Ted Briggs was one of only three men out of a crew of 1,421 to survive when the battle cruiser Hood was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait on May 24, 1941. All his life, Ted remembered his old ship and her crew.

As an 18-year-old Flag-Lieutenant’s messenger, Briggs was on Hood’s compass platform when a shell from Bismarck hit the ship between centre and stern, penetrated the deck, exploded and touched off the ammunition in the four-inch and 15-inch magazines. According to one witness, the column of flame generated was “four times the height of the mainmast”.

Ted Briggs himself recalled that he was lifted off his feet and dumped headfirst on the deck: “Then she started listing to starboard. She righted herself, and started going over to port. When she had gone over by about 40 degrees we realised she was not coming back.” There was no time, or need, for an order to abandon ship. Hood sank within three minutes.

On his way to the compass platform shortly before the action, Briggs had bumped into a fellow-sailor, Frank Tuxworth, with whom he had earlier been playing cards. Tuxworth joked: “Do you remember, Briggo, that when the Exeter went into action with the Graf Spee, there was only one signalman saved?” Briggs laughed and replied: “If that happens to us, it’ll be me who’s saved, Tux”

Lady Hood, widow of Sir Horace Hood (lost at Jutland) is invited to launch the new top-secret battlecruiser

Hood, launched in 1918, was at the time still the biggest warship ever built. “She was the outward and visible manifestation of sea-power,” wrote Sir Ludovic Kennedy in his book Pursuit: the Sinking of the Bismarck. “For most Englishmen the news of Hood’s death was traumatic, as though Buckingham Palace had been laid flat or the Prime Minister assassinated.”

Albert Edward Pryke Briggs was born on March 1 1923 at Redcar, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. He never knew his father, a builder and decorator who died in a fall from a ladder three months before his son’s birth. Ted first saw Hood when he was only 12 and she was anchored off the mouth of the Tees. In his book, Flagship Hood, co-written with the late Alan Coles and published in 1985, he recalled: “I stood on the beach for some considerable time, drinking in the beauty, grace and immaculate strength of her.”

The very next day he went to the local recruiting office and announced that he wanted to join the Royal Navy: “They patted me gently on the head,” he remembered, “and told me to come back when I was 15. So I did just that. I had joined up within a week of my 15th birthday.”

A signal card from HMS Hood

After his training at HMS Ganges, Ipswich, Briggs was surprised and delighted to be assigned to Hood; he joined her on June 29 1939, just before war was declared. “It never once occurred to me that she might be sunk,” he said. “As far as I was concerned, she was invincible. And everybody on board shared this view.”

The fact was, however, that this formidable vessel had one – and, as it turned out, fatal – weakness: her deck armour was not strong enough to withstand the vertical trajectory of a shell fired at extreme range. It was a weakness that the Bismarck was able to exploit.

HMS Hood on the way to her destiny, taken SW of the Faence islands on the afternoon of May 22, 1941

The British were aware in May 1941 that the German fleet had left Norway, and guessed that it would attempt to use the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland to break through to the Atlantic, where it would attack the convoys carrying supplies and arms from America to Britain.

On the evening of May 23 Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen were sighted in the Strait. Hood, along with Prince of Wales and six destroyers, went to intercept them. There followed several nerve-wracking hours of cat-and-mouse, as Hood and her sister ships tried to locate the Germans. Although dawn at this latitude was at 2am, visibility was poor; there were snow flurries, and radar at this stage of the war was not fully effective beyond 20 miles.

Last signal to the Admiralty from HMS Hood

Finally, at 5.35am on May 24, Hood spotted the enemy. She moved to close in, and attacked. Briggs recalled: “We had taken them by surprise, and fired about six salvoes before she replied. And when she did, her gunnery was excellent. The third salvo hit us at the base of the mainmast, causing a fire – some of the ammunition was exploding.

“Then there was a hit just above the compass platform. It didn’t explode but it caused some bodies to fall down. I saw one officer with no hands and no face – I knew every officer on the ship, but I didn’t recognise him. We were closing in to get the range we wanted, and that’s when the final salvo hit. I didn’t hear any explosion – all I saw was a terrific sheet of flame.”

