Secrets of Britain's worst maritime war tragedy

In 1943, the Daily Mirror in London reported the marriage of a British nurse who was one of the last to escape France before the onrushing Germans.

Nurse Honor Sawle possessed an indomitable spirit and had had a colourful war, which was worthy of a few paragraphs, which ended on the upbeat line: ‘She managed to get to St Nazaire and safely back to England.”

Those few words hid one of the most tragic – and secret – episodes of the entire war. The Lancastria.

 “The loss of the Lancastria in 1940 was the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history,” explains Dr Ruth Doughty, Reader in Film and Cultural History at LJMU.

“An estimated 5-7,000 men and women died prompting PM Winston Churchill to D-Notice the news so as not to harm morale just weeks after the success of Dunkirk.”

Honor, then in her early 30s, was on the ship survived and went on live to the ripe old age of 87. But hardly anyone has ever heard of the disastrous loss that day when she stripped off her thick woollen uniform and jumped into the Atlantic.

Dr Doughty knows Honor’s story well because she was her husband’s grandmother, a fearsome woman who became a single-mother and farmer in Cornwall after the war. But the episode is still far from the public eye.

“Due to Churchill's D-notice, much of the archive information has been redacted and won't be released until 2040,” explains Dr Doughty.

“This is very distressing for the families as it leaves them questioning what could be revealed. It was war, there were far too many people allowed to board the boat, but they were trying to evacuate. Is there something still left to be revealed?

Dr Doughty and colleagues Emily Cuming (English) and David McDermott (Creative Writing) have won funding to visit the National Archives and the Imperial War Museum London to look at documents, memoirs and other archival materials about the disaster. They have also been interviewing relatives of those lost and those few survivors and their quest reported on ITV Granada.

The Lancastria has strong Liverpool links as a Cunard ship that was repurposed for the war and left her home port of Liverpool on Friday 14 June 1940, never to return.

 Memorial plaque on Liverpool’s waterfront is one of the few reminders of the sinking and this week services of remembrance were held in the city and in St Nazaire to mark the 85^th anniversary.

Alan Banks, whose father Thomas survived said: “Why is it never mentioned when they can talk about the Titanic and the Lusitania. There was more killed on the Lancastria than those two put together.”

Added Dr Doughty “Unfortunately, there are no survivors left now as time has passed but we’re making sure we get those stories from the families and we can create a digital archive at the university.”