WW2 100 – 29 May 1940 – A casualty of Operation Dynamo: Lieutenant Hubert Charles Courtney Tanner (1913-40), Royal Navy, HMS Grafton

Continued from 27 May-2 June 1940

‘With no known grave’: SIGNALMAN JOSEPH HARRY V. DALE (1921-40)   

Royal Corps of Signals, 1^st Div. Signals   

https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/11/ww2-75-27-may-2-june-1940-with-no-known.html

 

 

 Budleigh Salterton’s War Memorial at the junction of Coastguard Road and Salting Hill

It was difficult to identify Hubert as a Budleigh-linked casualty of WW2, with only his name on the War Memorial and no further information initially available. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists many war dead with the name H. Tanner, and its record of Hubert gives no indication of the place of residence of his parents. This would explain why the excellent Devon Heritage website of local war dead lists him as ‘Not yet confirmed’, along with, sadly, half a dozen or so other other names on Budleigh’s War Memorial.  Eventually I came across an online mention of WW1 veteran Frederick Courtney Tanner as living in the town, and a genealogical website confirmed that Hubert was indeed his son, and that he had died in WW2, aged only 27.

Further information came from an impressive community website administered by residents of a Worcestershire village who decided to set up the Badsey Society in 2002. The only connection with Badsey is that Frederick Courtney Tanner’s wife Ethelwyn Florence Mourilyan was a member of the Sladden family, who lived at Seward House on the village’s High Street. On the Badsey Society website I discovered detailed biographies of both Frederick Courtney Tanner and Hubert, so I left words of high praise in the online visitors’ book.  You can admire the Badsey Society website here

 

Hubert’s father, apparently known as Captain Tanner 

Image credit: Chris and Julian Higman, and The Badsey Society  

Hubert’s father, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Courtney Tanner DSO, CMG, CdeG, was indeed one of those army officers so typical of Budleigh Salterton’s past. He certainly had strong Devonian links, being born in Plymouth in 1879 and growing up at the family home of Mutley House in what was the nearby village of Weston Peverell, now part of the city’s suburbs.  

Closer to Budleigh, we find that Hubert’s grandparents, Plymouth businessman Charles Frederick Tanner and his wife Ellen née Square, moved to our area and by 1902 were living at 3 Cranford Avenue in Exmouth.

 

Top: 4,Trefusis Terrace and houses in Alexandra Terrace

Image credit: Roger Cornfoot/Wikimedia

They evidently appreciated the town’s elegant buildings because they moved twice more, still in Exmouth. By 1911, they were living at 4, Trefusis Terrace, and by 1914, they had moved to 4 Alexandra Terrace. Both ended their days in the town, Ellen on 24 December 1924, and Charles on 3 April 1936.  

 

Frederick Courtney Tanner and his wife Ethelwyn Florence Tanner (née Mourilyan) at their wedding in 1911 

Image credit: Chris and Julian Higman, and The Badsey Society  

Their son Courtney, as he was known in the family, had a distinguished military career. As a Captain in the Regular Army, he was part of the British Expeditionary Force that went out to France just a few weeks after the outbreak of war in August 1914.  He was wounded, mentioned in despatches and awarded the DSO in December 1914, following his gallant leadership of the forced passage of a canal north of Vieille Chapelle two months previously on 12 October.

Posts on the General Staff in Britain, France and Italy followed, along with various awards. He received the Croix de Guerre (CdeG) and was made an Officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy in 1915.  In the 1919 Birthday Honours list, he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG). After the war, he remained in the army and spent time in Egypt and China. 

Although he and his wife lived for a time in Budleigh he ended his days not in Devon but in Llandridod Wells, in Powys, Wales, where he died on 14 July 1965, aged 85. Ethelwyn Florence died three months previously.

Hubert, the eldest of Frederick Courtney and Ethelwyn Florence Tanner’s three children, was born at Penicuik, Edinburgh in 1913.  

