Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that the Flower Class Corvette I have in my WW2 Royal Navy – HMS Coreopsis – eventually became, via the Greek Navy, the famous HMS Compass Rose from the film and the book ‘The Cruel Sea’ by Nicholas Monserrat. If you recall my post about the Flower Class corvette I had identified four vessels that I wanted to represent as they had been handed over to the Greek Navy in 1943 and in the fullness of time I would collecting an additional four models for use in their Hellenic guise. The ship mentioned above was one of the four vessels handed over and then – thanks to a comment about HMS Compass Rose from my Antipodean pal, Tas – I discovered that it had been rescued from Malta (at the time it was on its way back to the UK for scrapping) after having been discarded from the Greek Navy and so was then snapped up to be used in the making of the film of ‘The Cruel Sea’ starring Jack Hawkins. I will furnish the Greek names assigned in a later post - I have them at home on the PC. This was completely unknown to me so I am grateful to Tas for the prompt - thanks mate, I owe you one!
I have seen the film although it was many years ago; so a revisit would certainly be in order and I am sure picking it up on DVD would be relatively easy. To my shame I have not read the book so this is something I intend to rectify as soon as possible!
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