Norman Warden Owen DSM RIP

Kyt · Sep 11, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4734570.ece

As ship’s carpenter of the Blue Funnel Line’s SS Deucalion in the Mediterranean in the summer of 1942, Norman Warden Owen was decorated for the part he played in helping to get the stricken tanker Ohio and her precious cargo of fuel oil, paraffin and aviation spirit through to Malta in one of the war’s most celebrated convoy actions. The arrival of the Ohio in Grand Harbour on the night of August 15, intact though in a sinking condition, saved the day for Malta, which was running short of fuel of all sorts. It enabled the island fortress’s aircraft and warships to strike back at Axis forces that had seemed to be winning the battle for domination of the Mediterranean and the struggle to supply Axis forces in North Africa.

Only a few days beforehand, from the deck of Deucalion, a shaken Warden Owen had witnessed the violent death throes of the aircraft carrier Eagle, which at noon on August 11 was hit by four torpedoes and sank within six minutes, though fortunately 900 of her company of 1,150 were rescued. Barely 24 hours later, Deucalion was to share a like fate. She was attacked first by Italian aircraft in the morning of August 12, and succumbed later the same day to the bombs of two Ju88s.

Picked out of the water by the destroyer Bramham, Owen volunteered to join magazine parties handling ammunition up to the destroyer’s guns. It was a terrifying experience, as he later admitted, with the warship under constant air attack and in the knowledge that if the ship was set on fire or holed below the waterline the magazines would be closed down and flooded with the ammunition parties inside them.

All effort was now concentrated on — from the Axis side to destroy, on the Allied side to succour — the American-built but British-crewed tanker Ohio, the very heart of the convoy’s raison d’être with its 11,000 tons of fuel. Only three merchant ships of the convoy’s original 14 were to reach Malta but every nerve was strained to make sure that Ohio was one of them.

So weakened was the tanker that she was in constant danger of breaking in two. So two destroyers came alongside on her port and starboard sides, acting as “splints” while she was towed and supported from fore and aft. When volunteers were called for to go aboard to try to stanch the flow of water into her hull, Owen was grateful, as he thought, to escape from the hell of his magazine duties aboard the destroyer. But as soon as he and other volunteers had come aboard her, another bomb struck, penetrating the engine room and starting a fire, which threatened her high-octane cargo. A further attack by a Ju87 Stuka wrecked her steering gear.

As a trained “chippy”, Owen had to stem the rush of seawater into the tanker through a gaping rent in her hull and was also responsible for making sure that the steel wire ropes lashing her to the destroyers did not part. The towing hawsers also had to be kept under constant surveillance.

Finally, after a painful progress, Ohio was brought safely to harbour, her main deck awash, and her precious cargo was pumped ashore. Warden Owen and six of his shipwright colleagues were each awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for the part they had played in keeping her afloat under enemy attack.

Norman Warden Owen was born in Holyhead, Anglesey, in 1917, the son of a caterer in mail ships on the Holyhead-Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) route. After an apprenticeship at the Holyhead marine yard he went as a shipwright to Cammell Laird in Birkenhead from where he went to sea as a carpenter in general cargo ships.

He was serving in the freighter El Argentino in South American waters when the Second World War broke out, and in December 1939 entered Montevideo harbour shortly after the pocket battleship Graf Spee had been scuttled there after the Battle of the River Plate and saw her superstructure protruding above the waves.

After his Ohio experience he remained in the Merchant Navy until the end of the war, and afterwards worked for the Blue Funnel Line in Birkenhead. In the 1950s he went back to Holyhead to work on an RNLI project to build a slipway and lifeboat station. Training as a diver, he was subsequently employed by British Railways as its maintenance diver at Holyhead.

As such he nearly lost his life during the demolition of a pier. A 100-ton crane was being used to extract its remaining piles from the seabed but this was proving difficult. Owen repeatedly descended beneath the surface of the water in his diving suit to cut a notch in each pile with an axe, and then attach a wire hawser to it. One of these suddenly snagged and when Owen went down yet again to the seabed to try to unsnag it, two fingers of his right hand were trapped against the pile by the tightening steel wire. Although the crane stopped exerting pressure as soon as this was realised, the wire continued to clamp his fingers to the pile. With oxygen running short and no chance of cutting or releasing the wire Warden Owen pulled out his sheath knife with his left hand and cut through the trapped fingers to release himself. Then he collected his remaining tools and slowly surfaced, accompanied by a rising cloud of his own blood.

For this he was awarded the Daily Herald’s Order of Industrial Heroism. This decoration, instituted by the socialist newspaper in 1923, was known as the “Workers’ VC”. Of the 440 awards made before the paper’s demise in 1964, many were posthumous.

This accident put paid to his diving career, and he continued thereafter to work as a handyman. He was also a keen weekend sailor for the Holyhead and Trearddur Bay sailing clubs and continued to race well into his eighties. He is survived by his wife Gwladys, and by a daughter and two sons, one of whom is a master mariner, the other an Olympic yachtsman.

Norman Warden Owen, DSM, shipwright and diver, was born on May 17, 1917. He died on August 16, 2008, aged 91
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