Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

The important ‘Royal Yacht’ M.V.O., Great War ‘Coastal Motor Boats’ D.S.C. and Second War Posthumous M.I.D. group of thirteen awarded to Captain R. F. J. Onslow, Royal Navy, who gained his posthumous mention for gallant services as Captain of the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Hermes when she was bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft in April 1942

The Royal Victorian Order, M.V.O., Member’s 4th Class breast badge, silver-gilt, gold and enamels, the reverse officially numbered ‘1389’; Distinguished Service Cross, G.V.R., hallmarked London 1918; 1914-15 Star (S. Lt. R. F. J. Onslow, R.N.); British War and Victory Medals (Lieut. R. F. J. Onslow. R.N.); Naval General Service 1915-62, 1 clasp, Iraq 1919-1920 (Lieut. R. F. J. Onslow. R.N.); Coronation 1937; Russia, Order of St Stanislaus, breast badge with swords, silver-gilt and enamels, of continental manufacture, badly chipped, these last eight mounted as worn; together with 1939-45 Star, Atlantic Star; Africa Star; Burma Star, War Medal, with M.I.D. oak leaf, in their damaged card box of issue addressed to his widow, good very fine or better, the N.G.S. rare (13) £6,000-£8,000

M.V.O. 4th Class London Gazette 1 January 1938: Commander of H.M. Yacht Victoria and Albert (dated 29 July 1937).

D.S.C. London Gazette 20 September 1918:
‘For services in the Auxiliary Patrol, Minesweeping and Coastal Motor Boats, between the 1st January and 30th June, 1918.’

The recommendation states: ‘For consistent good service in C.M.B.s on the Belgian Coast over a period of months. He was in command of a C.M.B. in the operation on the 4 February, 1918, when mines were laid in the Ostend approaches, which subsequently sank enemy Torpedo Boat A10.’

Russian Order of St Stanislaus: C.W. 10241 of 1920. ‘Granted permission to accept and wear ribbon of the Russian Order of St Stanislaus 3rd Class with swords.’

M.I.D. (Posthumous) London Gazette 10 November 1942:
‘For great bravery when H.M.S. Hermes was sunk by Japanese aircraft.’

The life and loss of the Hermes

On 9 April 1942 H.M.S. Hermes, the Royal Navy’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier, was steaming north up the east coast of Ceylon returning to Trincomalee in company with the Australian destroyer H.M.A.S. Vampire when the two ships were spotted by a reconnaissance aircraft from the Japanese ship Haruna. Within an hour Admiral Nagumo launched a force of some 85 dive bombers against Hermes and Vampire which at the time were without any air cover; 15 minutes after the attack started both ships had been hit many times and sank. A total of 306 (307 according to some sources) officers, ratings and Royal Marines of Hermes’s crew of some 600 lost their lives, including the ship’s commander, Captain R. F. J. Onslow, M.V.O., D.S.C., though the ship went down less than five miles off the coast.

Hermes was the ninth ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name. She was built by Armstrong-Whitworth on Tyneside and was launched in September 1919, nine months after she was laid down. She completed her trials in 1923. Hermes was a small ship by modern standards, with a normal displacement of 10,950 tons (12,900 fully loaded) and a length of just under 600 feet. Her speed was 25 knots and she was built to carry 15 to 20 aircraft. Her complement was 551 to 664 excluding aircrew and her armament six 5.5-inch guns, four 4-inch guns and nine 2-pdr anti-aircraft guns.

Hermes spent most of the period from 1925-35 on the China Station, based at Hong Kong. She returned to home waters in 1933 for a long refit at Devonport and on 1 November 1934, she was re-commissioned for service again on the China Station. She was placed in the Reserve Fleet at Devonport in 1937 and later was used as a training ship for the Fleet Air Arm in 1938-39.

When war was declared in September 1939 Hermes was immediately put into service on Atlantic patrols searching for U-boats. She was also involved, together with ships of the French fleet, in searching for the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. In late October Hermes and her accompanying French destroyers captured the German supply ship Santa Fe which her crew attempted to scuttle by opening the sea cocks before taking to their boats. Hermes returned to port at Dakar, Senegal, with her prize following at reduced speed. After a refit at Plymouth in early 1940 Hermes returned to the Dakar station and was for a period transferred from there to the east coast of Africa where she captured several Italian ships, including the Leonardo Da Vinci, which were leaving the port of Mogadishu with valuables. Captain Richard Onslow took over the command of Hermes from Captain Fitzroy E. P. Hutton on 25 May 1940.