The Bismarck’s fifth salvo hit the Hood’s magazine hoist resulting in a catastrophic explosion that tore the ship in half.

Briggs was sucked down beneath the sea. He later wrote: “I had heard it was nice to drown. I stopped trying to swim upwards. The water was a peaceful cradle – I was ready to meet my God. My blissful acceptance of death ended in a sudden surge beneath me, which shot me to the surface like a decanted cork in a champagne bottle. I turned, and 50 yards away I could see the bows of the Hood vertical in the sea. It was the most frightening aspect of my ordeal, and a vision which was to recur terrifyingly in nightmares for the next 40 years.”

Hood sinking with HMS Prince of Wales in foreground. Painting by J.C. Schmitz-Westerholt aboard Prinz Eugen

“When I came to the surface I was on her port side . . . I turned and swam as best I could in water 4″ thick with oil and managed to get on one of the small rafts she carried, of which there were a large number floating around. When I turned again she had gone and there was a fire on the water where her bows had been. Over on the other side I saw Dundas and Tilburn on similar rafts. There was not another soul to be seen.”

Only these two other men – Midshipman William Dundas and Able-Seaman Bob Tilburn – survived.

“We hand-paddled towards each other and held on to one another’s rafts,” Briggs recalled, “until our hands became too numb to do so.”

The three clung on for nearly four hours, singing Roll Out the Barrel to stay awake; even so, they were close to death from hypothermia when they were picked up by the destroyer Electra. Their rescuers could not believe that there was no sign of anyone else from Hood, alive or dead.

Admiralty signal announcing loss of the Hood

Ted Briggs served 35 years in the navy, reaching the rank of lieutenant. He was appointed MBE in 1973, and until his retirement in 1988 worked as a furnished letting manager for an estate agent at Fareham, in Hampshire.

Both his fellow-survivors from Hood predeceased him: William Dundas in 1965, and Bob Tilburn in 1995.

Briggs, who was president of the HMS Hood Association, said shortly before the 60th anniversary of the sinking: “Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about it. I once said to an old Navy man that I sometimes wished I could forget about it. He said to me, ‘You are a naval curio, and you will always remain so. You will never be allowed to forget.’” In July 2001 he visited the site of the wreck and released a plaque to commemorate the ship and those who served in her.

Ted Briggs married twice, and his second wife, Clare, survives him. There were no children.

Sources: Daily Telegraph, October 5, 2008. HMS Hood Association, Ulrich Rudolfsky

J.C. Schmidt’s original sketches made during the battle

Lieutenant Julius Caesar Schmitz was an accomplished marine and railroad artist. He served as a propaganda command officer aboard Prinz Eugen during Operation Rheinübung as “Marinekriegsmaler – navy combat illustrator”. The hypen name – Westerholt was added to his name perhaps by the American or British archivists. He generally signed his name “J. or J.C. Schmitz” on his paintings. He may have been from Westerholt near Wilhelmshaven. The Julius Schmitz water-color sketches of the sinking of the HMS Hood (with handwritten comments by the PG’s KzS Helmut Brinkmann) http://www.kbismarck.com/archives/signalart.html are the artist’s superb interpretation of the action. In 1989, there was an estate sale in Germany by the son of Admiral Lütjens and, among medals, uniforms etc. http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b138/ … /Cover.jpg, another great painting of J. C. Schmitz surfaced: Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in action against HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b138/ … 2large.jpg. The picture was a gift to the Lütjens family by the Office of Naval Operations after the death of the admiral. I don’t know what happened to that picture in the auction; the reproduction is small and a lot of detail is lost. Ulrich Rudofsky

Links

HMS Hood Association
Make a donation to the HMS Hood Association

Thanks to old friend Abhimanyu Singh for passing this on to me. I am fascinated by these funny old letters that end up on the internet, causing endless arguments about whether or not they are genuine. (Another favourite of mine is the classic railway complaint of Okil Chunder Sen.)

