I have been on a search to find the full name and hope the history of a man whose letter was slipped into a book he sent to someone.

And someone else donated to our Oxfam bookshop.

But meanwhile, it being a book about an Admiral, I have fallen into more naval history than I ever thought I would want to know – but it turns out I do.

So, if you have missed previous episodes, we are with a biography of Admiral Duncan (famous in his day for beating the Dutch navy in 1797) written by his grandson and therefore not exactly dispassionate.

As you can see, it was given by the Ear of Camperdown (author) to Maria’s grandfather.

Given that only 100 copies were published it is (hopefully) bound to be worth a bit – always welcome.

But it was the letter inside which was, at least to me, as interesting as the book – admirable though the Admiral no doubt was.

So, I wanted to find out who Patrick was, who Maria was, who her grandfather was and the very longest of shots, who Sir John was.

I have had a lot of help with this sleuthing and first thanks go to a very nice man at Savills estate agents in Guernsey. Let’s call him Richard.

Because with no surnames to go on, the address was my starting point. 

And, what do you know, Savills the estate agents, had sold Patrick and Maria’s house in 2019. Well, I am not sure that it looked just like this when they lived in it, and it was sold some 30 years ago – it was a great lead.

I sent them an email and asked if they knew anything about the people who had lived there and, lets call him Richard, came back to me and said he did.

He gave me Patrick’s surname and told me Maria was a fairly renowned local artist.

What a stroke of luck was that?

Maria first:

Here are some of her paintings – the first was painted in 1995 which was the year she died and if I could be doing something as creative as that in my final year, I would be very pleased.

As mentioned before my Best Beloved’s niece is an ace sleuther and she found a reference in a piece about Patrick which mentioned that he had served in the Navy under Maria’s father, Rear-Admiral ‘Burgoo’ Burges Watson.

And her grandfather, recipient of the book, was also Rear-Admiral Burges Watson.

He was a few posh-sounding things in his career; naval aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, and Admiral Superintendent of the Malta Dockyard for example.

So, that is Maria and her grandfather and now for Patrick.

He turns out to have quite a history.

He says in the letter that he was a ‘snottie’ (a junior midshipman) ‘in the flagship during the Invergordon mutiny.’ 1931

The flagship was HMS Hood which was later to become famous for all the wrong reasons.

‘In May 1941, Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales were ordered to intercept the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which were en route to the Atlantic, where they were to attack convoys. On 24 May 1941, early in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Hood was struck by several German shells, exploded, and sank with the loss of all but 3 of her crew of 1,418. Due to her publicly perceived invincibility, the loss affected British morale.’ Wikipedia

Now I am no naval historian – though goodness knows I have spent so much more of my time than I had expected trawling through the stuff –  Patrick was actually serving under his (future) father in law on Nelson.

(Perhaps you can have more than one flagship in a gathering of soon-to-be-mutinous ships?)

Anyway, that makes the link, but Patrick had lots more to tell us.

He had to leave the Navy because of poor eyesight and went to join a trading house in Singapore – as you do.

But when war broke out he came home and joined the Royal Navy Reserve Personnel.

This is what the Imperial War Museum cite under the Special Forces Roll of Honour:

SIS (O.C. African Coastal Flotilla (ACF))

• RANK

Lieutenant

• NUMBER

• AWARD

Distinguished Service Cross,Croix de Guerre (Fr)

• PLACE

Mediterranean 1943-44

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

parent unit Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve

born 5.1.1912 Bolton,Lancashire

educated Dartmouth Naval College

HMS Nelson (Midshipman)

left R.N. as Lt

worked in trading house in Singapore

R.N.V.R. 1939

Assistant Naval Attache,Paris

Directorate of Operations (Irregular)

HMS Fidelity

O.C. African Coastal Flotilla (ACF) 1943-44

Diplomatic Service postwar

retired to Guernsey

married Maria (died 1995) (3 daughters)

author “Corsican Command : A Dramatic First-Hand Account of Clandestine Operations in the Western Mediterranean 1943-44” 1989

died 15.11.2004

But an obituary ( which I am sorry I cannot credit because I have lost the link) adds more dramatic colour to his life.

I have put it in wholesale below.

But before I leave you to read that, I couldn’t find Sir John. It was always going to be a very small needles in the haystack of Sir Johns so I am not so disappointed.

To have found Patrick, Maria and her grandfather has been more than enough. 

Commander Patrick Whinney, who has died aged 92, landed and collected agents from the French and Italian coasts during the Second World War.

Once inside the shipping lanes, he had to navigate with pinpoint accuracy on quietened auxiliary engines towards a rendezvous before rowing ashore in a dinghy; often he would be unsure whether there were passengers to pick up or he was entering a trap.

