The Royal Navy's Reserves in War & Peace, 1903–2003

By Stephen Howarth

The official volume marking the centenary of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, known as the 'Wavy Navy' because of the distinctive wavy gold stripes on the reservists' uniforms, from its formation in 1903 through its unification with the mercantile Royal Reserve in 1958, and on to its present complete integration with the Royal Navy as 'the part-time element of a single naval service'.It charts the difficulties, setbacks and delights of the reservists' peacetime years of service and chronicles their vital contributions during wartime.Since the end of the Cold War and the dramatic near-dissolution of the RNR in 1994, members of the modernized part-time volunteer service have served in many different RN operations at sea, on land and in the air, from the Balkans to the Gulf.This detailed and vivid history which and profusely illustrated is by a distinguished writer of naval history who served in the modern RNR both as a rating and an officer for over eleven years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 19, 2003
• ISBN: 9781783036875

Book preview

First published in Great Britain 2003 by

LEO COOPER

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley,

South Yorkshire S70 2AS

© Stephen Howarth, 2003

ISBN 1-84415-016-X

eISBN 978-1-78303-687-5

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in England by CPI UK

CONTENTS

Foreword by the First Sea Lord

Preface

VMT

APPENDICES

Appendix 1

Senior Royal Navy Officers with responsibility for

the Naval Reserves, 1903-2003

Appendix 2

Commodores of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve

and the Royal Naval Reserve

Appendix 3

Awards of the Victoria Cross to members of the Naval Reserves

Appendix 4

Awards of the George Cross to members of the Naval Reserves

Principal Published Sources

Foreword

by the First Sea Lord

‘The Reservist is twice the Citizen’

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

Naval Reserves have formed an essential part of Great Britain’s defences for centuries and, as First Sea Lord, and previously as Commander-in-Chief Fleet, I am acutely aware of the debt that we owe our Naval Reservists. It used to be that in times of crisis, seafarers of all persuasions would be hastily formed either into volunteer reserves or ‘pressed’ into the Royal Navy, and then disbanded once the moment had passed. These ad hoc arrangments were formalized in 1903 with the formation of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves.

This book, by the distinguished naval historian Stephen Howarth – himself a naval reservist – takes us through the history of those Volunteer Reserves, drawn from men (and later women), some with a maritime background and others with no seafaring connections at all. Why do these people voluntarily relinquish gainful civilian employment and go to sea? It must be something in the blood! Whatever it is, we must acknowledge that over the past 100 years vast numbers of Naval Reservists have manned and valiantly fought in our ships, submarines, the Royal Naval Division, commando units and aircraft. By the end of the Second World War the number of Reservists reached nearly 500,000 and since 1903 Naval Reservists have been awarded no fewer than twenty-three Victoria Crosses.

In the past twenty-five years, Naval Reservists have fought alongside the regulars of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines in the Falklands Islands, the Gulf War, the Balkans, Iraq, and wherever the Royal Navy has been in action. We remain as dependent on Naval Reservists as ever we were; indeed the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, following hard on the heels of a major reorganization of the RNR in 1994, allowed for even closer integration between the RNR and the RN and today Naval Reservists, of all branches and specializations, take their time-honoured, and essential, place alongside the regulars in billets afloat and ashore.

I can strongly commend this book, not only as a veritable encyclopædia of information about the Naval Reserve, but also as a fascinating and informative read. I am delighted to have been asked to write the Foreword and I congratulate the Naval Volunteer Reserves in this, their Centenary year. Those of us who, in May 2003, were privileged to be at Horse Guards Parade to witness the Presentation by HRH The Prince of Wales of the Sovereign’s Colour of the Royal Navy to the RNR can only marvel at the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism shown by the many members of the RNR and RNVR, past and present, who attended. There is clearly more than a grain of truth in the saying that one volunteer is worth ten pressed men.

This presentation was the first time that the Sovereign had honoured the RNR in such a way and I am in no doubt that it is a richly deserved recognition of the many years of dedicated service given by the Naval Volunteer Reserves to their country.

I wish the RNR good luck and best fortune in the years ahead.

Admiral Sir Alan West KCB DSC ADC

First Sea Lord

Ministry of Defence

October 2003

Preface

Today’s Royal Naval Reserve, the modern RNR, came into existence on 1 November 1958, amalgamating two previously distinct forces, the ‘old’ RNR and the RNVR, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Both forces voluntarily undertook part-time naval training, and in emergency were committed to call-up and service with the Royal Navy wherever they might be ordered to go. The distinction between the two was that the ‘old’ RNR was composed of professional Merchant Navy seamen, whereas the RNVR was composed of sea-loving civilians from many walks of life. The distinction was partly maintained after their amalgamation as the modern RNR, with Merchant Navy personnel being placed on one ‘list’ and civilians on another, but since 1958 the two have been essentially one.

