If you ever wondered what Camelot looked like, then I suggest that you go to the western edge of Dartmoor about five miles north of Tavistock. Here you will see Brent Tor, rising majestically to eleven hundred feet above sea level crowned with a small 13th century church of St. Michael De Rupe. So high is Brent Tor, that it was rumoured to have been used as a site for a beacon, to warn of the advance of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
From a distance the whole thing can look in turn ethereal, forbidding, magical, or just plain impressive, depending on the weather conditions. Religious services are still regularly held, in spite of the fact that there is no road, and that the parishioners have to scramble up a steep craggy path to the tiny church, often tripping over sheep as they go.
If you get a chance to visit I would highly recommend it, not only for the stunning views and sense of peace, but also to look inside the simple church, where there is a memorial of to Percival Rowland Cocks, a master mariner who lost his life when the S.S. Navasota sailing in convoy OB 46 was torpedoed by the German submarine U 47 and sank 150 miles west of the Bishop’s Rock Lighthouse on the Isles of Scilly. The Mater, Charles Joseph Goble and 36 members of the crew were killed, including the Chief Officer, Percival Cocks. However 37 crew were rescued by HMS Escapade, and the British Steamer Clan Farquar picked up another eight and landed them at Cape Town, South Africa.
There are two things that make this memorial interesting. At first I thought that Chief Officer Cocks was British, but in fact he was one of many from the South African Merchant Navy who came to fight and die in the cruel wastes of the Atlantic. Cocks had come all the way from the Orange Free State, and it was a bitter irony that some of the survivors from his ship, were landed back in his home Country.
If you want to get an idea of the amount of men that came from the Empire and other country’s to sail the merchant ships that delivered the lifelines of food and equipment to keep Britain going, you can do no better than to go to Tower Bridge Tube station in London. Right outside, in the shadow of the Tower of London is a huge memorial to the Merchant Seamen who died in both wars, often trying to do the impossible. Without them God only knows what would have happened to this country, and the rest of Europe.
The other interesting fact about this tragedy is the U 47, because this was commanded by one of the supreme U boat commanders, Gunter Prien. Two months before Prien sunk the Navasota he had become famous(infamous) for sinking the Royal Navy’s Battleship, H.M.S. Royal Oak in the heavily guarded anchorage of Scapa Flow. Out of a crew of nearly 1400 officers and men, 833 lost their lives. For the Allies this was a crushing blow, but for the Germans, it reinforced their faith in the U boats, and provided a massive boost to morale. In his short career, Prien carried out ten patrols, sinking twenty eight ships and severely damaging many others, but his winning streak could not last. The casualty rate amongst the U boats was getting on for eighty percent, so on the 8th march 1941 whilst attacking another ship, U47 was sunk with all hands. At the time, HMS. Wolverine got the credit for the kill, but new data suggests that whist he was attacking, one of Priens torpedo’s circled around and sank the U boat.
Guter Prien in U47, with its famous snorting bull emblemIf Prien and Cocks had anything in common at all, it was in the manner of their deaths. Merchant seamen and Uboat crews faced the certainty of death on a daily basis, trying to do their duty to their respective country’s. If that’s not sacrifice, I don’t know what is.
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