In October 1944 Cooper-Key, serving with 1st Battalion Royal Norfolk Regiment (1RNR), led his company in an assault crossing of the Molenbeek, south of Nijmegen. Unremitting rain had turned the stream into a river and the surrounding area into a quagmire. The bank and the riverbed itself were sown with mines, and in the advance through the forest German snipers had tied themselves to trees so that they could continue fighting even when they were wounded.
The crossing of the Molenbeek was forced in the face of ferocious machine-gun fire and earned the nickname “Bloedbeek”. The company then moved up towards the town of Venray and was ordered to strike, despite the fact that in the previous three days they had already taken part in two major attacks. These, the appalling weather, the casualties that they had suffered and the bitter resistance that they had encountered had all taken their toll. The men were exhausted.
When one platoon faltered, Cooper-Key crossed to it and led it himself until confidence was restored. He was seen moving among heavy and accurate fire, leading, encouraging and, in two instances, turning back waverers in retreat.
The citation for the award of his MC paid tribute to a series of brilliant battles that he had fought since D-Day in which, it stated, he had exhibited all the finest qualities of an officer. It added that his courage over many months had earned the highest praise of all ranks and far outweighed any individual act of gallantry performed on the spur of the moment.
Colour Sergeant Charlie Bowden
Royal Marine who took part in an extraordinary escape from Crete to North Africa in a landing craft
There Garrett told survivors that they could wait to be taken prisoner, join the resistance, or try to make their way off the island. Bowden chose to stay with Garrett who, when they found an abandoned landing craft, called out: "Who's for home? All aboard the Skylark."
They set out with 139 men, including 56 Marines, some Australians, New Zealanders, a Greek and two Palestinians. There was little fuel, food or water, but Bowden had found a map of the Mediterranean in a deserted school and this became their chart. "It was all in Greek," he recalled, "but we could still recognise the shape of the countries."
Their supplies were a travelling clock, odd tins of oil and petrol, and biscuits and bully beef which had been abandoned on the beach. With only one engine working, and the deck just above water level, they set sail at 08.55 on the morning of June 1.
When they ran out of fuel they used their bootlaces to stitch together a sail of blankets, and dived over the side in groups to steer the landing craft by swimming. After nine days, during which time two men died, the craft beached on the North African coast. Many of the survivors were so weak that they could not stand, but two Maoris went to search for water. Meanwhile, not knowing if they were behind British or German lines, Bowden and a young Australian officer set off into the darkness to reconnoitre.
A pipeline led them to a British anti-aircraft battery, where they summoned transport, and Bowden returned to the beach to report to Garrett. Though many were ill and without boots, they marched to a rendezvous which Bowden had fixed, where a convoy of lorries was waiting to take them to safety. Within days Garrett's Royal Marines were re-equipped and ready to fight again.
Sergeant Bill O'Leary
Tough NCO with Popski’s Private Army who specialised in silent ambushes
On November 13 1944 an order was given to attack and capture a German outpost in a farmhouse near Ravenna which was holding up the Allied advance. The operation had to take place without weapons being fired, to conceal from the enemy the fact that they had lost an important strongpoint.
Bill O'Leary (right) with Dennis Hodgson The task was given to No 1 Demolition Squadron, the irregular unit commanded by Major Vladimir “Popski” Peniakoff and better known as “Popski’s Private Army” (PPA). At first light the PPA party rushed into the farm and captured four surprised Germans who were on the bottom floor.
O’Leary ran upstairs and, meeting an enemy soldier with an automatic weapon, charged him and knocked it from his grasp. He then ran into a room in which there were four more Germans. Three were in bed, but the other reached for his gun.
O’Leary overcame him and called on the remainder to surrender, which they did. The citation for his MM paid tribute to his courage and coolness in not firing his Thompson submachine gun despite the fact that he was outnumbered.
Jack Plant
PoW who survived the horrors of the infamous 'Death Railway’ on Sumatra
On April 22 1943 Plant was among 1,000 British PoWs crammed into the cargo ship Amagi Muru. There were some 250 men in each hold, deprived of adequate food and water. After 10 days at sea, during which many died, the prisoners were landed on Haruku in the Moluccan Islands .
There the men were put to work building an airfield. By November, 363 had died and 800 had contracted dysentery. Plant and his few medical colleagues made heroic efforts to look after the sick despite their own desperate conditions. With the airfield complete in July 1944, the survivors were herded into ships transported to Sumatra; 415 of their comrades had died at Haruku.
Fearing an Allied invasion on the west coast of Sumatra, the Japanese decided to build a railway through the centre of the island for the transportation of supplies. Five thousand Allied prisoners and 30,000 Indonesian Romushas (forced labourers) were put to work on the 140-mile, single track railway from Pakan Baru to Muara, which had to cut through swamps and mountains covered in equatorial forest.
