Ships
- HMAS Hobart (D63) Captain from 8 June 1942
- HMAS Shropshire (73) In command, September 1944
Henry Arthur Showers was born on 24 May 1899 at Carlton, Melbourne, the youngest of four surviving children of Charles Showers, a hotelier, and his wife Alice Mary, née Villar. The family moved to Preston, where he grew up. In 1913 he entered the Royal Australian Naval College at Geelong with its first intake of cadet midshipmen, and he passed out at Jervis Bay in 1916 with prizes in engineering and with colours for rugby, cricket, and rowing. He became a midshipman on 1 January 1917 and joined the light cruiser HMS Glorious in the Grand Fleet, one of a small group of Australian midshipmen sent to sea during the First World War.
Navigation became his speciality. In 1926 and 1927, while serving in the survey ship HMAS Moresby, he helped prepare new charts of the Great Barrier Reef. He married Jean Alison Cunningham in 1927, and they had a daughter. Promoted commander in 1933, he spent further time with the Royal Navy, including service as navigating officer of the Third Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean during the Abyssinian crisis, before returning to Australia in 1936 as navigating officer of the Australian Squadron in HMAS Canberra. From 1937 to 1945 he was an honorary aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie.
His first ship command was the sloop HMAS Swan, which he held from January 1939. That September he succeeded Harry Leslie Howden in the light cruiser HMAS Adelaide, and on 31 December he was promoted captain. In September 1940 Adelaide carried the Free French administrator Henri Sautot from the New Hebrides to Nouméa. Sautot took over from the Vichy governor, and Showers spent the tense days ashore mediating between de Gaullist and Pétainist factions so that New Caledonia stayed with the Allies.
On 8 June 1942 Showers became captain of the light cruiser HMAS Hobart. He took her through the opening Allied offensive in the Solomon Islands, including the landings at Guadalcanal in August 1942, and on convoy escort in the Coral Sea into 1943. On 20 July 1943 the Japanese submarine I-11 torpedoed Hobart off Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was seriously damaged, reached Sydney in late August, and remained under repair until late 1944. Showers left her on 18 October 1943 for duty at HMAS Kuttabul as chief staff officer to the Naval Officer-in-Charge, Sydney.
On 2 May 1944 he relieved John Augustine Collins, a classmate from the 1913 college entry, in command of the heavy cruiser HMAS Shropshire. He was still in command through September 1944. In those months the ship fired in support of amphibious landings along the north coast of New Guinea and at Wakde Island and Morotai in the Netherlands East Indies. On 30 September 1944 he handed Shropshire to Charles Alfred Godfrey Nichols of the Royal Navy.
Promoted commodore second class on 15 October 1944, he went to Melbourne in November as Second Naval Member of the Commonwealth Naval Board, the first graduate of the Royal Australian Naval College appointed to the board. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1945 Birthday Honours. In 1946 he commanded Shropshire again and took the Australian victory contingent to London. He then served about two years as Commodore Superintendent of Training at Flinders Naval Depot, returned as Second Naval Member from 1948 to 1950, and worked with Prime Minister Ben Chifley on a pension scheme for naval personnel, an outcome he later counted among his proudest.
On 10 May 1950 he became acting rear admiral and Flag Officer-in-Charge of the Eastern Australia Area, living at the official residence Tresco in Sydney. He transferred to the Retired List on 8 February 1955 with the honorary rank of rear admiral. He was president of the United Service Institution of New South Wales from 1951 to 1954 and federal president of the Navy League of Australia from 1957 to 1968, and for fourteen years he was secretary of the Nuclear Research Foundation at the University of Sydney. Showers died on 31 July 1991, aged ninety-two, the last survivor of the college’s first entry. Sailors who served with him remembered a courteous captain and ships that were happy under his command.