Pacific ships

RN · Captain

Arliss, Stephen H. T.

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SA

Ships

28 November 1940 is the day Napier commissioned on the Clyde, not the start of the appointment. The compilations drawn from Navy Lists put him in the ship from 16 September 1940, while she was still completing, and as Captain (D) of the 7th Destroyer Flotilla from 24 October 1940. She commissioned with him already her captain. The initials are not Henry, and not a guess at Tolcher. The London Gazette, when it spells the name in full and spells it right, prints Stephen Harry Tolson Arliss. The D.S.O. notice of 8 January 1942 is the exception: it prints "Tolton". Every other full-name notice found here — the Chilean licence of 28 February 1941, the Norwegian list of 4 March 1947, the Companion of the Bath on 1 January 1949 — uses Tolson. The Admiralty's own record at Kew is filed under Stephen Harry Tolson Arliss, born 11 July 1895.

He was a Royal Navy officer lent to an Australian-manned destroyer, not an Australian, and not an American. The rest of the life is a boy who went to Osborne at twelve, a very young commanding officer in the last year of the first war, a string of destroyers between the wars, an earthquake in Chile, Crete, a commodore's broad pendant, a heavy cruiser, a flag in occupied Germany, and a death in Nairobi at fifty-nine. Some of those later dates are firm. Some are not. The difference is marked below.

Origins

The date of birth in the Admiralty catalogue is 11 July 1895. Hans Houterman's compilation of officers, which follows the service record and the Navy Lists, gives the same day and places the birth at Kensington, London. It calls him the second son of Edward and Florence Helena Arliss, of New Lodge, Hanbury, Burton-on-Trent, and records the nickname "Steve". A private family tree on the web gives the same parents but a different birth, 7 November 1895 at Battersea, and can be set aside on the date: it disagrees with the Admiralty. The place, Kensington, is taken from the compilation, not from a birth certificate seen for this essay. Nothing here describes the house, the money, or what sort of father Edward was. Edward's dates of death, and Florence's, appear only on that family site and are not used.

He was sent to Bramcote, a preparatory school at Scarborough, and then into the Navy the old way. On 15 May 1908, a few weeks short of thirteen, he entered the training establishments. Osborne first, then Dartmouth. He passed out on 15 May 1913 and was made midshipman the same day. Five years in a classroom and a training cruiser, and then a battleship. The record does not say whether he wanted destroyers yet. It says only that the Navy had him from childhood, which was how that generation of executive officers was made.

Formation

From 15 May 1913 to 15 October 1915 he was in H.M.S. Hercules, a Home Fleet battleship. He was eighteen when the war began, still a midshipman, still in a big ship that did not fight the kind of war he would later be known for. In the autumn of 1915 he was moved, briefly, to the armoured cruiser Berwick — not the ship he would command thirty years later — and then, from 22 November 1915, to the sloop Snowdrop. A torpedo-control course at Vernon followed in December 1916. After that the Navy put him in destroyers of the Harwich force, borne as tenders to Dido: Surprise, Lance, Skilful, Miranda. On 10 September 1917 he became first lieutenant of Viking, the acting lieutenancy having started on the 15th. The London Gazette of 1 March 1918 lists him among the sub-lieutenants promoted to lieutenant. The compilations give the seniority as 15 November 1917. The Gazette of 16 May 1916 had already carried him in the batch of sub-lieutenants whose date, printed with that list, is 15 May 1916. Acting sub-lieutenant from 15 September 1915 is in the compilations and is the ordinary next step after two years as a midshipman. None of these notices describes an action. They describe a young officer being moved, quickly, from a battleship's gunroom into the boats that did the North Sea's daily work.

On 26 January 1918, at twenty-two, he was given command of H.M.S. Speedwell, an old torpedo gunboat. He kept her until 14 December 1918. Command of the minesweeper Saltburn followed, to 1 December 1919, then a first lieutenant's job in Leamington, a short command of the trawler Arthur Lessimore, and back to Leamington. The war was over. The sweeping was not. There is no decoration from this war in any Gazette notice found for him, and no citation. What the appointments show is that the Navy trusted him with a ship of his own before he was twenty-three, and then kept him in small ships.