It was completed on August 15 1945 — the day the Japanese capitulated. Seven hundred PoWs and more than 10,000 Romushas had died, most from malnutrition, beriberi, malaria or dysentery.
Diana Geddes
Brigadier’s daughter who, aged 16, bluffed her way into a nursing job at a front-line hospital in the Far East
By the time the Japanese invaded Burma, Diana, then only 16, was in Maymyo, a hill station in the north of the country, without her parents — her father was away fighting and her mother had run off with a brother officer whom she later married.
At the club Diana saw a notice asking for volunteer nurses for the Army base hospital. She lied about her age, invented an impressive background in medical training (in fact, all she knew was school-level first aid) and had her servant run up a fake nurse’s uniform. Thus equipped, she presented herself to the adjutant, who took her on as the sister, and only European nurse, in charge of the local staff.
The Japanese drove through Burma much faster than anyone had expected, and the base hospital became a front line aid station for Commonwealth troops. On one occasion she was dressing the wound on a soldier’s leg when the leg simply fell off.
As Burma was being overrun, Diana’s mother reappeared at Maymyo and decided to escape to India with her three daughters — the youngest only a baby. They travelled in a cattle truck on a goods train to Cox’s Bazar (now in Bangladesh), and throughout the journey Diana had to nurse her mother, who was suffering from malaria and nearly died.
Major-General Norman Rogers
Army medical officer who walked 800 miles through enemy-occupied Italy to reach Allied lines
After the Italian Armistice in September 1943, the commandant of the camp opened the gates and the prisoners marched out in companies before separating. Rogers joined up with Capt Arthur Jones, who later became Tory MP for Northamptonshire South and then Daventry.
They skirted La Spezia, crossed the Arno east of Florence, and walked up and down the Apennine range, avoiding villages wherever possible. They used sheep tracks, knocked on the doors of isolated houses of shepherds and peasants, slept in barns and dodged German patrols. The Italians fed, sheltered and sometimes clothed them. However poor they were, they were always ready to share what little they had. Rogers found them voluble, often unreliable, but generous, kind and brave.
As they approached the Volturno River, near Venafro, the Germans were establishing a new defensive line and blowing up power stations, tearing up railway lines, demolishing houses to block roads and blasting craters in hillsides for gun emplacements. At Raviscanina, the village was empty. They were in no-man’s land.
Up on the high ground there was a castle which was being shelled by the Germans. They were making their way there by a narrow alleyway when an old woman shouted at them to stop. She had watched the mines and trip wires being laid and told them that a boy had been killed there the previous night.
Following in her footsteps, they got through the minefield. Climbing up the ridge, Jones, who was a gunner officer, told Rogers that they had been spotted by a German forward observation officer and were in a very exposed position. But they surmounted the crest without mishap and reached the positions of the 36th “Texas” Division.
“Say, who are those guys?” a GI shouted, for they looked like a couple of brigands.
“We are British officers,” Rogers told him.
After a moment of stunned silence, the GI exclaimed: “You must have come through the German lines! What does it feel like?”
Distinguished submarine commander who fought in the Mediterranean and became chairman of Vickers-Armstrongs after the war
During the Second World War, Richard Barklie Lakin commanded three submarines, two of which took part in the desperate campaign to establish control of the Mediterranean, ensure the survival of Malta and starve Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Corps of essential supplies. For his gallantry and professionalism he was awarded the DSO and two DSCs.
At the age of 8 he survived a car accident that killed his father. His subsequent survival through many perilous occasions has been attributed to having been born with a caul, believed by some societies to be an omen of good luck.
After graduating from Dartmouth naval college in 1932 and serving in the cruiser Sussex in the Mediterranean, Lakin volunteered for submarines and was first appointed to the Narwhal to learn the ropes as the “4th hand”. Lakin’s lively hobbies included racing a Bugatti at Brooklands and riding the fastest motorbike then available — a 1000c HRD Rapide — for which he had obtained a one-piece waterproof garment from Barbour. In May 1938 he joined the Ursula as navigating officer, captained by the celebrated Lieutenant-Commander George Phillips, DSO, GM, who, fed up with standard Admiralty oilskins, quite unsuitable for the really wet conditions on the conning towers of small submarines, seized upon Lakin’s garment and adapted it to a two-piece version which, after testing with a fire-hose, became standard submariners’ clothing, famously named the “Ursula-suit”.
Lakin’s appointment to the new submarine Thetis was luckily cancelled in favour of a Lieutenant Frederick Woods who was the torpedo officer on March 3, 1939 when Thetis sank during her initial trials in Liverpool Bay as a result of some enamel paint having blocked a torpedo tube test cock, thus not revealing that the tube bow door was open. Despite frantic rescue attempts, 99 lives were lost.
