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Denys Rayner
Denys Arthur Rayner DSC & Bar, VRD, RNVR (9 February 1908 – 4 January 1967) was a Royal Navy officer who fought throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. After intensive war service at sea, Rayner became a writer, a farmer, and a successful designer and builder of small sailing craft – his first being the Westcoaster; his most successful being the glass fibre gunter or Bermudian rigged twin keel Westerly 22 from which evolved similar "small ships" able to cross oceans while respecting the expectations, in terms of comfort, safety and cost, of a burgeoning family market keen to get to sea. Before his death in 1967, Rayner had founded, and via his pioneering GRP designs, secured the future expansion of Westerly Marine Construction Ltd – up until the late 1980s, one of Britain's most successful yacht builders.
Denys Rayner was born in Muswell Hill in a Georgian house, on the outskirts of London, to Francis (née Parker) and Arthur Rayner, a master electrical engineer, who became a commodity broker moving with his family to West Kirby on the Wirral Peninsula and sending his son to Repton School between 1921 and 1924. Flat feet kept Denys from entering the Royal Navy but not from pursuing a successful naval career. In October 1925, he joined HMS Eaglet, Mersey Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a part-time midshipman with time to pursue his interest in exploring the rocky coast of the Western Highlands in a small boat of his own design.
As an eight-year-old prep school boy, at the height of the First World War, Rayner was disappointed to be beaten for drawing an "infernal" U-boat sinking device in a school geometry book. "Diagrammatically portrayed, this spoiled the page – I can see that now" wrote the adult Rayner in the preface of his book Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic (1955). At school Rayner, impressed that an uncle by marriage was an officer on "a real destroyer", sketched a "continuous border of destroyers" in the margins of his school books. In later school years came "an endless stream of model destroyers...which really floated and were fitted with systems of propulsion..."
"I had already packed my bags, set my affairs in order and seen to the laying up of my yacht" wrote Rayner of his actions four days before the outbreak of World War II. By 1939, partly as a result of a recognition by others of his gift for leadership and partly by insisting on specialising in navigation rather than gunnery, against standard advice to RNVR officers wishing advancement in the Royal Navy, Rayner qualified himself to command 14th Anti-Submarine Group comprising HMTs Loch Tulla, Istria, Regal, Brontes and Davey, a unit of armed trawlers patrolling the notoriously dangerous waters surrounding the main fleet base of Scapa Flow – a 6 by 20 mile stretch of sea between Scotland and the Orkney Islands where a high spring tide can flow 8 knots against a westerly gale. His 'flag' was aboard HMT Loch Tulla for whom Rayner selected skipper Lang – a Devon trawlerman he describes as knowing things "about the way of a ship which no one not trained in sail could have understood".
In September 1940 Rayner, was appointed to command a corvette, HMS Violet, but finding her incomplete, and another, HMS Verbena, ready but without a commander, used all his skills of persuasion to get the command himself. Verbena, was the first long fo'c'sle Flower-class corvette and was, in Rayner's eyes, "quite perfect".
On Verbena, the nickname 'Ben', which stayed with him for the rest of his life, was used as Rayner's call sign. Verbena embarked on convoy duties between different escort groups before being assigned to B-12 group, under Commander C D Howard-Johnston of Malcolm. During the winter of 1940-41 and throughout the summer Verbena operated with the group in the North Atlantic, before a refit in August 1941.
Following this Verbena was sent south to Freetown, then Cape Town, for operations in the South Atlantic, before being dispatched to the Far East. After the Japanese invasion of Malaya, and the fall of Singapore, Verbena was based at Colombo; in May 1942 while heading for Karachi her boilers gave out as a result of constant high-speed work and lack of cleaning and she had to be towed the last few hundred yards to a berth in Bombay for refit. After some months in India, where he made a number of horseback treks, Rayner and his crew came home.
Just after Christmas 1942, he was given the lead of an escort group, in command of the destroyer HMS Shikari, becoming one of the first RNVR officers in the Royal Navy (along with Commander E N Wood of HMS Atherstone a year earlier) to be so promoted. Rayner returned to familiar ground, with his group operating in the North Atlantic on convoy escort duty. In June 1943 he was to lead Operation Rosegarden, an attempt to hunt and kill U-boats as they crossed the Denmark Straits, but this was ultimately unsuccessful.
