(First published in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of Warship World)
Cdr Lionel 'Buster' Crabb OBE GM RNVR
It is fifty years
since the Admiralty announced that the wartime diving hero Commander Lionel
‘Buster’ Crabb OBE GM RNVR was presumed dead after failing to return from trials
of underwater apparatus in Stokes
Bay
in the Solent.
Only after considerable press speculation and
political pressure did it emerge that he had failed to reappear after diving
under the hull of the
Soviet cruiser
ORDZHONIKIDZE during
her visit to
Portsmouth
in April 1956 at the height of the Cold War.
Despite the release of previously secret material by
the National Archives, some as recently as October 2006, mystery and controversy
continue to surround Crabb’s fate.
In fact, there
has been so much conjecture that it is difficult to distinguish between fact and
fiction.
It has been hinted that official documents telling the
whole story will not be released until 2057, a century after the event.
Lionel Kenneth
Philip Crabb was born in lowly circumstances on 28 January 1909 in Streatham,
London.
Between 1922 and 1924, he was a cadet in HMS CONWAY,
the
Mercantile
Marine
Service
Associations
School
ship, and subsequently served in the Merchant Navy.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined
the Army as a Gunner but transferred to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR)
where he was trained as a Bomb Safety Officer (BSO) and promoted to Temporary
Lieutenant (Special Branch) on 7 November 1941.
Crabb certainly became a wartime hero.
In October 1942, he was
appointed to HMS CORMORANT, the shore base at
Gibraltar, as the
Mine and Bomb Disposal officer.
Since July 1942, members of the Italian Tenth Light
Flotilla (Decima MAS) underwater forces had been operating
Maiale
(pig) human torpedoes clandestinely from the interned Italian tanker OLTERRA,
berthed across the bay in Algeciras,
to lay explosive warheads and place limpet mines on the hulls of Allied ships
anchored off Gibraltar.
As depicted in the 1958 film ‘The Silent Enemy’
starring Laurence Harvey, an Underwater Working Party had been formed to
counteract this threat under Lieutenant Bill Bailey RNVR, an electrical
specialist who had been awarded the George Medal on 29 December 1942.
Equipped with the rudimentary Davis Submerged Escape
Apparatus (DSEA) using oxygen, Bailey and Leading Diver (later Acting Petty
Officer) David Bell used breast stroke and wore overalls and plimsolls for
underwater work.
Swim fins had not yet been introduced into the Royal
Navy although they were used by the Italians.
An inveterate smoker with a penchant for
scotch with beer chasers, Crabb avoided exercise and was only just able to swim
three lengths of a swimming pool.
However, he insisted on learning to dive so that he
could participate in the search for underwater explosive devices and
undertake their disposal.
He eventually ended up commanding a much expanded
diving team but also implemented other countermeasures including patrol craft
dropping explosive charges in the water if they saw anything suspicious.
During an attack on 7 December 1942, two of the
Italian frogmen (Lieutenant Licio Visintini and Petty Officer Giovanni Magro)
died after their Maiale
came under fire from the defenders.
Their bodies were recovered a few days later and
their swim fins were then used by Crabb and one of his divers, Sydney Knowles.
The Italians continued
their underwater attacks on shipping anchored off
Gibraltar until
August 1943, a month before signing an armistice with the Allies.
For their services, Crabb and
Bell
were each awarded the George Medal on 25 January 1944.
In August 1944, Crabb was sent to North
Africa to assist Commander Roger Lewis (awarded the DSO for helping Cdr John
Ouvry render safe the first German magnetic mine at Shoeburyness in November
1939) to clear the newly liberated ports of North Africa following the defeat of
the German Afrika Korps.
In May 1945, he was appointed
as the Principal Diving Officer Northern Italy at HMS FABIUS, the shore base at
Taranto,
and assisted in the clearance of the ports of Leghorn,
Livorno and
Venice
which had been evacuated by the retreating Germans.
In August 1945, he was sent to
Palestine
to deal with Zionist underwater explosive devices and was awarded the OBE on 11
December 1945 for the wind-up of operations in
Europe.
According to official sources,
he was released from the RNVR on 30 April 1948 as a Temporary Acting Lieutenant
Commander but was subsequently attached to the Diving Support Vessel HMS RECLAIM
off
Malta
in the Spring of 1949
to take underwater photographs of propeller cavitation
produced by the cruiser HMS AMPHION.
He achieved this while clinging to a danbuoy mooring
as AMPHION steamed past him unnervingly close at various speeds.
Unverified sources also report him as having been
involved in surveying the site of a discharge pipe from the Atomic Weapons
Research Establishment at Aldermaston.
According to official sources, Crabb was
re-employed on the Active List on 12 October 1951 in the substantive rank of
Lieutenant Commander and appointed to HMS VERNON as a ‘Diving Trials Officer’
but unverified sources state that he had dived in January of the previous year
on the submarine HMS TRUCULENT, sunk with all hands in the Thames Estuary.
