Captain Spencer Drummond

Kyt · Nov 15, 2007

Skilled navigator who took part in the Norwegian campaign and the invasion of Sicily

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2879035.ece

When Spencer Drummond passed out from Dartmouth in December 1939, he was afraid he might miss the war as it was expected to be “all over by Christmas”. He need not have worried. In the cruiser Glasgow, he took part in the ill-fated Norwegian campaign of 1940, during which Glasgow was attacked frequently from the air and suffered casualties.

By late April the Norwegian Government's seat at Molde had become untenable and Glasgow was ordered to the blazing town to pick up King Haakon of Norway and the Crown Prince and take them north to Tromsø from where they were evacuated to the UK a month later.

In 1941, in the destroyer Hereward, Drummond took part in Admiral Cunningham's victory over the Italian fleet off Cape Matapan, in a spirited night action against an Axis convoy, and the evacuation of Greece. He was then fortunate to be sent to the battleship Valiant, as the evacuation of Crete was in progress and Hereward was sunk on May 29.

Returning home to qualify as a navigator, Drummond navigated the destroyer Belvoir during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and the Salerno landings in September.

His DSC was awarded for his courage and determination during the hard-fought actions in the Aegean that followed the September surrender of Italy. Churchill was keen that Britain should exploit the vacuum created by the collapse of one half of the Axis, by occupying the Dodecanese Islands. But the Germans acted with great speed, seizing Italian-controlled Rhodes with its valuable airfields, and leaving British forces with the lesser pickings of Cos and Leros. On one occasion Belvoir was hit by a bomb from a Stuka, which fortunately failed to explode. Drummond thereafter navigated the destroyer Farndale until the end of the war.

Postwar he was second-in-command of the destroyers Caprice and Cossack in the Far East. While supporting the British legation at Nanking, Drummond recalled a Cossack duck-shooting party on the banks of the Yangtze that was unceremoniously cut short by volleys of Chinese communist rifle fire.

In July 1961 Drummond was commanding the destroyer Cassandra and escorting the carrier Victorious towards Hong Kong, when both ships were ordered to the Gulf to help to forestall an Iraqi threat to the newly independent Kuwait.

Subsequent berths included that as 2 i/c of the cruiser Tiger; a defence fellowship in maritime strategy at the University of Southampton, which gained him an MPhil; deputy chief of operations at Nato southern region HQ; and his his final job, as Deputy Chief of Allied Staff, Nato, at Northwood, Middlesex, retiring in 1975.

For the next ten years Drummond was a schoolteacher. He also helped Chay Blyth to set up his British Steel Challenge race round the world in 1992, and helped the Sail Training Association with his navigational expertise.

His wife, Patricia, died in 1998. He is survived by his second wife, Cecily, whom he married in 2000 and by the two sons and three daughters of the first marriage.

Captain Spencer Drummond, DSC, Deputy Chief of Allied Staff, Nato, 1973-75, was born on June 2, 1922. He died on October 12, 2007, aged 85
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Antipodean Andy · Nov 15, 2007

I really hate this forum. Too many mixed emotions. Amazement at what these guys did and then sorrow that they're gone.

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Captain Spencer Drummond

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