The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories

LANCASTRIA

The Tillyer family had come a long, long way. Not so long, perhaps, in terms of actual miles — a moderately fast car could have covered the distance between the Fairey Aviation factory In Belgium, where Clifford Tillyer had worked as a technician, and the port of St Nazaire, in a day. But the Tillyers hadn't travelled across the smiling peacetime plains of Northern France in a fast and comfortable car: they had travelled, instead, across the war-torn chaos of a newly capitulated country, a country where demoralization, for the moment, was as complete as the defeat: and they had travelled either in overcrowded, haphazardly-routed refugee trains that sometimes covered only a few miles a day, or in the backs of trucks that crawled slowly along roads packed with thousands of refugees fleeing to the south.

The journey had taken a long, miserable month, but they had arrived at last: and as Clifford Tillyer, with his wife Vera and two-year-old baby daughter Jacqueline gazed out across the St Nazaire roads, crowded with Allied shipping which ranged from tiny minesweepers to great ocean-going liners all waiting to embark them and take them home to England, he felt that it had all been a hundred times worth while. The suffering, the fear, the privations of hunger and long sleepless nights all lay safely behind: before lay hope and freedom and home.

So, too, felt tens of thousands of others. No civilian refugees these others, but the last regiments of the British Expeditionary Force to France. Most of the BEF had already been evacuated from the continent. The miracle of Dunkirk was a fortnight old, and almost a third of a million men from these beaches were now safely home in England. Cherbourg, St Malo and Brest had been completely evacuated — a fantastic achievement in which 85,000 men had been snatched from the closing pincers of the Panzer divisions without the loss of a single ship or man. And now these men waiting along the banks of the Loire were almost the last to go. Men like Corporal John Broadbent, who had spent almost six weeks driving his OC from Rheims to the evacuation port and whose picture, published in the newspapers of the world, was soon to be known to countless millions: or like Sergeant George Young of the RASC, leaning against the brand new French bicycle which he had trundled half way across France, whose subsequent adventures in the next three days belonged to the realms of the wildest fiction.

But for Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent, the past, as it was for the Tillyers, was forgotten. The excitement of the immediate present, the promise that their turn would soon come for one of the dozens of tiny trawlers and minesweepers that were ferrying both soldiers and civilians out to the big ships lying offshore-these were all that mattered. Already they had been told the name of — and could clearly see — the ship that was to take them home: the LANCASTRIA. Even at the distance of three or four miles she looked gigantic, massive and solid and secure: once aboard that ship, they told themselves, all their troubles would be over.

The LANCASTRIA, a 16,243 ton Cunard White Star liner, swung gently from her two bow anchors in the Quiberon roads as the scores of small craft fussed busily around her during all that long morning and early afternoon of 17 June, 1940. Steadily the complement of soldiers and civilian refugees aboard her mounted — one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, then four. And still the ferryboats came, the numbers mounted, the decks rang constantly to the disciplined tramp of hundreds of marching feet going to their allotted positions in the ship.

Captain R Sharp, watching the scene from the bridge of the LANCASTRIA, was desperately anxious for the loading to be finished and the LANCASTRIA to be gone. With both anchors down, neither the room nor the ability to manoeuvre the great passenger liner, surrounded by small boats and with the number of refugee troops and civilians aboard steadily mounting with the passing of every minute, he realized all too clearly the hopelessness of offering any organized resistance to aerial or submarine attack.

Submarines, perhaps, were not greatly to be feared — a flotilla of destroyers prowled the estuary unceasingly. But an air attack was another thing: only the previous day the FRANCONIA had been attacked and hit, an adumbration, Captain Sharp feared, of worse things still to come. And now again the Luftwaffe's heavy bombers were beginning to launch scattered attacks against the passenger ships in the roads.

But however acute Captain Sharp's apprehensions, however sharp his anxiety for what might befall his ship, he could never have guessed, never have suspected that the name LANCASTRIA, then known only to a comparative few, would within a few short days become the worldwide symbol of the greatest maritime disaster in British history, a tragedy worse even than that of the TITANIC, the LUSITANIA or the ATHENIA.

