AN ANTIQUES Roadshow expert was left horrified by the “cold and heartless” contents of a guest’s WW2 letter.
BBC One antiques specialist Mark Smith was stunned after a woman brought along a piece of shell from the German warship, Bismark.
Bismarck was the first of two Bismarck-class battleships built for Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine, named after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
In a repeated episode on Sunday, Mark examined a collection of medals, photographs, a telegram, and a piece of shell.
He asked the owner: “So, who’s the gentleman in the photo?”
She replied: “My dad, who was on the Prince of Wales and out to try to sink the Bismark with the Hood.
READ MORE ON ANTIQUES ROADSHOW
style queen
Antiques Roadshow guest gasps as she learns truth about £20 clothing collection
“As you know, the Hood went down. They were outnumbered, the Bismark was huge, both ships apparently were outdone by it.
“The Prince of Wales was damaged, so it came back into dry dock and he had this piece of shell mounted.”
Mark was intrigued by a piece of shell and then swiftly moved onto a photo that caught his eye.
The black and white image featured a uniformed man holding a baby alongside a smiling woman.
Mark asked: “Is that you in that photo?”
“Yeah, that’s me with my mum and dad,” she replied.
“So I was christened and then sometime later, he went back on the Prince of Wales, with a repulse and they got sent 100 miles up towards Japan to see what was going on.
“And it apparently was one of the blunders of the war, of the navy, because they were sent up there with no air cover and they didn’t stand a chance, they were torpedoed by the Japanese.
“He went down on the ship, and that was obviously the telegram my mum had.”
Mark spotted a telegram and was chuffed to get his hands on it: “This is one of those things that you hear about but you very rarely ever see, the telegram, and they’re so bland, aren’t they?”
“Yes, so cold,” she agreed as Mark began to read the telegram.
He read: “‘I deeply regret to inform you that your husband Gordon EJ Hall, who is believed to have been serving on HMS Prince of Wales, has not been reported as a survivor.”
The expert was stunned at the blunt nature of the telegram and remarked: “So cold, and a heartless way of doing it, really.”
“No emotion at all, no,” Gordon’s daughter added.
Mark continued: “Dreadful. You’ve got, in a very small space, an incredible story of World War Two, you have a story that happened to so many people, but you’ve still got the telegram.”
The expert then turned the chat to how much he would pay for it.
“You have a piece of one of the most famous German battleships, the Bismark,” Mark said.
“It’s one of those things that, as a collector, it would be the one thing in the catalogue that you would have to buy.
Read More on The Celeb Report
“I would, I would have to buy that.
“I would think probably that once I told you that I think it would be about £500 to £600, I think I would still find someone bidding on it at around about the £1,000 mark.
“Because I’d certainly pay £1,000 for that. I mean… to think that that was on the Bismark at one point, absolutely brilliant.”
