大象传媒

23rd August, 1940

Alice maud Garvey and her daughter Alice were stunned by the message over the wireless. Lord Haw Haw's gleeful voice saying:-
'I have sunk the Severn Leigh with all hands on deck.'
The two Alices looked at each other in disbelief.
'Our Bill's on that ship!' they gasped.
For fourteen days they didn't hear a thing, all was silent and they feared the worst. On the fifteenth day there was a knock on the door. It was the local chaplain.
'Your son has been found alive in an open boat which drifted into the Isle of Harris.'

When I was a little girl my dad used to tell me the story of the time he was in the war. He was torpedoed and ended up in an open boat for fourteen days. he was one of ten survivors of a crew of 42 men. Being young I didn't take much in. All I can really remember is that they had been starving and my dad said they had been sucking fishes' eyes to get moisture. How true this was I do not know, but the vision to my child'd mind was ghastly, and I really didn't want to think about it. My dad told me the story a few times, but then suddenly stopped talking about it. I know that my dad never fully recovered from fourteen days in an open boat and the sights he saw and what he had to endure at such a young age. It would turn the strongest man's head, let alone a nineteen year old merchant seaman.

I don't know what it was, but something kept nagging at the back of my mind to ask about my dad's ship and what exactly had happened. Unfortunately, I lost all this information when my dad died at fifty nine of cancer in 1980, when i was twenty one years old, and I regretted not listening more carefully to what he had been saying.

Aunt Alice was very helpful. She sent a lovely letter detailing all the family and send photographs of my grandmother and great grandmother. There was a separate letter entitled Bill.

Bill

'The ship your dad was on was called the Severn Leigh. I will never forget it, it came through on the wireless with Lord Haw Haw saying, 'I have sunk the Severn Leigh with all hands on deck,' but we never believed all he said, but for fourteen days we never heard anything. We were all very upset and beginning to fear the worst when a chaplain came to our house and said they had dfited into the Isle of Harris, and your dad was one of seven survivors. He had a terrible time in an open boat for 14 days and was in hospital on the Isle of Harris for weeks. He had sea boils all over his body and he was in a terrible state. All they lived on was condensed milk and sea biscuits. He always looked very smart in his navy suit. It was a terrible ordeal for him. I don't think he ever got over it, but thank God he married you mam and had a lovely family, so he was well rewarded.'

Eye-witness Accounts

The letter whetted my appetite to know more. Would people on the Isle of Harris remember the incident? It must have been quite something to see an open boat drift onto their shores. What exactly happened? I was itching to find out.

A few days later I wrote a letter. I didn't know where I was sending it to. On the envelope I wrote, to the library, information centre/newspaper, Isle of Harris, Scotland.

The letter I received back from the Isle of Harris was beyond my expectations. I was absolutely amazed. I received a copy of an eye witness account of what happened and the name and address of someone who had actually seen the life boat drifting to shore, and he was eleven years old at the time, wee Finlay Macaskill.

Following is an account by John Morrision of Northton who is now deceased. He tells the story of shipwreck survivors who came ashore at Northton.

A ship was torpedoed 40 miles off St. Kilda in the Atlantic. The boat was torpedoed and she was sinking so they lowered the lifeboats. They lowered three lifeboats and she was sinking fast so the crew crowded into the lifeboats. The submarine submerged and then surfaced quite close to the lifeboats and the gunmen started riddling the lifeboats with machind gun bullets. Two of the lifeboats sank and a number of the crew were killed as well. Those that were still alive crowded into one lifeboat.

They had not had time to get as much rations as they would have liked into the lifeboats. There were plenty hard biscuits but there was not much water. The captain was rationing the water for each man and some of the poor souls with thirst and after eating the hard biscuits began to drink salt water. That was fatal as they went off their heads and the poor captain had to shoot some of them. It was hard for the poor man to shoot some of his own crew. After 14 days they came ashore behind the doctor's house in Northton. They only had a few days rations of water left. They had a sial on the boat and at night they had been spreading the sail over the boat so that as the dew fell at night it was collected in the water containers. When they came to the beach the sail was up but there was no one in the lifeboat who could stand up and take the sail down. They were in a poor way.
Malcolm MacAskill and Willie MacKay saw the boat coming to the sands. The news went through the village in a flash and every able bodied man that was there went down to the sands and they took the crew out. They took them to John MacKay's house - Seonnaidh Dubh as they called him - Finlay MacAskill's and the Martings. There were 14 survivors in all. They were given warm clothes and they wrapped them in blankets round the fire so they would thaw out and regain a bit of their strength.
They were all given warm drinks of hot tea. Now things were rationed at the time but there was no scarcity of food here, but of whisky! Colonel Thomson Rye, who stayed at the Terrace in Leverburgh came with two bottles of whisky. MacCallum, Rodel, sent another bottle. The doctor at the time was Dr. MacIntosh - he liked a drop of whisky himself.

