A Survivor's Tale
(Page 1 of 5... A story by Trevor Reeve, HMS Jervis Bay Association.)
This is
a story that I had been trying to write since 2003, but it was not until some
seven years later that I had my first opportunity to finally put pen to paper,
for a number of different reasons, which will become clear. I have always been
intrigued by a paragraph in
George
Pollock's 1958 book 'The Jervis Bay' which states the
following on page 188 (hardback edition):-
"So of the ship's company of two hundred and fifty-four who
sailed with Captain Fogarty Fegen, only sixty-five survived. One of these, a
middle-aged engineer, collapsed and died as a result of the delayed effects of
the action, the day he arrived back in Liverpool some weeks later."
This has always fascinated me. To start with of course, there were actually
two hundred and fifty-five men on board HMS Jervis Bay during her epic battle
with the 'Admiral Scheer', though Pollock is right in that there were just
sixty five survivors picked up by the 'Stureholm'. And of course the most
important item in this paragraph is of these sixty-five men, who died the day
that he landed in Liverpool on his return to England?
We have to look at what Pollock states. The man was middle-aged and a member
of the engineering staff. Just what does one class as being middle-aged? Forty
years of age... forty-five... fifty ? And an engineer ?
Of those listed as engineering staff on the
officers photograph
on the 'HMSJervisBay.com' website, there were the officers Guy Byam-Corstiaens
(referred to as just Guy Byam), John Hewitt Currie, Harold Gordon Moss and
Arthur John Robertson. Byam, Currie & Robertson were young men and so not
middle-aged.
So was the deceased man, Moss ? Apparently not, as he lived a great many years
after the 1940 tragedy. In fact on the photograph, only Moss is pictured. Byam,
Currie and Urquhart are either not pictured (Byam) or indeed not listed (Currie
& Urquhart.)
So, we can then turn to the ship's ratings. The fourteen Canadian survivors
would not be returning to England, so the two engine room articifers (Dalton
Greene and Ken Marginson) along with the five stokers (if you can class them as
part of the engineering staff), would all have to be discounted from the
equation.
Of the forty-four British ratings, stokers George Crowson, Shedrack Ellmes
and John McConnell are not listed on the Commonwealth Grave Commission (CWGC)
website as dying during WW2 and I know that stoker/greaser Dennis Drury
attended the crew re-unions at the Marylebone Station Restaurant, London from
1946 onwards, so neither can he be our man.
And so, the trail of the mystery man goes cold. Even a word with my good
friend Harold E.Wright (HMS Jervis Bay historian in Canada) fails to deliver an
answer. We both agree that George Pollock had to be wrong in his book
statement. The CWGC listed the only two crew survivors to die during WW2 are
engineering officer Guy Byam (killed when his plane got shot down over Berlin,
working for the BBC as a news reporter for radio on 3rd February, 1945), and
Randolph William Urquhart (listed as 2nd Radio Officer) on 13th August, 1942
(cause of death unknown). All sixty-three of the other crew survivors got
through WW2 more or less intact, (I.E. James 'Slinger' Wood lost a hand in a
later conflict for example.)
Even another website (www.unithistories.com
- which lists what happened to officers in WW2) failed to give any further
information regarding our nine surviving officers, but more importantly those
from the engineering staff of the ship. In fact, it appeared to use the same
photographic evidence and information (Tribune photograph) that the 'Jervis
Bay' website does to identify its officers and their relevant ranks etc. So,
this website had no photographs of officers (survivors Robertson & Urquhart
along with deceased officers such as Newton & Leddra along with others
too), as well as information that was not updated, or possibly even incorrect.
And even in 2007, no further gain could be achieved in trying to find out
what on earth Pollock had meant by his page 188 statement. It surely did just
have to be an error on his part, didn't it ?
Continue reading
Page 2 (of 5) "A Survivor's Tale"...
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