Obituary: Vice-Admiral Sir John Hayes

IN SEPTEMBER 1939, when the Second World War broke out, John Hayes was the junior Navigating officer (N) in Vindictive, the cadet training cruiser, after three years as a specialist navigator, spent mainly in Fowey, a sloop in the Persian Gulf, and with four years seniority as a Lieutenant.

During the next six years he would survive the sinking of the Repulse, the surrender of Singapore and the disintegration of Convoy PQ 17. He was one of that generation of officers who had lived through the singular rigours of Dartmouth and began to enjoy the relative peace of wardroom life in the old Navy and the last years of peace wherever it took them. They were to start their war as junior officers, and those who survived would find themselves competing for professional survival and promotion when it ended and the Fleet began to contract, just as they were in the zone for a brass hat or a fourth stripe.

Christened John Osler Chattock Hayes, Hayes inevitably became known as Joc, which is how he is remembered in the Navy. He entered via Dartmouth in 1927 and went on to enjoy most of the 39 years he spent on the active list and the 32 more in nominal retirement.

He was born in Bermuda in 1913, to the wife of an Army doctor in the RAMC. Before the Second World War, he had survived life in the gunrooms of the college, of the Royal Oak in the Mediterranean and the stately cruiser Cumberland on the China station, before going as a Sub-Lieutenant to the older light cruiser Danae in his native West Indies.

Vindictive had been demilitarised in 1937, and mobilisation meant a need for regular officers in the ships to come out of reserve. Hayes became N of the old light cruiser Cairo, manned mainly by ratings from the recently formed Humber division of the old RNVR. A navigational near-miss with a channel buoy during the passage of an East Coast coal convoy revealed that he had an eye problem. One consultant pronounced that he should never have been entered; another attributed the incident to strain.

He was discharged to shore early in 1940, but his dismay and uncertainties were resolved by an appointment to the old battle-cruiser Repulse. He had acted as Accountant officer as well as Navigator in Fowey; now he remustered as Signal Officer, and again as only the second N.

Admiral Sir Tom Phillips had been serving in the Admiralty for some time when he found himself sent to sea. He was far from enthusiastic about the doctrine of "naval air" and a strong partisan of the battleship. He took his little squadron, the Prince of Wales, Repulse and four elderly destroyers, without air cover on a fruitless reconnaissance east of the Malayan peninsula which ideally should have been left to land-based aircraft - a grounding had denied him the carrier Indomitable intended for his force.

The result was that, within the hour, the two capital ships were sunk by Japanese aircraft on 10 December 1941. As Captain S.W. Roskill, the Navy's official historian of the Second World War, found, the Admiral's "belief that air cover would meet him off Kuantan, when he had given Singapore no hint that he was proceeding there, demanded too high a degree of insight from the officers at the base".

It was wishful thinking, described as a reluctance to break radio silence. Hayes called it a "lethal mistake". However defined, Churchill later admitted that the Repulse's torpedoing was "the most direct shock" he felt in the war, and despite some brilliant and valiant ship-handling it cost the lives of the Admiral, his Flag Captain, 327 men from the flagship and 513 from the Repulse, which sank within eight minutes, turning over at 20 knots after three torpedoes opened her port side.

Hayes was lucky. Out on the signal deck, he found his movements being "dictated by gravity, like one of those balls on a bagatelle table that bounces off pins . . . the funnel, red hot from steaming, the port flag lockers, normally 50 feet above the waterline, they were almost awash, and so overboard helplessly and down for what seemed a long time. When I bobbed up, the great iron structure of the main top, normally some hundred feet above the waterline, skidded just above my head as the ship plunged on and down with the screws still turning". Hayes's year in Repulse would always remain to him "the centre of gravity of my naval life". Not surprisingly, perhaps.

Rescued by the old destroyer Electra, which did more than yeoman work that day, Hayes returned to Singapore. As naval liaison officer to the 2nd Battalion, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, (who, perhaps partly because of his initials, made him an Honorary "Jock"), he did great work there in assembling "a motley armada" to lift the soldiers off the Malayan mainland.