When France fell in June 1940 the governor of Senegal declared that the colony was pro the French Vichy government and Hermes was ordered to leave Dakar at only a few hours’ notice and take up a position to blockade the port since former allies were now regarded as enemies. The French battleship Richelieu, one of the most modern and powerful warships in the world, had sailed into Dakar a few days earlier and there was some on-board speculation that she might follow and try to sink Hermes.

Captain Onslow was appointed acting rear admiral for the period 7 to 11 July 1940, making Hermes the temporary flagship of the small British squadron now on patrol off Dakar. On 3 July a British fleet had carried out a pre-emptive attack on units of the French navy at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria, and four days later Hermes issued an ultimatum to the French admiral at Dakar. When no reply was received by the specified deadline, a plan to attack Richelieu inside Dakar harbour with depth charges was put into action.

Shortly before midnight Hermes’s 25-foot motor boat, which had been painted black, loaded with four depth charges and manned by a volunteer crew of ten men, slipped away from Hermes, passed over the harbour boom and with some difficulty in the dark found their target. The depth charges were dropped under Richelieu’s stern where, despite being triggered, they failed to explode. The motor boat, pursued by a French vessel which became caught up in the boom nets, eventually returned safely to Hermes. Shortly before dawn on 8 July six Swordfish aircraft from Hermes launched an attack and one of their torpedoes is thought to have detonated the depth charges, making a 60ft hole in Richelieu that resulted in some flooding and caused her stern to sink to the bottom; she was pumped out after a few days and made seaworthy for emergency service. In the London Gazette of 6 September 1940 the following awards for ‘bravery and skill in operations off Dakar’ were announced to men who crewed the motor boat:
Distinguished Service Order to Lieutenant Commander Robert H. Bristowe;
Distinguished Service Cross to Commissioned Gunner Frederick W. Grant;
Distinguished Service Medals to E.R.A. 2nd Class Cyril Ford and Acting Leading Seaman Patrick J. Kearns;
Mentions in Despatches to leading Telegraphist Ronald E. Tuffnell, Able Seaman Albert Cookson and Able Seaman John Quinn.

Two days after the attack on the Richelieu, in the early hours of the morning during a tropical storm, Hermes inadvertently crossed the path of a convoy and collided almost head on with the armed merchant cruiser Corfu, sustaining extensive damage to her bows but fortunately mostly above the waterline. Temporary repairs were carried out at Freetown in Sierra Leone, West Africa and she was then able to proceed to Simonstown for a new bow to be fabricated and welded in place.

After three months of repairs and refitting in South Africa, Hermes continued her patrols in the South Atlantic searching for German commerce raiders, including the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer which was not located. In 1941 she was transferred to the Indian Ocean to look for Vichy French blockade runners in and out of Madagascar and in February helped to blockade the port of Kismayu in Italian Somaliland. From April until mid-June Hermes was deployed to the Persian Gulf to support British operations in Basra following pro-German unrest in Iraq, a task which the 20-year-old ship’s crew found very uncomfortable in the heat of the Gulf. Later in the year she escorted the battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse from Mombasa to the Seychelles, en route to join Force ‘Z’ at Singapore, but engine problems forced Hermes to return to South Africa for repairs and a refit.

On completion of her refit Hermes was assigned to the Eastern Fleet when it was formed at Ceylon and on 19 February 1942, she received the Swordfish of 814 Squadron and rendezvoused with the destroyer H.M.A.S. Vampire to carry out an anti-submarine patrol. In mid-March the two ships were assigned to Force ‘B’ of the Eastern Fleet based at Trincomalee, part of the defences of Ceylon against Japanese Admiral Nagumo’s carrier fleet. Intelligence had indicated that the Japanese would attack Ceylon on 1 April, but when no attack materialised, Admiral Somerville withdrew his fleet to Addu Atoll, in the Maldive Islands, to refuel and sent Hermes and Vampire to Trincomalee to prepare for the planned Allied invasion of Madagascar. The aircraft of 814 Squadron were disembarked.

Two days later the Japanese fleet was sighted steaming towards Ceylon, but by then the British fleet was too far away to intercept it. On 5 April the Japanese attacked Colombo using their carrier-based fighter bombers; 19 of the 42 aircraft defending Colombo were shot down by the escorting Japanese fighters. Hermes and Vampire were ordered on 8 April to leave Trincomalee for safety and sail south down the coast, Hermes now without her aircraft.

