The Sinking of the Lancastria

by Jonathan Fenby

  In his war memoirs, Churchill put the loss at ‘upwards of 3000 men’.2 Crew members were recorded as saying that the number on board was more than 6000. Some estimates have put it considerably higher. Survivors numbered around 2500. So, at its lowest, the death toll appears to have been in excess of the number Churchill mentioned – at least 3500 or 4000.

  The sinking of the Lancastria certainly brought the greatest 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 the same 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 river to 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 Stafford, Grattidge was a companionable man who disliked having to apply the more rigorous aspects of the Cunard disciplinary code – on one occasion, he excused a male and a female crew member who had broken regulations by being in a cabin together. Having dispatched the crew and completed other formalities, the solidly built, full-faced Chief Officer flipped a coin to decide whether to eat at a steak house or the best hotel in town, the massive, white painted Adelphi, with its colonnaded upper storeys and huge, chandeliered lounge. The coin having told him to go for the second, he headed up Hanover Street from the docks to enjoy a leisurely lunch in the ornately decorated dining room.

  After his meal, Grattidge strolled back towards the docks in the afternoon sunshine. To while away the evening, he could choose between two top-line variety shows – one starring the ‘wizard of the piano’, Charlie Kunz, at the Empire, the other with the comic singing sisters, Elsie and Doris Waters, at the Shakespeare. Then he planned to take a three-week break in the Lake District to get over the pressure and danger of the previous months.

  As Grattidge passed the office of the Cunard Line behind the Port of Liverpool building at Pier Head, the Cunard Maritime Superintendent, a small, lively Welshman, hurried up to him.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ he said. ‘Big trouble. Get down to the ship and recall everyone. You haven’t much time – you’re sailing at midnight.’

  Grattidge asked what the destination would be.

  ‘The mission is urgent but unspecified,’ was the only reply he got.

  At that moment, the Chief Officer had a sense that something appalling was about to happen. Still, ‘there was nothing I could do but obey orders’.

  Some of the crew were still on board, including the Chief Engineer. Grattidge told him to get up steam. He telephoned Captain Sharp, and had telegrams sent to crew members who had left. ‘You are urgently requested to return to ship immediately,’ the cable read. ‘Acknowledge. Master.’

  Loudspeaker messages were broadcast at Liverpool railway stations telling those waiting for trains to go back to the ship. Others were contacted by telephone. All but three returned in time for the midnight departure. Among them was a Liverpool flyweight boxer, Joe Curran, who had joined the Merchant Navy. The youngest was a 14-year-old deck boy; the oldest a 74-year-old deck hand.

  One of the Lancastria’s waiters was in a Liverpool pub with his mother and father when two plain-clothes detectives came in and asked if Joe O’Brien was there. After O’Brien identified himself, he was told to report back to the liner. Walking down to the docks with his father, they met the ship’s chef, Joe Pearse. O’Brien’s father asked Pearse to look after his son. ‘I sure will,’ the chef replied.

  A Canadian sailor, Michael Sheehan, was drinking at a pub in Canning Place in Liverpool when he heard that the Lancastria needed to gather together crewmen in a hurry. He headed for the docks, and signed on.

  While the ship was in Glasgow, one of the liner’s stewards, Tom Manning, had written to his brother-in-law, John, in Liverpool saying that he had got a job for him on board. Accompanied by his wife, John went to the docks on the night of 14 June intending to board the Lancastria. By the time they got to the quay, the ship was moving out. The couple stood and watched until she was out of sight.

  Thomas Frodsham, known as ‘Shorty’, had been told by the Lancastria’s doctor to take time off for medical treatment. But no sooner had he reached his home in Birkenhead than he was informed that the liner was sailing that night. He asked his wife to pack him a small suitcase, and set off on the ferry back across the Mersey with his daughter, Leonora. Taking his leave, he assured her that he would be on deck beside a lifeboat at the first sign of trouble. ‘Don’t worry, and take care of your mum,’ he told 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 S
cotland 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 designed dance 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 silently, her departure cloaked in darkness.

  Five weeks had passed since Adolf Hitler ended eight months of phoney war on his Western Front by launching what he called ‘the most decisive battle for the future of the German nation’. Tanks, planes, artillery and infantry carved through the Netherlands and Belgium, outflanking the French by striking through the wooded hills of the Ardennes to avoid the supposedly impregnable fortifications of the Maginot Line. Sweeping north, the Wehrmacht drove back the British Expeditionary Force from its positions in Belgium and north-east France. Then, for reasons that have never been fully explained, Hitler had hesitated.

  The commander at the front, General von Rundstedt, had recommended that the tank advance should be stopped so that the slower-moving infantry could catch up. His superiors, including the Commander-in-Chief, von Brauchitsch, told him to press on. But the Führer backed von Rundstedt. So the Panzers halted, and 330,000 British and Allied troops escaped from Dunkirk in what Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister in the middle of May, called ‘a miracle of deliverance’ and the Daily Mirror described in a headline as ‘Bloody Marvellous’. Later, Hitler would say that he had wanted to spare Britain and to show that he was ready to reach a peaceful settlement. In fact, he may have believed that intense bombing raids by the Luftwaffe would force Britain to surrender – and have relished a chance to show his mastery over the army high command.