Half past three in the afternoon. Air-raid sirens were sounding, anti-aircraft guns were beginning to open up against the heavy bombers of the Luftwaffe circling lazily above the Quiberon roads, as the last refugees were just embarking on the LANCASTRIA — a total complement, now, of almost 6,000 men, women and children.

Among the six thousand were the Tillyers, Corporal Broadbent and Sergeant Young.

Mrs Tillyer had already bathed, dried and dressed young Jacqueline and now, with her husband and daughter, had gone down to the dining saloon for a meal. What Mrs Tillyer remembers most clearly about that moment was the order and courtesy she found on every hand: the smooth, calm efficiency of the white-jacketed stewards who moved about their duties as if quite oblivious of the gunfire and sirens above: the smiling painstaking care of the sailor who adjusted the tapes of Jacqueline's lifebelt, so that it would no longer slip over the slender shoulders.

Sergeant Young had come aboard almost at the same time as the Tillyers, still lugging his new French bicycle. Ex-Sergeant Young, now living in Wickersley Road, London, admits, in a masterly understatement, that the crew of the overcrowded liner did not take too kindly to the bicycle, but he ignored their curses, hauled it aboard, parked it in what he judged to be a relatively safe position, then went below for a shave, only seconds after he had seen the nearby liner ORANSAY struck on the bridge by a bomb. Bombs were disquieting enough, Mr Young says: but the need for a shave was imperative.

There were no half-measures like shaves, for Corporal John Broadbent. Ex-Corporal Broadbent, now a London taxi-driver living in Newport Street, confesses that he was feeling slightly apprehensive just at that moment, not because of the falling bombs or the fact that he was completely undressed and about to step into a bath, but because the door of the bathroom bore the legend 'Officers Only'.

Just after three-thirty, the LANCASTRIA was hit by three aerial torpedoes. One struck for'ard and another aft, but it was the third that caused most of the damage and was responsible for much of the subsequent appalling loss of life.

This aerial torpedo, by one chance in a hundred thousand, plummeted straight down the LANCASTRIAN's single funnel and exploded with curiously little sound but devastating power in the confined spaces of the boiler room and adjacent underwater compartments, many of them immovably packed with troops for whom there had been no room on the upper deck.

The boiler room was destroyed. Fuel tanks and lines were ruptured and thousands of gallons of oil immediately filmed out over the adjacent waters until the sea round the LANCASTRIA was covered in a thick carpet of oil. But, far more terrible was the fate of the men in the underwater compartments: close on five hundred of them, mostly RAF personnel, were blown out through the great jagged hole blasted through the thin, unarmoured sides of the great liner: many were already dead, killed by the concussive impact of the exploding warhead, by great sheets of steel plate wrenched from the sundered bulkheads, by the flying shrapnel that ricocheted blindly, lethally, around the confined spaces in which these men had been standing: many of those who were flung alive into the water survived only to die in choking, coughing agony in the thick oil pumping out from the ruptured tanks and lines immediately behind them.

Already the LANCASTRIA was listing heavily and beginning to settle slowly in the water. Even the most inexperienced aboard — and most of them knew nothing of the sea — knew that the LANCASTRIA had not long to live.

Hundreds were trapped below decks. In some cases watertight doors were shut fast or, like many other doors, immovably warped by the buckling effect of the explosion. Others were trapped just as effectively by the solid mass of men filling the gangways and ladders leading to the decks above — there was little hope indeed for the last men in the queues below decks. Some of these escaped through portholes, others through loading ports on the ship's side: Father Charles McMenemy, the former Roman Catholic chaplain in Wormwood Scrubs prison, led a group of such trapped men to a loading port some six feet above the water, gave his own life belt to a sergeant-major who couldn't swim, urged all the men into the sea and went himself last of all. No man ever better deserved to survive than Father McMenemy — and survive he did.

The Tillyers, Corporal Broadbent and Sergeant Young were among the lucky ones — those who reached the upper deck in safety. Broadbent and Young had to take their turn with the others, joining the solid queues of soldiers tramping slowly up the steel-ribbed companionway steps to the freedom of the upper decks and the illusory safety that lay beyond.

