A commemorative ceremony marking Merchant Navy Remembrance Day is held every year at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on 8 September at 11:00am.
The Battle of the Atlantic was the biggest battle of World War 2. Geographically it was big, around 3000 miles from British harbours to the ports of North America, and from Greenland in the north to the Caribbean in the south. It was big in human tragedy, some 2200 Canadian & Newfoundland seamen and women were lost – a rate higher than in any of the three Canadian armed services. Another 38,000 of other nations were also lost.
By the end of the war, Canadian merchant seamen had sailed all the world’s oceans, through storms, surface raiders and submarines to deliver essential supplies.
It is not a commonly known fact that sternwheelers were used more extensively in British Columbia than in any other part of North America even though they are popularly associated with the Mississippi River area of the United States.
At the left is shown Roy's model of Canadian Pacific's British-registered Beaverford in her peacetime colours. Included in the list on the above website, this vessel was lost with all of the crew on 5 November 1940. By that time she had made 16 wartime crossings of the North Atlantic and had survived a U-Boat attack on convoy HX 55 in July 1940.When the German battleship Admiral Scheer attacked convoy HX 84 eastbound in the North Atlantic, Beaverford was one of several ships sunk.
Most of Beaverford's crew were from Britain but three were Canadians including one of her two gunners.Tower Hill Memorial, the UK Merchant Navy monument in London, records the names of all 77 members of Beaverford's crew who were killed when she was sunk. The names of the three Canadians in her crew, Clifford Carter, Laughlin Elwood Stewart, William Lane Thibideau, are also inscribed on the Sailors' Memorial at Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia which overlooks the harbour mouth whence Beaverford made her final departure in 1940.
Canadian Pacific lost 4 of the 5 vessels of the "Beaver" class during the war.
At the end of the civil war in the USA, the South lay in economic ruin, seemingly unable to rebound from a tragic depletion of manpower and treasury.
That year George N. Ives, whose family was prominent in business and agriculture in Connecticut, came to Morehead City, North Carolina, to establish a wholesale fishing business. He would stay and become a leading citizen, distinguishing himself with numerous contributions and reforms in fisheries and related trades, and in fishery management.
One of Ives’s first concerns was the lack of a local boat that could support his business needs. The log-built craft were, he wrote in Forest and Stream in 1881, “strong and serviceable boats admirably suited for their purposes...” About the boats that were used for “business and pleasure,” he noted that they were “deep, sharp, clinker-built; fast sailers, but totally unfitted for shoal water navigation.”! In the sharpie of his native state, Ives perceived characteristics that he thought would be ideal for the Carolina sounds. He placed an order with George M. Graves, a sharpie builder in Fair Haven (now a part of New Haven).
The business was founded in 1930 when Robert Allan commenced private practice as a consulting Naval Architect after serving as Technical Manager of a local major shipyard.
HMCS Sudbury was ordered in February 1940, laid down by Kingston Shipbuilding Ltd. at Kingston in January 1941, launched in May and commissioned into the RCN in October 1941 at Montreal, Quebec. She was initially assigned to duties in the Western Atlantic where she served until January 1944 after which she was reassigned to the Pacific coast and immediately underwent a major overhaul. After workups in May 1944, she joined Esquimalt Force and remained with them until the end of the war.
HMCS Sudbury was paid off at Esquimalt 28 August 1945. She was sold for civilian use as a 892 GRT tugboat and entered civilian service in 1949. The ship retained her name. Sudbury underwent several ownership changes until she was acquired in 1954 by Island Tug and Barge of Victoria, British Columbia.
If you don't know the name then you may know one of their most well-known products, the Schottel Z-drive. Most often found on tugs, they combine propeller, rudder and Kort nozzle into one device, Peter F. demonstrated the tug he is building during the meeting in March 2019, and you will have noticed that it is powered by model Z-drives,
This is an extract from "Sharpies in the Carolinas", published in issue 137 of "Wooden Boat" magazine in July/August 1997.
SS Sudbury ocean-going salvage tug
Because it could be built quickly and inexpensively, the sharpie was accessible to many who could not afford a vessel of conventional construction. A small operator with a sharpie could vie with the schooners owned by the wealthy or by shipping companies. A farmer could contract with an independent sharpie owner at a rate significantly lower than that asked by the schooner operators. Or a farmer might just buy his own sharpie and not have to hire someone else to take his produce to market.
No small credit for the triumph of the sharpie must go to the perceptiveness and acumen of George Ives. He assured success of his endeavors by having his boat built by a top-notch builder and then testing its mettle against the home fleet in its native waters of Long Island Sound. He was well prepared when he made his case for the sharpie with the Carolina boatmen. He knew the local boats and their capabilities and limitations. His thoroughness gave him the confidence to challenge the fastest boat in the area.
After winning a race between the two types of boat, the pressure was on to get more of the new boats into local service. Ives had shipped his two boats on the deck of a schooner, but for the average fisherman, ordering a boat from New England was not an option. Even if one were to sail the new boat south to avoid shipping costs, there were risks. We might also assume that many Carolina sailors still had some mistrust of flat bottoms on seagoing boats.
Merchant Navy Remembrance Day, 3rd September.
Information from wikipedia.
Information from wikipedia.
An extract from the "Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle for 1858"
Sharpies in the Carolinas.
"The Canadian Merchant Marine had only forty-one ocean-going merchant ships at the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war this fleet underwent tremendous expansion as Canadian shipyards produced 403 merchant vessels. Most of these were taken over by Great Britain and the United States but a significant number sailed under the Canadian flag. The cost of the war was high, fifty-eight Canadian-registry merchant ships were lost to enemy action, or probable enemy action, and 1,146 Canadian merchant sailors perished at sea or in Axis prison camps. In addition, six Canadian Government owned, but British-registered, merchant ships and eight Newfoundland-registered merchant ships were lost to enemy action. Many other vessels serving the war effort were lost at sea to marine causes or accident."
The above appears on the web at: family heritage a page that also lists many details of the ships lost and damaged.
The smallest vessel listed is the Lucille M of 54 gross tons, (the size of a boat about 25m long) owned by Frederick Sutherland. She was shelled by U89 off Cape Sable. The 11 crew escaped, including the four wounded, and rowed 100 miles to shore at Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
The largest vessel listed is Canadian Pacific's Empress of Britain of 42,300 tons. She was torpedoed by U32 off Ireland on 28 October 1940 after being bombed by German aircraft. There were few casualties.
For many of the ships that were lost, it is reported that there was no loss of life, and presumably they were rescued by other ships. All 36 crew of the Canadian Cruiser of Canadian Tramp Shipping were taken prisoner after being sunk by the German battleship Gneisenau in February 1941. One man later escaped from the POW camp to Spain. The crews of some ships were not so lucky. All on board Imperial Oil's Victolite, 45 crew and 2 DEMS gunners, were lost in February 1942. The Canadian Government-owned Bic Island was sunk and all of its crew were lost as well as the survivors she had rescued from the SS Gurney E Newlin and SS Sourabaya.
The above is is just a random selection of the entries on the website.
Confederation Marine Modellers