Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle, who died at the end of May at the age of 88, had a valiant and varied career in the Royal Navy during World War II. After the war, he established two shipping lines and an airline in Africa and competed in the Olympics for Kenya. Despite this impressive career, he may be best remembered for his time spent in a German POW camp as one of the creators of “Albert RN,” a life sized dummy, used to facilitate prisoner escapes.
Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle
Bentley-Buckle was the camp’s watch repairer and lock picker, and he made the mechanism which enabled Albert’s eyes to blink and move, giving added realism to the dummy. In 1953 a highly fictionalised version of the episode was made into a film, Albert RN, but Bentley-Buckle’s true wartime adventures, behind enemy lines in Italy and Yugoslavia, were even stranger than fiction. Read the rest of the obituary.
A clip from the movie, Albert RN (distributed in the United States as Break to Freedom)
Thanks to Alaric Bond for passing the obituary along.
Most interesting career in both wartime and peacetime. The insignia in his photo of the button and stripe on black patch is that of a Merchant Navy Deck Apprentice. I wore them during my service as MN Deck Apprentice. The RN Midshipman is the same on a white patch. Did he serve in MN and transfer to RN when war broke out?
Good Watch.
A very interesting question. Despite his rather brilliant career, it is hard to find information about Bentley-Buckle. The Telegraph obituary says that he joined the RN at 18 in 1939. I wonder if you caught a detail that they may have missed.
After thinking about it a bit more I did some research on WW2 Royal Navy rank insignia and its quite a collection!. At that time for the first 7 months intakes at Britannia Royal Naval College (BRNC) in Devon UK were rated as RN Cadets. They wore the button and stripe on a navy blue patch, same as MN Deck Apprentices. If successful after that initial period they wore the white patch of Midshipman RN until promoted to Sub-Lieutenant. This sytem is no longer in practice. This would seem to explain things!!
Good Watch.