RMS Empress of Britain (1931)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section, while providing some complete reference citations, includes a list of references or external links, and its verifiability remains partly unclear because it has insufficient in-text citations. You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations. |
 |
|
| Career |  |
|---|---|
| Name: | RMS Empress of Britain |
| Operator: | Canadian Pacific Steamship Company |
| Builder: | John Brown & Company of Clydebank, Scotland |
| Laid down: | November 28, 1928 |
| Launched: | April 5, 1931 |
| Fate: | sunk on October 28, 1940 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Steam passenger liner |
| Tonnage: | 42,348 long tons (43,028 MT) |
| Length: | 760 ft 6 in (231.8 m) |
| Beam: | 97 ft 6 in (29.7 m) |
| Propulsion: | 8 × Yarrow & 1 × Johnson boilers 4 × Parsons turbines, 62500hp on four propellors |
| Speed: | 24 kn (44 km/h) |
The RMS Empress of Britain was an ocean liner built in 1930-1931 by the John Brown shipyard in Scotland & owned by Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. This ship -- the second of three CP vessels to be named Empress of Britain[1] -- regularly traversed the trans-Atlantic route between Canada and Europe until 1922 This Empress was distinguished by the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) prefix in front of her name while in commercial service with Canadian Pacific. When not carrying mail, the ship would have been identified as SS Empress of Britain.[2]
In her time, she was the largest, fastest, and most luxurious ship to sail between England and Canada. She was torpedoed on 28 October 1940 by U-32 and sank. At 42,348 gross tons, she was the largest ship sunk by a U-boat and the largest liner lost during the Second World War.
Contents |
[edit] History
The Empress of Britain was launched on June 11, 1930, started sea trials on April 13, 1931, and started her maiden voyage on May 27, 1931. [3]
She was designed for two purposes: to entice passengers to sail from England to Quebec instead of the more popular Southampton to New York route, and to serve as a luxury cruise ship during the winter. For the latter role her size was kept small enough to use the Panama and Suez canals, though at 760.6 feet (231.84 m) and 42,348 gross tons, she was still impressively large. Empress of Britain was powered by four steam turbine engines. For cruising two of her engines where shut down, and two of her propellers were removed, since speed was not important on a cruise. With all four engines, her speed was 24 knots, making her the fastest ship sailing from England to Canada. Her captain from 1934 to 1937 was Ronald Niel Stuart, VC an Anglo-Canadian First World War veteran who was entitled to fly the Blue Ensign on ships under his command.
The goal of Canadian Pacific was to attract North American Midwesterners from both Canada and the United States to travel by train to Quebec City as opposed to New York City. This was to give them an extra day of smooth sailing. While initially successful, the novelty wore off; potential passengers still preferred to depart from NYC, regardless of where they started from. The Empress was never able to earn her keep. According to William H. Miller from his book The Great Luxury Liners: 1927-1954, the Empress was one of the least profitable liners from the 1930's. Her most eventful crossing was when she carried the Royal Family from England to North America.
Upon Britain's entry into World War II, the Empress of Britain was requisitioned for use as a troop transport. She ended up transporting troops between England and Suez, traveling around the Cape of Good Hope to make the trip.
[edit] Sinking
At around 9:20 AM on October 26, 1940, while traveling along the west coast of Ireland, the Empress of Britain was spotted by a German Focke-Wulf C 200 Condor long-range bomber, commanded by Oberleutnant Bernhard Jope. Jope’s bomber strafed the Empress three times and hit her twice with 250 kg bombs.
It was only after Jope had returned to his home base in northern France that it was discovered which ship he had attacked. A telex reporting the attack was sent to German Supreme Headquarters. Realising the significance of the attack, a reconnaissance plane was sent out to verify it and having done so, the official German news agency reported that the Empress of Britain had been sunk, stating "The Empress of Britain was successfully attacked by German bombers on Saturday morning within the waters of Northern Ireland. The ship was badly hit and began to sink at once. The crew took to their boats."
Despite the ferocity of Jope's attack and the subsequent fires, there were relatively few casualties. However, the bombs had started a raging fire that could not be contained, and began to over take the whole ship. At 9:50 AM, Captain Sapworth gave the order to abandon ship. The fire was concentrated in the midsection of the ship, causing the passengers to head for the bow and stern and hampering launching of the lifeboats. Later that afternoon, the destroyers HMS Echo and Empress arrived. By then, the ship had been evacuated. Of the 643 people onboard, only 45 remained unaccounted for, and only 32 of those were crew members.
