Kenneth Dancy - Telegraph With the line attached, the two vessels set out for Falmouth, followed by a small flotilla, while an army of reporters and photographers converged on the Cornish town to report their arrival. But Flying Enterprise's ordeal was not over. Early in the morning on January 10, 40 miles short of Falmouth, the tow line snapped amid worsening weather, while the ship began rolling so badly her superstructure barely showed above the waves. A few hours later her stern plummeted, her bows pointed skywards, and just 39 minutes before she succumbed, Carlsen and Dancy hauled themselves up the funnel and jumped into the sea . The two men were picked up by Turmoil. Carlsen had become an international hero. He was feted in London and greeted with a ticker-tape parade on 5th Avenue in New York . On a smaller scale Dancy, too, was given due recognition. In his home town of Tunbridge Wells 20,000 people turned out to give him a hero's welcome . But the story of the Flying Enterprise left a lot of questions unanswered - such as why Carlsen had decided to stay on board at such enormous risk to his own life . In 2002 a Danish television documentary speculated that the ship had not been carrying pig-iron as claimed, but zirconium rods (zirconium is a metal of vital importance in nuclear technology), suggesting that it was intended for use in the world's first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus. The documentary reported that, despite the intervening years, information about the cargo remains classified. The loss of the rods, it claimed, had put the launch of Nautilus back by a year. The second of four boys, Kenneth Roger Dancy was born in North London on December 1 1924. His father was a businessman and the family later moved to a small village in Kent where Kenneth's parents ran a sub-post office and general store. He attended grammar school in north London until 1938, then the Skinners" Grammar School, Tunbridge Wells, until 1941, when he joined the Merchant Navy as a Navigation Apprentice. He served on his first ship, Blackheath, for two years, and took part in convoys around the globe, winning an impressive clutch of campaign medals. On one occasion, in the English Channel, when both the ship in front of his and the one behind were torpedoed, he reckoned he had survived because the U-boat crew were reloading their torpedo tubes as his ship passed. On another occasion in the Indian Ocean his ship was attacked by a Japanese submarine, but he was off-watch and slept through the action. Dancy obtained his Master's Certificate in 1950 and for some years was captain of a large tanker. He was on leave from his ship when the first mate of the Turmoil was taken ill, and he was asked to take his place to help in the rescue of Flying Enterprise. He had never been on a tug before. In 1956, he married Petronella van den Tempel, a Dutch woman, and two years later he gave up sailing and settled in the Netherlands, where he worked for Phillips Radio and latterly for IBM. Kenneth Dancy's wife and two sons survive him. Captain Carlsen died in 1989. Kenneth Dancy, born December 1 1924, died August 3 2013