"Kenneth Dancy, who has died aged 88, was a tugboat first mate who made headlines in January 1952 when he braved huge waves to leap aboard the stricken freighter Flying Enterprise, listing in heavy seas off the coast of Ireland. The plight of Flying Enterprise, which kept the media on both sides of the Atlantic gripped for two weeks, began on Christmas Day 1951 when the 6,700-ton New York-registered Liberty Ship sailed into the worst storm to hit the Atlantic in 35 years. It was en route for New York from Hamburg with a cargo said to consist of pig iron, coffee and furniture. On board were 40 crew and 9 passengers. The ship was 300 miles off the southwest coast of Ireland when, on December 27, it developed a stress fracture across the deckhouse and down one side; one of its holds filled with water and it began to list badly. Its captain, 37-year-old Danish-born Kurt Carlsen, radioed for help and two US Navy vessels rushed to the scene. The crew and passengers jumped into the freezing seas and all but one were rescued. But Carlsen refused to abandon ship. On New Year’s Day, the newspapers featured a grainy photograph, snapped from a British Navy observation plane, of Carlsen, alone on the afterdeck, clinging to a railing and waving, as the ship, its port decks awash and its starboard propeller out of water, seemed about to be swallowed by the mountainous seas. Even so , Carlsen radioed that he was happily dining on currant buns, beer and Rhine wine. He was “a little tired”, he admitted, but otherwise everything was “fine and dandy”. On January 2, the Turmoil, a state-of-the-art tugboat which had been busy towing another storm-hit vessel to safety, set off from Falmouth to try to rendezvous with Flying Enterprise. A new storm began to blow up as the tugboat set out, but by January 4 it had drawn up alongside the stricken cargo vessel. Several attempts were made to throw a line to Carlsen as he leant perilously over the rail – but to no avail. Then, as the tug edged as close as possible, the 27-year old Dancy, not wearing a life jacket, jumped the gap between the two vessels, taking the tow line with him. The headline writers went wild and newsreel reports of “Dancy’s leap” were soon drawing crowds into the cinemas. With the line attached, the two vessels set out for Falmouth, followed by a small flotilla, while an army of reporters and photographers converged on the Cornish town to report their arrival. But Flying Enterprise’s ordeal was not over. Early in the morning on January 10, 40 miles short of Falmouth, the tow line snapped amid worsening weather, while the ship began rolling so badly her superstructure barely showed above the waves. A few hours later her stern plummeted, her bows pointed skywards, and just 39 minutes before she succumbed, Carlsen and Dancy hauled themselves up the funnel and jumped into the sea . The two men were picked up by Turmoil. Carlsen had become an international hero. He was feted in London and greeted with a ticker-tape parade on 5th Avenue in New York . On a smaller scale Dancy, too, was given due recognition. In his home town of Tunbridge Wells 20,000 people turned out to give him a hero’s welcome . But the story of the Flying Enterprise left a lot of questions unanswered – such as why Carlsen had decided to stay on board at such enormous risk to his own life . In 2002 a Danish television documentary speculated that the ship had not been carrying pig-iron as claimed, but zirconium rods (zirconium is a metal of vital importance in nuclear technology), suggesting that it was intended for use in the world’s first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus. The documentary reported that, despite the intervening years, information about the cargo remains classified. The loss of the rods, it claimed, had put the launch of Nautilus back by a year. The second of four boys, Kenneth Roger Dancy was born in North London on December 1 1924. His father was a businessman and the family later moved to a small village in Kent where Kenneth’s parents ran a sub-post office and general store. He attended grammar school in north London until 1938, then the Skinners’ Grammar School, Tunbridge Wells, until 1941, when he joined the Merchant Navy as a Navigation Apprentice. He served on his first ship, Blackheath, for two years, and took part in convoys around the globe, winning an impressive clutch of campaign medals." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/10236118/Kenneth-Dancy.html
