Russia awards veteran Arctic sailor a Gold Star

A WAR veteran who risked his life as one of "Churchill's Pirates" keeping sea routes to Russia clear has been awarded with a medal by the country's consul general in Scotland.

The Gold Star was awarded to 88-year-old Harold O'Neill, who lives in Haddington, by consul general Sergey Krutikov. He was one of 27 Scots to receive the honour.

Great-grandfather Mr O'Neill was born in County Durham in 1922 and moved to London when he left school at 15. He worked for a grocer before volunteering for the war effort two years later.

But when he was ordered to report for training in August 1941 he decided to join the Royal Navy Patrol Service's Arctic convoy, because it paid better than normal warfare.

He said: "A friend from Manchester suggested it and the money was a big thing to a young man like me."

But little did he know of the danger in which he was placing himself. He was part of a crew of 14 sweeping for mines in the Arctic Ocean under a radio blackout.

"We had to work on fishing boats," he said. "We equipped ours as a minesweeper but it was no warship. In fact, I never served on a naval vessel until after the war. We did our job, but we did it our own way. They called us Churchill's Pirates, and we did look like pirates, some of us!"

Mr O'Neill spent his 20th birthday stuck in ice, under attack from German warships. He was forced to watch many of his friends in other boats die.

"They opened machine gun fire and the bullets ripped up our deck about a foot in front of my toes," he said. "You could hear the ship was creaking and groaning under the ice. We were definitely going to Davy Jones's Locker, but by a miracle we were saved by a Russian icebreaker.

"We followed in its wake back to the Kola Inlet in the north of Russia."

The young sailor was trapped in the Russian base for three weeks before he could be taken back to Britain. He made friends with the communist soldiers, going to see films with them.

He left the navy in 1946 and moved to Haddington in 1977 with his wife Beatrice and three children David, now 64, Elizabeth Anne, 61, and Pamela, 58.

He said: "I moved to Scotland and I never regretted it. It is a lovely place to live."

The couple were married for 60 years. Towards the end, Mr O'Neill nursed his wife through Alzheimer's disease until her death in 2004. His two daughters joined him for the ceremony last month. "The majority of us were on the verge of tears," he said. "It was so emotional to live through it again."