The death of a husband

There is a recurring theme in my family of fathers who died young. This was for a variety of reasons, from illness to suicide to accidental death. Several of them died leaving their wives with young children to raise - a prospect that must have been quite terrifying for the women involved. They survived in a number of different ways and I will share some of their stories with you here.

Mary Munro
Mary was 30 years old and pregnant with her fourth child when her husband William Drysdale died in 1892. His death was sudden and tragic. William was a doctor in the town of Garelochhead in Scotland when he administered himself with a dose of poison, mistaking it for medicine. He immediately realised his mistake and called for medical aid. Three other doctors tried to save him, but he died a few hours later. The couple had only recently moved to the area so, not only was Mary left pregnant and with three young children, but she was also isolated from friends and family. 

By the 1901 census she was living about 50 miles away with her children and her older sister. They were both living by their own means. With no-one in the family working they must have had family money or been receiving assistance of some kind. Ten years later they had moved to Surrey where they were living in what appears to be a quite respectable area. All of her children appear to be educated and her sons went on to have good jobs, so it seems likely she had some kind of inheritance or family allowance that allowed her to survive and prosper despite the loss of her husband.

Peggy Drysdale
Poor Peggy. She not only had a father who died tragically, but a husband who did as well. Mary's daughter, Peggy was 3 when her father died. As an adult, she married a photographer called Harold Turnbull and moved to Kenya (then British East Africa) where he had been given a job working for a newspaper. Their son, also called Harold, was born in 1917. In 1919, after the end of the First World War, Peggy visited England with her young son. It was a long journey by sea and she planned to stay in England for a few months. Harold remained in Kenya to work at the newspaper. Three months after her arrival in England she received a telegram telling her that her husband was dead. He had been electrocuted by an iron.

The inquiry into his death tells us that Harold had installed some DIY wiring in his office so that his assistant could iron his clothes for him. The wiring wasn't earthed and the voltage was too high so the casing around the wire cracked. When Harold touched the wiring he was unable to let go of the iron. His colleagues came running to help, but to no avail. His hands and the area around his heart were burnt black.

Peggy returned to Africa with her son, but she was not as lucky as her mother. She received no compensation for her husband's death because it was caused by his own error. He should not have been installing his own wiring in the company's building for personal use. With no income and no means of assistance she was forced to place young Harold in an orphanage and go out to work. Perhaps unsurprisingly she married two years later, to a farmer, and was then able to take her son out of the orphanage. Where they were living was very remote though. There were a few villages nearby, but their nearest white neighbours were 100 miles away. 

When Harold was seven, Peggy made the decision to send him to England so he could be educated. This must have been so difficult for her after having lost him once already, but she took him to England and left him with his aunt for her to raise him. 

The farm failed and she and her husband were left with nothing. They moved to South Africa, where he was from, and he managed to get work on a family member's farm. They had a daughter, Doreen, but she died as a toddler. Peggy was only able to visit Harold in England twice during his childhood and failed to persuade him to come back to Africa when he left school. Then the Second World War broke out and she died of cancer shortly after in 1948, never having had the opportunity to see him again.

Jane Osborne
Peggy's husband, Harold, was also the child of a father who died young. He was the fourth of six children and was 3 years old when his father, Henry Turnbull, died. His mother, Jane Osborne, was left to cope with five young children and a baby. Like Peggy, she married again, but she made a bad choice. John Smith, a school teacher, was an alcoholic and she ended up throwing him out. She took in lodgers to help with the family finances. By the 1911 census she was head of the household, despite still being married, but by this time her children were mostly grown up and working and the pressure to make ends meet would have eased.

Elizabeth Derrick
Elizabeth was 37 and had three young children when her husband, Robert Trivess, committed suicide. He hanged himself in the family home. The newspaper report is only a couple of sentences and doesn't say who found the body. At the time all three of her children were under 10 years old.

Elizabeth worked as a dressmaker and nine years later when the 1861 census was taken she and her 17 year old daughter were both working as dressmakers and her 14 year old son as a tailor's assistant. This is likely to have been low paid work and she would have struggled to support her children before they were old enough to help her.

