SFA News

Issue: 39

Oct 2017

Message from the Editor

I n my article about Shell’s Nineteen Fifties Newbuilding Programme in the

last issue of SFA News, I mentioned that Hemisinus was to have been fitted with gas turbine propulsion. I had read this somewhere but had no proof, so during the summer I spent a day in the Wirral Archives looking for evidence. This is described in my article on page 6.

Thanks to all who responded to my que-ry about La Mont boilers. Wirral Archives also revealed more on this subject, which I hope to put together in a future issue.

Man on a Wire

Shell Fleet Association News Editor: Mike Riley “Brackendel”, Firfields, WEYBRIDGE, KT13 0UD Phone: 01932 846128 E-mail: SFAhistory@yahoo.co.uk

wo men’s stories of capture

A ny sensible ninety-five-year-old would baulk at the idea of shooting

across a gorge on a Zip Wire but retired G.P. Dr Geoff Birch enjoyed it last year, so why not have another go? The scene was Ford Castle, a mediaeval fortress commanding the River Till in Northum-berland. Five hundred years ago, James IV spent the night here before heading out to meet his fate across the river at Flodden Field. It is now used as residen-tial centre for young people but we were there with a special dispensation.

Chatting to Dr Birch at Ford last April, revealed that he hadn’t originally con-sidered a medical career as remotely possible—he’d left school to work as a factory hand in his native Nuneaton and might never have aspired beyond that but for the outbreak of war in 1939.

Fate took him to sea as a radio officer, capture on the high seas and incarcera-tion at Milag Nord, Germany, where, instead of being the “Man on a Wire”, he was just another “Man Behind the Wire”. Like many other ex-POWs, Geoff never spoke about that period in his life but, at the age of eighty-nine, decided to record his experiences in a series of stories written for his daughters.

Sadly, Dr Geoffrey Birch, well-respected retired local GP in Co Durham, died a few months after our brief talk. Although not intended for publication, he felt it sad to think of how many stories of bravery; endurance and the optimism of human nature rising over adversity have been lost for ever, so he donated a copy of his stories to the Imperial War Museum. Among his fellow prisoners in Germany was Shell’s Captain Stanley Algar, whose biography “Goodbye Old Chap” also de-scribed life at Milag Nord. This article draws from both these sources.

At seventeen, Geoff Birch was too young to join the army, but persuaded his par-ents to let him train as a sea going wire-less operator, which he did at Colwyn Bay Wireless College. Six months later, having obtained his Postmaster Gen-eral’s Certificate, he joined his first ship, Bristol City Line’s Montreal City, as jun-ior of two Radio Officers. After two trips carrying T.N.T. from Canada to the U.K., he was sent home on leave prior to re-joining. Leave was interrupted by an ur-gent call to join Lamport & Holt’s Balzac whose Third Radio Officer had developed acute appendicitis. Balzac was waiting to sail from Port Talbot with a cargo of war

Merchant Navy prisoners at Milag Nord, 1945

supplies for the Army in Egypt. This was his first bit of good luck as Montreal City was later torpedoed in mid-Atlantic and lost with all hands.

After safely reaching Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope, Balzac sailed for Burma. Having departed Rangoon with a cargo of teak, rice and beeswax for Liverpool, she was intercepted in the South Atlantic early on 22 June 1941 by the German Hilfskreuzer (Auxiliary Cruiser) Atlantis, disguised as the Dutch motor-ship Brastagi. The raider managed to close to within 5 miles before being spotted by her victim, which then radioed RRR, in-creased speed and began to zigzag, stern-on. Although the odds were against the 10 knot Balzac, with her 4” vintage gun aft, she almost got away with it. The 18-knot raider, poured forty salvos (192 x 150mm and 53 x 75mm rounds), at the vessel’s retreating stern with only four hits, until two of the raider’s forward 150mm guns and No.5 gun overheated, and the recoil systems jammed. The raid-er was about give up the chase, when to his surprise, the freighter was seen to stop and lower boats.

In his account, Geoff said: “It was early morning and I was asleep in my bunk when the first shells from Atlantis struck Balzac. Quickly slipping on some clothes, I made for the wireless station, which I found had taken a direct hit and was in ruins. The Radio Officer on duty had es-caped somehow and was nowhere to be seen. I managed to find the codes we used for relaying messages still intact in their lead-weighted canvas bag and threw them over the side. Shortly after-wards I was hit in the bottom of my back when a shell burst only a few feet away from me. This was my second piece of good luck as if I had been any nearer I

would have been killed as were other of the crew and, if I had been facing the other way, maybe I would not have had any daughters for whom to write these stories. This was ten days before my nineteenth birthday.”

