Second World War submariner and whisky executive

Born: March 25, 1925;

Died: March 3, 2017

ADAM Bergius, a Glaswegian who has died aged 91, was a wartime Royal Navy diver and submariner, but one with a difference. His submarine was a five-man midget sub - known as XE-4 - tasked with cutting vital underwater Japanese communications cables towards the end of the war. That forced the Japanese to turn to overland radio communication, which was more easily decoded by the allies and hastened the end of the war. In fact, Operation Sabre, as it was called, was one of the final and most successful allied actions of the conflict.

Mr Bergius's actions in enemy territory as a Royal Navy Sub-Lieutenant were highly dangerous - capture could have meant execution by the Japanese - and earned him the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross). Merely being submerged at up to 300 feet for long periods of time also brought with it the threat of death by nitrogen narcosis.

After the war, he returned to a somewhat less dangerous life at his family whisky firm William Teacher & Sons Ltd, rising from junior clerk to chairman of Teacher's and being appointed as spokesman for the Scotch Whisky Association. Later, he was a highly popular farmer at Glenbarr on the west of the Kintyre peninsula where he successfully increased the quality, and therefore value, of locally bred lamb and was a funding director of Kintyre Quality Livestock Limited, a producers' cooperative.

He was also director of Scottish Opera after it purchased the Theatre Royal on Hope Street, Glasgow, in the 1970s and was a founding member and first commodore (1951-53) of the Helensburgh Sailing Club at Rhu on the Clyde estuary, which attracts yachtsmen from around the UK. Also in Helensburgh, in the late 1970s, he played a major part in the development of the town's highly regarded co-educational Lomond School, which, when he was chairman, brought together two formerly famous but struggling single-sex schools, Larchfield and St Bride's. In the 1950s and 60s, he served as treasurer for the Glasgow branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).

Adam Kennedy Bergius was born in Glasgow on March 25, 1925, the youngest of five children of William Manera Bergius, who was the son of Walter Bergius, a 19th century German immigrant to Scotland who married Agnes Teacher of the Scotch whisky family in the 1870s. Young Adam, whose mother was Agnes Hunter Bayne, was therefore born into the whisky business started in 1830 by 19-year-old mill worker William Teacher as a "dram shop" within a grocer's in Anderston, Glasgow. Adam was educated first at Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow and later at Glenalmond College outside Perth.

With the Second World War in full swing, Mr Bergius joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) aged 18 in December 1943 and began his training at HMS Ganges, a shoreside training establishment in Portsmouth. When the Navy asked for volunteers for "special and hazardous service," he stepped forward in early 1944. He did not really know what that would entail but was delighted to be sent for further training in his native Scotland - at HMS Varbel, another shore establishment, this time in the former luxury Kyles Hydro hotel (sadly now demolished) in Port Bannatyne on the Isle of Bute. Mr Bergius found himself training in midget submarines in nearby Loch Striven and later recalled that, although HMS Varbel was top secret and the local villagers and fishermen knew something extremely unusual was going on, their discretion ensured that the base remained secret until the war was over.

In his XE-4 midget submarine, which was 51ft long, Mr Bergius had to practise getting in and out through a small wet-and-dry chamber, shutting himself off from the rest of the crew before flooding the compartment and opening an external hatch, all of this in cold, black Loch Striven with zero visibility. He and his comrades would often come up from the loch bleeding from nose and ears.

In July 1945, with the war in Europe won, the allies focused on defeating Japan. Our American allies were initially unimpressed by the midget submarines - Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the allied Pacific forces, described them as "suicide craft" - following problems with an earlier model, the X-Craft, which tried to sink the German battleship Tirpitz. In 1945, however, Washington realised the mini subs were the only way to cut two vital Japanese underwater telegraph cables off Japanese-occupied Saigon. The task was given to the XE-4 manned by (Australian) Lieutenant Max Shean, Sub-Lieutenant Bergius, Sub-Lieutenant Ken Briggs, Sub-Lieutenant Ben Kelly and Engine Room Artificer Vernon Coles.

Mr Bergius, his fellow divers and their midget subs arrived in Labuan, off Malaysia, in July 1945 on board their depot ship HMS Bonaventure, which had been built in Greenock as the Clan Campbell of the Clan Line but was requisitioned for the war effort.

On July 31, in the Mekong Delta, the XE-4 snagged on its targets, the Japanese communications cables. Sub-Lieutenant Briggs dived from the sub and returned with a snippet to prove he had cut it. An hour later, they located the second cable and Sub-Lieutenant Bergius dived from the sub to snap it after four attempts at a depth of 50 feet. He was hauled back into the mini-sub in complete exhaustion but brandishing a length of cable. Mission accomplished, the war was about to be over.

For the rest of his life, Mr Bergius kept that length of cable as a war souvenir. His wartime exploits in Operation Sabre are recorded in several books. Just after the war, in 1946, and while still in the Navy, Mr Bergius was given leave to race the classic 70ft yawl Latifa, built by William Fife at Fairlie in Ayrshire, from New York to Bermuda. The yawl had hibernated during the war had no chance but Mr Bergius loved every minute of it.

In retirement, Mr Bergius continued to sail - on the surface rather than underwater - often with his close friends Sir Ian Denholm, of the Denholm shipping and seafood group, and his wife Liz. They would cruise around Scottish waters or off northern France on the yacht they co-owned, the 1911 Bristol pilot cutter Hirta, moored in the summers off Shandon close to Faslane.

Adam Bergius died at his home in Achnaha, Glenbarr, on Kintyre. His wife Fiona (née Sillars), whom he married in 1951, died in 2011. He is survived by their children Charles, Cara, Peter, Johnny and Pol.

PHIL DAVISON