Stoker (First Class) Sydney KNOWLES BEM Royal Navy

This is Peter Hore’s original version of the DT Obituary published on 29 Aug 2012:

Sydney Knowles, who has died aged 90, held a unique place in British naval history as a pioneer of today’s Royal Navy Clearance Divers, and was a close friend and diving partner of Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, whose disappearance while on a covert mission to examine a Russian warship in Portsmouth Harbour in 1956 remains shrouded in mystery.

In October 1955 Knowles, who had left the Navy and was working as a self-employed newsprint haulier between Blackburn and London, was contacted by Crabb, also retired but working for MI6, and asked if he would like to do “a small job for a large fee”. Knowles had been Crabb’s ‘dive-buddy’ for more than ten years and readily agreed to use his lorry to pick up his old boss in Hans Road, and drive to Portsmouth, where they parked near the southern entrance to the dockyard. Helped by a CIA agent who Knowles knew as Matthew ‘God damn’ Smith, and using the lorry’s canvas cover they dressed in Italian frogman gear (which they had kept since the war), slipped into the water, and drifted down on the Soviet cruiser Sverdlov which was on a goodwill visit to Britain.

Crabb was wearing a net over his face and Knowles an old fish box over his head to disguise their outlines and, while they could see the bright lights on the upperdeck and the noises of the ship, they reached Sverdlov undetected. Sinking into the depths they examined the rudders and propellers and then began an underwater search of the cruiser’s hull, and, while Knowles clung to the bilge keel, Crabb swam into a large circular trunk which concealed a bow-thruster – thus revealing the secrets of Sverdlov’s manoeuvrability

After a long, slow swim back to their rendezvous, they celebrated the success of their mission in the back of the lorry with malt whisky before Knowles drove them back to London. Later he was paid £40 in cash for his night’s work.

In London Crabb had introduced Knowles to ‘The Last Supper’, a dining club where the traitor Anthony Blunt presided as ‘Queen Mother’ (a mocking reference to his office of Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures) over a coterie of hard drinking young men, all, to Knowles’ mind “obviously homosexual”.

For more than 10 years Knowles had been Crabb’s close assistant and loyally obeyed him, but he became increasingly confused by Crabb’s behaviour and suspicious of the people he met at Blunt’s dinners, where, Knowles wrote, he met the bandleader Ray Noble, the Labour MP Bernard Floud, the head of MI5 Roger Hollis, and the American left-wing novelist Lillian Hellman. Worried by loose talk from Crabb that he was going to defect to the Soviets, when in April 1956 Crabb proposed another dive, this time on the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, to search her hull for other underwater openings, Knowles refused.

When Crabb disappeared on this dive, Knowles felt responsible that his boss had dived without him, and was intrigued to learn more. However when a headless, handless corpse was taken from the water several months later, it did not have the scars from the wounds which Knowles had seen and treated on Crabb’s body and he refused to identify it as his old boss. He developed his private theory that Crabb had been murdered by his own side in order to stop him defecting.

Sydney James Knowles was born in Preston on September 3, 1921: as a small boy he wore clogs, and on Saturday mornings accompanied his mother to the mill to clean her loom, and his father was a railwayman who supplemented the family diet with rabbits he snared while working on the tracks. Young Knowles was educated at St Matthews, Preston until the age of 14, when after the death of his mother his kept house for his father and did odd jobs.

Knowles joined the Navy as a stoker on the day war broke out and spent two years at his action station either in the boiler-room or as a loader in the magazine in destroyers.

In those years he saw service off Norway, in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, and off West Africa, taking part in the Norwegian Campaign in 1940, Operations Harpoon and Pedestal (two convoys which relieved the siege of Malta), the hunt for the Bismarck, and the capture of Madagascar from the Vichy French.

His biography, Diver in the Dark (2009), as well as being a unique account of Knowles’ pioneering experience as one of the Royal Navy’s clearance divers is a harrowing account of his years on the lower deck in wartime.

However, in Gibraltar Knowles answered a call for volunteers for hazardous duties, when he first met Crabb. Equipped with nothing but swimming trunks, lead-weighted plimsolls, and primitive underwater breathing apparatus, Crabb’s innocuous-sounding Underwater Working Party began a deadly underwater battle with Italian frogmen, based in Spain, who were trying to sabotage ships anchored off the Rock. They took into their own use the superior diving gear captured from the Italians and from the bodies of two dead enemies recovered the first ‘flippers’. Crabb, Knowles, Chief Petty Officer Ralph Thorpe, and others formed “a band of brothers forged by trust, our mutual love of the work, and not least the frequent adrenalin rushes … we loved life, we were young, athletic, friendly and carefree but, above all, we were intensely human.”

One of his tasks was to recover the body of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Commander of the Free Poles, after his aircraft crashed off Gibraltar in July 1943.

After the Allied landings in Italy Knowles accompanied Crabb through Italy, clearing mines and obstacles ahead of the American army. Once, driving an American lorry adorned with a White Ensign, he met a German Tiger tank, but quickly reversed into some trees to avoid being hit. In Venice he removed booby trapped mines from the Bridge of Sighs. .

Knowles’ and Crabb’s last dive before they left the Navy in 1950 was to search for a treasure-filled Spanish galleon in Tobermory Bay.

He was awarded the BEM for his wartime exploits, and in The Silent Enemy (1958) his role was played by Michael Craig, and Thorpe by Sid James.

For many years Knowles was haunted by his experiences and would wake shouting from nightmares in which he gasped for breath and struggled to swim to the surface.

Knowles, who died on 31 July 2012, married Joan Rowles in 1945 and after her death he married Frances Wearden in 1995 who survives him.