The 1920s and 1930s are a destroyer officer's career, not a staff career. From August 1920 to May 1923 he was in the sloop Wisteria. From June 1923 to December 1925 he was in the destroyer Wivern in the Mediterranean. The Gazette of 20 November 1925 promoted him lieutenant-commander with the batch dated 15 November 1925. An anti-submarine course at Osprey in March 1926, and then, from 30 March 1926, command of Sterling on the China Station, into early 1929. Waterhen in the Mediterranean followed, from 19 October 1929 to 29 July 1931. The Gazette of 3 July 1931 promoted him from lieutenant-commander to commander in the list headed 30 June 1931. He came home for a technical course and a tactical course, and in August 1932 took Thruster in the anti-submarine flotilla at Portland. A short spell as executive officer of the cruiser Effingham, in reserve, in the autumn of 1933, and then back to the Mediterranean destroyers that made his name inside the service: Delight from October 1934, Wild Swan from December 1934 to September 1936, Hero from October 1936 to 8 July 1937 and on to 4 January 1938.

The Gazette of 2 July 1937 promoted him commander to captain, "to date 30th June, 1937, except where otherwise stated." He was still in Hero when the half-yearly list came out. The Royal Australian Navy's later history of Napier calls him "a well known Royal Navy destroyer Commander and Captain (D) of a peace time Mediterranean Flotilla." The first half of that is fair. The second is not supported by any Captain (D) appointment found before October 1940. He had commanded Mediterranean destroyers as a commander and, for the last months, as a captain. Senior officer of a division is not the same post as Captain (D). The wartime flotilla is the one the lists actually give him.

In January 1938 he was sent to learn Spanish, borne in President "for study of foreign languages, i.e. Spanish", then for a month inside the Naval Intelligence Division. On 22 April 1938 he became Naval Attaché on the west coast of South America, at Santiago, accredited to Chile, Peru and Ecuador. He was there when the war in Europe began.

The earthquake, and the war he missed

On 24 January 1939 an earthquake wrecked Concepción. The London Gazette of 28 February 1941 records that the King gave Captain Stephen Harry Tolson Arliss royal licence to wear the insignia of Commander of the Chilean Order of Merit, conferred by the President of Chile "in recognition of valuable services rendered by him in the saving of life" on that day. That is the whole of the official story. No British notice found here says whose lives, or how, or what it cost him. The decoration is real. The picture of him in the streets is not in the sources used for this essay, and it is not invented here.

He stayed in the attaché's post until 26 May 1940. By then the German offensive in France was three weeks old, and the evacuation from Dunkirk was beginning. He was not in it. Rear-Admiral O. H. Becher, who served under him and wrote the sketch for the Naval Historical Society of Australia in 1978, put it plainly: Arliss came to Napier from the attaché appointment in Chile, he had missed the early part of the war, and "he was breathing fire when he joined." Becher was remembering a mood, decades later. The appointments support the fact underneath the mood. A destroyer captain who had spent the first nine months of the war at Santiago was given, in the autumn of 1940, a new flotilla leader and the Australians who would man her.

Between 15 August and 16 September 1940 the compilation has him back in intelligence and then, briefly, at the Imperial Defence College. On 16 September he was appointed to Napier, still building, and to duty with the Admiral Superintendent of Contract-Built Ships. On 24 October 1940 he was her commanding officer and Captain (D), 7th Destroyer Flotilla. The ship commissioned on 28 November. His staff was a mix of Australian officers and a nucleus of Royal Navy officers. The company was Australian. Commander (E) H. G. D. Oliver, the engineer officer and staff engineer, later listed the Royal Navy handful in her: the captain, the navigator, the captain's secretary, the coxswain, the chief yeoman, the flotilla shipwright, and one stoker petty officer. The ratings, Oliver wrote, were sad at losing the rum ration. They got over it.

Napier

Becher's sketch is the best portrait, and it is not a fond one at the start. He called Arliss one of the old type of destroyer officer, a hard-doer, physically tough, a fine ship-handler when he concentrated, a man who "did not know the word fear." It took the Australian sailors time to accept him, because he was a driver rather than a leader. They did not like being made to change into Number Twos for entering and leaving Scapa Flow in the middle of winter. Becher thought it took Steve a while to see that peacetime routines could not all survive. An editorial postscript to the same article, by someone who had been on board for the full-power trials, says the first impression was that the captain was utterly fearless, and that he had a most belligerent manner and was certainly a driver. The same note says that when he joined he was highly critical of the Royal Australian Navy, and that in time he accepted the judgement had been faulty. That last sentence matters, because it is one of the few places anyone records him changing his mind. It is memory, not a letter, and it is left as memory.