  Behind them, the troops rescued in the armada of small boats from Dunkirk left a country in collapse. The roads of France were clogged with refugees, moving through the summer heat in any form of transport available or, failing that, on foot. Millions fled the German advance. A Luftwaffe airman flying overhead described the scene below as ‘desolate and dreadful’. The French pilot and writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, compared it to a great anthill kicked over by a boot.

  Refugees from the Low Countries poured into Paris by train, bewildered and seeking shelter in France.2 At the Gare d’Austerlitz in the capital, 20,000 people were waiting for trains heading south at any one time. The crowd at the Gare Montparnasse, which served Brittany, stretched for a kilometre. The population of Lille, in the path of the German advance, dropped from 200,000 to 20,000. In the cathedral city of Chartres, only 800 of the 23,000 inhabitants stayed. In the eastern city of Troyes, thirty people remained.

  Cars and lorries abandoned when they ran out of fuel stood on the roadside beside dead horses. Dive-bombing by Stuka planes added to the panic. So did rumours of fifth columnists, and of German paratroopers landing behind the lines disguised as nuns. The Interior Ministry questioned 62,000 suspected enemy agents, but detained only 500. In the northern town of Abbeville, twenty-two foreigners were shot out of hand.

  With police joining the fleeing throng, law and order broke down. In one town in the Loiret department south of Paris, a local official reported that refugees were ‘killing the chickens, the rabbits, the cattle [and] carrying off drinks and goods and bedclothes’. Families became separated on the road. Farmers demanded payment for water from their wells. ‘Poor devils,’ a British general wrote. ‘It was a horrible sight.’

  Blame for the collapse of France was laid on politicians, Communists, Jews and Freemasons as a proud nation sought reasons for its implosion, and the military leaders tried to explain away their inability to cope with the mechanised and aerial warfare pioneered by Germany. Military failure fostered an already latent sense of inferiority among the French in the face of resurgent Germany. Politicians were regarded with cynicism or contempt, and defeatism spread.

  After Dunkirk, a new candidate joined the scapegoats. Britain, which had sent some half-a-million men to the continent following the declaration of war in September 1939, came to be depicted as an untrustworthy ally which had got France into the war and was now abandoning her at the crucial moment. A senior official remarked that, with the evacuation, Britain had already donned mourning clothes for France. Fearing the effect on morale, the high command asked Churchill not to say how many men had been taken off the beaches at Dunkirk – the Prime Minister declined to comply.

  Though 100,000 of their soldiers had been among those evacuated, the French could only see the withdrawal as fresh proof of the validity of their description of Britain as a perfidious nation. The Permanent Under Secretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, noted that, if Britain did send men and planes back across the Channel, it would not ‘prevent the French reviling us’.3 The American journal
ist Clare Booth recorded growing hatred of the French for the English. The pro-appeasement French minister Paul Baudouin noted bitterly that Britain had saved 80 per cent of its men while France lost half of its troops.4

  For the British, having got so many men home safely was a triumph in defeat despite the loss of 68,000 troops killed or captured in Belgium and France. For the French, it was made all the worse by the ringing declarations from Britain’s Prime Minister that his nation would go on fighting whatever happened across the Channel; at one point, the French embassy in London made it known that it did not regard this as ‘exactly encouraging’ for its country’s own efforts.

  The Germans did all they could to sow discord among their opponents. Leaflets dropped by their planes and broadcasts by Nazi radio stations in French made much of the phrase ‘filer à l’anglaise’ (to take French leave). Britain, it was said, would fight to the last Frenchman.

  In London, the British Cabinet did not speak openly of a French defeat. Instead, ministers referred only to ‘a certain eventuality’ which, they feared, could lead to Britain being attacked from two directions – across the Channel from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and over the North Sea from Norway. Reports from the war front made British generals increasingly pessimistic about their ally, and increasingly unwilling to send reinforcements back to France. In his diary, Alexander Cadogan reflected a widespread view when he wrote that, rather than dispatching help, ‘I’d really rather cut loose and concentrate on defence of these islands.’5

  Churchill, who was also Minister of Defence, was torn between two conflicting objectives. He wanted to keep France fighting, but he knew the need to conserve men and supplies – and, above all, planes – to defend Britain if the battle across the Channel was lost. The way France was crumbling could only arouse his worst fears. On 10 June, he set out for the airport to fly to Paris for a meeting with the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud. But he was told that the government had left the French capital, fearing it was about to fall to the Germans. ‘What the Hell?’ the Prime Minister said, and changed his plan to head for the Loire Valley where Reynaud and his ministers had set up temporary quarters.