Sir Archibald’s letter is said to have been found in the national wartime archives, and released under the Freedom of Information Act in 1999. The Usenet’s Urban Folklore junkies were soon questioning its authenticity. In February 2000, Ulo Melton, of The Sewergator Sanctuary wrote:

‘The Usenet group Urban Folklore has been looking it over, and somebody pointed out it’s written on a typewriter with proportional spacing. The letters ‘t’, ‘l’, ‘i’, and ‘f’ take up less space than other letters (especially evident in words like ‘little’). It appears IBM first introduced a typewriter with proportional spacing in 1944, about a year too late for the Mustapha letter. Somebody else has found that Archibald Clark Kerr was indeed an ambassador to the Soviet Union at that time, but his middle name is mis-spelled “Clerk” on the letter.’

The most cursory examination shows that the letters were regularly, not proportionally, spaced and it would be extremely odd if “i” and “l” were anything but skeletal. However the question of mis-spelling remains. So it is interesting to read in a letter Mr Douglas Stuart wrote to The Spectator on June 12, 1999 that:

For 40 years I have possessed and still possess the card left at the British embassy, Moscow, by M. Mustapha Kunt. It gives his name and underneath the inscription, `Secretaire de l’Ambassade de Turquie’. This card was given to me by my late colleague and friend, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, Thomas Barman, who was at the British embassy in Moscow during Sir Archibald’s tenure as ambassador. Tom told me the story that goes with the card when we were at the 1959 Geneva Conference of Foreign Ministers. On my return to Vienna where I was then the BBC’s correspondent, my wife put M. Kunt’s card in our scrapbook with a simple paper covering on which she wrote, `For Adults Only’. This was intended to warn off our children. It didn’t.

Captain Alexander van Straubenzee responded:

Sir: I am delighted to read that the name Mustapha Kunt (Letters, 12 June) has been given some credence. Some years ago, I was showing a Turkish friend some photographs of a visit I made to Ankara in 1975. He was intrigued to see a photograph of my guide on the trip – a very attractive girl by the name of Ufuk. ‘I wonder whether she knows the family of Mustapha Kunt,’ he mused. `That would be some marriage.’

“We all feel like that, Reggie, now and again,’ wrote Sir Archibald who, however, was probably gay. While Ambassador in Moscow he formed a close friendship with a young Russian man, Evgeni Yost, to whom he was so attached that when he left the USSR and Stalin offered him a farewell gift, he asked for Yost. The request was granted and Yost returned to Britain with Clark-Kerr, serving as his valet and masseur. After his master’s death he married a local woman, had nine children, and ended up running a fish and chip shop on the Isle of Bute.

We were having dinner with some friends who’d just driven up from Spain, ten of us round the table, when the phone rang. It was another friend demanding that we switch on the BBC. ‘Sir Howard Davies is on Radio Four and you’ve been longlisted for the Booker.’

The news sounded extremely unlikely. I knew Animal’s People had been entered, but had since forgotten all about it.

‘He definitely mentioned your book,’ my friend insisted.

I returned to the table and as calmly as I could told the others. Let’s not get too excited, he’s probably got it all wrong. A quarter of an hour later the phone rang again and this time it was my sister Umi who is never wrong.

It was rather wonderful news because Animal’s People had a disappointing start. One review in the UK, a couple in India. As time went by it became clear that there weren’t going to be any more. No one had heard of the book, friends couldn’t find it in the shops, Indian booksellers denied all knowledge of it. It was set to vanish without trace, a fate that overtakes so many novels. On Amazon it was ranked somewhere around 220,000. Once, when a kind friend bought six copies, it jumped 200,000 places.

The British review was from Lucy Beresford to whom I shall always be grateful. It appeared in the New Statesman which in the 1950s under the editorship of John Freeman had published a number of my mother’s short stories. When I was a student at Cambridge I dug out the old issues in the University Library and discovered that another of John Freeman’s up-and-coming young writers was one Doris Lessing.

The immediate effect of being longlisted was that people started talking about the book. From India, where previously it had been impossible to drum up any interest, came a stream of telephone calls wanting interviews. Some sent questionnaires they demanded back by return. I gratefully obliged. Anything to gain the novel a chance of being read.

At the Edinburgh Book Festival my reading was sold out, a welcome change from last time when I do believe it was festival staff gallantly making up most of the audience of ten. I apologised to the audience for the foulness of Animal, the narrator’s, language, but someone said to me later that they thought I was more shocked by it than anyone else.

