The Sinking of the Lancastria (28 page)

After that flurry of attention, the story disappeared. At most, Britain’s worst single maritime disaster was reduced to
a passing reference in the history of the Second World War. A report by the Commander-in-Chief of Western Approaches to the War Office on the war at sea, dated 5 August, simply noted: ‘the behaviour of the troops and crew of S.S.
LANCASTRIA
under most trying circumstances
was beyond all praise’.
²

The authorities classified most of the dead as ‘Missing’ since their deaths could not be confirmed, and there was a faint hope that they had got ashore and were prisoners of war. When the families sought news, officials could give none. The records of some military units had gone down with the ship.

Joe Sweeney travelled up to Hexham in Northumberland to console the mother of a man from his unit who had died on the liner. The woman ran a small grocer’s shop just behind the church. She wept for an hour, occasionally whimpering, ‘I lost my husband in the First World War and now my only son.’ It was, Sweeney recalled, the most poignant experience of his life.

The anguish of mothers and wives is evident from their letters
kept in War Office files.
³
In November 1940, a Mrs Sapsford of Teddington, whose son had been on the
Lancastria
, wrote: ‘I had been building such hopes of him having been picked up . . . It’s a terrible bit of dirty business altogether, our dear Lads should be homeward bound. I’m speaking for all mothers, poor souls, 21 years to have their lives cut off, for the sake of being held up for a few minutes & already overloaded.’

Mrs Sapsford added that she had received a visit one Sunday afternoon from an unidentified man who said his son had been a great friend of her boy. He added that ‘he had applied at the right quarters, and [been told] that his Son Ken . . . went down to get a meal when the bomb went off,
why werent we informed from you to that effect, instead of him coming to tell us. I think that needs an explanation. Unfortunately, I don’t know his Surname or address only that he came from Southall.’

Isabel West of Kingston upon Thames wrote to the War Office to say that she had spoken to a man who saw her son on the liner – ‘he was going up the stairway as my son was going down, he spoke to him for a while, my son would have just got below when the ship was struck, he did not see him again. That is all I have been able to find out. I have no further news. I wish I had, it is a great sorrow to us, my son was a fine boy.’

‘I am on the point of a Breakdown and my dear baby is in very bad health,’ wrote Mrs D. Hamper of Hove, whose husband had been a sapper. ‘Oh if you could give me some news! If you have bad news for me I would rather know as I know God will give me strength to bear this trouble. I do ask kindly if you will try & give me definite news & let me know what has happened to my dear husband. Do write to me soon.’

There was nothing the authorities could say in response. They had little idea who had perished on the
Lancastria
, or whether men who had not been brought back to Britain were still alive as prisoners.

On 25 June, the Cabinet War Room Report noted: ‘The armistice between France and Germany came into effect at 0035 hours BST today when hostilities ceased. The Bordeaux Government signed an armistice with Italy at 1815 hours BST on 24th June. There is nothing further of importance to
record on this front.’
⁴

The evacuation was not quite finished, however. There
were still 2500 French and British troops left on Ouessant Island off the north-west coast of France. They were shipped to Britain in the following weeks, before a German naval party took possession of the island.

On 20 July, the War Cabinet was told that 16,000 men had surrendered or were missing in France. Among them were those who died on the
Lancastria
, though the official reports made no mention of them.

St-Nazaire went on to have a rough war. The day after the French signed the armistice with Germany, British planes launched their first raid on the port. The harbour facilities were important berths for German battleships while its submarine pens were strategically placed for U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. These made it a prime target, so air attacks continued for the rest of the war.

In March 1942, British commandos landed to try to knock out the submarine bases, sailing in over the wreck of the
Lancastria
. Crossing the flatland by the sea, one of the officers looked back at the estuary and saw the liner’s masts poking out of the water at low tide. The raid put a big dry dock out of commission, but most of the attackers were killed.

An Allied air assault in early 1943 destroyed 60 per cent of the houses in the town, and made another 20 per cent uninhabitable. Visiting St-Nazaire, the German naval commander, Admiral Dönitz, remarked that there was ‘not a cat, nor a dog left; nothing left except for the submarine shelters’. Later, German troops in the St-Nazaire pocket were among the last to hold out. When the war ended, only 100 of the original 8000 houses in the town were standing.

On 8 October 1940, the
London Gazette
announced the award of OBEs to Captain Sharp, Harry Grattidge and the
Lancastria
’s chief engineer, James Dunbar. Three other crew members were also decorated, as were three men from the
Cambridgeshire
, though an administrative mix-up meant that this did not take place until 1942.

Grattidge, who was due £50 from Cunard in compensation for his possessions and clothes lost on the
Lancastria
, felt the pain of the disaster for weeks. ‘A seaman is cut to the heart when an accident befalls
his ship,’ he wrote.
⁵
‘But something dies inside him for ever if he loses her.’

The Chief Officer dreamed of the brooding silence before the bombs hit. When he woke, he would be trembling and sweating, though he felt cold at the same time. He went to his home town of Stafford, and tried to forget his experience in a round of parties. Then a cousin took him to a house where he cut himself off from the world in his bedroom. After three days, Harry found he could sleep properly once more, though he remained a little deaf as a result of the explosions.

He went back to work as an officer on a ship carrying planes from the United States to Britain. Surviving the war, he rose to become Chief Captain of the Cunard line and Captain of the
Queen Mary
.

Rudolph Sharp, whose compensation as a captain amounted to £100, was not so fortunate. In 1941, he was put in charge of the
Laconia
, another Cunard liner which had been turned into a troopship. One voyage took her to South Africa – also on board for the outward voyage was another
Lancastria
survivor, Harry Pack of the RASC.

