Maiden Voyages

by Siân Evans

  On their return journey the Pacific was appropriately peaceful, but once through the Panama Canal they turned towards the war zone of the North Atlantic. From Nova Scotia they set out as part of a convoy, escorted by the armed cruiser Jervis Bay. On the afternoon of 5 November 1940, Maida and Nancy were standing at the rail looking at the convoy, when Nancy had a premonition that they were about to face a terrifying ordeal. Her occasional claims to second sight were given credence by many of the crew, who tended to be superstitious, and she had startled and impressed Maida by predicting ‘a great slaughter from the skies’ a day or two before the Blitz started. The conversation turned to disaster preparations; a fellow stewardess, Barbara, announced she planned to change into trousers if the ship was torpedoed, as skirts would not be ‘decent’ if they had to climb down ropes or jump into the sea. Nancy pointed out that jumping into water often wrenched off trousers, and that if Barbara feared exposure, she would have to stay bobbing about in the water, rather than risk the shame of being rescued half-naked. Resourceful Nancy planned to be wearing her bathing suit and her furs if she abandoned ship.

  At 5 p.m. the same day, the convoy was attacked by a German raider, the Admiral Scheer, and the Jervis Bay attempted to protect the Allied vessels by engaging with the enemy in order to give the convoy time to scatter. Maida, Nancy and the passengers watched in horror from the deck. Outgunned, the Jervis Bay was quickly consumed by fire and sank, still firing salvoes as it went down. The Admiral Scheer circled the remaining unprotected ships, and attacked four of them, sinking three. Then it approached Maida and Nancy’s ship. Two mighty crashes rocked their vessel. A sheet of flame rose from the stern, and they assumed they had been hit. In fact, the chief gunner had jettisoned the anti-submarine depths charges in the bows to minimise the risk of damage, and one had exploded spectacularly but harmlessly underwater. The Germans assumed they had fatally hit the ship, and went in search of other prey, allowing Maida’s captain valuable time to take evasive action.

  The crew and gunners remained at battle stations, while passengers and stewardesses sheltered in the dim and packed alleyway just below the main deck, wearing their life jackets and clutching their ‘shipwreck’ bags, awaiting instructions to take to the lifeboats. The stewardesses removed their distinctive white headscarves to make them less visible as targets, because the Germans had been known to machine-gun survivors in boats or in the water. A tense wait ensued, as the ship dodged and weaved, engines straining, trying to stay out of the range of the Admiral Scheer, which continued to send shells thundering in their direction as darkness fell. A moment’s light relief was provided by the youngest stewardess, ‘Jock’ McCrae, describing their assailant as a ‘packet bottleship’, a spoonerism that provoked brittle laughter. To keep their spirits up, they sang rousing choruses of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, competing with the gradually receding sounds of shells. Almost incredibly, it appeared they had managed to escape. After a tense and largely sleepless night, dawn broke and they were alone on the ocean, as the rest of the convoy had followed orders and scattered. As a single unescorted ship, they were now in dire peril from German raiders, and there was the ever-present menace of submarines. No wireless messages could be transmitted in case they were picked up by the enemy, giving away the ship’s position. Later, Maida learned that the Germans had officially announced the sinking of her ship, as part of the havoc they had wreaked on the convoy.

  For a fortnight, the ship travelled alone across the Atlantic, ‘as solitary as the Ark’ in Maida’s words, heading for Britain. Those on board kept busy with a regime of frenzied cleaning and polishing. By a miracle, they were not detected by the enemy; the ship crept into Liverpool Bay just as a severe nighttime blitz started, so they headed for Milford Haven, only to find it also under aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe. Inching into Barry Docks, they saw that the harbour was littered with floating mines, so they headed across the Bristol Channel and finally found sanctuary in Avonmouth. Passengers and cargo were unloaded safely; they had had an extraordinary journey, from New Zealand to Somerset, and a miraculous escape.