Afterwards there was a long queue of people wanting signed copies. One man bought eighteen and when I asked what on earth he wanted with so many, replied candidly that he planned to sell them on eBay. ‘But I’ve paid full price,’ he said. I think this is when it sank in that something big had happened.

‘The attention will only last four weeks,’ my agent warned. As they passed, the pleasure of being longlisted slowly turned into apprehension about the shortlist.

I was invited to the shortlist party but didn’t want to go and flew over from Toulouse in a cloud of butterflies, despatched by my wife with instructions that ‘your smile must be warm and genuine whatever happens’. Spent the afternoon in my hotel room trying to doze, not daring to turn on the TV or radio, dreading the phone. Three thirty came and went and it didn’t ring. Obviously not good news. I logged onto the Booker website and was much relieved.

The drinks do was at the Century Club in Shaftesbury Avenue. I met three of the other writers. Nicola Barker was nice and down to earth, Mohsin Hamid was friendly (we have a mutual friend in Suketu Mehta, who wrote Maximum City) and we decided that we must stand together in the face of media reports that ‘Indo-Pak rivalries enter literary arena’. Lloyd Jones seemed a little reserved, but possibly with good reason, as I may have been pretty well oiled by that point. The stress, you know.

The Times reported that Animal’s People was one of only three longlisters whose Amazon ranking had climbed further from the peak reached after the longlist announcement, while The Telegraph reported that in the first ten days of being longlisted it had sold just 231 copies. If this seems contradictory, friends had initially reported not being able to find the book in any shop, and for much of the first ten days Amazon was out of stock, quoting a delivery date of between 4-6 weeks.

Animal’s People is the rank outsider to win the prize, but I am clear that I have been very lucky and glad that Animal, who has made so much of my past five years a pleasure and a nightmare, will now have his say.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE NEW STATESMAN UNDER THE TITLE ‘SURPRISE PARTY’

“Launderette” was a commercial for Levi 501s. Made in 1985 by Bartle Bogle Hegarty it starred Nick Kamen and first ran in the UK. Very clever, very memorable. It made Nick famous, won lots of prizes and regularly tops the list of British viewers’ favourite commercials. Watch carefully.

LEVI STRAUSS BY BARTLE BOGLE HEGARTY 1985

Advertising ideas famously have many parents. It’s hard when projects are discussed collaboratively over and over again to remember exactly where each thought came from. Ideas emerge out of one another; as another adland cliché has it, “An idea doesn’t care who has it”. Clients and agency bosses don’t either, but with so much at stake, people in creative departments are jealously protective of anything that looks remotely like an original notion. They go out of their way to avoid being accused of plagiarism and have long memories for famous work. But sometimes not long enough.

Have another look at the Levi’s “Launderette” commercial, then watch this:

HAMLET CIGARS BY COLLETT DICKENSON PEARCE, 1968

Uncanny. The Hamlet ad was made by Collett Dickenson Pearce in 1968. (Points for the afficionado: in those early days the Hamlet music – Bach’s “Air on a G-string” performed by Jacques Loussier – played throughout the ad. Only later would it start at the moment of disappointment to tell the audience they were watching a Hamlet commercial. I wonder who thought of that refinement?)

The Levis commercial is a straightforward reworking of the Hamlet, right down to the man’s white boxer shorts. It has the women on plastic chairs, the expressions of delighted shock. However in the Hamlet film the sixties girls really are sixties girls, whereas the Levi’s commercial has eighties women playing fifties girls and the film has acquired a kid with a knowing grin and backwards baseball cap. The Hamlet commercial has all the innocence of its era: Twiggy coat dresses, Biba, Sergeant Pepper, and cigars at four shillings eightpence halfpenny a pack; it must have cost hardly more than that to shoot. The set is a row of washing machines and four chairs, and like many of Alan Parker’s early films it was probably made in CDP’s basement.

The Levi’s ad transfers the scene to a New York of nostalgic memory. It has an expensive set and screams the production values de rigeur in the knowing and self-regarding eighties. Of course it also has Nick Kamen, who is far sexier than the gent in the bowler and despite the clear borrowing and added kitsch it’s the Levi’s ad that people remember. But I prefer CDP’s original.

