Shropshire Star

Sailor’s story revved again thanks to car firm

The uniform of a sailor who survived the 1941 sinking of HMS Prince of Wales has been given pride of place on board a new aircraft carrier carrying the same name after the director of a car company snapped it up on Ebay.

Published
Seth Day, 17, from Southampton, the youngest Royal Navy sailor on board HMS Prince of Wales, examines the uniform of Alf Woodhead before the commissioning ceremony. Photo: Joe Cater, Royal Navy

The HMS Prince of Wales aircraft carrier was commissioned into the Royal Navy in Portsmouth on Tuesday, 78 years on from the loss of the famous battleship of the same name during the Second World War.

On board is the uniform of Alf Woodhead, purchased by David Barzilay of Classic Motor Cars (CMC) in Stanmore Business Park, Bridgnorth, framed and given to Captain Darren Houston to display on board.

Mr Woodhead, from Keighley in Yorkshire, was just 23 years old when his battleship was sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers in the South China Sea on December 10, 1941.

He survived by leaping overboard onto another ship, HMS Express, later telling the Second World War author Martin Middlebrook in 1977 how he had almost been killed on that horrific day as he peered down at the sea thick with oil and bodies.

“My heels landed on the ropes around the side and I pitched forward onto two chaps, breaking my fall,” he said. “When I recovered from this fright, I looked up at the Prince of Wales, which was receding astern very fast.

“I noticed the group of chaps who had cautioned me not to jump still standing there.”

But when the Chief Petty Officer (CPO) returned home and was on a bus in a civilian suit, he was handed a white feather in the street by a woman who wrongly thought he was a conscientious objector. When he died in 1988, Mr Woodhead was buried at sea over the wreck of HMS Prince of Wales.

A gold wrist watch bought for him by his mother on his 21st birthday remains in his ship’s locker at the bottom of the sea.

Now the jacket and cap he wore during the ship’s sinking has been handed to the Captain and ship’s company. Mr Barzilay said of his purchase: “Over the last few years I have worked on various projects with HMS Prince of Wales and have collected various items that tell the short history of the Second World War battleships from the sinking of the Bismarck to the ship taking Winston Churchill to Newfoundland to meet President Roosevelt.”

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