IVES, Bertram Henry

Leading Seaman P/J 16592

Royal Navy H.M. Trawler St. Achilleus

Died 1-June-1940 aged 44

Son of Kate Ives, of Chesham, Buckinghamshire
Husband of Evelyn May Ives.

Bertram Ives was born in February 1896 and at the age of just sixteen he joined the navy as a boy entrant. At eighteen, he signed on for twelve years.

At the outbreak of WWI, Bertram was aboard the HMS King George V at Scapa flow. This ship was built at the Portsmouth Dockyard, laid down in January 1911, and completed in October 1912, just two years before the start of the war.

  In 1915 Bertram was posted to a gunnery school in Portsmouth.

One size fits all!

He was later aboard one of the ships making up an expeditionary force sent to North Russia to assist the White Russians in their struggle against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. The rather unusual photograph  on the right shows the tallest and shortest seamen in clothing issued for the voyage.   Bertram Ives was the tallest, and sent this postcard back home; it is marked  March1919.

In 1920 Bertram married Eveyln May Pope at Kingston.

During the following years, Bertram spent time in the Mediterranean and was away for up to two years at a time.  Each time he returned home, he brought back presents as well as bunches of bananas, and oranges. It was a very happy time for his family, which between 1925 and 1933 expaned to include four children, Katherine, Felicity, Mavis and the youngest, Ian.

Bertram retired from the Navy in 1936 and worked as a postman in the village of Banstead, Surrey.  He was recalled in 1939 and a Banstead local, Miss Edna Touzel remembers the Post Office being "emptied overnight" when the postmen were called up.

Betram Ives was posted to the Royal Naval Patrol Service aboard an armed Grimsby trawler, the St Achilleus. H.M. Trawler St. Achilleus had been requisitioned for Royal Navy service in August 1939, flying Pennant: FY 152.  One trip it completed successfully was to Trondheim in Norway, to bring refugees back to England.   Inevitabley, the trawler was called on to evacuate troops from Dunkirk and on the 31st May 1940, on  it's third crossing, it was sunk by a mine in the Dunkirk area. The reported date of death of Leading Seaman Bertram Ives is the following day. 
 
Edna Touzel, whose father Thomas, took over Ives' round remembers her dad coming home and saying " Ives has gone". This news  left the post office staff stunned, as he was their first casualty. At that time, it was custom for postmen to record any monetary gifts given to them at Christmas, and all the postmen agreed that half their collections should go to the family of the postman whose round they had taken over. 

One of Bertram's daughter's, Felicity,  got married  five years later, in 1945. On her borrowed wedding dress, she added a section of Maltese lace brought back as a souvenir years earlier, by Bertram , from the small island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Memorial Reference: Panel 38, Column 1.

PORTSMOUTH NAVAL MEMORIAL

Source : Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Family research by   Christine Kent
Personal details and photographs kindly provided by Mrs Felicity Little, Betram's daughter.

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mailed info@postalheritage.org.uk 12 Jan 2007