Denys Arthur Rayner DSC & Bar, VRD, RNVR (9 February 1908 – 4 January 1967) was a Royal Navy officer who fought throughout the Battle of the Atlantic during the World War II. Later, he became a writer, farmer, and a successful designer & builder of small sailing craft– his first being the Westcoaster; his most successful being the glass fibre gunter or Bermudian rigged twin keelboat named Westerly 22 which had been from evolved similar "small ships", through which he was able to cross oceans while respecting the expectations, in terms of comfort, safety and cost, of a burgeoning family market keen to get to sea. Also in 1960s, he had founded, Westerly Marine Construction Ltd– through his pioneering GRP designs, which he had secured the future expansion upto the late 1980s, where it became one of Britain's most successful yacht builders.
He died in 1967, due to the natural causes at the age of 58.
Early Life Denys Rayner was born in Muswell Hill in a Georgian house, on the outskirts of London, to a native British middle class family. His father Arthur Rayner, a master electrical engineer, became a commodity broker and moved with his family to West Kirby on the Wirral Peninsula, sending his son to Repton School between 1921 and 1924, while his mother Francis Rayner () was a traditional housewife. Flat feet kept Denys from entering the Royal Navy but not from pursuing a successful naval career. In October 1925, he joined HMS Eaglet, Mersey Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a part-time midshipman with time to pursue his interest in exploring the rocky coast of the Western Highlands in a small boat of his own design.
As an eight-year-old prep school boy, at the height of the First World War, Rayner was disappointed to be beaten for drawing an "infernal" U-boat sinking device in a school geometry book. "Diagrammatically portrayed, this spoiled the page – I can see that now", wrote the adult Rayner in the preface of his book Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic (1955). At school Rayner, impressed that an uncle by marriage was an officer on "a real destroyer", sketched a "continuous border of destroyers" in the margins of his school books. In later school years came "an endless stream of model destroyers...which really floated and were fitted with systems of propulsion..."Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 19
World War II
"I had already packed my bags, set my affairs in order and seen to the laying up of my yacht" wrote Rayner of his actions four days before the outbreak of World War II.Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 28 By 1939, partly as a result of a recognition by others of his gift for leadership and partly by insisting on specialising in navigation rather than gunnery, against standard advice to RNVR officers wishing advancement in the Royal Navy, Rayner qualified himself to command 14th Anti-Submarine Group comprising HMTs Loch Tulla, Istria, Regal, Brontes and Davey, a unit of armed trawlers patrolling the notoriously dangerous waters surrounding the main fleet base of Scapa Flow – a 6 by 20 mile stretch of sea between Scotland and the Orkney Islands where a high spring tide can flow 8 knots against a westerly gale. His 'flag' was aboard HMT Loch Tulla for whom Rayner selected skipper Lang – a Devon trawlerman he describes as knowing things "about the way of a ship which no one not trained in sail could have understood".Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 30
In September 1940 Rayner, was appointed to command a corvette, , but finding her incomplete, and another, , ready but without a commander, used all his skills of persuasion to get the command himself. Verbena, was the first long fo'c'sle and was, in Rayner's eyes, "quite perfect".
On Verbena, the nickname 'Ben', which stayed with him for the rest of his life, was used as Rayner's call sign.Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 113 Verbena embarked on convoy duties between different escort groups before being assigned to B-12 group, under Commander C D Howard-Johnston of Malcolm. During the winter of 1940 and throughout the summer of 1941, HMS Verbena operated with the group in the North Atlantic, before a refit in August 1941.
Following this Verbena was sent south to Freetown, then Cape Town, for operations in the South Atlantic, before being dispatched to the Far East. After the Japanese invasion of Malaya, and the fall of Singapore, Verbena was based at Colombo; in May 1942 while heading for Karachi her boilers gave out as a result of constant high-speed work and lack of cleaning and she had to be towed the last few hundred yards to a berth in Bombay for refit. After some months in India, where he made a number of horseback treks, Rayner and his crew came home.
Just after Christmas 1942, he was given assignment of the lead of an escort group, in command of the destroyer , becoming one of the first RNVR officers in the Royal Navy (along with Commander E N Wood of a year earlier) to be so promoted. Rayner returned to familiar ground, with his group operating in the North Atlantic on convoy escort duty. In June 1943 he was to lead Operation Rosegarden, an attempt to hunt and kill U-boats as they crossed the Denmark Straits, but this was ultimately unsuccessful.
In October 1943 Rayner was given command of , briefly joining B-5 EG, led by Havelock,Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p.174 before being given an Escort Group to operate in the Channel against E boats in preparation for D-Day. Just a day after taking station at Plymouth, on 20 February 1944, Rayner was with Warwick off Trevose Head when she was torpedoed, with the loss of 90 of her crew, by the submarine commanded by Kapitänleutnant Gustav Poel. He was picked up with other survivors by the steam trawler Lady Luck skippered by Victor Crisp.
