Lt-Cdr Hugh Knollys; Haguro sinker & marine artist
Hyfler/Rosner
May 16, 2006 Tuesday
Obituary of Lt-Cdr Hugh Knollys Naval officer who helped to
sink the Japanese cruiser Haguro and later became a marine
artist
http://www.maritimeprints.com/portfolio.asp?mp=70
LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER HUGH KNOLLYS, who has died aged 87,
played a major role in the last British destroyer action of
the Second World War, and later became a marine artist.
Sixty-one years ago, on the night of May 15/16 1945, Knollys
was flotilla navigation officer to Captain Manley Power,
leader of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla. He was on watch in
the cramped, fetid action information room of the destroyer
Saumarez when the radar echo of the Japanese cruiser Haguro
was detected in the Malacca Straits at the exceptional range
of 34 miles.
Knollys noticed how the tracks of Power's destroyers on the
chart seemed like a net as they closed to within short
range, and thought how uncanny it was to be chasing "this
silent monster around his own backyard without once being
bitten''.
A rating noted the exceptional calmness of Power and
Knollys - they were "regular RN officers who preserved a
professional curiosity to see whether their theories worked
in practice. Terribly British and very brave, pretending to
be unemotional, calm and faintly bored.''
In the subsequent close-range, high-speed melee Saumarez was
struck by Haguro's 8-inch guns several times, one shell
hitting amidships and raising a volcano of flames, smoke and
steam. Since Saumarez slowed down, Knollys thought that the
after part of the ship had been blown off. But as he
prepared to con the ship by emergency steering, Power
persisted in the attack until he could fire torpedoes. While
taking avoiding action, Haguro placed herself in an ideal
position for the flotilla's other destroyers to open fire.
The Japanese cruiser sank shortly before 2 am.
Knollys later told the Times of Ceylon that the ship's
mascots, Minnie the cat and an Alsatian pup called Punch,
were in the information centre throughout the action. "They
were both quite unperturbed by the noise,'' he recalled.
"Minnie was even marking the positions on the chart with her
paw regularly every four minutes.''
Knollys was mentioned in dispatches.
Courtenay Hugh Henry Knollys was a descendant of Sir Robert
Knollys, who is remembered every year in the City of London
when the Company of Watermen and Lightermen hold the Knollys
Rose Ceremony around Midsummer's Day. Hugh was born on
December 14 1918, and educated at Dartmouth. After the cadet
training cruiser Frobisher, he served in the battleship
Rodney during the Spanish Civil War and in the cruiser
Suffolk and the destroyer Witherington on the China Station.
Knollys spent the first three years of the war in the
battleship Ramillies, and was alongside Midshipman Prince
Philip of Greece when she chased the Italian fleet at battle
of Cape Spartivento. Knollys was also in her when she hunted
the German battleship Bismarck and then took part in the
capture of Madagascar, where he was appointed liaison
officer to the French forces in 1943. After Ramillies was
torpedoed by a Japanese midget submarine and had limped to
Durban for repairs, he returned to England to specialise in
navigation.
From September 1943 to June 1944 Knollys was navigator of
the fleet minesweeper Harrier, first on Russian convoy
escort duties and then at the D-Day landings. He was awarded
the DSC for navigating the minesweeping flotilla to the
beaches, but he regarded this as an award for efficiency,
whereas his contribution to the sinking of Haguro was worthy
of a higher award. Power, however, told him that as he had
one DSC he would not recommend him for another.
After the war, Knollys was still in Saumarez when she ran on
to a newly-laid Albanian mine in the Corfu Channel in
October 1946. He was mentioned in dispatches for helping to
save the badly damaged ship while injured; his injuries were
reported to his wife by Admiralty telegram as "braised
kidneys''.
Knollys's other postwar appointments included the aircraft
carrier Vengeance, the cruiser Superb and the Royal Yacht
Britannia. He went on a French interpreter's course before
becoming flag lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief,
Portsmouth.
On leaving the Navy Knollys worked for 11 years as a
designer and salesman for the Chichester Press. He then
became a freelance artist, sketching children's portraits on
the beach, and specialising in marine art. In his busiest
years he drew some 1,500 portraits of children, and his
accurately detailed pictures of warships appeared on 70,000
Christmas cards.
Knollys was self-taught, but from boyhood at Dartmouth he
illustrated his logs with watercolours; his first exhibition
was on Malta in the late 1940s. Later he merited an entry in
Denys Brook-Hart's Twentieth Century British Marine
Painting, and some of his work was hung at exhibitions of
the Armed Forces Art Society and the Society of Marine
Artists. Sadly, his old age was marred by a court appearance
for taking photographs of a young girl; he was given a
conditional discharge, but a misguided attempt to make
amends by offering to raise funds for the Children's Society
was very publicly rejected.
Knollys enjoyed amateur dramatics and once played King Cole
in a production of The Sleeping Beauty, starring his
neighbour's daughter, the teenage Amanda Holden. He trekked
Nepal when he was aged 70, and abseiled down the tower of St
Peter's at Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire, at 80.
Hugh Knollys, who died on April 22, married Cicely "Curly''
Evelyn Warren in 1943. She died in 1982, and he is survived
by a son and a daughter.