Mrs Tillyer had a far easier passage. No sooner had she emerged from the dining room with the lifejacketed baby Jacqueline in her arms than a score of voices took up the cry 'Make way for a baby!' And make way for the baby they did, every man pressing back against the side of the companionway to afford clear gangway, even though they knew the ship was sinking under their feet. This they did for every woman and child on the ship: it can never be computed how many men lost their lives because, in standing back to give way to others, they sacrificed those few seconds that made all the difference between living and dying.

The Tillyers, Broadbent and Young, reviewing these few ghastly hours, retain three outstanding memories in common, and that was the first of them — the utter calmness, the kindness, the selfless gallantry of the soldiers and crew. Confusion there was, and haste — these were inevitable: but of panic there was no trace.

But this impression, permanently engraved in the memory though it was, was a fleeting one only: there was no time for more. The air was filled with the staccato crash of AA weapons from every quarter of the roads, a bedlam of sound and smoke: Luftwaffe bombers still cruised overhead, some of them mercilessly raking the now sharply canting decks of the LANCASTRIA with machine-gun fire; the steel-tipped bullets swathing through the close-packed ranks of men queuing up for the lifeboats.

First into the lifeboats were the women and children. Clifford Tillyer saw his wife and Jacqueline aboard one of these boats just as it was about to be lowered. He himself then stepped back into the waiting crowd, only to find himself seized by soldiers from a tank regiment and bundled in beside his wife and child, 'Get in, mister,' they told him. 'You've got to look after your youngster.'

But the lifeboat was a refuge as temporary as it-was treacherous. Even as it started lowering towards the oil-slicked sea, it began to capsize. Neither of the Tillyers hesitated. Over the side they went and struck away from the sinking ship, Mr Tillyer holding Jacqueline's head above the oil as best he could.

For Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent there were no lifeboats. All those that could be lowered had already gone — and many of these had capsized.

For the first time in many weeks Sergeant Young forgot all about his bicycle. Lather still on his face from the unfinished shave, he made straight for the side and jumped into the water, into the confusion of wreckage and splintered wood and hundreds of men, many of them nonswimmers with neither life jacket nor anything to cling to, struggling in the water. Young knew what happened to people who stayed too close to sinking ships — and the LANCASTRIA was sinking foot by foot before his eyes. He struck out furiously to get well clear of the foundering liner, of the lethal suction that would be the death of anyone in the vicinity when she plummeted to the bottom of the Quiberon roads.

Corporal Broadbent was exactly as he had been when he had been preparing to take his bath — completely naked. (He was to remain thus for three long days.) Nothing, he says, ever worried him less than his unclothed state at that moment. With the deck sliding away beneath his feet he ceremoniously shook hands with his friend Sid Keenan — who had actually been in the bath when the LANCASTRIA was hit — and dived into the sea.

Then came the moment when the second main impression of the disaster was registered forever on the minds of the two soldiers and the Tillyers — and, indeed, of every one of the thousands who saw it. Its great propellers breaking free above the water, the LANCASTRIA slowly, inexorably, turned over, just before she sunk. Hundreds of soldiers, most of whom presumably were unable to swim, still clung ant-like to the great hull. There was no shouting, no screaming, no sign of fear at all. Instead, they were singing, and singing in perfect unison, 'Roll out the barrel' and 'There'll always be an England', and they were still singing when the waters closed over them. It is little wonder that many of the soldier survivors could never again bring themselves to sing 'Roll out the Barrel', the unofficial anthem of the army in the early years of the war.

Corporal Broadbent was one of the nearest to the ship when it went down. He himself has a personal memory, one which, he says, will always haunt him — the face at the porthole. As the LANCASTRIA tipped over, Broadbent could see a man trapped in a cabin desperately trying to smash in the thick toughened glass of the scuttle — trying and completely failing. For one brief moment Broadbent caught sight of the terror-stricken face, then the porthole slid beneath the oil-blackened surface of the sea.

