Another warm Welcome Aboard, to you,Alan.
That was an interesting introduction to yourself you gave,with mentions of your MN service from 1943,East Asiatic & BI,Florida and Peru…..Great life history in a nutshell.
What interested me was your reference to British India’s s.s. Sir Harvey Adamson.
For those who don’t know,she is another peacetime Forgotten Tragedy.
The Sir Harvey Adamson
(1914-1947)
Amid the series of sisters delivered in 1914 came a solo ship, the first ship actually designed for the Rangoon-Tavoy and Mergui mail run since the loss of the Mergui in 1904, that service having had to make do with second hand tonnage since then.
Built at Pointhouse by Inglis, the Sir Harvey Adamson had a long shelter deck and two masts set immediately at either end of the midships deckhouses. In these were the first class passengers (12) with the second class (12) aft and the deck passengers (476) on the shelter deck. Her shallow draft suited the restricted waters of the archipelago and twin screws gave improved manoeuvrability in the narrow channels. Steam was supplied from two single ended boilers.
The ships name requires some comment. Being so out of the BI pattern, it has often been suggested that she was taken over from other owners but she was a BI design and order from the start, her name being dictated by the fact that Sir Harvey Adamson, K.C.S.I., was Lieutenant-Governor of Burma, a position he occupied from 1910 to 1915.
Being such a specialised vessel, the Sir Harvey Adamson was left on the Mergui run for much of the war period, though with two periods as an Indian Expeditionary Force transport, the first of 21 months from September 1915 and the second a brief period in 1917 towing inland water craft along the Tigris and Euphrates. With the latter break, she was under the Liner Requisition Scheme from May 1917. She had the usual minor mishaps during the 1920’s and 1930’s that come the way of all ships trading in the still unsatisfactorily charted waters of the archipelago but was generally considered a lucky ship. The early years of the Second World War, when the conflict was confined to Europe, left her largely untroubled, although under the Liner Division from March 1940. However, she was in the thick of it from the time she was requisitioned as a Personnel and Military Store Ship at Rangoon in January 1942 and sent south to evacuate the best part of 1,500 people from Mergui before it was overrun by the Japanese. She continued in the role of mercy ship, seldom with less than a thousand people on board, during the evacuation of Burma generally and then served as a Military Store Ship and fuel depot ship from February 1943 until the end of the war.
Having been spared the attentions of the enemy during hostilities, it was ironic that the Sir Harvey Adamson should meet her end violently after peace had returned. Following a spell on the Colombo-Tuticorin run, she had resumed her Mergui sailings early in 1947 and on the 17th April of that year left Rangoon for Tavoy and Mergui, having on board a total of 269 passengers and crew. She reported by radio twice the following day and then disappeared with all hands in heavy weather off the Temasserin coast on the Mergui Archipelago, after leaving Rangoon. The ship is believed to have struck a mine and was never seen again. No entirely satisfactory explanation of the tragedy ever emerged but the generally accepted theory, and the one adopted at the subsequent enquiry, was that she had struck a wartime mine set loose from its moorings by the cyclonic weather and had gone down before any distress signal could be sent out. The Sir Harvey Adamson was built without double bottoms, which would have undoubtedly assisted the speed of flooding once the shell was penetrated.
-----------------------------------
Best Regards
Gulliver
