UNCOMMON COURAG

It was six years ago that I discovered the suitcase of my father George Jones’s papers which set me to researching his membership of the RNVSR (Royal Naval Volunteer Supplementary Reserve), also known as the Yachtsmen’s Reserve. I read about his prewar reconnaissance cruise to the Baltic aboard the Higley Halliday-designed motor yacht Naromis and I learned as much as I could about his wartime service. I published a small book, The Cruise of Naromis; August in the Baltic 1939 but I couldn’t stop. I seem to have been researching the RNVSR almost ever since.

When Dad was finally demobbed in 1946 he returned to Waldringfield on the River Deben to join his older brother Jack. Dad set up the East Coast Yacht Agency (the Easy Cosy) which later became Interyacht. I was born in 1954 and by the mid-1960s we’d moved to the family farm in Essex. It’s only recently that I’ve come to realise how many of the figures from those early childhood years had also been members of the RNVSR.

Many people say that their older relatives who served in the war didn’t want to talk about it. That was only partially true of my uncle Jack. He was to refer to him as a ‘yacht designer’ [feature in CB407]. He hadn’t been one of the first to rush into uniform. In September 1939 he was aged 24, newly qualified and working in Birmingham. He was also getting his first designs published and was absorbed in esoteric controversies over the metacentric shelf. His job in Birmingham was a protected occupation so he didn’t have to join the forces.