Reginald George COLLINS

Image from HMS Jervis Bay.

Reginald Collins was born in February 1902 in Church Street (now Vicarage Road), New Hinksey. He was baptised on Easter Day – 30 March – in nearby St John the Evangelist Church. He was the second of the nine children of William and Henrietta Collins. William had himself been born in Church Street (the son of a railway labourer and a tailoress) and lived there all his life.

Reginald’s mother Henrietta was from Headington Quarry, and was part of the extensive and well-known Coppock family, who had lived in Quarry since at least the 1770s, and after whom Coppock Close is named. Her father was a butcher. In September 1899 Henrietta married William Collins at Oxford Registry Office and the couple lived with William’s parents at 68 Church Street, New Hinksey. Their first child, William Albert, was born there in February 1900. By the time their second child Reginald was born two years later they had moved to the house almost directly opposite, 9 Church Street. Six daughters – Doris, Lilian, Eveline, Edna, Fanny and Ethel – and a son, Edwin, were born over the next seventeen years. All the children attended New Hinksey School further up the street. In around 1910 the family moved four doors along to 5 Church Street; William and Henrietta were to live there for the rest of their lives.

Reginald’s father William had started his working life as a shop-boy, and was later employed as a bricklayer’s labourer. During the First World War he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps Territorial Force and worked at Oxford’s wartime hospital, the 3rd Southern General. He was demobbed in March 1920, not long after the birth of his ninth and final child Edwin, and he returned to working as a builder’s labourer.

Meanwhile Reginald had found a job as a shop assistant, but in 1919, when he was seventeen, he enlisted with the Royal Navy, signing up for a period of twelve years. His Naval records describe him as being 5’3” tall, with dark hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion. He first served as a ‘Boy II’ on HMS Ganges, progressing to Able Seaman in October 1921, and serving on many different ships until his discharge in 1932 at the age of thirty. Throughout, his character was recorded as "Very Good" and his ability as "Satisfactory".

In the 1921 census Reginald was one of 116 crewmen living on board the destroyer HMS Violent, twenty miles off the south coast of Devon.

On leaving the Navy in 1932, Reginald returned to Oxford and to his parents' house at 5 Church Street, New Hinksey. He found employment as a furnaceman and under-porter at Rhodes House on South Parks Road. He also signed up for the Royal Fleet Reserve (RFR), which comprised ex-Royal Navy men – older experienced sailors – who could be brought back into service for hostilities only, to make up any shortfall in Navy numbers. He was later awarded the RFR Long Service and Good Conduct Medal.

A year after he left the Navy, in the spring of 1933, Reginald married Bertha Smith, the daughter of a carpenter who was originally from Souldern near Bicester. Bertha was twenty and Reginald was 31. They moved to 47 Lake Street in New Hinksey and their two sons Alan and Roy were born in 1934 and 1937. In 1939 the family moved to 14 Canning Crescent in Cold Harbour, at the far southern end of the Abingdon Road. The boys attended New Hinksey School as their father had done.

In August 1939, as the prospect of war loomed, Reginald was called up by the Royal Fleet Reserve. He left his job at Rhodes House and on 31 August, three days before war was declared, went for training at HMS Pembroke, the shore barracks at Chatham in Kent. On 23 September 1939 he was assigned to HMS Jervis Bay. This was a passenger ship which had been requisitioned by the Admiralty on 25 August and was being converted to an armed merchant cruiser. The work was completed on 15 October and the ship sailed first to Rosyth in Scotland and then, in May 1940, to the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. It was to be based there and to escort convoys of merchant ships carrying food, goods and equipment from Bermuda and Halifax, Canada, to Britain.

In early November 1940 HMS Jervis Bay was the sole escort for a convoy of 37 merchant ships travelling across the North Atlantic. On 5 November the convoy encountered the German warship Admiral Scheer about 870 miles south-south-west of Reykjavík, Iceland. The captain of HMS Jervis Bay, Edward Fegen, ordered the other ships of the convoy to scatter, and set his own ship on course towards the German warship in order to draw its fire. HMS Jervis Bay was hopelessly outgunned and outranged, but it attacked the larger ship, firing more to distract it from the merchant ships than with hopes of doing any damage. Although the German shells ravaged HMS Jervis Bay, and many crewmen were killed or badly injured, Fegen (who was himself wounded) and the surviving crew fought on, until their ship sank. Of the 255 crew, 190 were killed or lost at sea, including Fegan, and Reginald Collins.