And now came perhaps the worst experience of all — fire. Not fire aboard the LANCASTRIA — that would have been easy to escape — but fire on the surface of the sea, and for all too many there could be no escape from that. Nor was the fire any accident, but a piece of calculated and cold-blooded callousness for which there can be no forgiveness. In addition to machine-gunning and killing unknown numbers of people in the water — the twenty occupants of one raft, for instance, were completely wiped out by a sustained burst of machine-gun fire — the Luftwaffe pilots began to drop incendiary bombs on the oil-covered sea, and set it on fire.

Oil on fire is the most horrible, the cruellest death known to men. It is death by slow, agonizing torture, by drowning to escape that torture, by incineration of those parts of the body above water in a lung-gasping asphyxiation — for the flames feed on all the life-giving oxygen on the surface of the sea, and a man suffocates in the superheated and lifeless air. But drowning is quiet and simple and almost without pain, and where no hope of escape is left, only a madman would stretch himself out on the shrieking rack of agony a moment longer than was necessary when the means of kindly deliverance lies so close to hand.

The official history of the war at sea professes itself unable to understand why so many people — 2,823 — lost their lives when the LANCASTRIA went down, even though the disaster happened in broad daylight in a road crowded with many ships, especially small, manoeuvrable ships which were quickly on the scene — the anti-submarine trawler CAMBRIDGESHIRE alone rescued almost a thousand survivors.

It is difficult to understand this puzzlement: it is remarkable indeed that so many people, about two and a half thousand, were in fact rescued. Most of the ships in the roads were too busy looking after themselves, fighting off the attacks by the German bombers, and those which did eventually steam to the oil-covered and wreckage-strewn scene of the sinking liner found comparatively few survivors there after the CAMBRIDGESHIRE had gone. Hundreds had died in the initial explosion, as many again were trapped and taken to the bottom locked inside the shattered hull of the LANCASTRIA. Hundreds more, still clinging to the hull, were drowned as the liner plunged to the bottom, and of those then in the water alongside, many were either killed by the flame-covered sea or had swam so far and so frantically in search of safety, that they had put themselves outside the radius of search of the immediate rescue operations.

Such were Corporal Broadbent, Sergeant Young and the Tillyer family.

Broadbent, almost unconscious in the water, was rescued by a small craft and then transferred to the JOHN HOLT, still completely naked — when a newspaperman's camera clicked. He arrived in Plymouth three days later, still without a stitch of clothes on and bemoaning only the fact that he hadn't a pocket to carry the cigarettes he had been given, to find himself famous, and with his picture, the symbol of the disaster of the LANCASTRIA, published in newspapers all over the world.

Sergeant Young had found himself clinging to an orange box, one of ten who depended on the same flimsy support. When he was rescued by a French trawler four hours later, only three were left — the other seven had slipped off one by one as their strength failed. He was landed at a convent hospital, nursed by Mrs Joan Rodes — later famous as 'The Angel of St Nazaire' — given a French sailor's uniform, transferred to a military hospital and there told by a German officer that he was a prisoner of war and would be shot if he tried to run away. Sergeant Young didn't quite run away — along with some others he commandeered a Red Cross van, made his way to the coast and was picked up by the destroyer PUNJABI.

The Tillyers probably spent even longer than Young in the water — their memories are understandably vague on this point. All that Mrs Tillyer can clearly remember is that a soldier gave up his own piece of wood to which he was clinging to give young Jacqueline every chance possible, and that she kept calling 'Baby here', 'Baby here' so often, and so insistently, that she says Jacqueline took up the cry as though it were a game. ' "Baby here", she kept crying after me, until she grew too weak to say it any more.'

But the cries were heard and rescue came — a lifeboat from the destroyer HIGHLANDER. Neither Mr Tillyer, now a departmental manager with Fairey Aviation in London, nor his wife were, eventually, any the worse for their shocking appearance.

Neither apparently was baby Jacqueline, for the tiny two-year-old who cried 'Baby here, 'Baby here', in the oil-covered waters of Quiberon Bay eighteen long years ago was married on the 5th of July of this year.