 

Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC). Image credit: Wikipedia. I am grateful to Nichola Aldridge of The Britannia Association for providing material relating to Hubert's time at BRNC  Image credit: Wikipedia

Hubert joined the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in January 1927, aged 14. He completed 11 terms of training.   

Most naval officers of the 1903-1939 period began their careers at the Royal Naval Colleges Osborne and Dartmouth, explains Dr Elinor Romans, in a doctoral thesis published by the University of Exeter and focusing on officer training and recruitment in the Royal Navy between 1903 and 1939.   

Captain Stanley (aka The Hon. Sir Victor A. Stanley) with the Staff and Masters of the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth at Christmas, 1912. Image credit: www.dreadnoughtproject.org

The entire Dartmouth experience was calculated to produce devotion to the Royal Navy, with numerous aspects designed to develop officer-like qualities. The academic curriculum was tailored to the demands of the naval profession. There was an emphasis on self-discipline, obedience and physical and mental hardening. 

Pages from the Register of Britannia Royal Naval College, showing (left) Hubert's name as a First Term cadet in January 1927, and (right) in the Eleventh Term, Summer 1930

All of this was something of a departure from the family tradition. Hubert's father and his younger brother James Mourilyan, born in 1920, attended Marlborough College, the Wiltshire public school. However, as Dr Romans points out, institutions like Dartmouth and Osborne, central to the officer education process, operated in a unique dual role as both public schools and naval establishments. They provided cadets not only with an academic education, designed to be the equal of that provided by a top public school, but also with a thorough indoctrination into the ways of the Royal Navy.

Hubert is somewhere in this 1930 photo of cadets in his final term at Dartmouth. Image courtesy of The Britannia Association 

Hubert 'passed out' in the summer of 1930 as a member of Anson Gunroom and the College record indicates that he was placed 28th of 49 cadets.  Following Dartmouth, he was commissioned in the Royal Navy, and it was as a young naval officer that he met Anne Winifred Markham, the woman who would become his wife.

  

The Markham memorial tablet in the church of St Andrew and St Mary in Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire  Image credit: Wikipedia

Born in 1912, she was the daughter of the Reverend Algernon Augustus Markham, Rector of Stoke and Easton in Lincolnshire, and Bishop of Grantham from 1937 to 1949.

Anne Winifred’s family, through her mother, Winifred Edith, née Barne, was similar to Hubert’s. Both her grandparents had political connections.  Her grandfather was Lieutenant Colonel Frederick St John Newdegate Barne, of Sotterley Hall, in Suffolk. He had sat as an MP for East Suffolk from 1876 to 1885 after retiring from the Scots Guards regiment.

 

 

Lady Constance Adelaide Seymour  Image credit: National Portrait Gallery/John Watkins. Photo from the late 1860s

His wife, Anne Winifred’s grandmother, was Lady Constance Adelaide Barne, née Seymour, born in 1852 and the daughter of Francis George Hugh Seymour, 5th Marquess of Hertford GCB PC.

 

Caricature of Francis Seymour, 5th Marquess of Hertford, by Leslie Ward - Published in Vanity Fair, 7 April 1877  Image credit: Wikipedia

Like Lieutenant Colonel Barne, the Marquess had joined the Scots Guards and was a Conservative politician, serving as Lord Chamberlain of the Household under Benjamin Disraeli from 1874 to 1879.   

Three of the five children of Lieutenant Colonel Barne and his wife may have influenced Hubert in his choice of career.

 

Miles Barne's Diary: A Suffolk Countryman at War 1915-1917 was published in 2018

The two younger boys were tragically both killed in the same year during WW1. Major Miles Barne DSO, born in 1874, followed the family tradition by serving with the Scots Guards. He died after being mortally wounded on 17 September 1917 by a bomb inadvertently dropped by a British plane, well behind the line near Ypres in Flanders.

