The Sinking of the Lancastria Read Free Page B

18-year-old Leonora. Then she kissed him, and cried all the way home. They would never see one another again.
    Built in Dalmuir in Scotland by the William Beardmore Company, the
Lancastria
made her maiden voyage for the Cunard Steamship Company to Canada in 1924. Originally called the
Tyrrhenia
, she was known to her sailors as the Soup Tureen. Her name was then altered to the less obscure
Lancastria
. Though it might be easier to pronounce, the change was not welcome to the crew given the maritime superstition that doing this boded eventual disaster. But the worst that had happened to her was running aground on a pier in Liverpool harbour during a gale in 1936.
    With a single funnel and two masts, the
Lancastria
was 582.5 feet long and seventy feet wide. She had five decks, the top one forty-three feet above the water line – the bridge from which Captain Sharp and Chief Officer Grattidge ran the vessel was another fifteen feet up. Her single funnel left room for 3000 square feet of deck for sports, bathing and sun. Her oil-burning engines meant that the top decks were free from the dust or cinders encountered on coal-fired ships. Advertisements made much of the way that white clothes could be worn for games of quoits and egg-and spoon-races without their wearers having to worry about being smudged by coal specks in the air.
    There were two open-air swimming pools and a library stocked with the latest books. Special ventilators drew air down into staterooms. Her gymnasium had exercise bicycles, electrically powered horse-riding machines set to trot, canter or gallop, and a similarly designed electric camel whose use was said to be good for the figure.
    The sixteen-foot-high dining room was decorated in Italian Renaissance style with semicircular arches set on small columns, a central dome, projecting balconies with wrought-iron fronts, and a thick carpet in geometric pattern. The ivory-white walls were inlaid with grey panels; the curtains were blue and gold. The verandah café resembled a courtyard garden, with trellis work, plants and wicker armchairs. The main lounge in French Renaissance style had oak panelling, mouldings, a barrel-vaulted ceiling, and a specially designeddance floor. The promenade deck was fitted with potted trees and wicker chairs. The smoking room was flanked with marble pillars, and lit by a chandelier.
    The
Lancastria
was, one crewman recalled, a ‘very, very happy ship’. But, despite her impressive interior, she was, by the standards of the top Blue Riband luxury liners that crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s, a bit small and a bit old. So she came to be used for cruises from New York to the Bahamas and the West Indies aimed at young American company managers, secretaries giving themselves a treat and honeymooning couples.
    Receiving the call from Grattidge, Captain Sharp headed back across the Mersey from Birkenhead. He had taken command of the
Lancastria
only three months earlier. A solemn-looking and somewhat stout man of 5 feet 11 inches, Rudolph Sharp came from a seafaring family: his grandfather and uncle had both served with the Cunard Line, and one of his sons was in the navy. Graduating into the merchant marine in Liverpool in 1908, he had worked his way up on famous liners, including the
Lusitania
, which he captained until shortly before she was torpedoed in the Atlantic in 1915. He then commanded two other big liners, the
Mauretania
and
Olympia
, served on a third, the
Franconia
, and was staff captain on the
Queen Mary
. A Commander of the British Empire and member of the Royal Navy Reserve, Sharp sometimes appeared weary. He looked older than his fifty-five years.
    With her captain and nearly all the crew on board, the order was given to sail down the west coast and round Cornwall to Plymouth. Nobody had any idea of their eventual destination, or why they had been called back to service.Normally, the
Lancastria
blew her siren as she left Liverpool, but on 14 June 1940, she left