Image:CorvetteCoreopsis.jpg

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[edit] Summary

This image, which appears around minute 16 of the film "The Cruel Sea" and in its original trailer, is of the Flower Class Corvette HMS Coreopsis playing the part of the fictitious HMS Compass Rose. On her bow Compass Rose carries the number 49, half covered by a wave in this photo. K49 was in fact the pennant number of HMS Crocus - in a breaker's yard in Hongkong before filming of the "The Cruel Sea" began. Coreopsis had been loaned to Greece, before the end of the war, where she became the Hellenic Navy Corvette Kriezis [1], but by 1951 she was waiting in Malta to go back to the breakers in UK. The studio found her there and she was "cast" as Compass Rose.

The picture was downloaded with permission from Mark Walters - Flower Class Corvette Forums website [[2]]. I am grateful to him for his explanation of its origin, but I think it is fair to say that in 2006 both he and Mike Raymond of the Flower Class Corvettes Association are not fully confident of any such photo's provenance - especially as the film used some cutaway shots from factual documentary.

Taking photos of ships in wartime was strictly regulated, though sailors did take personal pictures home, and some crew might well have been skilled photographers from civilian life. Mike Raymond also suggested that in the film other ships may have been used for some shots or inserted documentary clips. On the other hand this may have been an official Admiralty photo of HMS Crocus (K49).

Thanks are due either to film's Director of Photography Gordon Dines A.R.P.S., or an anonymous photographer for a magnificent picture that captures the spirit of a film that sought, in the spirit of Montserrat's novel, to portray the sea as the villain, the brave crew as the heroes and the ships as the heroines. Sibadd 17:48, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Licensing

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

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(del) (cur) 17:04, 6 March 2006 . . Sibadd (Talk | contribs) . . 400×320 (52,561 bytes) (This image is a post-war photo of Flower Class Corvette HMS Coreopsis playing the part of the fictitious HMS Compass Rose, but with the pennant number K49 of HMS Crocus taken during the filming of the film The Cruel Sea in 1953. The picture was downloaded)