Destroyer had been zigzagging in the dark to avoid enemy u-boat attacks

HMS Duchess had been one of three destroyers escorting the battleship HMS Barham home from Gibraltar.

They were almost there, just nine miles off the Mull of Kintyre and about an hour from dock in Greenock when the accident happened.

Both ships had been zigzagging to avoid enemy U-boat attacks, and on one turn the Barham simply steamed into the Duchess and pushed her over.

It was 4am. The majority of the crew were asleep below, and the Petty Officer on watch had closed down all but one of the gunnery stations and ordered the gun crews to go below to secure their hammocks.

A boy sailor, Ernest Swinhoe, had been left up top on A-gun, as the sailor on watch in the icy morning.

He later reported that with the ship on blackout and no moonlight, the morning was coal back. Suddenly he spotted the massive prow of the Barham bearing down on them out of the darkness. She hit the Duchess amidships with such tremendous speed that she simply turned the destroyer over. Swinhoe found himself flung into the freezing water.

The Barham at first thought they had rammed an enemy submarine. The asdic gear on the bottom of the Duchess was now sticking up and looked like a conning tower, but soon they realised the awful truth.

She launched lifeboats to pick up survivors, but most of the Duchess’s crew were trapped inside the vessel.

Swinhoe later recounted how in the light from Barham’s searchlights he could see the panicked faces of men through the tiny portholes, from which they were unable to escape.

Depth charges on the Duchess then exploded and the ship sank taking the crew with her.

Swinhoe was lucky, he was picked up after an hour – an unbelievably long time to have survived in the icy water.

He was the last of 23 survivors to be rescued and the only one to have actually seen the collision.

The only positive to have emerged from the disaster was that afterwards ships were designed with escape hatches in the side to prevent a repeat of the fate that befell the Duchess crew.

There were no reports of casualties aboard the Barham, but she was not to escape the war. She was torpedoed less than a year later off the coast of Egypt and sunk with the loss of 862 of her crew.