Obituaries

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Gents if I may, although it is a great idea to post a tribute to a loved one, please make your own personal copy of their recollections if possible and if not then your own memories to treasure personally, I know from my own background as a boy I was not on top of things and lost all records, thoughts of my two Grandfathers that served in WW 1.
You will want this for your own children, and for their children .......... part of your heritage

my condolences

E ~
 
Thanks Erich
I agree with your views. The little book I mentioned has been copied and is in the hands of several people both academic and just friends he is also mentioned in a published book called
Invaders by Colin John Bruce of which I have a copy.
Unfortunately I nor my brother have any children of our own (the step kids are not interested) to pass this and his letters, documents and medals on to so the blood line will end with us.
I have already entered some of his recollections onto the BBC's peoples war in the hope they will be recorded for posterity. and will when my time comes pass what I have to my cousins kids to look after.
 
trackend said:
Thanks for the kind words EM SY.
Sounds like your dad was a bit rough handful too Emac but I think the war and before that the depression made people tougher in those days.
He did do some crazy things tho I remember him burying a car engine in the middle of our lawn so he could use the fly wheel as a telescope mount and making a zip line for us kids out of two telegraph poles, again buried in the garden trouble was I was too short to touch the ground to stop so I used to just bash into the bottom pole.(lost 3 teeth cause of that:rolleyes:)
He wrote a short booklet (only 48 pages) on his WW2 exploits I may copy it into his own thread so it will at least be some where on the web for years to come. All the people who have read it enjoyed it and a local college English teacher said it was well written for a person with only basic education. With lots of humour as well as the serious side from a lower ranks point of view it makes interesting reading.
Click to expand...

Not sure if you could call my Dad a rough handful Track. But he surely was an Aussie Larakin. God he had some adventures my Dad. It wasn't until he died Track. That I decided to source out his Army Records when he was with the 6th Division 2nd AIF earlier in the War. Rotten Old Devil had more run ins with the MPs and Army Justice in North Africa and the Middle East from 1940 to 1942. There were more transcripts than a 4 act play for a Shakespearian Threate Group. All of which he never told us about and I only found out about after his death some years later when I received his Army records from Australian War Museum records department. I was sure I heard him having a bloody good chuckle whilst I read his numerous charge sheet records attached to his normal army records.

But the funniest memory I have of my Dad. Was when he was having his morning shave with his trusty old cut throat razor over a laundry sink. When my elder brother came up behind Dad and stuck a nappy (diaper) pin right into Dad's arse cheek. why my brother did that was unclear, still is to this day. But Dad straigthened up as one would. He cut himself shaving and his eyes lite up like 2 roman candles. When dad had recovered from this he took off after my brother like a malley bull in the scrub. Brother was slightly quicker than Dad and beat a hasty retreat up the street. Leaving Dad rubbing his 2 different cheeks alternatively and swearing revenge. Which he got when my brother thought it was safe to come home. Then it was my brother"s turn to have a sore bloody arse
 
Good story EM its what makes a family tick:)

Cheers Adler Gnomey for the thought, all part of life.

Unfortunately it was not an easy death for him and he was in a lot of pain. Having said that he still told the nurse to sod off when she went to put an oxygen mask on him the cantankerous old devil.
 
Might be alittle late here but my condolences Track. Lost my dad a few years ago and can somewhat know what you're goin thru.
 
Lieutenant-Commande r "Fairy" Filmer, who has died aged 91, helped to sink a German cruiser in a dive-bombing attack; spent five years as a German prisoner-of- war; and later was a master of merchant ships in the South Seas.

Diving at 60 degrees from 12,000ft as part of a force of 16 Blackbird Skuas with 800 and 803 naval air squadrons on April 10 1940, he hit the German light cruiser Königsberg with a 500lb bomb, which was one of three which caught the ship in Bergen harbour, and sank her. It was, Filmer recalled, "the first time in the history of aviation that a major warship was sunk by air attack in wartime"; he was mentioned in dispatches for his daring and resource in the conduct of hazardous and successful operations.

Between April 12 and 26 Filmer flew five more sorties against German shipping and the Luftwaffe from Hatston in the Orkneys and the carrier Glorious. On the last of these he broke away from his flight of three Skuas to attack three Heinkel 111s, shooting down one but being caught by a burst of fire.

Blinded by spraying petrol and with his cockpit full of smoke, he ditched his aircraft in a fjord, but his torpedo air gunner, Petty Officer Ken Baldwin, was killed. Filmer was ever afterwards haunted by the thought that had he waited for his flight to follow, Baldwin might never have been killed.

With Norwegian help he salvaged his aircraft, and was evacuated to Tromsø in the cruiser Glasgow with King Haakon and the Norwegian gold reserves before taking a short period of survivor's leave and rejoining 803 squadron with a replacement aircraft.