 

The Battlefield Cross of Captain Seymour Barne, MC in St Margaret’s Church, Sotterley, Suffolk  Image credit: Adrian S. Pye/www.geograph.org.uk

His brother, Captain Seymour Barne MC, was awarded the Military Cross while serving  with the 20th Hussars during the First Battle of Ypres. At the time of his death, on 23 April 1917, he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps as an artillery spotter. Both he and his pilot were killed when they were shot down by an enemy aeroplane at Arras.

 

Naval officer and polar explorer Michael Barne  Image credit: Scott Polar Research Institute

Hubert would no doubt have enjoyed making the acquaintance of Anne's uncle, Michael, the surviving son of her grandparents, Colonel and Mrs Barne.  

Michael Barne, would have been something of a celebrity in naval circles. Born in 1877, he had entered the Navy as a Midshipman in 1893 after attending HMS Britannia, the training ship based at Dartmouth. In 1898 he was commissioned to serve aboard HMS Porcupine, and in 1901 was appointed by Robert Falcon Scott as Second Lieutenant to the Polar Discovery Expedition of 1901-04. He was awarded the Polar Medal for his contribution to the expedition. Barne Inlet, a 17-mile-wide (27 km) feature on the western side of the Ross Ice Shelf that he discovered, is named after him.  

During WW1 he was awarded the DSO while commanding the warship Monitor M27, finally retiring in 1919 with the rank of Captain. During WW2, he came out of retirement to command an anti-submarine patrol ship, and lived until 1961, the last survivor of the Discovery Expedition.  

While serving as a naval officer in the 1930s, Hubert applied for and was granted a temporary commission as Flying Officer on attachment for a year to the Royal Air Force. According to the Navy List he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy on 1 July 1937.

 

The Church of St Andrew and St Mary in Stoke Rochford  Image credit: Gary Radford

By February 1938 he had returned to naval duty, and that year, wearing full naval uniform, he married Anne Winifred Markham at the Church of St Andrew and St Mary in Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire, where her father was Rector. The reception was held at Stoke Rochford Hall.

 

‘War Memorial goes back’: a news item about the Memorial from an unidentified local newspaper. Image credit: Budleigh – Past and Present

Hubert’s parents, Ethelwyn and Courtney were living at 11 Coppleston Road in Budleigh with their daughter Ethelwyn Mary at the time of the wedding. But it’s likely that they had moved away in about 1943. The War Memorial was re-erected and a remembrance ceremony was held on Sunday 14 November 1949, when a WW2 panel was unveiled by Earl Fortescue, Lord Lieutenant of Devon.  Had Hubert’s parents still been living in the area they would no doubt have wished his name to be recorded with all his initials: H.C.C. Tanner.

 

 

Photo of HMS Grafton by a Royal Navy official photographer. Photograph FL 22287 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 8308-29)

On the eve of WW 2, Hubert was serving on the destroyer HMS Grafton. The ship was a G-class destroyer built for the Royal Navy during the mid-1930s.

Anne followed her husband abroad, becoming familiar with life at Britain’s two naval bases in Malta and Alexandria, Egypt. But the pair were apparently far from approving of British policy at a time of increasing tension in the Mediterranean. 

During the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935, according to Anne’s obituary in The Times of 20 November 2009, she and Hubert were appalled when, in line with the League of Nations’ failure to take effective action, London refused to authorise the Royal Navy to block Mussolini’s use of the Suez Canal, which would have hamstrung the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, then commonly known as Abyssinia.

By clearing its warships from the Mediterranean, Britain allowed Italy unhindered access to East Africa, leading eventually to the capture of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in May 1936.

The rise of Fascism in the 1930s: (l-r) dictators Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler  Image credit: Wikipedia

Similarly, with regard to the rise of fascism in Spain, both Hubert and Anne were said to have felt strongly about Britain’s failure to support the legitimate Republican government against General Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939.

