Duchess of Richmond (ship)
 As Empress of Canada in Montreal, July 1947
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The Duchess of Richmond was a 1929 commissioned passenger ship of the Canadian Canadian Pacific Navigation Company , which was designed for the transatlantic liner service. The ship, renamed in 1947 after renovation work in Empress of Canada , was destroyed in a fire in Liverpool in January 1953 and scrapped in La Spezia after being salvaged in 1954 .
history
The Duchess of Richmond was built under the hull number 523 at John Brown & Company in Clydebank and was launched on June 18, 1928. After the takeover by the Canadian Pacific in January 1929, the ship was put into service on January 26th with a cruise that took it from Gibraltar to the Mediterranean and then to Liverpool . Among the prominent guests on this maiden voyage was Robert Baden-Powell . It was not until March 1929 that the Duchess of Richmond began regular service to Montreal . She belongs to a group of four identical sister ships that Canadian Pacific put into service in the late 1920s. The other three were the Duchess of Atholl (1928), the Duchess of York (1928) and the Duchess of Bedford (1928; from 1947 Empress of France ). Because they rolled conspicuously in heavy seas , the sister ships were also called "The Drunken Duchesses" (German: The drunken duchesses).
After a good ten years in service, the ship was converted into a troop transport after the outbreak of war in 1939 . The Duchess of Richmond played, among other things, an important role in the Tizard Mission in September 1940, for which it transported troops and military equipment. In November 1942 she also carried troops to North Africa. The ship survived the war without major damage.
After the war, the Duchess of Richmond was modernized at Fairfield Shipbuilders and received, among other things, a new interior and a changed division of passengers. On July 12, 1947, she resumed service to Montreal under the new name Empress of Canada .
On January 25, 1953, a major fire broke out on board the Empress of Canada, which was located at Gladstone Dock in Liverpool, and destroyed large parts of the ship. The Empress was listed by the extinguishing water and capsized shortly after at the dock. Only in the following year could the wreck be removed after extensive salvage work and towed to La Spezia for scrapping.
Web links
- Entry about the ship on liverpoolships.org (English)
- the ship on clydeships.co.uk (English)