Lieutenant Harold Newgass GC - Characters from WW2

On 4 March 1941, Lieutenant Harold Newgass, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR), was awarded the George Cross for an extraordinary piece of courage on the night of 28 November 1940 in Liverpool. That night, the Luftwaffe bombed the city and dropped a pair of magnetic mines on the gasworks at Garston in the south-west of Liverpool.

Newgass had served as a Territorial Army officer in France during WW1 and rose to the rank of captain, but on the outbreak of war, he immediately volunteered to join the RNVR and was appointed as a Rendering Mines Safe Officer (RMSO). Only commissioned as a Temporary Sub Lieutenant in September 1940, that night in November he was called to investigate a mystery object dropped by parachute and entangled in a gasometer. Parachute mines were the responsibility of the Navy and not the Royal Engineers. Newgass had no idea whether the mine was a dud, magnetic or acoustic, but he had no choice but to deal with it as it was designated Category ‘A’. Until the mine was rendered safe, it threatened not just the gas supply to the south and east of Liverpool, but 6,000 residents had had to be evacuated from their homes. Work at the nearby factories had had to be suspended and the local railway and dock sidings shut. In Category ‘A’ incidents the RMSO’s life was considered subordinate to the needs of the city. Newgass was expendable!

The mine had penetrated the roof of the gas holder and landed in seven feet of filthy water, full of oil and tar. Newgass had to borrow breathing apparatus from the local fire brigade and work in pitch blackness. There was no question of using an electric torch in a container of highly flammable gas! Each oxygen cylinder lasted just thirty minutes and Newgass’s first sortie was one of reconnaissance. By touch alone, he realised that the mine was leaning nose down against a steel strut supporting the gasometer’s roof, but the fuze was on the wrong side for him to reach it. He would need to turn it. Working in such conditions was hard labour and he found himself using up his precious oxygen supply quicker than predicted. Over successive sorties and over two days, he first protected the nose of the mine with sandbags, tied the tail to the roof and managed to turn the mine in order to access the fuze. On his fourth sortie, he began the precarious task of removing the deadly fuze, again in the pitch black and filthy water. Only on his sixth visit to the mine was he able to render it safe finally.

Such examples of almost suicidal courage inspired me to write my Death to Touch trilogy on the lives of the RN’s RMSOs and in the first of the series, They Have No Graves as Yet, I give a more detailed fictional account of Newgass’s actions. I hope to have the third book in the series published in 2026.

Gasometer, Garston