Vice-admiral Sir Barry Wilson
Career naval officer who was instrumental in the expansion of the Royal Navy Museum, Portsmouth
VICE-ADMIRAL SIR BARRY WILSON, who has died aged 82, was a successful naval officer motivated by practical Christianity. Wilson rose quickly through the service and was promoted to commander in 1969 when, after study at the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich, he spent two years planning the Navy’s manpower structure.
In 1973-74 he commanded the frigate Mohawk in the Far East Fleet and took part in the blockade of Rhodesia known as the Beira Patrol. Then, during visits to Norwegian ports, the Mohawk joined the search for the trawler Gaul, missing in the Barents Sea, before sailing to become the West Indies guardship, a breathtaking worldwide deployment which brought the nickname “HMS Ubiquitous”.
Next, as Commander Sea Training, Wilson was responsible for the daily programme and detailed procedures at the Flag Officer Sea Training, the Royal Navy’s world centre of excellence for working up ships from basic to advanced operations.
Promoted to captain, in 1976-78 he was Assistant Director of Naval Plans, dealing with the Navy’s future planning and its budget, and in 1978-80 he commissioned the new destroyer Cardiff. After fitting-out at the Swan Hunter yard on the Tyne, and sea trials, during the next 12 months Cardiff steamed more than 13,000 miles.
Wilson took her back to the Tyne so that the men who had built her could show her off to their families, then visited Cardiff where more than 7,000 visitors were welcomed on-board and her crew raised money for local charities by sponsored bicycle rides and dinghy rows. In 1979 in Cardiff, Wilson coordinated the search for survivors of the merchantman Pool Fisher, which had sunk east of Isle of Wight. At Navy Days in Portsmouth and at Portland she welcomed some 17,300 guests, and in late 1980, after a visit to Ghent in Belgium, she returned to Wales for missile-firing tests off Aberporth and for celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of Cardiff ’s city status.
In 1981-82 Wilson was recalled to the Ministry of Defence to help staff the downsizing of the Navy consequent upon the Nott defence review. Then in 1982, after only a few days as a student at the Royal College of Defence Studies, Wilson was urgently recalled to fill a sudden vacancy as Director Naval Plans, an appointment which he filled with distinction for three years, his prime task being to rejuvenate the Navy by implementing the lessons learnt and replacing the ships lost in the Falklands war.
Promoted to rear-admiral in 1985, he was Flag Officer Sea Training and then Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Programmes). His last appointment in uniform was as a viceadmiral and Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Programmes and Personnel), 1989-92.
Barry Nigel Wilson was born on June 5 1936 at Southsea, the son of Rear-admiral Guy Wilson, CB, and his wife Dorothy. He was educated at Mount House, Tavistock, and St Edward’s School, Oxford, before entering Dartmouth in 1952.
If he had been ruthless, Wilson would have gone further in the Navy, but in 1993 he joined the board of the Royal Navy Museum, Portsmouth, where a £5½m expansion programme, creating new galleries and a new library, was planned. Wilson lent his huge enthusiasm, great energy and peerless interpersonal skills to fundraising.
He persuaded the Princess Royal to become president of the Museum and won a large grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. His skills as a public speaker and his enthusiastic championing of the museum brought in matching funds to complete the modernisation “within a whisker of the budget”. His achievement was the more remarkable because the historic dockyard in Portsmouth was afflicted with rivalries between several charitable trusts. It was said there was not an ounce of charity nor a grain of trust among them, but Wilson’s transparent decency, goodwill, integrity and razor-sharp intelligence, combined with his gentle, disarming way of engaging with people at every level, contributed in no small way to easing some of the tensions.
Appointed KCB in 1990, he was chairman of SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity, from 1994 to 2000, but his strong faith was most manifest in his close association with Bede House, a lay Christian settlement founded to help the poor of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe.
Wilson ran boxing clubs in railway arches owned by Clare College, Cambridge, and kept in touch with Bede House throughout his naval career: as a trustee from 1990 until 2003 he steered its adult education project through to independence. Wilson was also chairman of the Friends of Guys Marsh Prison in Dorset and chairman of governors of his local Church of England school. He was a churchwarden at St Catherine’s Church, Sedgehill in Wiltshire, and a bell ringer.
He was also a poet, and one of his last compositions concluded: “Belief in a dawning / Is as unshakable / As the peace of sleep.”
In 1961 he married Liz Hardy; they had one son and one daughter, who survive him. Liz died, and in 2016 he married Georgina Doyle (née Stevenson), who also survives him.
Vice-admiral Sir Barry Wilson, born June 5 1936, died August 29 2018