Weekly Meeting

Wed, Mar 26th 2014 at 12:00 am - 12:00 am

Speaker Supply: John Morrow
Fellowship: Graham Findlay

President Willie Nicoll welcomed thirty-six members and guest speaker Commodore Ronald Sandford CBE to the meeting at Watts Restaurant on the 26th March.

Introducing his guest, John Morrow outlined his career from entry to Britannia Royal Naval College as Midshipman in 1960 up to his retirement in 2005 as Naval Regional Officer Scotland and Northern Ireland. Commodore Sandford fleshed out the outline with a series of stories from this distinguished career. As a Midshipman he had been allowed to spend six months in Paris for French language study, qualified as a French interpreter, and was involved in a joint exercise on a French ship. This drill involved a floating flag being thrown over the side to represent a man overboard, the task being to turn the ship around and bring it to a stop beside the flag to allow it to be picked up. The French team made a poor job of this, and handed over to the Royal Naval officers who performed a text-book "rescue". Afterwards he overheard one of the French officers say "That's why they beat us at Trafalgar!".

After several promotions, he was serving on HMS Antrim as Executive Officer when it was sent to recapture South Georgia during the Falklands conflict. Operation Paraquet (known to those involved as Operation Paraquat) was to have been a joint SAS/SBS attack on the Argentines but the two Wessex helicopters bringing them in crash-landed on the Fortuna glacier in bad weather. When the weather cleared a couple of days later, they were rescued by the Antrim's Wessex helicopter, which three days later was deployed to drop depth charges on the Argentine submarine Santa Fe. The disabled submarine limped into Grytviken harbour and a land assault secured the surrender of its crew and the garrison at Grytviken. The other Argentine garrison, at Leith Harbour, surrendered the following day, with no loss of life on either side during the relief operation.

Later in the conflict, Antrim was supporting a landing at San Carlos Water in the Falkland Islands when a bomb became lodged in the flight deck but didn't explode. Ironically, they found that this faulty product had "Made in Birmingham" stamped on its casing. Arguing that there wasn't any point in removing the fuse if the bomb hadn't exploded in the impact, they cut a hole in the flight deck, raised it using shear-legs and a pulley, then dropped it over the side before moving off at full speed!

He was appointed OBE for service in the Falklands and then spent two years with responsibility for procurement and testing of advanced torpedoes, where he learned a lot about the business practices of the defence industry, holding one company to a fixed-price contract for remedial work when a set of torpedo trials failed - they would much rather have had their usual cost-plus version!

Promotion to Captain followed, he was appointed CBE in 1994, and a number of senior appointments culminated in his return to Scotland as Regional Officer in 1997.

After answering a number of questions, he was thanked on behalf of the club by Past President Graham Findlay.

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