airministry

Given the date on the photograph (September 25, 1940), I believe this may actually be a photograph of Lifeboat 12 from SS City of Benares. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_City_of_Benares "15 minutes after the torpedo hit, the vessel had been abandoned, though there were difficulties with lowering the lifeboats on the weather side of the ship. HMS Hurricane arrived on the scene 24 hours later, and picked up 105 survivors and landed them at Greenock. During the attack on the SS City of Benares, the SS Marina was also torpedoed. Hurricane mistakenly counted one of the lifeboats from the SS Marina for one of the lifeboats from SS City of Benares. As a result, Lifeboat 12 was left alone at sea. Its passengers had three weeks supply of food, but enough water only for one week. In the lifeboat were approximately 30 Indian crewmen, a Polish merchant, several sailors, Mary Cornish, Father Rory O'Sullivan (a Roman Catholic priest who had volunteered to be an escort for the evacuee children), and six evacuee boys from the CORB program. They spent eight days afloat in the Atlantic Ocean before being sighted from the air and rescued by HMS Anthony."

I'm curious to know if there would be an option to get higher resolution/sizes of this image, and if yes, how.

Hi Simon. You can order any of our images on Flickr at print resolution from our image library. Just follow the link at the bottom of the image description.

Thanks!

My elderly father claims that his father picked up a lifeboat of survivors from the SS Marina (which was torpedoed along with the SS City of Benares) just off Tory Island. They'd been at sea for 8 (?) days. I can't find anything about this on the internet. Any idea how I can find out more about it - I tried searching the National Archives site but I'm a bit confused by all the different sections. Thanks, Trish

Lovely shot

A truly beautiful shot of a most awful time in our history.

awesome

I think this photo is typical of the resiliency of the British during WWI and WWII. The women's body language says "well, this is a lot of mess to clean up". Unflappable.

The young lady on the left is my Great Grandma Brigham age 36.

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Accordion Lust, and we'd love to have this added to the group!