David Scott (Royal Navy officer)

Retiring in 1980, he became a director of Civil and Marine, a sea-dredged aggregates company, with which he remained involved up to his death. Scott was loved by so many of the people who knew him, some of the men who Scott commanded over decided to name a street after him, David Scott Avenue, located in Midlothian, Scotland. Sir David Scott died on 20 January 2006. He had a wife, Pamela, and three children.

After exhausting other avenues, Scott blew the whistle on the Chevaline development to the First Sea Lord on the grounds that cost and time had not been properly evaluated and that certain facts had been concealed. By 1976 the cost had doubled to £600 million; it was eventually to cost over £1billion at contemporary values.

As a result, the department was reorganised; Scott became the chief Polaris programme executive, reporting to the First Sea Lord and with responsibility for both scientific and naval aspects. His involvement with the Polaris programme would last for seven years. He was appointed C.B. in 1974 and K.B.E in 1977.

On return home in 1973 he was appointed deputy controller of the UK Polaris programme, Britain’s submarine-borne nuclear deterrent. At this time, the post reported to the Navy Board member responsible for equipment procurement, the Controller of the Navy, and had no oversight of scientific aspects.

Promoted rear-admiral in 1971, he was posted to Washington D.C. as the head of the British naval mission, forming useful relations with politicians, with Pentagon officials and a friendship with the charismatic US Navy chief, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.

In 1962 his course at the US Naval War College was the start of a warm relationship with the US Navy. He then commanded a submarine squadron and the depot ship and, after a tour in the Admiralty, the guided missile destroyer HMS Fife. While in Fife, he made a circumnavigation of the globe.

In the next ten years Scott led the midget submarine development unit, undertook staff and training duties and commanded a frigate and two submarines. He achieved the first submerged transatlantic crossing by a diesel submarine in HMS Andrew in 1953, a protracted test of snort mast breathing and of the crew’s patience — near-surface dived passages are not comfortable in submarines.

In 1948 he was appointed flag lieutenant to the C-in-C Far East Fleet and was on the fringes of the famous escape of the frigate Amethyst from under the guns of the Chinese Communists on the Yangtse river. This unfortunate entanglement resulted in damage and casualties to four naval ships before Amethyst made her exit. Because she had destroyed all her secret radio codes against capture, Scott’s contribution was to devise and signal to Amethyst a " one-time pad" encryption system based on her nominal crew list which was fortunately available at both ends.

In 1946, as second-in-command of the destroyer HMS Volage, he received a C-in-C’s commendation for his courage and coolness when his ship was mined by the Albanians in the Corfu Channel disaster. In May a force of British warships had passed between Corfu and the mainland and had been fired on by Albanian shore batteries, prompting an angry diplomatic response. A second force of two cruisers and two destroyers was consequently sent through the channel in order to demonstrate legal rights.

But Operation Mincemeat in 1943 provided the most unconventional and dramatic story, indeed one that has featured in novel and film as The Man Who Never Was. Scott believed that a large canister embarked at Holy Loch in Scotland was "optical instruments", as marked, until, off the Spanish port of Huelva, it was revealed that it contained a body dressed as a major of Royal Marines. The body, of a man who had died of pneumonia, exhibited, Mincemeat’s planners were assured by the renowned pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury, exhibited all the characteristics of drowning. On it were carefully devised high-level documents purporting to show that the Allies were planning to invade Southern Europe through Greece, while holding Sardinia and Corsica.

Rear-Admiral Sir David Scott, KBE, CB (5 April 1921 – 20 January 2006) was an officer in the Royal Navy from 1937 to 1980. He was second in command and served as a first lieutenant aboard HMS Seraph during Operation Mincemeat. Scott served on ten submarines in peace and war, commanding five of them. Scott was a popular officer noted for his gentlemanly way with subordinates and his sharp sense of humour.