In 1620 the Pilgrims, Protestant dissenters who had broken from the Church of England, set sail from Plymouth on the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in America. In 1957, 337 years later, a group set out to repeat their voyage on a replica of the ship. Among their number was Peter Padfield, a young sailor with an eye for detail.
The idea came from Warwick Charlton (obituary, December 24, 2002), a maverick entrepreneur who wanted to thank the Americans for coming to Britain’s aid during the war. However, the crew became known as the 50-50 Club after a journalist suggested that they had only a 50-50 chance of successfully crossing the Atlantic. For his troubles, the journalist had a sack thrown over him by the crew, was bound to the fo’c’s’le doorpost and doused with dishwater.
Padfield recalled that the sailing replicated the original as closely as possible, with no supply drops, no radar and only the wind for power. The one concession to modernity was a radio. The crew were even persuaded to wear Pilgrim clothing for Sunday services, “though few enjoyed the fancy dress”. Seasickness was a constant problem, with one of their number taking his turn at the wheel with a saucepan strapped to his waist to catch the contents of his stomach as they emerged.
At sea Padfield witnessed glorious sunsets. “Blazes of gold turning to flame orange and red and tipping receding layers of jaggedly topped cumulus clouds in concentric parallels for hundreds of miles down to the horizon of bright, steel-blue sea,” he wrote. Yet the best part was being “cut off from civilisation and any sort of worries”, adding: “I experienced a kind of freedom. It showed me that I could do what I wanted.”
What he wanted to do was to write and he built a career as a successful author of sometimes controversial naval and military books, some 29 in total, including The Titanic and the Californian (1965) in which he defended Stanley Lord, captain of the Californian, who had been censured for not going to the rescue of the Titanic’s passengers in 1912.
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His forays into naval history included a book to mark the 400th anniversary of the Spanish Armada in 1588 as well as War Beneath the Sea: Submarine Conflict 1939-45 (1995), which The Times described as an “excellent account of submarine warfare in the Second World War”. This interest in the 1939-45 war had previously been evident in Dönitz: The Last Führer (1984), about the German admiral who was briefly Hitler’s successor, the first in a trilogy about Nazi leaders, the others being about Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.
Padfield continued to be fascinated by Hess’s flight to Scotland in May 1941 and in a later book, Hess, Hitler and Churchill: The Real Turning Point of the Second World War (2013), he challenged the official accounts of that event. He was also unconvinced by the official line about Hess’s death in 1987 and believed that a suicide note was planted on his body. “The suicide note is obviously bogus — it was forged,” he told The Times after a four-month battle to obtain the secret report into Hess’s final hours. “That doesn’t mean he was murdered, but it does suggest they were trying to cover something up.”
Maritime power over the centuries was the theme of another trilogy, the second of which, Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, 1788–1851 (2003), describing Britain’s emergence over France as the leading world power, was awarded the Mountbatten maritime prize.
Peter Lawrence Notton Padfield was born in 1932 in Calcutta, where his father, William Padfield, was a captain in the Royal Engineers attached to the Indian army; his mother, Annice (née Abbott), was also from a military family. A younger brother predeceased him.
His father died of typhoid when Peter was seven and the family moved to England. He was sent to Northcliffe House prep school, in West Sussex, which during the war was evacuated to Cornwall. Later he studied at Christ’s Hospital school in West Sussex, before joining HMS Worcester, the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College.
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From there he served as a navigating officer on P&O liners to India and Australia. He gave that up after being offered a berth on Mayflower II. In the US he headed west and sailed across the Pacific to the Solomon Islands, where he panned in vain for gold and took part in a crocodile hunt, something he came to regret when his support for animal rights emerged.
Returning home, Padfield worked for Anglia Engineering while supplementing his income by selling sketches of East Anglian scenes. He also painted in watercolours. In London he met Jane Yarwood, who became a PA with Ipswich borough council, and they were married in 1960. She died in 2018 and he is survived by their children: Deborah, an artist and academic, Guy, a maths teacher, and Fiona, an author.
Padfield was vigorous and uncompromising in his views, whether over his vegetarian lifestyle or in his opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Union, against which he campaigned for many years. He was also involved in local affairs, helping to lead the successful battle against development plans for Bentwaters Parks, the former US airfield in Suffolk.
Despite having given up life on the sea, he remained drawn to the water. He built a gaff-rigged 1900 Norfolk shrimper replica, which he sailed with his children on the Deben. He remained fit, muscular and slim, enjoying cross-country skiing in Switzerland twice a year. Until recently he was working out each morning with a routine of squats.
Three years ago Padfield, one of the last of the 50/50 Club, published a volume called Mayflower II Diary: Sketches from a Lost Age. In it he described writing his original diaries, which were sent back to his mother, “in great haste, on a table . . . tilting with the unpredictable rolling of the ship”. He also recalled the exhilaration of swaying wildly “in the rigging and hanging on to the best available rope with the wind whistling about your face and clothes”, concluding: “I quite forgot to be scared stiff.”
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Peter Padfield, naval historian, was born on April 3, 1932. He died of prostate cancer on March 14, 2022, aged 89