Trials and work-up at Scapa were followed by a spell of North Atlantic convoy work that the ship history calls uneventful. Then the Mediterranean. Napier and Nizam came out by the Cape. On 18 April 1941 Napier left Simon's Town for Cape Town and went straight into dock. They were too late for the evacuation of Greece. They were in time for Crete.

Before that, in March 1941 if Becher remembered the month rightly, she was still in Fairfield's yard on the Clyde, preparing for the Mediterranean, when the Luftwaffe bombed Glasgow by night. Becher says Napier's 4-inch gun joined the barrage, enthusiastically if not effectively, and that Arliss took personal charge and thoroughly enjoyed himself. The shipyards were almost untouched. The tenements a couple of hundred yards back from the river, where the yard workers lived, burned. A bond store full of whisky took a direct hit and the whisky ran in the streets. The postscript adds that Hinchliffe, acting first lieutenant with most of the officers on leave, was gunnery control officer, with Arliss in command and, again, enjoying himself. One observer at the yard did not even realise Napier had opened fire. The editor remembered the tracers. This is a shore raid, not a sea fight. It is the first picture anyone gives of him under fire: present, in charge, and, by the account of men who watched him, glad of it. Whether that gladness was courage or the relief of a man who had missed a year of other men's war, Becher does not separate. He offers both facts and lets them stand together.

Crete

The ship's history and the memoirs disagree about numbers and about some of the details, and the disagreement is useful, because the official figures and the remembered ones are not the same story told loosely. They are two stories.

The Sea Power Centre's history, which reads as if it were taken from the reports, says that on 28 May 1941 Napier, as Captain (D), with Nizam and the British destroyers Kelvin and Kandahar, left Alexandria for Crete and reached Sphakia after a quiet run. In the early hours of the next morning Napier embarked 296 soldiers, three women, one Greek and one Chinese national, ten seamen, two children, and a dog. The force sailed at 3 a.m. Napier was not hit. Nizam was damaged by near misses. On the morning of 30 May the four destroyers sailed again. Kandahar had to turn back with engine trouble. Kelvin was damaged by air attack and turned back too. The two Australian ships went on, to lift the numbers that had been meant for four. At 2.30 a.m. on 31 May Nizam left with 698 troops. Half an hour later Napier left with 705 soldiers, mostly Australians. At 9 a.m. twelve aircraft came for Napier. Two sticks of eight bombs fell on her port side and across her stern. Fourteen were counted as near misses. Engine-room and boiler-room damage brought her down to twenty knots. The history quotes her commanding officer: "One Ju.88 was certainly shot down and it is considered three others were damaged." No one in the ship was killed. The troops were landed at Alexandria.

Cunningham's despatch, printed in the London Gazette of 21 May 1948, singles the same night out. The achievement of Captain S. H. T. Arliss, Captain (D), Seventh Destroyer Flotilla, in Napier, in embarking 700 men each in Napier and Nizam on the night of 30/31 May, was noteworthy. He had been deprived, by defects and damage, of two of his force, and he did not reduce the numbers to be embarked.

Becher, writing in 1978, remembered the order differently and the men differently. He remembered a first trip of about 250 a ship, and a second trip on which Cunningham had ordered them not to load more than 250 because of the aircraft. He remembered Kandahar and Kelvin falling out, as the report does, and then both Australian ships leaving nearer 5 a.m. than 4, with about 750 men each, mostly New Zealanders, not Australians. He remembered the last Ju 88 coming in from right ahead, where the 4.7-inch guns could not elevate, and Arliss ordering the wheel hard over so that the bomb fell about ten feet to starboard, abreast the engine room, instead of on board. He remembered the ship stopping, the cast-iron turbine feet broken, Nizam circling, and the engineer officer, "Bug" Oliver, arriving on the bridge unperturbed: "Give me half an hour and we will be going again." Becher remembered sixteen knots, no further attack, Alexandria at about 7 p.m., tugs because she could not go astern, and Cunningham coming over the guardrail to clap the captain on the back.

