Gilbert Hackforth-Jones

Born the ninth child of ten and deemed by his parents to be destined for a naval career, Gilbert Hackforth-Jones (1900-1982) attended Osborne and Dartmouth Naval Colleges and joined the Grand Fleet on his seventeenth birthday. As a midshipman serving during World War I, he saw action on the Empress of India. After the war ended, he was granted a short period of study at Cambridge University. Whether his deep love of literature and drama was strengthened by this happy phase, one can only conjecture.

Gilbert entered submarine service in 1920. He rose to the rank of Commander and was stationed with his wife Margaret and their young son in far-flung places, including China. In 1936 he retired from the Navy and briefly entered the profession of his stockbroker father, quickly discovering that it was not for him. But in his search for fulfilment and drawing on the wealth of experience he had already gathered at sea — in his leisure time he was a passionate yachtsman — he started to write. A short story accepted for publication by Blackwood’s in 1937 marked the beginning of a richly fertile and prolific writing career.

During World War II he was recalled to the Navy, but not to life on the ocean. Serving on land inspecting weapons and running an Admiralty department drove him to write in earnest, and he published his first novel, Submarine Flotilla, in 1940. After 1945, there was no stopping him in his resolve to write for a living, and he proceeded to complete a novel and a children’s book most years. His love for the Navy and the characters of all ranks that served in it shows up all the time in his writing. The Green Sailors was a popular series of children’s adventure stories about sailing that was also aired on BBC radio. In all, he was to write some fifty books with a maritime focus, many of them novels that reveal his remarkable gift for storytelling and characterisation, but also collections of short stories and non-fiction works. The creative partnership with his wife resulted in the writing of several plays, including Sweethearts and Wives, which was staged at Wyndham’s Theatre.