CHIEF Petty Officer Stoker Reginald Morgan would have been due to leave the Navy on the very day that he was lost in action aboard the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious off Norway – but for the war.
His daughter Yvonne Phipps, who was 10 on that fateful day, June 8, 1940, recalls that her mother had to wait agonising months, until October, before an Admiralty letter notifying her that he was feared dead.
"He was 38. He had actually put two years on his age to join the Navy at 16," she said.
Yvonne told the Review of her father's story after reading about Fred Barnett of Lydney, who was lost aboard HMS Acasta in the same action. In all 1,515 lost their lives when these two ships and HMS Ardent were sent to the bottom by the deadly German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisnau.
There were a bare five known survivors, among them a shipmate of Fred Barnett's who had fired a crippling torpedo at Scharnhorst moments before Acasta sank.
It turned out to be a crucial shot because the Scharnhorst would have been able to turn her big guns on the convoy carrying out the evacuation of Norway and no doubt thousands of civilian lives were saved – including that of Norway's king.
Fred Barnett's family attended a recent memorial service in Plymouth for those lost in the action but Yvonne, of Palmer's Flat, Coleford, who has suffered from Multiple Sclerosis for the past 20 years, was unable to attend.
However she and her two sisters went to the unveiling of a plaque in honour of the victims by Princess Margaret in Plymouth in 1954.
Reginald Morgan also went into action for Devonport Services Rugby Club on the field and Yvonne still treasures his cap for the 1926-27 season.