Current Information:

Age-39

Born-Brompton

In February 1917, the German navy introduced their ‘sink on sight’ policy whereby their submarines attacked all merchant shipping without warning. By doing this they hoped to starve Britain and the Allies of vital supplies and force them to sue for peace. At first it was very successful and hundreds of ships were were sunk in the opening months of the campaign and at one point Britain was reduced  to just six weeks' supply of wheat. But there were dangers for Germany. Many of the ships sunk were American and this was one of the main factors why the United States entered the war in April 1917. Eventually the threat of the U-boats was weakened by the introduction of a convoy system, but not before many ships had been sunk and many lives lost.

One of the victims of this ‘sink on sight’ policy was the Steam Ship Alnwick Castle, which, on 17th March, 1917, left Plymouth for Cape Town with 14 passengers a crew of 100 and carrying a general cargo. On 18th January, she picked up 25 survivors from the Steam Ship Trevose which had just been torpedoed by the German submarine U-81. The following morning, 19th March, she herself came face to face with U-81 when in a position about 300 miles off the Bishop Rock in the Scillies. She was torpedoed without warning and sank within half an hour. There was enough time however to launch six lifeboats who then faced the daunting task of reaching land. Two of the lifeboats were never seen again. The one with the captain aboard drifted for five days before being rescued by a French ship but by that time four people had died from exposure. The lifeboat containing the First Officer had to face a more perilous ordeal. With 31 people aboard, including a mother and baby, it drifted for nine days before being rescued by Spanish fishing boats and taken into Carino, near Cape Ortegal in northern Spain. Ten people had died. Some succumbed to exposure, others went mad with thirst and leapt overboard. The mother and baby survived. It has been impossible, so far, to discover what happened to the remaining two lifeboats. Altogether out of 139 persons on board the SSAlnwick Castle, 40, including three of the crew of the Trevose , had died. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission gives the date of death for T Bowes as 23rd March, 1917 which suggests that he was one of those who who died while on one of the lifeboats.