A True Survivor

by John Martin

It is perhaps true to say that Maritime historians have not as yet paid much attention to the huge effort that was required to re-configure the British Merchant Navy from that of serving in a wartime support role to that of the peacetime one at the conclusion of World War II. Perhaps this is understandable, given the earth-shaking events of the previous 6 years and the wholesale destruction of ships and port infrastructure on virtually a worldwide basis. But it is worth considering the enormous headaches that shipowners faced in 1945, as they attempted to relocate their far flung vessels from wartime locations and convoy duties, and to re-establish their traditional worldwide routes and liner ‘timetables’, for both cargo and passenger roles.

Companies such as P&O, British and Commonwealth and many others went to extraordinary lengths to secure not just new, replacement tonnage for the huge losses they had sustained, but also to find suitable second hand ships wherever they might be found. These ships, together with the vessels which had survived the hostilities, had to provide the backbone of their services, and no company was more innovative in their approach to solving that problem than Ocean Transport and Trading Ltd., also known as The Blue Funnel Line.

In 1935, The Glen Line of London was finally swallowed up by the ‘Ocean’ group of companies, however, they continued to operate mainly from the Port of London on Far Eastern cargo liner services, and one of their last ship construction programmes prior to the outbreak of World War II entailed the building of a group of no less than 8 twin screw cargo liners, one of which was the MV Glengarry. All of these vessels were designed as motor ships, and exhibited the classic Blue Funnel Line profile which remained so very popular until the construction of the final group of such ‘3 island’ vessels, namely the ‘M’ Class ships of the late nineteen fifties.

The roots of Glengarry’s interesting story lies in the fact that Glen Line by necessity had ordered several of her class to be built abroad, in her case at the Burmeister and Wain Maskin yard in Copenhagen. The result of this was that although she was launched in 1939, she was not completed until just the moment Germany was invading Denmark, who promptly seized the vessel for their own wartime purposes.

She was renamed Meersburg, and under the management of the Hamburg America Line, took up duties as a submarine depot and target ship for the 25th and 27th U-boat flotillas where they were based in the Baltic Sea port of Kiel. In 1941, the Kriegsmarine decided she was better suited to the role of a ‘hilfskruezer’ (armed merchant cruiser). This meant that she was now to become a fully fledged member of the fighting units of the German Navy, and so the contract with Hamburg Amerika Lines ended, and she was again renamed, this time as Hansa, and given a full Kreigsmarine ship’s complement. She was sent to the Wilton Fijnoord yard in Rotterdam for conversion as ‘schiff 5’ of that group of vessels. Interestingly, although she was from then on only known as Hansa for the duration of the war, the ship’s bell which had been inscribed with the name Meersburg remained as such until she was returned to her original owners, who quickly had the name plated over and replaced with Glengarry. For various reasons, work on conversion progressed only slowly, and in 1943, she was repositioned to Hamburg for final fitting out and a substantial amount of weaponry to be installed, including an aircraft catapult system.

On completion of all this work the Kriegsmarine intended that she be used as a minelayer, specifically on Northern Russian convoy routes. However, as the tide of war turned against them, and fuel shortages led them to prioritise their operations, yet another new role was offered up, when she took up a role as a training ship for naval cadets, and also as a mine laying training vessel. As the German Forces began to experience collapse along the Eastern front, Hansa found herself used more and more to evacuate German troops and civilians from Eastern Baltic Ports to Kiel, most specifically from the Helas peninsula and Gydnia. During these months, she sustained considerable damage in action, culminating in a most fortunate escape from a final disaster. In April 1945, a German convoy departed from Gydnia, a convoy which is remembered for seeing the largest loss of life in maritime history when the German Liner Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed and sunk by a Russian submarine with the loss of the over 9,000 lives of German soldiers and civilians. Hansa had departed in the same convoy, but due to engine difficulties had to return to the port of Gydnia, with several thousand military and civilian refugees still on board. The last, ghostly photo of that convoy, below left, shows the faint but unmistakeable outline of a Blue Funnel designed vessel leading the Wilhelm Gustloff out to sea.

The end of the war saw her languishing at anchor in the Kiel Roads, her German crew in internment camps nearby. However, by May 1945, plans were in place by the Royal Navy to utilise such captured vessels as they saw fit, and it is at this point where the history of the Glengarry/Meersburg/hilfskreuser Schiff 5/Hansa became somewhat fraught!

