Captain Douglas Crook
Newspaper Obituary (#1) - From the Daily Telegraph, September 15, 1995
CAPTAIN DOUGLAS CROOK, who has died aged 83, was a Battle
of the Atlantic veteran who achieved an epic feat of seamanship as Second
Officer of the tanker Athelknight, which was sunk by U-172
north-east of the Virgin Islands on May 27, 1942.
The U-boat surfaced alongside Crook's lifeboat, and its
captain asked if there was anything he needed. Crook said an extra bucket,
food and medical supplies. "He gave us the bucket and some fairly mouldy
bread," Crook recalled, "but said he couldn't spare any of his medical
supplies."
Crook, in charge of a lifeboat with 26 survivors, decided
he would make for Antigua. He maintained the strictest discipline in the
boat. "If anyone was caught tampering with the fresh water, I promised
personally to chop his bloody fingers off."
They drank condensed mail and water, and ate pemmican and
hard-tack biscuits, carefully rationed by Crook. "The best we did was
three fluid ounces a day," he recalled. "Eventually we got down to an
ounce of water a day.":
"But there was no escaping the sun. Some of the lads
wanted to take a dip to cool off, but I refused permission because I
considered that they'd be too weak to get back on board. "We became coated
in salt, and as time passed our lips began to suffer terribly."
After 28 days and more than 1,000 miles, they reached the
French island St. Barthelemey, 100 miles north-west of Antigua, and came
ashore with water and rations to spare. Crook was appointed MBE -- not an
over-generous award in the circumstances.
Crook at once volunteered to go to sea again, and won the
George Medal and Lloyds War Medal for bravery at sea later that year as
Second Officer of the tanker Scottish Heather.
Scottish Heather was equipped as an oiler to refuel
convoy escorts under way. She sailed with the outward-bound convoy
ONS154, which was badly mauled by two packs of U-boats, 13 ships being
sunk in a running battle which began on Christmas Eve 1942.
Scottish Heather was torpedoed by U-225 on
the night of the 27th and most of her crew, including the Captain and the
Chief Officer, took to the lifeboats. Crook was about to get into a boat
himself when he realised that the ship was not going to sink. He called
for volunteers, and took command of the ship. They raised steam, got under
way, recovered many of the survivors, including the Captain and Chief
Officer, and eventually reached the Clyde.
After the war Crook joined the Fire Service, commanded the
William Gregson at Liverpool, and headed the National Fire School
at Chipping Norton.
His wife died in 1989. They had a son.
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Newspaper Obituary (#2) - 1995, source unknown
Death of Sea Hero who Saved 33 Lives
One of the Merchant Navy's most decorated Second World War
heroes, Master Mariner Douglas Crook, of Three Crowns House, South Quay,
Lynn, died on Monday night in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital after a short
illness.
He was awarded the George Medal and Lloyds Medals, as well
as being made an MBE for his part in the Battle of the Atlantic when he
was twice torpedoed in convoys running the gauntlet of German U-boats
which hunted in deadly packs between the United States and the UK.
Mr. Crook (83) was a young, newly-married second
navigating officer on the oil tanker AthelKnight when it was sunk
at night by a U-boat which machine-gunned the survivors, killing two and
wounding several others.
Only two lifeboats managed to escape and Mr. Crook was in
command of one of them, with 33 crew members on board. He decided that the
only chance of survival was to make for the nearest land--Antigua in the
West Indies, 1,100 miles away.
All he had to navigate with was the lifeboat's compass, an
alarm clock and a pencil. The epic journey, sometimes under sail and
occasionally using oars, took 38 days before land was sighted on the
horizon.
They went ashore just 60 miles south of their original
goal, a triumph of navigation across 1,100 miles of trackless ocean.
Mr. Crook was then posted to another oil tanker, the
Scottish Heather, which was also sunk [i.e., torpedoed] in mid-Atlantic at
night.
After taking to a lifeboat, he noticed that the tanker,
although low in the water, was not sinking. So he boarded the vessel and
got a junior engineer to raise steam. Once successfully under way, they
later found the other lifeboats occupied by the captain and first officer
and their men.
Afterwards, Mr. Crook commented: "I didn't want another
long voyage in an open boat!"
This week a former colleague who also lives in Lynn, Jack
White, of King John Avenue, paid special tribute to his old friend: "He was one of the most famous Merchant Navy officer in
the war and was a remarkable main. It was an epic achievement to save the
lives of 33 men by sailing an open boat across 1,100 miles of ocean to
safety."
After the war Mr. Crook -- who moved to Lynn in 1991 to
be near his only son and his family -- remained in the Merchant Navy until
about 1948.
He then took up a unique position with the Merseyside Fire
Service as Master Mariner and was in charge of all fire-fighting
procedures for the Liverpool docks. In about 1965 [1955?], he was seconded
to the fire service staff college at Moreton in Marsh, Gloucestershire,
where he was in charge of the marine division. He left there in 1963 and
worked as a relief Master for the Ellerman Line for about three years
before retiring. ...
Although Mr. Crook lived in a house on the waterfront at
Lynn, a town famed for its maritime history, he was unsentimental about
the sea and for him it held no romance. In an interview, earlier this
year, he said: "I rarely bother to look at it."
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