The Non-Intervention Committee, based in London and consisting of a group of twenty-four nations had been set up in 1936 in an attempt to restrict the flow of weapons to the parties of the war. For Britain, it formed part of the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Italy and aimed at preventing the war – with Italy and Germany supporting Franco's Nationalist Coalition on one side and the Soviet Union supporting the Republican faction on the other – from escalating into a major pan-European conflict.

 

The luxury steam yacht Nahlin, built in 1930 for Lady Yule

Between 10 August and 9 September 1936, Grafton escorted the yacht Nahlin as King Edward VIII cruised the eastern Mediterranean, but for most of the period of the Spanish Civil War she spent considerable time in Spanish waters enforcing the policies of the Non-Intervention Committee.

 

A Christmas card dated December 1939, sent by Hubert and Anne from the destroyer HMS Grafton H89. Image credit:  http://dunkirk1940.org

Grafton was refitting in Malta at the beginning of WW2 in September 1939, and in October she was transferred from the Mediterranean Fleet to the Western Approaches Command at Plymouth for escort and contraband inspection duties.  Then, towards the end of  November, the ship was reassigned to the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla in Harwich of the Nore Command for patrol and escort duties.

 

HMS Grafton’s captain, Commander Cecil Edmund Charles Robinson. Image credit: Patrice Gorce

On 10 January 1940, Grafton was transferred to the reconstituted 1st Destroyer Flotilla, also based at Harwich, where she inspected ships travelling between German and Dutch ports for contraband. Between 26 March and 14 April, the ship was given a brief overhaul in Hull in the shipyard of Brigham and Cowan.  Nazi forces had invaded Norway on 8 April, and the Allies responded with an attempted occupation of the northern part of the country. As part of the Norwegian Campaign, after refitting, Grafton was reassigned to the Home Fleet where she escorted convoys until 11 May.

 

Belgian soldiers taken prisoner march past their German captors in May 1940. Image credit: Heinrich Hoffmann  Imperial War Museums

Meanwhile, on 9 May, German forces had begun their invasion of Luxembourg, progressing rapidly to the defeat of Allied forces in the Netherlands and Belgium and the collapse of the French government.

 

Calais in ruins, 1940

Image credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1971-042-08/Wikipedia

By 23 May, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was in full retreat towards the Channel ports and troops were being evacuated from France. The British garrison at Boulogne surrendered, and Calais was besieged by the German 10^th Panzer Division.

 

30 Brigade memorial plaque inside the gatehouse of Calais Citadel, scene of the epic defence in May 1940. Image credit: Rickfive Wikipedia

During the Siege of Calais, Grafton escorted the light cruisers Arethusa and Galatea as they provided naval gunfire support for the 30th Motor Brigade, consisting of two motor infantry battalions and a Territorial motorcycle reconnaissance battalion.

 

Men of the 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles awaiting evacuation at Bray Dunes, near Dunkirk, 1940  Image credit: Imperial War Museums

On 27 May, Grafton was involved in Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of troops from the beaches of La Panne and Bray, northeast of Dunkirk.

An Admiralty and Ministry of Defence (ADM) report, compiled by one of Hubert’s fellow-officers from HMS Grafton, Lieutenant Hugh Charles James McRae and dated 3 June 1940, records that she arrived from Dunkirk at about 11.00 am at Dover with about 280 troops on board. Troops were disembarked at the Admiralty Pier and at 11.45 am the ship slipped and prepared to secure to No.6 Buoy in the Outer Harbour. Before the ship was secured, orders were received from Vice-Admiral Dover to proceed to Dunkirk by the Northern Route. At approximately 1.10 pm she passed through Dover’s Eastern Entrance and proceeded at 30 knots.

British soldiers wade out to a waiting destroyer off Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo. From the collection of the Imperial War Museums

Lieutenant McRae’s report notes that no incidents developed during the passage and no enemy aircraft or surface craft were sighted. Grafton anchored close to the beach off Bray Dunes at 2.45 pm on Tuesday 28 May. Embarkation of troops was immediately commenced, using ship’s whalers – double-ended small open boats, which could be pulled by oars or powered by sail. Later, power boats, borrowed from the light cruiser HMS Calcutta, would manage to evacuate 1,200 troops that night.