The sinking of the SS Britannia

My great-grandfather should have been a very lucky man. Born in late 1898, he managed to just catch the tail end of the First World War. He was still in training with the RAF (at the time called the Royal Flying Corps) when the war ended. By the time the Second World War started he was 41, married and working in a reserved occupation, so he was unlikely to be conscripted... except he was in the RAF reserves, so he was called up anyway.

After WWI he had stayed with the RAF for a few years and trained as an engineer. He then left, got a civilian job and started a family. In the depression of the 1930s jobs were scarce and he found himself unemployed. The only work he could find was a paper round for the local newsagent, a job normally done by children, and he joined the RAF reserves to top up this meagre income. Once he was in full time work again, he decided to keep both the newspaper delivery job and the RAF reserve income to top up his salary and allow the family to take a summer holiday each year.

This decision backfired on him when war broke out in 1939. I'm not sure exactly when he was called up, but in 1941 he found himself in Liverpool boarding the SS Britannia, headed for India. It's believed he was going to teach recruits how to fix aeroplanes and it's likely that, had he reached his destination, he would have been quite safe. It wasn't meant to be, as the SS Britannia came under attack.

The ship left Liverpool as part of a convoy of ships travelling through the dangerous European waters, but by the time she reached Africa she was on her own. By 25 March 1941 she was 600 miles off the coast of Sierra Leone and spirits were high as they approached the equator. A ship was sighted nearby but it was flying a Japanese flag and wasn't seen as a threat because Japan had not yet entered the war. Suddenly, the ship was rocked by gunfire. The Japanese flag had disappeared and a German flag raised. They had been ambushed.

The German ship, Thor, had attacked their front and rear guns, killing and injuring a number of men. The Britannia tried to fire back and to outrun the Thor, but it was apparent this was not possible. The captain made the announcement to abandon ship and those on board began to lower the lifeboats. Some of the life boats had been damaged in the initial attack, so there were not enough spaces for everyone onboard. They did their best. One account describes 47 men in a 25 man lifeboat. Those that were in the water clung to pieces of debris or made rafts. Some expected to be taken prisoner by the German ship and they threw their identification into the sea, but the rescue and imprisonment didn't happen. Whilst still on board a distress message had been sent out by the Britannia to Sierra Leone. The Germans intercepted a message back that said a navy warship was on its way at speed. Because of this, they left the scene and expected the survivors to be picked up by the navy warship. Unfortunately, it never came.

Of the 492 people on board, 243 of them survived, but my great-grandfather was not one of them. Having read the harrowing reports of the survivors, I hope he died quickly at the beginning of the attack. Most of the survivors were picked up by a ship called Cabo de Hornos after five days and were taken to Tenerife. Shockingly, one of the lifeboats was at sea for 26 days and travelled all the way to Brazil. Two seamen on board realised that although Sierra Leone was much closer, the winds and tides meant that their chances of reaching Brazil were much higher. They put the survivors onboard on strict rations of one cracker spread with condensed milk per day. 38 of them survived the journey.

In my naivety, when I originally heard about the sinking, I assumed my relative had gone down with the ship or drowned quickly because he didn't reach a lifeboat. Having read the accounts I realise that many of those who died were actually in the lifeboats or on rafts, and their deaths were not pleasant. Some were already injured and died of their wounds. Some drank sea water. For others the cause of death was sharks, loss of hope or madness.

Nearly all the survivors describe the waters as shark-infested. I imagine they were drawn by the bodies from the initial attack, but they then found a steady source of food. Some men were dragged from the rafts after they dangled their legs in the water, but mostly the men jumped to their deaths. After several days of little food or water, exposed to the elements with their skin blistering from the sun and with nothing to see except the empty ocean, many men began to lose hope. Some of them went quietly to their deaths. One survivor describes a man getting to his feet, putting his coat on and calmly stepping off the side of the boat. Some said goodbye to their fellow travellers and explained that they had had enough. Others ranted and raved, frothed at the mouth, became wild and aggressive, but all seem to have ended the same way - by jumping into the sea. Even those that survived describe hallucinations and feelings of despair.

All of this makes for distressing reading, but I'm grateful to the survivors who had the courage to bear witness and record their stories. There is an excellent website called www.ssbritannia.org which has links to survivors' stories as well as news articles and information about the ship.