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Celebrating television's This Is Your Life

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THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Kenneth Cooke, country gamekeeper, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews while taking his daughter to school near the village of Weston-under-Lizard in Shropshire.

Kenneth was a carpenter onboard the British cargo ship SS Lulworth Hill when, on 19 March 1943, having left Cape Town with a cargo of sugar and rum, the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the Italian navy submarine Leonardo da Vinci while sailing through the South Atlantic. Kenneth was one of 14 survivors, hauled, exhausted, onto one of two rafts 800 miles from land.

After a 50-day ordeal under a tropical sun, with a shortage of food and water, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Rapid rescued the only survivors, Kenneth and Able Seaman Colin Armitage, who later died. Eamonn read extracts from a diary Kenneth wrote on sailcloth during the tribute, which takes place on the anniversary of the sinking. Kenneth later became a gamekeeper for the Earl of Bradford at Weston Hall in Shropshire.

programme details...

• Edition No: 188
• Subject No: 189
• Broadcast live: Mon 19 Mar 1962
• Broadcast time: 7.30-8.00pm
• Venue: BBC Television Theatre
• Series: 7
• Edition: 25

on the guest list...

• Dr David Charley
• Cdr Michael Tomkinson
• David Cockram
• John Stainton
• Kathleen - wife
• Mary - daughter
• Earl of Bradford
• Countess of Bradford
• Leslie Hull
Recorded tribute:
• Mrs Cooke - mother

production team...

• Researcher: Peter Moore
• Writer: Peter Moore
• Director: David Croft
• Producer: T Leslie Jackson

Military Life

saluting the armed forces

Photographs of Kenneth Cooke This Is Your Life

David Croft recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in his autobiography, You Have Been Watching... reproduced here with kind permission of the author...

I directed alternate weeks with Yvonne Littlewood under T. Leslie Jackson, who was the legendary producer of the series. I directed 'Lifes' for Kenneth Horne, Coco the Clown, Madame Rambert and several brave Englishmen and nursing sisters who had massaged polio victims from sickness to health.

To liven the show up a bit, Jackson the producer rightly decided to change the scenery. Instead of the large affair with a grand mid-set entrance, which they later reverted to, he decided to make a set appropriate for the personality being featured. Thus Madame Rambert had a ballet studio with barres and Coco the Clown had a circus tent. The ultimate came when we featured a brave Englishman who had been torpedoed in the South Atlantic. He had then spent several weeks in a life-raft while, one by one, his fellow sailors dropped off into the ocean. For this we had two large back-projection screens. On each screen we showed moving pictures of the surging, rolling, foaming South Atlantic. The result was that on every monitor in the gallery I had pictures of people in front of an exceedingly rough sea. About ten minutes into the programme I didn't know where to look. I was feeling very, very seasick. The brave seaman was completely unmoved by the proceeding and not a shadow of emotion crossed his British countenance. I had in reserve a great device on the front of one of the circle cameras. It was an outside broadcast camera and had an amazing zoom that would take the shot from a wide angle to a tight close-up at the plunge of a lever. We also had a really great research team on the show. They had managed to find the captain of the submarine who actually torpedoed the sailor. The critical moment arrived. Eamonn Andrews made the announcement, and the submarine commander made his dramatic entrance. 'Zoom in!' I yelled from the gallery. The lever was plunged. We zoomed in on the sailor's face. Nothing! He remained totally unmoved.