Royal Indian Navy veteran dead..Commander Brian Goord, DSC, Royal Indian Navy

Dear Members,
Regret to inform the demise of Commander Brian Goord, DSC, Royal Indian Navy on 08 May 2009 at Christchurch , New Zealand.
Regards
Vice Admiral Harinder Singh (retd)
President , NFDC

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Royal Indian Navy veteran dead
Anthony Brian Goord’s unusual seagoing career started with his education at the Nautical College, Pangbourne. He then served in the New Zealand Shipping Company until 1934 when he decided to join the Royal Naval Reserve and while training at Dartmouth Naval College he was recruited into the Royal Indian Navy (RIN). At the outbreak of the Second World War the RIN owned only eight minor warships, some of 1919 vintage, and depended for officers on the Royal Navy. (The first Indian to be commissioned was an engineer sub-lieutenant in 1930.) By the end of the war it had risen to 117 combat vessels and 30,000 men. Much of Goord’s work involved managing and training this huge expansion, finding it necessary to pass the lower and then the higher-standard Urdu language exams in 1936 and 1941.
His first seagoing appointment in September 1935 was to the sloop Hindustan, at that time the RIN’s best ship, as gunnery and navigating officer. In 1938 he returned home to undergo specialist courses in navigation and anti-submarine warfare, returning to India in October 1939. He thus became the RIN’s staff anti-submarine officer and commanded the anti-submarine school.
During this period he invented the Goord Goldfish, a device that, adapting diving gear and towed behind a motor-boat, issued a stream of bubbles that returned a credible submarine-like echo for training Asdic (underwater detection) operators in ships. A grateful Admiralty rewarded him with a princely cheque for £20, a sum also granted by the Government of India.
Thereafter he held headquarters posts and commanded coastal forces bases until appointment in May 1944 as captain of the 1,700-ton sloop Godavari when the ship arrived from Thorneycrofts in the UK. On August 12, 1944, Goord was on anti-submarine patrol near the Seychelles as part of Eastern Fleet Force 66 with the escort carrier Shah when Godavari, with RN frigates Findhorn and Parret, sank submarine U198, Godavari’s Asdic performance being particularly praised. Goord was awarded the DSC.
At naval headquarters from February 1945 to the end of the war with Japan, Goord was appointed as Assistant Chief of staff (operations and intelligence) to the Flag Officer RIN, Rear Admiral John Godfrey whose many near-intractable preoccupations at that time included the Indianisation of the navy with the need to blood officers of the right quality. Goord was selected as the naval member of Commander-in-Chief General Sir Claude Auchinleck’s armed forces reorganising committee chaired by Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Wilcox and based at Dehra Dun.
In February 1946, while Goord was in Delhi, elements of the RIN at Bombay, fuelled by “quit India” activists, slow demobilisation and complaints about food, pay and leave, made a mutiny that lasted three days and caused widespread civic unrest. It was suppressed at the cost of the death of one officer and nine ratings. Goord was sent to INS Valsura, the torpedo school at Jamnagar in Gujarat, to preside over a local board of inquiry. Much of the cause was attributed to poor long-term policy decisions concerning officer recruitment and training.
In October 1947 after continuing as staff officer plans and naval member of the reconstitution committee at naval headquarters, he was compulsorily retired on the transfer of power to India and the division of the navy between India and Pakistan.
With his wife, Freda, and their son, Goord moved to Kenya and developed a farm from virgin bush. He was elected to the Nakuru Country Council and was a founding member of the multiracial New Kenya Party, which in 1959 was arguing for a fair distribution of land for all. He participated in the 1960 Lancaster House conference in the lead-up to Kenyan independence. In 1964 his farm was compulsorily purchased for African resettlement. The family moved to the Algarve and built properties. Freda died in 1974; Goord remarried but separated in 1984.
The next 20 years were spent cruising the Mediterranean in his yacht Novanda. He finally moved to New Zealand to join his son who farms near Christchurch.Commander Brian Goord, DSC, Royal Indian Navy staff and commanding officer and farmer, was born on May 18, 1911. He died on May 8, 2009, aged 97--