Hector Boyes

Rear Admiral Hector George Boyes, CMG, CIE (20 February 1881 - 23 October 1960) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Background, early career, and World War I
Hector Boyes was born in in 1881 at Plymouth, the son of a naval officer: he entered the service shortly before his fourteenth birthday. He saw action in the Boxer Rebellion, and by the oubreak of World War I, he was thirty-three years old, and the Flag Lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief of the China Station.

In 1915, Lieutenant-Commander Boyes was assigned to command the gunboat HMS Thistle in the East Africa Campaign. In the subsequent fighting, he was mentioned in dispatches seven times, and earned the Order of St Michael and St George and the Portuguese Order of Aviz.

Shore appointments and diplomatic duties
In 1919, Commander Boyes, now thirty-eight years old, married Eleonora Bille de Falsen, a twenty-year-old half-Norwegian, half-Afrikaaner. Subsequently, he was promoted to captain, commanding the Australian naval academy at Flinders, the British squadron in the Persian Gulf, and the shore base at Simon's Town in South Africa, before being appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, The Nore.

Captain Boyes took retirement with the rank of rear admiral in 1934, but he was subsequently appointed as a naval attaché with the temporary rank of captain, serving in Oslo, where he was responsible for obtaining an important dossier of German military blueprints.

Admiral Boyes continued in the diplomatic service during World War II, serving as attaché in Tokyo until the outbreak of the Pacific War, and then at various embassies in Latin America. He retired for a second time on 31 March 1947, and died in 1960.