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A Collection of Medals relating to H.M.S. Zinnia


‘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.


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