At the outbreak of war he was appointed instead as second-in-command of the elderly H32, operating in the North Sea. He was mentioned in dispatches before being sent to the submarine Utmost in November 1940, again as second-in-command. Arriving off Gibraltar, Utmost was mis-identified and rammed by the destroyer Encounter and took a month to repair. Subsequently, a successful series of patrols which sank Italian supply ships and landed or recovered agents on three occasions resulted in the award of Lakin’s first DSC, his captain earning a DSO.
Returning home for the submarine commanding officer’s course, or “perisher”, Lakin was appointed in December 1941 in command of the H43 which, with a hurriedly assembled crew of trainees, was deployed with several other submarines to attack the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with the cruiser Prinz Eugen as they made their celebrated “Channel Dash” from Brest to safety in Germany.
He took command of the Ursula at home in March 1942, joining the “Fighting 10th” submarine squadron in Malta during the protracted Mediterranean battle in which British submarines suffered a 50 per cent loss rate. In early November Ursula was stationed off Oran as one of 21 submarines protecting Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. Later a sabotage team was successfully landed and recovered near Genoa and an anti-submarine vessel sunk by gunfire. Ordered to divert Axis activities away from invasion beaches, Lakin was commended by the expeditionary force commander for his efforts which included bombardments of oil tanks and railways and the sinking of a supply ship by gunfire. In December he sank a large heavily escorted steamer but got too close to another and was run down, losing his periscopes. For his part in Operation Torch and kindred operations he was awarded the DSO.
By April 1943 the tide had turned in the Mediterranean. Lakin’s command of the Safari continued that submarine’s exceptional war record, he being awarded a second DSC for four successful patrols. After acting as a navigational beacon for the invasion of Sicily, for which he was awarded the American Legion of Merit, the Safari attacked and sank by torpedo and gunfire a variety of petrol carriers, barges, a minelayer and minesweeper, expending all her ammunition in a final patrol which the dry official history describes as “audacious”.
Having taken Safari home for a refit, Lakin followed the movement of the centre of gravity of the war with an appointment as British liaison officer on the staff of the American commander of all submarines in the Pacific. Never one for sitting in an office, Lakin went on patrol in several USN submarines, acting as mentor and submarine warfare instructor to inexperienced captains. Some of his experiences were alarming: penetrating into the Sea of Japan through the Tshushima minefield in the USS Crevalle and being surprised and bombed by a floatplane while on the surface off Rabaul.
During his final tour in the Royal Navy, Lakin looked after a host of surrendered U-boats at Londonderry before they were scuttled or scrapped. In 1946 he retired and joined the engineering company Vickers-Armstrongs, where he had successful 30-year career, becoming chairman and chief executive. Always an ingenious man with an enthusiasm for practical engineering that was evidenced by the well-equipped workshop which accompanied all the family moves, he was also known for his enlightened man-management. When asked why there was never a strike at Vickers Elswick, the union convenor replied: “Because the Commander will always see us right.” The Suez crisis of 1956 broke when he was managing Tel el Kebir, the British Army’s huge engineering and supply base in Egypt. While his family was repatriated, Lakin was interned for six months. He later worked for Joseph Isherwood Shipping Architects before finally retiring to the Isle of Wight.
His wife, Pamela Jackson-Taylor, whom he married in 1936, died in 1981. His second wife, Pansy Phillips, also pre-deceased him. His devoted companion, Joy Almond, supported his final 17 years. He is survived by the three sons and three daughters of his first marriage.
Lieutenant-Commander Barklie Lakin, DSO, DSC and bar, submarine captain and businessman, was born on October 8, 1914. He died on March 1, 2011, aged 96
Cavalry officer who was decorated during the Italian campaign and later became an authority on dressage
Val ffrench-Blake had a gallant and distinguished war record and afterwards he and his wife became authorities on equitation dressage. He was equally devoted to music and painting but it was as one of the architects of the syllabus for the new Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, opened in 1947, that he offered his most significant contribution to public life. Unfortunately, after two or three years, the syllabus he helped to devise was made less intellectually challenging, concentrating on facts rather than reasoning.
Robert Lifford Valentine ffrench-Blake was born in Rawalpindi in 1913 where his father, later killed at the first Battle of Gaza in 1917, was serving with the 21st Lancers. His family is descended from Sir Hubert de Freyne, later Freynshe, who owned lands in Leinster and Wexford in the 12th century. It was united with the Blakes of Galway and Mayo by the marriage of Nichola ffrench to Henry Martyn Blake early in the 19th century.
Val ffrench-Blake was educated at Eton, where he was an Oppidan scholar, won the science prize in the Lent half of 1927, the Latin verse prize in Lent 1929 and the language specialists’ prize in 1930. He also won the Harmsworth music prize for organ in 1929 and the Lloyd organ prize in Michaelmas 1930. He was commissioned from RMC Sandhurst into the 17th/21st Lancers in 1932 and served in India with his regiment, still horsed cavalry, until 1938.
