The Old Ship Hotel, HMS Hood and the Battle of the Denmark Strait

Thanks to Barbara for this contribution. The Old Ship Hotel, HMS Hood and the Battle of the Denmark Strait What connection could there be between the oldest hotel in Brighton, the British battlecruiser HMS Hood, and a naval engagement in May 1941? The connection is Reginald Keith Peel, who has deep family links in our Vlieland story. Named after his father but always called ‘Keith’, he was the eldest son of Reginald Peel by his second marriage, his first being to Frances Maude, eldest daughter of Charles James and Alice Edith Vlieland. HMS Hood was launched at John Brown & Co.’s shipyard on the river Clyde in Scotland on 22 August 1918. The largest in the world at the time, she was built for speed, but this sacrificed the protection of her armaments. In July 1940, she helped to destroy the French ships in the harbour of Mers-El-Kébir, to deny Germany the use of the fleet. She next deployed in Scapa Flow, off the Orkney Islands, escorting British merchant convoys bringing in vital supplies from America under German U-boat attack. By then over 20 years old, a refit to strengthen her decks and protect her vulnerable magazine (ammunition store) had to be cancelled in 1939. On 24 May 1941, she engaged with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. A 15- inch shell from Bismarck hit Hood’s magazine containing 100 tons of cordite explosive: she blew up, split in half and sank in 3 minutes, with the loss of 1418 crew, including Keith, Assistant Steward on the ship. Keith enlisted in October 1940 and joined Hood in February 1941. He is named on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial and in the Hood Chapel in St John the Baptist Church at Boldre in the New Forest, the family church of Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, who was also lost: Ted Briggs, one of only three of the crew to survive, had a last sight of Holland sitting in his chair in stunned dejection as his ship disintegrated around him The Old Ship Hotel on Brighton seafront was first recorded as The Shippe as early as 1559, and by the 1760s was the most fashionable venue in the town. Archie Graham (husband of Barbara Vlieland Peel), always took a room when he was playing the Theatre Royal. Keith joined the hotel at 18 in 1935, and learned the etiquette of the sommelier’s trade (how to choose wine and glasses and present them at the table), bringing up bottles from the cavernous cellars with their smugglers’ passages leading to the sea. On Hood, he would have been assigned to serve at table in the messroom or officers’ quarters and maintain ‘discipline’ in his onboard ‘hotel’. Although it is now lost, a brass plaque in the Old Ship’s foyer honoured all the hotel staff killed in the two World Wars, so Keith was remembered there as well. Some of the material in this post draws on that by Barbara Smith (Keith’s daughter) on 25 August 2013. Ted Briggs’ memories come from David Mearns and Rob White, Hood and Bismarck(2002)