Lieutenant Commander Denis Theodore John Stanley MBE DFC Royal Navy

Denis was an absolute gentleman whom it was a pleasure to know but I cannot improve upon the address given by Denis’s son-in-law at the funeral service held on 1st July:

” And so another Old Warrior has made his last and greatest flight and we gather here today to celebrate his life.

Denis was born in Eltham, London, on 7th April 1921, and was educated at Eltham School from where he joined the Woolwich Arsenal as an apprentice in 1937, following in his father’s footsteps. He tried to join up when war broke out in 1939 but was considered to be in a reserved occupation and was not allowed to do so.

He thus continued his engineering duties making machine gun ammunition but quickly moved on from the Arsenal to work for High Duty Alloys, where he met Dorothy, the girl who was later to become his wife. He was finally called up for Naval Aviation duties in May 1941. He went first to Gosport before starting Observer training and he then flew in Swordfish aircraft operating from Tangmere and Ford using early ASV radar against German E-boats, for which he was awarded the DFC in 1943, and he later flew as an Observer in Barracudas and Mosquitoes. He also played rugby for the Navy and always claimed that he might have played for England had the war not intervened.

He married Dorothy Lovegrove in January 1944 before undertaking a tour of duty at Ulundapet in India (where unfortunately his first Log Book was lost)..
In 1946 he was offered pilot training, and learnt to fly on Tiger Moths and Harvards, gaining his Naval wings on 18th June 1947, and he then went on to fly Fireflies, Firebrand and Hawker Sea Fury aircraft before volunteering for helicopters in 1951. Once qualified on these, he was attached to HMS Eagle, and whilst on ‘plane-guard’ duties flying a Dragonfly on March 25th 1953, he was credited with the first live aircrew rescue of a British pilot off a British carrier. He repeated the feat on 15th July when another Attacker went in off the flight deck, and it should be remembered that this, too, was pioneering work using a net scoop, not a man on a winch line as is the case now.

Denis’s daughter Elizabeth was born in 1952 and later that year he took part in Operation Hurricane, which was the Montebello Island Atomic Bomb test during which he was in command of the Ships Flight attached to HMS Campania. As well as providing general air support for all manner of duties, after the bomb was detonated he flew the first helicopter over the lagoon to collect water samples, for which he was awarded the Military MBE.

He was appointed CO of 848 Squadron in the Spring of 1955 and operated the first batch of lease-lend Sikorsky S-55 Whirlwind helicopters in Malaya, and along with others pioneered the very rapid movement of troops and police deep into the jungle to fight the insurgents. These tactics were widely regarded as materially shortening the conflict and demoralising the terrorists and he was personally thanked by Lord Mountbatten of Burma for his part in defeating them. In his latter years he did his best to rescue the last remaining S.55 of that first batch (WV 198) which currently resides in an Air Museum near Carlisle.

After Malaya he was offered sea-going duties or a Staff College appointment, neither of which appealed to him very much, so he left the Navy voluntarily in 1958, and went to work for the National Research and Development Corporation at Calshot, then Acorn Marine, Dunlop, Ford Bacon and Davis, Submex, and other Consulting Engineering Companies before retiring in 1986.

For Denis, as with so many others of his age, WWII plucked him from obscurity into fighting for his country in a task where life expectancy was often measured in weeks. He never forgot the camaraderie and friendships forged during that time, and indeed, without doubt, his happiest memories are of the Navy and all it stood for. Again like so many before him, he fitted rather uneasily back into civilian life and one of his most abiding and oft-repeated memories was of a car journey he made with Dorothy from Culdrose to Eltham in 1947 during a period of severe petrol rationing, where the only obstruction to the entire journey seems to have been an errant milk tanker. I’m sure it was all viewed in hindsight with rose-coloured spectacles, but I know that he itched for more action than he ever managed to find. He had been promised a flying job with Fairey’s on the Rotordyne, but that was scrapped by the Government of the day, and his last hope of a civilian flying job went with it.

After Dorothy died in 1993, his brother-in-law Charles suggested building an aeroplane to take his mind off things, to which Denis readily agreed, and the result of the collaboration was a Minimax single-seat microlight, in which he is pictured on the cover of the Service Sheet, and which he passed on to me a few years ago when he became too infirm to fly it any more.

Denis had a huge interest in all manner of diverse things, and as well as being involved with trying to rescue the previously-mentioned helicopter, he was an avid reader, a very active member of St. Andrews Church choir, had served on the committee of the Chedworth Society, and was instrumental in restoring the village water wheel to working order. Shortly before he was taken ill, he was discussing improving the water flow to the lake at the Fossebridge Inn.

One of his abiding passions was his membership of the Fleet Air Arm Officers Association and the Fleet Air Arm Squadron, and no story of Denis’s exploits would be complete without mentioning his ditching off the Scilly Isles in October 2003, when the engine failed on their Cessna and three old pals, two of them already octogenarians, went into the water. All their previous Naval training paid off, they completed a text-book ditching close to a trawler (the Semper Allegro), and all three were whisked off to hospital by helicopter where they instantly became minor celebrities, with Denis recovering sufficiently to attend the Squadron Dinner later that evening, which cost him a small fortune in champagne. The trawler skipper later remarked that Denis came aboard “looking as if he had just dropped in for afternoon tea”,

After becoming increasingly disorientated and suffering numerous falls, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour late in 2007 and was soon deemed to be too ill to be nursed at home so he went into Care Homes, the first in Mickleton and the second in Chipping Campden, and we have the very highest regard for the staff in both places, who looked after him to the very best of their ability, though he was not the easiest of patients.

He suffered no pain at all during his illness, although he found it increasingly frustrating, and the end came peacefully early last Tuesday morning (23/6/09).

So let us all take away our own very special, very personal memories of Denis, and rejoice in a long life, well lived.”