Three of her crew of fifty-one had lost their lives during the attack, while an-other died later on board the Atlantis. Once the survivors had been picked up, the 21-year-old ship was quickly sent to the bottom and Atlantis headed south, towards the Cape of Good Hope, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, taking her prisoners with her.

Exactly three months earlier and some 1,400 miles north, the Anglo-Saxon tanker Agnita was in ballast on her way from Freetown to Caripito, Venezuela, when the Third Officer sighted a ship right ahead, heading south. The Master, Captain Stanley Algar, who was on his way to breakfast, said she was probably bound for the Plate but to get Sparks to warm up the radio just in case the stranger should act suspiciously. Stanley related “As I sat down, the alarm sound-ed and as I dashed to the bridge, I saw the ship heading straight for us. I said, tell Sparks to send the ‘enemy raider’ message, which would also give our position. By this time, the alien vessel, in only a few minutes, had hoisted the Ger-man flag, dropped its false sides to re-veal its guns, and hoisted a two-flag signal, which we all knew meant ‘stop’.”

The raider was Kormoran, which had been launched at Kiel in 1938 as a fast diesel-electric cargo-passenger liner for the Hamburg-Amerika Line was convert-ed in 1940 to become the largest of the German Hilfskreuzers. She had a formi-dable main armament of six 150mm guns, plus 1 x 75mm, 1 x Twin 37mm Flak, 2 x 37mm Army Anti-Tank guns, 5 x 20mm Flak, six torpe-do tubes and could carry 360 mines.

The raider’s signal was reinforced by several salvoes—one hitting the engine room. Against such opposi-tion, Stanley quickly realised that resistance would serve no useful purpose and, having dumped the secret papers, gave the order to stop and then abandon ship.

Due to the damage done to her engine room, the raider’s commander decided to sink her. Scuttling charges were set and exploded, but she would not sink, being kept afloat by her empty tanks. Agnita was the world's first purpose-built LPG carrier and her twelve cylindri-cal pressure vessel tanks must have add-ed considerably to her buoyancy. After nine 150 mm shells had been put into her without success, she was finally sunk by a torpedo, and her thirty-eight-man crew was picked up.

A few days later, Kormoran captured the Canadian tanker, Canadolite. Her crew joined those from Agnita while the ship itself, being undamaged, was des-patched to Bordeaux under a prize crew. After spending two weeks on Kormo-ran, her prisoners were transferred to the homebound supply tanker Rudolf Albrecht, which arrived at Bordeaux in Vichy-controlled France on 03 May 1941. After being held in a camp outside the city for nine days, the prisoners were put in railway trucks for a horrendous 900 mile, 4½ day journey to Bremervorde, Lower Saxony, the nearest station to their destination—Stalag XB, near the village of Sandbostel.

Before they could settle down, Stanley accompanied by the chief engineer, chief officer & third officer from Agnita were taken to Wilhelmshaven naval

The merchant raider Atlantis, formerly Hansa Line’s Goldenfels, pictured with a dummy funnel.

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base for interrogation, returning to Sandbostel some five weeks later, as Stanley put it “ready to take an honours degree in malnutrition.”

Stanley joined another Shell master at Sandbostel—James Anderson, whose ship Simnia had been sunk by the battle-cruiser Gneisenau on 15 March 1941. A total of fifty-four people from Simnia were taken on board Gneisenau, joining Eagle Oil master Harry Shotton, whose ship, San Casimiro, had been captured earlier on the same day. The captives were landed at Brest a week later.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Geoff Birch had spent three months cooped up in Atlantis as the raider continued her progress across the Pacific. On 24 Sep 1941, Atlantis arrived at rendezvous point “Balbo” between New Zealand and Pitcairn Island, where she met up with fellow raider Komet and her prize Kota Nopan, which was being re-fuelled from the tanker Münsterland.

m.v. Kota Nopan was a 7,000-ton car-go-passenger ship built for Rotterdam Lloyd that Komet had captured off the Galapagos Islands during the previous month. Geoff and his fellow captives were put aboard the former Dutch ship, which then departed for Bor-deaux via Cape Horn. The prisoners were locked in the centrecastle, where the deckhead was too low to stand upright. Some slept in hammocks slung above the less fortunate majority who slept on the steel deck. The only sani-tation was a half oil drum that was periodically emptied over the lee side.

