Walter Cowan Britain's oldest commando

For some servicemen hardened by a long military career, death in battle is preferable to simply fading away in old age. Tells the story of one such man, a retired naval officer who leapt bravely back into the fray during the Second World War at the age of 70

- JOSHUA LEVINE

Admiral Sir Walter Cowan was a true Victorian. He came of age as a midshipman in the days of sail, and his lifelong principles – duty, courage and British moral superiority – were common to many Victorians. Unlike others of his generation, however, Cowan spent his later years fighting the Nazis. At the age of 70, he carried out daring commando raids alongside men less than a third of his age. After a long and glorious naval career, he went in search of an equally glorious death.

Cowan never attended school. Instead, in 1884 – aged just 13 – he became a naval cadet on HMS Britannia, a two-decades-old battleship moored off Dartmouth. His father, a friend of the admiral of the fleet, had used his connections to secure his son this posting.

Cowan was, unsurprisingly, homesick, his mood not improved by the reek of fresh paint permeating the lower decks of the Britannia. “When we were all fallen in on arrival,” he wrote, “quite a few boys were sick and some fainted.” The food was bad, he recalled, but there was “unlimited beer for the midday meal”.

Such experiences were intended to instil an ethos of manliness in the cadets in an era when the Royal Navy was still all masts, yards and violence. Mass brawls often broke out on board, with several dozen boys fighting each other, “each one doing his utmost to draw blood”. Cowan, a smallish lad, was worried that he was too weak to be an asset to his mates. A nasty eye injury, however, cemented his status among the other boys.

After HMS Britannia, in 1886 Cowan became a midshipman with the Mediterranean Fleet in Malta, where the emphasis on toughness continued. “If a man didn’t prove himself a sailor, he had a dog’s life,” he recalled.