The Sinking of the Lancastria Read Free

loss of life in any single British maritime disaster. But those who died that June afternoon have been forgotten except by the survivors and families who gather once a year at a church in London to remember them, and to give thanks for their own survival. This book tells their story, and the story of how they found themselves on the
Lancastria
that summer day and how they fought for their lives in oily waters among thousands of dead and dying.

CHAPTER 1

    Friday, 14 June 1940
    IT WAS, THE CHIEF OFFICER of the
Lancastria
decided, time to buy himself a good meal. Harry Grattidge and the rest of the crew had been at sea for much of the ten months since the outbreak of war with Germany. Gone were the days of cruising to the Norwegian fjords, the Mediterranean and the West Indies, of five-course dinners and of days filled with shore visits, bridge and whist drives, lotto parties, treasure hunts, concerts and, during a stopover in Cadiz, a cricket match at which gentlemen passengers beat the ladies by 107 runs to 85.
    When war was declared in September 1939, the
Lancastria
had been on a cruise to the Bahamas. Her captain was told to head immediately for New York. When she sailed from Nassau, a crowd of local inhabitants turned out to see her off, but there was no cheering, and the ship left in the most profound silence Harry Grattidge had ever heard. ‘All of us sensed that it would never be thesame again,’ he recalled. 1
    In New York, the liner was fitted out as a troopship. Nonessential crew were disembarked, including the musicians who played beside the sprung dance floor and the gardeners who tended the plants in the verandah café and the potted trees on the promenade deck. The gleaming hull and superstructure in the black and white livery of the Cunard White Star Line was painted battleship grey. So was the single red funnel topped by a black band. The portholes were blacked out. A 4-inch gun was fitted as her sole armament. Then she sailed back to her home port of Liverpool without an escort.
    In the following months, the
Lancastria
crisscrossed the Atlantic, ferrying men and supplies to and from Canada. In the late spring of 1940, she joined a convoy of twenty ships evacuating Allied troops from the ill-judged campaign to halt the Nazi advance in Norway. On the way back, the
Lancastria
was the target of an air attack, but the bombs fell wide. After disembarking the dirty, depressed troops in Scotland, it was time for another trip north, this time with men to garrison Iceland.
    Returning from that voyage, the
Lancastria
called at Glasgow, where her captain asked for surplus oil in her tanks to be taken off, but there had not been time to do so before she sailed on to Liverpool. Knowing of the high losses of merchant shipping, including the Cunard liner, the
Carinthia
, which had been sunk by a German submarine the previous month, the crew were tense. They had spent months on repeated voyages without any proper defence against German planes and submarines. But now, there was the promise of a rest while their ship was reconditioned in her home port.
    As soon as the
Lancastria
berthed in the Mersey, her captain, Rudolph Sharp, went ashore, crossing the broad riverto his home in Birkenhead. Harry Grattidge called the 330-strong crew together in the dining salon to tell them the ship was going in for a refit. The men from outside Liverpool would be paid off while the locals would be kept on the books.
    The Chief Officer had been at sea for thirty-six years, having gone from school to become a cadet in the merchant marine, first on a four-masted cargo barque, and then on liners that took him to the Americas and the Mediterranean. In the First World War, he spent a year in the doomed campaign in the Dardanelles. Later, he would captain Cunard’s most famous liners, the
Queen Elizabeth
and the
Queen Mary
, mingling with celebrities and statesmen on cruises and transatlantic voyages.
    The son of a brewer from the market town of