owl, escorting traffic to France, and after a gunnery course joined HMS Crusader on the Dover Patrol. On 23 April 1918 he was in HMS Sirius for the attempt to block Ostend and deny the port to German destroyers and submarines. The harbour stayed open, yet Knight received the Distinguished Service Cross for his coolness under heavy fire, and he was mentioned in despatches for a second attack on 10 May. Promoted temporary acting lieutenant in February 1919, he joined the minesweeper HMS Northolt, clearing the Northern Barrage from Lerwick. He left the navy in January 1920 and gained his master’s certificate the following month.
He returned to the merchant service with the Booth Line and then Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line, sailing to the Americas, the Far East and Western Australia, and he spent a period with the Malayan Customs service in its campaign against rubber smuggling. After a visit to Australia he was appointed a lieutenant in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve (Seagoing) on 1 January 1923. In 1925 he joined the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, serving in ships that included Aorangi, Niagara and Awatea, and made his home in Sydney. On 12 April 1930, at St Nicolas’s Church of England, Coogee, he married the artist Irene Ethel Pain. The reserve advanced him to lieutenant commander in 1931 and to commander on 30 June 1937.
The Royal Australian Navy mobilised him for full-time duty on 16 March 1940 and employed him in the trade division at Navy Office, Melbourne. In February 1941 he was appointed to command the Bathurst-class corvette HMAS Lithgow (J206), then fitting out at Mort’s Dock, Balmain. He commissioned her at Sydney on 14 June 1941. From July she worked with the 20th Minesweeping Flotilla in Bass Strait and Tasmanian waters. The flotilla accounted for twenty German mines that year, and Lithgow swept one of them off Tasman Island on 14 October.
The opening of the Pacific war ended that sweeping. Lithgow took up anti-submarine patrols off Sydney, and in January 1942 helped escort the first United States convoy to Darwin, where she passed to the local command. On 20 January 1942 she shared in the destruction of the Japanese minelaying submarine I-124 off Darwin, a sinking credited jointly to HMAS Deloraine, Lithgow, HMAS Katoomba and the American destroyer USS Edsall. She then escorted convoys between Darwin and Thursday Island until September. On the 18th of that month she sailed from Townsville with a three-ship troop convoy for Port Moresby, and in December she took part in the fighting to retake Buna. Knight was appointed OBE in the 1943 New Year Honours for his service in corvettes. He gave up Lithgow early in 1943, his first naval command, during which he had also been senior officer of a group of four corvettes working mostly in northern Australian waters.
In February 1943 he assumed command of HMAS Westralia, then converting in Sydney from an armed merchant cruiser to a landing ship, infantry. Under his command she trained more than 21,000 men for amphibious operations and carried more than 19,000 troops and 30,000 tons of military stores into forward areas. She put troops ashore at Arawe, New Britain, in December 1943, at Humboldt Bay in Netherlands New Guinea in April 1944, and in Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944. The United States awarded him the Legion of Merit for his part in that training and in the combined landings. In November 1944 he came ashore as sea transport officer at Sydney, working among merchant shipping and the British Pacific Fleet as Australia became a base for the last campaigns against Japan.
He was promoted captain in December 1946 and was demobilised on 1 July 1947. He then commanded merchant ships for the Australian Shipping Board, which became the Australian National Line in 1956, among them the bulk carrier Mount Kembla. On retiring in 1962 he was made the line’s first commodore, and in 1972 honorary commodore of the fleet. Irene died in 1967. On 17 October 1968 he married Hilda Marian Menlove, née Stevens, who died in 1975. He chaired the Glebe Island Committee, held a directorship with an engineering firm, and remained active in naval and merchant-navy associations, with golf and fishing for recreation. Knight died at his home in Double Bay, Sydney, on 22 January 1983, survived by the daughter of his first marriage, and was cremated after a funeral in the naval chapel at HMAS Watson.