Denys Rayner

In October 1925, he joined HMS Eaglet, Mersey Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a part-time midshipman with time to pursue his interest in exploring the rocky coast of the Western Highlands in a small boat of his own design.In later school years came "an endless stream of model destroyers...which really floated and were fitted with systems of propulsion..."[1] "I had already packed my bags, set my affairs in order and seen to the laying up of my yacht" wrote Rayner of his actions four days before the outbreak of World War II.[2] By 1939, partly as a result of a recognition by others of his gift for leadership and partly by insisting on specialising in navigation rather than gunnery, against standard advice to RNVR officers wishing advancement in the Royal Navy, Rayner qualified himself to command 14th Anti-Submarine Group comprising HMTs Loch Tulla, Istria, Regal, Brontes and Davey, a unit of armed trawlers patrolling the notoriously dangerous waters surrounding the main fleet base of Scapa Flow – a 6 by 20 mile stretch of sea between Scotland and the Orkney Islands where a high spring tide can flow 8 knots against a westerly gale.[10] Here, overseeing radar guided plots from deep underground in a way that would have been impossible at the start of the campaign, Rayner applied his specialist experience to the deployment of a large force of anti-submarine warships in the closing months of the war.Rayner speaks in Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic of his respect for one of his colleagues at the fort – First Officer Audrey Faith Parker, OBE, WRNS – for the seafaring experience she brought to her operational work.Rayner's Distinguished Service Cross was announced in the London Gazette of 29 December 1940,[12] dated 1 January 1940, for the "hard and perilous task of sweeping the seas clear of enemy mines, and combating submarines" while commanding the trawler Loch Tulla.Rayner, though at the time given credit for sinking or damaging an unidentified U-boat on 22 May 1941' [2], had doubts even then, as he had about an earlier incident while in charge of 14th Anti-Submarine Group on HMT Loch Tulla, sailing towards Scapa Flow.He writes of picking up a strong asdic signal north of the Humber on the UK east coast, a depth charging exercise and a pool of oil,[18] and later he mentions "thinking" that his first DSC, announced on 1 January 1940, was "probably" for this action "off Flamborough Head".Mike Raymond of the Flower Class Corvette's Association reports a portrait of Rayner 'with pipe and beard' in the frontispiece of Escort – the picture at the start of this article emphasising this is more biography than history.While escorting the homeward-bound convoy SC 31, on board Verbena in company with Commander Bostock of HMS Churchill, Rayner spotted a big ship on the horizon hurrying southward: "... she was hull down and difficult to identify.Some of the actual experiences described in the novel and later transferred to film can be read in Rayner's low-key account of his encounter between corvettes and U-1200 off southern Ireland on 11 November 1944 between pages 224 and 228 of Escort.In his novel The Long Fight (1958) Rayner wrote about a three-day ship-to-ship engagement in the Indian Ocean during the Napoleonic Wars; about tank warfare in The Small Spark of Courage (1959) (titled Valor in US editions of the novel), ).Simcoe, writing meticulous logs of intricate exploration of sea lochs with the added excitement of swift and sometimes rough open water passages, including encounters with overfalls and squalls, entranced by the scenery of these complicated shores.Rayner gave the Westcoaster "sitting head room for tall men" – rare in yachts so small – while ingeniously camouflaging the reverse sheer needed for such generous accommodation by carrying the decks out to the sides of the boat as he had with Robinetta 20 years earlier.Thus Rayner, developing a concept pioneered in 1922 by a fellow member of the RCC, Arthur Balfour, later Lord Riverdale, and became a key player in the expanding field of affordable chine plywood yachts, brilliantly popularised by Robert Tucker's Mystic, Debutante and Silhouette.Such a vessel could navigate canals and shallow estuaries including short-cuts through swatchways, take the ground safely and 'look after her crew' in hard weather, close to and off shore.Hargreaves' stepson with a companion, Chris Jameson, as her skipper, proved Danica by taking her through France by river and canal and on through the Mediterranean to Athens, returning via the Bay of Biscay where she successfully weathered F10 gale force winds (September 1962), but her construction costs focused Rayner's attention on the emerging technology of glass-reinforced plastic (GRP).From this temporary project he embarked on the factory manufacture of an ideal family sailing boat expanding, in 1963, to larger premises – temperature-and-humidity-controlled – as the firm of Westerly Marine Construction Ltd., at Hambledon Road, Waterlooville near Portsmouth on the Solent, with himself as Chief Designer, having become, in 1964, an Associate of the RINA.When Rayner was overseeing the construction of his brilliant little Westerly 22, he strengthened his friendship with Jack Hargreaves, who, as an enthusiastic populariser of "messing about in boats", filmed Young Tiger – W22 68 – departing the Solent for America.Young Tiger, crewed by Simon Baddeley and Sue Pulford, telegrammed news of her arrival at Bridgetown on 5 January to Rayner at the 1966 London Boat Show with the words "EASY 29 DAYS.The photo of Young Tiger shows many of the qualities Rayner sought for his Westerly 22 – a shipshape 'baggywrinkled' small craft for everyman moored close to palm trees overhanging a shallow Caribbean beach after an uneventful 29-day crossing of the Atlantic Ocean crewed by two student friends.But if these small craft were swiftly made and so affordable, none left Rayner's factory unfit for the sea, of which he wrote "neither cruel nor kind... Any apparent virtues it may have, and all its vices, are seen only in relation to the spirit of man who pits himself, in ships of his own building, against its insensate power.