Embarkation proceeded slowly at first owing to the lack of power boats. Troops were stowed as low as possible in the ship, and all Mess Decks, engine and boiler rooms were filled. The more seriously wounded were placed in the Engine Room Artificers’ (ERA) mess and the starboard side of the fore mess deck.

In addition to whalers and power boats, flat-bottomed Dutch river-boats or barges known as schuits were used during the evacuation. About 40 of these craft had been temporarily commissioned under the White Ensign with Royal Navy crews.

By 9.00 pm, 580 men had been embarked and orders were given that all ship’s boats should transport troops to the schuits lying closer into the beach, and that the schuits should unload to the destroyers when they were full. During this period about 50 cases of corned beef and 50 cases of biscuits were landed for the troops on the beach.

Lieutenant Donald McBarnet, later promoted to Lieutenant Commander and awarded a DCS for his efforts during the Dunkirk evacuation. He died in 1989, aged 77. Image credit: www.hmscavalier.org.uk

At about 11.10 pm HM Schuit Doggersbank, under the command of another young officer, Lieutenant Donald McBarnet, came alongside Grafton’s starboard side and reported she had about 360 troops on board. These were embarked, although Hugh McRae considered the number was nearer 280. Doggersbank then took on fresh water, and at Donald McBarnet’s request, four seamen from Grafton were transferred to Doggersbank to reinforce their small ship’s company.

There may have been a reason for this. The 1989 obituary for Donald McBarnet published at www.hmscavalier.org.uk records that on the previous day, Monday 27 May, he had brought Doggersbank close inshore, where he had lowered a raft and a boat to ferry men to and fro. In the rush of soldiers eager to leave France, both vessels were immediately mobbed and swamped; it was clear that naval discipline needed to be enforced if the evacuation was not to descend into complete chaos. Eventually, Donald McBarnet and his crew took off nearly 1,000 men.   

British troops were lined up on the beach while awaiting evacuation, 26–29 May 1940. Collection of the Imperial War Museums

Tom Perrin served with the 9^th Army Field Workshop in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) and contributed his memories of the day to the BBC People’s War Series, recorded in 2004. He recalled climbing up a scrambling net hanging over the side of Doggersbank and falling exhausted on to the deck.

‘I was wearing a greatcoat and carrying full marching order, big and small pack, tin helmet, water bottle and bayonet, and a rifle. I was also wet through to above my waist, not the best gear to go mountaineering in.’ Transferring from Doggersbank to Grafton was, he remembered, a long weary process as other ships around them were attacked by the Luftwaffe. ‘For some reason, even when there were no other people to come aboard we waited and waited and waited until it was dark.’

At 12.15 am on Wednesday 29 May, Grafton weighed anchor and proceeded. At this time a considerable amount of shipping was under way proceeding to and from Dunkirk. Navigation lights in all ships were switched on, which apparently attracted the attention of enemy aircraft, as several bombs were heard to fall in the vicinity, and aircraft were heard to cross the line of shipping in a direction NW to SE. One bomb appeared to strike a small vessel about 400 metres (437 yards) astern of Grafton.

The destroyer HMS Wakeful (H88) Image credit: Wikipedia

After snatching an hour’s sleep Lieutenant McRae was woken at 2.30 am by the news that a ship had been torpedoed. On the bridge, Commander Robinson ordered Grafton to be stopped and both whalers lowered to rescue the survivors.The bows of a ship could be seen standing out of the water near to the Kwinte Buoy. Men were desperately clinging to the bows and shouting for help. 

