Orders, Decorations and Medals

The Second World War anti-U-boat operations D.S.C. group of eight awarded to Commander C. G. Cuthbertson, Royal Naval Reserve, whose meeting with Nicholas Monsarrat immediately following the disastrous Gibraltar convoy OG. 71 inspired the latter to write his best selling novel, “The Cruel Sea”: Cuthbertson was one of only 15 survivors from his torpedoed ship, and was fortunate to be picked up by a dinghy from H.M.S. Campion after clinging to the trunk of a body to stay afloat - ‘with blood and oil fuel coming out of me both ends’

Distinguished Service Cross, G.VI.R., reverse officially dated ‘1940’ and privately engraved, ‘C.G. Cuthbertson, Lieut. Commr., R.N.R.’; 1939-45 Star; Atlantic Star; Africa Star; Burma Star, clasp, Pacific; War Medal 1939-45, M.I.D. oak leaf; Royal Naval Reserve Decoration, G.VI.R., reverse officially dated ‘1941’; U.S.S.R. 40th Anniversary 1945-85 Commemorative Medal, together with a set of related dress miniature medals (including the Defence Medal but excluding the Soviet award), mounted court-style as worn (excepting the Soviet award), very fine and better (16) £4000-5000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Ron Penhall Collection.

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D.S.C. London Gazette 1 January 1941.

Mention in despatches London Gazette 25 August 1941 and 1 January 1946.

Charles George Cuthbertson was born in Gillingham, Kent in September 1906, the son of an Engineer Captain, R.N. Destined to follow in his father’s footsteps from an early age, he attended the training ship Worcester, lying at Greenhithe on the Thames, and was appointed a Midshipman in the Royal Naval Reserve in the new year of 1923. But as a result of the cutbacks being imposed on the strength of the Senior Service, in a pacifist influenced post-Great War era, he opted instead to join the Merchant Navy, in which he was accepted as a Cadet-Apprentice by the Union Castle Mail Steamship Co. at the end of 1923. A diligent and competent student, he passed the relevant examinations without difficulty and obtained his full Master’s Certificate in 1930 at the unusually early age of 24. Thereafter he served in various capacities aboard a number of Union Castle vessels around the globe, all the while attending his annual naval training with the R.N.R.

Early Wartime Career and a D.S.C.

The outbreak of hostilities in 1939, in which year Cuthbertson had attained advancement to Lieutenant-Commander, R.N.R., found him serving as 2nd Officer of the Union Castle Line’s prestigious Cape Town mail route ship, Carnarvon Castle, shortly thereafter destined to be converted into an Armed Merchant Cruiser. But the Admiralty already had plans for such qualified and experienced officers as Cuthbertson, and for his own part he was immediately attached to the Royal Navy for service as O.C. of an ad hoc flotilla of 70 anti-submarine trawlers, their task to patrol the east coast of Scotland, particularly in the Fleet’s main anchorage at Scapa Flow, in addition to the vital dockyard at Rosyth.

But in the course of this appointment, that lasted until October 1940, Cuthbertson also volunteered to participate in a number of daring missions for “Gubbins’ Flotilla” in the Norwegian campaign, the latter comprising an irregular force of small ships and fishing vessels - including some of the renowned Scottish “puffers” - that carried out clandestine operations in and out of Norway’s fjords supplying Gubbins (later of S.O.E. fame) and his men behind-the-lines with vital equipment, personnel and ammunition. Supporting these ‘independent’ troop companies - out of which soon emerged the formidable Royal Marine Commandos - was a hazardous business, and Cuthbertson twice had ships sunk under him by enemy air attack.

On 10 October 1940, he was appointed to his first command, H.M.S. Hibiscus, a Flower-class corvette which had been specifically built for convoy escort duties, but, which, nonetheless, lacked speed and armament. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, he commanded her with distinction over the coming months, not least on the night of 19-20 October, just a few days into his appointment, when, as part of Atlantic convoy HX. 79, the Hibiscus made an unsupported and daring attack on a U-boat - that same night 12 of the convoys merchantmen were sunk. Cuthbertson, who was gazetted for the D.S.C. on New Year’s Day 1941, was next appointed to the command of another Flower-class corvette, the Zinnia, which ship he joined that February. It was a busy month, for on the 22nd he also had to attend an investiture at Buckingham Palace to receive his D.S.C.

