The most authoritative and devastating repudiation of Williams’ position came from Captain Nigel Malpass, a former chief officer on Derbyshire who also served on two of the other Bridge-class vessels and ultimately rose up the ranks to become the managing director and chairman of various Bibby Line companies. In an expert demonstration of his knowledge of seamanship, Mr Malpass (he spurned his title of captain) showed the court how Bibby Line crew normally applied additional lashings to hatch lids when severe weather was expected. The complicated lashing was called a ‘cat’s cradle’, and once secured to all the tightened toggles and over the top of the closed hatch lid it acted to prevent the toggle nuts from working loose. He identified the fragment of line attached to two of the toggles as the heaving line they would use to make the cat’s cradle. His demonstration of tying the cat’s cradle on a half-scale model of the foredeck access hatch brought into the courtroom was termed ‘Very impressive’ by Justice Colman. In his written statement, Mr Malpass left no doubt how absolutely wrong Williams was about the hatch lid being left unsecured, and about the professional conduct of Derbyshire’s crew.
Mr Williams suggests that the mooring rope may have been draped over the coaming, and that the hatch lid was then dropped down on the rope and the hatch lid only secured by the loop of heaving line drawn across the corner of the hatch lid between the two toggles. I find it hard to believe that such a statement could possibly be made by anyone who has the remotest practical knowledge of sea-going life. I cannot accept that Mr Williams really believes that on the basis of a typhoon being forecast a crew member on any ship, let alone a well-run ship of this sort, would go forward to secure a hatch cover and leave a rope coming out over the coaming so that by definition the hatch could not be made watertight and thereafter just secure it on one corner.
Remarkably, Williams stuck fast to his implied position that the crew did not secure the foredeck hatch, even though he accepted he was wrong about the mooring line coming out of the hatch. It was left to the DFA’s barrister, Andrew Moran QC, to finally get him to grudgingly agree, after repeated questioning, ‘that it was more probable than not that the crew did fully secure the forward stores hatch’.
The final word on the matter was left to Justice Colman, whose report was made public on 8 November 2000. Some criticism was reserved for Oceanroutes, the routing agency hired to provide information to Derbyshire’s captain about the track of Typhoon Orchid and advice on the best route to avoid the worst weather. As to the cause of Derbyshire’s loss, Colman concluded with ‘reasonable confidence that the initiating event was destruction of ventilators and air pipes on the foredeck’ by waves breaking over the bow, allowing water to slowly flood the ‘bosun’s store, machinery spaces and probably the ballast tank in substantial quantities’. With the vessel trimmed by the bow, the sequence of events detailed in the assessors’ report – including the destruction of hatch no. 1 by the overloading of green water, the flooding of hold no. 1 and then the successive collapse of hatch no. 2 and no. 3 and the flooding of these holds – caused it to sink. As for the conduct of Derbyshire’s crew, Colman was unequivocal in clearing them of any blame.
The condition of the store hatch as found does not suggest that the lid was left unsecured by the crew or that the lid could not properly be closed because a rope was protruding from the hatch. On the whole of the evidence the lid was adequately secured both by properly tightened toggles and by a complicated roping device designed to prevent the lid coming loose because the wing nuts had ridden up the toggle shanks with the motion of the ship. The rope seen in the wreckage to emerge from the hatch was a mooring rope one end of which was originally attached to the inside of the hatch lid. This Report rejects the Assessors’ conclusion that the crew had left the hatch lid inadequately secured prior to the Derbyshire entering the typhoon.
The DFA accepted the conclusions of the court.
During the twenty years the Derbyshire case rumbled on, the shipping industry was forced to look inwards and adopt some changes to improve the safety of ships, in particular bulk carriers. For example, in November 1997 the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted new rules for bulk carriers of 150 metres and upwards whereby the bulkhead and double bottom must be strong enough to allow the ship to survive flooding in no. 1 hold unless loading is restricted. A major portion of Colman’s report was devoted to ship design regulations and standards; the most important concerned the relationship between cargo hatch cover strength (thought to be seriously deficient) and the height of bow freeboard, which Colman said should be totally re-evaluated. New amendments for specially strengthened hatch covers to be fitted to the forward holds of all new cargo ships (not only bulk carriers) came into force internationally in 2005. His report also included a list of twenty-two recommendations for the improvement of ship safety, nearly all of which have been adopted in new-build ships.
