MUSEUM staff are seeking the family of a man who survived the Second World War sinking of the ill-fated liner TSS Athenia.
As the ship went down –the first British ship of the war to be sunk – and thinking he would die, cook Sidney Worrall handed his watch to passenger Gerald Hutchinson.
Mr Hutchinson died in 2015 and now his family want to find Mr Worrall’s family and tell them he treasured the timepiece.
A Glasgow Museum curator turned detective to find out more about Sidney Worrall – and discovered he survived.
The watch was gifted to Glasgow Museums by Rob Hutchinson in Canada, who said: “An explosion ripped through the ship and the force of the blast knocked a huge pan off the stove, deluging two poor men with boiling oil.
“My father Gerry was a passenger on board and as the order to abandon ship came he helped to load and then man the lifeboats. “He ended up in lifeboat six, which also carried the two badly injured cooks. My father did what he could for them over the next few hours. One of them, named Sid, was really ill when he pressed his wristwatch into my dad’s hand saying: ‘Please look after my watch for me’.”
A rescue ship took survivors from the Glasgow-built Athenia to Galway. Gerald Hutchinson assumed Sid had died. Mr Hutchinson added: “My dad grew to treasure the watch that he had been entrusted with.” After his father’s death, Mr Hutchinson decided to donate some of his Athenia items to the Riverside Museum. Glasgow Museum’s curator Emily Malcolm received the package, which included telegrams, letters and Sid’s watch, and decided to try to find out more about Sid. She said: “I was extremely surprised to find that Sidney Worrall, the second fish cook on board Athenia, didn’t die after the sinking.
“It looked as if he had recovered and gone on to live and marry in Scotland.”
She consulted the lists of those killed in the disaster, or merchant seamen who had died in the war, then searched the City Archives in the Mitchell Library.
One file, the Athenia Relief Fund, contains letters from people injured or who lost family members in the sinking.
One was from Andrew McOnie, the other cook who was injured. He wrote a letter of thanks to the fund saying “all the Glasgow boys” were home except he and Worrall, who were in a nursing home in Galway.
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