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On 27th May 1941, 70 years ago this year, a simple hand-written note was handed to Winston Churchill as he sat in Church House, then being used as the temporary House of Commons because of bomb damage, waiting to address the assembled Members of Parliament. The main text of the message was just two words, "Bismarck sunk", but they were words that were calculated to lift the spirits of the British Prime Minister.

Only completed in 1941, the Bismarck had been the latest in German naval technology; a fast and heavily armoured battleship with a battery of 15 inch guns. For almost a week she had been engaged in a cat and mouse game with the Royal Navy's British Home Fleet, destroying the battle cruiser HMS Hood and damaging the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. At one point, the Bismarck had almost escaped into the Atlantic, but, with the secret help of the still neutral United States, she had finally been spotted, located and sunk.

Churchill, the former First Lord of the Admiralty (the civilian Minister in charge of the Navy), had been following developments with a close, personal interest. It is easy to forget that good news was still in short supply in the spring of 1941. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States were yet in the war. British forces were losing in Crete, and even this incident was one small victory in a battle for the Atlantic that Britain was far from winning.

This note survives in the extensive papers of the Labour politician Albert Victor Alexander, first Earl of Hillsborough; the man Churchill chose as his successor as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1940. Alexander had entered politics through the co-operative movement, and represented the working class constituency of Hillsborough in Sheffield. He has been overshadowed by Attlee and Bevin, and other Labour figures, yet he served as First Lord of the Admiralty three times, including for the duration of the Second World War, and thereafter as Minister for Defence.