Commander Keith Evans
Junior officer in the Hood, later sailing master with Prince Philip
COMMANDER KEITH EVANS, who has died aged 98, was one of the last pre-war survivors of the battlecruiser Hood. When Evans joined Hood for “a happy year” in early 1938, she was the pride of the Royal Navy and he was her most junior officer.
Over the next 12 months he helped to rescue refugees from the Spanish Civil War and to mark the German pocket battleship Deutschland during the Munich Crisis, as well as taking part in a busy programme of visits to Mediterranean ports, sports and fleet exercises. His messmates included several Australian midshipmen, some of whom were lost in 1941 when the cruiser HMAS Sydney disappeared, and he made lifelong friends with Frank Hearn (later a rear-admiral) and William Willett (later sailing master in the Duke of Edinburgh’s yacht Bloodhound).
Evans led a charmed life during the Second World War: four ships in which he served were sunk soon after he left them, including Hood. It was while entering Durban, in the cruiser Hawkins, that he heard the news of the loss of the ship and her 1,400 men in May 1941. Later he recalled: “As a former shipmate I just could not comprehend that the mighty Hood had gone and am not a bit ashamed to say that I began to cry.”
From 2014 to 2017 Evans was chairman of the HMS Hood Association and became involved in plans to revisit the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic. He had supported a previous policy of using a remotely controlled submersible craft to “look-but-not-touch”, and only reluctantly was he persuaded that in a subsequent expedition one of Hood’s three bells should be brought to the surface, admitting that “in my heart of hearts I hoped that the bell would never be recovered.”
However, when the bell was brought to Portsmouth he was proud to be associated with the achievement of recovering it from a depth of 9,200ft.
Thomas Keith Evans was born on September 6 1919 at Bidston Hill in the Wirral. His father was chairman of Evans Sons, Lescher and Webb, a pharmaceutical company which traded in Russia and went bankrupt after the revolution.
Keith was educated at Pangbourne Nautical College: early memories included the Silver Jubilee Review for George V in 1935, “when you could hardly see across the Solent for warships”, and then lining the street for the king’s funeral a year later.
Evans’s eyesight was too poor for him to become a seaman officer, and so he joined the Royal Navy’s training cruiser Frobisher as a paymaster cadet. After Hood he served in the light cruiser Arethusa and the battleship Barham, and was serving in the battleship Warspite on cyphering duties when war broke out, Sent to Penelope as captain’s secretary, he returned home by train from Marseilles, “cheered all the way” across France.
After two and a half years in Hawkins, Evans became captain’s secretary at the signal school near Petersfield, where he fell in love with and married his WRNS driver, Frances Reid, in 1943.
Postwar, Evans was a shipmate of the young Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, the future Duke of Edinburgh, at the RN leadership school HMS Royal Arthur at Corsham, Wiltshire, often covering for him as he courted Princess Elizabeth. They became firm friends, Prince Philip addressing Evans as “Scratch” – naval slang for a secretary.
Retiring in 1970, Evans led the Surrey Council for Voluntary Services for 15 years. He participated in local politics, was a governor of the Royal Hospital School, and benefactor of many small charities. He was patient, tolerant of others, and made the most of life.
Evans’s wife Frances died in 1966 and in 1997 he married Heather Huntley (née Bevan-williams), who survives him with two sons from his first marriage.