THE rescue ship MV Orchy, searching for survivors from MV Princess Victoria, sent a message to the coast guard at 5.34pm on Saturday January 31 1953.
“Can do nothing more. Am going back to Belfast Lough.”
It was a sad summary to the surge of anguished signals that began with deceptive tranquillity nine and a half hours earlier. The 2,694 ton British Railways Larne-Stranraer ferry Princess Victoria commenced her routine sailing across the Irish Sea with the customary message to Portpatrick Radio station shortly after 8am.
Her 53-year-old radio officer David Broadfoot, on relief duty from another ferry, tapped out the same staccato Morse signal that he’d sent so many times before - “I am now leaving Stranraer bound (for) Larne.”
His daughter-in-law Janet Broadfoot talked recently about several cherished items that remained close to David’s heart six hours later during his final moments of unimaginable heroism that earned him a posthumous George Cross.
“One of the most poignant things we have left is his watch,” said 69-year-old Janet, “it was on his body when it was found. And we have a Christmas card that we were told he had been clutching.”
The card’s festive message is still legible - “you deserve the nicest things that life could bring to you.”
In cruel contradiction to the card’s seasonal wishes, Princess Victoria’s Radio Officer was standing on the side bulkhead of his radio room - the ship was on its side and the radio room’s wall was its floor - when he tapped the last three messages from on his transmitter just before 2 o’clock.
“SOS. Estimated position now five miles east of Copelands entrance Belfast Lough” was followed with an apology a few seconds later: “Sorry for Morse OM (old man) on beam ends.”
At 1.58 pm he repeated the SOS from a vessel engulfed with raging seas, shrieking winds, and crashing waves - a fearsome cacophony of noise that didn’t dull the pitiful cries of struggling passengers. At 2pm the ship lurched violently and someone shouted “It’s going.”
In a final death roll she turned over onto her back, and with fixtures and fittings clanging against her bulkheads, icy waters rushed through her corridors and lounges, dragging her slowly down.
Broadfoot’s last signal had barely reached Portpatrick. His grandson Will said recently: “Heroes usually come from the pages of books but this story is real.”
The story began six decades ago at 7.45 am on that fateful Saturday morning. Beneath their feet the six-year-old Princess Victoria’s 127 passengers and 51 crew sensed the gently escalating throb of two powerful diesel engines. Her twin propellers churned faster as she nosed into Loch Ryan. Captain James Millar Ferguson, an experienced 55-year-old master and D-Day veteran, monitored a number of last-minute procedures before he cast off from his Stranraer berth. The harbour water was rough and choppy, with strong winds throwing flurries of snow against the bridge, so extra mooring ropes had been attached twixt ship and shore. The wind was too strong to load any vehicles into the car deck, and half a dozen crewmen were ordered to secure his ship’s regular cargo of Royal Mail post and parcels with ropes and tarpaulins. The latter task was said to have been the first time this procedure had ever been carried out on the vessel.
There had been gale warnings at 6pm on Friday January 30 and there were three metre waves off Portpatrick.
Princess Victoria had come into Stranraer under these conditions, so she was well able to depart into them on Saturday. That was the mood on the bridge, even though force seven to nine winds were gusting up to 70 knots around Helen’s Bay across the Irish Sea. Captain Ferguson and his officers made their final pre-sailing check of the ship. A number of ships had sunk or were in difficulties around the UK’s coastline, but after personally scrutinising his car deck and ordering the cargo to be secured with ropes, Ferguson set sail. With her stern protected by two steel, side-hinged, five and a half feet high rear doors, and with a substantial gap above the doors, Princess Victoria cast off, moved slowly astern from her berth, turned about to proceed up Loch Ryan, and onwards to Larne.
“It was a catalogue of errors,” Co Down author and maritime historian Stephen Cameron told me.
His book ‘Death in the North Channel’ is a detailed, authoritative and vivid account of the tragedy. Serious design problems had been noted on the ship prior her January 31 sailing.
“Members of the crew sent all the information about previous incidents to the ship’s owners,” Stephen told me, “but it didn’t seem to get through.”
There had been regular episodes of flooding because the drainage scuppers (outlets) weren’t big enough. On two occasions the ineffectual drainage of water was such that the vessel severely listed. Stephen says that the ship’s owners “chose to ignore what had happened and failed to do anything to enlarge the size of the scuppers.”
He also found it extremely disturbing that a special ‘guillotine door’ had never been used “to secure the vulnerable opening stern doors.”
He refers to the vessel’s 150 by 45 feet car deck as its “Achilles heel.” Princess Victoria was one of the first roll on/roll off (RoRo) class of ferries and the car deck was completely open at the stern, allowing vehicles to embark, turn around on a turntable, and disembark on arrival in port. Strangely, the space above the rear doors was completely open to the elements, even with the guillotine door locked in place. But, having decided to sail, Captain Ferguson navigated his vessel towards an awaiting eight to 10 force gale.
“Generally these vessels will not set sail if weather conditions are worse than force nine,” Stephen Cameron states bluntly in his book. The crew had lashed down most of the ship’s 43 tons of cargo which included a Royal Mail consignment of “100 bags of letter mail, 425 bags of parcel post and 1,000 rail parcels” according to Stephen Cameron’s meticulous research.
There was also baggage, boxes of fish, hampers of laundry, 55 cartons of footwear, two crates of textiles, 14 tea chests full of sundries and 520 sanitary pipes. It had all been loaded by hand because the cranes couldn’t operate on the wind. But infinitely more precious than the contents of the hold was Captain Ferguson’s cargo of passengers - 98 men, 25 women, four children, and a crew consisting of 48 men and three women. Out of 178 souls on board, only 44 men set foot on Northern Ireland. Not a single woman or child survived, and 78 bodies were never recovered.
“We had no idea it was such a size of a tragedy,” 90-year-old Ruth Fullerton told me last week. St. John Ambulance Nurse-Attendant Ruth Wilson, her maiden name, was on her way to a Saturday morning shift in Belfast’s Bank Buildings as the doomed ferry struggled at reduced speed through stormy Lough Ryan on the other side of the Irish Sea. On duty with two St. John ambulance drivers later in the afternoon, Ruth received an emergency call to Donaghadee.
“It was a dreadful day’s weather,” she recalled, “with rain and terrible storms.” They’d been told to stand-by at Donaghadee because “there’s a ship in trouble out at sea somewhere.”
She remembers a lot of apprehensive people waiting around the promenade “and sheltering in the foyer of a hotel with its doors crashing open and shut in the gale.”
She attended to a policeman “whose head had been split open by a slate flying in the wind.” Unknown to Ruth, infinitely greater agonies were unfolding just a few gale-lashed miles away. As her call-up had said: “There’s a ship in trouble out at sea somewhere,” but few yet knew how much trouble, or where. Princess Victoria’s crew had miscalculated their co-ordinates, leading a number of rescue ships in the wrong direction. But prior to the vessel’s confusing Morse messages, at about 9am, she was steering into her first major misfortune - the avoidable calamity that ultimately caused her to founder.
It was avoidable because she shouldn’t have left her quay, never mind venture out of Loch Ryan into a ferocious gale that was coming from the Atlantic, and which was to visit the bulk of north western Europe bringing many deaths, countless injuries, and unimaginable devastation. In retrospect, Princess Victoria’s tragic demise can only be imagined because it actually happened, and people lived to tell their terrible tale of a severely crippled ship that sank within sight of safety. As she foundered, a lifeboat was lowered and the women and children were first, according to the most fundamental convention of the seas. But convention, like Princess Victoria, turned upside down, and the women and children were first to perish.