Lt-Cdr Don Ridgway Royal Navy

Lieutenant Don Ridgway, who has died aged 92, flew with 816 Naval Air Squadron and postwar pioneered a revolution in the retail industry.

Between July 1942 and August 1944 Ridgway rose from sub lieutenant to lieutenant commander and senior observer in 816 Naval Air Squadron, while more than four out of five of its aircrew perished.   

            The Swordfish of 816 NAS were intended to operate from small escort carriers,  known as ‘Woolworth’ carriers, and to fill the gap in air cover between Europe and North America.    When the squadron was ready for action in September, their designated carrier, Dasher, was taking part in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa.   So, Ridgway and his squadron undertook night operations in the English Channel, laying mines in the harbours of Cherbourg and le Havre and attacking enemy shipping.   Within a few weeks the squadron had lost half its aircrew.    However, one of its successes came after Ridgway had identified a German convoy which was then attacked and sunk by surface forces.

            In February 1943 the squadron embarked in Dasher and escorted convoy JW53 from Iceland to Russia, but the ship and her aircraft were so badly damaged in stormy weather that she was forced to return to the Clyde.  The squadron re-embarked a month later, but on March 27 while an aircraft was being refuelled, Dasher blew up and sank within a few minutes.   Only 149 of the 538 ship’s company, including Ridgway and six others of the original aircrew of 816 NAS survived. 

            Within six months Ridgway had helped the redoubtable Lt Cdr Freddie Nottingham  (Daily Telegraph, June 5 2005) and a score of new aircrew to reform 816 at Machrihanish.   The squadron worked-up by searching for and attacking German E-boats in the English Channel in May, and in June moved to the Fearn peninsula where its strength was adjusted to six Swordfish and six Seafires before embarking in the escort carrier  Tracker to conduct anti-submarine operations in conjunction with Captain Johnnie Walker’s 2^nd Support Group in the NW Approaches.    Walker’s tactics were to use the aircraft to keep the U-boats down [below the surface] so that they could only move on their batteries and therefore at slow, submerged speed, making them easier targets for Walker’s escorts.  The tactics worked better than expected, and no merchant ships were sunk in the gap between August and December 1943.

            By January 1944 Ridgway was Senior Observer of 816 NAS when it embarked in the escort carrier Chaser to cover the Arctic convoys.    Shadowing aircraft were driven off and U-boats were kept down and no attacks took place on convoy JW57, a 42-ship convoy which reached Murmansk without loss. On the return convoy 816’s rocket-armed Swordfish played havoc with U-boat group Werewolf, sinking three U-boats U-472, U-366 and U-973, 366, and damaging several others.   This success led to all future Arctic convoys being protected by escort carriers.

            In April Ridgway planned the move of 816 NAS to Perranporth,  Cornwall where for the next several months the squadron maintained continuous night patrols over the Western Approaches.

            James Donald Ridgway was born where his father was Stockport sales manager for Cheshire Sterilised Milk Company and he was educated locally.   He volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm and was commissioned as an observer in 1941.

            He was immediately appointed to the heavy cruiser Berwick an observer in her catapult-launched Walrus amphibian biplane.   Berwick was employed on patrols off Iceland, to search for German ships which might break out into the Atlantic, and to cover the passage of convoys to Russia.   The Walrus was used to fly patrols around Berwick., and would then land in the sea and taxi parallel to the cruiser in order to be picked up by crane:  the most arduous part of Ridgway’s duties was to climb up on to the upper wing after 3-hour sortie in bitter weather and hook on – without slipping into the Walrus’s pusher-propeller.  [See picture.]

            In August 1944 Ridgway’s  816 squadron was disbanded.  Briefly he flew from merchant aircraft carriers (MAC) [, oil tankers with minimal aircraft handling facilities,] and he became an air navigation instructor.   He was offered a permanent commission, but having been on frontline flying throughout the war, he thought his luck might run out and he resigned.

            In 1946 he read microbiology and dairy science at Aberystwyth before joining a large private diary which manufactured bottled sterilized milk and Cheshire cheese.    Subsequently he worked for Unigate, Model Diaries in Australia, and Associated Dairies.  Among his many achievements were trials to produce UHT milk in 1953 and the first milk tetra-pack plant in Britain.   When Associated Dairies founded Asda, Ridgway became the company’s technical director and planning expert and by 1970 he had built the company’s first eight out-of-town shopping centres.    Next he devised the concept of district centres with individual shops around an Asda magnet store.   Between 1973 and 1983 Ridgway built 29 district centres from Aberdeen to Plymouth, each with between 10 and 30 shops with at its core an Asda store of a minimum of 50,000 sq ft and 500 car parking spaces.    When he retired 1984 to care for his wife, Ridgway had built 69 large Asda stores.  He was particularly proud of the store on the Isle of Dogs, where no new building had been built for over century, and he had anticipated the redevelopment of the docklands.

            Ridgway married first Margaret Adshead in 1945 and after she died of a long illness in 2000, he married his son’s mother-in-law,  Muriel Breaks (nee Naylor).  He lived between a cottage in Wales and a house in the Canaries, but after his second marriage he gave himself to travel and visited more than 90 countries.     He is survived by Muriel, and a son and daughter of his first marriage.   Twin daughters predeceased him.       

Donald Ridgway, born April 29 1921, died October 22 2012