While commanding MTB683 and attached to a Norwegian flotilla based at Lerwick in Shetland, John “Polly” Perkins found himself alongside a jetty up a Norwegian fjord having completed a clandestine operation, landing agents and recovering refugees from the attentions of the Gestapo. As it was a few days before Christmas 1944, he sent one of his sailors ashore to root up some Christmas trees.

The MTB returned to Lerwick with three saplings which were displayed on the upper deck and in the officers’ and ratings’ messes. But the Norwegian admiral who had come aboard to be de-briefed on the operation begged for two, which were swiftly flown to London as gifts to King Haakon and the prime minister of the Norwegian government-in-exile.

Coastal Forces like to think that this incident is the origin of the annual donation from 1947 of a Norwegian tree to Trafalgar Square each Christmas, though an article in the quarterly Naval Review of October 1993 suggests that the provision of royal Christmas trees began in 1940 as a duty on the Norwegian Navy’s clandestine “Shetland Bus” operations. The Norwegian Embassy believes today that the annual donation was the independent idea of the Mayor of Oslo.

John Perkins’s career in coastal craft began with dangerous — if acutely tedious — sweeping for air-dropped acoustic mines in the Manchester Ship Canal. After a brief spell as second-in-command of a motor launch (ML) at Lowestoft, he was appointed, virtually untrained, to the destroyer Southdown on East Coast convoy duty.

As a temporary sub-lieutenant RNVR, thirsting for the excitement of the fast night-time actions against enemy convoys in the narrow waters of the Channel and North Sea, he bearded his appointing officer in the Admiralty and got himself transferred to coastal forces.

Commanding MTB230, he was awarded his first DSC and a mention in dispatches for actions against the enemy in the Nore area in October 1942 and March and June 1943, the first being against a heavily escorted convoy off the Dutch coast where Perkins earned a reputation as an “eager and aggressive torpedo marksman”. The many difficulties of the MTBs’ early days included their unsilenced engines. Lacking starshell, radar and radio navigation aids, they were often unable to find the enemy or achieve the surprise necessary for the decisive close-in torpedo attack — sometimes becoming the hunted, not the hunter. His own lobbying helped to obtain the vital engine mufflers for the flotillas.

His second DSC was awarded for his part in another action off the Dutch coast while commanding MTB683 in June 1944. He remembered the campaign after D-Day as being one of “various bloody actions against flak ships”.

In command of MTB766 Perkins was engaged in offensive operations up the Scheldt river with the aim of opening up the port of Antwerp when his seagoing career was brought to an end by “the Ostend disaster”. Numerous MTBs were berthed at Ostend when a mechanic spilt a bucket of petrol into the water. This caught fire and the subsequent explosions, which included the large compressed-air vessels of torpedoes, caused the loss of 12 boats and the death of 68 sailors. Perkins was blown into the water with his navigating officer, who was never seen again. After survivors’ leave he was appointed to the coastal forces staff division of the Admiralty until his retirement.

Continuing his Cambridge-based education, Perkins qualified for the bar, but seeing little future as a barrister obtained a post as deputy company secretary with Rolls-Royce at Derby. In 1956 he moved to Manchester to work for Clayton Aniline, part of the Ciba chemicals company until 1967. He was for some years the managing director of Ciba’s pharmaceuticals division at Horsham until retiring in 1971 as Ciba merged with Geigy.

A keen leisure sailor of a number of power boats, Perkins was brushing up his navigation by taking the offshore skipper’s course at Brighton Marina sea school when his remarkable business skills were again recognised by the offer of the job of managing director of the marina construction project. The largest in Britain and formed mainly of massive concrete caissons on an unsheltered coastline, the Brighton Marina development started in 1971. By 1977 the infrastructure was complete, and the marina was opened in 1978.

The cost of constructing the marina had far exceeded the original budget and the backers were reluctant to commit more funding, so further development was halted. In 1985 the marina was taken over by Brent Walker, led by boxer-turned-businessman George Walker, and Perkins left the company.

He subsequently became a director of Windsor race course.

His wife Mary predeceased him; he is survived by their son and daughter.

Lieutenant John Perkins, DSC and Bar, coastal forces captain and businessman, was born on January 1, 1920. He died on June 1, 2008, aged 88