They suffered seven weeks of this be-fore arriving at Bordeaux on 16 Nov. Like Captain Algar, Geoff had two weeks in the French transit camp fol-lowed by the long rail journey, in con-ditions not so different to those he had endured on Kota Nopan.

By this time, Sandbostel was gradually being emptied of its M.N. personnel, so Geoff and a group of other junior officers from Balzac, were confined in the naval barracks at Wilhelmshaven until early January 1942, when they were moved to the permanent camp at Milag Nord. Captain Algar and his companions moved there shortly after-wards on 5th February.

Conditions at Sandbostel deteriorated rapidly after the RN and MN prisoners had left, with Soviet POWs being espe-cially targeted—thousands died from disease, starvation and brutal treat-ment by the guards.

Generally, Marlag-Milag prisoners were treated correctly according to the Geneva Convention and had access to Red Cross aid. Although food was nev-er deliberately withheld, heavy reli-ance was placed on Red Cross food parcels and Stanley and Geoff both

talked of constant hunger. Neither man smoked, so they were able to use their cigarette allowance to trade with camp guards to buy extras.

Stanley mentions that men from the two Shell ships received small food parcels from the group’s company in neutral Por-tugal but this stopped in early 1942 be-cause of currency and other difficulties. However, Shell employees continued to receive parcels of cigarettes or tobacco for the remainder of the war.

For Stanley, one of the best “features” of the camp was the library. He says it be-gan modestly but the number of books soared with contributions from other prisoners, the Red Cross, POW societies, shipowners and other sources, growing to 7,000 volumes, 2,942 of which were on technical subjects—agriculture, archi-tecture, engineering, law, commerce, languages, medicine, navigation, insur-ance, physics, seamanship…

Despite many disadvantages, a school flourished with many subjects being stud-ied. Stanley resumed the Pitman’s short-hand course that he’d abandoned three decades before and also joined a class of forty learning Malay but, in less than a month, he was the sole survivor. Other courses were more successful and prison-ers passed examinations set by the Board of Trade, City & Guilds and the Civil and Electrical Engineers’ Institutions.

Geoff confessed to being fairly aimless as a youth but had decided early on in his captivity that his misfortune had to be turned into a chance to better himself after release. He just couldn’t think of what he wanted to become but this changed in a sort of ‘eureka moment’ one day in the camp urinal. Striking up a con-versation with the man standing next to him, he idly asked what he intended to do after the war. ‘Oh’ he replied ‘I’m go-ing to be a doctor’. Geoff says ‘Even be-fore I had done up my trousers, I knew that this was what I intended to do as well. Life is determined by chance and chance had been kind to me that day. I must hang my head a little when I tell my readers that at that time I was not moti-vated by high ideals or a desire to help suffering humanity—that came much later in my life when I was at medical school. In fact, I had very little idea what

The Sandbostel camp was originally opened during the Depression by the Lutheran Church to house out-of-work single people who were employed in public works such as road building. It took on a more sinister role in 1933 when the Nazi Party took it over to con-fine “undesirables” and then with the outbreak of war, the Bremen Military District, expanded and divided it into four sub-camps for prisoners of war, the first two being run by the German Navy (“Kriegsmarine”):

a “Royal Navy” camp (“Marinelager” or “Marlag”)

an internment camp for enemy civil-ians including British Merchant Navy (“Internierungslager” or “Ilag”— hence “MarineInternierungslager” or “Milag”)

a camp for non-commissioned sol-diers (“Stammlager” or “Stalag”)

a camp for officers (“Offizierslager” or “Oflag”)

Although initially designed for 10,000, this was expanded to 30,000 with the Fall of France in 1940. With the German Invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, it became extremely overcrowd-ed, so the officers were moved to Oflags elsewhere and by the autumn of 1941, the Royal Navy and M.N. personnel be-gan to be moved 11 miles south to two camps that had been established at a former Luftwaffe training camp, about 17 miles NE of Bremen. near the village of Westertimke. The two camps were about 300 metres apart and were col-lectively known by the Germans as “Marlag und Milag Nord”.

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doctors did, but those I had seen before the war seemed very well off, lived in big houses, drove big cars, didn't seem to work too hard and people were very re-spectful to them. How little of the reality of a doctor's life I knew then but I’d de-cided and that was that.’

