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- Colonel Sam Bassett CBE RM (1890-1974)
Colonel Sam Bassett is a legend in the Royal Marines, having spent over 50 years in the service, rising from the rank of Private and serving in both World War I and World War II.
Samuel John Woodroffe Bassett was born on the 12 June 1890 to Samuel John and Eleanor (nee Woodroffe) Bassett in Peckham, South London; he was their first child and was baptised on 20 July 1890 at St Judes, Peckham. Samuel senior had been a journalist and was widely-travelled. The 1891 census shows the family living at 55 Lugard Road, the father’s occupation is given as a “bookseller’s assistant”. The family however, fell on difficult times and moved to Portsmouth to live with Sam’s Aunt Emily and Uncle Alfred. By the 1901 census the family included Sam’s brother Christopher, and sisters Evangeline, Pepita and Hettie. They were living at 36 St Paul’s Road, Portsmouth, and Samuel senior’s occupation is noted as “commercial traveller”.
Uncle Alfred owned a small sailing boat and Sam and his brother learnt to sail and earned money by ferrying passengers over to HMS Victory, and by ferrying Royal Marines to Gosport.
Sam Bassett attended a local Church School where he was taught French. He became a server in the local Church which conducted services in Latin; consequently the priest taught him Latin. Additionally, at the behest of his father, he learnt Russian; and he studied Welsh in order to appreciate its poetry. Also, his brother taught him to play the piano. His parents decided on a career in the priesthood for him and he was sent to an ecclesiastical college in Wimbledon where he stayed for the next three years. Just before the final examinations in 1907 however, he decided that this was not the life for him and simply walked out of the gate, crossed Wimbledon Common and travelled to London. Walking to Trafalgar Square, he stopped and watched the Life Guards at the entrance of Horse Guards Parade. He was spotted by a Recruiting Colour Sergeant for the Royal Marines who explained that he was too small to be in the Guards but he could join the Marines and see the world! Sam Bassett was led to the recruiting office where he was given a brief medical examination and signed on the dotted line for 12 years in the service.
Sam Bassett was sent to Deal in Kent for his basic training. He was of slighter build than his comrades, but better educated; he took extra physical training exercises and, uniquely, passed the Third, Second and First Class education certificates in one go. In eight months he was made Section Leader of his drill squad, which aroused a certain amount of jealousy amongst his men. This was cured one evening however when he was set upon by a drunken bully in the barrack room. Bassett happened to be sitting on his bed cleaning his bayonet and immediately retaliated by stabbing him in the thigh. The screaming of the wounded man quickly brought the Corporal and the Sergeant-Major who sized up the situation and instructed the Sick Bay Attendant to sew him up there on the barrack room floor. No more was said of the incident.
After twelve months training at Deal, Sam Bassett was transferred to Portsmouth as a full Private. There he set up a Signal Department, learnt Morse Code, and became an instructor. He was posted to HMS Euryalus and then to the Signalling Station on Malta with the Mediterranean Fleet. On his return to Portsmouth he was promoted to Corporal and in 1914, just before World War One broke out, was promoted to Lance-Sergeant. Soon after, he was on board a yacht in the English Channel which was struck by a French Destroyer; he was one of only five survivors. A few days later he was informed that he had been selected for a commission. Up until then it was not possible for a man on the lower deck to be promoted to the quarter deck (Officer rank), but this new possibility had just been introduced by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
All was not straightforward however and Sam Bassett was informed that promotion would not happen unless he had seen active service. Inevitably he was sent to a Marine Division fighting on the Western Front and experienced all the horrors of trench warfare. He survived the carnage, carried out his duties well, and was duly commissioned a probationary Second Lieutenant in His Majesty’s Corps of Royal Marines.
His first posting as an officer was to HMS Dreadnought at Scapa Flow; the ship occasionally steaming out into the North Atlantic to intercept and challenge the German fleet. In February 1918 he was posted to HMS Isis for Atlantic convoy protection duties.
After WW1, Sam Bassett was sent to the island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea as Signals Officer. His fluency in Russian caught up with him however. The Russian civil war (Bolshevik Revolution) was in full swing and his talents were required at the British Military Mission in Rostov. So, from Lemnos he was posted to Army HQ in Constantinople as Staff Captain and liaison officer and thence travelled by Royal Navy destroyer to Novorossiysk in Russia. He then continued to Rostov. The war between the White Russian and Red Russian armies caused thousands of civilian refugees to head to Novorossiysk. Sam Bassett witnessed three girls making their way slowly along, the one in the middle having no shoes and being supported by the other two. Despite orders not to fraternise, he threw her a pair of his shoes. Refugees were evacuated by the Royal Navy back to Lemnos and a refugee camp set up. Before long, Sam Bassett needed help with his interpreter duties, and a girl was duly found in the camp who could speak English; she was the girl to whom he had thrown his shoes in the retreat to the Crimea! The girl was Zoya Gadzinzski and was to become his wife. They married in 1921; there were three wedding ceremonies, one in Russian, one before the Civil Governor in Lemnos, and one aboard HMS Dublin which was moored in the harbour.