The ‘old’ RNR began in 1859 with an Act of Parliament enabling Merchant Navy seamen to train with the Royal Navy. A further Act in 1861 built upon this by introducing Merchant Navy officers to such training, and in 1903 another Act established the RNVR.

This book has been written primarily to commemorate the centenary of the RNVR’s creation, and it may at first seem odd to mark the hundredth anniversary of something that strictly speaking no longer exists in its own right; but the reason is simple. The ‘old’ RNR and the RNVR both live on in the modern RNR, and together, for the benefit of the nation, they form a very unusual service: a part-time, volunteer force of men and women who enthusiastically give large amounts of their private time to undergo naval training to the highest possible standards, who work eagerly with their full-time professional colleagues in the Royal Navy, and who in time of crisis are willing to be called up for service anywhere in the world.

These are very considerable commitments which members of Britain’s Merchant Navy have made since 1859. However, it is only since 1903 and the creation of the RNVR that everyone in Britain, seafarer or not, has been able to do likewise; so here we not only commemorate the centenary of the RNVR, but also celebrate a hundred years of the British public’s remarkable volunteer spirit in naval service.

The Royal Navy’s Reserves in Peace and War, 1903-2003, is a grand and inclusive title for a book of fairly small length. Written within typical RNR-style constraints (that is, with part-time hours to accomplish a full-time task) the text attempts to be as inclusive as possible, but in writing it I have come to sympathize strongly with J. Lennox Kerr and Wilfred Granville, who wrote The R.N.V. R. – A Record of Achievement (1957). In their preface they said,

The authors propose to disarm their critics: no adequate history of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve could be given within the pages of a single volume.

That was already true when their book was published. Moreover, with a text that was twice the permitted length of this, they were writing about a period barely half as long, just fifty-four years. Since then, forty-six more years of considerable RNR activity have passed, so today it is worth repeating their proposal, for it is nothing but the truth: one book cannot do full justice to a century of the Royal Navy’s volunteer reserves. This book does not pretend to be a complete history of the volunteer reserves to date, any more than Kerr and Granville pretended theirs to be; but they wrote a good and absorbing account, and without claiming any special qualification for writing this more modest one, I come from a family which unites the various strands of Britain’s naval reservist tradition. In the nineteenth century, one of my great-grandfathers served in the Shetland RNR; during the First World War, one of my grandfathers served in the RNR; during the Second World War, my father served in the RNVR; and with that background I am proud and glad to have served in the modern RNR.

To all who have served, who are serving, and who may yet wish to serve, I therefore offer this volume. Any faults it may have are mine, but its inspiration is a long tradition of civilian naval service – a tradition of service by turns enjoyable and tedious, arduous and exciting, sometimes tragic, and often of extreme gallantry and courage; yet above all, a tradition of service always given voluntarily.

Stephen Howarth

Shelton, Nottinghamshire

2003

VMT

The jargon of the Royal Navy and its Reserve is littered with abbreviations and acronyms. Many are impenetrable to the uninitiated but they can be useful once understood, and I have often thought that one of the most pleasant and useful is VMT: Very Many Thanks.

In writing this book I largely relied upon the principal published sources (listed separately) and on files held in the Public Record Office and the Naval Historical Branch of the Ministry of Defence, but I was also greatly helped by many people who provided additional material and other assistance, with aid ranging from anecdotes and memoirs to hard objective data and constructive critical comment. So much additional material of the anecdotal type was offered that it was impossible to use it all, and I must apologize to those who provided information that has not been used; but whenever possible within the limitations of length, and whenever appropriate to illustrate a subject or theme, or to drive the story of the Reserves’ first century on from one stage to the next, I have used those personal sources. Most, though not all, of the contributors listed below are naval. Several would have long rows of letters after their names if listed formally, but in keeping with the brevity of acronyms I shall use only their names, with a sincere VMT to all.

