Adding another story to the photo above. Before my mother met my father, she had another boyfriend who's name or nationality I have never been able to establish. He wrote the comment below the photo. He gave my mother the photo album containing photos of warships. The cover is brown suede and he drew a picture of HMS HOOD in silver on the outer front cover.
Inside most of the photos are missing now with the exeption of the one above and a few others of HMS Hood taken from another ship where the stormy seas are so high, only the mast and parts of the superstructure are visible.
There are some great pics of her 'Night Shoot', but most strangly, there are other individual pictures of some of the famous German Battleships in the German Navy. It always intregued me where these photos came from.
On the HMS Hood website I found other pics posted by the families of people lost on her and many have some of the same photos that I have. I still do not know how they each got their copies. It was suggested by the HMS Hood Society that the unknown boyfriend may have been serving on HMS Hood when he met my mother.
The last of the Survivors of the sinking, Ted Briggs, who died in October 2008 also came from Fareham in Hampshire, my mother's home town where I grew up. He was only 18 when she sank and he survived with two others.
Ted Briggs said he survived because he was trapped in an underwater air pocket and eventually was pulled from the freezing water.
The picture above also appears in the book 'Flagship Hood' I have which Ted Briggs wrote about life on board the ship.
Another of life's mysteries
