"Native" Stokers lost with H.M.S. Good Hope

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, KevinBattle said:

Whilst Fatal Octave remains somewhat of a mystery as possibly being mis-spelt, Octave as a St Lucia surname still exists - https://www.stlucianewsonline.com/breaking-news-two-charged-in-connection-with-tuesdays-deadly-shooting/

 

Throw in native patois and whoever was writing down the names wrote what he thought he heard.

If the person was illiterate, then no correction to the error would be made.

Could he be Vidal or Vital for instance?

Would the St Lucia War Memorial be more accurate?

Where did they get the Names they used that differ?

 

   All good questions-but most of the surnames are common across the Leewadrs and the Windwards- and the proximity of St. Lucia to Martinique provides further problems with the French names.  I have asked of the St. Lucia National Archive if they hold anything and will post it's reply, if any is received.  All suspicions by me are that there are service records somewhere in the UK for both Their Lordships and CWGC to get a grip. Thus, CWGC will be contacted the morrow. Naval records of service are generally pretty complete- so quite what has happened to the NCS records is an issue of wider interest for GWF. 

    A related problem is that of "Navy" that is not.  I have a local casualty who is known from war memorials and died at Basrah (or thereabouts). He worked on a transport. But he seems not to be recorded by CWGC.  His name was George Anton Dinn and it is known he was buried in Basrah- though it seems unlikely that this would be outside of  a British cemetery.  

     To me, there are 2 issues  that the St. Lucia men raise-

1)   The extent of  losses that are not strictly RN or MN but fall outside  those services directly. the forerunners of RNTS seem to have fallen off the record but I live in hope that there are non-standard or outlier records still out there somewhere.The St. Lucia men might be a way into it, as there is a fair bit of paper trail and clear indications about where to start looking.

2) The  extent of "Empire" contribution  may be underrepresented and the dispersed nature of records and memorials may have furthered this.

[Guest]

   And a little bit more on this theme, which suggests that it may be worthwhile cracking down on any residual UK located records.  Below is the blurb from CWGC that details the rationale as to who is commemorated on the Bombay memorial

 

      It looks to me that the St. Lucia men are on the wrong memorial- they are in the surviving ADM records as being  "home based" at Portsmouth-most likely as Good Hope was a  Pompey ship. But these men do not fit the criteria of  CWGC for listing them on a memorial thousands of miles away from where any of them had ever been. In addition, they were NOT of "African" birth, so seem to be in the wrong place. I suggest that they might be more properly recorded on the Portsmouth memorial. Again, I will ask CWGC the morrow why they are listed at Bombay when they appear not to fit CWGCs  own criteria.

 

 

THE BOMBAY MEMORIALS. The three Memorials of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, Plymouth and Chatham and the Memorial of the Merchant Navy at Tower Hill record the names of those European sailors who met their death in combatant service, or at the hands of the enemy, and whose graves are not known. There remain, however, the sailors of Asiatic or African birth who took the same risks and met the same fate, and for these men two other Memorials at two great Eastern ports have been erected. The names of the Chinese sailors are erected at Hong Kong; the Indian, Adenese and East African sailors are commemorated at Bombay, and with them are associated those Indian dead of the Royal Indian Marine who fell in the Great War and whose graves are in Eastern waters. The Bombay 1914-1918 Memorial commemorates more than 2,000 sailors who died in the First World War and have no other grave than the sea. A tablet erected in Bombay (St. Thomas) Cathedral records the names of Officers and Warrant Officers of the Royal Indian Marine who fell in the War, this also forms a Memorial to the five who have no known grave and whose names are given separately under the heading of the Bombay (St. Thomas) Cathedral Memorial.

Edited 16 July , 2018 by Guest

[Malcolm12hl]

The GOOD HOPE St. Lucia stokers would appear to be the only men with non-Indian/Lascar names listed in the RN section of the Mumbai memorial, which might suggest that other West Indian (or for that matter West African) casualties found their way onto the three big home memorials.  There might not be many of them as I don't think there were any major warship losses in distant waters after Coronel, but unless GOOD HOPE was the only British warship to sign on native stokers/seamen overseas, there might be a possibility that disease or accidents produced some fatalities on other ships.

 

Let me know if anybody has come up with anything more over the past two weeks - particularly if the CWGC has shed any light on the subject - as I don't want to duplicate anyone else's labours.

