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 overcrowded 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, chest — deep — 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…'
Rescue came at 4.00 p.m. when the destroyer HURRICANE spotted them and came alongside. Only one person was able to climb up the lowered scrambling nets — 25-year-old Angus MacDonald, the ship's carpenter in charge of the boat, and due to whose magnificent seamanship all the survivors undoubtedly owed their lives. All the survivors… ten out of the original forty.
Kenneth Sparks' adventures form a strange contrast to those of Colin Richardson. He too, was in a crowded lifeboat — there were no less than forty-six people in it — but, instead of being eighteen hours in the boat, as Colin was, before being rescued, he and his forty-five companions spent eight days and nights on the surface of the broad and hostile Atlantic — and all forty-six of them miraculously survived.
The difference in survival ratios appears unaccountable at first sight — until it is remembered that Kenneth Sparks' boat did not become swamped and waterlogged, and those in it were not condemned to sit in crouching immobility with the ice-cold water up to their chests: with a judicious sharing out of clothes and covering and huddling together for mutual warmth, even the chill night air of the Atlantic can be borne: it is only when one is immersed in the freezing water itself that there can be no defence.
They also had another great advantage — a means of propulsion through the water. Colin Richardson's lifeboat had had all the oars swept away in the first few moments, but on Kenneth's boat there were no oars to be lost. There was, instead, a screw attached to a long driving shaft, turned by means of vertically mounted push-pull levers between the seats. Not only did this give them directional stability and enable the man in charge, Third Officer Purvis, to keep head to stern on to the worst of the seas, but it also had the great advantage that it could be worked by anyone, the exercise providing life-giving warmth on even the coldest of nights.
They suffered, of course — they suffered cruelly. The cold and exposure were with them all the time — Kenneth spent two months in hospital after his rescue — so were the discomfort and sheer physical fatigue of holding on in the heavy seas. They had food and drink, but not enough; hunger, thirst and sleeplessness were part of their every waking thought. Kenneth Sparks is convinced that he and the five other children aboard that boat owed their survival to Miss Cornish, an official escort later honoured for her courage: she spent nearly all her waking hours in massaging the hands and feet of the children to keep the life-warming blood circulating, giving them exercises and telling them countless stories to keep their minds off their desperate predicament. It says much for the entire success of her efforts when Kenneth says that no one among them ever lost hope of being rescued. And rescued they finally were, located in the first instance by a patrolling plane, and then picked up by a destroyer that took them safely home to Scotland.
Such, then, is the tragic story of the CITY OF BENARES, surely the most pathetic and heart-rending story of the war at sea. It is reasonable to hope that not even the most ruthless U-boat captain would have torpedoed the CITY OF BENARES had he known that there were a hundred children aboard, but speculation is no consolation and makes the story no less dreadful.
A dreadful story, but not without its splendour. Apart from Colin and Kenneth and his five companions, only twelve other children survived. A pitiful handful. But it was to give a chance of life to this pitiful handful that dozens of adults out of the 163 crew and passengers gave their own lives willingly and without thought of self.
Who, for instance, was the man who towed a raft away from the sinking ship, just as it was in deadly danger of being sucked under, saw the children on board safely on a lifeboat, turned back again, towed another raft with a woman and four children through the huge seas towards another lifeboat, turned away again into the darkness to search for other survivors and was never seen again?
We do not know, nor does it matter. All we can know is that this man who selflessly gave his own life, would never have thought of recognition nor cared for it had he been given it. An unknown man, a nameless man, but he remains for ever as the symbol of the spirit of the CITY OF BENARES.
The Gold Watch
His watch was the pride of our captain's life. It was of massive construction, being no less than three inches in diameter; it was made of solid gold; it was beautifully engraved with cabalistic designs of extraordinary intricacy; and finally, it was attached to a chain, whose dimensions, with regard to both length and circumference, had to be seen to be believed. The chain also, needless to say, was made of gold. Anyone who had the temerity to doubt this last fact, was handed the chain and coldly asked to observe for himself that it was stamped on every link.
In addition to the aforementioned merits, the watch, our captain claimed, was completely moisture-proof. We
