Leading Seaman, Royal Navy
Born: September 4th 1917
Died: October 14th 1939
Age at Death: 23
Killed, October 14 1939
Theodore was born in Rangoon, Burma on 5 September 1917, son of Thomas Playford-Fenn, a merchant seaman, whose own father had been an officer in the Royal Navy, and his wife Ethel (née Benskin).
Given his family background, it is not surprising that Theodore went to sea himself, enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1938 and being assigned to the Royal Oak, a battleship.
On 14 October 1939 the ship was in the naval base of Scapa Flow, in the Shetland Islands, when she was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat commanded by Günther Prien, one of the great German submariners of the Second World War, who henceforth carried the nickname “the Bull of Scapa Flow”. His own death while attacking a convoy less than a year and half later – sunk by a destroyer whose second-in-command was fellow Old Brightonian John Christopher Langton (q.v.) – was considered so important to the Allies that it was announced in the House of Commons by Churchill.
Playford-Fenn remains buried in the wreck of the Royal Oak, a designated War Grave.