The Sinking of the Lancastria (18 page)

Men from the Church Army and YMCA kneeled on the deck in prayer before getting up to help non-swimmers. One young padre holding a Bible went below to comfort men. A sailor warned him of the danger. ‘I know,’ he replied. ‘But
those men need God. They are my people.’ He did not survive.

The padre, Charles McMenemy, who had served as Catholic chaplain at Wormwood Scrubs prison before the war, also went below and led a group of men to a loading port six feet above the water. He gave his life belt to a sergeant major who could not swim, waiting till all the men were in the water before he jumped.

In the passageways, men cleared a path for Mrs Tillyer and her two-year-old daughter. As the mother and child passed, they stood back, delaying their own escape until they saw the pair was safely out on deck.

In his cabin, Clement Stott was awakened from his postprandial nap by the bombs. The door flew open, and a man covered in blood fell through it. Getting outside, the Captain saw a dignified grey-haired woman sliding down the deck, screaming as she went.

As an accountant steeped in the importance of numbers, Stott tried to carry out a roll call of his unit. This proved difficult in the circumstances. When he called the names of two corporals, he was told that they had been killed. Stott instructed his men that they would be safer staying with him than jumping into the sea. The steepness of the ship’s list meant that people leaping from the superstructure were crashing into the hull or hitting the edges of portholes, screaming as they died in a mass of blood and broken heads.

Stott took off his pince-nez, and put it in its case. ‘I knew I should need my glasses when I got ashore,’ he recalled. ‘But I knew even more that it would have a good steadying effect if the men could see I wasn’t in a panic.’

Then he stood to attention, and called out as if on a parade ground: ‘Detachment, 67th Company. Detachment! Abandon ship! Follow me, boys, and good luck!’

‘Good luck, Sir!’ the soldiers shouted back.

The Captain climbed the deck rail, stepped on to the side of the ship and moved towards the sea, followed by his men. Water was lapping over the hull. Stott asked a ship’s officer if he should remove his boots. Yes, the man shouted. So the Captain sat down, and began to undo the laces. But then he thought that he would need his boots when he got to dry land, just as he would need his pince-nez. Though they might hamper him in the water, he decided to keep them on.

As he sat on the hull, Stott saw a man trying to squeeze through a porthole, but he was wearing so much webbing equipment that he was stuck.

‘Cut your straps!’ Stott shouted to him. A wave hit the porthole, and the man disappeared. Another soldier dived through it, naked except for his army identity tags.

Suddenly Stott found himself sinking beneath the sea. As he rose back to the surface, he found that a man was hanging on to his feet.

‘I realised I had to get rid of him quick, or we’d both drown,’ the Captain recalled. ‘I kicked hard and struggled free of him. Sticking to heavy army boots had paid off already!’

Fernande Tips tried to keep with her family as they fled from the dining room. But they became separated as they went up the stairway to the deck. Clifford Tillyer saw his wife and daughter into a lifeboat, and soldiers pushed him in after them. As the boat was lowered, its ropes jammed in the davits.
It tilted over, throwing the occupants into the water and separating the Tillyers. A man holding on to a piece of wood gave it to Mrs Tillyer and Jacqueline. As they floated away, the mother kept calling out ‘Baby here,’ ‘Baby here.’ After a while Jacqueline picked up the two words, and repeated the sounds until she became too weak to make any noise.

The Fairey manager, Legroux, took his 13-year-old daughter, Emilie, by the hand while Madame Legroux led their 11-year-old son, Roger, towards the lifeboats. They were all wearing life jackets.

‘The stairs weren’t straight as they should be,’ Roger remembered. ‘There was panic on board, people were shrieking and shouting, guns were firing at German planes, it was chaos.’

When they got to a lifeboat, it was packed. People were jumping all over the place. His mother and sister got in. His father threw Roger into the boat; then climbed in himself.

As they waited for the boat to be lowered, soldiers jumped in and the craft became unbalanced. One side tilted. Everybody fell out. As he dropped, Roger was holding his father by the hand. On the way down, he let go.

