Glenart Castle (ship)
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The Glenart Castle was a passenger steamer put into service in 1900, which was used by the British shipping company Union-Castle Line in passenger and mail traffic between Great Britain and South Africa . During the First World War , the ship served as a hospital ship until it was sunk by a German submarine on February 26, 1918 in the Bristol Channel . 153 people were killed.
Passenger ship
When the shipping companies Union Steamship Company Ltd. ( Union Line , founded 1857) and Castle Mail Packet Company Ltd. ( Castle Line , founded 1862) merged and formed the new Union-Castle Line, the ships of both companies became the property of the Union-Castle Line. This included the 6757 GRT passenger steamer Galician , which had been commissioned by Union Line and was still under construction at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, Northern Ireland (hull number 348, identification 6824). The ship was launched on September 20, 1900. It was completed on December 6, 1900.
The Galician was 134.20 meters long and 15.91 meters wide and had a chimney, two masts and a twin propeller. The two triple expansion steam engines made 375 nominal horsepower (nhp) and allowed a top speed of 12.5 knots (23.2 km / h). On board there was space for 70 passengers in the first, 105 in the second and 91 in the third class. The Galician was used in the regular service to Cape Town .
On August 15, 1914, the Galician was stopped near Tenerife by the German ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Große , which had been converted into an auxiliary cruiser . Lieutenant Deane and the gunner Sherman were captured, but because of the women and children on board, the ship was able to continue its voyage.
Hospital ship
In September 1914, the Galician was converted into a hospital ship with space for 453 patients and was named HMHS Glenart Castle after the tradition of the shipping company to name its ships after castles and castles. In addition, Galicia , after which the ship was originally named, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus an enemy.
On March 1, 1917, the Glenart Castle drove on the voyage from Le Havre to Southampton with wounded on board northwest of the Owers Bank to a sea mine laid by the submarine UC 65 (Kapitänleutnant Otto Steinbrinck ) and was towed to Portsmouth for repairs.
Sinking
On Monday, February 25, 1918, the Glenart Castle put under the command of Lieutenant Commander Bernard Burt with crew members and nursing staff in Cardiff for a crossing to Brest to take in new patients. On board were 120 crew members, eight nurses, seven officers of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and 47 other ranks of RAMC (182 people in total, other sources also assume 186 people). Fishermen in the English Channel could see the brightly lit ship, clearly recognizable as a hospital ship. It had set position and mast lights and the red cross painted on the hull could also be made out.
On February 26, around 4 a.m., the Glenart Castle was torpedoed by the German submarine UC 56 in the Bristol Channel without warning. UC 56 was a submarine of the Imperial Navy under the command of Kapitänleutnant d. R. Wilhelm Kiesewetter found. The torpedo struck hold number 3 just behind the engine room . The blast of the explosion immediately extinguished all lights and destroyed most of the lifeboats. The rapidly growing list disabled the proper exposure of the other boats.
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In the eight minutes that the struck ship sank, only seven boats could be launched. Most of them were flooded and capsized in the rough seas. 153 of the 182 people on board, including the captain, 94 crew members, all eight nurses, all seven RAMC officers and almost all nurses were killed. The head nurse of Glenart Castle , Katy Beaufoy (1869-1918), was a veteran of the Boer War and already head nurse of the New Khedivial Hotel in Alexandria and the Polytechnic Institute in Rome . Her family kept her diary, in which she described life on the ship.
A lifeboat with 22 survivors was found by the French schooner Feon , which was taking the men to Swansea . Several other men were picked up by the Parker , a destroyer of the United States Navy , on the evening of February 27th . A total of 25 crew members and four RAMCs survived. The number of victims is given in other sources as 155, 162 and 168.
There was suspicion that, as in the case of Llandovery Castle , the submarine crew shot at survivors in the water to wipe out eyewitnesses. For example, the body of an officer at Glenart Castle was found near the site of the accident with bullets in the neck and hip.
After the war, the British Admiralty tracked down submarine commanders who had sunk hospital ships and charged them. The commander of UC 56 , Wilhelm Kiesewetter, was arrested in 1918 and imprisoned in the Tower of London . He had to be released on the grounds that no prisoners could be held during the peace negotiations.
The wreck of Glenart Castle is about ten miles west of Lundy Island at a depth of about 73 meters. 51 ° 7 ' N , 5 ° 3' W
See also
- HMHS Anglia : British hospital ship; ran into a German sea mine on November 17, 1915 and sank (134 dead)
- HMHS Britannic : British hospital ship; ran into a German sea mine on November 21, 1916 and sank (30 dead)
- HMHS Dover Castle : British hospital ship; sunk by a German submarine on May 26, 1917 (7 dead)
- HMHS Salta : British hospital ship; ran into a German sea mine on April 10, 1917 and sank (130 dead)
- HMHS Llandovery Castle : British hospital ship; sunk by a German submarine on June 27, 1918 (234 dead)