Western Morning News :: Echoes Of A Distant Tragedy

By Paul Berger

For a man approaching his centenary, former Royal Navy lieutenant Bill Easton becomes incredibly animated when he talks about a broken promise made more than 70 years ago. “I’m 98-and-a-half,” he says proudly, lying in his bed at Hillcrest House Nursing Home in Looe, Cornwall.

It is July 27, 2003 – 74 years and one day since he lost 18 comrades in an explosion aboard HMS Devonshire, near the island of Skiathos, Greece. At the mention of the tragedy, and of a Greek councillor’s recent threat to exhume the bodies of his lost friends buried in Greece and throw them in a ditch, Bill becomes incensed.

He propels himself forward onto his left arm and gesticulates with his right: “Why are the Greeks bringing all of this up now? We paid them for the ground and they promised that they would not dig them up.

“I was very angry when they said they would throw their bodies in a ditch. Why can’t they let sleeping dogs lie?” The British servicemen were buried in Nea Ionia, just outside the central port of Volos.

Volos councillors announced in May that they wanted to move the cemetery so that they could build a park on the site.

Because of limited space in Greece, exhumations are a fairly common practice, and most of the graves in the cemetery are Greek.

Aware in 1929 of the tendency to move graves, the marines built a low wall around their comrades to try to protect them.

But Konstantinos Morfogiannis, a Volos council member charged with cemetery maintenance, said last week that unless the British Government compensated the city for 72 years of cemetery fees – £85,000 – the bodies would be thrown in a ditch.

The fee for the exhumations has since been reduced to £28,000, as discussions continue between the British Embassy and the council about payment.

When Bill is told that the Ministry of Defence has pledged to pay for the bodies to be exhumed and transferred to a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery near Athens, he relaxes.

“If that happens that’s fair enough, I suppose,” he says, leaning back on his pillow.

“It’s not so bad. It’s not so bad. It’s not so bad. If they give them a decent burial somewhere else, we can’t complain.” HMS Devonshire, a County-class cruiser, had only been launched two years previously when the explosion ripped through a gun turret during firing exercises on July 26, 1929.

Bill, then aged 24, was in the cordite handling room below the gun with two other men.

The burning cordite, which was used as the propellant for firing shells, rained down on the men, who frantically stamped it out as it hit the ground.

In a similar explosion aboard HMS Lion during the Battle of Jutland in 1915, everyone in the cordite room was killed or drowned after the hatch doors were locked and the room flooded to prevent the ammunition exploding.

Bill raises himself onto his left arm again, and says: “Bits of cordite were coming down from everywhere. The whole ship could have gone up. We thought we would never get out, like the poor devils on the Lion.

“Thirteen men in the cordite room drowned on that ship and we could have drowned too if my chum hadn’t opened the hatch to let us out.” He laughs: “I was a trifle perturbed. I was delighted to see that hatch open. I think I went straight up from the cordite room without touching the rungs.

“I heard the angels singing in heaven and I didn’t like the sound of it.” Two of the bodies of the 18 men who died that day – the largest naval loss since the First World War – were never found. One of those was Sergeant Walter Snell, of Tiverton in Devon, who was blown overboard.

“If the top of the turret hadn’t gone up it would have come down on us and blown the ship up,” said Bill.

“Sergeant Snell was underneath the top of the turret. We went round and round looking for his body but it was never found. It was terrible. He was a fine man, a very kind man, everybody liked him.

“After the explosion they kept us up on deck for five days so that we could recover from the cordite fumes.

“I knew all of the men who died that day by sight. We built a little wall around the graves to let local people know that there was something different about these men.” Bill, who was born on February 18, 1905, in Devonport, travelled around the world with the Navy, but his home has always remained by the sea in the Westcountry.

He moved from Plymouth to Saltash, and three years ago to Looe.

“I like to be by the sea. It has always looked after me very well, although now and again it has given me a shock,” he said.