The Lonely Sea (14 page)

The day's work was done. The skipper, his hands gently caressing the wheel, was talking quietly to the Lieutenant, relaxed on a disreputable camp stool, his back against the bulkhead, his hands behind his head. Down below, the cook, his
labours over, was lying on his bunk, reading a detective novelette. The winch-driver, impervious, as ever, to the icy wind which still blew, had not stirred from his post, but was dreamily regarding our slightly phosphorescent wake, watching it recede gradually into the darkness. A couple of men were sheltering from the following wind in the well-deck before the bridge, quietly smoking. Yet another two men were on the bridge-deck, steadying a ladder, on the top of which was perched a man for whom the slight pitching of the ship, the insufficient light, and the chilly night wind were proving no deterrent in the execution of his task. To him, art was all. He was painting our tenth chevron on the funnel…

Words cannot adequately express what we owe to these men—fishermen all, from the Hebrides and Mallaig, Wick and Peterhead, Aberdeen and Grimsby, Lowestoft and Yarmouth. Call them heroes, and they would jeer at you: yet they are nothing else. Theirs is, at once, the most lonely, monotonous, and dangerous of all our Empire Forces' tasks, and one indispensable for the maintenance of danger-free sea-lanes for the Merchant Service, our lifeline with the world beyond. They put to sea in the morning, gay or grave according to their wont…and some do not return. But they close their ranks, and carry on.

Colin Ryder Richardson, a city broker, and Kenneth Sparks, a Post Office employee, both live in the western outskirts of London, the former in Worcester Park, Surrey, the latter in Alperton, Middlesex. Both are approximately the same age, both are married, both have a baby son. Superficial similarities, these, similarities that could be duplicated ten thousand times: but through the warp and woof of the lives of these two young men runs a coloured thread of memory that sets them apart from all the others: the memory of that dark and bitter and hopeless night eighteen long years ago, when the torpedoed liner
City of Benares
slid beneath the gale and sleet-torn surface of the North Atlantic and left them to die in the cold and hostile waters.

They should have died that night. Their chances of survival, the chances of survival of any child, in waters such as these, were remote. But
incredibly survive they did—they and a handful of other children. A handful, no more. The chances were remote, and with the sinking of the
City of Benares,
a tragedy which aroused more pity and indignation than any other naval loss of the war, the law of averages had its inexorable way. Of the hundred young children aboard the liner, no less than eighty-three, far from the parents, the homes, and the friends that had until then made up the entirety of their young lives, died on that night of 17 September, 1940.

Kenneth Sparks was thirteen years old, Colin Richardson only eleven on the day when the
City of Benares
left England for Canada with a total complement of 406—191 passengers and 215 of a crew. Even today, Kenneth Sparks can recall the dark mutterings of some members of the crew on the choice of a sailing date—Friday the 13th of September.

But no one paid any attention to their gloomy forebodings—certainly none of the children, ranging from five to fifteen years of age, for all of whom this voyage was the most exciting adventure of their lives. There was so much to see—all the other ships in the convoy, the destroyers fussing busily around them, and so much to do—exploring the big liner, playing games, trying their best to do full justice to the magnificent meals set before them.

Nearly all the children were being evacuated, Kenneth Sparks among them, under an official
Government scheme, from heavily bombed areas such as London, Middlesex, Sunderland, Liverpool and Newport: there were nine officially employed escorts to look after them. Colin Richardson was an exception, travelling privately under the care of a Mr Raskay, a Hungarian, who had arranged with Colin's parents to be his guardian for that trip.

On the third day out from England, the destroyers, their charges now safely past the recognized danger zone, turned for home, leaving the convoy on its own. Even among the most hardened sailors in wartime there is always the same feeling of desertion and vulnerability when their naval escort is compelled to withdraw. But this very human apprehension subsided considerably on the evening of the next day when the liner began to pitch and roll in awkward cross-seas as the weather deteriorated and the wind moaned and whistled round the superstructure and through the rigging as it steadily mounted towards gale force, building up the big seas ahead of it.

The tension and the strain aboard the
City of Benares
eased; it was safe now almost to relax. Uboats, of course, were the great menace. But everyone knew how almost impossible it was to launch an accurate torpedo with such seas running, even if a U-boat captain was lucky enough to see them and have time to take an aiming sight, through the cold rain and sleet showers that were beginning to sweep across the darkening sea.
Besides, it was the absolutely recognized convention and law of naval warfare that the torpedoing of liners in gale seas was forbidden: in such heavy seas the chances of survival of the complement of a torpedoed liner were remote indeed.

