IN 1942 the British light cruiser HMS Edinburgh was scuttled north of Murmansk, having been wrecked by German torpedoes.

When she sank more than half a mile to the bottom of the Barents Sea, she took with her the souls of 56 men and the best part of five tons of Soviet Gold.

The precious metal was part payment from Stalin’s regime for Allied supplies in its war effort.

The survivors of the ship included a Swindon-born teenager called John Marsh, who’d joined up aged at 15 in 1939 and only survived because of a snap decision to take a shower.

For years afterwards he would be haunted by the cries of young shipmates trapped below when the bulkheads were closed in a bid to keep the ship afloat.

“He always said it was only the hand of God that saved him,” recalled his only surviving sibling, Marion Tapscott, 77, who lives in Old Walcot.

John, who emigrated to Canada after the war, died a decade ago and seldom spoke of his experiences, but in 1981 he gave an interview to his local newspaper in Moncton, Nova Scotia, and sent Mrs Tapscott a cutting which she has decided to share with Rewind readers.

Mr Marsh told the Canadian paper: “We came off the Atlantic patrols and were posted to the Russian convoys, the hardest convoys of them all to do.

“We had to go up to the Arctic, where there’s six months of daylight and six months of darkness.

“Most of the men wore three coats on deck – a duffel coat, an overcoat and a raincoat. When the spray came over the side of the ship, it would freeze on the raincoat.

“I remember loading the gold – in little boxes about a foot square that were too heavy for me to lift – into the hatch at the after end of the funnel and right to the bottom of the ship.”

In 1942 the gold was worth £1.5m, the equivalent of about £60m today.

Younger seamen, about 50 of them, were quartered together amidships, three decks down.

“When we left Russia,” Mr Marsh continued, “we left the convoy and went out scouting to see if there was anything around.

“Every afternoon, after the evening meal at 4pm, we used to sit around playing cribbage in our quarters, but on April 30 no-one seemed interested in cards, so I started up to the next deck for a shower.

“The ship was zig-zagging ahead of the convoy and I, stripped, with a towel around me and soap in hand, had just got to the top of the ladder when suddenly there was an explosion and the ship went into darkness.

“There was a lot of confusion and shouting but little panic, for we’d been taught to get around the ship in the dark. It was a good 45 minutes before I got out of the darkness and on deck.”

The darkness, he recalled, was bad but the light was worse, because it revealed that the ship had all but been torn in two. The hardest part, he said, was knowing that his mates were trapped when the hatches had to be closed – but it seems the veteran spared the reporter the whole truth.

His sister said: “He could hear all his mates down below, screaming.”

The surviving crew were taken to Russia before being shipped back to Britain and further duty.

Mr Marsh transferred to submarines. “I became the hunter instead of the prey,” he said.

Most of HMS Edinburgh’s gold was recovered by salvagers in the 1980s.