He returned to Constantinople and Sebastopol where he was invested with the Order of St Stanislas for his work in Russia.
He and his wife returned on board HMS Centaur to the UK, where his daughter Zoya Eleanor Bassett was born, and after a further signalling course the family was posted to HMS Ceres in Malta. After a stint with the Mediterranean Fleet he was appointed to the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich, the first ranker to receive such an appointment. After passing out he was posted as Staff Officer (Intelligence) to Cape Town in 1926, and also made ADC to the Governor, the Earl of Athlone. One of his duties was the preparation of war plans, and to this end he engaged in solo clandestine reconnaissance of foreign areas, mainly harbours and docks, for possible future use by the Royal Navy.
After three and a half years he returned to the UK in January 1930 and a posting at the Naval Intelligence Department at the Admiralty. In September 1931 the Invergordon Mutinies occurred at the anchorage of the Royal Navy Atlantic Fleet due to the defence cuts and subsequent pay reductions of RN sailors and officers. Sam Bassett was sent to Scotland on an undercover mission to determine the circumstances and the ringleaders which had brought to a halt the greatest battle fleet in the world. After this and further investigations he reported directly to the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. He also carried out naval investigation work in Gibraltar and Malta which led to meetings with Lord Louis Mountbatten and The Prince of Wales.
Sam Bassett was subsequently promoted to the rank of Brevet-Major and left the Security Service to take up an appointment as Company Commander at the Officers’ Training and Recruit Depot at Deal in Kent. He was soon however sent back to intelligence work in Singapore and carried out under-cover work in the Dutch East Indies. He was then posted to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then back to the UK as Brigade-Major at Chatham in Kent.
In 1939, when World War 2 broke out, Sam Bassett was ordered to report to the Naval Intelligence Division in London. Here he set up a department that was to eventually be one of the largest inter-service and inter-allied intelligence organisations, employing almost six thousand people, and having a major input into the planning of the war effort. It was known as the Inter-Services Topographical Department (ISTD), was based in Oxford, and was responsible for providing maps, photographs and scale models of important areas and targets anywhere as requested. This inevitably brought him into direct contact with the Chiefs of Staff and also the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.
Although now aged over 50 and with the rank of Colonel, Sam Bassett was still a fully active Royal Marine. In the lead up to the D-Day Landings in 1944 he realised that although the ISTD had provided the Allies with extensive reconnaissance information of the proposed landing sites, crucially there was no knowledge of whether they could support the great weight of tanks and military equipment. To get some answers Sam Bassett went on a clandestine mission by RN submarine to the coast of France where he was landed at night to assess the ground and take soil samples. He hid during the next day and was picked up the following night.
After the invasion, the ISTD continued to provide maps, photos and intelligence to the advancing armies in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Also sections had been set up to concentrate on the Far East and South-East Asia, and others set up in the USA and in Australia.
As World War 2 ended, Sam Bassett was rewarded by various countries for his valuable and outstanding work:- The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (Commander) United States Order of Merit (Officer) Royal Norwegian King Haakon VII Order of Freedom Royal Norwegian Order of St Olave Legion d’Honneur (Chevalier), France and also personal letters from General Eisenhower, their Lordships at the Admiralty and Buckingham Palace. Other awards were: The Order of St Stanislas (Commander with Swords), Russia The King George V Silver Jubilee Medal 1935 The Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal 1953 Colonel Sam Bassett CBE RM retired after 54 years’ service and died in 1974 in Woking, Surrey.
Author’s Notes
· This account is taken in the main from Sam Bassett’s own autobiography “Royal Marine”, published in 1962 by Peter Davies Ltd, from which the photographs of him are reproduced with thanks. · Sam Bassett’s medals are on display at the Royal Marines Museum in Southsea, Hampshire. The photograph of them is reproduced with kind permission of The Trustees of the Royal Marines Museum. · I undertook some ancestry research for completeness which showed that Lieutenant Samuel John Woodroffe Bassett RMLI married Dora Mildred Fuidge at St John’s Church, Upper Holloway, London on 09 Apr 1919. The national BMD register shows that Dora M A Bassett died in the third quarter of 1920 in Islington, London. These events are not mentioned in the autobiography. · Sam Bassett’s daughter Zoya Eleanor married a Royal Marine Officer, Peter Hellings, in 1941. Later, as General Sir Peter William Craddock Hellings KCB DSC MC he subsequently became Commandant General of Royal Marines (1968-1971).
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Bassett Family Association Database
1890 - 1974 (84 years)