  By the summer of 1940 German forces had swept through Europe and France had fallen. In the skies, the Battle of Britain raged as Allied planes desperately fought the German Luftwaffe for air supremacy. U-boat bases were established at Atlantic ports much nearer to the transatlantic shipping routes, and submarines went hunting Allied shipping, to devastating effect.

  The possible invasion of Britain by German forces seemed an imminent threat, and many families feared for their children, especially as nightly aerial bombing increased over the major cities. Some who could afford it, such as Lady Diana Cooper and Vera Brittain, sent their children abroad to friends or relatives, but for most this was not an option. In June 1940 the British government founded the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB), evacuating children to the relative safety of the British dominions, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It was a popular scheme: within a week of its launch more than 210,000 applications were received for just 20,000 places. Disadvantaged families from the areas deemed most at risk were prioritised. Children, known as called ‘seavacs’, would be looked after during voyages by volunteer adult escorts, and families clamoured to get their children sent to safety, though with mixed feelings. One teacher commented sadly, ‘We are sending away our crown jewels’, and it was common to see files of small children trudging along railway platforms, clutching their few personal belongings, gas masks slung over their shoulders.

  In June 1940, CORB employed Edith Sowerbutts. An able and competent administrator now in her late forties, with a genuine commitment to welfare, Edith was perfect for the job. She knew the North Atlantic merchant fleet and its ships, she had worked in emigration offices, and she was familiar with Canada, America and Australia. Her role was to find suitable men and women to act as escorts to the thousands of children to be despatched overseas. London was badly bombed day and night at this time, but the CORB team, housed in Thomas Cook’s offices near Piccadilly, worked on processing applications from thousands of volunteers, surrounded by teetering stacks of files and paperwork.

  Crossing the Atlantic was not without risks, even for juvenile civilians. On 29 August 1940 the Volendam left Liverpool carrying 320 children under the CORB scheme. On its second day out it was torpedoed seventy miles off the Donegal coast of Ireland. They were lucky; the ship was still close to land, it was a calm night and the ship’s lifeboats were safely deployed, so all the children survived.

  However, another ship, the City of Benares was not so fortunate. Though usually based in London, in September 1940 Edith travelled to Liverpool to oversee the embarkation of ninety CORB children on a passenger ship bound for Canada. Edith arrived in Liverpool and checked in to the Adelphi Hotel in time to avoid an air raid. She always travelled light – just a suit, coat, spare underwear, nightdress and umbrella. Her family had no idea of her whereabouts or her job as she had signed the Official Secrets Act. Edith did not even know the name of the ship going to Canada, but she had an identifying code number for it. She carried typed details of the ninety children due to embark, hidden underneath some knitting in a stout paper carrier bag from a department store. Her homely disguise belied her official and highly confidential mission, though she also thought it unlikely she would ever be mistaken for a beautiful spy.

  Edith met the escorts and their excited young charges at Fazakerley Cottage Homes to go through the formalities and have final medical checks. All the children had been provided with warm woollen winter clothes for the voyage by Marks and Spencer, as part of their support for the war effort. One five-year-old, Leonard Grimmond, was so excited that he was sick down Edith’s coat, but she forgave him – he was the youngest of five siblings, and their family had been bombed out in London. The children were to join the City of Benares, a ship that was now under the control of Cunard White Star Line. Edith also met an old friend, Mrs Whatmore, former senior bath attendant on the Queen
Mary, who was in charge of linen for the voyage. The two former colleagues had lunch on board the ship with the evacuees before it departed. Edith described the joyous mood:

  It was like a school outing, only lots better – there was a carnival atmosphere. The children were so thrilled, and delighted with the varied menu in the big dining saloon. We stayed on board all afternoon, and were able to watch the lifeboat drill. The children, wearing lifebelts, were thoroughly instructed in all procedures and assisted in and out of the lifeboats by Lascar seamen and Goanese stewards. The scene is etched in my memory.6

  The City of Benares left Liverpool on 13 September under the command of Captain Nicholl, as part of an escorted convoy of nineteen ships bound for Canada. Six hundred miles out to sea, the escort ships departed to meet another convoy heading for Europe. The City of Benares was sailing in darkness when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 17 September 1940. It was 10 p.m., heavy seas were running, and it was bitterly cold. The ship went down in twenty minutes. Many children were immediately drowned; others found themselves adrift in the dark in partially swamped lifeboats manned by distraught, sodden and scared strangers. Those who had managed to get into boats mostly succumbed overnight to exposure, as they were wearing nothing more than thin nightclothes.

