Commander Hugh Boyce, DSC

As senior staff electrical officer of the Sheerness Minesweeping Flotilla, Hugh Boyce was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in clearing the Scheldt estuary of mines, an operation which opened up the port of Antwerp in the autumn of 1944. This vital step enabled the first Allied convoy to reach this important port on November 29, 1944. It completely transformed the sup-ply position of most of the Allied armies in North-West Europe, whose advance had been hampered by shortages of fuel and other supplies since the late summer. Herbert (always known as Hugh) Boyce was born in 1911 in Devonport, where his father, a naval rating, was based. After his father retired from the Navy as a petty officer in 1922, the family moved to Street, Somerset, where Boyce went to school.

Advised by a consultant to leave school there, since he suffered from asthma, he began his working life at the age of' 13 as a labourer on his grandfather's farm at Dundry.  At 16 he became an apprentice electrician with the shoe firm Clarks in Street. After obtaining his diploma, he had various posts with electricity companies in the south-vest of England before going to South Africa in 1936 as an electrical engineer with the Victoria Falls Power Company. He was still in South Africa when the Second World War began, and he attempted to enlist. Permission was not at first given, since power generation was a reserved occupation. But in 1940 he was allowed to apply to join the Navy, and in that year he was commissioned as an electrical officer in the Royal Naval Reserve. After training, he specialised in electrical and magnetic mine-sweeping, spending a good deal of time at sea before being sent to South Africa in 1941 to supervise the fitting out of minesweepers and to train crews.

He spent the next two years in South Africa, based at Simonstown, before returning to Britain in 1943, where he was appointed electrical officer of the 120 minesweepers of the Sheerness Flotilla, under Captain Hopper. Their task was to keep the Channel free of mines for coastal convoys. For the D-Day landings Boyce was responsible for fitting out two flotillas of minesweepers for operations off Arromanches on Gold Beach, and to supervise their task, he and Hopper sailed for Normandy.  In the aftermath of the landings, main-taming the supply of fuel became a pressing problem as the Allied armies advanced from the beach-heads towards the Belgian and German frontiers. The rapid drive of Patton's US Third Army had ground to a halt 100 miles short of its goal, the Saar industrial area, in late August, while to the north the British 2nd Army, which reached Antwerp on September 4, was also short of fuel.

Hopper and Boyce returned to Sheerness to be told that Montgomery was insisting to the Commander-in-Chief Nore, Admiral Sir John Tovey, that the

Scheldt must be cleared of mines to enable supplies to reach the Allied armies through Antwerp. Boyce and a fellow officer were dispatched at speed by motor torpedo boat to Ostend, from where Boyce proceeded by Jeep to reconnoitre the south shore of the West Scheldt.  While inspecting the damaged jetty at Terneuzen, he noticed some papers tucked behind a board in the pill-box on the shore. These gave the dispositions of the German minefields at the mouth of the West Scheldt, a discovery of incalculable value. 

Reporting back to Tovey, Boyce soon returned with Hopper in command of 50 minesweepers, which proceeded to blow up more than 400 mines in the mouth of the Scheldt, a hazardous enough proceeding in any event and one conducted under fierce fire from German forces who had still not been dislodged from Walcheren and South Beveland, to the north.

Boyce personally made safe several mines which had been dropped by German  aircraft by night. During the operation the minesweeping force lost eight of its ships. When it was completed Hopper and Boyce kept their fingers devoutly crossed as the first relief convoy inched its way up the Scheldt with its precious cargoes, and gained the haven of Antwerp without loss.

At the end of the war the Sheerness Flotilla was ordered to clear the Dutch coast-line of enemy mines. Hopper and Boyce were supervising the sweep from the HQ ship HMS Prompt when she detonated an acoustic mine and suffered severe damage and engine-room casualties.  Boyce went below and restored an emergency supply to keep the ship from sinking, while another vessel came alongside to take off the survivors and wounded.

After the war he was offered a perm-anent commission in the Royal Navy's newly established electrical branch and was drafted to the British Pacific Fleet as its first electrical officer, based in the cruiser Belfast. Subsequent appointments included spells in the cruisers Nigeria and Bermuda and, as senior staff electrical officer, with the aircraft carrier Theseus, flagship of the training squadron at Portland, 1954-56. His final appointment, in 1958, was to the planning division of the Director-General of Dockyards in Bath, where he helped to supervise the building and refitting of all naval ships.

He retired from the Navy in 1966, but further employment awaited him as a staff technical officer in the Nuclear Division of the Ordnance Board. There, for the next ten years, he worked on aspects of nuclear weapons for le armed ser-vices, specifically the safety of nuclear weapons in submarines and aircraft.

In final retirement after 1976, he enjoyed his garden, playing squash (he had a¾vrays been a keen sportsman) and his family.

Hugh Boyce married Madeline Manley in South Africa in 1940, and they had three sons. His wife died in 2000, while in hospital after a car accident. Boyce, who died on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, is survived by his three sons: Admiral Lord Boyce, former Chief of Defence Staff; Sir Graham Boyce, a former Ambassador to Egypt; and Professor Philip Boyce, head of the department of psychological medicine at Sydney University and President of the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatry.

Commander Hugh Boyce, DSC, naval electrical officer, was born on July 10, 1911. He died on, June 6, 2004, aged 92.

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