“In Hazard”, book & broadcast

Richard Hughes produced three enormously interesting novels. High Wind In Jamaica (1929) and Fox In the Attic (1962) are much the better known, but In Hazard (1938) has a devoted following.¹True to my usual perversity, I haven’t yet read “High Wind In Jamaica”. It has Richard Hughes quirkiness in spades, being a dark story about boys captured by pirates. Sort of, “Lord of the Flies” meets “Peter Pan”. By that sort of token, “In Hazard…” could have been “High Wind off Cuba”. I have not listed the sequel to “Fox In The Attic” – “The Wooden Shepherdess” (1973) – amongst Hughes’s finest. It is incomplete and by almost all accounts also disjointed. I hope this reputation will grow when – if – the 1940 BBC radio dramatisation of the fine maritime story-telling of In Hazard (and Hughes’ own narration) is revived, say on iPlayer. (More on that, below.)

In Hazard is a slim but quite daunting book. It risks many of its quite few words on an extensive flirtation with the idea that a ship’s mechanical being is quite like a human’s body and being.  It tells of a freak hurricane putting a crippled Archimedes and its crew under intense pressure and the engineering, atmospheric, meteorological and biological details reward the patient reader.

It is worth saying, too, that In Hazard has its quotient of racism. There are (I think) more Chinamen than Europeans on the Archimedes. For much of the novel the orientals are disobligingly treated en masse, all similarly huddled in terror (most of the time) or (quite suddenly) grouped in stroppy rebellion. But then, about two-thirds in, one of the Chinese crew members, a fireman, Ao Ling, steps into the limelight of the story, both as a leader of his fellows on the ship, and in his back-story as a stand-out rebel in revolutionary China.

In an important sense, Hughes’s treatment of non-Europeans is fine: the novel is not an account of what the novelist is thinking, but an imagined account of what a ship’s crew thought, said and did. If the average white seaman felt more or less disobligingly about his foreign-bred shipmates, then – right or wrong – that’s what needs to get written.

My strong feeling when I finished the novel was that I had read something imaginatively of the first rank, not least in the crowded field of sea-stories.  It is up there with my favourites such as CS Forester’s The Ship (1943) or Martin Cruz Smith’s Polar Star (1989).²It is also of a piece with other adventure novels which combine the author’s expertise with an emotional component which might be called spiritual. Nevil Shute, John Buchan, Nigel Balchin, for example, elevate their well-informed writing in that way. BTW: I haven’t read all the Conrad or Melville that I should.

Besides, and I didn’t know this until I had half-read the novel, this is a real-life story told with more than usual claims to expert verisimilitude.

Hughes’s authorial voice describes Archimedes as a fictional (“single-screw turbine steamer”) cargo ship which is imagined as being on passage in 1929 from the US East Coast to the Far East when it encounters a hurricane off the West Indies.

When I bothered to look, I found the extraordinary back-story to Hughes’s novel in the fine 1994 biography of the novelist written by Richard Perceval Graves (the son of Robert Graves, a Hughes intimate).³Richard Perceval Graves, “Richard Hughes: A biography”, André Deutsch, 1994 RPG tells how, in the real world of real ships:

A hurricane had raged across the Caribbean in November 1932; and it had seized the steamer Phemius and sucked it across the sea, so that the ship was battered almost unceasingly for five days and nights.  Only the heroism and ingenuity of the ship’s officers had prevented a disaster. Capt DCL Evans (who had coped with both the fury of the wind, and the panic of his Chinese crew) sent a detailed report to Laurence Holt (chairman of the line to which the Phemius belonged); and Holt was so impressed that he passed it on to John Masefield (now poet laureate|) ‘feeling like Gengi “There are things which must never be forgotten”.’⁴ Some of this can be found at Wikipedia’s Richard Hughes entry. That leads to its 1932 Cuba hurricane material, which includes some material on the experience of “Phemius”. I don’t know where the “Gengi” reference comes from, but I wonder if it is more normally written as Genji, which is currently fashionable and was also current in Holt’s day.

Masefield, an experienced seaman and maritime writer, didn’t take up Holt’s offer. Luckily, it came to Hughes. There followed an unusual co-operation between shipowner and writer, and multiple opportunities for Hughes to meet Phemius and her crew; he was even able to take passage with Capt Evans (on a different command). Hughes was given the accounts of their plight written by the captain and one of his officers (and talks of a “printed account”). Hughes was determined that his version of the story would be highly fictional, and thank goodness, Holt didn’t demur. Indeed, his one complaint concerned a too-close-to-life depiction of one of the officers. Hughes addressed this, having always insisted that his crew was fictional, and that his novel would otherwise recount the ship’s saga faithfully.

At the core of the ship’s crisis was a total loss of power as it confronted the worst storm imaginable. Its propulsion was knocked out, but also its steering and (for a while) all its pumps.⁵All that is recalled in the systemic power failures which beset “MV Dali” as it crashed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge in March 2024.Paradoxically – deliciously – In Hazard tells us that though his Archimedes lost her huge funnel, and her bilge pumps, the events turned out to be blessings in disguise. I especially hope that bit was based on Phemius fact.

One oddity is that the true 1932 story of Phemius seems never to have been recounted properly. Those various contemporaneous accounts must be somewhere.⁶The Maritime Museum Liverpool seems the obvious place to start. It has a Blue Funnel Line collection.