 

Malcolm

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Malcolm12hl said:

The GOOD HOPE St. Lucia stokers would appear to be the only men with non-Indian/Lascar names listed in the RN section of the Mumbai memorial, which might suggest that other West Indian (or for that matter West African) casualties found their way onto the three big home memorials.  There might not be many of them as I don't think there were any major warship losses in distant waters after Coronel, but unless GOOD HOPE was the only British warship to sign on native stokers/seamen overseas, there might be a possibility that disease or accidents produced some fatalities on other ships.

 

Let me know if anybody has come up with anything more over the past two weeks - particularly if the CWGC has shed any light on the subject - as I don't want to duplicate anyone else's labours.

 

Malcolm

 

 I followed this because a local casualty  for my area was lost with Good Hope. But another casualty was lost with the Steam Tug "Porpoise" of the Nigerian Marine. And a difficult job tracking down both him and a memorial. My local man, A.E.Brown was First  Mate on this boat- a paddle tug -highly unusual-and it took me untila month or so to find out what happened to it.Taken up for the 1915 campaign in the Cameroons, she disappeared running a mail trip from Lagos to Calabar in December 1916..All the crew perished- right down to "Jumbo" a fireman.They are recorded on a church memorial in Lagos.But there appears to be no memorial to the Nigerian Marine.On the other hand, I am not at all sure why they are commemorated by CWGC at all as the ship was lost when not-to my direct knowledge-engaged on war work-though she and her crew may have been classed as such as after the Cameroons was captured, the ship may have been kept on some sort of Admiralty retainer to keep a watch on the coast.

   Similarly, another man, George Anton Dinn, died at Basrah in 1916 and is presumably buried there somewhere "official" but he is not on CWGC. The whole history of naval transport personnel is a bit of a mystery to me- being neither fish nor fowl-not Royal Navy fully, yet not also Merchant Navy.

   Our 3 big "no Grave but the Sea" memorials -in my home town of Plymouth ,at another place on the southern coast of England I will not mention and Chatham are well-known. So to is the MN memorial on Tower Hill.  The Indians seem-to me at least- to be fairly well covered as the greater part of the uptake of additional crew for campaigns such as Mespot was taken up on the Indian Marine- and from the mid-19th Century there were clear and specific laws relating to Lascar seamen.

  But the oceans are multicultural and the crewing of foreign-going ships around the Empire was  kaleidoscope of nationalities, colours and creeds (Did you perchance see the old documentary on who served on Bellerophon at Trafalgar?- Showed strongly that manning was done from wherever it could be got)

 

    With the St. Lucia men, there should be something in the home naval archives at Kew-though I cannot see offhand where that would be. Whether the stokers were taken up by some existing Admiralty scheme (of which there were many before the war,) whose details I have not tripped over as yet. It seems to me to be the key - to find where British and Empire casualties of various forms of naval service are-probably-pretty well covered for most areas  but West Africa and the Caribbean are a mystery. And losses  of neutrals sailing in British or Empire ships is a ball game that is a complete blank. I think we still have a way to go on this subject- so far, the St.Lucia men on the Indian memorial seems like administrative convenience alone,as I cannot find any rationale for it.

(I have discovered this week that my British Library ticket enables me to remotely access(ie sitting at home with a cup of tea)  the Digital Library of the Caribbean-the Caribbean equivalent,of sorts, of British Newspaper Archive. I will be giving it a bash this week to see if it turns up anything about the St. Lucia men- or any others.)

 

[Malcolm12hl]

H.M.S. MONMOUTH (a Devonport ship) also appears to have done a bit of supplementary recruiting on her way south.  She picked up a handful of stokers from the Pacific Steam Navigation Co. liner ORDUNA, but these would appear to have been British born.  The one man I have looked into so far - James Finnegan (Finnigan on the crew casualty list) - is simply shown as "ex-S.S. ORDUNA" on the crew list, but turns out to have been a short service stoker discharged in 1911 because of (if I have read his service record correctly) defective eyesight.  He is listed on the Plymouth memorial.

 

Do post again if your search of the British Newspaper archive turns up anything on GOOD HOPE's St. Lucia stokers.

 

Malcolm

[Guest]

52 minutes ago, Malcolm12hl said:

Do post again if your search of the British Newspaper archive turns up anything on GOOD HOPE's St. Lucia stokers.

 

 

   Wiil do-  I think this is a particularly fascinating story. The Monmouth/Orduna  recruitment suggests a pre-existing  contingency agreement between the shipping company and Their Lordships. I have come across these for other areas of activity, where the Merchant Navy and the shipping companies were signed-up for "stand-by" agreements, to be taken up by Their Lordships as and when ( I have done quite a bit on  a local casualty who was a Marconi wireless operator and the history of the agreements between Their Lordships and the Marconi Company).  