Convoy OG. 71 and the Monsarrat Connection

The terrible fate of convoy OG. 71 - vividly described in Nightmare Convoy by Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam - was to prove the inspiration for Nicholas Monsarrat’s famous title The Cruel Sea, for, as a young R.N.V.R. officer, he witnessed the unfolding massacre of the convoy’s merchantmen from the escort H.M.S. Campanula. Moreover, it was his meeting with Cuthbertson after he had been rescued that eventually led to the birth of Monsarrat’s fictitious character, “Commander Ericson”, a role so ably portrayed by Jack Hawkins in the film that followed in the wake of The Cruel Sea’s success in print.

In mid-August 1941 Cuthbertson was ordered in the Zinnia to join the escort for OG. 71, outward bound for Gibraltar. First spotted by enemy aircraft on the 17th, the convoy came under repeated U-boat attack once clear of Land’s End, and lost several ships, amongst them the cargo liner S.S. Aguila, which was torpedoed on the 19th with heavy loss of life, including an entire detachment of Wrens. In fact the U-boats continued to harass the convoy all through the Bay of Biscay until, in the early hours of the 23rd, Zinnia herself was torpedoed off the coast of Portugal, near Oporto. Lund and Ludlam’s Nightmare Convoy takes up the story:

‘Zinnia, captained by Lieutenant-Commander Charles Cuthbertson, R.N.R., kept close station in her new position, carrying out a broad irregular zig-zag at fourteen knots. Both the captain and his No. 1, Lieutenant Harold Chesterman, R.N.R., were on the bridge. After the grim fate of the Bath with her exploding depth-charges, Lieutenant-Commander Cuthbertson had ordered all Zinnia’s depth-charges to be set to safe, and the corvette was keenly on the alert with extra bridge lookouts ordered to keep watch for torpedo tracks.

Lieutenant Chesterman was on the starboard side of the bridge peering through the darkness trying to see the convoy and judge when the Zinnia was about 2,000 yards off to make a turn to the outward leg. The order “Port ten” had just been given and the corvette was turning to port and heeling to starboard when a torpedo from U-564 struck her portside abreast of the main bulkhead between the engine-room, bridge and foc’sle.

There was a blinding flash and violent explosion followed by angrily hissing clouds of escaping steam.

The captain had just stepped out of the bridge asdic house. In a split second it collapsed behind him and parts of the ship were thrown into the air - Zinnia instantly heeled over on to her starboard side beam ends and in five seconds had capsized through 120 degrees, hurling the captain from the compass platform into the water.

So close had he been to the explosion that a mass of flame had singed his hair and eyebrows. Now, dazed but otherwise unhurt, he looked up to see the deck of the ship coming over on top of him as she broke in two around the funnel and a huge swirl of water sucked him down. When he struggled to the surface again his lungs and stomach were filled with oil fuel and he was partially blinded, but he could see the bows rising vertically out of the water - then they disappeared.

H.M.S. Zinnia, which had taken seven months and ten days to build, had sunk in fifteen to twenty seconds, leaving behind hardly a vestige of wreckage.

Commander Cuthbertson struggled in the sea, hampered by the heavy binoculars attached to lanyards round his neck which were nearly strangling him. He tried to blow up his inflatable lifejacket but could not. He heard many cries for help in the water but he could do nothing to help them. The water was thick with oil fuel and it was all he could do to keep his balance in the swell and his mouth and nose out of the oil.’

As it transpired, only 15 men from Zinnia’s crew were eventually plucked to safety, most of them by a dinghy lowered from H.M.S. Campion, but, as Lund and Ludlam recount in Nightmare Convoy, Cuthbertson had his own nightmare to contend with in the interim:

‘Zinnia’s captain, Lieutenant-Commander Cuthbertson, had struggled for forty minutes to keep afloat before finding the trunk of a body which had been blasted and was buoyant; he clutched on to this to keep himself alive. He had been in the water for over an hour when he heard the throb, throb, throb of the propeller of a searching corvette as she passed through the oil fuel patch. It was H.M.S. Campanula [with Monsarrat aboard], but as he sighted her through oil-dimmed eyes to his astonishment and dismay she steamed past him at half a cable’s distance ... convincing him that he had been left to die. It was ages before Campion’s dinghy then came upon him, still clinging to the buoyant corpse of one of his crew, near complete exhaustion and ready to meet his Maker. As hands hauled him onboard he was dimly aware of the exclamation of a Cockney sailor: “Blimey, he must be an orficer, he’s got a pair of glasses round his bleedin’ neck!” ’

