Captain Rolfe Monteith, of the Royal Canadian Navy, who has died aged 101, was one of the teenage Dominion volunteers who crossed the Atlantic to serve in the Second World War, and one of the last survivors of the wartime Arctic convoys.
Inspired by family holidays in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, young Monteith was eager to go to sea. In 1941, aged 17, he volunteered for the Royal Canadian Navy and soon found himself on his first Atlantic crossing – not yet in uniform – aboard the armed merchant cruiser Laconia with convoy HX 147. The voyage was perilous, passing through wreckage from convoy SC 42, which had recently been mauled by German U-boats off Greenland.
