Exmouth Survivor of the gold ship Edinburgh
IT happened just after four o’clock on 1 st May. We were having tea in No.21 Mess when suddenly there was a terrific crash and we were plunged into darkness. Through a smoky stench we made our way up the hatch to the flight deck….. the ship was listing to starboard.
The event was the end of the British cruiser HMS Edinburgh, recently in the news when a salvage firm brought up £40 million of the cargo in gold she was carrying from Russia when the Germans torpedoed her in 1942, sending her to the bottom of the Artic ocean 200 miles north of Murmansk.
The words are those of one of the survivors of the sinking, Mr John Horder, who now lives in Bradham lane Exmouth, and who still has the diaries he kept at the time.
The Edinburgh sunk the day after the first torpedoes struck, after taking a third torpedo hit. With their ship in a sinking condition the crew stood to quarters until they could be taken off.
I was in ‘A’ turret. Two sloops were standing by, one on either side. Normally, from the side of the ‘ Edinburgh’, they would have been below us. We had been in the turret firing guns and slowly sinking - -or perhaps not so slowly. When we came out we were so low in the water that the sloops towered above us.
The sloops carried about 800 survivors to Russia. Some were accommodated in the town of Polyarno, and a second party, including Mr Horder, two miles away in the village of Vaenga.
Faced with a long wait to be returned to Britain, Mr Horder’s interest in foreign languages prompted him to start learning Russian, and his value as an interpreter led to his being one of the last to be repatriated.
His command of the language, and the time he spent in Russia gave him a chance, not often found by British servicemen, of seeing everyday wartime life in that country at first hand. Some of his impressions of Russia and its people, recorded in exercise books with ink improvised by the local Commissar, who mixed crushed indelible pencil with water for him, will appear in next week’s Journal ....
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‘TORPEDO COCKTAIL’ DRINK AS EDINBURGH IS HIT
The Journal’s story last week about Mr John Horder, survivor of the sunken bullion carrying cruiser HMS Edinburgh, sparked off memories among some of our readers and we were very quickly put in touch with two more local men who were aboard the vessel when she was mortally damaged in action 200 miles north of Murmansk in May, 1942.
The Edinburgh recently came back into the news when a salvage company retrieved £40 million – worth of the cargo of gold from Russia which went down with her – an operation which one of the local survivors, former Chief Petty Officer Harold Cooper, of Queens Road, Budleigh Salterton, felt some reservation about. “After all”, he said, “The ship is the grave of about 60 of the crew”.
Mr Cooper was the Captain’s chief cook on the Edinburgh “I was in my cabin when I heard over the ship’s communications system that there were three German destroyers in the area. It wasn’t long after that they caught us.”
Edinburgh was hit by two torpedoes, causing extensive damage to the stern.
There was no panic. said Cooper. I said to the purser ‘Take a look at the old man’s wine store,’ and he came back with a jug of spirit. We christened it ‘Torpedo cocktail’.
The following day the Edinburgh, after taking another torpedo hit, was evacuated, and more than 800 of her company were taken to Russia were they were billeted at Vaenga and Polyarno to await transport home.
Mr Copper’s first stop ashore, however was a hospital in Murmansk; while helping, as one of the ship’s medical staff, to transfer the wounded crew members to the rescue ships, he slipped and injured his back.
MAIL SUNK
I was in Russia for seven weeks, he recalled, and during that time, my wife didn’t know if I was alive or dead – our letters home went out on board the cruiser Trinidad, which was torpedoed and sunk along with all our mail.
Another local survivor was Lt. Cdr. Frederick Northam, of Withycombe Park Drive, Exmouth, who had the unfortunate experience of being one of the party from the Edinburgh which was to have come back on the Trinidad, and so suffered a second sinking.
He was one of the ginnery officers on the Edinburgh, and later in the war saw action against the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst aboard Edinburgh’s sister ship, the Belfast, now preserved on a permanent mooring on the Thames. He was mentioned in despatches for his war service.
