King on board Snapper, his first submarine command. With casualties high, he was one of only two commanders to serve throughout the Second World War
Wartime submarine captain decorated for sinking and damaging seven enemy vessels who later sailed round the world single-handed
Bill King was one of only two naval officers who were in command of submarines throughout the entire Second World War, a remarkable feat of endurance given that the Submarine Service suffered 38 per cent casualties with 63 commanding officers losing their lives.
Subsequently, at the age of 58, King was the oldest participant in the first solo non-stop around the world yacht race, The Sunday Times Golden Globe of 1968, sailing his famous junk-rigged boat Galway Blazer II.
His father, William de Courcy King, was a major in the Royal Engineers who was awarded the DSO in 1916 and was killed the following year while working on the preparations for the Battle of Arras. His son was brought up by his mother and grandmother, a formidable woman who took up skiing in her seventies and sailed in her eighties.
William Donald Aelian King (known as Bill) was born in 1910 and was sent to Dartmouth at the age of 12 where he excelled at boxing and distance running. His first appointment in 1927 was as a midshipman in the battleship Resolution in the Mediterranean. He volunteered for submarines and between 1932 and 1938 served on the China station and in the Mediterranean in three submarines, rising to become the second-in-command of two. In September 1938 he passed the commanding officer’s qualifying course and was appointed captain of the Snapper in April 1939.
His first war patrol was something of an ordeal. Patrolling off the Frisian island of Texel in shallow water and a December gale, King found it impossible to keep periscope depth and one night, when his position was in doubt, Snapper ran on to a sandbank in heavy seas and only got off by working her motors every time she lifted off the bottom. She was lucky not to be a total loss. On the way home she was attacked by a Coastal Command aircraft but fortunately without damage.
During the Norwegian campaign, King and Snapper sank or damaged six ships, mainly in the Skagerrak Strait. He was awarded his first DSO in May 1940 and the DSC in September for these successful operations conducted under very difficult circumstances. Modestly, he attributed these awards to a need to boost morale early in a war that was not going well.
His next submarine was the Trusty, operating in the Mediterranean during what became known as the “first battle of the convoys” as Allied submarines helped to destroy Italian supplies to North Africa in the period June to December 1941, most of the damage however being inflicted by the RAF and surface warships. King had to abandon one of his attacks on an escorted tanker when a torpedo “ran hot” in the torpedo tube, nearly asphyxiating the crew.
Trusty was dispatched to the Far East as part of the reinforcements designed to counter the rapid Japanese expansion, arriving at Singapore at the end of January 1942, nearly two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse had already been sunk by Japanese aircraft. The Dutch had already lost four of their seven submarines while the British had lost two and all their reserve of 230 torpedoes from a devastating air attack on Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines. Late February saw the catastrophic Battle of the Java Sea, which finally wiped out the American, Dutch and British efforts to stem the Japanese tide.
Trusty was slightly damaged in an air raid as soon as she entered Keppel Harbour, Singapore. Nevertheless, she was sent north to the Gulf of Siam to try to cut enemy supply lines. Able Seaman Hillyard, a member of Trusty’s gun crew, recalled a dusk attack on a large troop transport with hits at very close range on the bridge structure and at the waterline when an orange flash showed they were firing back. A hit at the base of the gun wounded Hillyard’s hand. Feeling no pain, he was surprised to see blood all over the upturned faces down the access hatch. “Who’s bleeding?” he asked.
Hillyard’s memoir describes the fall of Singapore — “a scene of utter despair and confusion” — and Trusty’s alarming adventures while escaping to Surabaya and finally to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). King’s crew survived for 40 days at sea on “a few boxes of Australian lozenges” that they had hurriedly scavenged from the dockside (“everyone remarked how thin we were”). After a further patrol in the Strait of Malacca, King was relieved and returned briefly to a post as executive officer of the submarine base at Beirut in Lebanon.