Despite resigning as an assessor, Professor Douglas Faulkner did contribute to the assessors’ report and gave testimony at the inquiry. He also devoted considerable effort to studying Derbyshire’s loss and published numerous papers including his own independent assessment of the sinking of the ship. He was firmly of the opinion that hatch cover failure was the only cause of the loss and that Derbyshire would have sunk because of this whether the bow was flooded or not. His articles also criticize Robin Williams for his inflexible adherence to bow flooding as the initiating event in the overall sinking scenario.
The Derbyshire Families Association was awarded the Marine Society’s prestigious Thomas Gray Silver Medal in 2004 for their tireless campaign to improve the safety of bulk carriers. Paul Lambert, who was chairman of the DFA and afterwards worked within the IMO on new safety regulations for bulk carriers, was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s birthday list in 2010 for services to maritime safety.
Although bulk carriers and other large cargo ships still sink every year, and such are the inherent dangers in shipping that this will always be the case, the rate of losses has diminished over time, in large part due to the regulations and safety standards that have come into force both indirectly and directly as a result of the investigation of Derbyshire’s loss. I have been involved in finding arguably more famous ships, but for this simple reason the MV Derbyshire is the most significant.
* The term ‘green water‘ describes the actual solid seawater on the deck, as opposed to spray and foam.
III
HMS Hood and KTB Bismarck
SEARCH FOR AN EPIC BATTLE
HMS HOOD
SUNK 24 MAY 1941
1,415 died
3 survived
KTB Bismarck
SUNK 27 MAY 1941
2,131 died
115 survived
One thing I have learned to expect after every wreck I successfully locate is for someone to ask me what I’d like to find next. When Rob White put this question to me at a party in March 1995 to celebrate the broadcast of the award-winning Channel 4 television documentary he’d produced about the loss of Derbyshire, my immediate answer was ‘I’d like to find the wreck of HMS Hood.’ I had no idea at the time how much this simple statement would change both our lives and bind us together in a twenty-year journey to honour the memory of this extraordinary ship and the 1,415 men who went down with her.
I will never forget Rob’s reaction to my reply. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open but no words came out. When he finally regained the power to speak, he said, ‘Is that possible, could you really find the Hood?’ Having just spent the afternoon at the Guildhall Library in central London researching the loss of the battlecruiser, I did think it was possible and that there was a good reason for doing it.
The seed for finding the Hood had been placed in my mind by my boss and friend Don Dean, based on a casual conversation we had had about what wrecks would be interesting to find. The ship that was credited with sinking the Hood, the German battleship Bismarck, had been found some years earlier by Robert Ballard, but no one had ever attempted t
o search for the ship to which Bismarck basically owes its fame. Don and I both found it curious that of the central combatants in their epic battle, it was the Bismarck whose fame grew with the passing of time, whereas the Hood, a ship with a far more celebrated and eventful career, seemed to have been forgotten. Perhaps this was only the case in America, where there is a somewhat odd fascination with Nazi Germany, but I did get the sense that the average person in the street outside the UK would know the name of Bismarck before Hood.
I myself had little idea about the historical significance of Hood and what a tremendous shock it was to the country when they learned that her destruction had been so quick, so total and with such an unspeakable loss of life. Reading the contemporaneous newspaper accounts in the Guildhall was the start of my education. These reports emphasized that Hood – at 42,000 tons displacement – was the largest, most powerful warship afloat but that she was also an older ship completed just after the end of World War I, whereas the Bismarck was brand new and equipped with superior gunnery. There was also a lot of discussion about how Hood was sunk by an apparent lucky strike from Bismarck that penetrated the magazine, causing the ship to explode, and how magazine explosions also caused the loss of three British ships during the Battle of Jutland in 1916. I was especially drawn to the comments of two writers who, just a few days after Hood’s loss, already had diametrically opposed views about the real reason it happened.