Amazingly, Cuthbertson somehow found the strength to climb up the rope ladder swinging from the side of the Campion, but could only crawl on all fours once on her deck - nonetheless, he made it forcibly clear to those present that his uncontrollable shaking was the cause of the cold, and not fright. Shortly afterwards he collapsed, ‘with blood and oil coming out of me both ends’. Cuthbertson, who passed an uneasy night on the floor of the No. 1’s cabin after being bathed in paraffin, insisted on reading from the Naval Prayer Book as the bodies of several Zinnia men were committed to the deep the following day.

Somewhat revived by the time Campion reached Gibraltar, he paid a courtesy call to the Campanula, and discovered that Lieutenant Nicholas Monsarrat, R.N.V.R., was particularly interested in the terrible fate of the Zinnia, and her ‘oily, half-dead master mariner’, so much so that he wrote down Cuthbertson’s answers to his questions: it was from this interview, which was assisted by a stiff gin and tonic (‘The only stuff which would stay down!’), that sprang the genesis of one of the greatest of all wartime stories, The Cruel Sea (first published in 1951), which was to make its author one of the most widely read in the post-war era.

The novel features a Gibraltar convoy like OG. 71 in which an escort vessel, H.M.S. Sorrel, is torpedoed and sunk with only 15 survivors. The tale of their rescue, with their captain, one Lieutenant-Commander Ericson, is based entirely upon Cuthbertson’s real-life ordeal and in his autobiography, Life Is A Four Letter Word, Monsarrat acknowledges that his fictional character Ericson ‘was based, so far as looks, achievement and reputation were concerned, on Lieutenant-Commander Cuthbertson’. In the same autobiography, Monsarrat claimed erroneously that it was he [and the Campanula] who had rescued all of the Zinnia’s survivors, a statement subsequently challenged by veterans of the convoy and discussed in an extremely interesting series of correspondence between Monsarrat and Cuthbertson in 1970, the year in which the former published his autobiography (included with the Lot).

Returning to more contemporary events in the wake of OG. 71, Cuthbertson declined hospital treatment on reaching Gibraltar and flew out in a Catalina the very next day. Having then delivered reports to the Director of Anti-Submarine Warfare, and met the head of the Casualty Department, he was sent home to Dorset to recover. While here, he penned his official report into the loss of his ship for the Admiralty, the Fourth Sea Lord subsequently noting in the margin, ‘The C.O. of Zinnia appears to have survived an ordeal which might be described as “awful” with remarkable fortitude.’ No-one else took any notice. In contrast, Oberleutnant Reinhard Suhren, captain of the U-564, was awarded Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross.

Post OG. 71 and Two “Mentions”

In October 1941, after recovering from his ordeal, Cuthbertson was given command of another corvette, the Snowflake, in which ship he served on both Atlantic and Arctic convoys until May 1942, work that resulted in him being mentioned in despatches (London Gazette 25 August 1942), not least for his successful shadowing of three German destroyers on one particular Murmansk run.

He next commanded the destroyer Scimitar, from May 1942 until July 1943, during which period he was advanced to Commander, thereby becoming the youngest reservist to attain that rank in the history of the service. His final wartime appointment was as captain of the River-class frigate Helford, in which ship he served as Senior Officer of an Escort Flotilla, initially in the Atlantic but latterly with the Pacific Fleet in the Far East. He was again mentioned in despatches (London Gazette 1 January 1946), this time for his services in escorting two important floating docks from Cochin in India to Manus Island in the Pacific. Soon after returning to the U.K. at the end of hostilities, Cuthbertson was appointed to the Admiralty for special duty and from April to June 1946 he commanded the Royal Navy Victory Parade Camp at Kensington Gardens, and marched at the head of the Navy’s column in the great victory parade in London exactly one year after V.E. Day.

