In the early morning hours of Monday, Sept. 4, 1939, Judith Evelyn found herself adrift in the Atlantic Ocean on the overturned bow section of her wrecked lifeboat. The burgeoning stage actress had been returning to Canada when her ship, the British liner Athenia, was torpedoed by a German submarine only hours after England and Germany declared war (see blog post March 15, 2015, Judith Evelyn, Part 2).
Evelyn escaped the sinking ship along with her former fiancé, Andrew Allan, and his father, the Reverend William Allan. After several hours in the lifeboat, they were in the process of being rescued when the propeller of the would-be rescue ship inadvertently chopped their boat to pieces, tossing all aboard into the sea.
Five others rode with Evelyn on the overturned bow, including her former fiancé. Allan’s father, however, was not among them. As they drifted on the dark and rising seas, two or three times they came near other lifeboats, but their cries for help were lost in the wind. Their hopes rose when they were momentarily caught in the beam of a searchlight from a second rescue ship before they slid from view down the back of an ocean swell. The light was unable to locate them again and they drifted helplessly past the ship and on into the night.
At one point, Evelyn was swept off the side of the overturned hull by a large wave. Fighting against the weight of her sodden fur coat she made it back to the hull and helped another young woman in the water to climb back onto the wrecked bow. She realized the coat had become a liability, but one she couldn’t shed because her lifejacket was tied securely over it. Determined to survive, Evelyn focused all of her being on remaining attached to the wrecked lifeboat hull.
Just before dawn, Evelyn and her companions were at last rescued by the Royal Navy destroyer, H.M.S. Escort, but not before one last tragedy. The man who had helped Evelyn back onto the hull after she had been washed off by the wave, slipped during rescue operations, fell in the water and was killed when the wrecked bow crushed him against the destroyer’s hull.
On board Escort, she was given dry clothes and shared a small cabin with two women and a baby. The next morning, Sept. 5, fog prevented the destroyer and her sister ship Electra from proceeding up the River Clyde to Glasgow as planned. The survivors were let off at Greenock, an industrial port with no facilities for passengers, to wait for a fleet of buses and ambulances from Glasgow to pick them up. Standing on the open dock with more than 600 other bedraggled survivors, Evelyn witnessed a spontaneous outpouring of charity from the local townsfolk. As word spread of their predicament, men from the nearby docks offered the survivors food from their lunch buckets. Women from the town appeared with armfuls of clothing and food, their efforts soon augmented by local merchants.
When the survivors finally arrived in Glasgow they were offered free accommodation in local hotels as well as food and clothing. The city’s lord mayor set up a relief fund for their support and the United States also sent money to help those of its 300-plus citizens who had survived the torpedoing. For Evelyn and Allan it was a time to rest and recover, but also to grieve. Allan’s father, the Rev. Allan, wasn’t listed among any of the survivors taken aboard two other rescue ships. He was presumed dead and his body was never recovered.
For Evelyn the immediate future held the prospect of another Atlantic crossing to return home and the eventual resumption of her acting career, as we will see in Part 4.
Photo: This overturned lifeboat is smaller but similar in design to the hull on which Judith Evelyn and five others survived for several hours in rising seas.
Photo credit: pixgood.com
