Heading home across the cruel sea

Apr 23 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

The Cruel Sea

WRITTEN in 1951, The Cruel Sea was one of the biggest best-sellers after the war and has sold more than 10m copies.

It is hard to imagine today the sheer impact this book had on the post-war world, with its new style of gritty realism.

Hugely pertinent to Liverpool, this is the story of the fictional HMS Compass Rose and HMS Saltash, two corvettes escorting British convoys at the peak of the German U-boat wolf-packs.

The combination of worldwide sales, critical and film success meant he was always tagged as “author of The Cruel Sea”, but he happily described this as “my calling card”.

A keen yachtsman from his family’s annual holidays on Anglesey, he signed up on the outbreak of war in 1939, and was soon on a corvette escorting Atlantic convoys.

His home-port was his home town and it was at his Albert Dock base that he spent the terrible days of the May Blitz, of 1941.

He narrowly escaped death when a delayed action bomb exploded near his ship, HMS Campanula’s berth, killing several others.

At the war’s end, he was commanding a destroyer, but, like so many who survived action, the conflict had a profound effect on him and took a life-long toll.

He regarded The Cruel Sea as his “last shot” at becoming a professional writer. His widow, Ann, believes the compulsion to write was too strong for him to ever stop.

“Nicholas was never without the next project. He always had about three or four ideas on the go,” says Ann.

“The Navy disciplined him and he was an early riser who completed two pages each morning. He’d then type up a clean copy.

“He didn’t like me getting up too early and spoiling this routine. We had a big garden on Gozo and he’d walk round and round thinking the stories out.

“He liked a small circle of friends and didn’t mix much with other writers, as he was worried he’d be influenced by them.”

Until The Cruel Sea’s publication, he only earned £450 from his books and plays, written while working full-time as a British colonial administrator in South Africa and Canada.

Fascinated by islands, the Monsarrats settled on Gozo, off Malta. He repaid the Maltese and the Gozitans with his outstanding novel, The Kappillan of Malta (1973).

Its success conferred special status on the couple in Malta, which lasts to this day.

The Monsarrats and marriage >>>