Imagine this if you will. In a lull in Hughes’s enthusiasm for the writing of In Hazard, in January 1936 (after he had had the Phemius material and Laurence Holt’s acquaintance for a few years) another of the ship-owner’s vessels, the Ulysses, was in severe difficulties in heavy seas off Swansea, not far from Hughes’s town. There were deaths and heavy injuries. Within a day, Hughes heard the news and rushed to Swansea. There he got hold of a suitable pilot cutter, similar to the sailing boat he owned and was used to. He raised a scratch crew and they set off for the scene. They had to stand-off  from the casualty for several hours, but were eventually the first to reach the stricken vessel and evacuated the dead and injured. ⁷This account by Hughes is credited by Graves as being in the Indiana University RH archive (in “Boats and sailing”). “Ulysses” was sunk by a German submarine off the US Coast in 1942, with no loss of life. “Phemius” was sunk by a German submarine off the West African coast in 1943, with several lives lost. See: The Allen Collection. Richard Hughes found himself re-energised to continue with his novel.

When published in 1938, In Hazard had mixed reviews (I mean: they varied between high praise and scepticism). It had poor sales. However, the book became very popular with the advent of war. A radio version was proposed.

At this point, it is worth turning the pages back a bit. In 1923, when Hughes was quite suddenly a big West End theatre success, he conceived the idea of writing a radio play, and duly did so. He was committed to the idea that the new medium would reward new techniques. Hughes’s friend, Sir Nigel Playfair, remarked over dinner one night that he needed material for an imminent theatrical broadcast and that it was a pity there was nothing around which had been specifically written for radio. Knowing that he had just thing well-started, Hughes said he would have something to show by the next day. The result was “A Comedy of Danger”, quickly abbreviated to “Danger”. It depicted a group of people who are by chance trapped in a part of a mine when it collapses. They can overhear the suffering and eventual deaths of miners nearby. They consider their own likely deaths, and we are invited to listen in the dark, just as they speak in the dark. The play was a success with critics and audience alike and has been played quite recently.⁸A recent BBC radio play, BBC’s “Danger 2023” riffed on the 1924 “Danger”. It was the first adult play written for radio.⁹That “adult” caveat is needed because female writers had got dramas for children on air before “Danger”. See: Tim Crook, Rewriting the Beginning of BBC Audio Drama History: Three women playwrights and their contribution to British radio drama culture, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 2023

“Danger” takes place in the aural perfection of a mine in total darkness. It is remarkable that the next Hughes radio enterprise was “In Hazard”, a 1940 dramatisation of the 1938 novel concerning  a ship in a raging tropical storm that half-deafened the crew.

Philip Burton wrote the radio version of “In Hazard”, and Richard Hughes appears as the narrator in it. Burton was a very interesting figure: a thwarted actor; educator; Richard Burton’s mentor; a prolific scriptwriter. All this and more will be told in a forthcoming biography by Angela V John.¹⁰Angela V John, “Behind the Scenes: The dramatic lives of Philip Burton”, Parthian, 2025. Professor John’s book includes news of an extraordinary coincidence.

Almost by chance, whilst on another assignment, Philip Burton met one Charles Pollard who told the radio man of “his latest adventure as chief engineer on the oil-tanker, the San Demetrio“. Burton turned the story into a script for radio broadcast from Cardiff, and Winston Churchill ordered that it should be repeated.

Having seen it on Talking Pictures TV, I had been considering the 1943 movie The San Demetrio London as a sea-story comparable to In Hazard, whether in novel or radio form.

The stories told by Hughes and Pollard share mad courage, but also tremendous improvisation amongst obdurate machinery and against frightful odds.

Footnotes

• 1
  True to my usual perversity, I haven’t yet read “High Wind In Jamaica”. It has Richard Hughes quirkiness in spades, being a dark story about boys captured by pirates. Sort of, “Lord of the Flies” meets “Peter Pan”. By that sort of token, “In Hazard…” could have been “High Wind off Cuba”. I have not listed the sequel to “Fox In The Attic” – “The Wooden Shepherdess” (1973) – amongst Hughes’s finest. It is incomplete and by almost all accounts also disjointed.
• 2
  It is also of a piece with other adventure novels which combine the author’s expertise with an emotional component which might be called spiritual. Nevil Shute, John Buchan, Nigel Balchin, for example, elevate their well-informed writing in that way. BTW: I haven’t read all the Conrad or Melville that I should.
• 3
  Richard Perceval Graves, “Richard Hughes: A biography”, André Deutsch, 1994
• 4
  Some of this can be found at Wikipedia’s Richard Hughes entry. That leads to its 1932 Cuba hurricane material, which includes some material on the experience of “Phemius”. I don’t know where the “Gengi” reference comes from, but I wonder if it is more normally written as Genji, which is currently fashionable and was also current in Holt’s day.
• 5
  All that is recalled in the systemic power failures which beset “MV Dali” as it crashed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge in March 2024.
• 6
  The Maritime Museum Liverpool seems the obvious place to start. It has a Blue Funnel Line collection.
• 7
  This account by Hughes is credited by Graves as being in the Indiana University RH archive (in “Boats and sailing”). “Ulysses” was sunk by a German submarine off the US Coast in 1942, with no loss of life. “Phemius” was sunk by a German submarine off the West African coast in 1943, with several lives lost. See: The Allen Collection.
• 8
  A recent BBC radio play, BBC’s “Danger 2023” riffed on the 1924 “Danger”.
• 9
  That “adult” caveat is needed because female writers had got dramas for children on air before “Danger”. See: Tim Crook, Rewriting the Beginning of BBC Audio Drama History: Three women playwrights and their contribution to British radio drama culture, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 2023
• 10
  Angela V John, “Behind the Scenes: The dramatic lives of Philip Burton”, Parthian, 2025