Instead of taking "survivor's leave" after this experience, which had included being in the water as depth charges from a destroyer in pursuit of the U-boat exploded close by, Rayner, pressing Admiral Max Horton for "a destroyer with two funnels", was given command of – "best-loved"Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 242 of his wartime commands – joining B-4 Escort Group led by Helmsdale on the Gibraltar run.Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p.198
Towards the end of 1944 he was appointed senior officer of a support group of s – 30th Escort Group – in command of and including Portchester Castle (later to 'play' Saltash Castle in The Cruel Sea), Launceston Castle and Kenilworth Castle. On the 11th of November 1944 Rayner's group gained an ASDIC contact off the southern coast of Ireland and attacked it. It was previously believed that this event led to the sinking of the German U-Boat U-1200, for which Rayner was credited. However, due to the discrepancy between the location of Rayner's attack and U-1200's wreck in the English channel, this has since been disproven. It is unclear what prompted the ASDIC contact which led to the attack.
As the Pevensey Castle was returning to her base, her steering broke in a northerly gale off the mouth of the River Foyle. Rayner nearly lost his ship on the long sandy spit leading to Magilligan Point before hand steering was connected. He writes that at this point "The candle was burned out".Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 230 He sought three weeks leave of Max Horton who then posted him, in the months before V-E Day, to a senior staff role with Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, in the tunnel complex of Fort Southwick behind Portsmouth Harbour.Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic pp. 232–241 Here, overseeing radar guided plots from deep underground in a way that would have been impossible at the start of the campaign, Rayner applied his specialist experience to the deployment of a large force of anti-submarine warships in the closing months of the war. Rayner speaks in Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic of his respect for one of his colleagues at the fort – First Officer Audrey Faith Parker, OBE, WRNS – for the seafaring experience she brought to her operational work.Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic pp. 235–236 It was to her and her husband Gordon that Rayner, in 1946, after a stint as temporary commander of a naval air station at Kirkistown near Cloughy on the east coast of Northern Ireland, sold his yacht, laid up in north Wales for the duration, and moved his household to the first of several farms in the English home counties.
During a campaign that had lasted from 1939 to 1945, Rayner's youngest son, Vyvyan, reckoned (in April 2006) that his father took "as little as four or five weeks home leave in the whole period." After 24 years with the 'wavy navy' Rayner retired from the RNVR in 1949.
Decorations
Rayner's Distinguished Service Cross was announced in the London Gazette of 29 December 1940, dated 1 January 1940, for the "hard and perilous task of sweeping the seas clear of enemy mines, and combating submarines" while commanding the trawler Loch Tulla. On 26 September 1941 it was announced that he had been Mentioned in Despatches 'for good services in action against enemy submarines' while commanding HMS Verbena. On 23 March 1943 the Gazette announced the award of the Volunteer Reserve Decoration (VRD). On 25 May 1945 he was awarded a bar to his DSC "for courage, skill and perseverance... in successful operations against enemy submarines."
Rayner was credited with the sinking of one U-boat on 11 November 1944 – U-1200, commanded by Hinrich Mangels, "to pay me back for Warwick".Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 221 In an escort group action the fatal depth charges were dropped by under Lieutenant R M Roberts, DSC, RNVR.
Rayner, though at the time given credit for sinking or damaging an unidentified U-boat on 22 May 1941' , had doubts even then, as he had about an earlier incident while in charge of 14th Anti-Submarine Group on HMT Loch Tulla, sailing towards Scapa Flow. He writes of picking up a strong asdic signal north of the Humber on the UK east coast, a depth charging exercise and a pool of oil,Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic pp. 40–41 and later he mentions "thinking" that his first DSC, announced on 1 January 1940, was "probably" for this action "off Flamborough Head".Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic p. 51 He was uncertain whether this involved a genuine sinking, writing of the greater "difficulty" of damaging the "pressure hull" of a "modern submarine". Later Rayner refers to an action on 22–23 May 1941 when, in HMS Verbena, he engaged a U-boat on the surface after it had torpedoed the Dutch tanker Elusa and surfaced to inspect the burning wreck. The U-boat dived. Rayner depth charged a strong asdic contact, saw oil on the surface, lost contact and guided HMS Churchill, with deeper depth charges, to the same target, both ships remaining in the area until dawn on 24 May 1941.Rayner, Escort: The Battle of the Atlantic pp. 92–94 In the back inside cover of Escort Rayner's map of Western Approaches shows the cross-swords symbol of an engagement and the words "U-boat damaged by Verbena 22.4.41". Many years later – 2006 – Gudmundur Helgason, researcher of the Battle of the Atlantic points out that Elusa was sunk by U-93 "which certainly survived the attack" adding that "there were lots of those attacks reported (often with seemingly very convincing evidence at the time) that failed to sink or even damage an U-boat. Since 1955 there have been loads of revisions of U-boat fates, almost to this day even."
Writer