Commander Norman Tod RIP

Kyt · Mar 30, 2009

Commander Norman Tod - Telegraph

Commander Norman Tod, who has died aged 98, was one of the last survivors of the Battle of the River Plate.

In December 1939 Tod was navigator of the light cruiser Ajax, flagship of Commodore Harwood's cruiser force which was hunting a German raider in the South Atlantic. He had directed the squadron to the Plate when the New Zealand light cruiser Achilles, detached to investigate a distant sighting at dawn action stations, reported: "I think it is a pocket battleship."

The squadron immediately executed the plan which Harwood had announced at a conference of his officers the previous evening. This was "to attack at once", despite the superiority of the enemy. In the ensuing battle the heavy cruiser Exeter engaged the battleship from one side, while Ajax and Achilles attacked from the other and then, like dogs in a pack, drove the German ship into Montevideo. Exeter, which had been badly damaged by 11-inch shells, limped off to the Falklands, leaving the six-inch cruisers to blockade the port in the knowledge that, if the battle was resumed, the odds would be against them.

Tod was astonished that the battle had lasted only an hour and half, as it seemed more like half a day. On his chart of the battle, now in the Imperial War Museum, he had marked the enemy as Admiral Scheer, and he learned only at the end of the day that it was Graf Spee. For the next four days tension in Ajax was high as the British hoped for reinforcements; and there was great relief when Graf Spee left harbour only to scuttle herself.

Ajax spent Christmas being repaired in the Falklands, and returned to Chatham via Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro – enabling Tod to visit his Spanish girlfriend in Buenos Aires.

On February 23 1940 he took part in a victory march through London, and was presented with his DSC by King George VI at a parade on Horse Guards, followed by lunch at the Guildhall.

The son of an Army officer, Norman Kelso Tod was born at Quetta on November 12 1910. He was educated at Miss Corfe's and Windlesham House in Brighton, and lived with his grandmother and her sisters until his father returned home at the end of the First World War.

Young Norman entered Dartmouth in 1924, and passed out fourth in his term of 50 cadets three years later. His first ship was the battleship Iron Duke, and he recalled coaling at a rate of 2,000 tons per hour, with both officers and men wielding shovels.

Service in the battlecruiser Tiger in the Mediterranean during the late 1920s gave Tod his taste for foreign travel, which persisted throughout his life. After promotion to sub-lieutenant and courses at Greenwich, he joined the destroyer Westcott, in which he enjoyed lavish hospitality in Baltic ports that left little time for sleep.

In 1933 he was in the minesweeper Sutton, which escorted the King's racing yacht Britannia around Britain. The crew dressed formally for racing in yachting cap, blue reefers and flannels, and a claret glass of port was served in the saloon at noon whatever the state of the weather or the race. During the winter he rode with the Cattistock hounds.

After specialising in navigation, Tod was appointed to the sloops Lupin and Deptford in the Persian Gulf. One duty involved taking the Sultan of Muscat and Oman on a tour of his possessions on the coast of Baluchistan, when the sultan's bodyguard of 45 black Zanzibari slaves nightly slaughtered a goat and cooked it on the quarterdeck.

After Ajax Tod served in the cruiser Norfolk which, in May 1942, shadowed the German battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Denmark Strait until she was joined by Hood and Prince of Wales. Tod saw Hood blown up after a hit from Bismarck, and continued shadowing until the German disappeared from the radar in a rain cloud on the night of May 24/25. The discovery in the Public Record Office of Tod's accurate chart of the battle led directly to the discovery of the wreck of Hood by David Mearns of Blue Water Recoveries in 2001.

After the war Tod was assistant naval attaché in Shanghai and attaché in Lisbon before being appointed naval adviser in Karachi.

On retiring from the Navy in 1958, he set about looking for a career involving travel to warm places that were not too much affected by modern civilisation but which offered opportunities to paint.

He found it as a courier for upmarket travel agencies, escorting small groups of determined tourists to North Africa, the Middle East, Ethiopia and south-east Asia. Logistically this was more demanding than his naval career, and diplomatically more difficult than his life in embassies. Both his customers and his employers learned to admire his skills and calmness, as when, in the first days of the Lebanese civil war, he spent hours negotiating visas and air tickets before extracting his party unharmed on an Aeroflot flight.

Tod's summers were spent camping and caravanning in France, Iberia and North Africa, driving a succession of vehicles which became smaller and smaller; they had to be big enough to transport only him with his paints, maps and basic supplies. He made friends of all ages without the need for languages, and was once was an honoured guest at a Berber wedding in the mountains of Morocco.

His winter travels took him to Burma and Thailand, and he found a hideaway on the remote eastern part of Bali. One of his objects, he said, was to be in a non-Christian country in December. After acquiring a mobile phone at 90, he rang his family on Christmas Day from a raft floating down the Mekong.

Diffident and retiring, Tod did not believe in birthdays (or at least his own) and only reluctantly attended family events. He was against what he called "fuss", which, as he grew older, included most possessions and all ceremony.

Norman Tod suffered a stroke while sitting beside a pool in Thailand in 2002, when a young backpacker raised the alarm and took him to hospital. His family reluctantly brought him back to England, knowing he would rather have been left sitting in the sun with the young of many nations around him. He died unmarried on March 6.
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liverpool annie · Mar 30, 2009

Now thats the way to live and die ...... !

RIP Norman Tod

Antipodean Andy · Apr 1, 2009

A man who made a significant impact on the RN's history both during the war and after. RIP.

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