  Edith remained unaware of the tragedy for days. She was in Glasgow with another group of evacuees when she was unexpectedly visited by her boss, Geoffrey Shakespeare. He broke the news that the City of Benares had been sunk, but Edith was sworn to secrecy until each and every bereaved family had been visited and told of its loss. Out of ninety CORB children, only three girls and three boys had then been rescued. Edith and Mr Shakespeare were taken out to a destroyer at Gourock to meet one of the adult survivors, and the three boys; the three girls had already been taken to hospital with an escort, Mrs Lilian Rose Towns, a schoolteacher. Edith was haunted by the sight of the shocked and dazed faces of the survivors, walking as though in a trance.

  Edith was appalled to think that only six of ‘her’ CORB children had survived, but eight days after the sinking, another lifeboat was sighted drifting on the ocean by a Sunderland flying boat. Piano teacher Mary Cornish and Father Roderic Sullivan, a Catholic priest, were rescued, with six more boys. Mary Cornish was awarded the OBE for her outstanding heroism. It was some small solace for Edith to discover that two siblings who she had particularly liked, Bessie and Louis Walder, fifteen and ten years old, had both survived. Louis was in one boat, while his sister managed to cling to an upturned lifeboat until rescued. Altogether 294 lives were lost, including 81 children. Among them were Michael Brooker and Patricia Allan, who had survived the sinking of the Volendam weeks before. While Edith gathered together the juvenile survivors, worried parents who had expected to hear that the ship had arrived safely in Canada besieged the organisation. Nothing could be said publicly until each bereaved family had been personally visited and informed of their losses. Edith particularly remembered a little girl from Liverpool, Aileen Murphy, whose father had put her on the ship himself – he was in an RNVR uniform. He phoned Edith seeking news, but she was sworn to secrecy, even though she knew Aileen was not among the few survivors.

  Edith was now faced with the harrowing business of reuniting traumatised survivors with their families. Two youngsters, Rex Thorne, aged thirteen, and Jack Keeley, eight, had each lost a sister in the disaster. Edith accompanied them on the sleeper train back to London. She recalled: ‘they talked together like two little old men, asking each other, ‘“When did you last see your sister?”’7

  When the news of the catastrophe broke, so great was the public horror that the CORB evacuation initiative was abandoned. Questions were asked about why the protective escort did not stay with the Children’s Ship, when U-boats were known to be operating beyond the west coast of Ireland. Families decided they would rather risk the bombs together than send their children across the oceans alone to face such hazards. All 600 children on board ships about to sail were returned to their homes. CORB was largely wound up; Edith left the organisation in November 1940 and became involved in welfare work in London. Based in Hampstead in north London, she was put in charge of requisitioning empty buildings to rehouse people who had been bombed out elsewhere.

  Towards the end of the Second World War, Edith was invited to Liverpool by Miss Prescott, the lady superintendent for Cunard. Miss Prescott wanted to discuss her ambitions for re-staffing Cunard passenger ships with female staff when peace returned. Many experienced stewardesses had been hurriedly laid off when the war started, and inevitably they had found new careers ashore, which they were now reluctant to leave in order to resume a life afloat. Edith was one of them; after welfare work she had moved to personnel work, and was now living with her ailing sister. Miss Prescott had hoped she could persuade Edith to return to Cunard as a senior stewardess on a prestigious vessel, but Edith declined. She never forgot her involvement in the City of Benares tragedy, and did not resume her career at sea, even after peace was restored.

