Commander Nigel Matthews DSC Royal Navy

Obituary by Peter Hore:

Commander Nigel Matthews, who has died aged 89, survived being run over by an aircraft carrier and flew again the same day.

On June 14, 1945 Matthews was the senior observer of 828 Naval Air Squadron. Sitting in the rear cockpit of Avenger fighter-bomber JZ 547, with the Torpedo Air Gunner CPO C Ward and flown by the squadron CO, Lieutenant Commander Alan Swanton, Matthews was about to lead a raid on the Japanese-held island of Truk. JZ 547 was at the front of the crowded flightdeck of the fleet carrier Implacable and had the shortest length of deck for a running takeoff.

As Swanton charged along the deck at full power, he realised he had insufficient power for take-off on the wet oily deck and, too late, closed the throttle. Implacable was streaming full speed into wind at 30 knots and there little anyone could do as JZ 574 “trickled” onto the sea 200 yards ahead of the carrier.

Matthews looked up briefly to see Implacable sharp bows strike his aircraft at the wing-root and cut it “like butter.” The next few minutes were filled with darkness and noise as violent eddies tossed and tumbled him in the sea and he swallowed much salt water, but as he was swept into the wake he met Ward, who helped him climb into his liferaft, and a few seconds later, from the other side of the ship, up bobbed Swanton.

Swanton was bleeding and weighed down by his dinghy which had not inflated, and Matthews saved him by cutting him free, and he and Ward supported Swanton between their own rafts until twenty minutes later the destroyer Terpsichore picked them up.

Swanton was wounded and remained in the destroyer’s sickbay for two days, but Matthews was transferred back to Implacable and flew a second sortie on the evening of June 14. He was awarded DSC for his determination and eagerness that have been an inspiration and example to others.

Nigel Matthews was on January 27, 1921 in South Kensington where father was a GP. His father had met his mother, Jeanne-Marie Louise Brochier, in Marseilles while serving in the RAMC. Young Matthews was educated at Graham Street prep (now Francis Holland school), and entered Dartmouth in the Benbow term of 1934.

As a cadet and midshipman in 1938-40 he trained in the cruiser Vindictive and visited the Baltic and the Mediterranean, and served in the battleship Nelson, when she escorted HM King VI to Canada.

In December 1940, Matthews joined the light cruiser Aurora. Next month Aurora met at sea and escorted into Kirkwall five merchant ship which had run the blockade from Sweden; in February March and April Aurora covered minelaying forces in the North and Norwegian Seas; in May she took part in the hunt for the Bismarck, and conducted radar trials; and in June sank the German supply ship Belchen in the Denmark Strait; and in July and August evacuated Russians and Norwegian from Spitsbergen and destroyed coalmining and harbour installations in order to deny them to the Germans. It was, Matthews said, his best period in the Navy.

He trained as an observer in 1942, and was appointed to 803 Naval Air Squadron in North Africa. He travelled to Cape Town in the tramp ship Umtali, took a train to Durban and the troopship Nieuw Amsterdam to Mombasa, before taking the train to Nairobi.

In late 1942 he became senior observer of his squadron and flew down Nile in a formation composed of 6 Albacore torpedo-bombers and 6 Fulmar fighters to Fayid, Egypt for operations against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

His return journey was just as meandering: as a passenger in an Imperial Airways Empire and USAAF Dakota to Elizabethville, and train via Bulawayo to Salisbury, where he met a naval officer who needed an observer in a Fleet Air Arm Bristol Beaufighter, in which he hitched back to Nairobi.

In the spring 1943 he spent three months in Madagascar, supporting the Free French and for much of the rest of that year he was based based at naval air stations at Kilindini in Kenya, Tanga in Tanganyika and Wingfield, South Africa. Remarkably he suffered only one accident when an engine failure in an Albacore made his pilot to make a forced landing.

His return to the Britain in the spring of 1944 by troopship was uneventful. By that summer he took part in raids on Norway, bombed the German battleship Tirpitz, and in one torpedo attack, on a merchant ship, he was wounded by shrapnel from flak in the posterior. Having treated himself with morphine, he failed to paint ‘M’ on his forehead and in consequence he received a second, near fatal, dose when he was lifted from his seat after landing on.

After a period in hospital Matthews’ squadron re-equipped with Avengers at Fearn, near Invergordon where he met and married his WRNS: they enjoyed a week’s honeymoon before Matthews departed for the war in the Pacific.

In 1946-47 Matthews retrained as a pilot and was sent to 827 NAS to fly the Firefly from the carrier Triumph in the Mediterranean. After staff courses and desk jobs he commanded the frigate Loch Insh, seeing service 1958-59 in the Gulf June and Indian Ocean.

Matthews qualified as a French interpreter in 1961 and served at SHAPE in its Paris headquarters, before retiring ten years later.

He was a Conservative councillor for Fareham and Hampshire in the late 1970s, enjoyed travel to see fine art museums on the continent and occasionally the rugby in Paris.

Matthews, who died on December 19, 2010 married first Jean McFadden in 1945, who died in 1977, and, second, married Annette Pask (nee Pinhey) in 1979 who predeceased him in 2008, and he is survived by four children of his first marriage and stepdaughter.