Orders, Decorations and Medals

An extremely rare Second World War “V.C. action” D.S.M. group of five awarded to Able Seaman W. J. A. Cooper, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, who was decorated for his part in the Jervis Bay’s famous duel with the Admiral Scheer in November 1940 - ‘crippled, in flames, unable to reply, for nearly an hour the Jervis Bay held the German’s fire’, thereby allowing the majority of her convoy to escape

Distinguished Service Medal, G.VI.R. (C/LDX. 3515 W. J. A. Cooper, A.B., R.N.V.R.); 1939-45 Star; Atlantic Star; Defence and War Medals, the first with contact wear and severe edge bruises over surname, otherwise generally very fine and better (5) £4000-5000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The collection of Medals formed by the Late Clive Nowell.

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D.S.M. London Gazette 23 January 1941.

For courage and devotion to duty when H.M.S. Jervis Bay, defending a large convoy, was sunk by a powerful German warship.

The same London Gazette entry continues.

Among those who went down in Jervis Bay there must have been many, and among the survivors others, whose gallantry, were the truth known, deserved a decoration. The above awards should be taken as an honour to their ship as well as those who earned them. Three further medals for this action will shortly be gazetted.

In total, therefore, in addition to the posthumous V.C. awarded to Captain E. S. F. Fegen, R.N. - ‘For valour in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect’ - the crew of Jervis Bay won a D.S.O., a D.S.C., a C.G.M. and seven D.S.Ms.

William James Albert Cooper was born in Tottenham, London in April 1918 and joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1937. Mobilised in August 1939, he joined the armed merchant cruiser H.M.S. Jervis Bay in the following month, shortly before her famous encounter with the Admiral Scheer. Allocated to P1 Gun as a sight-setter, he was to remain at his post throughout the action, until it was evident that the fore part of the ship had been abandoned.

Hopeless odds.

The property of the Aberdeen & Commonwealth Line, the Jervis Bay had been requisitioned by the Admiralty in August 1939, but in common with other armed merchant cruisers of the period, stood little chance if confronted by enemy capital ships, being unarmoured and poorly compartmented - weaknesses painfully exposed in the equally gallant last stand of the Rawalpindi in November 1939, against the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

But the Jervis Bay’s weaknesses were not purely of a structural nature, for her seven 6-inch guns were of the Great War period and no match for the modern firepower of her likely adversaries - and so proved the case on 5 November 1940 when, escorting 38 ships across the Atlantic and in a position approximately 1000 miles east of Newfoundland, she encountered the vastly superior Admiral Scheer, the latter armed with six 11-inch guns, in addition to a secondary armament of 5.9-inch guns.

Yet in the full knowledge that his guns could never hope to reach his adversary, Captain Fegen closed the enemy to draw his fire from the scattering convoy, and kept him at bay for nearly an hour, while his command was decimated by a merciless torrent of accurate fire - within 15 minutes of the commencement of the action most of Jervis Bay’s 6-inch guns were put out of action, one of Cooper’s shipmates manning P1 Gun commenting, “We might as well stand here and throw bloody spuds for all the good we are doing.” Fegen, meanwhile, was seen directing operations from the bridge, one arm practically severed at the shoulder.

At length, as the crippled Jervis Bay started to sink, her crew to took to the life rafts, but such survivors still had to endure a pounding from the Admiral Scheer’s 5.9-inch guns as she closed in for the kill. In the end, Jervis Bay went down with a loss of 33 officers and 147 ratings, just 65 of her original complement being plucked from the harsh Atlantic waters by the Swedish vessel Stureholm, Cooper among them - the latter ship had been directed to the scene by Admiral Scheer, and assured in the same signal of a free rein to go about her rescue work.

The supreme gallantry of Fegen and his crew had not been in vain, the Admiral Scheer catching up with only five of the convoy’s defenceless merchantmen, and before too long the story of their gallantry and sacrifice was ringing around the free world.

Cooper received his well-merited D.S.M. at a Buckingham Palace investiture on 4 March 1941, by which time he was employed ashore at the R.N. depot Pembroke. But in April 1942, he returned to sea in the battleship Anson, in which capacity he remained actively employed on the Arctic-run and elsewhere until joining the shore establishment Malabar in Bermuda in early 1944. He was finally released in January 1946.

Sold with a small quantity of related documentation, including two wartime portrait photographs; letters to Cooper from the M.O.D., dating from the 1980s and 1990s, one of them with a list of costs for replacement campaign awards for those originally issued to him in April 1950; a copy of the book, The Jervis Bay Goes Down, by Gene Fowler (Random House, New York, 1941); and a First Day Cover marking the 50th Anniversary of Jervis Bay’s action, dated 5 November 1950, and signed by three ex-Admiral Scheer crew members.