SS City of Benares: The Evacuee Children Sent to Safety Who Never Reached Canada

SS City of Benares: The Evacuee Children Sent to Safety Who Never Reached Canada

Imagine saying goodbye to your child because you believed sending them thousands of miles away was the safest thing you could do.

You watch them leave Britain, knowing you may not see them for years.

But at least, you tell yourself, they will be far away from the bombs.

Then the message arrives.

Their ship has been sunk.

In our recent posts, we have been looking at the experiences of children during the Second World War - evacuation, separation from parents and the different ways children learned to live with fear and loss.

Today I want to look at one of the most heart-breaking chapters of that story.

The SS City of Benares.

By the summer of 1940, Britain faced the possibility of invasion and increasing air attacks. Thousands of parents were considering whether their children might be safer not in the British countryside, but on the other side of the world.

The government-backed Children's Overseas Reception Board, usually known as CORB, arranged for children to be evacuated to countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Between July and September 1940, more than 2,600 children were sent overseas under the scheme.

For many parents, Canada must have seemed almost impossibly distant from the war.

On the 13th of September 1940, the SS City of Benares left Liverpool as part of a convoy bound across the Atlantic.

Among those aboard were 90 children travelling under the CORB scheme, aged between five and fifteen, accompanied by adult escorts.

There must have been excitement mixed with fear. Some children were facing a long sea voyage without their parents, heading towards families and homes they had never seen.

Four days later, everything changed.

Late on the night of the 17th of September, in rough Atlantic weather, the City of Benares was attacked by the German submarine U-48.

A torpedo struck the ship.

The City of Benares went down quickly, sinking in little more than half an hour. In darkness, cold and heavy seas, passengers and crew struggled to launch lifeboats. Some boats were damaged or overturned, while people were thrown into the freezing Atlantic.

For the children, the situation was terrifying.

Of the 90 CORB evacuee children, just 13 survived.

Seventy-seven died.

The loss was particularly cruel because these children had been on board the ship for one reason - their families believed they were being taken somewhere safer. The National Archives records that the disaster effectively brought the government-sponsored overseas evacuation programme to an end.

But among the tragedy was an extraordinary story of survival.

One lifeboat, Lifeboat No. 12, was not found during the initial rescue operation.

Inside were survivors including six evacuee boys and their escort, music teacher Mary Cornish.

They remained adrift in the Atlantic for eight days.

Cornish tried to keep the boys' spirits up, food and water were carefully rationed and those in the boat had to endure cold, exhaustion and uncertainty.

Eventually, a Sunderland flying boat spotted them.

Help was called and the survivors were rescued by HMS Anthony.

It is difficult to imagine what those parents at home experienced while waiting for news.

Evacuation is sometimes remembered through photographs of children standing on railway platforms with labels attached to their coats. But the story of the City of Benares reminds us that wartime parents were being asked to make almost impossible decisions.

Keep your child close and risk the bombs.

Send them away and hope that distance would protect them.

For the families of those 77 children, a decision made out of love and desperation to keep them safe ended in unimaginable loss.

And after the sinking of the City of Benares, Britain largely abandoned the idea that sending children across the sea could offer the safety everyone had hoped for.

Had you been a parent in 1940, would you have considered sending your child overseas to escape the war?