On the way back to Britain, the ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Sharp stayed on board as she sank, with the First Officer, George Steel. As the last men left on the final
lifeboat, Sharp asked them for a cigarette, and they saw its glow as they pulled away. The death toll of 1614 on the
Laconia
was the second worst of any single boat in the war, after the
Lancastria
.

Among the other boats that took men from St-Nazaire, the
John Holt
was sunk by a submarine off Africa. The
City of Mobile
was bombed and went under while plying from Glasgow to Liverpool. The KG30 Luftwaffe wing took part in the Battle of Britain. Peter Stahl was awarded the German Gold Cross in 1942 for his war services.

CHAPTER 14

The Memory

SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER
the sinking of the
Lancastria
, a dozen survivors sailed out from St-Nazaire on a pilgrimage to the scene of the disaster. The weather was fine, bright and sunny with a blue sky and a slight breeze. The 75-strong party, which also included descendants of those who had been on the liner, made its way to the site on a French passenger ship. Another eight French vessels joined them in circling the scene of the wreck – the crew of a minesweeper stood to attention ranged along the deck. Claude Gourio, who had fished bodies from the sea, watched from a lifeboat. Harry Harding, Fred Coe and other survivors stared down at the water.

As the circle of boats passed round the marker buoy, a service was held and wreaths were dropped into the sea. The Last Post and Reveille sounded with a minute’s silence between them. The survivors and the relatives raised three
cheers for the French Navy. As some noted bitterly, no Royal Navy ship was present.

On land, memorial services were held at cemeteries where dead from the
Lancastria
lie. French officials joined in. The Mayor of Pornic, where bodies had been brought ashore, offered a lunch for everybody at a restaurant by the harbour, attended by the local member of the National Assembly who made a speech in honour of those who died on 17 June 1940. In La Baule, the municipality decided to rename a street as the Esplanade Lancastria.

At a similar pilgrimage five years earlier, Michael Sheehan, the Canadian helmsman from 1940, cast the first wreath of red poppies on to the sea. A piper played a lament. A soldier recited a prayer starting, ‘There are no roses on a sailor’s grave; Nor wreaths upon the storm-tossed waves.’ As the survivors paid their respects to the dead, a dolphin suddenly jumped out of the sea, executed a turn and swam away.

Below the pilgrims on the boats, undisturbed by anything but the tides, lay the wreck of the liner from which they had escaped six decades earlier. The once-proud Cunarder is seventy-two feet down on the seabed. Ships travelling in the estuary steer clear of her, using the buoy as a navigation aid.

Strong currents make diving dangerous, so the
Lancastria
has been undisturbed. One diver who went down after the war was said to have reported glimpsing skulls behind the portholes, but some local people think that was a matter of poetic licence. Another who dived in 2000 said the water was so dirty that he could not see anything. As the tide changes, the water around the wreck grows cloudy from the mud and debris on the seabed, and a dark stream rises towards the surface.

The
Lancastria
has been designated a maritime monument by the French, meaning that it cannot be moved or interfered
with. In St-Nazaire, a stone memorial on the seafront looks out at the site of the wreck, dedicated to ‘more than 4,000 who died’.

On the Sunday nearest to the anniversary date, a special service is held in St Katherine Cree Church in the City of London, which has a link with seamen. Fred Coe leaves his pew and goes to the rear of the church. Straight-backed in a dark suit, white gloves and a beret, he carries the standard of the
Lancastria
Association on a long wooden staff down the aisle. The banner is blue and black with the name of the liner in gold. When Coe reaches the altar steps, the Association’s chaplain takes the banner from him, and places it against the wall. Fred goes to sit in the front row, beside Denis Maloney, who had been in charge of the boat that saved him.

To their right, a panel in a stained-glass window shows a lifeboat pulling away from the stricken ship below an image of Christ walking on the water. The words on a brass plaque declare: ‘TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN PROUD MEMORY OF MORE THAN 4,000 PEOPLE WHO DIED WITH THE TROOPSHIP
LANCASTRIA
AND TO HONOUR ALL WHO TOOK PART IN THE WORK OF RESCUE’, followed by a list of the eighteen British rescue ships and the French fishing boat, the
Saint-Michel
, on which Joan Rodes crossed the bay on 17 June.

After a hymn and prayers, the Chairman of the Survivors’ Association reads the passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes that proclaims the glory of humble men. When the sound of the singing dies away, Fred Coe steps forward again, adjusts the leather harness round his neck and shoulder, and goes back to the altar steps. Three survivors accompany the priest in the blessing of a painting of the
Lancastria
in peacetime. A wreath is laid.

Coe lowers the tip of the standard till the banner unfurls on the floor as an army trumpeter sounds the Last Post. The congregation stands in silence, the only sounds coming from a ticking clock at the back of the knave. Then the trumpeter blows Reveille, and Coe lifts the standard back to the vertical position.

The ‘Marseillaise’ is sung, the choir and congregation intoning the French words as strongly as if it was their own anthem. Then comes ‘God Save the Queen’, after which the chaplain offers a final prayer: ‘Lord support us all the day long of this troublous life. Till the shades lengthen, the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is done; then Lord in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.’

The survivors gather at the altar for a group photograph. Then they go into a side room with relatives of those who were on board the liner for sandwiches, cakes and tea.

Denis Maloney recounts how he went straight on from the rescue at St-Nazaire to serve on ships hunting U-boats in the Atlantic and on commando raids in the Middle East before sailing to China where he saw the Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949.