Frank Brogden, an electrician from Bolton who had signed up for the Merchant Navy at the age of thirteen and had looked after the loudspeakers and the sound equipment for the ship’s cinema in peacetime, was on the midnight to 4 a.m. watch. He remembered the sea as being very calm under a full moon. ‘You would never think there was any war on,’ he recalled. ‘We might have been going down on a cruise. It seemed very pleasant.’ But then, when the ship sailed on in the cool, bright dawn, he saw smoke from fires on the shore. Standing on the bridge in the dawning light, Harry Grattidge could hear the throbbing of planes not far away. As well as the Lancastria, thirty or so evacuation boats had gathered in the bay. Among them were two destroyers, the Havelock and the Highlander, which had taken part in the evacuation from Norway earlier in the month, and the Cambridgeshire, an armoured trawler from Grimsby with a single 1.47 gun. The convoy of six ships that had come down the Bristol Channel included a smart new freighter, the John Holt.
What do You think about The Sinking Of The Lancastria?
