At 5am I found a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne. 'No, no!' cried the head waiter, 'Those are the wrong glasses'



If Briton Nick Hayward had finished his meal at the Taj Mahal hotel 30 seconds later, he would have been caught in the gunfire.

‘I was very lucky,’ he said. ‘If I’d left the restaurant for a nightcap at the bar half a minute after I did, I’d have been in the lobby when the siege began and would have been shot.

‘When I heard the shots, I looked through a window in the bar and saw a gunman firing a heavy-duty machine gun. People were screaming. But we had no idea that this had anything to do with terrorism. We thought it was a bandit off the street.’

'Can do' attitude: Briton Nick Hayward, pictured with his wife Kammilla, the Brit was in the Taj Mahal hotel when the terrorists struck

Nick, 37, Asia-Pacific managing director of Euromoney Conferences, added: ‘We barricaded ourselves into a kitchen. It had a heavy door and there were about 15 or 20 of us crammed into this very small space, so it was claustrophobic. But for half an hour nobody was too concerned. We thought it was cops and robbers stuff.’

The group then decided to find a safer, more comfortable place to hole up. ‘There was an adjacent restaurant called The Zodiac which we could get to without going through the lobby,’ said Nick. ‘There were some other people in there, so when we arrived there were about 40.

‘One was a very nice Guatemalan. He didn’t speak English but his friend did and explained that this guy was ex-army. He took a lead role.



‘A few of us helped him try to keep people calm. We barricaded the doors and, because there were grenades and bombs going off all the time and gunfire in the hotel, we made a thorough bomb search of the area.’



Nick, who lives in Hong Kong with his wife Kammilla and their young daughters Anna and Pernille, said the group then heard on their mobiles that other places had been attacked.

Scene of terror: The lobby area of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai after the attack

‘We realised this was highly organised,’ said Nick. ‘The mood dropped very quickly.’



Nick and his younger brother Anthony, who is in the security industry, were in contact via their BlackBerrys. ‘Anthony was giving me good intelligence,’ he said. ‘That allowed me to pass information on and explain that the army was outside and hopefully we’d be rescued shortly.’

For three hours they remained on high alert while yards away the executioners calmly went about their business. ‘There were explosions, some so big the whole building shook, and sporadic gunfire,’ said Nick.

Terror struck everyone at 4am, when they believed they were about to be found and killed.

‘Some of the terrorists made an effort to try to get into the restaurant,’ said Nick.



‘If they’d really wanted to, they could have just blown the door up and that would have been that, they’d have killed us. That was truly frightening, a dark moment. But for whatever reason, they didn’t. They decided they had other things to do and left us alone.

‘Then, about two hours later, we got a message that the army had retaken the lobby, so we opened the door, put our heads down and ran out of the hotel at full steam.



Burning: An Indian soldier stands guard in front of the Taj Mahal hotel during the gun battles between the Indian military and militants

'Thank God that was it. It was tunnel vision. I knew there was carnage in the lobby but I didn’t want to know anything about it. I just wanted to get out of there.



‘I was extremely lucky. I was with a very good bunch of people. Three or four of us were Brits. There were some Irish as well. Most were Indian.



'We’d never met each other but I have to say, it was a true British stiff upper-lip situation. Together, the Brits helped to keep up morale.



‘There was a can-do attitude. We thought, 'Let’s get the barricades done, let’s do the practical things rather than sit there like sheep and wait to meet our fate.'

‘There was a lot of crying from many of the other people and I suppose comforting them was a way of keeping ourselves occupied. My boss Christopher Garnett and some old friends were sending me messages to keep my spirits up.



Soldiers stand in the lobby of the Taj Mahal on Thursday - Mr Hayward and the group he was with made their escape when they heard the army had re-taken the lobby

‘At one stage Christopher sent me some stanzas from The Private Of The Buffs [a ballad by Sir Francis Hastings Doyle describing the execution of a captured British infantryman for refusing to kowtow to the Chinese in 1860].’

Nick added: ‘We all decided that even though we had alcohol within reach we wouldn’t touch it because it seemed like a bad idea to get drunk.

‘But come 5am, we were fairly confident the police were going to get us out, so I marched over to the bar and found a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne and opened it and began pouring it into glasses.

‘Then the head waiter came rushing across to me and said, “No, no, you can’t do that!” and I said, 'Well we’re going to' and he said, 'No sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes.'

'And he did. The service was immaculate.’