"Captain North Dalrymple-Hamilton, who has died aged 92, witnessed the demise of the German battleship Bismarck, and later served in the Royal Yacht Britannia. As dawn broke over the Atlantic on May 27 1941, Dalrymple-Hamilton had been at his action station all night. From his position in a gun director high above the bridge of the battleship King George V, he could see the battleship Rodney (commanded by his father) on the port beam. It was blowing hard and there was haze on the horizon. Then, at 08.42, he saw the vague shape of Bismarck, which the Royal Navy had been hunting for several days, at a range of 12½ miles. The British ships steered towards their enemy at 22 knots, limited by the fastest speed which Rodney could achieve; Bismarck, already crippled by a torpedo from one of the carrier Ark Royal’s Swordfish torpedo-bombers, headed for Brest in occupied France. Dalrymple-Hamilton recalled two enormous battle ensigns being hoisted at King George V’s fore- and mainmasts; he saw Rodney open fire, and the great mushrooms of yellow flame when Bismarck replied a minute later. He felt guilty at thinking he was glad that she was firing at his father’s ship and not at his, but as Rodney was enveloped in sheets of flame and smoke from her own 16-inch guns, and tall columns of water from Bismarck’s accurate return fire, he worried whether she had been hit. Soon the German ship shifted target to his vessel, and shells roared over his head. After about an hour he saw gushes of flame coming up from inside Bismarck and the roof of 'B’ turret fly off. As the range closed to one and a half miles — point-blank range for the British guns — Dalrymple-Hamilton ordered his 5.25-inch secondary armament to open fire, but he was ordered to cease when their smoke threatened to obscure the big guns’ rangefinders. At close range he could see men throwing themselves over the side, and the swastika on its red background flying at the mainmast. Firing continued until Bismarck capsized. When he and his father compared notes afterwards, they thought they were probably the only father and son at the battle. His father told him: “You are lucky to have seen a show like that after only being in the Navy for 18 months — I’ve had to wait 35 years.” North Edward Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton was born on February 17 1922 at Widworthy Court, near Honiton, Devon, the home of his grandmother, Lady Peek. He was son of Gwendolen Peek and the future Admiral Sir Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton of Bargany, though at the time of his birth his father was a lieutenant-commander in the battlecruiser Renown in Japan, accompanying the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, on a cruise to the Far East. George V had been one of his father’s godparents, and the Prince in his turn became a godparent to North, who was educated at Eton . His naval career had an inauspicious start: in January 1940 he went down with measles and had to be quarantined just as he should have joined the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth; then, when he finally set off a fortnight later, the area around his home in south-west Scotland was hit by the worst blizzards in living memory, blocking road and rail routes. Undeterred, his mother hired a Cairnryan fishing boat to ferry him up the coast to Girvan to catch a train to Glasgow. Eventually he was forced to travel south by train down the east coast from Edinburgh ." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11053695/Capt-North-Dalrymple-Hamilton-obituary.html
