Death of Adrian Seligman-Aegian & Med Covert Cpt

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Death of Adrian Seligman-Aegian & Med Covert Cpt

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Post by Andy H » 22 Aug 2003, 18:16

From the Daily Telegraph

Adrian Seligman
(Filed: 21/08/2003)


Adrian Seligman, who has died aged 93, was a master mariner, naval officer and author; before the war he undertook a two-year voyage around the world in his own sailing ship, Cap Pilar.

His first contact with the Royal Navy came when he checked the chronometers of Cap Pilar on board the cruiser Leander off the coast of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. By the start of the Second World War he was a qualified First Mate in steam and sail and a sub-lieutenant RNVR. He then served in minesweepers and commanded a destroyer; but his unique contribution to the war was in special operations.

In the desperate winter of 1941 Seligman and a handful of reserve officers travelled by train to Turkey to pilot five Russian ships through the Dardenelles and past the Axis blockade of the Aegean to Syria. Passing himself off as a salvage expert, Seligman's personal task was to camouflage a small oiltanker, Olinda, by cutting away her catwalk and rigging a jury mast.

He had his first encounter with a German spy, who tried to stop him when they were on a snowbound train.

He also managed to smuggle away from the Turkish authorities a beautiful agent, who had posed as a bar girl in Ankara while watching over him.

Over several nights Olinda hugged the coast to avoid German patrol boats while being frequently fired upon by Turkish sentries. When she ran aground, and was caught listing at low water in daylight, Seligman got her off by calmly pumping ballast as he waited for the arrival of German bombers.

Several years later, a clerk in the Admiralty pursued Seligman for the return of an advance of pay which he had spent during his undercover activities. In reply Seligman sent a copy of his book, No Stars to Guide (1947), with a note saying "while it may contain some pages not wholly relevant to the work of the Navy accounts department, it should nevertheless give a good idea of the general circumstances of my expenditure".

Between 1942 and 1944 Seligman commanded the Levant Schooner Flotilla, equipped with Greek fishing boats and caiques which had been refitted with tank engines. They made numerous raids on islands in the Aegean, landing soldiers, collecting intelligence and supplying isolated garrisons; more important, they held down large numbers of German forces.

After the Italian armistice the Germans turned on and, in some cases, murdered their erstwhile allies and the situation on the islands was often confused. On one island Seligman was overtaken by a staff car carrying both German and Italian officers. His only article of uniform was a naval cap which he swiftly doffed to scratch the back of his head as the vehicle swept by.

All Seligman's crews were volunteers, and their motto, "Stand Boldly On", was taken from the old seafaring adage "log, lead, latitude and stand boldly on", according to his account, War in the Islands (1996).

Later he was in command of a Flower class corvette Erica which was reported missing. After four days Seligman sent a signal saying that he was alive and had read his own obituary.

Adrian Charles Cuthbert Seligman was born at Leatherhead, Surrey, on November 26 1909, the eldest son of Dr Richard Seligman, a metallurgist of international reputation. Adrian's mother, formerly Hilda McDowell, was an authoress and sculptress who, between the wars, entertained Mahatma Gandhi and the Emperor Haile Selaisse at soirees in the family home at Wimbledon.

On holidays the Seligman family travelled to Europe, each child with a rucksack carefully graded according to the bearer's age; they looked like a ragged little caravan of pack animals jostling each other down the roads and across the station platforms of Europe, he recalled. In the summers the Seligmans went to the village of St Jacut-de-la-mer, on the Brittany coast, where Adrian learned to sail in fishing boats.

Rokeby prep school, Harrow and Caius College, Cambridge, failed to kill his love of the sea. After failing his second-year examinations in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, being thrown over by his girlfriend and receiving a "charmingly courteous threatening letter" from his bank manager, Seligman was in the London docks when he decided to board a small freighter. He was engaged on the spot as mess boy, and sailed that night for the Spanish coast.

From then onwards, the sea had claimed him. He sailed before the mast for three years in the Finnish square-rigger Killoran and then in Olivebank, which, under Captain John Matson, raced home with a cargo of wheat in a voyage of 104 days from Australia to Queensferry in 1934.

After another year as mate in a tramp steamer, Seligman's grandfather left him some money to buy a house. Instead, he purchased a 250-ton French fishing barquentine, Cap Pilar, and, advised by Commander J R Stenhouse who had been Shackleton's First Officer in Discovery, fitted her out for a voyage round the world. When he placed an advertisement in a national newspaper for six young men for a voyage to the South Seas, "each to contribute £100 to expenses", the News Chronicle reported more than 300 applicants, and offered him sponsorship.

Seligman sailed in September 1936 with his new wife, the 17-year-old daughter of his prep school headmaster, and a volunteer crew, only two of whom had been to sea before; there were also a pig called Dennis (subsequently eaten), a gramophone and a piano.

The odyssey took Seligman around the Cape of Good Hope to Sydney and Auckland, New Zealand; there followed six weeks in the South Sea islands, before they returned through the Panama Canal. His 14-month-old daughter Jessica, born in New Zealand, was listed as the ship's second stewardess when they returned home two years and 32,500 miles later.

His book, The Voyage of the Cap Pilar (1939), contained some dramatised descriptions ("the ship seemed to cower into the sea beneath her, then gather herself and leap forward as though in terror of her life, quivering from stem to stern as a big sea exploded upon her sending clouds of spray as high as the main top") and became an instant success despite the outbreak of war. It remains a sailing classic.

After the war Seligman wrote a series of children's books about the sea while living on Malta. He then spent several years on Cyprus, where he wrote about the Turks and struck up a friendship with Rauf Denktash, the future president of Turkish Cyprus, before returning home as the Greek independence movement grew.

In 1958 he founded a technical press agency in London which translated press releases and articles about British firms into any European or Asian language for sending to some 23,000 journals.

In retirement he published another sailing classic, The Slope of the Wind (1994), about his early experiences in sail. Seligman also related many of his often strange experiences in short stories and broadcasts, and lectured until his late 80s. One grisly tale was of a shark, disembowelled by the crew whilst his ship lay becalmed in the doldrums, thrown into the sea for dead and floating slowly around the ship before coming, full circle, upon its own entrails and consuming them.

Seligman, who died on August 6, married first, in 1936, Jane Batterbury, with whom he had four daughters. In 1950 he married Rosemary Grimble, daughter of the diplomat Sir Arthur Grimble, with whom he had two sons.

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