The death throes of a great ship are, among seafaring men, at once the most awesome yet terrible of sights. And the destruction of the battleship Barham, torpedoed by the U-boat U331 as she sailed in the Mediterranean with her sister ships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth on November 25, 1941, is one of the most graphic images of naval warfare to have been captured on film.

That it was so is due to John Turner, a Gaumont-British News cameraman who was on board the Valiant at the time the torpedoes struck. Cannily husbanding the last two minutes of film in his camera as the great ship settled in the water and began to heel over, he was able to record for posterity Barham’s last moments before her magazines exploded, blowing her and most of her crew to kingdom come.

The three battleships, all survivors of Winston Churchill’s beloved “fast division” created a quarter of a century before, and the ultimate expression of naval power in the years 1914-18, had sailed from Alexandria. Escorted by a dozen destroyers, they were seeking out an Italian convoy carrying fuel supplies from Greece to Benghazi when U331, commanded by the resourceful Kapitänleutnant Hans-Diedrich von Tiesenhausen, slipped between two destroyers of the screen and positioned himself at periscope depth 750 yards off Barham’s port beam.

Of U331’s salvo of four torpedoes three struck the battleship abaft her funnel, tearing open her hull below the waterline. As her crew hastened to abandon ship she developed a rapid list to port. Within less than three minutes she had rolled onto her beam ends, and was showing the underside of her hull.

Just as it seemed that the First World War veteran would slide quietly beneath the waves, the after 15-inch magazines exploded, rending her hull asunder and sending a huge jet of fire, smoke, steam and metal aloft to a height of several hundred feet. Those who were still in the water nearby were showered with debris or scorched and choked by lethal gases. Her commanding officer, Captain Geoffrey Cooke, was among 861 officers and men who perished that day, out of a total complement of 1,200.

Turner’s film makes compelling viewing to this day. But it was never to be a wartime scoop either for him or Gaumont-British. “Your Mr Turner should be aware that it is not in the interests of the war effort or of the Royal Navy to show our own warships sinking,” was the edict of the C-in-C Mediterranean, Admiral Andrew Cunningham.

Indeed, the loss of Barham was kept a secret from the Germans until January 1942, since von Teisenhausen had no idea of the identity of the warship he had struck. It was to be a bad period for the old battleships. The following month Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were crippled in Alexandria harbour in an ingenious attack carried out by Italian “human torpedoes”. In less than a month the Mediterranean Fleet’s battle squadron had ceased to exist.

John Turner was born in Hampstead in 1915, the son of a printer. An uncle was in the film industry and, after leaving school, he joined Gaumont British News in 1936, soon becoming a cameraman. Among the historic events he filmed during the 1930s was the arrival of Neville Chamberlain at Heston airport, waving the worthless piece of paper he had obtained from Hitler in Munich and promising “peace in our time .

During the war Turner served as a naval correspondent. In addition to the destruction of the Barham, he filmed the invasions of Sicily in July 1943, and of Normandy in June 1944. At the end of the war he filmed the surrender of the Japanese at Singapore.

Postwar asssignments included independence celebrations in India in 1947 and the funeral of Gandhi in January the following year. In the 1950s he covered various royal vists. But by the end of the decade the heyday of the cinema newsreel was coming to an end in the face of competition from television. In the early 1960s he joined Pathe News as an editor and was responsible for organising coverage of such events as Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965 and the football World Cup of 1966.

In retirement he wrote an account of his life behind the lens, published in 2005 as Filming History: The Memoirs of John Turner, Newsreel Cameraman. In 2001 the British Universities Film and Video Council instituted the John Turner Prize for newsfilm studies.

Turner’s first marriage was dissolved. His second wife predeceased him.

John Turner, newsreel cameraman, was born on March 31, 1915. He died on March 7, 2007, aged 91

Watch the sinking of the HMS Barham