He certainly delivered a newly developed underwater
television camera to HMS RECLAIM in April 1951 to assist in her inspection of
the sunken submarine HMS AFFRAY on the edge of the Hurd Deep and this may
account for the confusion.
On 15 March 1952, he married
Margaret Elaine Player, a typist/barmaid from Dover,
but they only lived together until April 1953 and were divorced in December
1953.
On 30 June 1952,
Crabb was promoted to Commander and became head of the Experimental Clearance
Diving Team based at the Underwater Countermeasures Weapons Establishment (UCWE)
at West Leigh House, Havant just north of
Portsmouth
but he was not a popular choice.
According to Lieutenant Commander Gordon Gutteridge,
over whose head he had been appointed, Crabb “distrusted scientists and avoided
all things scientific.”
Unverified sources report
Crabb as having undertaken a covert mission in the
Suez Canal in 1953. During the summer of 1954,
he and Sydney Knowles (one of
his
wartime naval divers at Gibraltar and in
Italy) were engaged by the Duke of Argyll in an unsuccessful
attempt, under the overall direction of Rear Admiral Patrick Vivian McLaughlin
CB
DSO (Senior
Naval Member and President Ordnance Board until 1953),
to locate and salvage a Spanish galleon, believed to be the SAN JUAN BAPTISTE,
in Tobermory Bay.
Interestingly, a group of 27
photographs documenting this expedition was sold at auction for £90 in Edinburgh
in May 2005.
Naval divers from HMS VERNON had undertaken a
similar expedition in 1950 but had only recovered a few artefacts.
It is intriguing that a magazine’s account of this
previous expedition did not divulge the names of the individuals involved “for
security reasons”.
According to official records, Crabb was finally
released from active service on 8 April 1955 although he “remained attached to
the RNVR so that he could be re-called if necessary”.
In his tweed suit and pork pie hat,
Crabb remained a familiar, ostentatious figure around the
Portsmouth area
although he normally resided in a flat in
London.
His penchant for alcohol remained undiminished.
In Rear Admiral Edmund Nicholas 'Nico' Poland’s
book, The Torpedomen,
Lieutenant Commander Gordon Gutteridge is quoted as saying
of him:
“He remained … a
diver of enormous experience with a singular ability to endure discomfort, but
not given to long, hard slogs underwater.
His lack of fear was unquestioned but his assessment of experimental
equipment and techniques bordered on the bizarre.
By now his personality, behaviour and dress were set in stone; the
quintessentially, curmudgeonly but kindly bantam cock, complete with swordstick
with a silver engraved crab on the knob.
Certainly he was, with his friends, a most pleasant and lively
individual.”
In October 1955, Sydney Knowles
claims to have been involved with Crabb in a covert night diving mission to
inspect the underwater fittings of the Soviet cruiser SVERDLOV when she visited
Portsmouth
in company with the cruiser ALEXANDER SEVAROV and the destroyers SOVERSHENNY,
SMOTRYASHCHY, SMETLIVY and SPOSOBIRY (simultaneously, the light fleet carrier
HMS TRIUMPH (with the CinC Home Fleet, Admiral Sir Michael Denny GCB, CBE, DSO
embarked), the fast minelayer HMS APOLLO and the destroyers HMS DECOY, HMS
DIANA, HMS CHEVRON and HMS CHIEFTAIN were visiting Leningrad).
We now come to the shadowy events
surrounding Crabb’s disappearance.
On 18 April 1956, the Soviet cruiser
ORDZHONIKIDZE, in company with the destroyers SOVERSHENNY and SMOTRYASCHY,
arrived in Portsmouth Naval Base and berthed on South Railway Jetty.
This is the VIP berth immediately in front of the
distinctive
Semaphore
Tower.
ORDZHONIKIDZE carried the
Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev and Premier
Nikolai Bulganin
for talks in London
with the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden.
The previous day, Crabb and someone calling himself ‘Smith’
had booked into the Sally Port Hotel in Old Portsmouth.
Unverified sources said ‘Smith’ was actually a young
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agent called Teddy Davies, Crabb’s MI6
handler, but he was subsequently revealed to be MI6 agent Bernard Smith who had
booked in using his and Crabb's real names.
According to Admiral Poland’s
book, Crabb and Smith had a meeting at the hotel with the Chief Constable, Mr
A C West, who assigned Superintendent Jack Lamport as Crabb’s police liaison
officer.
That afternoon of the 17th, Crabb had tea with the
Commander of HMS VERNON.
In the evening, he met Lieutenant George ‘Franky’
Franklin, a diving officer at HMS VERNON, in a pub and asked him to act as his
diving tender and dresser for a dive he was undertaking.
According to
Franklin,
Crabb said this was in a private capacity and under no circumstances was he to
inform any responsible Naval authority.
At some stage,
Franklin
appropriated a launch from VERNON’s
diving training ship, HMS DEEPWATER, and took it to the boat pound immediately
south of South Railway Jetty.
By the following afternoon, the Soviet ships had
arrived.
Crabb, assisted by
Franklin,
made his first dive from the launch that same day.
