Remembering Jack Glover: Navy decoder and shipmate of novelist Alistair MacLean

Jack Glover, who was a mate of novelist Alistair MacLean in HMS Royalist, lived his later years in Plymouth’s Millbay. He sadly died this month, aged 101.

By The Captain.

Jack Glover was born in Leeds on 23rd Oct 1923. After leaving school, he trained as an accountant and in 1942 was called up and sent to HMS Royal Arthur (aka Butlins Skegness), where his naval communications training started.

Coders were the specialised members of the communications branch who encoded and decoded all the classified signal traffic. This required speed and precision (difficult sometimes to achieve both simultaneously). Jack, with his training and experience as an accountant, would have made a natural choice for this specification.

His first ship after training was the anti-submarine trawler, HMS Butser, based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. After further specialised training in September 1943, Jack was sent to the cruiser, HMS Royalist, just coming into service from Scotts of Greenock - where he encountered and became good friends with Alistair Patterson (aka the author of the best seller, HMS Ulysses, Alistair MacLean.)

Jack’s time in her included operations in support of the Russian Convoys and against the German battleship Tirpitz (operations that undoubtedly helped form the basis of HMS Ulysses). In due course, Royalist moved to the Med, in support of the Allied landings in the south of France and the liberation of the Greek islands & mainland. Finally, she joined the Pacific Fleet and assisted in the liberation of Burma (now Myanmar) and then Malaya (now Malaysia). Jack was present on his ship at the liberation of Singapore on 11th September 1945.

In early 1946, HMS Royalist returned to Portsmouth and Jack was discharged from the Royal Navy on 11th May 1945. He returned to life as an accountant and in 1949, married Joan Taylor, who pre-deceased him. In London, he worked for Price Waterhouse and then Deloitte. His work included auditing two of the City’s Livery Companies, the Fishmongers (where he was a Freeman) and the Watermen.

In 1952, he moved to Brazil, where his daughter Jill was born and where he spent the rest of his working life. Jack retired to the Millbay area of Plymouth more than 30 years ago and spent the last few months of his life in Nazareth House. He died peacefully last Friday evening.