Lt-Cdr Geoffrey Brooke. RIP.

CXX · Jan 30, 2009

Lt-Cdr Geoffrey Brooke - Telegraph

Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Brooke, who has died aged 88, was serving in the battleship Prince of Wales when she was sunk in December 1941, and two months later made a dramatic escape from Singapore just before the Japanese arrived.

On the night of Friday February 13 1942 he left Singapore in an unarmed Yangtze river steamer, which had already been badly damaged by bombs and machine-gun fire. There were some 140 passengers, though others had refused to board after seeing the poor state of her lifeboats. By the next night she was on fire, and the party was forced to abandon ship 80 miles south of Singapore and paddle to a desert island, reefed by sharp coral and having only a trickle of fresh water.

Over the next week Brooke used a motor boat to bring in wounded women and children from two other ships, laying them down on the beach, where they tore up their clothes to make bandages. Brooke and Lieutenant-Commander AH Terry then loaded the most seriously wounded on to rafts to be towed to Sumatra while he and 60 other men, mainly from Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, volunteered to remain.

After seven days on sparse rations Brooke persuaded some passing Chinese traders to take his party, packed like sardines into four small junks, to the island of Sinkep. There the Dutch administrator gave him a supply of opium, which Brooke rationed out daily to pay the Chinese taking them to the mouth of the Indragiri river, which winds through Sumatra. Towing and poling their way in ever smaller boats, while gathering more survivors until they numbered some 600, they eventually reached a small town. Brooke was then held up for five days, thereby missing the last ship to sail from Padang – she was torpedoed with heavy loss of life.

On resuming his journey after a 24-hour road trip over the mountains to the railhead leading to Padang, he was ordered by the Royal Marine heading the SOE resistance to board a Malay prauw and attempt the ocean passage to Ceylon. With the 17 officers thought to be the most useful to the war effort if they survived, the party endured 37 days at sea. The decrepit prauw was machine-gunned from the air, but later sailed unmolested through a Japanese fleet returning from raiding Ceylon. After sailing 1,660 miles on a diet of bully beef and tinned salmon (which Brooke could never again face) they were rescued south-east of the island by a merchant ship and taken to Bombay. Lean, hungry, unshaven and lubricated by alcohol, Brooke was interviewed by the C-in-C, Admiral Sir James Somerville.

The son of a destroyer captain awarded the DSC on the Dover Patrol in the First World War, Geoffrey Arthur George Brooke was born on May 20 1920, and went to Dartmouth aged 14. At the beginning of the war he was shaving in the battleship Nelson when he should have been on the foc's'le, and therefore escaped unscathed when she hit a minefield laid by the German submarine U-31 at the entrance of Loch Ewe, injuring 52 crew.

The following June Brooke was navigator of the destroyer Douglas, which carried Admiral Sir Dudley North into Oran on a mission to persuade the French commander in-chief to take his fleet to a neutral port. Brooke recorded that he was more scared of running aground with his admiral aboard than of the French guns. But he also discovered that he suffered chronic seasickness in small ships, which removed any chance of his following in his father's footsteps. The ship's company awarded him a bucket with a sub-lieutenant's stripe painted around it.

Brooke was appointed to the battleship Prince of Wales while she was still building at Birkenhead, and was in the standby director of the 14-inch guns on May 24 1940 when he witnessed the duel between Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Hood and the German ships Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. He never forgot the thrill of seeing Bismarck's topmast heave over the horizon, or the horror of hearing: "My God, the Hood's gone!"

There was no time to look because Prince of Wales was then hit, killing many on the bridge and putting the main director out of action. Brooke took control of her guns, firing salvoes every 20 seconds until Bismarck slunk off into the gloom. The Battle of the Denmark Strait was over in 35 minutes, and only three of Hood's 1,400 crew survived.

Brooke was still in Prince of Wales when she took Winston Churchill to meet President Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. He remembered the formal exchanges as well as Churchill's relaxed mood on the way back, when he persuaded the prime minister to talk to the young midshipmen in the gunroom.

By the end of the year Prince of Wales was part of Force Z at Singapore as she was overwhelmed by the Japanese air attack. The pom-poms under Brooke's control had shot down one or two aircraft when he felt a monstrous convulsion, which reduced the ship's speed to 10 knots. Co-ordinated attacks followed until about 12.30, when he saw the pale green streak of a torpedo heading straight for the bows. There was a heavy thud, the ship trembled and a great column of water rose up by "A" turret.

Several more hits struck home, and a mass of smoke and water cascaded over Brooke. By now Prince of Wales's list had become worse, and when the destroyer Express came alongside, the quarterdeck was awash. Brooke had decided to jump off the fo'cs'le until he saw the orderly queue waiting to use a jackstay between the two ships. Once aboard Express he watched in silence as the great ship rolled until she was bottom up and the huge hull gradually slid from view.

After a month's home leave following his epic journey, Brooke was appointed to the cruiser Bermuda, which took part in the North African landings and Russian convoys. He was in the carrier Indomitable when the Fleet Air Arm raided the Japanese-held refineries at Palembang on Sumatra in March 1945, and then in the carrier Formidable when she was twice hit by kamikazes. He was awarded the DSC for gallantry, skill and devotion to duty in putting out the fires afterwards.

After retiring from the Navy in 1958 he worked in advertising for Smiths Industries, Kelvin Hughes and Decca before eventually becoming a press officer for Racal and a consultant there until 1985. He also wrote Radar Mate (1970), a child's guide to yachting.

Brooke was a keen horseman, fisherman and shot, and also enjoyed painting, photography and gardening. He rode in the last race on the Gibraltar course before it became an airfield in 1938. A decade later he competed in the modern pentathlon at the London Olympics, drawing his horse only five minutes before jumping and being allowed only one practice.

As a bicyclist in London, he was knocked off on several occasions, and regretted that there was no equivalent for the maritime signal: "Get out of my way. I can't get out of yours."

His book about the war, Alarm Starboard! (1982), which he illustrated with his contemporary photographs, demonstrated an eye for detail and a gift for spinning a good story. Admiral Sir Edward Ashmore described it as the best book on the naval war. It also led a number of survivors to contact him with further details of the horror and the heroism of the escape from Singapore, and he followed up with another book, Singapore's Dunkirk (1989).

Geoffrey Brooke, who died on January 6, married, in 1956, Venetia Mabel Cornwallis. She survives him with their three daughters.
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Antipodean Andy · Jan 30, 2009

It was an adventure reading that obit. Imagine the adventure of living that life! RIP.

Another two books to track down, me thinks.

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