The
City of Benares
was torpedoed at exactly 10.00 p.m. that night. The torpedo struck the ship far aft on the port side, almost directly opposite the place where the majority of the evacuee children had their quarters. It is not known exactly how many of them lost their lives in that first lethal moment of impact, when the detonating torpedo ripped a huge hole in the unarmoured hull of the
City of Benares
from above to far below the waterline. The probability is that nearly half of these children either died in the first moment, were too dreadfully wounded either to struggle to freedom or even cry out for help, or were trapped in their cabins by warped and buckled doors and taken down with the ship with no one near to help them.

Some children, on the other hand, were at first quite unaware either of the fatal extent of the damage or, indeed, of the fact that there had been any damage at all. Among the unsuspecting ones were Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks.

Colin was in his bunk at the time, alone in his cabin, reading a comic. He felt a heavy bump, but paid no attention to it—we can only assume that he found the contents of his comic singularly
engrossing—and carried on reading. Not until the alarm bells started ringing did he reluctantly abandon his comic, don a pair of slippers, put on his dressing gown over his pyjamas, his vivid red kapok life jacket—given him by his mother with the instructions that he should wear it always, and of so eye-dazzling a colour that he was already known throughout the ship as Will Scarlet—over his dressing gown, a cork life jacket above that and made his way to the ship's restaurant where he found all the passengers lining up to go to their boat stations.

Kenneth was in bed at 10.00 p.m., and sound asleep. The insistent clamour of the alarm bells brought himself and his two cabin companions—both of whom were to die during the darkness of that night—to their feet, struggling into coats and life jackets before hurrying to their boat positions on the upper deck.

Newly awakened from the soft blanketed warmth of their beds, most of them still halfasleep, the children shivered and tried to crouch more deeply still inside their thin night clothes as the bitter night wind, blowing a full gale now, knifed through their pathetically inadequate garments, drenching them with driving rain and icy hail, blinding them with the bulleting spray whipped off the wave-tops as the already sinking ship, losing way rapidly, began to wallow helplessly in the deep troughs between the seas.

It was not until then that Kenneth Sparks realized what was happening, not until he saw the blown hatch-covers, the snapped and splintered mast, the debris lying everywhere, the dazed and fearful lascar crew members that he understood that the ship was sinking beneath his feet. Both he and Colin Richardson remember clearly that there was no panic, no fear at all among the children, nothing except the lonely sobbing of one little boy, crying quietly in the darkness, his voice carrying only faintly in the sudden moments of silence when the
City of Benares
listed far over to one side, momentarily blocking the sound and the power of the gale.

One by one the lifeboats were lowered—a difficult and often dangerous task in a wickedly rolling, all but stopped ship in those wild and pitch-dark seas. Some of the lifeboats capsized immediately, throwing the occupants into the water—few of these were ever seen again. Some were swamped and cut adrift. Others came alongside the foot of rope ladders, and women and children clambered down over the side towards them, as often as not to find that the boats were no longer there. And then they would find that they no longer had the strength to climb back up on deck again: for a few seconds they would hang there, being battered against the ship's side, alternately being plunged deep into the water or hauled high above it as the foundering vessel
rolled deeply, sluggishly in the seas: and then their slender strength would fail them, their fingers would open and they were never seen again.

Other women took children in their arms and leapt into the darkness of the sea near a spot where they had seen a raft being dropped over the side. Occasionally—very occasionally—they would reach it, drag themselves aboard and lie there helpless, beaten flat by the wind, the hail and the waves, unable even to so much as raise their heads: more often than not, they would fail to see the raft in the deep gloom of a sea where the towering wave-crests reduced visibility to only a few feet, or, even if they did see one, would find it floating away into the outer darkness more quickly than they could swim after it.

The
City of Benares
sunk in just over ten minutes from the time she was torpedoed, and the wonder of it is that so many managed to get away at all. Miracles of effort and selfless courage were the order of the day. Crew-members leapt into the water to right upturned boats and rescue what passengers they could. Others stayed on the slippery canting decks until the
City of Benares
foundered, struggling to free rafts and jammed lifeboats. All too often they were still struggling when the ship foundered, taking them along with it.

