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Royal Navy veterans honoured by King and Queen
12 November 2025
The King and Queen honoured veterans of the Second World War at a reception to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory over Japan.
A number of veterans and their families who served in the Far East during World War 2 attended the reception at Windsor Castle, where the King and Queen were joined by the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duchess of Gloucester.
The veterans included centenarian Henry Rice, who served in the Royal Navy and was part of D-Day+5. He took supplies over to the beaches and brought injured Canadian and British soldiers back. He then went on to Malta where he was land based for 12 weeks before traveling through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea.
He spent some time based in the Gulf before going further East on to Sri Lanka, Burma and Singapore. Henry remembers a close encounter, when he and his crewmates saw a torpedo coming toward them, and recalls that they were lucky that the boat sat high in the water, so the torpedo went beneath the hull. Also in attendance was former Wren Pat Owtram, now 102. Just after she turned 18, Pat joined the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) as a codebreaker in the ‘Special Duties Linguist’ branch.
She joined Y Service, consisting of 400 German-speaking Wrens. As a petty officer, she was based at listening stations along the coast and Pat and her fellow Wrens would "search the part of the radio dial where we might pick up one of the German Navy ships, write down exactly what we heard and report it to Naval Intelligence”. She was awarded the Victory Medal, the Bletchley Badge.
Royal Navy veteran William ‘Bill’ Jones, now 100, was also at the reception. Bill volunteered for the Senior Service aged 18 in 1944 and was posted to the Fleet Air Arm as an air fitter/metal worker in 1944.
There he served in a mobile Navy air base on a tiny coral island called Ponam, in the Admiralty Islands of Papua New Guinea. One of Bill’s key memories of his time in Ponam was seeing prisoners of war on the way back to Australia just after the atomic bombs were dropped and being aghast at the condition they were in.
On VJ Day, he recalls a celebratory atmosphere on Ponam, and they all enjoyed an extra tot of rum. Earlier this year the King, Patron of the Royal British Legion, attended a commemorative event at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire to mark the 80th Anniversary of VJ Day hosted by the Royal British Legion.
Nine veterans at the reception were supported by Royal British Legion and two supported by the Burma Star Association.