According to Mary Alwyn, William was particularly satisfied with the scores of Odd Man Out, The Rocking Horse Winner, and The Ship that Died of Shame. For Dearden's The Ship that Died of Shame, Alwyn's proportioned and complex score in 1955 is in contrast to his spare contribution to the same director's The Rainbow Jacket the previous year. The heroine of this excursion into the paranormal is motor gunboat number 1087, with a noble wartime history and commanded by Bill Randle (George Baker), whose young wife Helen (Virginia McKenna) is killed in an air raid. With the war finished, he enters a partnership with his wartime second-in-command, the spivvy George Hoskins (Richard Attenborough). They buy 1087 and refit her for smuggling. Hoskins, however, becomes involved with less pleasant contraband than nylons and watches, culminating in an attempt to smuggle a child murderer, Raines (John Chandos), out of the country. After her illustrious wartime career, 1087 increasingly balks at these activities, until in a storm Hoskins is drowned and the ship crashes to her death on the rocks.

The producer, Michael Relph, considered that 1087 “in a sense, represented what people had done with the country they had inherited after the war”. Modern commentators, too, have seen the film as a metaphor in which the wartime ideal of commitment to the community is demolished for the degrading quick buck. The metaphor is validated only by the anthropomorphic device of imbuing 1087 with a wilful soul. In the cinema such symbolism depends upon apt musical composition, a task for which Alwyn was at his best - one recalls the benign forces of The Magnet and the diabolic forces in The Rocking Horse Winner.

Like all ships, 1087 is feminine, and after the death of Helen she becomes the film's single female presence. Her importance is emphasised before the commencement of the title music, sweeping towards and past the camera, the prima donna, displaying her form visually and by the roar of her engines. To her, too, is awarded the film's major musical leitmotif, which bursts in exuberantly as the title music, based around a simple five-note motif:

At the start, the score reflects with dignity the wartime achievements of 1087, but soon key, rhythm, and harmony are transformed to express her changing moods.