  The story of the sinking of the City of Benares reverberated round the world and caused international outrage. The tragedy had a profound effect on Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr, who had escaped an unhappy marriage and the growing political menace of National Socialism in 1937 by crossing the Atlantic on the Normandie. In the process she reinvented herself as a glamorous Hollywood film star. Hedy’s family were Jewish, and by autumn 1940 her widowed mother, Trude Kiesler, who had also left Austria to escape the Nazis, was becalmed in London, hoping to get a visa for America and passage on a liner to join her daughter. The sinking of the City of Benares, and the possibility that other passenger ships could meet the same fate, galvanised the inventor in Hedy. She collaborated with a friend and neighbour, the Hollywood-based composer George Antheil. They both had personal incentives to assist the Allied war effort: Hedy wanted to ensure her mother’s safe passage to the States, while George was mourning his brother Henry, a diplomatic courier, who had died on 14 June 1940, when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.

  Their joint invention was a blend of Hedy’s inspiration and George’s development. They wanted to invent an improved radio-controlled torpedo that could be used by Allied forces to attack German submarines. Hedy and George invented a secret method of avoiding jamming, which might interfere with their torpedo and send it off course. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, their system made a secure communications channel which it was impossible for outside agencies to disrupt. George and Hedy patented the invention in 1941 and provided the details to the US Navy, but at the time it was shelved as having no practical application. Meanwhile Hedy joined the war effort, touring the States and raising $25 million in sales of War Bonds (worth some $343 million today). Her mother reached the USA safely, and eventually joined her in California

  In truth, Hedy and George’s invention was far in advance of its time, but during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s their system was used on US Navy ships. It subsequently had many military applications, and what became known as ‘spread spectrum’ technology later revolutionised the digital communications explosion, as it was the basis of fax machines, cellphone technology and other wireless operations. It was not until 1997 that Lamarr and Antheil’s extraordinary invention received official recognition, when they jointly won the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. In the same year, Hedy was the first female recipient of the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, given to lifelong inventors, and known as the the equivalent of the Oscars for inventors.

  Crossing the Atlantic on a blacked-out Allied ship during the Second World War was a fraught and nerve-racking experience because of the ever-present threat of submarines and gun attacks from German ships. For civilians who had inadvertently found themselves on the wrong continent it was also extremely difficult to obtain a ticket, and any voyage involved circuitous and lengthy diversions, which added to the heightened sense of combined tension and frustratio
n recorded by a number of female travellers.

  After spending nearly twenty years living abroad, writer and activist Nancy Cunard, the great-granddaughter of the shipping line’s founder, was travelling round South America when France fell to Germany in 1940. Restless and troubled, and estranged from her family, she decided to return to embattled London, where she had spent her teenage years. She undertook a succession of journeys, ‘hopping’ from Chile via Mexico to the West Indies, on to Cuba, north to New York and finally got a berth on a ship going to Glasgow. Her arduous travels took almost a year, and she didn’t arrive back in London until 23 August 1941.

  As usual, Nancy wrote obsessively while travelling, recounting the dreadful conditions in which she had seen African-American workers living, the Civil War in Spain and the Spanish refugees confined in French concentration camps. Human rights were her great passion. On arrival in New York from Cuba on the Marqués de Comillas, she could not go ashore because she did not have an American in-transit visa, but she was allowed on to Ellis Island at her own request, despite the justice department forbidding her from landing on American soil. There she spent five days mustering her influential American friends and chivvying immigration officials into providing asylum for a Chinese author who had been facing deportation back to Chiang Kai-shek’s China, where he faced certain death. Her appeal was successful, and he was allowed to stay in the States. The authorities were not sorry to see her go; Nancy’s confrontational championing of black rights in the 1930s, from her flagrant inter-racial relationship with African-American pianist Henry Crowder to her fund-raising in defence of the Scottsboro Boys – nine African-American teenage boys who had been falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931 – had left her persona non grata, despite her illustrious surname.