I came into possession of many letters exchanged between my paternal great grandparents along with letters from the King, the Minister of War Transport & the shipping company whose ship my great grandfather was working on as a Laundry & Assistant Steward in the Merchant Navy.
The letter I have shared from Hannah, Alfred’s wife, was sent on the 17th December 1942 asking him to send a cable as soon as he received her letter to confirm he was ok. She’d read in the paper that his ship the SS Ceramic had gone down but it was believed to be just ‘German talk’.
The letter was returned to her stamped ‘Unable to Deliver’.
What she was unaware of at the time but feared, was that the report in the paper was true. Her husband Alfred had died on the 6/7th of December.
The White Star Liner Ceramic had been requisitioned in February 1939 as Troop transport for duties out of Australia. It was the largest ship on the Antipodean route and she held the record for the loftiest masts to pass under Sydney Harbour Bridge.
She left Liverpool for St.Helena, Durban & Sydney with 378 passengers- mainly women & children- & 278 crew. On the 7th December, she was west of the Azores when she was torpedoed 3 times by the German submarine U-515. She took about 3 hours to sink. All 656 aboard were lost in violent weather except for one man, Sapper A.E Monday- Royal Engineers- who was taken out of the water by the submarine crew for interrogation.
It was little publicised at home due to general censorship of shipping information. It was a long time later they realised the cause.
After asking her husband to send reassurance that he was well she shares a funny story in her letter about my father. They’d taken him to the primary school he was due to attend & the teacher suggested they let him stay for a while. At playtime he’d found an open gate & walked home on his own! How people continued to live day to day while worrying about loved ones during war time is very difficult to comprehend.