During high water at around 1730, he entered the
water about 80 yards from where the Soviet
ships were berthed, but became trapped in the jetty pilings and aborted the dive
after only 20 minutes.
Early the next morning, on 19
April, Crabb accompanied Franklin, and possibly Smith and one or more police
officers, to the launch where Franklin
helped him to dress.
He entered the water at around 0700 but returned 20
minutes later after experiencing some difficulty with his equipment.
After a while, he returned to the water and was
never seen alive again by anyone British.
When Crabb failed to reappear, a cover-up operation was
initiated almost immediately.
Smith checked out of the Sally Port hotel taking
Crabb’s baggage with him.
A few days later, the police removed four pages of
the Sally Port Hotel’s register but not before journalists had already looked at
it.
The removal of the pages aroused their suspicions even
more.
Franklin
was sent on leave with instructions not to talk about the incident to anyone.
It transpired that Crabb had
been spotted by one of the Soviet ships and, Khrushchev made a bantering
reference to the incident at a dinner party with
Eden.
Being unaware of the spying
mission, Eden
was puzzled until briefed on events the following day.
The Soviets subsequently registered a diplomatic
protest.
As the Navy had not been officially involved, and Crabb was
no longer on its books, the Admiralty had difficulty in producing any credible
explanation for Crabb’s disappearance without raising even more questions.
Nevertheless, on 27 April, Rear Admiral J G T Inglis
OBE, the Director of Naval Intelligence, instructed the Admiralty to announce,
but only if pressed, that Crabb had been specially employed in connection with
trials of certain underwater apparatus; he had not returned from a test dive in
Stokes
Bay
on 19 April and must be presumed drowned.
This statement contradicted the known facts so
blatantly that the Prime Minister was taken to task for it in Parliament on 14
May.
Sir
Anthony Eden tried to dismiss the whole matter by saying,
“It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which
Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.”
He then added mysteriously, “I think it necessary,
in the special circumstances of this case, to make it clear that what was done
was done without the authority or the knowledge of Her Majesty's Ministers.
Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.”
The incident certainly caused the UK Government of
the day, and the intelligence services, considerable embarrassment.
It is probably no coincidence that MI6’s
Director, Major General Sir John Sinclair, was relieved by MI5’s Sir Dick White
in 1956.
On 9 June 1957, 14 months after
Crabb’s disappearance, two fishermen discovered a body floating in the water off
Pilsey in Chichester
Harbour,
14 miles to the east of Portsmouth.
The body, dressed in a distinctive Pirelli two-piece
diving suit, was missing its head and hands and some of the chest.
In view of the body’s lengthy immersion in the
water, there was nothing particularly sinister in this.
On 11 June, Lieutenant
Commander William McLanachan, a diving officer from
VERNON,
and Crabb’s ex-wife were called upon to identify the remains.
The physical stature and other characteristics
including body hair colour plus the Admiralty Pattern swim fins, two-piece
diving suit (Pirelli purchased from Heinke of Chichester) and clothing beneath
all matched Crabb’s on the day he disappeared.
Sydney Knowles was asked to identify Crabb’s feet
from a photograph showing his ‘hammer toes’ but was unable to provide positive
confirmation.
At an inquest held on 29 June 1957, the Coroner accepted
the body was Crabb’s and recorded an open verdict.
In the intervening
years, there have been several other theories about the circumstances of Crabb’s
disappearance ranging from allegations that he had been working for the CIA to
others that he had defected to the Russians and was living under an alias in
Moscow.
Patricia Rose, who described herself as Crabb’s
fiancée at the time of his disappearance, even claimed in a September 1974
newspaper interview that he was a double agent training Russian frogmen in the
Black Sea but had passed her a message saying he wanted to return to Britain.
As to the manner of Crabb’s death, it
seems most likely that Crabb succumbed to oxygen poisoning or possibly carbon
dioxide poisoning during his dive as a result of his exertions.
Combined with his unfit state, this led to
unconsciousness and death by drowning.
Other unverified sources state that he was shot in
the head by a Russian using a small calibre weapon when he surfaced between the
destroyers.
Even a South African clairvoyant got in on the act by
writing to the Admiralty in January 1975 to say he/she had been possessed by
Crabb as he relived being sucked into an underwater compartment and suffocated
before his heavily chained body was deposited in the sea about 14 miles north of
Portsmouth.
Most recently, a fictionalised account of
Crabb's life, called ‘Man Overboard’, was published in 2005.
On 26 March 2006, The Mail On Sunday published an
article by its author, Tim Binding, entitled ‘Buster Crabb was murdered - by
MI5’.
In this, Binding wrote that Sydney
Knowles had contacted him after his book had been published to tell him that MI5
knew Crabb intended defecting to the
USSR and
had arranged the mission under the
ORDZHONIKIDZE
specifically to have him eliminated.
Knowles alleged that he was ordered by MI5 to
identify the body found in
Chichester
Harbour as
Crabb although it was definitely not Crabb.
Knowles also alleged that his life was threatened in
Torremolinos in 1989 while he was in discussion with a biographer.
One thing is for certain.
This story will continue to fascinate the British
public for many years to come.
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