There was a coloured man in the crew and he was very poorly. His religion was that as he believed he was going to die, he must not eat or drink. So Doctor MacIntosh made a good toddy for him, opened his mouth and poured it right down. The man survived very well too!

A crowd were gathered. There was a dentist in Leverburgh at the time attending the school, and he was there. I was there and Katie Ann was there too. She was a nurse and she was able to give some help.

A naval ambulance and a doctor came from Stornoway. I would say that the Naval doctor was what I would term in Gaelic 'nyaff de dhuine!' (An idiot of a man). He was ordering the poor souls about as if they were men that had been training for a fight. Now the dentist swept the floor with him! Anyway, the ambulance took those that were very ill and I took the rest in my bus. Doctor MacIntosh went as well. I believe that one died in the ambulance on the way to Stornoway but the rest survived.

The captain, who had stayed at the MacKay's house, wrote to Mary MacKay after that but then the strain and stress that he had suffered with having to 'do away with' some of his crew took effect. He ended up in a mental home. The lifeboat was given to the township and it was sold to John MacCallum, proprietor of Rodel Hotel. The proceeds went to the township. It was later sold to someone in North Harris.

Findlay Macaskill

Another eye-witness that day was wee Finlay Macaskill, then eleven years old and just returning from school for lunch. He writes:-
I was 11 years old at this time and was at home from school for lunch 1-2pm. My father raised the alarm that a strange boat was heading for the beach, under sail. The 'grapevine'soon had all the near neighbours converging at the sands. There appeared to be no sign of life on board and no attempt was made to lower the sail as the boat approached. It was a beautiful sunny day with a light breeze blowing so the boat grounded on the sands in a few inches of water. I recall being a bit apprehensive about going too near, initially, as one did not know what to expect, but when the older people went on board and called for all possible aid, as every one was alive, I became bold and ventured closer. The scene there was unforgetable - living dead is the onhly description. The captain had been lashed to the thwarts in a delirious state, owing to drinking sea water, and to prevent him consuming any more. Everyone was in a state of dehydration to almost a point of no return. All were helped, some carried, to the nearest houses and by this time the local doctor had arrived and began treatment as was available. We had three of them at our house and I remember my mother remarking on a young lad of such tender age, maybe eighteen, being subjected to such an ordeal. This was probably your dad as the rest were of an older class. An older one of this three was in a bad state of delirium and did not recover despite all efforts to bring him round - he died the same evening on the way to hospital.

There were two lascars in the company one of whom came ashore clutching his Koran - his only possession. They only had a smattering of English and communication with them was not easy. However, it was decided by the doctor to transfere them all to hospital, much against the wishes of the locals who were prepared to let them stay and recover more fully before sending them on a 60 mile tortuous road to Stornoway hospital. Two small coaches were converted as make-shift ambulances and the transfer was carried out late the same evening. I don't think anyone in the village slept that night. My mother went to the hospital to visit them and found an unbelieveable transformation in everyone after a week.
The reason they were so dehydrated, it emerged, was that the lifeboat had been shelled at by the submarine as they tried to get away from the sinking ship, bursting two of the fresh water tanks. An intereting article appeared in the press some time after this incident - a raft from the Severn Leigh landed at Halifax, Nova Scotia with only one survivor on it.
The submarine that torpedoed the Severn Leigh was manned by Kapitanleutnant Viktor Oehrn, captain of U-37. Oehrn stalked convoy OA200 in mid-Atlantic on 23rd August. He waited to select his target 5,242-ton Severn Leigh, owned by the kelston Steamship Co. When the men took to their lifeboats they were sprayed with maching-gun bullets. Oehrn said later that his men had thought that the merchantsman's crew were going for their gun, which had been reported to him, and that was why he had ordered them to fire.

Tricia Garvey
Hull, March 2004

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