Hidden depths: Ray Burke on the extraordinary life of a submarine commander and sailor

The first individual to carry the Irish tricolour around the treacherous waters of Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America did so while completing a solo circumnavigation of the world at the age of 62 years.

The lone sailor, William (Bill) King, was the only British submarine commander to survive combat for the entire six years of the second World War, after which he spent the rest of his life in Oranmore, Co Galway.

He embarked on the 28,000-mile circumnavigation in his self-designed 42-foot yacht Galway Blazer II, named after his local winter foxhunting troop, to exorcise his memories of the war when, he recalled, “nearly all my friends had been killed”.

He endured big delays for essential repairs after losing his mast when capsized by an exceptionally strong hurricane 1,000 miles south of Cape Town, South Africa, and later when his yacht was holed below the waterline by a killer shark 400 miles from the coast of Australia. Replacing unsuitable rigging caused further interruption.

King was the son of a British Army Royal Engineer colonel who was killed by a shell in 1917. His great-grandfather was the academic who coined the term Neanderthal Man while professor of mineralogy, geology and natural history at Queen’s College Galway (now the University of Galway) between 1849 and 1883.

He learned the fundamentals of sailing from his grandmother and he was sent to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Devon, aged 13 years.

Aged 17 when he went to sea on HMS Nelson, King was unusual among naval cadets in being immune to seasickness. Taking command of his first submarine aged 29 he was sent to patrol the North Sea, where three of every four British submarines were destroyed with the loss of all crew in the early years of the war.

In six months he went from being the most junior lieutenant in command of a submarine to being senior submarine officer in the flotilla. “So few of us now remained that we could not cover the vital spots even when spread out singly,” he recalled.

North Sea patrols lasted three weeks. “A submarine is a most disagreeable place in which to pass long periods”, King wrote in a memoir. “Even when you are not being depth-charged or stuck on the ocean floor, every man is kept tense and uncomfortable”.

Every crewman did four-hour watch duties, expect the commander, who had to be “alert and prepared all the time, 24 hours out of the 24, hardly daring to sleep, but knowing he must, or the tiresome apparatus that is his brain won’t work properly”.

By mid-January 1941 King was ill in hospital when his submarine, Snapper, was sent to the Bay of Biscay under a substitute commander. It never returned. For most of his next patrol he spent six months as commander of the only British submarine in the South China Sea after the fall of Singapore.

Submarines without air conditioning should not have been sent to patrol those equatorial waters, he said, but no replacements were available. When King showed his records of heat, humidity and body sores on his second submarine, Trusty, to the navy doctor, he was told: “What your instruments have recorded cannot support human life.”

After doctor’s orders confined him to shore work in England and Malta for eight months, King took command of his third submarine, Telemachus, named after the only son of Odysseus and Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey. He returned to the Far East with a 60-man crew, although “owing to heavy losses we were having to crew submarines with semi-trained men”. His orders were to attack the ships and U-boats supplying the Japanese armies that had invaded British territories in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya (now Malaysia) and Burma (now Myanmar).

Like Telemachus in The Odyssey, his mission was to oust the Usurper, the stand-alone final word in the opening Telemachus episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose wanderings around 1904 Dublin correspond to events in the original Greek epic.

King sank a large Japanese U-boat, killing 89 crewmen, on his first patrol north of Singapore, but had to dive and remain deep underwater to avoid chasing Japanese ships and bombers. He lost his pursuers just before he would have had to surface or die from lack or air.

He returned to Galway after the war and married Anita Leslie, whom he had met in Beirut. They lived together in Oranmore Castle and on their organic farm nearby. Among those to visit him in Oranmore was Akira Tsurukame, son of the chief engineer on the Japanese submarine that King had sunk in 1944.

King died in 2012 and is buried with Anita beside Glaslough lake on her childhood home estate, Castle Leslie, in Co Monaghan. His epitaph is the last two lines of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Requiem: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter, home from the hill.”