Though calamity often threatened, no agents were lost in transit. When one important group of Italians, led by a general, were to be collected from a beach near Orbitello, Whinney and his right-hand man, Petty Officer Jim Bates, paddled their dinghies carefully through the surf with Tommy guns cocked; but when he gave the password there was no reply. Bates could see a huddle of men silhouetted up the beach and, fearing that the Italian party was under hostile control, he whispered: “Shall I let ’em have it, sir?” “No, wait,” said Whinney, who repeated the challenge twice more. At last came the response: “Giuseppe”, followed by a question: “English?” When Whinney replied “Yes”, six men flung themselves down the beach and into the dinghies.

As they steamed back to Bastia on Corsica at 40 knots in a USN patrol boat, the general showed Whinney the ancient automatic with which he had been about to shoot him. Their courier had been gone a week, and they suspected a trap themselves. One of the group had thought Whinney sounded German; it was not until the third challenge that the general, whose wife was English, had been convinced that all was well.

Patrick Fife Whinney was born on January 5 1912, the son of an Army officer whose family had the accountancy firm Whinney Smith and Whinney (later part of Ernst and Young). Patrick’s elder brother, Reginald, was awarded the DSC and Bar in destroyers escorting convoys in the North Atlantic.

Patrick Whinney went to Dartmouth in 1925, and as a midshipman served under his future father-in-law, Rear Admiral “Burgoo” Burges Watson, in the battleship Nelson. But poor eyesight forced him to leave the service and join a trading house in Singapore.

On the outbreak of war Whinney immediately returned home and was commissioned in the RNVR. With another young intelligence officer, Steven Mackenzie, he was sent as liaison officer to the French Admiral Darlan’s headquarters outside Paris. At the Fall of France, Whinney escaped in the Canadian destroyer Fraser, and survived when the ship was run down and sunk by the anti-aircraft cruiser Calcutta on the night of June 25 1940.

Back in London, Whinney reported to Ian Fleming, who sent him to the newly-created Directorate of Operations (Irregular), where his early naval training was of great assistance to Captain Frank Slocum, who had neither adequate or trained staff.

On August 3/4 1940 Whinney undertook his first clandestine mission. This was in a commandeered French-built motor dispatch vessel to land agents at Ouistreham, on what would later be famous as Sword Beach. His next mission, to Sein in Brittany, involved escorting Breton fisherman who had taken refuge at Newlyn; Whinney recalled being met off the train in Cornwall by a Russian Grand Duke, also in RNVR uniform.

Early in 1941 Whinney acted as liaison officer on board Le-Rhin, a French cargo vessel being refitted at Barry for special operations; it was no easy task, as the French crew had little knowledge of English or of naval procedures. Despite the opposition of de Gaulle’s Free French in London, the ship was placed under the White Ensign and renamed Fidelity. She sailed from the United Kingdom to land Special Operations Executive agents in southern France and to recover escaped British servicemen. Whinney and Mackenzie were awarded the Croix de Guerre in April 1943.

When Whinney’s loan to SOE was over, he was sent to Gibraltar to organise all irregular naval operations in the Western Mediterranean. After a brief return to London, and a visit to Spain to arrange for the covert purchase of fishing boats to augment his flotilla, he travelled to North Africa to reconnoitre suitable advanced bases and requisition Italian-type local craft for operations to the Italian mainland and islands; his flotilla was known, for cover purposes, as the African Coastal Flotilla.

Whinney spent 1943 at Slocum’s headquarters in London, controlling Mediterranean operations, then was sent to set up an advanced operational base at Bastia, using a mixture of borrowed British, American and Italian craft. Since the same craft were rarely loaned consecutively, Whinney had to train each crew in special operations, while commanding the base and planning and co-ordinating other operations. He personally took charge of the first 18 operations. Shortly afterwards a temporary illness forced him to relinquish his command and return to England where, after sick leave, he was given liaison duties with French special forces, and also awarded the DSC for his gallantry, enthusiasm and devotion to duty in hazardous operations.

After the war Whinney joined the diplomatic service. He spent many years in Athens, and then went into cosmetics business with a wartime colleague. In the 1960s he settled on Guernsey, where he helped his wife to found the Coach House Gallery.

From 1981 he became involved in the Guernsey Cheshire Home. Returning from a committee meeting at which it had been plain that the home faced a six-figure hole in its finances, on a whim Whinney walked into the local television studio where he found Sarah Montague, then a budding journalist, on duty alone. Whinney charmed her into giving him an interview, and held forth so eloquently that, a few days later, an anonymous cheque arrived for the sum required.

Patrick Whinney, who was appointed OBE in 1998, died on November 15, 2004. He married in 1939 Maria Burges Watson, who died in 1995; they are survived by three daughters.