Bernard Gray was lost together with all the crew when URGE was mined shortly after leaving Malta on 27 April 1942, although they were not declared officially dead until 6 May when the submarine was overdue and declared lost.

He was born on 14 May 1906 at Donington on Bain, Louth, Lincolnshire.  On the 4 March 1929 he married Dorothy Bentley. His occupation was a journalist. He qualified as a pilot on an Avian 80h.p. Cirrus Mk II in 1930.

According to the Times of Malta, while working in Malta in 1942 for The Sunday Pictorial, a now defunct Mirror Group newspaper, he lived up to his reputation as a “richly piratical” reporter by using well-placed friends to wangle his way on board HMS URGE. Mr Gray had covered the British retreat from Dunkirk, which was commanded by Lord John Gort who later became governor of Malta.

Museum archivist George Malcolmson said it was possible that the journalist’s contact with the governor secured his fatal place on HMS URGE.  He was eager to cover the Egyptian desert campaign, the war’s biggest story at that time.

“My own darling,” he had written to his wife an hour before he sailed, “I’m going away now on a trip which is dangerous. It’s the last thing of its kind I shall ever do. I’m doing this for the children.”