Post-war

At the end of the year, Cuthbertson rejoined the Union Castle Line, and, following one voyage as Chief Officer of his old ship the Carnarvon Castle, held successive command of the Samflora, Sampan and Sandown Castle, prior to his retirement in July 1948. The same period witnessed him being elected a Younger Brother of Trinity House as well as a Member of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners, and he represented the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleet at the Cenotaph parade in Whitehall in November 1947. Following his departure from the Union Castle Line, he established himself in a private capacity as a nautical consultant and assessor, and in 1953 was appointed a Nautical Surveyor in the Marine Survey Service of the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation.

Cuthbertson, who by any standards had a superb wartime record, was also President of the Flower Class Corvette Association for many years. Somewhat ironically, however, his profound real-life experiences are now immortalised in a work of fiction, a work likely to endure for as long as people remain interested in the momentous struggle for supremacy at sea in the 1939-45 War.

Sold with a substantial quantity of related documentation, and assorted artefacts, including:

(a) Mention in despatches certificates (2), dated 25 August 1942 and 1 January 1946, the former as Lieutenant-Commander, D.S.C., R.N.R., H.M.S. Snowflake, and the latter as Commander, D.S.C., R.N.R., framed and glazed.

(b) Certificate and related forwarding letter for the Soviet 40th Anniversary 1945-85 Commemorative Medal, framed and glazed.

(c) H.M.S. Worcestershire Thames Nautical Training College, Second Mate’s certificate with ‘First Class Extra’ in both scholastic and seamanship categories, dated 12 December 1922, framed and glazed; together with a series of Worcestershire reports (6), covering the period 1921-22.

(d) Warrant for the rank of Sub. Lieutenant, R.N.R., dated 1 July 1931, defective; together with a quantity of Admiralty letters regarding his promotions to Probationary Midshipman, Midshipman, Acting Sub. Lieutenant and Commander (1923-43), and a letter placing him on the Retired List, this dated 23 January 1953.

(e) A small series of ship service slips (a.k.a. “flimsies”), signed by respective C.Os (7), mainly wartime vintage but including an example as early as 1923.

(f) A letter of commendation from the Naval Officer in Charge, Leith and Granton, dated 17 June 1940, regarding Cuthbertson’s ‘creditable salvage operation under difficult conditions in Tjelsundet on approximately 16 May ... his flotilla had been continually bombed before and after these operations. Eldorado was towed from where she was grounded to Harstad and afterwards repaired.’

(g) Three leather-bound certificates, comprising Board of Trade Continuous Certificate of Discharge; Royal Naval Reserve Officer’s Training Certificate Book and Master (Foreign-going) Certificate of Competency.

(h) Certificate appointing Cuthbertson a Younger Brother of Trinity House, dated 16 July 1947, framed and glazed.

(i) Certificate of Services with the Union Castle Line, provided at Cuthbertson’s request in 1949; together with further Union Castle Line correspondence and papers, mainly post-war; a typed ‘Log of the M.V. Beatrici, Voyage No. 1,’ circa 1949; a detailed statement of war and peacetime services prepared by him post-1956, in the form of a C.V.; and Life membership certificate for the Flower Class Corvette Association, with related gilt badge.

(j) A copy of Nicholas Monsarrat’s autobiography, Life Is A Four Letter Word, volume II, Breaking Out (published in 1970), inscribed by the author to ‘Charles G. Cuthbertson, ex-Zinnia and The Cruel Sea; together with three autographed letters dating from October 1970, comprising Monsarrat to Cuthbertson; Cuthbertson’s reply and Monsarrat’s acknowledgement, the second being a highly charged account of Zinnia’s sinking.

(k) A fine series of career photographs, subjects including Sir Max Horton with Cuthbertson, assorted ships and ship’s crew, among the latter the Hibiscus, Scimitar and Helford, several framed and glazed.

(l) A sweetheart’s brooch in the form of a Naval Crown, in gold; a hip-flask; a razor-set and a small silver compact box carried by Cuthbertson as a lucky talisman, the base engraved, ‘Lieutenant-Commander C. G. Cuthbertson, R.N.R., O. 2611’, and which he had with him throughout his ordeal following the loss of the Zinnia.

(m) Assorted newspaper cuttings, comprising an immediate post-war feature highlighting Cuthbertson’s promotion as the R.N.R’s youngest Commander, and three obituaries.

Provenance: Ex Sotheby’s, 26 July 1995 (Lot 799).