Denys Rayner

Commander D. A. Rayner DSC. and Bar, VRD, RNVR was born in 1908, joined the RNVR as a midshipman in 1925 and by 1939 had reached the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. At the beginning of WW2 he commanded trawlers that patrolled waters round the main fleet base of Scapa Flow. In 1943 Rayner was given command of the destroyer Shikari and thus became the first RNVR officer in the history of the British navy to be appointed to such a command. He survived the sinkiing of HMS Warwick in 1943. He was decorated twice and mentioned in despatches. His novels include “The Enemy Below” used as a basis for the film directed in 1957 by Richard Powell starring Robert Mitchum -Rayner's British commander became an American - and Curt Jurgens, “The Long Fight”, “The Crippled Tanker” and “The Small Spark of Courage”.

Rayner also wrote a first hand account of convoy defence operations in the North Atlantic between 1939-1945 called “Escort – the Battle of the Atlantic” published by Kimber (1955) and reissued by the Naval Institute Press (1998).

A member of the Royal Cruising Club, Rayner was a keen yachtsman enjoying coastal and deep sea cruising in small family type sailing boats of his own design. He was a founder of a small boatbuilder in Donnington, Berkshire in 1961 which, when it moved in 1963 to Waterlooville near Portsmouth in Hampshire grew to be the enormously successful Westerly Boats Ltd., a company, which after after Rayner’s death in 1967, grew to be Britain's biggest yacht building company and a world leader in family yachts.

Denys Rayner lived to see both his first two fibre glass designs sailed across the Atlantic (see “A Voyage to America” by Simon Baddeley, Roving Commissions (7) 1966 (RCC Press:London March 1967 pp. 9-30)) by relatively inexperienced seafarers of the kind he dreamed of encouraging to sail wisely in deep waters. His practical guidebooks for them include “Small Boat Sailing”, Collins Nutshell Books (1962) and “Safety in Small Craft”, Coles,Harrap,De Graff (1961).