    Would you know if (like the St. Lucia men), the Orduna men were allocated paperwork or numbers for RND Devonport?   All  of this suggests that there is paperwork in the Archives relating to this form of taking-up from the merchant service- now all we have to do is find it!!

 

     PS- Malcolm- Do you know where the Orduna men signed-on???  This may help track the story.  I suspect at the moment that the St.Lucia men were taken on after 4th August-ie under wartime contingency plans kicking into operation

Edited 30 July , 2018 by Guest

[Malcolm12hl]

James Finnegan's service record shows his previous Short Service Stoker Devonport number (S.S.109321).  This does not appear in the MONMOUTH crew list, so there was probably some detective work after the event.  He was signed on to the MONMOUTH on 9 September 1914 - I have yet to go through the sources to try to work out where the ship was at that date.  The other man signed on from the ORDUNA, Stoker John Carty was a R.N. Reservist (service number 1656 S) who is also listed on the Plymouth memorial - I have not yet tracked down his service record.  There are a handful of other R.N.R. men on the crew list, and I will look into them in due course to check the circumstances of their arrival on board.

 

The GOOD HOPE arrived at St. Lucia on 23 August, so her stokers must have been signed on after that date.  Again, I have not tracked down the dates of her arrivals and departures on the way south, but I would be surprised if she remained there for more than a few days.  I will return to the fray when I have more information.

 

Malcolm

[Guest]

Thanks Malcolm.  Looks like there is more than one issue of take-up in this matter:

 

a) Taken up as reservists?   (This I think is the most likely for your man). I think this may mean looking up the terms for recall to service of reservists if they were serving- obviously mostly afloat- outside the UK. It would seem sensible to me to have an arrangement to recall reservists from either foreign ports-of-call or the ships therein.  It  suggests that there must be documentation on the terms of service of reservists and the terms of their recall-which should be represented in the archives for 1914-as, presumably, the Orduna example was likely to have taken place elsewhere around the Empire (Not being a flag-wagger here- I suspect that transferring reservists from  Red Duster to White Duster in a neutral port (such as Rio, in the case of Monmouth and Good Hope) would have been regarded as a breach of neutrality in international law. So we should be looking at other likely Empire ports and naval movements to narrow this down. Of course, the hardest part is to spot the right file at Kew.

b)  The St. Lucia men were not reservists- As far as I am aware, they were not on the Board of Trade registry and were not UK merchant seamen. Again, this only highlights the need to track their actual terms of engagement.

    At the moment, the likeliest sources of information would seem to be those ships which went south with Good Hope and Monmouth or which turned up for battle of the Falkland Islands.  The records for Glasgow and Canopus may be of interest for this

[PhilB]

Is there a reason why they`re all stokers? Was there a particular shortage of stokers or were these chaps particularly suited to that kind of work? It seems to have been a rotten job!

A stoker works four hours at a stretch, and during that time the temperature of his surroundings varies from 120 degrees to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. One stoker usually has four furnaces to attend to, and while feeding one furnace a man has to be extremely careful or his arm may be burned by the furnace behind him.

As a rule a man is occupied about three minutes at each furnace, and directly he has finished he rushes to the air pipe and waits until his turn comes again. The intense heat of the furnaces has sometimes rendered stokers temporarily insane, and there are many cases on record where they have jumped overboard after having made their way to the deck.

John Colgate Hoyt, Compiler, "The Stoker." In Old Ocean's Ferry: The Log of the Modern Mariner, The Trans-Atlantic Traveler, and Quaint Facts of Neptune's Realm. A Collation of Odd and Useful Information for Nautical Travel and Strange Features of the Sea, for Landsman and Mariner, New York: Bonnell, Silver & Co., 1900, Page 121.

[Guest]

 

       A note on numbers from the local paper-Voice of St. Lucia.    Cannot trace when they were recruited, as that does not seem to figure. I have taken the paper back to the beginning of May 1914-  Good Hope was recommissioned for South America in March. Any idea how she made her way south??

 

[seaJane]

Was it via Canada? When I was researching her surgeon I found a photo of him with some Canadian crew.

PS and what that cutting says is most certainly true.

[Guest]

38 minutes ago, seaJane said:

Was it via Canada? When I was researching her surgeon I found a photo of him with some Canadian crew.

PS and what that cutting says is most certainly true.

