Peter Jinks
Swordfish air gunner who somehow survived five crashes in the Mediterranean and Atlantic
PETER JINKS, who has died aged 99, was a schoolmaster whose wartime flying career was jinxed. Jinks’s most serious accident occurred on September 22 1943 on board the escort carrier Battler off Gibraltar. The sea was calm as his Swordfish, flown by New Zealand sub-lieutenant Percy Craig, made a long, steady run-in for a perfect landing with the hook down ready. The plane caught the first arrestor wire but, in a misunderstanding, was waved off.
Craig applied full throttle, but the aircraft stalled and crashed over the side, where it hung half in and half out of the water. It was battered against the ship’s side before falling into the sea, just missing Battler’s propeller. Jinks recalled: “After the noise and turmoil of the last couple of minutes it seemed peaceful as we drifted clear, gently sinking in the warm waters of the Mediterranean.”
Jinks and Craig scrambled on to the upper wing, where a dinghy was stowed, but found it too mangled. Fortunately, one of the ship’s Carley floats was entangled in the wreckage – but climbing into it, they realised that they were about to be pulled underwater until Jinks used his knife to cut the raft free.
Within 15 minutes they were picked up by a boat from the cruiser Carlisle and returned to Battler, where, Jinks recalled, the only counselling was a double brandy. However, he was enrolled in the Goldfish Club: members wear a special badge showing a white-winged goldfish flying above two symbolic blue waves.
Peter Charles Jinks was born on September 21 1921 and educated at Leicester Grammar School. He had always yearned to fly, and though he was in a reserved occupation as a fitter at a local machine tool manufacturer, in November 1939 he volunteered to be a Telegraphist Air Gunner and trained at HMS Kestrel, the Royal Naval Air Station at Worthy Down, near Winchester.
He recalled his first flight: “I had a large grin on my face and enjoyed every minute, noisy, windy and looking down on the world from a low altitude. This was real flying!”
He was appointed to 771 Naval Air Squadron (NAS) based at Hatston in Orkney, where one of his first pilots was a youthful midshipman, Peter Twiss, “who likes to throw the aircraft about a bit”; postwar Twiss became Fairey Aviation’s chief test pilot and the first man to fly at more than 1,000 mph.
Jinx’s first accident came in March 1942 when landing on the escort carrier Archer at the end of a dusk patrol. His Swordfish biplane, piloted by a sub-lieutenant Pratt, bounced over all the restraining wires and ran into the crash barrier.
On May 14 he crashed again, heavily damaging the undercarriage, and six days later his Swordfish came in too low and wiped off the undercarriage on the rear end of the flight deck. It ploughed along the wooden deck and stopped with the nose hanging over the ship’s side. After the crew had climbed out safely, the wreckage was pushed over the side.
Still in Archer, in the Atlantic, Jinks’s fourth accident came when his Swordfish landed safely but the arrestor wire hydraulics failed and his aircraft again ran into the crash barrier: there it stuck nose down, tail up.
But there were also successful operations, and in 834 NAS, Jinks took part in Atlantic convoy escorts, the Allied landings in North Africa and Italy, and in January 1943, after the aircraft had been painted matt black, anti-e-boat operations in the English Channel. Later, the squadron developed Combined Attack Team tactics, whereby cannon-armed Seafire and two Swordfish – one armed with depth charges and another with rockets – would hunt for U-boats.
Battler was redeployed to the Indian Ocean, where Jinks experienced a final accident, on December 15 1943, after several
hours on anti-u-boat patrol; they became lost, and glided to a crash-landing in the dunes on the island of Socotra. After walking for two days they found a Dutch naval airbase, whence they were returned by sea via Aden and Bombay to Ceylon, and eventually to Britain.
Postwar, Jinks trained on a one-year emergency training scheme to become a teacher, and for many years taught at primary schools, finishing as headmaster of Eldene in Swindon. On his 80th birthday he enjoyed a 15-minute flight in a Swordfish of the Navy’s Historic Flight.
Peter Jinks married Audrey Jordan in 1949. She and a daughter predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters and son.