The first thing he had to do was to get qualified to go to university—something that few of his class and generation man-aged to achieve. He heard the University of London had sent a letter to the camp to the effect that anyone wishing to take their Matriculation exams could apply stating the subjects they wished to take. He enrolled at once, choosing English, French, Mathematics, Electricity & Mag-netism and Mechanics from the subjects allowed by the Germans. All he had to do then was find some way of learning

about these subjects and hope that the examination papers would arrive. He acquired a dictionary and spent many hours each day learning new words with a friend and testing each other on their meaning. Among the other captives, he found someone who had been a Maths Teacher in ‘Civvy Street’ who agreed to help him.

All these activities were organised by the prisoners themselves. Other peo-ple got involved in sport and indoor entertainment like debates, theatre and music. In the camp were passen-gers and entertainers, including the band from the liner Orama, which had been sunk at Narvik. These all helped to keep spirits up but there were still those who spent their time wandering aimlessly round the wire or playing cards for cigarettes or for relatively worthless Kriegsgefangenen Lager-geld—the camp’s internal currency.

Stanley and Geoff both talked about the business of staying warm in the bitterly cold winters. Although each room had a stove, there was never enough fuel to burn and it was com-mon for the windows to have several inches of ice hanging on the inside. After supplies of fuel were stopped in November 1944, trees around the camp began to disappear. All the wooden fencing, seats, shutters and even the structural parts of barracks

were consumed in the stoves—the screening around each hole in the com-munal latrine had long gone, so shyness and prudery had no place at Milag Nord.

Add to all this: the stench, bed-bugs, meagre rations, the worry of not know-ing what was happening at home, armed guards, barbed wire… it was not a pleas-ant place to be.

On 17th April 1945, the camp comman-dant handed over to his second-in-command, who intended to hand the camp over to the British Army on their arrival but two days later German tanks and artillery were positioned next to the camps. The prisoners responded to the threat of a pitched battle on their door-step by digging slit trenches. The artillery fired from the positions next to the camps, but fortunately had moved away by the time the British Guards Armoured Division liberated the camps on 27 April 1945.

Former members of Our Association known to have been at Milag Nord:

S. Algar, master, Agnita

J.R Anderson, master, Simnia

W.O. Brown, chief officer, Simnia (later Captain)

J. Campkin, third officer, Eulima (later Captain)

R.C. Durrant, apprentice, Simnia (later Captain)

H.R. Shotton, master, San Casimiro (later Commodore of the Eagle Oil Fleet)

In October 1945, Geoff Birch became an undergraduate of the University of Lon-don reading medicine at The Medical College of St. Bartholomew's Hospital.

The London Gazette of 16 Nov 1945, announced that Jack Parker, Fourth Engi-neer Officer of Agnita was among eight awarded an M.B.E. for services rendered to his fellow prisoners at Milag Nord.

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He will be sworn in during December.

There is no jury system in Guernsey. The Jurats act as a jury, and are judges of fact (thus guilt or innocence) in both civil and criminal cases.

Under the guidance of a judge, Jurats also deliver the sentence, although Peter, who is the first mariner to be appointed ‘for several hundred years’, understands that ‘hanging from the yardarm’ is no longer an option.

Election as a Jurat is the highest honour that Guernsey can confer on a resident of the Island. They are rightly accorded a special status within the community, and are styled 'Jurat' for the remainder of their lives after they have retired from life on the Bench.

Peter now has to swap his captain’s hat for the ceremo-nial ‘Toque’ and we are hoping to be able to have a pic-ture for the next issue!

C ongratulations to SFA member Captain Peter Gill, who has been elected to the position of Jurat of the Royal Court of Guernsey.

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S hip’s postcards have been sold on our ships since around

1950 and have continued to be a popular way for people

to send a note home saying “this is my ship”.

Or is it?

If they were on any of Shell’s twenty-five T2s, a more accurate

statement may have been “my ship looks something like this”.

Here are two T2 postcards—one British, one Dutch—identical

but for the name. Our collection has eight more like this.

It was obviously far quicker and cheaper to take just one

photo of a freshly painted ship at sea and then set Shell’s

graphic artist to work re-touching the name on the bow!

When you’ve seen one T2... Shell graphic artists in the pre-“Photoshop” era

As well as name changes, graphic artists could modify other

details as shown in this series of photos of San Emiliano.

At the top is the original picture, showing the ship after her

Eagle emblem was replaced by a Shell. When Shell’s graphic

artist used it for the postcard, he made a subtle change.

The tug mysteriously re-appeared five years later, when the

funnel turned red and the ship became Hemitrochus!