Oliver's own account, published in 1983, is the engineer telling it forty years on, and it does not contain the sentence Becher gave him. Oliver remembered being ordered to lift about 500 when two of the four ships had turned back, and then a ship so full that men were underfoot. He remembered a Czechoslovak family, father, mother, boy, girl, and a red setter, seven Chinese seamen, and five chaplains, which is a different passenger list from the ship's history. He remembered one boiler lost because a near miss broke the foot of a fuel pump and sprayed oil across the furnace front, a leading stoker shutting the boiler room down in the right order, a crack across the forward foot of the port main engine, timber shores under it, a circulator that stopped for no reason anyone could see, and the old Clyde-trials trick of using the ship's own way through the water to keep a condenser cool. He telephoned the figures to the bridge. Arliss had already hoisted speed flags for nineteen knots and told Nizam to take station ahead, zigzagging, asdic running. Oliver went up, apologised for the boiler blowing off just abaft the bridge, and told him they would get to Alexandria even if they had to sail there on the forecastle and waist awnings. Arliss, Oliver wrote, was glad to have the engines at any speed. They were still in unhealthy water. Nizam was sent ahead to ask for two tugs. Every ship they passed in the harbour cheered them.

The bones that survive the disagreement are these. He was Captain (D). Two of his four destroyers were gone before the beach. He did not cut the lift to what one ship could comfortably carry. Cunningham, in a despatch not written to flatter a captain, called that noteworthy and put the figure at 700 a ship. The bomb that would have finished her was a near miss, and the ship got home because the engine room held her together and because he handled her. His own sentence that got into the later history is not about himself. It is about a Ju 88 he thought they had shot down, and three more he thought they had damaged. The D.S.O. followed in the Gazette of 8 January 1942, in the general list "for outstanding gallantry, fortitude and resolution during the Battle of Crete," with his name misspelt Tolton and with no separate citation. Houterman notes an investiture on 30 October 1945, long after the night itself. That date is from the compilation, not from a court circular read here.

Becher thought Oliver's mention in despatches was one of the most deserved of the war and should have been a D.S.C. That is Becher's opinion about another man. It sits here only because it shows what the flotilla thought of the repair that let Arliss keep the ship at sea. From 2 July to 21 August 1941 the compilation has Arliss temporarily ashore at Nile, the base at Alexandria, while the ship was patched. The ship history says the repair was at Port Said, from June into August, and that she was used as control ship for the harbour air defence. The night after she berthed, Port Said had its first raid. Eleven bombs fell nearby. She was not hit again. In August she went back to sea as leader of the 7th Flotilla, with Jaguar, Jackal, Javelin, Kingston and the others.

The year after Crete

The rest of 1941, in the ship history, is the flotilla's work rather than a set of stories about him, and it should stay that way. Napier ran to Tobruk in September, screened convoys in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and was one of the screen when Barham was torpedoed and sunk on 25 November 1941. That month she was also among nine destroyers moving troops between Haifa and Cyprus. On 30 December she sailed from Alexandria with the heavy ships that bombarded Bardia. No report found for this essay says what Arliss did or said at Barham's sinking. He was the captain of one screening destroyer. That is all that is supported.

In January 1942 Napier, Nizam and Nestor left the Mediterranean for the Indian Ocean, escorted Indomitable while she flew aircraft off for Malaya and Java, and then did it again from Port Sudan. Singapore had fallen before the second flight could land there. The aircraft went off about a hundred miles from Colombo in time for the first Japanese raid on that port. Napier then joined the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee. February to May 1942, the ship history says, was escort, patrol, and screening, and for her it was uneventful. Uboat.net, working from logs and reports of proceedings, still styles him captain of Napier in March, April, May and on 5 June 1942, when she arrived at Suez.

In June she went back to the Mediterranean as one of the destroyers with a large convoy from Alexandria toward Malta. Nestor was lost on that passage. The ship history does not describe Arliss's part beyond the ship's presence. On 9 June 1942, by Houterman's dates, he was made Commodore, second class, and Commodore (D) of the Eastern Fleet destroyers, while remaining Napier's commanding officer into August. Commodore here is an appointment, not a permanent rank. He was still a captain.

Where he was in the late summer and autumn of 1942 is the one real muddle in the operational record, and it is set out as a muddle, not smoothed.

The Sea Power Centre says Lieutenant Commander Arnold Green, D.S.C., R.A.N., assumed command from Captain Arliss on 7 November 1942, and it tells Napier's story straight through to that date: back to the Indian Ocean, the closing stages of the Madagascar campaign, present at the surrender of Majunga on 10 September and at the occupation of Tamatave on 18 September, then Kilindini, escort and patrol to Durban, nothing much happening. Uboat.net gives him Napier from 28 November 1940 to 7 November 1942.