Fegen and his crew’s actions allowed time for the convoy to scatter, and 32 of the 37 merchant ships escaped. Their heroism was widely reported at the time, and the loss of the Jervis Bay is considered one of the most dramatic incidents of the Second World War. Captain Fegen was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross "for valour in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect". Reginald was reported missing in the Oxford Mail on 16 November 1940.

Reginald Collins and the other 189 men who lost their lives on HMS Jervis Bay are commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial in Kent (Reginald is named on panel 35, 2). There is also a special memorial plaque to Reginald in the porters’ lodge at Rhodes House in Oxford. Because he grew up in New Hinksey, he is one of the eighteen men named on the Second World War memorial in the church of St John the Evangelist (together with another of our 24 Men of Grandpont and Cold Harbour, Ken Ayres). He is also commemorated on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour which is in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket.

The Rhodes Trustees, Reginald's employers, gave his widow Bertha a payment of £50 after his death, as a Christmas gift and "a slight token of their appreciation of your husband's services both to his country and to the Rhodes Trust". The Warden of Rhodes House Professor CK Allen said of Reginald "He was a very good fellow and always performed his duties very efficiently". The Rhodes Trust archives contain a copy of a thank you letter from Bertha in which she wrote: "Reg was always one to stick to a job until it was completed, and the fight of the Jervis Bay is typical of him. I am proud of him. I pray God will give me strength to bring his two sons up to be as brave and true a man as he was, but I have not given up hope of seeing him again and I really believe one of these days I will."

Bertha was awarded a government pension, but it was not enough for her and her two young sons to live on, so she got a full-time job at the Pressed Steel factory in Cowley, working long hours on piece-rates, and earning between £2 12s and £4 4s a week (about £120 to £180 in today's money). She also let out part of her council house to another family, and later took in lodgers, to supplement her income.

The Rhodes Trust kept in touch with Bertha, via the Warden of Rhodes House Professor Allen and his wife Dorothy (who was known as a particularly kind woman). In February 1943 the Warden advised the Trustees that, having had to give up her job at Pressed Steel, Bertha Collins was in financial difficulty, and they granted her an allowance of ten shillings a week. This was to be for the benefit of her children Alan and Roy (who were six and three when their father died), and was to continue until the boys reached the age of fourteen, or until Bertha remarried. The money was to be paid monthly, and Bertha was to come to Rhodes House to collect it "so that one could see her regularly and observe her progress and circumstances".

Bertha married Shirley Robert O’Neill on Easter Saturday 1944. He was originally from Limerick in Ireland and worked as a coach trimmer (probably at Morris Motors in Cowley). The Rhodes Trustees gave her a wedding present of £10, but the weekly allowance of ten shillings stopped. Bertha's sons Alan and Roy were aged ten and seven when she remarried; she and Shirley do not seem to have had any more children. Bertha died in Oxford in 1999.

Two of Reginald’s sisters married men who also died in the war. Edna married Bernard Jones in 1934; he served with the Royal Artillery and died in November 1942 in Japan. He is commemorated on the Second World War memorial in the church of St Thomas the Martyr in Oxford. Ethel married John Turner in 1939, just as war was breaking out; he was in the RAF and died in Germany in October 1942, a month before Bernard. Like Reginald, John is commemorated on the Second World War memorial in the church of St John the Evangelist, New Hinksey. Both Bernard and John are commemorated on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour which is in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket.

Reginald’s father William died in 1954, aged 79, and his wife Henrietta died four years later, aged 80. They remained living at 5 Church Street, New Hinksey (or Vicarage Road as it was renamed in 1955) all their lives.

Research by Liz Woolley; with thanks to Antonia White, Archivist and Records Manager, The Rhodes Trust.

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