The first writer suggested that perhaps the lessons of Jutland and the vulnerability of the magazines on British warships were not learned by the Admiralty. He surmised: ‘Her loss therefore immediately raises the technical question whether a miscalculation was made, while probably leaving no evidence to assist in answering it.’ This article drew an immediate and sharp rebuke in a subsequent letter to the editor, which argued that a lucky hit or technical miscalculation was not the reason for Hood’s sudden annihilation. Rather, claimed the writer, it was ‘because she had to fight a ship twenty-two years more modern than herself’. So the debate had already begun about whether the disastrous loss of Hood was an unlucky or preventable event.
The instant attraction for me was whether evidence could be collected from Hood’s wreck to solve this debate. I wasn’t to know at the time, but it didn’t take me long to learn that no definitive answers to the central question about what had caused Hood to explode and why there were so few survivors had been put forward in the intervening fifty-four years. After finding the Derbyshire, I was keen to demonstrate to the shipping industry that it was feasible to investigate marine casualties to determine their cause and to use the lessons learned to prevent similar losses. It might have been an outlandish idea, but I thought if we could solve the mystery of the loss of Hood, perhaps we could convince more insurers and maritime authorities to take proactive action in the investigation of current shipping losses. While this motivation stayed with me right up to the search expedition I led six years later, in July 2001, to find and film the wrecks of both Hood and Bismarck on the sixtieth anniversary of their battle, it was meeting Ted Briggs and other former crew members that gave me a far better appreciation of how the search could be used to tell the human story of Hood through the experience of those who had sailed on her.
The Hood had started life as a plan on paper for a new type of British capital ship that blurred the lines between the early-twentieth-century ‘dreadnought’ battleship, with its big guns and heavy plate armour, and the battlecruiser, which also had big guns but placed a priority on speed over protective armour. Her design stemmed from the transformational thinking of Admiral Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher, a modernizer and one of the most important and influential figures in British naval history. For Fisher, speed in battle was paramount and he consistently advocated it over armour as the best form of defence. His fondness for speed was readily apparent in this sharply worded letter to his successor as First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, in 1911:
The first desideratum is speed! Your fools don’t see it. They are always running around to see where they can put on a little more armour! ... You hit him first, you hit him hard, and you keep hitting. Tha’s your safety! You don’t get hit back! Well! That’s the improved 13.5 inch gun! But disassociated from dominating speed, that gun is futile.
The battlecruiser was thus the perfect embodiment of Fisher’s maxim that ‘speed is armour’, and Hood was the evolutionary end point of this design philosophy, even though by the time the first designs were being formulated in late 1915, Fisher was no longer in charge of the Admiralty. After a change in plans, the final design was chosen in April 1916 and the Admiralty ultimately placed orders for four ships of the new Admiral class, designated Hood, Howe, Rodney and Anson. The Hood was the first of the four to be constructed, at the John Brown and Co. shipyard at Clydebank, but the catastrophic loss of three earlier vintage battlecruisers (HMS Invincible, Queen Mary and Indefatigable) at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 — including the combined loss of 3,309 men — brought the project to a shuddering halt.
Hearing of these losses, Admiral David Beatty, Commander of the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron at Jutland, is reported to have said: ‘There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.’ While Beatty survived the numerous hits the German battlecruiser Lützow inflicted on his flagship HMS Lion, Rear Admiral Sir Horace Hood was not so lucky. As commander of the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, he was killed when his flagship HMS Invincible was hit by a German shell – also from Lützow — which penetrated one of its turrets, causing an explosion that literally blew the ship in half. One of the most evocative images from Jutland, which speaks to the high price the British paid in ships and men, is the photo of Invincible’s shattered bow and stern resting on the shallow seabed. Somewhere within her wreckage lie the remains of Sir Horace Hood KCB DSO MVO.