Promoted to commander in June 1943, King was back in the Far East as captain of the new submarine Telemachus in January 1944, conducting war patrols from Trincomalee in Ceylon and Fremantle in Australia against targets severely diminished in numbers as Allied forces overcame the Japanese. He was awarded a bar to his DSO for the sinking in July of the large long-range Japanese submarine I-166, a success that stirred up two days of intense anti-submarine activity. Under the command of Lieutenant Suwa Koichiro, I-166 had been one of the most successful Japanese submarines, having accounted for a Dutch submarine and several merchant ships.
At the end of the war King was appointed executive officer of the submarine depot ship Forth, retiring from the Navy in 1948.
In January 1949 he married Anita Leslie whom he had met in Beirut in 1942, the eldest child of Sir John Leslie, 3rd Baronet. She was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and became an author of more than a dozen books, including a biography of Sir Francis Chichester, the first person to sail around the world single-handedly.
Her wartime service was in the Motor Transport Corps, as an ambulance driver for the French Army for which Charles de Gaulle awarded her the Croix de Guerre. After the war they both took up farming and were avid fox-hunters. In 1946 they had bought Oranmore Castle, a dilapidated 15th-century Norman keep in Co Galway, for £200.
By 1967 King was intent on sailing around the world by himself. He had a boat built for this purpose at Souter’s yard in the Isle of Wight. Named after a local fox-hunting club, Galway Blazer II, a two-masted junk-rigged yacht was specially designed for him by Angus Primrose with support from Colonel “Blondie” Hasler, the celebrated yachtsman, who had a similarly rigged Folkboat. Having been displayed at the January 1968 London Boat Show, Galway Blazer competed in The Sunday Times Golden Globe single-handed round-the-world race.
Starting in August, King was capsized off Gough Island in the South Atlantic in October by 50ft waves, breaking both masts, and had to be towed to Cape Town.
In 1969 King again tried and failed to complete a circumnavigation. In 1970 he tried for a third time and was successful, despite being holed by a “large sea creature” about 400 miles south-west of Fremantle, requiring heroic repairs. He completed the voyage in 1973, being awarded the Cruising Club of America’s Blue Water Medal. Between 1958 and 1997 King wrote six books recounting his wartime career and his sailing exploits which included several transatlantic crossings. A keen mountaineer, he climbed the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc. In his late seventies he took up hang-gliding.
His experiences attracted much media attention. He was filmed for two documentaries about the Golden Globe Race while his war experiences have frequently been used by documentary film-makers. A recent event was an act of reconciliation when a tree was planted at Oranmore by himself, Akira Tsurukame and Katja Boonstra-Blom. Tsurukame was the son of the chief engineer of the Japanese submarine I-166 and Katja Boonstra’s father was killed when the I-166 sank the Dutch submarine K-XVI.
He was the oldest surviving Second World War submarine commander. At 96 he was surprised to be awarded another campaign medal, the Arctic Emblem, for operations north of the Arctic Circle in Snapper.
His wife died in 1984. He is survived by their son and daughter.
Commander Bill King, DSO and Bar, DSC, submarine captain, yachtsman and author, was born on June 23, 1910. He died on September 21, 2012, aged 102
Lou Kenton
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Growing up in the East End, Lou Kenton defended himself against anti-Semites with his fists and fought against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936
Kenton served as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War (seated in beret) and was an active socialist to the end
Veteran of the Battle of Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War who later helped to organise monitored group tours to the Soviet Union
Lou Kenton, born in Stepney in 1908, was one of the last survivors of what is now often regarded as a heroic era in the history of the British Left, a working-class socialist who campaigned against Mosley’s Blackshirts and rode on a motorcycle through France to fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
Kenton’s family were Jewish refugees who had fled the pogroms and persecution in Ukraine, and settled, as did so many Jewish immigrants, in East London. Kenton was one of nine sons (six survived childhood) brought up in a three-room flat in a Stepney rife with poverty and ill health. His father, a tailor, died of tuberculosis and Kenton left school at 14 to work in a paper manufacturing factory, where he had to defend himself against anti-Semitism with his fists: “On my first day at the factory, I was involved in seven fights. I reacted very badly to being called a Jew bastard.”