Robert Avis

Bob Bainbridge

David Baird

Arthur Baker

Peter Baker

Pat Barber

Kevin Barfield

Andy Barnwell

John Blackadder

Eric Bond

Christine Bradford

John Bradshaw

James A Brown

Pennie Burne

Bryan Cambray

Michael Cannan

A M Carter

Am Chalmers

Liz Church

R Coates-Walker

Steve Collins

Bernard Cookson

Josh Cosnett

John Coxon

David Crone

Kate Dace

D L Damsell

Mike Davies

Joan M Davison

John W Dawkins

David Dennis

John Ellis

Jeremy Eyre

Stephen Foster

John Goodwin

Andrew Gould

Marc Gryspeerdt

Neil Haggath

C J P Hall

Brian B Hargreaves

Colin Harvey

Derek Head

John Hill

David Holmes

Nigel Hope

Roger Hutchins

Sue Jameson

David Kay

Charlie Krasun

David Lee

John Lee

Cedric Loughran

Peter Machin

Donald J MacLeod

Alasdair MacTaggart

Hubert Makin

Tony Matthews

Stuart McAlear

Geoff McConnall

Vince McDonagh

J McHardy-Roberts

George B McKenzie

Mick Meras

Brian W Mitchell

Berkeley Moir

Jevan Morris

Mike Mullane

Peter Nicholson

P R Noel

Raymond Osgerby

Christopher Page

F D Patterson

Ian Pemberton

Laurie Phillips

Paul Raggett

David Read

Dick Richardson

Ian Robinson

John Sainsbury

Tony Sainsbury

Richard Simmons

J I D Smith

Lesley Smith

Margaret Smith

Roderick Stewart

Alan Stenning

John Stoy

Judith Swann

Andrew Thompson

Brian Thorne

Kate Tildesley

Victoria Trelinska

Jonathan Turner

Adrian Villanueva

Paula Vokes

Paul M Walker

Ronald Warriss

Maurice Weight

Brian H Wheddon

Ted Wilson

Clive Woodman

Alistair Worsley

Mark Wyatt

All the above made valuable contributions of different sorts to this book, and I am glad to be able to accord them recognition.

I also wish to add an emphatic VMT to a very large group of individuals without whom this book would have been impossible, because without their support and agreement it would be impossible for many – perhaps most – members of the Reserves to undertake their voluntary duties. I mean of course the partners of those members.

If I may give a personal example, my own desire to join the RNR was triggered by a visit to the Ton-class tender of HMS Wessex, alongside in Portsmouth during Navy Days. My wife Marianne was with me, and knowing my liking for the sea and respect for the Royal Navy, she was not very surprised after the visit to see me looking extremely pensive.

‘You’d like to join, wouldn’t you?’ she said. I said I would, and she gave the most marvellous reply: ‘Well, if that’s what you want, I won’t stand in your way.’ With both of us in full-time work, neither had any inkling of what this supportive attitude might entail in years to come, but month by month and year by year we gradually found out the practical implications of a commitment to my sometimes prolonged periods of service and absence.

These implications increased with the arrival of children, but the support did not waver. Listening to RNR colleagues it became clear that most relied to a comparable extent upon their partners’ willingness to accept the often demanding domestic implications; and in other discussions it became clear too that full-time members of the Royal Navy had very little idea of the extent to which their Reservists depended upon such support.

No one could name all those unsung background supporters, so with author’s privilege I shall name my wife as just one example, the one who is closest to me; and in expressing my gratitude to her I have more to say than VMT. The Royal Navy has long been accustomed to using biblical references as short-hand for important messages, so if you have the time, the patience, the curiosity, and a copy of the King James’ Authorized translation, then please read Proverbs, chapter 3, verse 15.

Stephen Howarth

CHAPTER ONE

‘A force to be called the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve’

The background and formation of the force, 1793–1903

It could be argued that the Royal Navy’s volunteer reserve forces go back much further than the title of this book suggests. Some people claim that Britain’s first naval reservists were people called lithsmen, who served at sea under the Danish kings of England in the ninth century, but that seems rather whimsical: the Royal Navy (RN) is a British force, and ‘Britain’ did not exist then as a political or economic entity. Moreover, the lithsmen’s duty was more one of feudal obligation than of voluntary service, and after them there was a gap of several hundred years before anything emerged that could be called a national navy – and you cannot really have national naval reservists if you do not have a national navy.

