Leading Torpedoman Ron Rendle
Sailor who partied in Casablanca but lost his earnings from photography when his ship went down
LEADING TORPEDOMAN RON RENDLE, who has died aged 98, was sunk twice in the war and helped to sink three U-boats; afterwards he mixed public office with running an Essex nightclub.
After seamanship training at a Butlin’s holiday camp at Skegness which had been requisitioned for the war, Rendle was drafted, in January 1940, to the armed merchant cruiser Patroclus, a cargo-liner of the Blue Funnel Line re-equipped as an armed merchant ship. He celebrated his 21st birthday in Casablanca, and, after the Dunkirk evacuation, Patroclus ferried refugees and French troops from Marseille to North Africa.
When on the night of November 3/4 1940 Otto Kretschmer in U-99 torpedoed the SS Casanare and the armed merchant cruiser Laurentic, Patroclus went to their aid and was rescuing survivors, she too was attacked. During five-and-a-half hours of battle, Patroclus, armed with six ancient 6in guns and built, according to Rendle, like “a floating block of flats” with her holds filled for buoyancy with empty oil barrels, held off U-99, until after several salvoes of torpedoes Patroclus was sunk.
Rendle was picked up by the destroyer Achates, given a tot of rum and a hammock and slept for 12 hours.
After survivor’s leave, Rendle trained as a torpedoman, and in September 1941 joined the destroyer Wishart. The next 12 months as part of Force H based on Gibraltar were the busiest of the war for him. Wishart took part in several “club runs”, the nickname given to a series of operations to ferry aircraft to Malta. On May 2 1942, eastsoutheast of Cartagena, Spain, Wishart and her sister ship Wrestler hunted and sank U-47.
In 1943 Rendle was drafted home for further training at the torpedo school, which had been evacuated to Roedean school. Afterwards he claimed to be an old boy of the girls’ school.
Next, he joined the newly built frigate Bickerton, commanded by Captain Donald Macintyre, a brilliant U-boat hunter and in Rendle’s view “an absolute tyrant, but the best skipper I ever had”. When Macintyre sank U-765 on May 6 1944, Rendle recalled that the survivors were “much the same as us, they mixed in, had good jokes and we got on well”. On June 25 Bickerton also sank U-269 in the Channel south-east of Torquay.
Rendle obtained a camera and a supply of materials on the black market and set up a business on-board as a photographer. When his work was seen by Macintyre, Rendle was given an action station on the bridge of Bickerton so that he could photograph the next U-boat kill, but on August 22 off Norway, it was Bickerton that was torpedoed.
Rendle was commended by Macintyre in his autobiography, U-boat Killer (1956), for his good example during the sinking, but all the money made from his photography was in the safe which went down with the ship.
Rendle finished his war in Ceylon. Earlier he had turned down the opportunity of a commission and now he turned down a career in the Navy, preferring to return to Britain and to civilian life.
Ronald Walter William Rendle was born on May 31 1919 in East Ham and brought up in Ilford. His father was an insurance agent and Ron an only child whose mother died while he was still at school. At 16 he joined Ilford Borough Council’s treasury department as a clerk, and was progressing well when in the late summer of 1939 he volunteered to join the Navy.
Rendle returned to his pre-war career, rising steadily through the bureaucracy until he was head of Tonbridge and Malling housing department. He retired aged 55 and took satisfaction in drawing a full pension for more than 40 years.
Meanwhile, Rendle was in partnership with Bob Patience in running the Barn nightclub in Braintree, Essex. For some years, it was the place to see celebrities such as Alma Cogan and Frankie Vaughan.
The Barn achieved notoriety in 1972 when it was the scene of an armed robbery and Patience’s wife was murdered. When a known gangster was hastily arrested for the crime, a “free George Ince” campaign led to a revival in trade (Ince was cleared of the murder but later jailed for his part in a silver bullion robbery), but the Barn closed after New Year’s Eve 1977.
Rendle had an encyclopedic memory. He continued to drive until 2016 and visited a casino in Southend every week. He never missed the annual reunion of the V&W Destroyer Association, and was a regular guest at Buckingham Palace garden parties.
Rendle married Elaine Campbell in 1944; she died in 2010 and he is survived by three children.
Ronald Rendle, born May 31 1919, died December 23 2017