In February we told the story about Coventry’s links with the Royal Navy and referred to the Coventry Cross that was recovered from the sunken HMS Coventry. CovSoc member and Chair of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral, Martin Williams, now tells us about a commemoration of Operation Blackleg which recovered the Cross of Nails from HMS Coventry. Martin writes….
Forty years after the Coventry Cross of Nails was recovered from the wreck of HMS Coventry in the Falklands, one of the members of the diving team has had it commemorated on canvas.
On the initiative of diver Ray Sinclair, the South African artist, Dave Coburn, has pictured the rescued Cross of Nails in the grasp of a diver emerging from the sea bed.
HMS Coventry was a Type 42 destroyer sunk in the Falklands War. The Coventry Cross of Nails stood in the ship’s chapel. The recovered Cross of Nails is now aboard the destroyer, HMS Diamond, that is currently deployed in the Mediterranean.
Operation Blackleg was the name of the Royal Navy diving operation that set out to recover all the secret documentation that went down with HMS Coventry.
The divers discovered the Cross of Nails in the course of their recovery work and brought it to the surface with other rescued material.
Ray Sinclair, who now lives in Brisbane, Australia commented “To this day, Operation Blackleg has been the Royal Navy’s finest achievement in deep saturation diving recovery from inside a warship – on the same page as the gold recovered from HMS Edinburgh. One was for the security of NATO; the other was about treasure.”
The painting is on display in the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport.
This story first appeared in the April 2024 edition of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral Chair’s e-news.