Commander A F King Royal Indian Navy

Commander Arthur King, Royal Indian Navy, who has died aged 97, was a witness to the Indian naval mutiny whose death marks an end to a chapter in the history of the British Empire.

King has just returned from a wartime course in England when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, and unexpectedly he found that the Indian navy which he had helped to expand in the war was in the midst of a disorderly rundown.    Then on February 18, 1946 a one-day strike by sailors at Bombay escalated into a mutiny.   It started as a protest about pay and food.  The nationalist movement was quick to proclaim sympathy and later the Communist party claimed credit.    Later still racist behaviour by some British personnel towards Indian sailors was alleged, but King wrote in his memoirs “the political background in India was tense and the demand of home rule was understandably on the increase.   The fact that demobilisation plans had not been fully developed made the situation even more severe”.

200 suspected ring-leaders of the mutiny were placed in a camp at Mulund outside Bombay and King was put in charge with a guard drawn from the Mahratta regiment.   He was pained that among the sailors were many whom he knew.   He understood their motivations and aspirations and felt no danger and mixing with them and talking to them.   It was some consolation to him when a few weeks later he drove his prisoners to the railway at station at Thane where they were given railway tickets and allowed to go home.   There were no prosecutions or trials of his people.

Arthur Frederick King, the son of a Cornish country parson, was educated Truro Cathedral school and in 1934, aware that his father “did not have greatest salary” he applied for a cadetship in the Royal Navy.    King had enjoyed rugby and cricket at Truro, and messing about in boats, but the teaching of French was poor, “the French teachers kept on getting pregnant and we rarely got beyond the recitation of verbs before having to start again with a new teacher”.   King passed the Admiralty Interview Board, but his poor French let him down in the written exam.  The letter announcing his failure was accompanied by another inviting him to join the newly-renamed Royal Indian Navy, an invitation which he seized. 

King’s training in the cruiser Frobisher followed the same lines as his RN contemporaries, and he claimed to have learned his seamanship when in his first weeks at sea Frobisher salvaged of the 40,000 ton tanker Valverda in mid-Atlantic.  He remembered the lessons because he also earned a considerable addition to his pay:  £12 10s in salvage money.

In a sign of changing times, while still in Frobisher King attended the 1935 fleet review at Spithead to celebrate the silver jubilee of George V, when he embarked for India in the SS Nevasa at the end of 1936 his sword was engraved with the monogram of Edward VIII, but his commission, which arrived later, was signed by George VI.

Soon after arriving in Bombay King was tasked to cox a pinnace carrying the Governor, Lord Brabourne:  when Brabourne asked him long he had been in India, King admitted “Two days, Sir!”, whereupon the Governor talked frankly to the young man about the political situation and warned him that Indianisation of the armed service was gathering momentum.

King’s first ship was the elderly sloop HMIS Clive operating in the Bay of Bengal and searching the Andaman and Nicobar islands for Japanese spies who were believed to be surveying the island in the guise of pearl-fishermen.  

The Indian navy was beginning a period of expansion and the advantage for King was the opportunity of early responsibility.   In 1938 he was appointed to the training ship Dalhousie, where his first class was forty boys from the Punjab most of whom had never seen the sea.  King used the occasion to learn Urdu and to pass his command exams, and in 1939 he was sent to Delhi to help set up the new Navy Office, and in 1940 he returned to England to qualify as a gunnery specialist. 

In early 1941 King was appointed to HMIS Jumna, the second of a new class of ships, with home-grown names, being built at Dumbarton for the Indian navy.    It was while standing by Jumna   that King visited Glasgow and met Anne, the “bonny lass” who he would marry.  King also helped turn Balloch Castle on Loch Lomond into accommodation and classrooms for his mixed-faith crew of Indians, including the provision of halal meat.

After work-up and Atlantic convoy duties King was recalled in late 1941 to Delhi as staff gunnery officer.  He travelled east in SS Orontes, and meeting the battlecruiser Repulse in Freetown he dined onboard with old friends.  He recalled that her officers were “enthusiastic with the expectation” of going to Singapore: but within four weeks Repulse and the modern battleship Prince of Wales  had been sunk by the Japanese, and many of officers he had dined with were dead or prisoners.

Arriving in Bombay King was surprised to find his faithful bearer Elias Dias, a Goan, waiting for him on the jetty:  he never found out how Dias knew to expect him.

1942 was an exasperating year for King, living in the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club but doing a staff job which he did not want.   He relieved his frustration by visits to shipyards, which enabled him to observe the growing ‘Quit India’ campaign.  At last in mid-1943 King received orders to return to England, this time to become first lieutenant of HMIS Cauvery, and in April 1944, when her captain fell ill, 26-year old Lieutenant King took command, escorting convoys in the Atlantic and later hunting Japanese submarines in the Indian Ocean.       

After the Indian naval mutiny King again visited England, this time to supervise the refit of the cruiser Achilles which was about to be recommissioned as HMIS Delhi.   Despite the warning he had been given by Brabourne all those years before, and the work he had done to grow the careers of India officers and sailors, independence and the partition of India caught King by surprise.  Offered the choice of a short service commission in the Indian or the Pakistan navy, King opted to leave the service and joined Phillips, Scott & Turner in Newcastle on Tyne, a company which made Delrosa Rose Hip Syrup, California Syrup of Figs and Andrews Liver Salts., and in 1955, Panadol. 

In King’s 34 years with the company it became Sterling Winthrop Group, he travelled widely in Europe, and, when Sterling opened a factory in Dijon, he at last learned some French.    King was awarded the Queen’s Award for Industry for Exports.  

 He retired in 1982 to the New Forest where he became captain of Brokenhurst Manor Golf Club, and where he developed new standards for course management which was recommended by the English Golf Union to all its member golf clubs.

King also researched and wrote articles about the history of the Royal Indian Navy, and he supported the restoration of the frigate Trincomalee (which was built in Bombay in 1816) and which is now in Hartlepool.    By 1997 King was one of the last members of the Royal Indian Navy (1612-1948) Association when he organised a final last tamasha or grand show.   In 2004 he was persuaded to revisit after 58 years the scenes of his youth.  He was made a welcome guest in India, was delighted to find that many of the young officers he had known had become admirals, and pleased to note that the Indian Navy had become one of the top ten navies of the world.

As a result of his visit and subsequent research there is now a Seaman’s War Memorial in Pune to commemorate the 7,955 Indian merchant seamen who died in the First and Second World Wars.   King also became a member of the Memorial Gates committee prior to their construction at the top of Constitution Hill, he met HM the Queen at the inauguration in 2002 and he attended annually to lay a wreath until prevented by his frailty.            King married Anne Stewart in 1941 and he is survived by their younger daughter, Jennifer.