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Denys Rayner
Denys Arthur Rayner DSC & Bar, VRD, RNVR (9 February 1908 – 4 January 1967) was a Royal Navy officer who fought throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. After intensive war service at sea, Rayner became a writer, a farmer, and a successful designer and builder of small sailing craft – his first being the Westcoaster; his most successful being the glass fibre gunter or Bermudian rigged twin keel Westerly 22 from which evolved similar "small ships" able to cross oceans while respecting the expectations, in terms of comfort, safety and cost, of a burgeoning family market keen to get to sea. Before his death in 1967, Rayner had founded, and via his pioneering GRP designs, secured the future expansion of Westerly Marine Construction Ltd – up until the late 1980s, one of Britain's most successful yacht builders.
Denys Rayner was born in Muswell Hill in a Georgian house, on the outskirts of London, to Francis (née Parker) and Arthur Rayner, a master electrical engineer, who became a commodity broker moving with his family to West Kirby on the Wirral Peninsula and sending his son to Repton School between 1921 and 1924. Flat feet kept Denys from entering the Royal Navy but not from pursuing a successful naval career. In October 1925, he joined HMS Eaglet, Mersey Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a part-time midshipman with time to pursue his interest in exploring the rocky coast of the Western Highlands in a small boat of his own design.
As an eight-year-old prep school boy, at the height of the First World War, Rayner was disappointed to be beaten for drawing an "infernal" U-boat sinking device in a school geometry book. "Diagrammatically portrayed, this spoiled the page – I can see that now" wrote the adult Rayner in the preface of his book Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic (1955). At school Rayner, impressed that an uncle by marriage was an officer on "a real destroyer", sketched a "continuous border of destroyers" in the margins of his school books. In later school years came "an endless stream of model destroyers...which really floated and were fitted with systems of propulsion..."
"I had already packed my bags, set my affairs in order and seen to the laying up of my yacht" wrote Rayner of his actions four days before the outbreak of World War II. By 1939, partly as a result of a recognition by others of his gift for leadership and partly by insisting on specialising in navigation rather than gunnery, against standard advice to RNVR officers wishing advancement in the Royal Navy, Rayner qualified himself to command 14th Anti-Submarine Group comprising HMTs Loch Tulla, Istria, Regal, Brontes and Davey, a unit of armed trawlers patrolling the notoriously dangerous waters surrounding the main fleet base of Scapa Flow – a 6 by 20 mile stretch of sea between Scotland and the Orkney Islands where a high spring tide can flow 8 knots against a westerly gale. His 'flag' was aboard HMT Loch Tulla for whom Rayner selected skipper Lang – a Devon trawlerman he describes as knowing things "about the way of a ship which no one not trained in sail could have understood".
In September 1940 Rayner, was appointed to command a corvette, HMS Violet, but finding her incomplete, and another, HMS Verbena, ready but without a commander, used all his skills of persuasion to get the command himself. Verbena, was the first long fo'c'sle Flower-class corvette and was, in Rayner's eyes, "quite perfect".
On Verbena, the nickname 'Ben', which stayed with him for the rest of his life, was used as Rayner's call sign. Verbena embarked on convoy duties between different escort groups before being assigned to B-12 group, under Commander C D Howard-Johnston of Malcolm. During the winter of 1940-41 and throughout the summer Verbena operated with the group in the North Atlantic, before a refit in August 1941.
Following this Verbena was sent south to Freetown, then Cape Town, for operations in the South Atlantic, before being dispatched to the Far East. After the Japanese invasion of Malaya, and the fall of Singapore, Verbena was based at Colombo; in May 1942 while heading for Karachi her boilers gave out as a result of constant high-speed work and lack of cleaning and she had to be towed the last few hundred yards to a berth in Bombay for refit. After some months in India, where he made a number of horseback treks, Rayner and his crew came home.
Just after Christmas 1942, he was given the lead of an escort group, in command of the destroyer HMS Shikari, becoming one of the first RNVR officers in the Royal Navy (along with Commander E N Wood of HMS Atherstone a year earlier) to be so promoted. Rayner returned to familiar ground, with his group operating in the North Atlantic on convoy escort duty. In June 1943 he was to lead Operation Rosegarden, an attempt to hunt and kill U-boats as they crossed the Denmark Straits, but this was ultimately unsuccessful.