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
