Sub Lieutenant Owen Lawrence-Jones Royal Navy

Volunteered for Navy in 1942 but poor eyesight obliged him to become an aircraft direction officer for which he found the training bizarre but effective. Basic training was at HMS Royal Arthur, a Butlin’s camp at Skegness, where the unheated chalets were so cold that he slept under his oilskin coat, and in the morning the frozen condensation enabled him to stand the garment on its own. Later he slept in a hammock on the gundeck of HMS Victory with plentiful cockroaches and no plumbing, and then in a maple-panelled room in the Royal yacht Victoria and Albert, with a marble washbasin and ivory tap handles. He joined the new carrier Indefatigable before her launch in 1943 and after operations in the Norwegian Sea against the German battleship Tirpitz and on Arctic convoys, in 1944 the carrier joined the British Pacific Fleet. He survived a kamikaze attack in Indefatigable and was present in Glory at the Japanese surrender on 6 September 1945 in Rabaul Bay. Post war he followed a career in finance. He died aged 97.