The fire had left the ship severely damaged and unable to move under her own power, but she was not sinking and the hull appeared to be intact despite having a slight list. It was therefore decided to attempt to save her and 9:30 AM on 27 October a party from HMS Broke went on board and attached tow ropes. The oceangoing tugs Marauder and Thames had meanwhile arrived on the scene and took the hulk under tow, escorted by Broke and HMS Sardonyx.
The ocean going tugs Marauder and Thames had arrived, and had the task of towing the gutted hulk of the once magnificent Empress. Slowly under the care of the tugs, she began to move, with the Broke and Sardonyx standing by as escorts. The magnificent Empress of Britain although ripped apart by explosions and gutted by fire, was not dead yet. Under the tender care of the salvage tugs and the watchful eye of her escorting destroyers she could yet, with luck, make port. A ship of her capacity was a valuable asset during those dark days of the Second World War; she could be rebuilt and she needed to be rebuilt.
The German submarine U-32 commanded by Hans Jenisch had been informed by radio of the location of the stricken vessel and headed in that direction. He was at first unable to do anything but dive due to the presence of a patrolling aircraft, but later surfaced and that night, using hydrophones (passive sonar), located the ships and closed on them. The destroyers were maintaining zigzag courses and U-32 positioned herself between them and the Empress of Britain, from where she fired two torpedoes. The first detonated prematurely, but the second one hit the Empress of Britain, causing a massive explosion. It appears that the crews of the destroyers initially thought that the explosion was caused by the fires aboard the liner reaching her fuel tanks. Jenisch manoeuvred U-32 into position and fired a third torpedo which impacted just aft of the earlier one.
The Empress of Britain began to fill with water and list heavily. The tugs slipped the tow lines and at 2.05 am on 28th October, the Empress of Britain sank northwest of Bloody Foreland, County Donegal.
[edit] Gold and salvage
It was suspected that the Empress of Britain had been carrying gold when she sank. At the time, the United Kingdom was trying to ship gold to North America to improve its credit. South Africa was a major gold producer, and the Empress had stopped in Cape Town, South Africa before heading to England. Most of the gold went from Cape Town to Sydney, Australia, and then to America, but there were not enough suitable ships to move that gold, and it was getting stuck in Sydney. Therefore, it was theorized that the Empress may have been used to take gold from South Africa to England were it could then be moved to America.
On January 8, 1949, the Daily Mail published a story about a salvage attempt that was going to be made that summer. There were no follow-ups, and the story contained several errors. In 1985, a potential salvager got a letter from the Department of Transport Shipping Policy Unit saying that there was gold on board, but that it had been recovered.
In 1995, a group of salvagers found the Empress of Britain lying upside-down in 500 feet of water. Using saturation diving, they entered the wreck and found that the fire had destroyed most of the decks, leaving a largely empty shell rising from the sea floor. The ship’s bullion room, however, was still intact. Inside was a skeleton, but no gold. It is now suspected that the gold was unloaded during the period of time when the Empress of Britain was on fire and its passengers were evacuated. The body found inside the bullion room may have been from someone involved in this period of emergency salvage.[4]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ The first SS Empress of Britain (1906) was built for CP; and the third SS Empress of Britain (1956) was also built for CP.
- ^ Ship List: Description of Empress of Britain
- ^ Empress of Britain (II) 1931 - 1940. The Great Ocean Liners. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
- ^ Pickford, Nigel (1999). Lost Treasure Ships of the Twentieth Century. National Geographic. ISBN 0792274725.
[edit] Further reading
- Seamer, Robert "The Floating Inferno", Patrick Stephens Limited (1990) ISBN 1-85260-324-0
- Harvey, Clive RMS Empress Of Britain: Britain's Finest Liner, Tempus Publishing, Limited (February, 2005) ISBN 0-7524-3169-2
- Musk, George. (1981). Canadian Pacific: The Story of the Famous Shipping Line. Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles. 10-ISBN 0-715-37968-2
- Watson-Smyth, Kate. "Salvage team dives for pounds 1bn wartime treasure", The Independent, November 9 1998. Retrieved on 2008-03-02.
