Saturday, 13 July 2024

THE LITTLE-KNOWN REASON WHY ‘UNCLE BILL’ WANTED TO TEACH SO MANY TO SWIM

A plaque on Falmouth’s Custom House Quay reads: “Remembering the local people who gave their support to Falmouth Swimming Club.  None more so than William ‘Uncle Bill’ Boulton, who taught a generation of local children to swim from these steps.”

 

For “that generation,” read hundreds of enthusiastic and appreciative youngsters in the 1960s and ‘70s.

 

Uncle Bill, who died in 1978, was one of the waterfront’s best-known characters. 

 

But what was not well-known about him was precisely why he was so motivated to spend so much time passing on his own expertise to so many others.

 

I’ll wager that few if any of those he taught to swim realised that he was a survivor of one of the darkest episodes in Royal Naval history.

 

He was serving on the battlecruiser HMS Repulse when it, along with the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, was sunk by Japanese torpedoes and bombs off the east coast of Malaya during the Second World War. 

 

The vessels had no effective air cover and around 1,200 men were lost. 

 

For such a scale of loss, remarkably little has been recorded about the event – and you will certainly find nothing relating to Uncle Bill’s involvement.

 

There is reference to what became known as “the naval battle of Malaya” in the BBC’s WW2 People’s War archive, with Commander R V Ward, another survivor, lamenting the fact that “no-one seems to have heard of the awful event of 10 December 1941.”

 

He recalled how everyone on the Repulse and Prince of Wales lost all their possessions and how those who remained alive had to swim in shark-infested waters for 90 minutes before being rescued by other naval vessels.

 

Bill Boulton was a real-life uncle to Falmouth GP Dr Rob Jones, who told me this week: “Like so many of his generation, he just did not want to talk about his wartime experiences; certainly he kept very quiet about the sinking and its aftermath.

 

“To the extent that he did talk about it, he always said that he would never have survived that ordeal in the sea if he had not already learnt to swim – and that was why he was so keen to teach others.

 

“I was one of those youngsters who he taught to swim from those quay steps. I was just 12 when he died. People still remember him and speak very fondly of him; he was a very charismatic man.”

 

He added: “My uncle was one of a large number of men from Cornwall and Devon who served on those ships in the war and who went down with them or spent so long in the sea awaiting rescue.”

 

Twenty-odd years later, Uncle Bill was part of the regular summer evening scene at Falmouth’s Custom House Quay basin, where large crowds were thrilled by open-air entertainment including swimming galas and water polo matches, complete with superb running commentaries by Monty Banks with his megaphone on the diving raft.

The plaque dedicated to Uncle Bill was officially unveiled in 2017 at a ceremony involving John Murray - whose parents Pearl and Paddy (a county champion) were heavily involved in running the swimming club – and John Kent, who succeeded Bill and was also part of the successful water polo team at that time. 

No comments:

Post a Comment