After conversion of the regiment to tanks, he commanded a squadron during Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942. Seriously wounded through the neck and arm by a sniper, he returned to England for treatment. Until graded fit for active service, he was an instructor at the Royal Armoured Corps tactical school at Oxford and attended the wartime Staff College course at Camberley in 1944. This resulted in his being posted to Italy as a reinforcement staff officer. But on disembarking at Naples, a trooper of the 17th/21st Lancers informed him that he had been appointed commanding officer.
After a tiresome winter facing the German Gothic Line, including a period standing in for an infantry battalion in its forward positions, he led his regiment in the final offensive of the campaign in the Po Valley in April 1945. With a group of all arms, including an infantry motor battalion, an artillery battery and a squadron of engineers, ffrench-Blake crossed the Fossa river at Segni and, putting on a determined burst of speed, reached the town of Poggio Renatico in the early evening of the same day. This effectively broke up the enemy’s reserve and closed the road for the withdrawal of two German divisions. He was awarded the DSO for his initiative and dynamic leadership.
Too young at 32 to continue in command of a regiment in peacetime, initially he became the principal administrative officer of the 6th Armoured Division in Allied-occupied Austria, then Chief Instructor of Old College at the combined Royal Military Academy and College at Sandhurst in 1947.
The syllabus he drew up with Major (later Brigadier) Tony Hunter of the 60th Rifles (obituary, November 23, 2004) and Major Bill Stevenson of the Cameron Highlanders placed emphasis on training the cadets to think for themselves. In particular, in addition to the academic subjects of the 18-month course, they were taught to solve military problems by analysis of the restraints and possibilities of any situation. Some became quite good at it, but regiments complained that Sandhurst was endeavouring to turn out generals rather than troop or platoon commanders. This was true, but the policy was not a mistaken one.
Shortly before leaving Sandhurst in 1949, he wrote to his stepfather: “It has been intensely interesting here but now too much time is spent rescuing one’s creations from being battered or diluted by other people’s ideas. The few original lines of thought we brought to the syllabus are slowly but surely being reduced to orthodox bromides of traditional military teaching and clear simple English turned back to slogans and catch-phrases.”
Bored with peacetime soldiering, he left the Army after his Sandhurst appointment to join his wife on the farm she had bought during the war, where they built up a herd of Ayrshire cattle over a period of 12 years. They also met a former Polish cavalry officer, Captain Stefan Skupinski, who was teaching continental horse dressage in this country. The ffrench-Blakes were impressed by the value of dressage in “making” a young horse or “remaking” an older one. The most successful of the remade horses, Terrhou, was ridden by their younger son Anthony with success in many events, including a fourth place at Badminton.
ffrench-Blake became a highly respected dressage judge and published Dressage for Beginners, reprinted in Dutch and Spanish. He later wrote a short but lucid history of the Crimean War, filling the gap between the many personal and regimental accounts of the fighting in Russia and the wider aspects of the war, intended as a guide to those visiting the battlefields.
He had learnt to paint in oils when in hospital recovering from his wounds. He persistently claimed not to be creative, preferring technique to self-expression. In the 1960s he turned to restoration work and was a professional in this field for more than 20 years. When the rapid rise in value of damaged pictures made this work no longer worthwhile, he turned to copying Old Masters — in particular flowers, winter landscapes and maritime scenes. He drew much satisfaction from two such works being stolen from an exhibition in a London gallery.
While he claimed only moderate ability on piano and organ, his facility to read music fluently brought him great delight in accompanying other players and singers. In Austria shortly after the end of the war in Europe, he gave a recital for his regiment with a leading tenor of the Munich opera and, in 1986, played the Müller “Mozart” organ in the Grote Kerk in Haarlem.
It gave him particular pleasure to introduce young people to music, painting and equestrian skills. Despite his often protested amateur approach, there was much of the perfectionist in him. On music, he would say: “The amateur practises until he can do it right, the professional until he cannot do it wrong.” Had he remained a professional soldier, it seems most likely that he would have reached high rank — even against the cut-throat competition of his generation in a steadily shrinking army. In 2004, he was invited to return to Sandhurst to explain the philosophy of his 1947 syllabus to the commandant then, Major-General Andrew Ritchie, who was conducting his own review of teaching methods.
Shortly before the war, he married Grania Bryde Curran, who predeceased him. He is survived by two sons, one of whom followed him into the 17th/21st Lancers before becoming a diplomat.
Lieutenant-Colonel R. L. V. ffrench-Blake, DSO, soldier, musician, painter and dressage judge, was born on March 3, 1913. He died on March 11, 2011, aged 98