Houterman's Navy List compilation has him as commanding officer only until about August 1942, and then "at H.M.S. Hecla (additional)" from August to November. Hecla was the destroyer depot ship. She was torpedoed and sunk off North Africa on the night of 11/12 November 1942. The compilation does not say he was on board when she sank. A researcher who reconstructed Hecla's pay ledger, Bill Forster, concluded that Arliss had been her commanding officer until 2 August 1942 while she was under repair at Simon's Town, that he was also the designated commodore of the Eastern Fleet destroyers at Mombasa, and that he may have taken passage in her later. Forster also records that Arliss's name was not in the reconstructed ledger of the 858 men on board when she was lost, and so he is not on that crew list. Those three accounts cannot all be simply true. Either he remained captain of Napier until Green relieved him on 7 November, in which case the Madagascar passages belong to his command, or he had already left her by August and was borne in Hecla, in which case Majunga and Tamatave were someone else's. The primary book that would settle it, the officer's service record, was not read for this essay. Until it is, the September operation is the ship's, not automatically his, and the sinking of Hecla is not his story. He was not among the names recovered for the men on board that night.

From December 1942 the compilation has him additional at Tana, the base at Kilindini, then from 26 September 1943 at Highflyer in Trincomalee, then from 15 January 1944 at the depot ship Woolwich, and from 4 April 1944 back in Napier — not as her captain. Green had the ship. Arliss was Commodore (D). The Times obituary of Vice-Admiral Sir Ian Hogg, who had been his staff officer, says Hogg stayed with Napier as senior staff officer to Arliss when Arliss became the commodore in command of Somerville's Eastern Fleet destroyers, based in Ceylon, until early 1944. "Early" is a little soon. The ship's history is more exact about the pendant. On 19 April 1944 Napier, wearing the broad pendant of Commodore Arliss, D.S.O., R.N., Commander (D) Eastern Fleet, and four other Australian destroyers, screened Saratoga and Illustrious for the strike on Sabang. On 17 May Napier took part in the strike by the same two carriers on Surabaya. The history does not say in words that he was embarked for the second one. It does say that on 4 June 1944 his pendant was struck in Napier and Commodore A. L. Poland's was hoisted in its place. Houterman ends the Commodore (D) appointment on that day, 4 June 1944. The ship's later war — Burma, Okinawa, Tokyo Bay — was not his. Poland had the pendant, and other captains had the ship.

Berwick, and the men he asked to see

On 10 August 1944 he was appointed to command the heavy cruiser Berwick. Uboat.net and the Dreadnought Project's summary end that command on 10 February 1946. Houterman carries it to 26 June 1946. Both may be a matter of what "in command" includes — the ship, the paying-off, the leave — and the service record would choose. She was H.M.S. Berwick, a Kent-class cruiser of the Royal Navy. Becher, lunching with him later, remembered the ship as H.M.A.S. Berwick. That is a slip. There was no Australian Berwick in his life. The slip is worth keeping only because the rest of the lunch is the one postwar remark of his that got written down.

Becher says that after the war, while Arliss was in command of the cruiser, he visited Sydney, lunched with Lieutenant Commander Hinchliffe, then commanding Macquarie, and asked to see as many of the old 7th Flotilla as could be got together. They were got together. He said how much he had enjoyed serving in Napier as Captain (D). Set that next to the man who had made them change into Number Twos at Scapa and who had been highly critical of the R.A.N. when he joined. The enjoyment is his, reported by Becher. It is not a speech, and it has no date beyond "after the war" and during the Berwick command, which means late 1945 or the first half of 1946, depending on which end-date is right.

What he did in Berwick week by week is not written here, because the sources used do not describe it as his. A log-style note on uboat.net places Berwick under Captain S. H. T. Arliss, D.S.O., exercising off Scapa Flow on 10 October 1944 with Kent, Euryalus and Apollo. That is an exercise, not a battle. He was a cruiser captain in the last year of the war and the first months of the peace. The Pacific fighting of 1945 was Napier's, under other men.

