Orders, Decorations and Medals

A Second World War O.B.E., and Great War Submariner’s D.S.M. group of eight awarded to Engineer-Commander F. W. Crabbe, Royal Navy

The Order of the British Empire, O.B.E. (Military) 2nd type; Distinguished Service Medal, G.V.R. (M.1483 E.R.A.3. R.N.); 1914-15 Star Trio (Mte., R.N.); 1939-45 Star; Africa Star; War Medal, the D.S.M. and Great War medals all official replacement issues, not marked as such but impressed in a later style, extremely fine (8) £250-300

O.B.E. London Gazette 11 June 1942.

D.S.M. London Gazette 1 January 1917: ‘The following awards have been approved.’

Frank William Crabbe was born in August 1886 and entered the Royal Navy in January 1910. He was awarded the D.S.M. for services in H.M. Submarine E38, and it is probable that his award stemmed from E38’s encounter with the German Battle Fleet, outside Heligoland Bight, on 19 October 1916. After missing a battle cruiser, E38’s skipper, Lieutenant-Commander J. de B. Jessop, attacked the light cruiser Munchen and hit her abreast the foremost funnel. The torpedo caused extensive damage and flooded the cruiser’s foremost boiler room, but due to the calm weather she got back to port. Jessop received the D.S.O. for this action, announced in the same gazette as Crabbe’s D.S.M. Commissioned as a Mate in May 1917, Crabbe finished the War in the cruiser Blonde, a K-Boat surface leader.

K-Boats, from time to time, assumed their function as fleet submarines and accompanied sections of the Grand Fleet in sweeps along the enemy coastline. These operations were designed to tempt the High Seas Fleet out to fight. The 12th Submarine Flottila accompanied part of the fleet on one such sweep which began on 16 November 1917. The K-Boats saw no action, but at about eight o’clock that night two of them collided off the Dutch coast. The flotilla and its surface leader, Blonde, were changing course at the time when K4 ran down K1, crippling her. Blonde took off the crew and tried to tow the submarine, but worsening weather and seas defeated her. The captain of the flotilla leader decided that he was too close to the enemy coast to await better conditions, so he sank K1 with gunfire.

In March 1919, Crabbe returned to the Submarine Branch in K-Boats and remained employed as a submariner until his retirement in 1926. Rejoining as a Lieutenant-Commander in September 1939, he was posted to St Angelo, for submarines, Malta, on the Staff of Captain S. M. Raw, 1st Submarine Flotilla. In August 1940 he moved to Alexandria as Engineer-Commander on the Submarine Depot Ship Medway, and was aboard her when she was torpedoed by the U-372 off Alexandria on 30 June 1942. Medway went down in less than 20 minutes but of her total complement of some 1100 men, only a handful were lost. It is probable that Crabbe’s original medals were lost on this occasion. Medway’s C.O., Captain Philip Ruck-Keene was awarded the C.B.E., announced in the same gazette as Crabbe’s O.B.E. This sinking appears to have marked the end of his active service, his name being shown on the Retired List thereafter.