His memory of meeting the Norwegian king made Filmer all the more determined when, on June 13, he was a section leader of 803, which flew from the carrier Ark Royal to make an ill-fated attack on German ships.

"As we neared Trondheim I was stunned to see the battlecruiser Scharnhorst was surrounded by a heavy cruiser and four destroyers," he remembered. "It was painfully evident that the firepower from the six naval ships, plus the land batteries, was going to be immense. The tracer bullets commenced rising well before we were within striking distance".

Despite the heavy flak Filmer completed his attack, but was jumped by two Me 110 fighters. Outgunned and out-manoeuvred, he ditched his aircraft to save his wounded observer, Midshipman Tony McKee, landing wheels-up on the fjord where they were picked up by Norwegians in a small boat. En route to hospital Filmer and McKee planned their escape to Sweden, but they were taken prisoner and flown to Germany.

Cecil Howard Filmer, known as "Fairy", was born in South Africa in 1916, and in 1931 he joined the South African training ship General Botha. He was runner-up to the King's Gold Medallist for his term and appointed midshipman, RNR. After three years' apprenticeship with Houlder Brothers, a UK firm, he passed his 2nd mate's certificate and was sent to the destroyer Foresight.

He then transferred to permanent service, serving as a sub-lieutenant in the battleships Resolution and Ramillies. Aged 21, he was appointed navigator of the destroyer Grenade in the Mediterranean, and volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm as a pilot, obtaining his wings in 1938.

Filmer spent five years as a prisoner of war, beginning in Dulag Luft, and delighted in making repeated escape attempts. Once he and five others jumped at night from a train travelling at about 25 mph, but were recaptured the next day. Another time he hid in the false bottom of a box filled with empty food tins and was carried out to a rubbish dump. While the guard was distracted, he slithered out and hid in a hut until darkness fell and walked away from the camp using the lights behind him as a navigation aid. After 10 days he reached the Danish border, where he was caught again.

He helped with the tunnel at Stalag Luft III for the Great Escape of April 1944, which led to 50 of the airmen who got away, including his Norwegian friend Halldor Espelid, being shot on Hitler's orders. Finally, with several thousand other PoWs, Filmer marched hundreds of miles, in freezing conditions, from southeast of Berlin to the port of Lübeck in order to avoid the advancing Russians. He was mentioned in dispatches for his good services while a prisoner of war.

After the war Filmer flew again with the Royal Navy but retired in 1958, returning to his first love, the merchant navy, and within 12 months he was master of a ship belonging to the King of Tonga.

Once, south of New Caledonia, his ship broke down, and being unwilling to be adrift in the hurricane season, Filmer made sails out of deck awnings and sailed 350 miles at four knots to a rendezvous with an Australian rescue tug. He continued for a further 16 years, based at Fiji, and sailing between Tahiti, Rarotonga, Honolulu and the Gilbert Islands, before retiring aged 69 to Durban.

"Fairy" Filmer, who died on July 15, never married. "Just as well," he said. "A wife would not have seen much of me over the years."
 
Captured submarine ace whose many escape attempts culminated in a 400-mile trek across Italy to Switzerland
Vice-Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, who has died aged 93, was a wartime submarine ace and a serial escaper after being captured by the Germans in the Mediterranean in 1943.

McGeoch's most famous exploits in submarines came in the period between November 1942 and April 1943. On his first war patrol he was deployed off Naples to ambush any Italian battleship which might threaten the Allied landings in North Africa.

He hunted and missed a German U-boat, but when an anti-submarine schooner was sighted the same afternoon McGeoch surfaced and fired a few shots to persuade the crew to abandon ship; he then boarded and searched her before setting her on fire. He allowed an armed merchant cruiser to pass unmolested, but the next day another U-boat proved too tempting to resist - it was not an easy attack, however, and McGeoch's torpedoes missed their target.

A day later - determined not to waste his one remaining torpedo - McGeoch took Splendid inshore, where he could see two merchant ships under the escort of two destroyers. Picking the larger and more modern of the destroyers, he scored a direct hit.

Returning to Malta, McGeoch saw an RAF Wellington attack a convoy and disable a merchantman; he surfaced and shelled the straggler until she sank.

What the official record described as an "exhilarating" patrol was further enlivened the following night, when Splendid was forced to turn and dive to avoid the tracks of two torpedoes.

On his second patrol McGeoch and Splendid made a nuisance of themselves on the Axis convoy routes to North Africa, sinking another destroyer. On his third and fourth patrols he sank two anti-submarine vessels and another 19,000 tons of shipping. He was awarded a DSO.

Later McGeoch spotted a 10,000-ton tanker with a powerful escort off Sicily. The conditions were as unpromising as they could be (a flat calm and a bright sun), but he pressed home his attack to within 600 yards and "made a job of it" with three torpedoes. Two days later he sank a 3,000-ton tanker.