Their Colonel and Joc were last across the causeway. appropriately piped, albeit in the Caledonian mode. Hayes was evacuated to Batavia in the new destroyer Jupiter, having witnessed with dismay and contempt the breakdown of army discipline, especially among the Australian troops, as they waited to be surrendered. A frustrating passage to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) in a Dutch coaster and an onward passage in a troopship to Liverpool brought him home.

He became SSO (Staff Officer, Operations ) to the newly promoted Rear- Admiral Louis "Turtle" Hamilton, commanding the 1st Cruiser Squadron with his flag in London. In July 1942, when escorting Convoy PQ I7 carrying supplies to Russia, the naval force and its convoy were ordered to scatter by that weary First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, mistakenly apprehensive that the German battle-cruiser Tirpitz was at large in their vicinity.

This decision, "the wisdom of which was doubtful from the start, was thus made disastrous when translated into action", and cost 23 of the 36 merchant ships involved - "the poignancy of the tragedy is only accentuated by our present knowledge of how easily it would have been avoided", according to Roskill in 1956.

At the time, the C-in-C Home Fleet, Admiral Sir John Tovey, considered that "the order to scatter the convoy had been premature; its results were disastrous". Once again Hayes had been fortunate. But in 1968, when David Irving's The Destruction of Convoy PQ 17 was published, his contemporaneous pencilled notes, once flown to his C-in-C by a reliable old Walrus amphibian in order to preserve radio silence, were of material help to Commander J.E. Broome, who had commanded an Escort Group in close support of the convoy and now successfully sued his critic for what Hayes called "vicious fabrication".

Hayes stayed with the Home Fleet until 1944 when he went out to the Mediterranean, on the staff of Admiral Gerard Mansfield. In 1945 he was promoted Commander, and appointed OBE for his work in the liberation of Greece from invasion and from Communism. Promoted to Captain in 1953, he commanded a frigate squadron off South Africa.

Alas, his eyes troubled him again, and he was never to command a large ship. But his merits were recognised. He became one of the principal appointers, for commanders and more junior officers, under the Second Sea Lord and then Naval Secretary to the First Lord, a post which he filled for two years until he was promoted to the Flag List in 1962.

In 1964 he flew his flag as FO Flotillas in the Home Fleet, and then as second-in-command of the Western Fleet. His flag in the already obsolescent cruiser Tiger, he revisited Bermuda once more. He was advanced to Vice Admiral in 1965 and his last appointment was Flag Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland from 1966 to 1968 when he retired. He had been appointed CB in 1964 and was advanced to KCB in 1967.

He then embarked on a long and happy so-called retirement; it is very pleasing to see the longevity of so many sailors who survived particularly trying times on active service. Admiral Sir Frank Twiss attributed the phenomenon in part to the pre-war regimen at Dartmouth.

Hayes worked hard as Chairman of the Scottish Council of King George's Fund for Sailors (1968-78) and of the Cromarty Firth Port Authority (1974- 77). He was a member of the Royal Company of Archers (the Monarch's bodyguard in Scotland) and from 1977 to 1988 Lord-Lieutenant for Ross and Cromarty, Skye and Lochalsh.

He recorded his recreations as walking, music and writing and in 1991 published a valuable autobiography entitled Face the Music. This is well worth reading and makes a fitting and lasting memorial to a long and rewarding life. It is a valuable guide for any rising officer in even a shrinking navy: how to restore discipline and improve morale in an unhappy ship, how to serve two masters - First Lord and First Sea Lord - without losing the respect of either or one's own integrity, and how to make the disappointed make the best of things when determining their destinies; all are evidenced.

John Hayes was a delicately dedicated officer, who could tell a joke against himself, and it was the date of his birth more than anything else which tapered his career.

John Osler Chattock Hayes, naval officer: born 9 May 1913; OBE 1945; CB 1964, KCB 1967; Flag Officer, Flotillas, Home Fleet 1964-66, Scotland and Northern Ireland 1966-68; Lord-Lieutenant of Ross and Cromarty, Skye and Lochalsh 1977-88; married 1939 Rosalind Finlay (two sons, one daughter); died Inverness 7 September 1998.