The boy sank below the oil-covered water. When he came back to the surface, his mother was next to him. Roger clung to her and to Fernande Tips, who had ended up in the water near the Legroux family. Around him, he saw soldiers all over the place, and heard hundreds of voices singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’. Then Roger passed out because of the amount of water and oil he had swallowed. The two women kept his head above the sea.

His sister was floating in a different part of the sea. Emilie was worried because she had lost a pair of wonderful red shoes her father had bought for her. Soon, she found herself
riding on a man’s back. She thought he was her father. She ran her hands over him, and she may have screamed when she realised he was a stranger.

Some soldiers passing by on a raft took the girl on board. From there, she saw her mother and brother about a hundred yards away. Three members of the Legroux family were safe, but their father was lost for ever.

Michael Sheehan, of the
Lancastria
crew, was thrown along a passageway by the force of the first bombs that missed the liner. He got up on deck by the time of the second attack. Reaching the fore deck, he pulled off all his clothes, and dived into the sea, where he found a hatch board. Two soldiers were already hanging on to it. Together, they struck out from the sinking ship, but both soldiers were killed by strafing, and Sheehan was left alone, covered with oil.

Joe Sweeney was lying down in a smoking room when the bombs exploded. Going to the door, he saw a demented soldier swinging his rifle round and round over his head, cursing and swearing. After the butt of the gun hit somebody on the head, a man rugby-tackled the crazed figure.

The lights went out; the uproar grew louder. Water began to trickle down the companionway, and then gushed on the stairs. Bells clanged amid the screams. Some people began to sing military, religious and patriotic airs.

Sweeney got out on the deck, took off his jacket, and hopped over the deck rail. He left behind the chalice from the clergyman’s briefcase and his cache of Players cigarettes he had stowed behind a ventilator vent.

The tilt of the ship meant he landed on the side of the hull, bruising and scratching himself. For a while, he sat there, smoking a cigarette handed to him by an old soldier. The two men discussed if it was better to be clothed or naked to survive in the sea. Sweeney removed his trousers, and slid into the water.

He went under. As he rose to the surface, he was grabbed round the neck by somebody shouting ‘I can’t swim’ and pulling them both under again. Struggling free from the other man’s grasp, Sweeney rose to the surface again and clung on to a plank with two other men – a fourth person lay across it. Together they floated away from the
Lancastria
.

In the chaos and darkness below decks, Edwin Quittenton groped along a wall. Suddenly, he felt a flap in the wall beside him give way, letting in a streak of light. He pushed at the flap, and got a glimpse of an empty open porthole. Followed by other men, he began to climb through it, but got stuck.

He felt as if he was in the jaws of a trap, the water immediately beneath him, men shouting from behind for him to get through the opening. When he did not move, they started to push him, but the more pressure they exerted, the tighter his body became rammed in the porthole.

‘I can’t move!’ Quittenton shouted. ‘Pull me back inside.’

At last they did so, and slimmer men swarmed through the porthole as fast as they could. Quittenton saw another porthole, and opened it to let in more light. Looking round, he spotted a wooden door which might provide an escape route. It was locked, so he kicked it down. On the other side lay an iron door in the hull. He unscrewed the bolts on it, but
the 45 degree angle at which the
Lancastria
was listing made it impossible to lift the door open on his own.

He could hear men talking behind him ‘in all kinds of babble’, and he called for them to help him. Pushing together, they soon had the door open. Below lay the sea. Quittenton could not swim, but he saw a dangling rope, and launched himself into the air to grab it. Going under after jumping from the hull, he swallowed too much water for comfort. But, coming to the surface, he saw a lifeboat only a few feet away and got to it by kicking out.

Joe O’Brien, the teenage waiter on the
Lancastria
who had been called back from the pub in Liverpool three days earlier, was in the dining room when the bombs hit. Using his knowledge of the liner’s lay-out and her passageways, he got up to the promenade deck, bypassing corridors full of men screaming as boiling water sprayed on them from broken pipes.

Reaching the top of the ship, Joe found himself jammed up against a deck rail by the press from behind him. He climbed over, and held on the outside. Beside him, he saw the big figure of the liner’s chef, Joe Pearse, who had promised his father to look after him. A steward, Johnny Rock, from Glasgow, was also there. They all had life jackets.