Oi!

Where’s my tug?

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E xperience of working in Shell Centre suggested that the likelihood of

records relating to the design of Hemis-inus having survived within Shell for sixty years would be zilch. In this period, not only had the Company gone through numerous reorganisations but the office itself had moved at least four times. Keeping paper records costs money and commercial pressures mean that much regularly ends up in the skip.

This can be frustrating as the research-ers tasked with writing “A History of Royal Dutch Shell” will testify—the spar-sity of early records within the Shell system meant they had to look else-where, eventually finding what they wanted in the small town of Roubaix in Northern France in the archives of Rothschild frères!

A better bet for Hemisinus would be the shipbuilder’s records. Fortunately many of Cammell Laird’s records have been deposited at Wirral Archives in Birken-head. There are over 2,500 archives in the U.K. ranging from modern, purpose-built record repositories with bright, well-equipped reading rooms, such as The National Archives at Kew and the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, down to cramped, inconvenient ad-juncts to existing buildings elsewhere.

The Wirral Archives sits somewhere between these two extremes—a suc-cessful example of where an architec-turally-interesting yet redundant struc-ture has been converted to a new use.

In this case, the building was originally a railway goods shed built by the Chesh-ire Lines Committee to serve Birken-head’s Woodside Landing Stage. It was later used for offices—Littlewoods Pools was a tenant for a time—and has now been refurbished to provide two floors of modern office space for Wirral Borough Council. Their archives are located on the lower ground floor-where the railway tracks used to be.

Half a mile to the south is the present Cammell Laird shipyard. In the late 1930s, this yard built its first three ships for Anglo-Saxon, including the Compa-ny’s first dedicated bitumen carrier—the 9,500 dwt Pomella. Post-war, starting with the order for Volsella in 1948, and ending with the delivery of Opalia in 1963, there was an unbroken period of activity where the yard was engaged in building ships for Shell.

However, this was to be Shell’s last ship from Cammell Laird—a sister ship, origi-nally ordered by Eagle Oil and to be named San Dunstano, was cancelled. Cammell Laird was nationalised along the rest of the British shipbuilding in-dustry in 1977 and the yard closed in 1993. Since then it has been reborn twice and is currently in operation un-der new ownership, who have acquired the rights to the Cammell Laird name.

Archived records

Among the documents preserved in the archives is a series of correspondence between Cammell Laird and Shell Tank-

ers (or Anglo-Saxon Petroleum as it was at the beginning of the file).

In 1950 Cammell Laird received the first of an eventual five orders for 18,000 ton tankers with steam turbine propulsion—Nos 1218 [Hemidonax], 1219 [Hemifusus], 1225 [Hemiglypta], 1234 [Hemiplecta] & 1235 [Hemisinus]. At this time, Shell’s Marine Research & Devel-opment Division, led by John Lamb, were experimenting with gas turbine propul-sion and in October 1951, Auris sailed from the Tyne with a gas turbine in-stalled in place of one of her four diesel engines.

The following April, John Lamb wrote to Cammell Laird to say that Auris had completed her second trip across the Atlantic propelled solely by her 1,200 b.h.p. gas turbine, which had operated continuously for 720 hours with perfor-mance exceeding his expectations. He went on to say “the results obtained using this small unit in the Auris con-vince me that the gas turbine will be the propelling power for future ships and I am prepared to place an order for an 18,000 ton tanker propelled by two gas turbines”.

Cammell Laird agreed to co-operate in a project involving British Thomson-Houston of Rugby, that would replace the proposed geared steam turbine plant of 1235 (Hemisinus) by a gas tur-bine/electric propulsion system utilising two 4,150 h.p. gas turbines.

A Trip to the Archives Hemisinus and gas turbine propulsion

The Cheshire Lines Building—home to the Wirral Archives Service

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In the event, technical difficulties and mounting costs meant that John Lamb’s scheme was scaled back: only one of the two gas turbines was built and this was installed, not in the 18,000 ton Hemis-inus (which was completed as a conven-tion steam turbine tanker), but the 12,000 ton Auris. The original timetable slipped drastically and it was not until 19th August 1959 that the work was fi-nally completed on Auris, where the part diesel/part gas turbine plant and electric drive had been replaced by a single gas turbine with geared drive. Sad-ly, John Lamb did not live to see this event, having died 12 months earlier.

