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Date Posted: 06:15:43 08/01/04 Sun
Author: apple
Subject: Re: Commander - times obituary
In reply to: Andy 's message, "Commander" on 12:59:27 07/22/04 Thu

in print edition of london times - obit carried two pix.

the invigorating simplicities of pulling a 32ft cutter - johnson instructing a party of young charges at the national nautical school

carrying a distinguished passenger, the first sea lord, admiral of the fleet, sir michael le fanu.
----------
Obituaries

July 28, 2004

Lieutenant-Commander Martin Johnson

Officer who defused four torpedoes from a captured U-boat and later taught seamanship at Portishead

When, in August 1941, the German submarine U570 was captured after surrendering, uniquely, to an aircraft of Coastal Command, and brought in to the Vickers shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness for examination, the naval authorities anticipated with relish the chance to examine such a highly prized enemy.

There was only one snag. The damage U570 had sustained from the Lockheed Hudson’s depth charges had buckled her bow plates, trapping beneath them four 500lb torpedoes and their armed warheads.

On a dismal morning with mist and rain enveloping the Vickers yard from the Irish Sea, F. Ashe Lincoln, who had joined the RNVR as a junior barrister, and Lieutenant Martin Johnson, RNR, both of the Department of Torpedoes and Mines Investigations, arrived at Barrow from London to assess the task confronting them. The German G7e torpedoes, which were electrically powered and easier to mass-produce than the variously compressed-air, oxygen and diesel-driven weapons of other navies, were a focus of particular interest, and the DTMI was keen to learn all about them.

The first step, however, was to get inside the buckled casing, and this could only be done with an oxyacetylene cutter. The shipyard welders were understandably reluctant to approach nearly a ton of TNT with such a fiery instrument, so Lincoln decided he would do it himself, if one of them would show him how to operate the torch. At that point one of the younger men stepped forward and said he would be the operator, if Lincoln would show him where to cut the metal casing. While the rest of the dockyard force retired to a safe distance the plates were cut open to reveal the torpedoes. Johnson then applied himself to the delicate and hazardous task of separating the torpedo pistols from the charges.

This done, the pistols themselves had to be opened and made safe. This was a dangerous undertaking in itself, since these ingenious items comprised strikers, primers and detonators, which were themselves capable of producing a lethal explosion, as a Dutch team found when opening similar pistols from a U-boat which went aground in Dutch Guiana — the resultant explosion took seven lives. But on this occasion luck and skill were with Johnson, though in the end the opening had to be done by the somewhat crude means of a hacksaw and screwdriver in what were by then very difficult conditions of driving rain.

Johnson was subsequently awarded the George Medal, the citation acknowledging his “gallantry and undaunted devotion to duty”. As Lincoln (later a commander and in civilian life a distinguished QC and Master of the Bench, Inner Temple) recorded in his book Secret Naval Investigator (1961): “The question of danger did not bother Johnson personally . . . but he was most anxious that nothing should be done to damage the submarine; she was much too precious to risk damaging.”

As for U570, she entered British naval service as HMS Graph, and was operational in the North Atlantic in the autumn of 1942. In 1944, while being taken to a Clyde breakers, she broke her tow and ran aground on Islay. There she lay until being salvaged for scrap in 1947.

Martin Challenor Page Johnson was born in Johannesburg in 1911, the son of a clergyman. When he was 3 the family came home to England, to Chatham, and he was educated at Christ’s Hospital and Pangbourne Nautical College. He joined the Merchant Navy as an apprentice with the Blue Funnel Line, serving there and with the New Zealand Shipping Company.

But before the outbreak of war, he was to find his true vocation working with young delinquents for the Prison and Borstal Commission. His first posting was as a housemaster to HM Prison Sherwood, a borstal in Nottinghamshire, from where he moved to Hollesley Bay Colony, near Woodbridge in Suffolk. There the matron was Daphne Shelmerdine, whom he married in 1941.

Called up as an RNR officer that year, he joined the Department of Torpedoes and Mines Investigations, where he served until 1944. He returned to working with delinquents in the post of Deputy Captain at Heswall Nautical School, an approved school on the Wirral, overlooking the Dee. Known as the Akbar, the college was a spiritual descendant of HMS Akbar, a reformatory ship for boys, which was moored in the Mersey from 1862 onwards.

Johnson was appointed captain of the school, in 1950, developing a regime central to which was the instilling in the 120 inmates, many of whom had been rejected as too unruly by other approved schools, of the notion of the responsibilities involved in living in and working for the community. Under a disciplined but enlightened programme which involved practical seamanship, cooking and stewarding, as well as schoolroom lessons, a majority of the boys were enabled to lead normal lives after leaving.

Not a few of them went into the Merchant Navy. The rate for inmates remaining out of trouble with the law in the first three — and most difficult — years after leaving the school was 83 per cent. Johnson’s after-care programme, encouraging letters and contact from boys on licence, was remarkable. More than 400 letters a year came in from Akbar old boys. But in 1956 the Home Office closed eight approved schools, the Akbar among them. As a reform school captain, Johnson was offered the post of senior seamanship instructor at the National Nautical School at Portishead on the Severn Estuary.

There, for the next 18 years he trained boys in the classroom and in the practical side of seamanship, ranging from the invigorating simplicities of sailing and pulling 32ft cutters to familiarisation visits to merchant ships which visited Portishead and other nearby docks.

Johnson retired in 1974 and devoted himself to his hobby of churches and graveyards. His book on the subject, The Churchyard Carver’s Art, a study of gravestones through the centuries, was published in 1985.

Martin Johnson’s wife died in 1991. He is survived by a son and daughter.

Lieutenant-Commander Martin Johnson, GM, wartime explosives disposal expert, was born on June 7, 1911. He died on June 23, 2004, aged 93.

www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1193220,00.html

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  • Re: Commander -- jock maclachlan, 07:16:26 01/12/05 Wed
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