David White – Meeting and working with Ted Briggs, one of the three survivors of HMS Hood
So I got an interview, so I went for this interview and it was the guy who was retiring, er, and the Director and I had a successful interview and they offered me the job so about a couple of weeks later I started and that was fine, so I’m learning the ropes from this retiring Property Manager and all we were in charge of was lettings, you know, managing the house while it’s being let, finding new tenants, mustering people in and out, um, inventories, that kind of thing, and I’m chatting away to him, and a very pleasant, amenable old man.
He took me up to his house and introduced me to his wife, and then I’m talking to the Director one day and he said, “Oh I suppose you and Ted are talking all the time about the Navy.” I said, “Oh, was Ted in the Navy?”
He said, “Don’t you know who he is?” I said, “No.” He said, “He’s Ted Briggs” and I thought I obviously should know who that is. I said, “No I didn’t know.”
He said, “And you know who Ted Briggs is?” I said “No.” He said, “He’s one of the three survivors from HMS Hood.”
Ted never said that to me in the, all the weeks I’d been working with him, he talked about he, I knew he was ex-Navy ‘cos he’d mentioned it, he never once said that he was one of the most famous Naval people in the country.
I mean you see any programme about The Hood, he comes up as one of the people interviewed, there was only three of them. She was blown out of the water by the Bismarck. They reckoned the Bismarck got a lucky shell, went straight down into the ammunition hold and blew the ship to smithereens and she turned over and sank in minutes and only three blokes escaped out of 1,524 people I think.
Some figure like that, um and so yeah, this modest, self-effacing man, had a story to tell better than anything I could imagine. So of course, I then started to chat about it and months, he knew I knew, he opened up about it and told me all about it.
He got pulled down with the ship and the ship sort of rolled a bit and he went down on the portside when she sank but he came up on the other side, so somehow he went all the way under the ship and then got blown up in an air bubble, probably a Boiler burst and he just got thrown up to the surface.