-H.M.S. Hood Crew Information-
H.M.S. Hood Crew List
Updated 11-Apr-2022

Background

It is estimated that as many as 18,000 men, perhaps more, served aboard the "Mighty Hood" during the operational portion of her 21 year career. The Royal Navy kept no lists of ratings serving in individual ships and, therefore, for ratings any crew list can only be assembled from information relating to individuals. For officers, the situation is easier as The Navy Lists do list all Commissioned and Warrant officers serving in Hood at any given time.

What is presented below is therefore necessarily incomplete in respect of Royal Navy ratings and Royal Marines. That said, it is the work of more than 20 years, and is unlikely to be surpassed elsewhere else. The database remains a "work in progress" and records are added to it at regular intervals.

Sources

Officers

As mentioned above, for officers, the main source, which is a complete listing of all officers who served in Hood, is the Navy Lists. Although these give the date on which any man joined the ship, they do not give the date on which he left. Although this can be ascertained by tracing his next ship, this is a prohibitively time consuming process. Additional information on the service of individual officers is contained in the ADM196 series of records which are available on Ancestry (subscription required) or The National Archives (free if registered). However, these records are only available for men who joined the Royal Navy before 1931. As a result, for the Midshipmen and junior officers who served in Hood in the later years of the 1930s little information in addition to the date on which they joined the ship is available without charge.

Ratings

In the early days of the database, information came to us mainly from relatives of individual men. More recently, the records for men who joined the Royal Navy before 1929 have been released into the public domain and are available on Ancestry (subscription required) or The National Archives (free if registered). The relevant series of documents are ADM188 (men joined before 1926), ADM362 (men joining 1926-1928) and ADM363 (service after 1929 for men joining before before that date). As a result, the greater part of the infomation that we have brought together in this database has come from the service records of individual men. Service records list all ships in which a individuals served but it is not possible to search for "Hood" or any other individual ship. The process of identifying Hood men is, therefore, a time-consuming one which involves trawling all records looking for "Hood" as an entry in amongst the list of ships in each record. We are particularly grateful to Barry Roberts who has dedicated many hours undertaking this task and has identified several thousand "Hood men" thereby.

Submitting data for inclusion in the database

In addition to the above, submissions by individuals remains a valuable contribution to the database. Many men - particularly those who formed the crews of the late 1930s and early 1940s - fall outside the publicly available records. But, even in the case of those for whom records are available, relatives often hold far more information about individuals than can be gleaned from the necessarily impersonal nature of their official records. We therefore welcome and encourage anyone with information on the men who served in Hood to contact us to submit new or supplementary information or photos

If you have information about a man who served in the ship please contact William Sutherland by e-mail at crewsubs@hmshood.org.uk In the first instance if would help if you include in your e-mail the following information relating to the crew man:

- Their name
- Their rating (if known)
- Dates served in Hood (if known)
- Their Date of birth
- The type of information you have - service record, letters, documents, photos etc.

When he is able, William will reply to your e-mail so that we can draw it together into a page for the man concerned.

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