On 12 Apr 2011, at 8:51 AM, Nivard Ovington wrote (snip): > UK Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 > Southampton, England > 1935 > > January > Llandovery Castle > Maccoll Alan Ernest 119 Bedford Court Mans London Farmer > Maccoll Elsie Mary (wife aged 38) > Maccoll Elsie (daughter aged 8) > Last permanent residence South Africa > Future permanent residence England > Name: Alan Ernest Maccoll > Birth Date: abt 1879 > Age: 56 > Port of Departure: Mombasa, Kenya > Arrival Date: 7 Jan 1935 > Port of Arrival: Southampton, England > Ports of Voyage: Mombasa > [Zanzibar] > [Dar-Es-Salaam] > [Beira] > [Natal] > [Port Elizabeth] > [Cape Town] > Ship Name: Llandovery Castle > Search Ship Database: View the 'Llandovery Castle' in the > 'Passenger Ships and Images' database > Shipping line: Union-Castle Mail Steamship Company Ltd > Official Number: 148678 > > BT26; Piece: 1077; Item: 129 The Llandovery Castle caught my eye. The connection for my family is that this ship was sunk off the Fastnet (Irish coast) in June 1945, en route from Canada to the UK in the course of its service as a Hospital Ship during the War, and my wife's uncle, Charles FULTON, was one of the crew who was lost. In the Latrobe University Library, Melbourne, where my wife was working at the time, we found in microfiche files of The Times over the immediate post-war period an account of the War Crimes trial of the Second Officer of the submarine in question. The accused claimed that the captain had insisted that the ship, though painted white with large red crosses, was being used to ferry recovered troops back to combat rather than returning empty, but that he didn't personally believe that this was the case (and, indeed, it wasn't -- very few persons survived the attack, and they, and all those lost, were crew-members). In the circumstances he was in no position to disobey his captain's orders. The captain had evaded retribution by fleeing to Poland, which by the time of his trial was under Soviet control, so he couldn't be extradited. Charles Fulton's only memorial is in the records the National War Memorial in the UK. We only got onto Uncle Charlie and his elder brother through a tiny newspaper cutting sent from England to my mother-in-law by some contact in Surrey (where Charlie had stayed after leaving home following a big quarrel with his father in the mid-1930s), which we found in her papers after her death. His elder brother, who also left in similar circumstances, simply disappeared, and my mother-in- law never knew where he was until she happened to overhear, in a corner store near a friend's home which she happened to be visiting that day, that he had died. All those years he had been in Cape Town, working as a sort of odd-job man in the Mount Nelson Hotel. My mother-in-law was most reticent about her past -- part post-Victorian reserve, but probably mainly because there was non-white ancestry on both sides of my wife's family and Apartheid was still in force, so these details never came out in full during her lifetime. That we know anything at all is due to one small oral clue during her lifetime and the clipping found after her death, as neither of them left any issue. All this is maybe a bit off-topic, but it does illustrate the degree of luck and alertness to clues that you need for genealogy, and is meant to encourage those in constant collision with brick walls!