 

     I believe so- The casualty file at Kew for "Good Hope" shows that enquiries were sent out to Halifax regarding who had left the ship there. It's where she went south after that that is a bit of a mystery.  

[seaJane]

Has "oldweather" or whatever it is transcribed her log? I'd check for you, but am horizontal...

[Malcolm12hl]

Yes, GOOD HOPE called at Halifax, Nova Scotia before she sailed south.  Four Royal Canadian Navy Midshipmen joined her there, and there is at least one photograph of her in Halifax harbour.  I have not yet pieced together the full details of the ship's long voyage from Portsmouth to Coronel, but will post again when I have made some progress.

 

The St. Lucia newspaper report is an interesting one, as it suggests that some stokers signed on there by the GOOD HOPE were later transferred to other ships.  None of the latter appear to have become casualties (there are no other non-Asian RN men on the Mumbai memorial), and I am certain that none of them are on the MONMOUTH casualty list.

[Guest]

  The "Voice of St. Lucia" was browsed for May-December 1914 and thence into the Spring of 1915. There is one more Kew reference to a file on these men- referred to as "Natives" that I have not seen as yet. I went for the 1918 Colonial Office file which backtracked to the 1916 listing but there seems to be another coming up.

    In addition, the following man   seems to have survived  and been on a more regular engagement, so his record is there to be zapped on Ancestry,etc. (which I have not done as yet-lost the reference!)

 

Name Joseph, Cherriban. Official Number: K49017. Place of Birth: Saint Lucia, West Indies. Date of ...

Admiralty: Royal Navy Registers of Seamen's Services. Stokers. 49001-50000. Name Joseph, Cherriban. Official Number: K49017. Place of Birth: Saint Lucia, West Indies. Date of Birth: 1881.

Location: Saint Lucia, West Indies

Held by:	The National Archives - Admiralty, Navy, Royal Marines, and Coastguard
Date:	1918
Reference:	ADM 188/965/49017
Subjects:	Armed Forces (General Administration) | Caribbean | Navy

[Guest]

   The other source at Kew, which may take some unravelling, is, of course, the correspondence and papers of C-in C North America and West Indies (one C.Craddock)   - which could be in one of several places at Kew (though 1914 is curiously a bit of a blank). There are also the back-up papers for the Official History -certainly there for  1916-1918 but I cannot see obviously where the back-ups for Coronel and Falklands are located. Although Their Lordships were anally retentive about paperwork, they were not keen on mere mortals below the Board of Admiralty knowing what was going on.

   And I think I will take a look at the casualty file for "Monmouth" to see if there is anything about "native stokers"

Look on the bright side- I am fairly sure that "Good Hope" never berthed at Thames Ditton on its way south.........

 

[Malcolm12hl]

I have had a quick look at Joseph's ADM 188.  He signed on with GOOD HOPE on 23 August 1914 but was discharged at Port Stanley on 13 October - if I am reading his card correctly, he was awarded 26 days imprisonment in Port Stanley jail.  In any event he re-joined CANOPUS on 9 November and went on to serve on a variety of postings until being demobilised in mid-1919.  Interestingly, his record card shows him as a Devonport man - GOOD HOPE was a Portsmouth ship, so it seems that his service status was regularised after the event, probably in May 1915 when he transferred to VIVID, the Plymouth stokers' depot.

 

On the wider "Native" stoker question, I have the complete crew list for the MONMOUTH and can confirm that she had none of these men aboard when she was lost.

 

Little land-locked Thames Ditton did lose men in some of the RN's early-war tragedies - one on the HOGUE and another on the FORMIDABLE - but nobody at Coronel...

[Guest]

Good work- I went for a snooze instead- Ancestry can wait until a bit later.   Interesting to have a go at the others now,using him as a lever. And it gives a "Good Hope" date- 23rd August,which is very helpful.

[Guest]

15 hours ago, seaJane said:

Has "oldweather" or whatever it is transcribed her log? I'd check for you, but am horizontal...

 

      Thanks Jane. Serves you right for drinking in hot weather. Alas, Good Hope's final log went down with her at Coronel-  although TNA at Kew has 2 logbooks for Good Hope of 1916 and 1917. -which would take some doing. Alas, they are for some sort of armed trawler/tug taken up by the Admiralty in Dundee. 

      One of the curiosities  of  wandering through "Voice of St. Lucia" yesterday  were the reports of german warships  popping up hither and thither in the early months of the war.  Good Hope was last reported sighted off the coast of Canada but as the editor pointed out, this was unlikely as she was known to have rounded the Strait into the Pacific on 30th September or thereabouts.