The expected attack on Trincomalee by more than 100 aircraft from Nagumo’s fleet began at 7am on 9 April and resulted in extensive damage to the airfield and dockyard. Aircraft were destroyed on the ground and 11 of the 23 defending fighters were shot down. At 8.55am a reconnaissance aeroplane from Haruna sighted Hermes and Vampire and reported their position to the Japanese fleet. The signal was intercepted at Colombo and the two ships were ordered to reverse course and return to Trincomalee from where air cover could be provided. At 9.45am Admiral Nagumo launched his force of 85 dive bombers which found their targets off Batticaloa and sank both in short order. Some 40 bombs hit Hermes in the space of ten minutes. The guns of the ships managed to shoot down four enemy aircraft between them, but the token force of British fighters arrived on the scene too late. The hospital ship Vita which was fortuitously in the vicinity picked up most of the survivors. One survivor who was on the bridge with Captain Onslow after the ‘abandon ship’ command had been broadcast recalls offering him a lifebelt which was refused and then saw him go down the ladder towards his cabin; the captain was not seen again.

The London Gazette of 10 November 1942 carried the announcement of Mentions in Despatches (Posthumous) ‘for great bravery when H.M.S. Hermes was sunk by Japanese aircraft’ to Captain Onslow and Able Seaman George Page.

In August 1982, forty years after the loss of Hermes, a team of divers, guided by local fishermen and assisted by the gunboat Balawatha of the Sri Lankan Navy, located and positively identified the wreck of the carrier. The Admiralty chart current at the time showed the ship to be resting about nine miles offshore in some 60 fathoms of water, just on the edge of the continental shelf of the east coast of Sri Lanka. As a result of the dive the correct position was found to be 4.24 miles from the coastline and about 5 miles away from the charted position at a depth to the sea bottom of 180 feet (30 fathoms). The ship rolled over on to her port side as she sank and the wreck is now lying upturned with the flight deck almost horizontal, the slightly higher side being held up by the remains of the starboard side superstructure.

Richard Francis John Onslow was born on 29 March 1896, at Woolston, Hampshire, the eldest son of the Rev. M. R. S. Onslow, M.A., Royal Navy chaplain and his wife Fanny Harriet Onslow (née Graham). He joined the navy’s training establishment on 15 January 1909, a couple of months before his thirteenth birthday, first at the Royal Naval College at Osborne and afterwards at Dartmouth.

On 15 September 1913 he was appointed midshipman and posted to the brand new battle cruiser H.M.S. Queen Mary within two weeks of her being commissioned. The Queen Mary was attached to the 1st Battle Cruiser Squadron under Rear Admiral David Beatty; in June 1914 the squadron paid a visit to Russia. Promoted to acting sub lieutenant on 15 September 1915, Onslow next saw service in the destroyer Zulu attached to the Dover Patrol for the first two years of the First World War until a mine removed her stern in October 1916.

A posting to the submarine depot ship H.M.S. Thames, based at Sheerness, for ‘special service’ in April 1916 was followed by his next step to sub lieutenant on 15 May and four months later he was appointed to command Coastal Motor Boat (CMB) No 12. He was promoted acting lieutenant on 15 September 1917, and lieutenant two months later and continued in command of coastal motor boats until the end of the war, receiving generally excellent reports on his ability and potential from his superior officers.

A Court of Enquiry in April 1918 into an accident involving CMB 31B in the River Thames that resulted in the death by drowning of two men concluded that blame was attributable to Lieutenant Onslow in that ‘he did not get a clear understanding with C.O. as to who was in command of the CMB and in that he cornered at so high a rate of speed in narrow waters, where traffic was to be expected.’ He was cautioned to be more careful in future. This setback did not, however, stand in the way of his being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for services in CMBs with the Auxiliary Patrol at Dover.

On 28 January 1919, he was posted to H.M.S. Theseus, at that time the depot ship for the Caspian and Black Sea, for command of CMBs. In November 1918 the anti-Bolshevik authorities in Azerbaijan made it known that they would welcome the return of British forces which had been withdrawn two months earlier and the Royal Navy’s Caspian Naval Force under Commodore Norris returned to Baku to assist and train local forces in support of the White Russians and to deter the Bolsheviks from moving south down the Caspian. In March 1919 the Centro-Caspian Flotilla, nominally under the White Russian commander-in-chief, was forcibly disbanded and its gunboats immobilised and disarmed when it was found to be in contact with the Bolsheviks.

