Saved a tanker under heavy fire

Norman Owen, who has died aged 91, helped to save the tanker Ohio as she sailed to relieve Malta in 1942, from The Telegraph

..When the call came for men to board the abandoned Ohio and try to take her into Malta, Owen eagerly volunteered, preferring the known dangers of death by burning and sinking to the claustrophobia he suffered in Bramham.

Ohio had already been torpedoed and was without engine power, so Owen had the job of preventing further flooding and reconnecting the tow which broke repeatedly under the weight of the tanker. In further air attacks Ohio was reduced to a sinking condition though not much more than 45 miles west of Malta.

Norman Warden Owen was born on May 17 1917, the sixth of 10 children of a steward on the Holyhead to Kingstown (now Dunlaoghaire) ferry service. He was educated locally and apprenticed as a shipwright in the Holyhead marine yard. Later he worked for Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on the carrier Ark Royal and the doomed submarine Thetis. But during a strike he signed on with the Houlder Line Argentina as a carpenter. From 1939 to 1941 Owen served in several ships in the Far East and on Atlantic and Mediterranean convoys, including Operation Substance, also bound for Malta...