John Rippon RM

John Rippon holding a two year old Angela after arriving back from in his WW2 service

Angela has kindly provided the RMA Gig Club with a personal biography of her father and his service in the Royal Marines.

“My father, John, one of seven children, was born in 1919 in the village of Esh Winning, County Durham. 

His father, grandfather and uncles were all coal miners in the nearby Cornsay colliery, but like his eldest brother who joined the Army, my father wanted a different career.  So as soon as he came of age, he joined the Royal Marines and even though he left the service in the mid 1950’s, he remained a Royal Marine in his heart until the day he died, aged 84, in 2003.

When war was declared in 1939, he was assigned to HMS Rodney, on which he served as a member of the gun crew on one of the 16 inch guns.  On that ship he saw service in Iceland, the North Atlantic and Malta Convoys as well as off the coast of Africa.

As a little girl I loved hearing the stories he was prepared to talk about but like so many men who returned from that war, he was reluctant to discuss in detail everything he had witnessed and been involved in. But for me, the stories he was prepared to tell sounded like wonderful adventures.  His description especially of how the guns of the Rodney famously ripped through the great German Battleship Bismarck , sounded thrilling to me as a small child.  It was only much later, as a grown woman, when I made a film about him for ITV, that I realised the full hell of what that battle must have been like for him and the crews of all of the ships that were involved in action.   

In particular, how his 16 inch guns fired 340 shells into the hulk of the Bismarck, most at a range of under 3,000 feet, as their captain zig-zagged their pocket battleship down the length of the mighty Bismarck to avoid that ships own fire and, as a result, inflict most of the crucial damage on Bismarck’s hull.

In 1943 he was assigned to another battleship, this time HMS Newfoundland, and served in the Mediterranean during the Sicily Campaign, where they were torpedoed . They had to limp to Boston, Massachusetts to be repaired and re-fitted.  It was there that he discovered American hospitality, along with apple pie and ice cream which remained his most favourite dessert for the rest of his life.

Whilst I was working in Boston in 1984 as the CBS correspondent for Theatre and the Arts, my parents joined me for a two week holiday, and my father was able to make his own personal pilgrimage to the areas that he remembered and the families he had met.

After Boston, it was off to the Far East where HMS Newfoundland fought alongside the Australian Navy for a year, until they joined the American 5th Fleet in Japan.

He had so many experiences there, from being attacked by Japanese Kamikaze planes to being marooned with his company on a small Japanese Island after they had made an assault landing, only to be “rescued” by an American warship.  On cap it all, he and the entire ship’s company were in Tokyo harbour to witness the surrender of the Japanese to the Americans aboard the USS Missouri in September 1945.

Once the war had ended, he remained in the Far East for several months and used the opportunity to take lots of photographs. Throughout the war he carried a small box camera with him so I an fortunate to have an album full of photographs from his various deployments,  most striking of which are some stunning images of rural Japan in 1945. 

His last deployment on HMS Newfoundland was to repatriate prisoners of war from Japan to Australia, making their way home, the long way round via New Zealand, the Pacific, the Panama Canal and finally arriving back in the home port of Plymouth in December 1946.

I had been born in 1944 and my father had seen me only briefly a few weeks after my birth.  After that he and my mother were separated by the war for just over two years.

His return , and that of his shipmates, was a huge day for Plymouth. The Daily Mirror photographer was there to capture the moment when sailors and Royal Marines were finally reunited with wives and families.

I was two years and two months old and had no clue who this man in uniform was, having been brought up in an all female household by my grandmother, mother and aunties - hence the very sour expression on my face in this photograph of our first encounter!

As you can probably imagine, for the rest of his life,  I adored my father and was so proud of him . It’s why I’ve always been thrilled to do anything I could for the Royal Marines, from compering the annual concert by the combined Royal Marine Bands at the Royal Albert Hall to now becoming Patron of the RMA Gig Club - it’s exactly the sort of thing that my dad would have loved doing. 

And I so look forward to meeting all of you very soon.

Very best wishes

Angela"