I don’t for a moment think that John Hegarty or Tony Scott would stoop to purloining someone else’s work. I prefer to think of the Levi’s commercial as a tribute to its predecessor which, although not the most memorable Hamlet ad ever made, was an idea so natural for Levi’s that it proved simply too good to waste.

Just to show how much can be squeezed out of a strong idea, here is a 2006 commercial for Childline.

CHILDLINE BY THE OUTWARD FILM COMPANY, 2006

In the early eighties I worked as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather in London. One of my clients was Shell UK, and I often had to boast about how many million pounds Shell had invested in the North Sea, or paid in tax to the exchequer.

“TEMPEST”, Shell UK. Richard Williams Animation. 1982.

Inserting the correct figures would have meant finding and re-reading the brief, something I could rarely be bothered to do. However, rather than write £000, which to me looked untidy, I would insert ad hoc amounts, leaving it to the account director to correct them later. Thus I’d proclaim that Shell had spent £1,950 million on Brent Charlie, or invested £24.46 million planting trees over its gas pipelines, these sums being derived from mathematical constants such as the year of my birth and the agency phone number.

One day a new brief arrived containing a figure that I recognised as the date of the Great Plague of London. I asked the account director where he had got it. He said he had found it in a newspaper article.

‘It’s wrong,’ I said.

‘No it isn’t. I double checked. The source was one of our ads.’

After many years in advertising I switched to writing fiction of another sort, never dreaming that I could ever again be accused of falsifying history.

The other day I came across An Honourable Murder, a thoroughly-researched article about legal aspects of the infamous Nanavati murder trial, which took place in Bombay in 1959. The defendant, a handsome naval officer called Kawas Nanavati, had shot dead his wife’s playboy lover, and more than half the nation thought he had done the right and decent thing.

As the Nanavati case is at the heart of my novel The Death of Mr Love, I read the article with interest.

‘Blitz, the popular weekly tabloid owned by newspaper baron Rusi Karanjia,’ the article’s author Aarti Sethi wrote, ‘ran a parallel trial by media that not just acquitted Nanavati, but indeed celebrated the elegant Commander. . . Blitz sold the case as a classic story of love, betrayal and the restoration of honour. It recounted how the dashing naval officer had met his wife in England [and how she] had been tricked and seduced by the villain Ahuja, whom Blitz described bitingly as “a symbol of those wealthy, corrupt, immoral and basically un-socialist forces which are holding the nation and its integrity to ransom”.6

Strong words, and ones I knew well, for I had used them in The Death of Mr Love. With some indignation Sethi continued: ‘Blitz exhibited none of the discretion that is normally reserved for the dead. “Some”, it wrote, “may attribute this sickening event to the heat of the season, but this is a mistake. Persons such as he do not share the lot of the common man. They live in a world of privilege. For their sins, their outrages, their crimes, they and they alone are to blame”.7

Now this sneering passage I knew even better, for every word of it was my own. I had composed it as a small fiction set inside a larger one. It had taken me a long time to capture the snotty righteousness of Blitz’s prose and I had been quite proud of it at the time, one of those small achievements that no one but the author of a novel will ever notice or appreciate.

Turning to the article’s footnotes, I discovered that quotations 6 and 7 had as their source The Death of Mr Love, by Indra Sinha.

So this is how history is written. Unless someone takes the trouble to check the Blitz archives (which reside in a dusty Bombay building near the Excelsior cinema under the custody of a sweet man called Mr Vohra) or unless they read this piece, those two quotes will henceforth be as much part of Blitz’s history as if Karanjia had sweated over them himself – and I still can’t remember which of us wrote the first one.

The Honourable Murder: The Trial of Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati, by Aarti Sethi
The Death of Mr Love, by Indra Sinha

CODA:
Years ago I wrote to Graham Greene to ask if he would pass on the secret of a delicious sounding dish mentioned in Our Man in Havana. Back came a charming reply. ‘I am sorry that I don’t remember where I got the recipe for Granny Brown’s Ipswich Roast. I think I must have invented it.’

There is no greater award for a writer than the Nobel prize for literature. Five years ago the accolade went to VS Naipaul in recognition of his 50-year writing career. Naipaul, born in Trinidad, also won the 1971 Booker prize (now the Man Booker) in Britain, where he has lived since 1950. It was awarded for In a Free State, his novel about displaced colonials on different continents.

