BEDRAGGLED, lucky to be alive, several hundred survivors of the torpedoed Glasgow liner, SS Athenia, were landed in Greenock. The injured were hospitalised, the others were brought to three hotels in Glasgow. The Donaldson Atlantic liner had been attacked by a U boat on September 3, 1939, 200 nautical miles north-west of Ireland, while en route to Canada, just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany.
Of the 1,418 passengers and crew, 112 died. A survivor, Thomas McCubbin, said: “One woman threw her baby to me as I was standing near the lifeboat helping people into it. She shouted ‘For God’s sake take care of my baby’.” He passed the infant into the lifeboat. A woman said an oil tanker had ventured near her lifeboat but had been deterred by heavy seas from rescuing the passengers: “We lost touch with her, and we felt thoroughly dispirited.” A London woman had been separated from her husband and young son and did not know where they were. “We have lost everything,” she said.
The Glasgow Herald noted that America was currently determined to stay out of the war but that with thousands of Americans waiting to cross the Atlantic, a “mood of belligerent unneutrality” might arise there in the event of further torpedoings.
Five months later, a Motherwell man who had worked in the Athenia’s kitchens lost his bid to be exempted from military service as a conscientious objector. “I have seen enough of the agony and misery caused by war,” he told the tribunal.
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