‘HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour’ by Nicholas Monsarrat is a lovely book which is illustrated by James Holland and was published in 1952. Actually it’s quite hard to believe that my copy is 70 years old, but it is. It’s a quick read with just 92 pages and a lot of illustrations. I didn’t know what it was about when I bought it in Edinburgh, so it was only when I started to read it that I realised that it was about a ship which gets torpedoed by a German U-Boat, so I did an inadvertent book link as I read it straight after reading about the sinking of The Lusitania – Dead Wake.

The book begins: The sloop Marlborough, 1,200 tons, complement 8 officers and 130 men, was torpedoed at dusk on the last day of 1942 while on independent passage from Iceland to the Clyde. She was on her way home for a refit, and for the leave that went with it, after a fourteen-month stretch of North Atlantic convoy escort with no break, except for routine boiler-cleaning.

But 500 miles from home she was hit by a torpedo killing 60 of the men immediately, the nearest land is 250 miles away, things look very black indeed, there’s a huge hole in her hull, is beginning to sink, it’s bitterly cold and their radio is broken and unfixable.

This was a great read, a real tale of adventure and it felt quite personal to me as my father was in the Merchant Navy on the Atlantic convoys AND had been torpedoed several times – but he never spoke about it other than to say that as soon as your ship was lost your pay stopped! As some of the pay was being sent home to a wife or mother that must have been alarming as they wouldn’t have known if they had survived. I would have loved to speak to him about this book but I think maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to go back to that time – even in fiction.

You can see some of the book’s illustrations here.