Britain’s first recognizable voluntary naval reserve forces, the Sea Fencibles and the River Fencibles, were created during the Napoleonic Wars, in 1798 and 1803 respectively. A ‘fencible’ was someone fit and liable for defensive call-up, but for several reasons the Fencibles were only distantly related to modern volunteer reservists. For one thing, the Sea Fencibles only manned shore batteries, and harbour and coastal defence craft; and although the River Fencibles (drawn from watermen and others who worked on the River Thames) saw action at Walcheren and Flushing, neither they nor the Sea Fencibles could be required to go very far from their home areas. They were exempt from the press gang and, as the Napoleonic Wars proceeded, it seems that both sorts of Fencible included a lot of men who volunteered for that very reason – a reasonable motive, it might be said, considering that by volunteering for a limited duty they were able to stay close to their homes and also to provide a measure of defence for the places and people they loved. But though it was an understandable human attitude, it also placed the greatest distance between them and modern volunteer reservists: many of the Fencibles saw their role as a means of avoiding serious service, not as a means of giving it whenever and wherever the need might arise.

A certificate of membership for the River Fencibles, 1806.

The Sea Fencibles were disbanded in 1810, and their River counterparts in 1813. Another ‘naval reserve’ of that period was a still shorter-lived group, the 1,200-strong Royal Trinity House Volunteer Artillery, created in 1803. Composed mainly of merchant seamen and their officers and paid for by Trinity House, this London corps was large enough to man ten frigates, and served to stiffen Londoners’ nerves at a time when the threat of invasion seemed strong; but in 1805 the Battle of Trafalgar ended that threat, and the Volunteer Artillerymen were promptly disbanded.

With no serious challenge to British power at sea thereafter, there was no further need for any kind of voluntary naval reservist until the middle of the nineteenth century. In August 1853, seven months before the Crimean War began, an Act of Parliament established the Royal Naval Coast Volunteers, who were to be controlled by the Coastguards, trained in gun drill, musket drill and the use of cutlasses, and exempt from compulsory service in the RN. A handful of these men served in the Crimea, but they were very much the exception: the Coast Volunteers’ commitment was limited in a manner similar to the Fencibles’, and they were not initially obliged to go more than 150 miles from shore in peacetime, or 300 in wartime. They passed under Admiralty control in 1856, and although in 1863 the geographical limitation on their service was abolished for new recruits, the RN still disliked them: they were seen as ‘boatmen, fishermen and longshoremen’ and ‘cabmen and others who had never been to sea’. Even worse from the RN point of view, they were ‘almost inevitably dirty’. The Coast Volunteers soon went the way of all their predecessors, being disbanded in 1873.

By then, though, a major step had been taken, with the passing of the Royal Naval Reserve (Volunteers) Act of 1859. This provided for the raising of a voluntary force of professional Merchant Navy seamen who would undergo naval training, and was followed in 1861 by a similar Act enabling the enrolment of officers: the first were commissioned on 22 February 1862. Together the two Acts created a service that for nearly 100 years held sole title to the name of the Royal Naval Reserve, the original RNR – a body which was more experienced and much longer-lived than all previous forms of voluntary naval reservists, and which was also one of the two parents of today’s RNR.

Why, then, does this book’s title not refer to 1859? Because two parents are required, and the second had not yet been born itself. Indeed, even the first had not yet gained its lasting name. An often forgotten wrinkle in the history of the original Merchant Navy reserve force is that it was first called the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, a title that was amended by Order in Council in 1864 to Royal Naval Reserve. Thereafter the new name stuck.

The second parent of today’s RNR was thus also second of its name: the civilian-based Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the RNVR, was formed in 1903 and celebrated for many years as ‘the Wavy Navy’, in recognition of its distinctive wavy insignia.

Before it was formed, however, there was still one more variation on the reservist theme that should be mentioned. This was the Royal Naval Artillery Volunteers or RNAV, created by an Act of Parliament passed in 1873 and effective from 21 May 1874. Like the Coast Volunteers, the purpose of the RNAV was to train men in naval gunnery, but whereas the Coast Volunteers had been mostly inshore fishermen, members of the RNAV came from many different backgrounds. In other words, unlike the original merchant-based RNR, RNAV people were not all proficient seafarers; instead, while some were keen amateur sailors, others had little or nothing to do with the sea, but all were eager to take up part-time training in naval gunnery. In those ways they might be regarded as the spiritual ancestors of the RNVR, and there were other similarities – perhaps most notably their enthusiasm – but there were also major differences: in particular, the limitations on their training and obligatory service. As we shall see, these contributed to making the RNAV another short-lived force.

From 1874 RNAV units were set up at the Clyde, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton and London, and organized into military-style batteries and brigades. Although personnel were permitted a kind of naval uniform with an RN training officer appointed to each unit, they were otherwise accorded the least possible naval recognition. Officers’ insignia included stripes like the RNR, with each chain-like stripe composed of two thin criss-crossing lines; however, they could not wear gold lace