On 4 March 1947 the London Gazette, in a list of Norwegian awards, included Captain Stephen Harry Tolson Arliss, D.S.O., Royal Navy, under the bare heading "for services rendered to Norway during the war." The page does not name the decoration in that paragraph. A later heading on the same page, King Haakon VII's Liberty Medal, belongs to a different citation, "outstanding services in connection with the Liberation of Norway," and to other officers. Houterman's list identifies Arliss's award as that Liberty Medal and says the decoration was posted. The Gazette, read on its face, does not say so against his name. The Norwegian service is itself unexplained in anything found here. He was in Chile in 1940, when the Norwegian navy was being rebuilt in Britain. The Gazette's neighbouring paragraph, about reorganisation of that navy, names a different officer. His own heading is only "during the war." It is recorded, and it is not embroidered.

The flag, the wife, the farm

The compilations promote him rear-admiral on 5 July 1946. The Gazette line for that day was not found in this search. What is in the Gazette is the style. On 1 January 1949 he is "Rear-Admiral Stephen Harry Tolson Arliss, D.S.O." when he is made a Companion of the Bath. On 29 November 1949, notified from the Admiralty on 30 December and printed on 17 January 1950, "Rear Adml. S. H. T. Arliss, C.B., D.S.O." is placed on the retired list. On 1 May 1950 the retired rear-admiral is promoted vice-admiral on the retired list. The rank is not in doubt. The precise July 1946 day rests on the compilations, which agree with each other.

Houterman has a stretch of courses after Berwick: home service leave, a senior officers' air-support course, a tactical course, a technical course, Exercise Spearhead in May 1947, and unemployed time. On 17 June 1947 he became Flag Officer Commanding, British Naval Forces, Germany, and Chief British Naval Representative on the Allied Control Commission, borne in Royal Albert at Hamburg. Colin Mackie's compilation of senior appointments, which is what the usual reference list of that command is built from, gives the same post from June 1947 to August 1949, and the next officer, Archibald Day, from August 1949. Houterman ends Arliss on 17 August 1949. The C.B. of the New Year 1949 honours, with an investiture Houterman dates to 1 March 1949, came while he still held the flag. Nothing read for this essay says what he thought of the Germany appointment, or what he did with the disarmament and the minesweepers and the control commission beyond holding the post. The Navy List compilers are sure he held it. That is the level of the evidence.

He retired on 29 November 1949. He was fifty-four. Houterman says he married, in 1926, Alice Dugdale Greenwood, elder daughter of Frederick W. Greenwood of Accrington, and that she died in 1949. The same compilation says there was one son, and does not name him. A family tree agrees the marriage was in 1926 and that she died in 1949, and adds a registration district and a birth year for her that are not confirmed here. No birth certificate, no marriage certificate, and no will were read. The year is the hard part. His wife died in the year he retired. Whether her death was before the retirement or after it, and whether it had anything to do with his going, is not in the sources. It is not guessed.

The same compilation ends with one sentence: he went farming in Kenya. It then gives his death as 6 November 1954, at Nairobi. The family tree gives the same day and the same city. No obituary, no probate, and no Kenya death entry were found in this search. The National Portrait Gallery holds four portraits of him and dates him 1895–1954, which confirms the years and not the place. If the Nairobi date is right, he was fifty-nine, and he had been a retired vice-admiral for four and a half years. What the farm was, whether the son was with him, and what he died of, are blank.

What the sea made of him

The man the records will support is a certain kind of destroyer officer, and not a mystery. He was trained from twelve. He had a command at twenty-two. He spent the middle of his life in Mediterranean and China Station destroyers, and he was known for it. A shore appointment in Chile kept him out of the first nine months of the second war and put him, on one day in January 1939, into the work of saving life after an earthquake, work the Chilean government thought worth an order and the King thought worth a licence to wear. He came to an Australian ship's company angry at having missed the war, hard on peacetime ceremony, critical of the navy he had been lent, and, by the account of the officer who watched him longest in that ship, he revised the criticism. At Crete he kept the lift when half his force had gone home, and he put the wheel over. The D.S.O. is for that battle, not for a paragraph of his own. He was commodore of Somerville's destroyers for nearly two years, and his pendant came back to Napier in 1944 without the ship being his to command. He asked, afterwards, to see the flotilla again, and he said he had enjoyed it.

That is as far as the evidence goes toward character. It does not include a letter home, a reason for Kenya, or a last illness. The sea career is full. The private life is a marriage, a wife's death in 1949, one unnamed son, and a farm that is a single sentence.