Kenton joined the Communist Party in 1929 and was involved in the Battle of Cable Street, that decisive moment in October 1936 when socialists fought against Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists as they attempted to march through the East End. In 1937 Kenton and his first wife, Lillian, an exiled Austrian nurse, decided to travel to Spain to aid the Republicans in their fight against the Fascist rebellion. Interviewed in 2000 by The Guardian, Kenton reminisced about his departure on his Douglas motorcycle from Stepney, the crowd that turned up to wish him well, and the parting from his mother: “Being of the Left, she was proud but when she said ‘Are you going?’ she burst into tears and I did a wicked thing — I said: ‘If you’re going to cry every time, I won’t come and say goodbye.’ ”
He said he remembered little of the journey from London, but remembered very well his arrival in Perpignan. “I arrived in this big square and was looking for signs to Spain. I said: ‘Spain, boom, boom,’ to some people in a café and they laughed. There was a sign to ‘España’ right there but how was I to know España was Spain?”
Kenton drove an ambulance during the war, and was on the front line many times from the spring of 1937 to late 1938. He also distributed medical supplies to villages on his Douglas, noting that “the first time I arrived in this little village, the people embraced me and took me into their homes and gave me food. When I got back to the hospital, they said, ‘Don’t ever do that again — they have got no food.’ ”
On his return to Britain in 1938, Kenton raised funds to help to purchase a new ambulance, but the war was ending — the Republican cause was lost and the funds were now needed for evacuation vehicles rather than ambulances. Kenton returned to Spain, only to meet the floods of refugees trying to escape: “It was heartbreaking ... There were wounded carrying wounded and mothers carrying children who were already dead.”
The saddest moment for Kenton was to come after the civil war, when the British Government agreed to return refugee children from the Basque Country whose parents were still alive. Kenton drove the first of these groups of children (some of whose parents were already dead or were about to die) to the border: “I shall never forget it as long as I live. Across the bridge for the first time I saw the Fascist police in their three-cornered hats. All the children were in tears and all of them were hanging on to me as we checked each one and handed them over.”
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Kenton was working in a whaling ship in the Antarctic. It was not a happy time — his communist views were not welcome and he got the dirty jobs to do. Back in London, his marriage to Lillian was dissolved and in 1941 he married a fellow communist, Rafa Ephgrave. Kenton was badly injured during the Blitz and spent two years in hospital recovering.
After the war he worked with Homes for Heroes, a group dedicated to helping ex-servicemen to find housing and, with Rafa, set up a travel company called Progressive Tours, a Communist Party organisation (“Progressive” was a common euphemism for “communist”) which organised monitored group tours to the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Dubbed the “communist Thomas Cook”, Progressive Tours was successful — so successful indeed that, according to some, it was the only part of the communist organisation in Britain to make money.
The Kentons — like many idealistic British communists — left the party in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the brief flowering of moves towards democracy, the Prague Spring. They then joined the Labour Party, for which they became active members. For the rest of his life he remained an active socialist; his beliefs were tested, but he never lost his passion, and always insisted that people should stand up for what they believe in, not merely observe from the sidelines.
Kenton became a proofreader at the Financial Times, and in the 1970s an enthusiastic potter. He built a kiln in the garden of his home in Acton, West London, and produced commemorative pottery for causes such as CND and the Greenham Common campaign.
Along with six other veterans, Kenton was awarded Spanish citizenship at the Spanish Embassy in 2009.
The commemorative mug he was most proud of making was for the International Brigades, featuring the Cecil Day-Lewis poem The Volunteer, which concludes:
“We came because our open eyes, Could see no other way.”
He is survived by his second wife Rafa and by a son and daughter.
Lou Kenton, Spanish Civil War veteran, political activist and potter, was born on September 1, 1908. He died on September 17, 2012, aged 104
