Commander William Donald Aelian King, DSO & Bar, DSC (23 June 1910 – 21 September 2012) was a British naval officer, yachtsman and author. He was the oldest participant in the first solo non-stop, around-the-world yacht race, the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and the only person to command a British submarine on both the first and last days of World War II.
Brought up by his mother and grandmother, King went to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. He was first assigned to the battleship Resolution, and later became commanding officer of the submarine Snapper. He commanded three separate RN submarines in World War II, and was promoted to commander and awarded seven medals during the war. King not only survived World War II, but succeeded in a singlehanded circumnavigation in 1973 on his third attempt. During the latter journey, he managed to reach port despite a collision with a large sea creature 400 miles (640 km) southwest of Australia.
Family background and childhood
William Donald Aelian King was born to William Albert de Courcy King and Georgina Marie MacKenzie in 1910. King's great-grandfather, William King, was Chair of Mineralogy and Geology at Queen's College, Galway. He was appointed when the College first opened in 1849. William King was the first to argue that Neanderthals were a species separate from modern humans.
King's father, William Albert de Courcy King, was born in 1875. He married Georgina Marie, daughter of a "Mr. D. F. MacKenzie, of Collingwood Grange, Camberley, Surrey" in June 1908. De Courcy King attended Royal Military Academy, Woolwich and then the School of Military Engineering, Chatham. He received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in 1894. Prior to World War I, his postings included Saint Lucia in the 1890s, where the Engineers constructed gun emplacements and fortified coal stations, and South Africa, where the Engineers built blockhouses (designed by Major S. R. Rice, RE) during the Anglo Boer War. De Courcy King was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in 1916 while a major, during the First World War, serving later as Lieutenant-Colonel with the 36th (Ulster) Division in Belgium. He was killed on 27 May 1917 at the age of 42, and lies buried at Dranoutre Military Cemetery in Belgium.
As a result of his father's death, Bill King was brought up by his mother and grandmother. His MacKenzie grandmother was a formidable woman who learned to ski at the age of 75 and still sailed in her eighties.
After preparatory school, at the age of twelve, King was sent to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in Devon. In the 2006 documentary about the disastrous 1968 round-the-world yacht race; Deep Water, King said that he had been a boxer and a "champion long-distance runner" in his youth.
From December 1927 to April 1930, King was posted to the battleship Resolution, which served in the Mediterranean.
During this time he became a midshipman. From June 1932 to January 1934, he was posted to the submarine Orpheus, which served near China. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1932. In April 1935, King was appointed first lieutenant of the service vessel Pigmy, formerly the Polish sailing vessel Iskra, used by the Royal Navy at Gibraltar to supply the 8th Submarine Squadron.
After seven months, he was transferred to Starfish, then to Narwhal, before being sent to Portsmouth for the Submarine Command Course at HMS Dolphin. Having successfully qualified to command a submarine, a four-month stint aboard the submarine depot ship Titania followed, before, in May 1939, King travelled to Malta to take command of Snapper.
During World War II, King served in three submarines of the Royal Navy: Snapper, Trusty, and Telemachus. He patrolled the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Far East.
At the outbreak of the war, King and Snapper were sent to patrol the North Sea. King was commanding officer on Snapper from 16 April 1939 to April 1940. On 3 December 1939, Snapper sustained a direct hit from a British aircraft while returning to Harwich after a patrol, but without taking damage.
Between December 1939 and July 1940, Snapper sank six ships, mainly in the Skagerrak Strait. These include the tanker Moonsund, the merchant ship Florida, the minesweepers H. M. Behrens and Carsten Janssen, and the armed trawlers Portland and Cygnus. Snapper was later lost under command of Lieutenant Geoffrey Vernon Prowse, either in a minefield or sunk by German depth charges.
In 1941, King served on the T-class submarine Trusty in the Mediterranean Sea. On 4 December 1941 Trusty unsuccessfully launched torpedoes against a boat which may have been the Italian torpedo boat Orsa.
From 21 July 1943 to August 1945, King was commanding officer of the T-class submarine Telemachus. Telemachus dropped off a special forces unit in western Malaya in October 1944.
Operating from a joint British-Dutch base at Ceylon, Telemachus sank the Japanese Kadai-class submarine I-166 in the Strait of Malacca on 17 July 1944. Telemachus tracked I-166 for 30 minutes, then fired a spread of six torpedoes. One torpedo hit, and sank the Japanese boat with 89 lives lost; five men on bridge watch survived to be rescued by the Japanese.
During the war, King was promoted to commander, and awarded seven medals, including the DSO on 9 May 1940 for "daring, endurance and resource in the conduct of hazardous and successful operations in His Majesty's Submarines against the enemy", and the Distinguished Service Cross on 6 September 1940 "for bravery and determination during arduous and successful patrols in H.M. Submarines" both whilst in command of Snapper.
A bar was added to his DSO on 16 January 1945 "For outstanding courage, skill and determination in one of H.M. Submarines in successful patrols in Far Eastern waters" (specifically the sinking of I-166). In 2006, he received an eighth medal, the Arctic Emblem.