    I think  the logs for Canopus and Glasgow may be worth a look-though whether they record any incoming personnel is doubtful.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Malcolm12hl said:

I have had a quick look at Joseph's ADM 188.  He signed on with GOOD HOPE on 23 August 1914 but was discharged at Port Stanley on 13 October - if I am reading his card correctly, he was awarded 26 days imprisonment in Port Stanley jail.  In any event he re-joined CANOPUS on 9 November and went on to serve on a variety of postings until being demobilised in mid-1919.  Interestingly, his record card shows him as a Devonport man - GOOD HOPE was a Portsmouth ship, so it seems that his service status was regularised after the event, probably in May 1915 when he transferred to VIVID, the Plymouth stokers' depot.

 

On the wider "Native" stoker question, I have the complete crew list for the MONMOUTH and can confirm that she had none of these men aboard when she was lost.

 

Little land-locked Thames Ditton did lose men in some of the RN's early-war tragedies - one on the HOGUE and another on the FORMIDABLE - but nobody at Coronel...

 

     So he must have picked up some service medals if he was on any form of regular engagement during the war?

[Guest]

     A curiosity of this, with  Cherriban Jospeh, is the treatment of other foreign-recruited stokers. I ran the service numbers for stokers either side of Joseph- which was a surprise. The succeeding numbers are all regular RN, from Scotland- but the numbers immediately before  Joseph are a group of stokers all recruited on Malta,  A number of Maltese stokers, all with K numbers ( Keyham numbers)  were lost in the Med. with the loss of HMS Louvain, (ex-SS Dresden)  in January 1918.   But with K numbers, they are all listed on the Plymouth "No Grave but the Sea" memorial, up on the Hoe.   Which to me suggests that the Good Hope men are commemorated in the wrong place- and  that they should more properly be listed on  either the Portsmouth memorial (as Good Hope was Pompey-manned)  or on the Plymouth memorial, as stokers. The place they should NOT be is Bombay - as they were not Lascars

 

 

3045723	ARNAUD	GUISEPPE
2867469	TREGILLIS	JOHN
3045794	BONELLO	LORENZO
3046070	FARRUGIA	SPIRO DOMENICO
3046049	ENDRICH	GIOVANNI
3045891	CHIRCOP	PAOLO
3046371	LIA	CARMELO
3046873	WILLIAMS	ALFRED
3045967	CURMI	EMMANUELE
3046930	ZAMMIT	CARMELO
3046472	MIFSUD	EMMANUELE
3045873	CASSAR	CARMELO
3046757	TANTI	EMMANUELE
3046688	SCHIAVONE	GUISEPPE

[horatio2]

So he must have picked up some service medals if he was on any form of regular engagement during the war?

He claimed and was issued with a 1914-15 Star trio of medals.

[Malcolm12hl]

If the crews of GOOD HOPE and MONMOUTH are anything to go by, ships often had a small number of men from the other two depots in their crews - thus GOOD HOPE (a Portsmouth ship) has some men commemorated on the Devonport and Chatham memorials, while MONMOUTH (a Devonport ship) has some on the Portsmouth and Chatham memorials.  I do not know if this was a common occurrence or just the one-off product of mass mobilisation in the summer of 1914.  A spot check on some of the major warships lost later in the war might be revealing.

[horatio2]

A number of Maltese stokers, all with K numbers ( Keyham numbers)

I am not clear where this "Keyham" link comes from. The 'K' prefix to RN Offficial Numbers was applied to all stokers from 1 Jan 1908 (c.f. 'J' for seamen and comms ratings, 'L' for officers' domestics and 'M' for miscellaneous trades. I am not aware that 'K' refers to Keyham which trained engineer officers not stokers.

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, horatio2 said:

I am not clear where this "Keyham" link comes from. The 'K' prefix to RN Offficial Numbers was applied to all stokers from 1 Jan 1908 (c.f. 'J' for seamen and comms ratings, 'L' for officers' domestics and 'M' for miscellaneous trades. I am not aware that 'K' refers to Keyham which trained engineer officers not stokers.

 

     As the stoker school is in Plymouth-my home town- I always remember it as being "K for Keyham"-even though not strictly true. Much of the expansion of the dockyard at Devonport in the decade or so before the war was referred to as being at "Keyham"- it basically means everything built north of the existing dockyard.  Anyway. it helps me remember that stokers are Devonport boys!!