Edwin Hunt (waterman)

Edwin "Ted" Hunt was a British waterman who served as a sapper waterman in World War II, and was in 1978 appointed as the Queen's Bargemaster.

Hunt was born on 23 March 1920 in the London Borough of Camden, and was bound apprentice to his father as a waterman (lighterman) in 1935 on the River Thames where he learned to tow Thames barges with a rowing-boat. At the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered as a sapper waterman in the Royal Engineers and served in the Narvik campaign in Arctic Norway, in April–May 1940. By 1944 he was commissioned and as a captain commanded fifteen of the Rhino ferries on Gold Beach on D-Day. In four months, all sixty-four of these landing craft put ashore 93,000 units (tanks, guns and vehicles) and 440,000 tons of military stores. During the last six months of the war in Europe, together with the Dutch hydraulics engineer Lt. C L M Lambrechtsen van Ritthem, he advised the Chief Engineer Second Army, Brigadier "Ginger" Campbell on the “opposed crossing of water obstacles”, so that the longest floating Bailey bridge in WW2 could be constructed at Gennep, the Netherlands. This bridge over the river Maas (Meuse) was 4008 feet [1221 metres] long and was opened on 19 February 1945.

Demobilised as a major he returned to civilian life as a college lecturer in navigation and watermanship at the City & East London College, Bunhill Row, London from 1948 until 1985. As a Royal Waterman, he was appointed Bargemaster to Her Majesty in 1978 and retired from royal service as a Member of the Royal Victoria Order in 1990. The Bargemaster is "nominally responsible for the Crown".

He lives in Lancing, Sussex, UK. He still attends commemorative functions relating to World War II throughout Western Europe.