The Ministry of War Transport had created a group of ships which bore the prefix ‘Empire’, and were used directly under their supervision for the war effort in all areas, including the Japanese theatre. Ships were either newly built tonnage from sources on both sides of the Atlantic, or were captured or seized from the enemy, wherever they could be found. The fact that the Glengarry had been built abroad, had itself been seized by German Forces and then served for nearly five years under different branches of the Kriegsmarine, under three different names, and crucially had never actually sailed under the British Flag was clearly going to lead to some confusion in the fog of war’s end. Well-found ocean transports were in scarce supply at that time, and hostilities still raged in the Pacific area, still demanding the use of such ships for supply and support roles on behalf of the allies. The Ministry of War therefore very smartly identified the Hansa as a war prize, seized her and had her promptly renamed as the Empire Humber. Meantime, her actual owners, who had bought and paid for her back in 1939 but never taken delivery, had been urgently trying to locate the ship too, in the certainty that she rightfully belonged to them, and not to either the Kriegsmarine, the Ministry of War Transport or even the Royal Navy!

Alfred Holt and Co. eventually discovered her, already crewed up with Officers and men from the Currie Line at Kiel in preparation for her first voyage back to the United Kingdom, and plotted immediately to circumvent her seizure in the righteous indignation that she was theirs in the first place. The managers and superintendents put together a scratch crew under the command of a certain Captain Frank Brown, and sent them poste haste to Kiel, to at least in the interim, have her crewed by company personnel. Curiously, it seems that the engineers from the Currie Line who were already onboard were in fact qualified as steam engineers, and not motor ones, and apparently they were happy to defer to the men of Alfred Holt and Company when they arrived in Kiel.

In June, she joined a convoy of about forty German prize vessels bound from Hamburg to the Fife port of Methil in Scotland, and apparently on that voyage for the first time ever she flew the red ensign rather than the black flag of surrender, as demanded by the Royal Navy, a clear point being made by the master employed by Alfred Holt and Company! The actual renaming of the vessel from Hansa to Empire Humber took place at Methil, and now crewed by a full complement of Blue Funnel men, she set sail for Portsmouth and Southampton, prior to a proposed refit for further service as a combined operations command vessel in the Pacific.

Matters between the Ministry of War, the Royal Navy and Alfred Holt and Company took a turn for the worse in the next few months, as unresolved arguments raged concerning her rightful ownership, which culminated in an Admiralty marshall appointed officer boarding the vessel and attempting to serve a writ on her, forbidding the company from their intention to take full possession of her and sail her immediately to the Gareloch back up in Scotland again. Captain Brown disobeyed the writ and departed that day, no doubt with some concerns as to how this might affect his future. Surprisingly, the Company had its way despite the Navy’s objections, and the matter was never challenged in court.

The Glengarry then commenced on over 25 years of unbroken service to the Far East. Conflict of some kind was never far away from her however, as she navigated through the troubled waters of the insurgency in Malaya, revolution in Asia, confrontation with Indonesia, and finally the turbulence of the Cultural revolution in a communist China.

For many years for instance, after one blue Funnel ship had been sunk, alongside her berth on the Whangpoo river near Shanghai by bombers during the Communist revolution in China, and yet another had been raked by aircraft machine gun fire with loss of life in what was then known as the Straits of Formosa, she would sail northbound along the China Coast with two of her cargo holds, one forward and one aft, completely covered over with enormous union jacks. This was in order to have her clearly identified as a British non combatant ship, and to deter warships as well as aircraft, large union jacks were also hung over the ship’s side. Even with those safeguards, Glengarry would regularly have been angrily ‘buzzed’ by either nationalist or communist fighter aircraft, an unnerving experience for the crew to say the least.

All of these circumstances made her life interesting to say the least, and a curious reflection on these troubled times surfaced recently, as the country digested the news of the passing of Cilla Black, that much loved Liverpool lass. In the nineteen sixties, the Glengarry, like several of her sister ships within the Blue Funnel and Glen Line Group had been targeted by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai for denunciation and vilification. Ships were boarded, officers apprehended and sometimes jailed, and many others subjected to hours of torment and humiliation at the hands of the cadres of those misguided youngsters.

A retired Blue Funnel master recently recounted the following.

The Glengarry after one such episode had returned to London, and prior to the officers taking their leave, they were invited to London’s Dorchester Hotel for an evening’s entertainment and overnight accommodation, all at the courtesy of a grateful board of directors. Clearly, they recognised the exemplary way in which their officers had conducted themselves in the most trying of situations. Dinner was followed by a cabaret, and headlining the show was a young Cilla Black. During her act, she paused to mention that the boys from the Glengarry were in the audience this evening, and therefore the next song was for them and them alone, they would know why. She then broke into the familiar song ‘What’s it all about Alfie?”, knowing well that only a Liverpool lass and the crew of the Glengarry that night would recognise the ‘Alfie’ in the song to be the founder of their company, Alfred Holt and Company.

In 1971, as this now publicly owned Company entered a period of huge change in which conventional cargo liners would have no place, she finally made her way to the breakers yard at Sakaide in Japan, marking the beginning of the end of the famous ‘twin screw Glens’, and the start of the container revolution.