The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Officials at the time chose to ignore the Lancastria disaster, as it was deemed a failed evacuation, and it was almost overshadowed by the news of the French surrender to the Germans. 2 and No. At the end of the day, some 2,477 survivors were picked up from the sea. She sank around 5 nautical miles south of Chmoulin Point in the Charpentier roads and around 9 nautical miles out of St. Nazaire. Within hours of berthing at Liverpool, Lancastria was urgently recalled to sea; loud-speaker announcements at the main railway station successfully recalled nearly all the crew members;[16] she arrived in Plymouth on 15 June to await orders. She sailed scheduled routes from Liverpool to New York until 1932, and was then used as a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. I can't think, after all of these years, it can still be a secret. She was the sister ship of RMS Cameronia which Beardmore had built for the Anchor Line the previous year. [4] All the photographs of the sinking were taken by Frank Clements, a volunteer storeman aboard HMS Highlander, who was exempt from the regulations prohibiting the use of cameras by service personnel. RMS Lancastria: 17 June 1940. | Liverpool Ships and Sailors [3] It is the greatest ever loss of life in the sinking of a single British ship, claiming more lives than the combined losses of the RMS Titanic (1,523 passengers and crew) and RMS . "But the lack of recognition and acknowledgement in the subsequent years that has left many survivors and relatives of victims feeling their sacrifice was worth less than the big heroic events of the Second World War.". [28], Survivors were taken aboard other British and Allied evacuation vessels, the trawler HMTCambridgeshire rescuing 900. Whatever the case, this event likely remains the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history, more than the RMS Titanic, which had an estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard and suffered over 1,500 fatalities. There are no actual transcripts of these speeches, but they have been reconstructed from Churchills notes given to Charles Eade. The ferrying trip took three to four hours. [49] The day of the 75th anniversary of the loss of Lancastria was marked in the Westminster Parliament on 17 June 2015 at Prime Minister's Questions by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, who was standing in for the Prime Minister. The 'Lancastria' - a Secret Sacrifice in World War Two It highlighted claims from the New York Sun newspaper on the sinking, with 500 feared dead. Jacqueline Tanner is one of a handful of people who was on the Lancastria and is still alive. Under the British Official Secrets Act, the report on the Lancastria cannot be published until the year 2040. [56][57] The site of Lancastria wreck lies in French territorial waters and is therefore ineligible for protection under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986; however, at the request of the British Government, in 2006 the French authorities gave the site legal protection as a war grave. Many lifeboats could not be launched as they had been damaged, and there were only 2,500 life jackets on board. Just to say a little. The captain said that he would be able to take 3,000 at a pinch. The ship was built by William Beardmore and Company of Dalmuir on the River Clyde and launched in 1920 as Royal Mail Steamship (RMS) Tyrrhenia for the Anchor Line, a subsidiary of the better-known Cunard Line.
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