Ships
- HMS Quality In command, 23 March 1945
Robert William Jocelyn was born on 4 December 1909 at Tollymore in Northern Ireland, the family home of the earls of Roden. In the Service he was known as Viscount Jocelyn, the courtesy title of the heir to that earldom. He became a sub-lieutenant on 1 September 1930 and a lieutenant on 1 December 1931. On 1 December 1939 he was promoted lieutenant commander.
His first wartime command of a destroyer was the A-class ship Achates, which he took over on 10 August 1940. On 8 June 1941 the German submarine U-38 torpedoed the merchant ship Kingston Hill southwest of the Cape Verde Islands, and Achates later took sixteen survivors from the water. The next month he was screening the carriers that were preparing an air strike on Kirkenes and Petsamo. On 25 July 1941 Achates struck a mine off Seidisfjord, Iceland, and was severely damaged. He left her late in 1941. A Mention in Despatches was gazetted on 20 January 1942.
On 25 October 1941 he took command of the newer destroyer Panther. In January 1942 Panther left Scapa Flow with the Home Fleet for Hvalfjord in Iceland after the German battleship Tirpitz was reported at sea, in company with ships that included the battleships King George V and Rodney and the carrier Victorious. Panther afterwards served with Force H in the Mediterranean. The command ended on 9 October 1943, the day German aircraft sank Panther in the Scarpanto Strait during the fighting in the Aegean. Jocelyn came through the loss.
By June 1944 he was in command of the Q-class destroyer Quality, built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend and commissioned in 1942. That summer the ship was with the Eastern Fleet, and on 25 July 1944 she took part in the bombardment and air strikes against Japanese positions at Sabang. On 23 March 1945 he was still in command, as a lieutenant commander, when the British Pacific Fleet sailed from Ulithi for the Okinawa campaign. Quality remained with the fleet through the strikes against Japan.
At Manus in the first days of July 1945, between operations, he received word of his promotion to commander, dated 30 June. He cleared the lower deck and told the ship's company that the next operation would be off Japan itself. Through July and August Quality worked as plane guard for the carrier Formidable, and the men on the bridge remembered him marking off each aircraft as it left and returned, ready to close at once if one went into the water. The ship's company later put the number of pilots saved at thirty-five, and counted ninety-five occasions between 7 July and 12 August when Quality went alongside other ships for fuel, stores, mail, or passengers. On 24 September 1945 Quality left Tokyo Bay. Jocelyn had already taken passage in the battleship Duke of York to join the battleship Anson. The following month Quality was transferred to the Royal Australian Navy.
He was promoted captain on 31 December 1950 and retired on 7 January 1960. He succeeded as the 9th Earl of Roden. He died at Newcastle in Northern Ireland on 18 October 1993, at the age of eighty-three.