Harold "Barehands" Bates

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Harold Raymond Kingsmill "Barehands" Bates (November 3, 1916 - May 9, 2006) was an officer in the Royal Navy. His father was the Rector of Horsington, Lincolnshire. He was educated at St Michael's, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, and at Magdalen College, Oxford University.

After having built a crystal radio receiver at the age of ten, Bates further developed his life-long love for radio. He joined the British Merchant Navy, but transferred to the Royal Navy in 1939 on the outbreak of war. He saw active service in the Battle of the Atlantic and convoyed merchant and troop ships in the Mediterranean Sea and during the North Africa landings.

On December 26, 1943, Bates was the electrical officer aboard HMS Duke of York, the flagship of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, when the ship was in pursuit of the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, which had sailed out of port in Norway to attack a Russian convoy. At one point, a German shell exploded near Bates's position near the antenna mast. The explosion moved the Duke of York's radar antenna out of alignment. In a winter force 8 gale, Bates climbed the mast to realign the antenna. The British ship sank the German ship, and Bates was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Dubbed "Barehands Bates" by the British press, the young officer became a national hero. As radar was virtually unknown to the general public at the time, images depicted him holding two electrical cables together with his bare hands.

Later during the war, Bates commanded a commando raiding and recce party which landed behind German lines to find prisoner of war camps and released the prisoners. He was aboard HMS King George V and witnessed the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

As a Royal Navy Captain, Bates served as Assistant Director of Royal Naval Intelligence, and later as Deputy Director of the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment.

Following the war, Bates specialized in the radar control of guns and missiles, and oversaw the development and testing of the Medium Range System Mark 3 (MRS3), an automatic radar control system for ships' guns.

He retired from the Royal Navy in 1969 after thirty years service, purchasing a filling station in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.

During the last two years of his life, Bates lived in a nursing home in Skegness, Lincolnshire where he died.