An exceptional Royal Navy Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, G.VI.R., awarded to Shipwright Ernest Harold Hawkins, Royal Navy, who was awarded the medal in 1939 wile serving aboard the battlecruiser H.M.S. Hood and was still serving aboard the ‘The Mighty Hood’ on 24 May, 1941, when she was sunk by a shell fired from the German battleship Bismarck during the Battle of the Denmark Strait. All bar three Hood’s company of 1418, including Hawkins, lost their lives in that tragic encounter and the loss of Hood and nearly all of her company came to symbolise the tragic cost of war.
Royal Navy Long Service and Good conduct Medal, G.VI.R. (M36757 E. H. HAWKINS. SHPT. 2. H.M.S. HOOD)
Condition: Extremely Fine.
Ernest Harold Hawkins was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, on 3 April, 1906, the son of Ernest and Ada Hawkins. The 1911 Census shows that he was living, aged 5, with his parents at 273 Twyford Avenue, North End, Stamshaw in Portsmouth. His father Ernest was an electrician in the Royal Navy and had been married to Ada for six years with Ernest being their only son at that time.
He joined the Royal Navy on 22 August 1929 as an Apprentice Shipwright, aged 15, his occupation given as ‘scholar.’ He served first as Shipwright 4th Class, then promoted to Shipwright 3rd Class in August 1930 and then promoted to Shipwright 2nd Class in August 1934 when serving aboard H.M.S. Royal Sovereign.
He married Liv Borgny Olsen in the October quarter of 1932, in the Portsmouth registration district,
On 14 Aug 1937 he joined the crew of H.M.S. Hood. The award of his Long Service and Good Conduct Medal was announced in May 1939 and the medal was named to Hawkins as a Shipwright 2nd Class on H.M.S. Hood. He was promoted to Shipwright 1st Class in August 1939 and tragically lost his life when Hood was sunk during the Battle of the Denmark Strait on 24 May 1940.
Hawkins was 35 and is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval memorial.
Hood was the biggest battlecruiser ever built, the largest warship in the world throughout her career and the largest RN warship ever commissioned until the recent entry into service of the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. She was an icon of British might and global influence between the World Wars and the only ship of her class.
Hood was ordered, at the height of World War I, from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown – shipyard number 460. She was conceived as a battlecruiser – a warship type which shared the ‘big gun’ firepower of a battleship but which sacrificed some armour for sheer speed. Not only could her eight 15-inch guns hurl a near-one-tonne shell seventeen miles, but her 144,000 horsepower steam turbines could carry her into battle at 32 knots – nearly 37 mph. Hood was planned to be the apotheosis of the type – larger, faster and more powerfully armed than her predecessors.
But, just as her keel was about to be laid, the vulnerability of British battlecruisers, illustrated by the explosive loss of three of them at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, caused a rapid reappraisal of the viability of the type. Hood’s construction was delayed by some weeks in order that any lessons could be learnt. As a result, Hood’s design was subject to some late alterations – around 4000 tons of extra armour were added to her plans, making her armour comparable with that of contemporary battleships. Her keel-laying went ahead on 1 September 1916, and HMS Hood was commissioned in 1920, too late to see service in World War 1.
For twenty years, Hood was the pride of the Royal Navy. Successive Captains and Commanders strove to ensure that she was second to no other ship in all the activities which a warship undertakes. Her cleanliness, efficiency and reputation were repeatedly demonstrated by her performance in fleet-wide exercises in gunnery, seamanship, engineering and sport. Devonport-based for the first half of her service, she moved home port to Portsmouth later in her career. Since many fleet exercises were held in waters around the north of Scotland, Hood was a frequent visitor to Invergordon and Scapa Flow.
Hood’s status as a symbol of British sea power meant that she was the automatic choice to lead the ‘Special Service Squadron’ on the ‘Empire Cruise’ circumnavigation over ten months in 1923-4. In company with her fellow battlecruiser HMS Repulse and a squadron of light cruisers, she visited ports in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. Hood was the perfect vessel to ‘show the flag’ across the world and huge crowds welcomed her wherever she went. The Empire Cruise was just one of many occasions on which Hood ‘flew the flag’ for Britain.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Hood was nearly two decades in commission. Because of her high value and her busy programme, it had not been possible to spare her for the major refit and upgrade which had been planned, and modern battleships of the new war era were equipped with armour which enjoyed the benefits of twenty years of development. Despite this, Hood was still a formidable weapon of war: in the tragic Battle of Mers el Kébir in July 1940, she and other RN warships were ordered to neutralise the battleships of Britain’s recent former ally France, and inflicted catastrophic damage on them. It was a tragic episode, but it served to demonstrate that ‘The Mighty Hood’ was still a force to be reckoned with.
It was no surprise that, in May 1941, Hood was dispatched from Scapa Flow to intercept the new German battleship Bismarck, known to have left Norway on a commerce-raiding operation in the Atlantic: Hood’s speed would enable her to cover vast spans of ocean to hunt down her adversary. With the brand-new, and untried, battleship Prince of Wales, Hood intercepted the Bismarck, and her consort the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, in the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland. The engagement was short and brutal, and a single German shell, piercing Hood at a weak point in her armour, ended the career of Hood and the lives of 1,415 men – the largest-ever loss of life in a Royal Navy warship. Prince of Wales, suffering technical teething troubles, was forced to break off the engagement.
Hood’s loss resonated around the world, and dealt a blow to national morale which made it imperative that the Bismarck be destroyed. Three days later, the German battleship herself was hunted down and sunk by the Royal Navy.
The sheer numbers of sailors lost in Hood left a void for so many families, and memories of them and their unique ship remained strong through the years.
