‘My son drowned, and the government ignored my search for justice'

Telegraph

2 days ago

At 2am on the morning of June 3, 1984, 18-year-old Ben Bryant sat on the yard arm of the square-rigged cutter Marques and enjoyed a quiet smoke. The London lad had yearned for a life on the ocean waves since he was seven years old.
Now, those dreams were coming true. The Marques's crew had won the first leg of that year's Tall Ships Race and they'd just set sail from Bermuda on the second leg, heading for Nova Scotia. The smoke from Ben's predawn cigarette drifted into the darkness over calm Caribbean waters.
Two hours later, a squall hit. The Marques toppled starboard and water flooded in through an open hatch that should have been closed. In less than a minute, the 120ft wooden ship slipped beneath the surface. Ben Bryant drowned, along with another 18 of the Marques's 28 crew members.
Now his 95-year-old mother Shirley Cooklin – an actress who starred in 1960s Doctor Who, turned prison campaigner and author – has written a furious memoir. Blame Not The Wind vents her frustration that nobody was ever held accountable for the disaster, with Margaret Thatcher's Minister for Transport, Nicholas Ridley, not responding to her requests for help.
'Not the fault of any person or persons'
At a public inquiry in October 1985, bereaved families learnt that the Marques's owner, former Navy officer Mark Litchfield, had ignored strong (and repeated) advice from a Department of Trade inspector to investigate the vessel's stability.
The cutter had been refitted with a heavy poop deck in the 1970s to make it suitable for use as a film prop (notably in the BBC's The Voyage of Charles Darwin) which may have made her unsuitable for racing. But in 1984, Litchfield talked officials from the Ministry of Transport into granting the 67-year-old Marques an exemption from the usual inspection by a ministry surveyor.
Instead, the Ministry took the word of the owner's own surveyor that she was seaworthy. It further transpired that Litchfield had engaged a captain – Stuart Finlay – who'd forged his licence. Finlay had also altered paperwork which restricted him to sailing within 100 miles of the US coastline. The Marques's co-owner, the Englishman Robin Cecil-Wright, emerged from the inquiry as Litchfield's most severe critic, arguing that the ship should never have attempted such an arduous voyage. Yet the inquiry found that the Marques sinking was 'not the fault of any person or persons'.
In Blame Not The Wind, Cooklin describes the helplessness she felt, listening to the 'chummy men' letting Litchfield off the hook in court. She remembers fantasising about leaving the room, buying a 'serious, head-sized' bucket and returning to place it on the parquet floor filled with salt water. In her fantasy, she writes, she plunged the 'well-fed faces' of the lawyers, one by one, into that water – 'until they splutter and can no longer breathe, until they start to choke, and if they should happen to drown, that will just be too bad.'
Reaching out to clutch my hand today when I meet her today, Cooklin asks: 'Did you like the part about the bucket?' Her eyes are sharp and probing and I freeze for a second.
A second tragedy
We can't be sure if she's right to see a government conspiracy behind the tragedy. But I completely understand her need to remind those in power of the emotional and physical trauma they were assessing, so I nod.
'Good! If you understand the bucket, then we can be friends.' Settling onto a bench in the tiny back garden of her home in Chichester, she grits her teeth at the name of 'awful, entitled, slippery' Mark Litchfield who died last year, aged 82. 'I couldn't have written my book while he was still alive,' she says. 'He was a very rich, very litigious man.'
But now she wants the world to know that if he'd been held accountable for the loss of the Marques back in 1985, another tragedy might have been averted. In 1995 – a decade after Ben's death – another of Litchfield's ships (the 137-year-old Maria Asumpta) was wrecked off Cornwall with the loss of three more lives. Litchfield was skippering that boat at the time and sentenced to 18 months for manslaughter.
At his trial in 1997, a surviving crew member said he felt 'completely and utterly' let down by Litchfield and recalled that he yelled 'you bastard, you bastard' at Litchfield the moment the ship hit the rocks – its engines failing due to cheap, contaminated fuel. The mother of 19-year-old crew member Emily Macfarlane, who died in that crash, told the court that Litchfield had used his money and influence to 'wriggle out of his responsibilities as a leader'.
'I'm a doer, not a feeler'
Decades after her own bereavement, Ben's mother is still more comfortable expressing anger than sorrow. In the time we spend together she lights up sharing gossip from her showbiz days and eye rolling her 'rather too adventurous' love life. 'I was the original silly moo,' is how she laughs off her brief second marriage, to a convicted murderer she met while volunteering as a prison visitor. (This experience yielded both a memoir, Knockback, which was made into a film starring Pauline Collins, and a prisoner's handbook, From Arrest to Release: The Inside/Outside Survival Guide.)
