On this day in 1940, Percy Charles George Dudd (1918-1940) died in a British submarine in the Second World War.
An able seaman in HMS Regulus, he was 22 when the vessel was lost off Italy in 1940.
The Regulus, commanded by Lt-Cdr Frederick Basil Currie, was reported missing after leaving Alexandria to patrol the southern Adriatic.
She was believed to have been mined in the Straits of Taranto between late November and early December 1940.
Regulus, a Rainbow-class submarine built for the Royal Navy in the 1930s, left Alexandria between November 18 and 1940 and was reported overdue when she failed to return to the Egyptian port on December 6 that year.
She was lost with all hands.
The Italians claimed to have sunk a submarine – possibly the Regulus – on November 26.
A man whose uncle was one of the crew members said he had been told that ‘the submarine had not been repainted after being in the Far East, which made it an easy target for the Italian air force’.
This, he said, was ‘confirmed by an interpreter, who had listened in to the Italian messages and she had relayed this information to my family many years later during a dinner party’.
Percy, one of 56 officers and men in the submarine, is remembered on the Plymouth Naval Memorial. Overlooking Plymouth Sound, it commemorates more than 20,000 naval personnel lost or buried at sea.
Paul Roberts
NOTES
Born on August 28, 1918 in Bedminster, near Bristol, Percy was the son of Percy Charles Dudd (1885-1924) and Frances Ellen Haskins (1890-1950).
Percy was a stepson of William George Delve (1897-1953), who served in the Great War. William married Blanche Roberts (1894-1979) in 1919. Blanche was a daughter of William Roberts (1855-1923), the eldest son of John Roberts (1829-1919), my great-great grandfather who had 30 grandsons serving in the Great War.