Some of the armed merchant ships were incorporated into the Royal Navy flotilla which continued to grow until the middle of the year when it peaked at 47 RN officers and more than 1,000 ratings. It had 12 CMBs, brought by rail for use in the shallow water of the north Caspian. The flotilla did a lot of patrolling and carried out some successful attacks on Bolshevik naval forces in May. After the Paris Peace Conference responsibility for the area was transferred to the White Russians, the flotilla’s ships were handed over in stages and, on 2 September 1919, the Royal Navy’s Caspian flotilla ceased to exist. Lieutenant Onslow’s service record is annotated ‘sent home’ in September 1919 from H.M.S. Caesar, which the previous month had become the depot ship in the Black Sea for British naval forces operating against the Bolsheviks. The Russians awarded him the Order of St Stanislaus 3rd Class with Swords, which, according to his service record, he was granted permission to accept and wear, while the card index at TNA notes that he was granted unofficial permission, that the award was for the Mediterranean and its disposal was on 13 July 1920.

On 16 February 1920, he was posted to H.M.S. President ‘for service with Commodore Norris outside [the] Admiralty’ as a member of the Anglo-Persian Naval Mission. His service record notes that in July he was lent by the Naval Mission to Teheran to the General Officer Commanding, Mesopotamia for service on river patrol boats and on 21 September that G.H.Q. Baghdad no longer required his services. He returned to England in the P&O Line’s S.S. Naldera, arriving at Tilbury on 20 November 1920. This secondment earned him the Naval General Service Medal 1909-62 with the scarce clasp ‘IRAQ 1919-1920’ – there were, according to the medal roll only 129 awards, of which nine were to officers, for service on river craft operating within Iraq between 17 July and 17 September 1920. It is interesting to note that had Lieutenant Onslow stayed with the Naval Mission under Commodore D. T. Norris, C.B., C.M.G., the purpose of which was to consolidate the British position in Persia by helping with the development of the Persian navy and mercantile marine on the Caspian Sea, he would instead have earned the very rare clasp ‘N. W. PERSIA 1920’ of which only four were awarded. The qualification dates for that clasp were 10 August to 31 December 1920, though the mission appears to have been withdrawn in early December.

After his return from Baghdad he was posted to the navy’s gas school at H.M.S. Excellent for two years and then from 2 January 1923 until 3 January 1925 he was in the battleship Resolution. There then followed a two-year appointment to Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth during which he was promoted lieutenant commander on 15 November 1925. Onslow’s next ship was H.M.S. Hood of the Atlantic Fleet and in which he stayed for 30 months until he was posted to the light cruiser Colombo on the America and West Indies Station until January 1930.

He was advanced to commander on 30 June 1931, and two months later his senior officer’s report assessed him as generally exceptional with marked powers of leadership and unafraid of responsibility; he was recommended for the Staff College course, reinforcing earlier assessments that marked him as a man who should do well in higher ranks. After attending the staff course at Greenwich in 1933 he returned to Britannia RNC for two years until December 1935. He was then appointed on 7 February 1936 to command the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert until 8 February 1938. On 20 May 1937, Victoria and Albert took part in the Coronation review of the fleet and Commander Onslow received the Coronation Medal 1937. This period also saw his appointment to the Royal Victorian Order, Member of the 4th Class, announced in the 1938 New Year honours (but dated 29 July 1937), and his advancement to captain on 31 December 1937.

Captain Onslow’s first seagoing appointment in command of a capital ship was on 18 August 1938, to the anti-aircraft cruiser H.M.S. Coventry. He was her commander when she was with the Home Fleet and was damaged on 1 January 1940 in a German air attack on the Shetland Islands. He left the Coventry on 22 April 1940 and, as mentioned above, was placed in command of H.M.S. Hermes on 25 May 1940. He was just a few days past his forty-sixth birthday when Hermes was sunk.

Sold with original M.I.D. Certificate to ‘Captain Richard Francis John Onslow, M.V.O., D.S.C., R.N., H.M.S. Hermes’, dated 10 November 1942, with accompanying Admiralty letter, dated 14th November 1942, ‘I am commanded by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to send you the enclosed Certificate of a Mention in Despatches, awarded by the King to your husband, Captain Richard Francis John Onslow, M.V.O., D.S.C., R.N., for distinguished service in the action in which he lost his life. H.M.S. Hermes was bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft in April, 1942. Captain Onslow handled and fought his ship with the utmost determination to the last in the face of an overwhelming attack.’