1976 was the year in which I came increasingly under the sway of the fifties, a decade far less congenial to my rarified tastes than the Bright Young 1920s, and yet I was thirsty for change. Thence, inchmeal throughout '76, I sidelined my hyper-elegant wardrobe in favour of a far more overtly masculin outfit of red windcheater and white tee-shirt; straight leg jeans; and loafers or black working boots. However, on occasion I reverted to the foppish apparel of old, such as the time towards the end of the famed long hot summer of '76 I wore top hat and tails and reddened nails to a party hosted by a friend from Brooklands College, where I'd been a student since the previous year.
To my shame, this took place a day or so immediately before or after the ship I was due to be sailing on at the time, the minesweeper HMS Fittleton, had capsized and then sunk to the bottom of the North Sea following a tragic accident involving another larger ship, the frigate HMS Mermaid, and resulting in the loss of twelve men most of whom I knew personally, given that only weeks earlier I'd spent a few days on Fittleton with more or less exactly the same crew.
HMS Fittleton had been accepted into the Royal Navy in January 1955, although she wasn't actually named Fittleton (after the Wiltshire village) until almost exactly 21 years later. She set sail from Shoreham in Sussex on the 11th of September 1976 with the intention of reaching the port of Hamburg on the 21st of that month for a three day Official Visit, but never arrived. On the 20th she took part in the NATO exercise "Teamwork" 80 miles off the Dutch coast in the North Sea, after which she was ordered to undergo a Replenishment at Sea with the 2500 ton frigate HMS Mermaid, and it was during this exercise that the bow waves of the frigate inter-reacted with those of the sweeper to cause the two to collide.
For some reason I decided I didn't want to be onboard for this particular trip and so pleaded sickness, a decision I was ultimately to rue rather than rejoice in as I recall. This despite the fact that had I taken part in the RAS manoeuvre I'd almost certainly have been assigned Tiller Flat duty, as had been the case on several previous occasions during exercises of this kind. This would have resulted in me being in a highly precarious place when the Fittleton turned over, namely below deck, rendering escape exceptionally difficult although not impossible.
An impression I can recall cultivating with respect to those who didn't survive was that they were natural gentlemen. I knew three of them quite well, and they were all men of signal sweetness of disposition. Which is not to say that the survivors weren't; far from it, for among them were men of whom I was fond and who were good friends of mine. I had really begun to fit in by '76, making my absence from Fittleton very hard for me to bear, although I was not made to suffer for it, that is by anyone other than myself.