In April 1943 McGeoch was awarded a DSC for his bravery and skill in successive submarine patrols, but on April 21 his luck turned. He was in Splendid three miles off the south-east coast of Capri when he was puzzled to see through his periscope a British destroyer; it was in fact a British-built warship, formerly the Greek destroyer Vasilefs Georgios, but now under the German swastika as Hermes.

In good asdic conditions Hermes dropped three accurate patterns of depth charges and Splendid sank to the seabed, where the depth gauge stopped at 500ft. McGeoch blew all his air tanks to raise his submarine to the surface; the crew abandoned the boat through the gun and conning tower hatches while Hermes made direct hits with her main armament, killing 18 of Splendid's 48-man crew.

McGeoch himself was wounded, in the right eye, but stayed in the boat until he was sure that there was no one left alive and that it would sink before the enemy could board it. The entire action was over in 12 minutes.

As McGeoch was hauled from the water into a German motorboat he heard a guttural voice delivering the classic line "For you the war is over", and he thought to himself "No, it bloody well isn't". Thus began a year-long odyssey to reach Britain.

Although now blind in one eye, McGeoch made several escape attempts: he attempted to dig, during the siesta hours, a tunnel from an Italian hospital where he was being treated. He jumped from a train when he was being moved between camps, but was recaptured. After being taken to Rome for interrogation, he leapt from a moving car and made a vain attempt to enter the Vatican.

Later, after the Italian armistice, he was promised repatriation, but the train in which he was travelling was commandeered by the Germans; McGeoch was taken to a prison hospital, from which he simply walked away, eventually crossing the border into Switzerland after a 400-mile hike.

He chose Switzerland - more distant than the Allied front line - because he wanted medical attention, and he was conscious while Professor Adolphe Franceschetti used an electromagnet to draw a jagged sliver of rusty steel from his blind eye.

He was also taken with what he called "the silken dalliance" of Geneva, but was impatient to get home and obtained false papers before walking into France in January 1944. Making contact with the Resistance, he travelled westwards by train and car, then skied across the Pyrenees and into temporary internment in Spain.

From Gibraltar he took passage in the dummy battleship Centurion, and his arrival in Britain was announced to the Resistance by the BBC with the cryptic words le tabac du Petit Pierre est dans la boîte. His reunion with his wife and the child he had not yet seen was delayed until two days later by a debriefing with MI9. He was mentioned in dispatches for his successful escape.

Ian Lachlan Mackay McGeoch was born on March 26 1914 at Helensburgh, where he was inspired to pursue a life at sea by messing about in boats on the Firth of Clyde. He was educated at Pangbourne, and entered the Royal Navy as a special entry cadet in 1931.

In 1933 he served as a midshipman in the battleship Royal Oak, the destroyer Boadicea and the cruiser Devonshire, but six years later began to specialise in submarines.

On the outbreak of war McGeoch was third hand in the submarine Clyde. He passed the perisher in 1940 and was sent to Malta as spare commanding officer. He commanded Splendid during the Allied landings in North Africa (Operation Torch) before embarking on the period in which he became a submarine ace.

After his escape McGeoch attended the naval staff course in 1944 and was staff officer operations in the 4th Cruiser Squadron of the British Pacific Fleet.

In 1946-47 he commanded the frigate Fernie until being promoted commander and sent to work in the operations division of the Admiralty. In 1949 he commanded the 4th Submarine Division in Sydney.

He was naval liaison officer to RAF Coastal Command in 1955-56, Captain 3rd Submarine Squadron in 1957-58, then spent two years as director of the Underwater Warfare Division in the Admiralty. After a year as a student at the Imperial Defence College, McGeoch commanded the cruiser Lion from 1962 to 1964.

Promoted to admiral, he was successively Admiral President of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, Flag Officer Submarines, and Flag Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland. He was appointed CB in 1966 and KCB in 1969.

After retiring in 1970 McGeoch went to Edinburgh University to study Social Sciences, and in 1975 was awarded an MPhil for his study of the origins, procurement and effect of the Polaris project.

From 1972 to 1980 he was editor of The Naval Review, and contributed to many other service journals. He collaborated with General Sir John Hackett and other senior Nato officers in producing two editions of The Third World War (1978 and 1982), which predicted how a future war might be fought.

McGeoch wrote a wartime memoir, An Affair of Chances: a Submariner's Odyssey, 1939-44 (1991), and The Princely Sailor: Mountbatten of Burma (1996), an assessment of the service career of a leader with whom McGeoch had several times served and whom he had always admired.

Interested in all maritime affairs, but especially in safety at sea, McGeoch took an active interest in all his many nautical associations, including the Royal Institute of Navigation, the Nautical Institute and the Honourable Company of Master Mariners.

He was a member of the Queen's Body Guard for Scotland, the Royal Company of Archers and of the Royal Yacht Squadron.

Ian McGeoch died on August 12. He married, in 1937, Eleanor Somers Farrie (whom he always called Somers); she survives him with their two sons and two daughters.
 
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