Kingsmill Bates

Captain Kingsmill Bates (November 3 1916 - May 6 2006) was a British sailor who made repairs to the radar for the battleship Duke of York during the Battle of North Cape during the Second World War.

Born in 1916, Bates had served in the Merchant Navy before transferring to the RNVR in 1939. He was appointed to the position of electrical officer aboard the Duke of York.

In the Battle of North Cape on 26 December 1943, the Duke of York intercepted the German battleship Scharnhorst with the intention of sinking her. At a range of 12,000 yards, in bad light conditions due to the gloom of the North Atlantic in midwinter, the Duke of York opened fire with 14 inch shells. Due to bad light, the Duke of York was relying on radar to be able to locate the other ship.

Scharnhorst returned fire, one shell passing through the Duke of York's tripod mast. The immediate effect was that the Duke of York's radar stopped working.

In spite of gale-force winds, darkness and cold, Bates climbed the damaged mast and found that the gyroscopic stabiliser on the radar had been knocked down. He was able to fix it and the radar was working again in a few minutes. With radar repaired, Duke of York completed the engagement and the German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk.

Bates was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions. His efforts to repair the radar were given wide but increasingly inaccurate publicity, and to his exasperation he found that he was depicted as "Barehands Bates", holding wires together while shells whistled around him.

At the end of the war, he gained a permanent commission, finally ending his naval career as deputy director of the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment on the Isle of Portland, Dorset. He retired in 1969.

He then ran a petrol station in Wiltshire before retiring again and moving to Lincolnshire.

Sources

* "The Times", Obituaries, 18 May 2006, p. 62