Leaning on a cane as she leads me through her minimalist home decorated with abstract art 'because I don't want this to look like an old lady's place!' – she points out to me faded snapshots of her adventurous son as a little boy –'I love this one, because he's smiling and later on he would never smile for the camera!'. But she becomes more energised rooting through files of evidence in her study.
'I found grieving difficult,' she acknowledges. 'I'm a doer, not a feeler.' So while her ex-husband – the TV producer Peter Bryant – 'went up to Hampstead Heath and howled his heart out,' Cooklin quickly 'found I was better at bashing people's heads together than I was at crying'. In the year after the Marques sank, she channelled her rage into radio interviews and crisp newspaper articles (in both The Sunday Times and The Observer) pushing for answers from Litchfield and his old-boys-club contacts in the Ministry of Transport.
Ridley – then Minister for Transport, and a key ally of Margaret Thatcher – never replied to her letters. (It turned out he had also signed off on the ship's dodgy survey.) Her friend, the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, did some digging of her own, and told Cooklin that Ridley was being shielded by the prime minister because he was 'part of her plan for Britain'. Cooklin also uncovered Litchfield's shifty business practices. It transpired he had been involved in a scam offering insurance for trainee sailors that he never provided, instead pocketing $50,000.
It's a huge relief for Cooklin to finally air these allegations. She also relishes conjuring the moment Litchfield stood briefly shamed in the dock, forced to admit he never took the time to call her to offer his condolences. At that moment, she grins, 'he was s--- scared of me. Terrified.'
'No regrets'
She has no regrets about letting Ben pursue his passion for adventure and smiles recalling the determination with which he set off for the Caribbean after sitting his A-levels. 'He loved sailing, lived for it. I couldn't have stopped him and I wouldn't have wanted to,' she says. 'I believe you start letting go of a child from the moment they are born and Ben was an old soul. Older than me in many ways. He always treated me with gentle tolerance.'
Cooklin – who enjoyed sailing in her own youth – had first encouraged Ben to hop aboard a boat when he was seven. 'He had become very inward, very shy at that time,' she recalls, 'and I thought it would help him to look to the horizon. I will never forget the first time they said: 'Take the helm, Ben'. That was it. By the time he was 11 all the kids were coming up to me asking: 'Are you Ben's mum? He's brilliant!''
She laughs recalling her son's love of Led Zeppelin, incompetence during a brief spell of window cleaning, and his emerging skill as a writer, seen in his letters home.
But her face darkens as she recalls hearing news of the Marques's sinking on the radio. Family friends (including novelist Beryl Bainbridge) encouraged her to hope that Ben had survived. ''He must be alright,' they said, 'He's so sensible.'' She felt that 'not to hope felt like a betrayal' but in her heart she knew he was lost. 'It's not easy,' she says, 'when you're left with nothing more than a bundle of photographs where it's always summer.'
'We were lost in a haze of alcohol for those first days,' she tells me. 'I knew Ben was dead. I knew he would have been disgusted with me if I had fallen apart. He would have said: 'For f---'s sake! I'm dead, you're alive, get on with it!' So we all drank ourselves silly. People would arrive at the house and a wonderful friend would pull them aside and give them directions to the offie.'
Cooklin reflects that her greatest consolation during those days was the arrival of Ben's Dutch girlfriend Tine Joustra.
'It was a huge comfort that he got to fall in love,' she says. 'I couldn't have borne it otherwise. She told me it was love at first sight – that he had admired the way she tied a knot…' Cooklin and Joustra – now a successful actor – are still close today and attended the book's launch party together.
'Looking back, in my 90s, I've been able to put the personal aspect to one side and approach Ben's story as a writer,' she says. 'I am not religious. I don't think there's a man up in the sky telling us all what to do. But I do think Ben was there with me when I was writing. 'God's sake, mum,' he was saying. 'Get on with it!''
Finding her walking stick to show me out, Cooklin takes my hand more gently as I express my belated condolences for her loss. 'That's kind,' she says. 'But it's OK. I would rather have had 18 years of Ben than a lifetime with anybody else.'
Blame Not the Wind (HarperElement, £22) is published on Aug 14