Capt Charles Coke

Fleet Air Arm officer and cosmopolite

Charles Playfair Coke, naval officer and aviator: born Ashford, Kent 17 July 1909; DSO 1942; married 1939 Denise Heywood (died 1982); died Gaucín, Spain 6 February 2003.

Charles Coke was a wartime observer in the Fleet Air Arm and captain of one of the Royal Navy's most formidable aircraft carriers. As a prototype of today's "techies", he was also a pioneer of aerial- defence tactics and fighter direction. Yet, as an inveterate world traveller and cosmopolite, he drew a clear line between principles and issues of national interest, and, as a career officer, made history by retiring early to avoid becoming an admiral.

Coke hated his time at the Royal Naval Colllege, Dartmouth, and life as a lieutenant in the Persian Gulf in the 1930s. He therefore took up flying in the Fleet Air Arm. In the Second World War he served on Britain's most famous aircraft carrier, Ark Royal. Later, on the Victorious, he participated in Operation Pedestal, which was charged with relieving Malta, then under siege by Axis forces.

Everyone agreed when Churchill declared that the British were "absolutely bound to save Malta". Possession of the island was not just a concomitant of the North African campaigns against Rommel. It was also a matter of honour. Twenty supply ships had already been sunk by enemy bombs and torpedoes. Now, in August 1942, this new operation was committing 14 more to the relief of the island in its hour of desperate need. As they edged through the Mediterranean, Pedestal's immense convoy of battleships, cruisers and destroyers struggled to protect them from ferocious assaults. Meanwhile, in the sky, Coke and his Fleet Air Arm colleagues, under constant fire, sent vital directional instructions to the ships below during countless heroic sorties mounted from the carrier's precarious flight-decks.

Though only five supply ships arrived intact, they provided 32,000 tons of food and essential goods – enough to keep Malta going on iron rations for two more months. It was for his role in these events that Coke was awarded the DSO.

In 1951, Coke became Naval Attaché in Washington, DC, where, to this day, Admiral Sir John Treacher remembers when Coke rolled up in Norfolk in an open-top Cadillac and swept him off to Virginia Beach to introduce him, then only a young lieutenant, to the finest soft-shelled crabs in America. Having leapt up the career ladder with phenomenal speed, Coke impressed many others by the quality of his table on board the modernised Victorious, where, as Captain, he entertained guests lavishly in the Admiral's quarters.

It was while commanding this vast nuclear-armed carrier in 1957 that Coke assembled his 2,000 officers and men on the flight deck and, as they passed Trafalgar, delivered a brilliant sailors' talk on the great naval battle fought by Lord Nelson against the Franco-Spanish fleet on those same waters more than 150 years earlier.

One of Coke's lifelong interests was technical innovation. His more entertaining wartime experiments involved men riding around the flight deck on tricycles. Pretending to be pilots, they directed their make-believe planes from behind screens that forced them to navigate with compasses, metronomes and commands issued by a radio controller. Similar experiments conducted in England are displayed in the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Somerset.

Coke was appointed an ADC to the Queen before taking early retirement in 1960 in order to satisfy his passion for painting and to undertake yet more extensive travels than had been possible in the Navy. With his beautiful wife, Denise Heywood, he lived on his yacht, the Pleiades, before transferring to his personally designed "land yacht" – a lorry perfectly crafted in solid oak and containing a library of rare books. It was in this luxurious vehicle that he and his wife spent 10 years exploring at least 18 countries before settling in France.

After his wife's death in 1982, Coke moved to Spain and lived in a caravan. He now became increasingly solitary and involved not only in his painting but also in the music of J.S. Bach and the study of Christianity – a religion that he never embraced. To the end he remained alert, fastidious and familiar with all the latest developments in digital recording and computer technology.

Alan Rush