BTH’s initial proposal was to have two sets of gas turbines (H.P. & L.P.) each set driving a synchronous induction pro-pulsion motor, the two motors being connected to the pro-peller shaft in one motor frame. This was BTH’s convention-al scheme, as used on Shell’s turbo-electric ship Helix, in which the motors are run up to 20% speed, synchronised with the propulsion motors and the speed then varied as to the speed of the turbine and alternator.

However, the first major design modification was made when it was discovered that the machinery weight was excessive and the arrangement was modified—dropping the double propulsion motor and substituting two high speed, high slip induction motors driving the propeller through a gearbox. It was estimated this would save about 30 tons. An ‘in-line’ arrangement was also adopted.

Proposed Gas Turbine Propulsion

Schemes for Hemisinus

Significant dates in this saga

Aug 1951 #1235 ordered as geared steam turbine for Oct 1956

Apr 1952 #1235 to be gas turbine instead

Jun 1952 #1235 reverts to steam turbine with new ship #1260 being a gas turbine

Jan 1954 #1260 cancelled; gas turbines to be installed in #1235

Sep 1954 Costs rise to double original estimate. Shell decide #1235 to be completed as steam turbine—as original steam turbines had been sent to Denmark for installation in Hima, new set ordered for Hemisinus. Project scaled back— Auris to modify and trade but viewed as experimental ship.

Aug 1957 #1235 Hemisinus delivered (10 months late)

Aug 1959 Auris conversion completed

Aug 1962 Auris scrapped

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T his building will be familiar to any-one watching any of the “Family

Tree” television programmes that have become so popular lately.

The Public Record Office was created in 1838 to ‘keep safely the public records’. The building on the left, with its rather brutalist architecture, opened when the PRO moved to Kew in 1977. As well as document repository space and offices, it contains three public reading rooms, a bookshop and a café.

Between 2003 and 2006, the PRO merged with three other government bodies—the Royal Commission on Histor-ic Manuscripts, H.M. Stationery Office and the Office of Public Sector Infor-mation—to form The National Archives.

Officially, the name includes the definite article—thus ‘The National Archives’ or ‘TNA’ for short.

It is the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, and the national archive for England and Wales and has one of the largest collections in the world with over 11 million historical gov-ernment and public records. “from Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files” to quote their website.

Its catalogue, called Discovery, is also accessible on-line and allows searches to be made not just of its own collections but those of an increasing number of other archives across the U.K.

Tyne & Wear Archives is located in the Newcastle Discovery Museum, which is housed in the old Co-operative Whole-sale Society building. Members who attended the 2010 Autumn Reunion Weekend in Newcastle may remember strolling around the “Story of Tyne” gal-lery and its model of Serenia? The archives are directly below this area.

These archives contain a large collection of shipbuilding records from the area. With over 150 Shell/Eagle Oil ships hav-ing built on the Tyne and another 50 on the Wear, this a significant collection.

About 70 ships were built for the Group on the Tees and Teesside Archives, lo-cated in a former GPO building in Mid-dlesbrough, has records from Furness Shipbuilding and Smiths Dock.

Glasgow University Archives hold rec-ords from yards on the Clyde, where another 75 Group ships were built.

The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) has a collection of Har-land & Wolff records. The shipyard, which built nearly fifty Shell ships, is within sight of PRONI’s new purpose-built facility situated within Belfast’s Titanic District.

The editor would be interested in hear-ing from anyone who has visited or is thinking of visiting any of these archives.

The National Archives at Kew, formerly the Public Record Office

This can reveal some unexpected re-sults—a recent search for information about the ‘T2’ Theliconus got a ‘hit’, not on TNA’s Board of Trade collection, but on a archive in Newcastle called “Seven Stories, National Centre for Chil-dren’s Books”! The item was a photo-graph of the ship taken in Curaçao in 1947 and signed by the Master. It had been in the papers of Kaye Webb MBE, editor of Puffin Books and wife of car-toonist Richard Searle.

The Master was Captain Arthur Clat-worthy, who we know from our records was chairman of our Association when he died in 1962. He had been seconded to the British Ministry of War Transport during the Second World War, spending time in Halifax, Nova Scotia and later New York organising convoys. He has no obvious connection to Kaye Webb but perhaps they met in New York or were fellow passengers across the At-lantic at some stage—who knows! He was the first master of Theliconus when it was purchased from the Ameri-can Government, sailing from New York on 24 May 1947.

Unfortunately, the National Maritime Museum’s Caird Library catalogue is not linked to Discovery at present, which is great pity. Maritime sources that ARE linked include:

The National Archives