HMS Hood

For twenty years she was the most photographed warship in the world. Laid down in the last year of the Great War and commissioned in 1920, HMS Hood was, at 47,000 tons, the largest warship afloat when she joined the fleet and remained so for the best part of two decades. She was the face of the Royal Navy to a generation — on recruiting posters, on cigarette cards, on the flagship bunting of every imperial cruise.

She was also, her officers quietly knew, a battlecruiser. Her builders had added armour during construction after the loss of three battlecruisers at Jutland, but she retained a magazine arrangement that her critics considered unmodernised. A full reconstruction, scheduled for 1941, was overtaken by the war.

The Denmark Strait

On 24 May 1941, in company with the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales, Hood intercepted the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen at the edge of the pack ice west of Iceland. The action lasted not more than nine minutes. At approximately 0600, the fifth salvo from Bismarck struck Hood near her after magazines. A column of flame, witnesses said, rose higher than her masts. When it fell, the ship was gone.

Of her 1,418 crew, three men survived. Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn, and Bill Dundas were picked up by HMS Electra after three hours in the North Atlantic. The shock to the Royal Navy, and to Britain, was such that Churchill ordered the fleet to sink the Bismarck at any cost. Eight days later — chiefly by the torpedoes of Swordfish from HMS Ark Royal and the 16-inch guns of HMS Rodney — they did.

The Wreck

The wreck of Hood was located by an expedition led by David Mearns in 2001, in three main sections at a depth of 2,800 metres. Britain designated the site as a protected war grave under the Protection of Military Remains Act. The ship's bell was recovered in 2015 with the permission of the families and is now displayed at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, where it is rung each day at colours.