Ted Briggs remembered leaving Hood’s compass platform as the ship rolled. Water reached him while he was on the ladder, and he was pulled under. When he surfaced, he could still see part of the ship. He reached a small raft; when he looked again, Hood was gone. B32
He saw William Dundas and Bob Tilburn on other rafts. The three paddled towards one another and tried to hold their rafts together. Eventually their hands became too numb to keep their grip. Briggs’s account ends with the arrival of the destroyer Electra. It gives the loss of a warship a human scale: three men trying to remain within reach of each other. B32
Remembering, years later
Briggs wrote this account around 1976, decades after the sinking. It is his own recollection, reproduced by the Hood Association, not a transcript of his 1941 evidence. Here it is used for his remembered experience of escape and waiting. Its timings and explanations of the ship’s destruction are not treated as independently established facts.