Dennis Potter, the TV dramatist, praised its “lucid complexity”. He wrote: “Do not miss the exhilaration of catching one of our most accomplished writers reaching towards the full stretch of his talent.”

Surely the special qualities of such timeless prose would be recognised by today’s publishing industry? Surely a first-time novelist who matched the standard of Naipaul at his best would be snapped up?

The Sunday Times sent out the opening chapter of In a Free State to 20 agents and publishers to find out. Only the names of the author and main characters were changed.

None of the agents or publishers spotted the book’s true pedigree. And instead of experiencing Potter’s exhilaration, they all sent back polite rejections.

Typical was the reply from PFD, a major London literary agency. “Having considered your material,” wrote a submissions department reader, “we do not feel, we are sorry to say, sufficiently enthusiastic or confident about it.”

The Blake Friedmann agency also sent its apologies: “In order to take on a new author, several of us here would need to be extremely enthusiastic about both the content and writing style. I’m sorry to say we don’t feel that strongly about your work.”

Earlier we had also submitted copies of Stanley Middleton’s 1974 joint Booker winner, Holiday, to the same agents and publishers. Middleton, well- regarded in the literary world, has produced 42 books. Ronald Blythe, the author, once wrote in The Sunday Times: “We need Stanley Middleton to remind us what the novel is all about.”

But Middleton’s Booker winner also received a less-than- enthusiastic response. Bloomsbury, the London publisher, read the book “with interest” but found it unsuited to its list. Time Warner said the manuscript contained “good ideas” but it was not its sort of book. Thirteen others gave similar replies. Only one literary agent, Barbara Levy, expressed an interest in reading further chapters.

So why were two such “great” literary works overlooked? David Taylor, the novelist and critic, thought Middleton’s novel may now be regarded as “old-fashioned” but could not explain why Naipaul’s “timeless” work was ignored.

But he was not entirely surprised. “The sort of books being rejected would really shock you,” he said.

Nicholas Clee, former editor of the Bookseller, said that publishers were no longer keen to take risks on untried authors because they faced fiercer competition as the supermarkets forced down prices. He said: “Publishers tend to go for newcomers who have something sensational to offer, or established names. They’re putting big promotional efforts behind just a few titles.”

This has led to a growth in celebrity novels. For example Katie Price, the model known as Jordan, secured a deal to write two novels with Random House earlier this year.

Today’s authors have to be marketable. Taylor said: “Being 29, blonde, good-looking and vaguely famous should be enough to get you a book published nowadays.” Although there are still middle-aged novelists who buck the trend, our rejected version of Holiday was purportedly written by a 53-year-old man.

According to Doris Lessing, the author, publishers have become less willing to nurture talent. “The whole industry has changed so much,” she said. “They used to make an effort to keep first-time novelists in print. Maybe it took till the fourth book for the writer to take off. Now, if the first novel doesn’t attract any attention, they don’t take another one.”

There has also been an explosion in the number of aspiring novelists. Many are attracted by stories of huge advances even though, according to Taylor, no more than 20 writers of literary novels earn enough to survive on without another source of income.

Most of the major publishers have stopped operating a “slush pile” — their name for unsolicited submissions. Instead the work is passed on to the literary agencies, who themselves find it difficult to read everything. Many manuscripts are discarded after a few pages.

Carole Blake, of Blake Friedmann, receives up to 50 novels a day but takes on just six new authors a year. “We have two book agents and we’re pretty full,” she said. “So unless something leaps off the page as amazingly commercial or literary, it is very unlikely we will take new clients on.”

Bloomsbury, Time Warner and PFD were unavailable for comment last week. Barbara Levy said her agency was deluged with 1,500 manuscripts a year. Patrick Janson-Smith, of the Christopher Little agency, said: “We get masses, and it would be a foolish person who pretended they read every sentence.”

Mark Lucas, of the Lucas Alexander Whitley agency, said: “We would love to claim that absolutely everything that came in got extensively cross-examined. But successful agencies have rather full client lists . . . when you guys do things like this, it’s time for us all to celebrate. It shows there isn’t an absolute scale of values and nor should there be.”