From a message sent to Grafton by the minesweeper HMS Lydd which was in the vicinity it seemed that the stricken vessel was the destroyer HMS Wakeful and that it had been torpedoed. In fact Wakeful had been struck by two torpedoes, fired by German E-Boat S-30 – a fast motor torpedo boat – captained by Oberleutnant Wilhelm Zimmermann, which was concealed behind the brightly flashing Kwinte Buoy.

One of the torpedoes had hit the forward boiler room. Casualties were heavy, only two out of the 640 Allied troops aboard survived, along with 25 out of Wakeful's 110 crew.

 

The Dunkirk Evacuation. Image credit: Wikipedia. Some place names have been added

About ten minutes later, one of Grafton’s lookouts on the port side of the bridge reported ‘Torpedo Port Side’, and, some moments later, a violent explosion shook the ship, to be followed by a second, equally violent. It was unclear for some time what damage had been done. Understandably, many of the soldiers on board were on the verge of panicking, believing that the German E-boat which had just torpedoed Wakeful would now be targeting Grafton.

In fact she had been struck in the stern by a torpedo from the German submarine U-62 under the command of Kapitan-leutenant Hans-Bernhard Michalowski.

Tom Perrin described the event in vivid detail, recalling how Grafton lay helpless, wallowing in the dark channel swell, with all on board praying that the bulkheads – the ship’s internal walls - would hold. ‘If they had gone there would have been few survivors for there were no life jackets and most of the lifeboats and rafts had been damaged in the explosions. Everyone was ordered to keep still and to keep silent. I still remember the eerie silence, 1,400 men making no sound, only the slap, slap as small waves lapped against the ship. There seemed to be two options now, either the-E boats came back and finished us off, or rescue. Which would be first?’

But a further disaster occurred. No doubt it arose from the tenseness of this nighttime situation, where any dark shape could be mistaken for an enemy vessel. Hugh McRae described in his report how HMS Lydd appeared to be trying to come alongside Grafton, hitting her starboard side. Lydd suddenly sheared off and apparently rammed a vessel on the opposite side. Grafton’s crew waited until Lydd was clear and then opened up with multiple machine gun fire on what they thought was an enemy motor torpedo boat. The report mentions that the gunfire then targeted a further vessel which blew up with a bright flash.

The minesweeper HMS Lydd. Image credit: Imperial War Museums 

Tragically, it later turned out to be probably a case of friendly fire. The ‘enemy motor torpedo boat’ was in fact HM Drifter Comfort – a ‘drifter’ being a vessel built on the lines of a fishing boat but often used for naval purposes. On this occasion she was carrying a crew of six, all of whom were lost.

Comfort had been originally built as a trawler and requisitioned by the Royal Navy for wartime service with the Royal Naval Patrol Service. Such vessels were often used during minelaying to lay coded warning buoys. Three of them, including Comfort, were lost during Operation Dynamo on this one day, Wednesday 29 May.

 

 

A painting of Malines by the Dutch artist Alfred J. Jansen Image credit: Wikipedia

Eventually, to everyone’s relief, out of the morning mist appeared the destroyer HMS Ivanhoe escorting a cross channel steamer, the SS Malines, which tied up alongside the Grafton. In single file, soldiers and seamen crossed from the bridge of the helpless Royal Navy ship to the deck of the steamer. It took quite some time before everyone was off the Grafton as there was a considerable number of wounded, some of them stretcher cases, recalled Tom Perrin. ‘But eventually the last person left the Grafton and we pulled away on what we sincerely hoped was the last part of our channel crossing.’

By contrast with the traumatic nighttime events, the evacuation of the ship was indeed carried out in a remarkably orderly fashion. Hugh McRae in his report noted that the conduct of the officers and ship’s company was exemplary. ‘The difficult task of keeping some 850 soldiers under control was efficiently carried out, and at the same time guns and boats were manned,’ he wrote. 

