In early April 1942, HMS Cornwall and her sister ship Dorsetshire, were ordered to escort the carrier Hermes to Trincomalee, Ceylon. On 5 April, the two cruisers were sighted in the Bay of Bengal by a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft. Soon afterwards, waves of carrier-based bombers attacked. Cornwall was hit by nine bombs, with several near misses, and was left dead in the water almost immediately. Fires took hold, and she sank in just twelve minutes; Dorsetshire followed soon after.
Of Cornwall’s crew, 192 men were killed, including Arthur, a former clerk from Rochester. His body was never recovered. More than a thousand survivors from both ships spent the night in shark-infested waters before being rescued by British warships.
Arthur’s name is among the 10,098 recorded on the Chatham Naval Memorial, commemorating those lost at sea during WW2.
