Commander Peter Poland, RN, who died at Cape Town, 30 August, 2021, aged 98, was a scion of that landed gentry family.
He was born 24 July, 1923, son of Commander Kenneth Gordon Plowden, RN [1896-1973], and his wife the former Hester Mary Beatrice Chichele-Plowden [1902-1993], scion of the Fitzherbert Barons Stafford, and niece of Pamela Chichele-Plowden [1874-1971], who turned down a marriage proposal from Sir Winston Churchill, and married the 2nd Earl of Lytton [1876-1947].
He married firstly, 28 July, 1944, June Mary Bowlby [1925-69], scion of that landed family, daughter of Henry Russell Bowlby [1890-1965], and his wife the former Hermione Hester Isabel Wisden [1898-1981]; and married 2ndly, 1969, Lorette Durr [who died in 2014].
Cdr Poland's Daily Telegraph obit: in May 1941, 17-year-old Midshipman Poland was navigator’s tanky (assistant) to Commander Frank Lloyd, Master of the Fleet, in the Home Fleet flagship, the battleship King George V. Intelligence was received from the naval attaché in Stockholm that the German battleship Bismarck had been sighted off the coast of Sweden..... Gifted with extraordinary powers of observation and memory – aided by his letters home to his mother, his midshipman’s journal, and the navigational notebook which he kept during the action – Poland left a unique memoir of the hunt for and sinking of Bismarck......
Cdr Poland leaves issue, a son, Peter and a daughter, Jill.
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