The bravery of Surgeon Lieutenant Joseph Wishart Shield, later awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his conduct, was especially noteworthy. He was responsible for the rescue of at least one wounded Army officer from the Ward Room Lobby, and, in the words of the report, ‘worked indefatigably among the many wounded and with complete disregard for his own safety, visited damaged compartments in the stern, before he could have possibly have known that the ship would not sink at once’.  

But, tragically for their families, Hubert and 15 other members of Grafton’s crew, along with 35 Army officers, never made that last part home across the English Channel.

When Hugh McRae went to the bridge to report to Commander Robinson he found that it had been wrecked by the explosion. Only the sides were left standing around what was a scene of devastation, with equipment smashed and three bodies lying buried under the wreckage, with a fourth blown out onto a gun deck. It was obvious that the Captain, Hubert and two Leading Signalmen, Robert Todd and Dermot Coghlan, were dead. All four must have been killed instantaneously was Hugh McRae’s conclusion. He believed that the damage had no relation to that caused by the torpedo, and appeared to have been caused by some form of grenade or stick bomb.  

Sadly, it seems possible that this was another case of ‘friendly fire.’  Some historians hold that in the chaos which followed the first torpedo fired at Grafton, a number of British vessels, believing that they were coming under attack from German motor torpedo boats, ‘fired wildly into the darkness’, and that such actions could have been to blame for the deaths.  

The Withdrawal from Dunkirk, 1940, by Charles Ernest Cundall  Image credit: Imperial War Museums   Art.IWM ART LD 305

Wednesday 29 May 1940 is a grim date in the Royal Navy’s calendar.  Operation Dynamo resulted in what was called ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk’ but, on the day that Hubert and his fellow-crewmen died, a total of 13 British vessels were lost, almost all of them sunk by enemy action.  

After consultation between the officers of the two ships, Ivanhoe sank Grafton with naval gunfire as she was too badly damaged to be towed to safety.

 

 Plymouth Naval Memorial  Image credit: Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Hubert is commemorated on the Plymouth Naval Memorial and at the Church of St Andrew and St Mary in Stoke Rochford where he and Anne were married. Sadly, at around the time of his death, their child died at birth.

Anne met and married her second husband partly as a consequence of the war work into which she threw herself after Hubert’s death. Training first as a nursery nurse, she worked with evacuee children, and then, later, as a volunteer joining one of the relief teams being set up to help refugees in Germany and Central Europe. 

The work led her to help with the starving and diseased survivors of Belsen concentration camp, and it was here that she met David Waterston. A member of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), he had been appointed an MBE in 1940 for his Field Ambulance service and work with a Blood Transfusion Unit in the Western Desert. In 1945 he was one of the first medics to enter Belsen. He died in 1985, following a distinguished career at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, where a ward in the Cardiac Wing is named after him. Anne survived him, living to the great age of 97.

 

 Professor James Mourilyan Tanner, James Spence Medal winner, working in his garden. He died in 2010. Image credit: Wikipedia 

Apparently as a consequence of Hubert’s death his younger brother James Mourilyan also chose medicine as a career rather than following his father into the military.

It was a decision which led him to become an eminent paediatric endocrinologist, best known for his development of the Tanner scale, which measures the stages of sexual development during puberty.

But earlier in his career, like his sister-in-law Anne and her husband David Waterston, he found himself as a young doctor with the task of helping people mentally damaged by WW2. After qualifying in 1944 and spending nine months in the USA, he joined the Emergency Medical Service (EMS) – often seen as the forerunner to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). There he worked at the Maudsley Hospital, relocated during WW2 to Mill Hill in Outer London and at the Southern Hospital, in Dartford, Kent. Both hospitals made a valuable contribution in treating both service personnel and civilians who had suffered emotional traumas caused by so many terrible events during six years of conflict. 

 

 

The next post is for LIEUTENANT CYRIL HOWLETT (1913-40), Royal Navy, killed on 8 June 1940 while serving on HMS Glorious. You can read about him at  

https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/11/ww275-8-june-1940-victim-of-cover-up.html