‘Come on, Joe, get in,’ Rock shouted, giving the youth a push.

The trip down to the sea was, O’Brien recalled, ‘like coming down from the Empire State Building’. He remembered the drill for the cork and canvas life jackets. ‘When you hit the sea, the jacket stops, but your body goes on falling. So you risk having your neck broken. To prevent that, put your knees up and tug the jacket down.’

By applying the drill, O’Brien saved himself from joining those who had not been told it and died as a result. Dropping below the surface, he thought he would never come up. But then he shot out, and swam away as strongly as he could. His protector, Joe Pearse, failed to follow the drill, and broke his neck. Johnny Rock survived.

The two Church Army sisters, who had seen the bomber flying down on the
Lancastria
like a black cloud, got into a lifeboat. While it was being lowered, it tilted as the liner keeled over. One end lodged against the hull, and then hit a porthole. Hearing soldiers calling for help, the sisters handed over their life belts. Then, their boat swung free, and went down the rest of the way, the great bulk of the
Lancastria
looming above them.

Captain Brooke of the Pay Corps slipped into the sea though he had never learned to swim. But he vowed that Hitler was not going to deprive his wife and family of his company, nor stop him enjoying the pension he had earned with service stretching back more than twenty-one years. Once in the water, he found, to his surprise, that he could swim after all.

J. H. Drummond of the RAF had been lying down after a ‘lovely hot bath’ when the bulkhead in front of him erupted in a huge sheet of flame, and he was blown upside down against a wall. He felt his hair on fire – his face had also been flashburned though he did not realise this immediately.

In utter darkness, Drummond struggled to his feet. He
could not breathe; the blast had blown all the oxygen out of the room. He stretched his mouth to its limit as he gasped to get air in his lungs. Eventually he succeeded.

He lost his bearings in the dark, but heard someone grunting and sobbing nearby. Reaching the other man, he asked if there was a way out.

‘Please push me up,’ the man said.

Drummond did so, and someone behind them said there was an escape ahead. Drummond tried to climb up, himself; but all he could feel in front of him was a huge flat sheet of metal.

Sinking down, utterly exhausted, he felt he was finished. Everything was quiet. He could not hear anybody else near him. He thought of his father, who had been killed in the First World War, and of the tough life his mother had had as a war widow. That must not happen to his wife, Marjorie, he decided.

‘Then I thought, if I had unwittingly harmed anybody, now it is up to God to decide,’ he recalled.

All of a sudden, a voice behind him asked: ‘Is there any way out?’

‘Yes, give me a push up,’ Drummond replied.

As he went up, he could feel the edge of the sheet of metal. A very faint glimmer came from far above. Crawling on, he got to some stairs. Ahead, along a corridor, a dim light filtered from a broken-down cabin door. Behind it was a mass of wire like a huge spider’s web.

Despite the danger of electrocution, Drummond dived through the wire. He ran along a corridor, seeing daylight at the end. Water began to run down the floor. Two men who had got out of the hold before him were trying to escape through a porthole. He did not stop to join them, rushing on
wildly towards the daylight coming through an open loading port. Reaching his destination, he found a warrant officer standing there. The man gave Drummond a cigarette and a light, and he stood staring silently into the sea. Then the warrant officer said, ‘Better get in lad – there’s a lot of stuff on the top deck will be toppling over soon.’ Drummond jumped.

Amid the chaos, some kept calm, taking off their uniforms, and folding them neatly before leaping into the sea. The blast blew all the clothes off one man, leaving him in his boots and socks. Two men with badly burned arms took off their clothes, but put on tin helmets to protect their heads from the strafing. An interpreter stripped down to a pair of blue silk swimming trunks which he had bought in La Baule.

John Broadbent, who had been in the ‘Officers Only’ bath when the bombs fell, did not bother to put on his clothes before running out and jumping into the sea. Padre McMenemy gave his blue Lilo to two soldiers who did not know how to swim. On the top deck, a lance corporal came across a second lieutenant and four men crying. They had no life jackets, and could not swim. So the lance corporal helped to tear up some wooden boxes to give them something to cling on to when they went into the water.