The new header for this ‘latest’ section is an extraordinarily skillful painting of MTBs (Motor Torpedo Boats) on passage by the artist David Cobb. His is a name I seem to have known all my life as I remember the oil painting of a yacht in a stiff breeze on a grey day which hung in our drawing room when I was a child in Woodbridge. I suppose that was some time in the later 1950s, early 1960s. It was a striking painting that even a small child woudl notice and admire. When we moved house, it moved with us. My brother has it now and I suppress feelings of envy with some difficulty every Christmas time when we gather in the room where it hangs.

David Cobb was born in 1921. He was too young to be eligible for the pre-war RNV(S)R but finds his way into my book Uncommon Courage through his passion for yachts, motor boats, ships and his personal determination. Just as he found his way into the Royal Naval Patrol Service when he’d been discharged from the Navy School at Pangbourne and thought his only option was an undergraduate degree at Cambridge (such hardship!). In the aftermath of Dunkirk there was a call for anyone with experience of small craft to volunteer. Eagerly he assured two RNVR officers that he knew ALL of the boats on the Itchenor Hard

“And it was true. For years I’d known and loved their wide variety.” In his book The Making of a War Artist he recalls a family sailing holiday with a precise date 11.August 1939 “when our little family cutter bound for Cornwall, was nearing the Eddystone, my brother and I watched, absorbed, as there swished close past us, a tall rectangular shape. She was the Clyde-built, four-masted Barque Archibald Russell loaded with grains from Australia, bound from Falmouth to Hull on what was to be her very last cargo and signalling the end of four-centuries of world trade in deep-water square-riggers. It proved to be an apocalyptic experience, like having seen the Flying Dutchmen…” Within weeks the country was at war.

When peace came Cobb described himself as “suffering from acute visual indigestion”. He had seen so much. He set himself to become “a painter of our sea-affairs” and try to capture, though his work, some essence of the qualities he felt he and his generation had been fighting for. I’d like to thank his daughter Mairet Cobb for permission to use this image and also for giving me a copy of her father’s book