Ian Kinloch Bryce DSC Royal Navy

Ian Bryce, who has died aged 89, crewed the Cutty Sark on her last voyage, was one of the youngest ever winners of the DSC for his bravery, and wrote a frank autobiography of his years in the Royal and Merchant Navies.

Bryce was a 17-year old Midshipman RNR in the minesweeper Fitzroy when she anchored off La Panne 9 miles east of Dunkirk on the evening of May 28, 1940. There his captain ordered him inshore with the ship’s motorboat and a crew of two, Signalman Dick Minter and Ordinary Seaman Harry Hawkins, and the order “Mid, I want you to go ashore and bring off the British army. Got it?”
Bryce grounded his boat in shallow water just before midnight. Finding himself the senior naval officer, he organised the soldiers who crowded round him to form groups opposite the ships lying offshore, and he refloated his own boat by gathering ten men on each side, with bows pointed seaward, and ordered them to march into the sea until the leading pair lost their footing, and then, in succession, he allowed them to scramble onboard.
After he had made several trips to the beach, Bryce’s Fitzroy landed 109 British troops, 8 Belgian officers, 2 French soldiers and 2 Jewish refugees in Dover.
On May 30 Fitzroy anchored closer to Dunkirk where once ashore Bryce found the beaches covered with “khaki everywhere many men wading out to sea in columns” and “the air alive with German aircraft.” He was determined to carry on the method he had perfected at La Panne and only once found it necessary to fire his pistol in the air to maintain discipline. The embarkation smartened up dramatically when he enlisted the help of an RSM of the Scots Guards, who “got the boat drill buttoned up in no time and speeded up the loading”: that night Fitzroy landed 678 British troops in England.
In the early hours of May 31, Fitzroy anchored again, this time off Bray beach, but on landing Bryce could only find 3 stragglers. Next day he searched the dunes for men who were hiding or late arrivals from the hinterland, until he was summoned by urgent signals telling him “Rejoin ship now.” Fitzroy crossed the Channel with 67 soldiers from France.
Waking from the sleep of exhaustion on June 2 Bryce volunteered to return for one last crossing to France, and joined the destroyer Winchelsea which was aid need of officers for a high-speed cross-Channel dash, and, when she berthed after sunset on June 2 on the eastern mole of Dunkirk, he was impressed by the courage and discipline of the 152 men of the rearguard, including French poilus, who marched onboard and were landed at Dover next day.
A few days later Bryce celebrated his 18th birthday, becoming one of the youngest recipients of DSC, and was pleased that Minter and Hawkins were awarded the DSM, for their “good services in the withdrawal of the Allied armies from the beaches at Dunkirk.”
Ian Kinloch Bryce was born in Darlington, Co Durham on June 9, 1922 of and educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School and Monkton House, Cardiff after his father, a tobacco salesman for WD & HO Wills, moved there. Born of Scots-Italian stock, he ever afterwards considered himself a Welshman.
He joined the Thames Nautical Training College HMS Worcester in 1936 and was Cadet Captain there when he and a team of cadets helped man Cutty Sark on her last voyage, under tow, from Falmouth to Thames. He remembered the cheering crowds manning the shore, and her arrival off Chatham when she was greeted by his hero, the much decorated Antarctic explorer Admiral Lord Mountevans.
Pre-war Bryce spent a year in Canadian Pacific Steamships, but was called up on August 28, 1939. His first RN ship was the minesweeper Kittiwake which was mined in the Dover Straits in September and badly damaged: Bryce was uninjured and commended for his marked coolness during the ensuing chaos, but he spent five months on survivor’s leave in Cardiff, during the Phoney War, when he became friends with many young doctors and nurses at Cardiff Infirmary.
Music was integral to Bryce’s life: he played Chopin for long hours to relieve stress, and in Fitzroy he formed a mouth organ band. Having helped a drunken stoker, also called Fitzroy, to return onboard without being spotted by more senior officers, and earned the respect of the stokers’ messdeck, when he met them on a ‘run ashore’ in London, they took him to the Fitzroy Tavern in Soho where his band played through the night despite the bombing.
On February 26, 1941 while home on leave, Bryce was hit by a bomb splinter during the blitz of Cardiff. He woke from unconsciousness on a hospital trolley where he was recognised by one of his doctor friends whose prompt surgery helped him make a speedy recovery, assisted by one of the night nurses.
Bryce served three busy years in the destroyer Oribi 1941-44, participating in many Arctic and Atlantic convoys, surviving damage by ice which needed emergency repairs in Russia, taking part in the raid on Vaagso in Norway in December 1942 – when he recalled Jack Churchill’s commandos going into battle to the sound of the bagpipes – , the ramming in fog of U-531 in May 1943, and D-day.
Postwar Bryce accompanied the Royal Family on their tour to South Africa in the battleship Vanguard in 1947 and the following year he gained his Master’s ticket and returned to Canadian Pacific. Realising that CP were not building any more ships he transferred to the Cunard line, starting as 3rd Officer in ‘the Green Goddess,’ RMS Caronia. However in 1956 Bryce suffered a flashback to his arduous war years was advised not to continue his seagoing career.
He spent six years as a shore manager with Regent Oil and a further seven years with Conoco, before setting up Kinloch Bryce Associates, a company which specialised in training young people in management, leadership and enterprise.
In the war Bryce has witnessed the work of the lifeboats, especially the last sailing and pulling lifeboat, the New Quay-based William Cantrell Ashley (he swore that one of the crew was still wearing his butcher’s apron) and as soon as his finances permitted he became a life governor of the RNLI.
In Bryce’s autobiography Shipmates & Mistresses – Bye and Large (2005), the mistresses were the ships he served in, but Bryce was also remarkably frank about the life of a sailor ashore and his youthful, romantic attachments.
Bryce, who died on December 11, 2011, married first Brenda ‘Brandy’ Pearce in 1949, who died in 1962, and second Sue Balkwill in 1964 who survives him with two sons and two daughters.