It is often said that the construction of Hood was started on the same day as the Battle of Jutland, but this is untrue. The reality is that the loss of three British battlecruisers to plunging shellfire that apparently penetrated their decks and turrets gave pause to the Admiralty’s plans. An immediate redesign was necessary to correct several deficiencies that were fatally exposed at Jutland, including poor handling and flash-proofing of inherently unstable cordite, and inadequate armour protection around the vital parts of the ship. The question of how much protective armour a battlecruiser should have, and the part it played in the losses at Jutland, was still a vexing issue, and there was no unanimity of opinion within the Admiralty. The decision to potentially sacrifice speed for armour was clearly a struggle for the designers, judging from the number of changes that were made both before construction started and afterwards. By the time work began on Hood’s hull (designated ship no. 460) on 1 September 1916, there were increases in armour to her horizontal decks (1.5 inches to 3 inches), barbettes (8 inches to 12 inches) and angled main armour belt (also 8 inches to 12 inches), resulting in an additional 3,450 tons in weight.
When launched on 22 August 1918 by Lady Edith Hood, widow of Sir Horace, Hood was armed with eight 15-inch guns mounted in four turrets, twelve 5.5-inch secondary guns, four 4-inch high-angle anti-aircraft guns, and a total of six torpedo tubes placed above and below the waterline. Her design speed of 32 knots, intended to give her an advantage of several knots over any foreign capital ship, was achieved in part due to her extreme length, despite the additional weight she carried in armour and other structures. At 860 feet (262 metres), Hood was the longest ship in existence during her life. For those who witnessed her full-power trials at the Isle of Arran in March 1920, it must have been an extraordinary sight to see this 46,680-ton behemoth of a ship, with thick plumes of black smoke streaming from her twin stacks, ploughing her way through the mile course at a maximum speed of 32.07 knots.
In the end, whether she was really a ‘fast battleship’ or a ‘super battlecruiser’ – a debate that continues in certain circles today — mattered very little to the way she was viewed by anyone lucky enough to catch sight of her at sea or
in the numerous ports she visited in the UK and the twelve countries that constituted her famous world tour in 1924. She was that rare beast: a fearsome warship bristling with deadly weaponry that also invoked visceral feelings of affection and respect. Her graceful, majestic lines were awe-inspiring and moved many a hardened man to tears. Loved by friends and feared by foes, the ‘Mighty Hood’ was quite simply the most famous and most powerful warship in the world for the next twenty-one years until the day her nemesis, the Bismarck, broke out into the Atlantic on 19 May 1941.
Not long after the television documentary on Derbyshire was broadcast, I was back in the UK to accept a Seatrade ‘Safety-At-Sea’ Award for our work in locating the Derbyshire, and to meet with my new clients at Blue Water Recoveries (BWR). BWR was a brand-new consulting company founded to advise on the salvage of valuable metal cargoes from modern shipwrecks in deep water. It was formed off the back of the recovery of 1.3 million silver Saudi Arabian riyal coins from the wreck of the US Liberty ship John Barry, sunk off the coast of Oman during World War II. This groundbreaking salvage, from a depth of 2,600 metres, was the first to utilize the type of instrumented and controllable recovery tool that the CIA first developed for a highly secretive and daring attempt to retrieve the sunken Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 some twenty years earlier. Like the CIA salvage, which was only partially successful, recovering the forward section of the submarine but none of its nuclear missiles, the John Barry project was a technical triumph but a financial loss. The team, led by the joint talents of Bob Hudson and Mark Cliff, had proved that seriously heavy cargoes could be extracted and lifted from wrecks in ultra-deep oceanic waters on a commercially viable basis. If only the 2,000 tons of silver bullion rumoured to be on board the ship had been recovered along with the 18 tons of numismatically unimportant coins, this one-off project would have been a roaring success.
The Shipwreck Hunter Page 13