In the minds of nearly every one of the crew and the passengers, the children were the first,
last and only thought. The Captain died while still searching for them below decks. So did Colonel Baldwin-Webb, MP for the Wrekin Division of Shropshire, who had acted with imperturbable gallantry throughout and had led many children from the cabins to the lifeboats. So did Colin's guardian, Mr Raskay, who gave up his own place in a lifeboat to a woman and child, turned back, went below, extricated more women and children from blazing cabins, returned to the upper deck and dived into the sea, not to save himself, but to rescue drowning children in the water. It is not known how or where he died, but it was inevitable that he should die. Mr Raskay was a Hungarian, but race and creed meant nothing to him, only humanity.

The chief quartermaster also died in the search for children. He had loaded a lifeboat with women and children, left it in the command of another seaman, climbed back aboard and was never seen again. And the children's official escorts more than lived up to the trust that had been placed in them: only three of them survived.

One of them was Mrs Towns. She stayed to see as many children as possible into the boats, refused a place for herself, and jumped over the side—and she had never swum before in her life. Somehow she reached an upturned boat and clung on to it, one of fifteen, mainly children, who did so. But the cold struck deep, the biting hail
and pounding seas numbed arms and bodies and legs, and one by one the children dropped off during that bitter and interminable night. When dawn came, only Mrs Towns and two little girls were left. They survived.

Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks were luckier—they managed to get away in lifeboats. Colin remembers vividly the actual moment of the sinking of the
City of Benares,
the spectacle of a man being blasted out through a door crashing back on its hinges, the swift plunge, the bursting open of doors and ventilators as the air pressure inside built up swiftly to an intolerable degree.

He remembers too, the strange sight of the sea dotted with the red lights attached to the life belts of the crew struggling in the water, of those who swam alongside and begged to be taken into the already over-crowded boat; the quiet, unquestioning acceptance of nearly all those who were told there was no room left. They swam away to find what floating debris they could, most of them knowing that it could be only a token postponement of the death by exhaustion and exposure that surely awaited all those without either boat or raft. And the fear-crazed selfishness of one or two who desperately hauled themselves aboard, almost sinking the boat.

‘It was a dreadful night,' Colin Richardson remembers. ‘Rough and bitterly cold: we were continuously swept by icy wind, rain and sleet.
There was a half-hearted attempt at singing to keep up our spirits—but this did not last long for every time we opened our mouths we got them full of salt water. So we resigned ourselves to concentrating silently and grimly on keeping our place in the boat.'

And, indeed, that was an almost impossible task. Colin's lifeboat was swamped, waterlogged, down to its gunwales in the water and kept afloat only by means of its buoyancy tanks. All were sitting waist-deep—for youngsters like Colin, chestdeep—in the freezing water: every time a wave came along, and they came in endless succession all through that endless night, they had to cling on desperately to prevent themselves from being swept away into the sea: when, like Colin, it was impossible even to reach the floorboards with your feet, the chances of holding on and surviving were negligible. But Colin held on—and he survived.

But many failed to hold on, and many died. One by one they died—from exposure, from just drowning where they sat, from that murderous cramp that weakened their last grip on gunwales and on life and let them be swept over the side to the oblivion and swift release of death by drowning.

The lascar seamen died first—ten of them in swift succession: accustomed all their lives to tropical and subtropical heat, they had no defences against that intolerable cold. Then members of the
white crew, and some of the women and children also—up to their chests all night in that freezing water, their hearts just stopped beating. One man went mad and leapt over the side. An old ship's nurse died in Colin's lap after he had spent much time in comforting her, cradling the tired head in his arms, telling her over and over again that the rescue ship was coming. (Mr Richardson, when interviewed recently, did not mention that he had received the King's commendation for bravery for his conduct in the lifeboat that night—surely one of the youngest ever to receive it.)

Dawn came, the sea calmed but the cold was as bitter as ever. Still they died, one by one, but Colin Richardson says his most vivid memory of that day was the sight of an upturned lifeboat with five people clinging to it. ‘When first we spotted them, the five waved at us quite happily. But, as the day wore on, one by one they weakened, lost their hold and disappeared. Five, four, three, two, one…'