Merdeka and Much More: Reminiscences of a Raffles Professor, 1953-67

8 Tea Cups and Tokyo

TEA CUPS AND TOKYO 63 63 8 Tea Cups and Tokyo N ot long after returning to Singapore on Keningau, her chief engineer, Alan Ferguson, invited me home to meet his wife Violet. They lived in one of the Straits Steamship Flats in Sommerville Estate, and she was to fill in the details, so I understood, of their extraordinary wartime experience. Alan, a quietly spoken slightly deaf 50-year-old Ulsterman, was but one of several score Company employees, from chairman to chinchews who I interviewed for Home Port Singapore, covering the length and breadth of England and Scotland one bitterly cold winter (as well as in Singapore and adjacent areas) in order to do so. With Alan I maintained a friendly acquaintance, nurtured by our Borneo voyage, until his death in 1968. In May 1940, so he told me on that voyage, he and his wife were in France, she recovering from an appendectomy operation and a miscarriage. They were caught unawares by the German invasion but managed narrowly to escape, sailing for England from Bordeaux in a ferry packed with refugees, almost the last vessel to leave the port. Heaving a sigh of relief they sailed from Liverpool on September 24, happy to be returning to a peaceful East. They did enjoy a long and peaceful journey, but it came to an abrupt end early on the morning of November 11. Their ship, the Blue Funnel Automedon had crossed the Indian Ocean and was due at Penang the next day. She never made it, being intercepted by the German merchant raider Atlantis. Summoned to stop, Automedon sent out a distress call. This sealed her fate. Struck MERDEKA AND MUCH MORE 64 by several salvos fired from the raider, within a few minutes her radio was destroyed along with most of her superstructure, her steering smashed, most of her officers and crew killed or wounded. She lay a floating wreck motionless in the water. It had been another swift and successful attack, led by Captain Bernard Rogge. He and his Adjutant, Ulrich Mohr, were remarkably humane officers, and repeatedly in their years at sea in Atlantis helped survivors in many ways. In this instance Rogge told the surviving passengers who had been transferred to Atlantis that they were going to Germany, a cold country, and he hoped they would have some warm clothes. Frantically Mrs Ferguson pleaded that her trunk, down in the hold, be brought up and passed over. Rogge signalled across to Mohr who was preparing to sink Automedon and anxious to depart the scene. He obeyed orders however and went below with a search party. It stumbled on the strong room. Here was all “unwanted on voyage” luggage, including not one but two trunks of Mrs Ferguson. One contained clothes, the other some crockery, including a tea set. She wanted only the clothes but Rogge insisted and both trunks were transferred to Atlantis, along with other material found there, including some mail bags. Automedon then was sunk and Atlantis headed southwest across the Indian Ocean. The group of survivors, some thirty of them, spent four weeks on her before being transferred to a captured Norwegian ship Storstadt. It held nearly 500 prisoners from eight other ships sunk by Atlantis, with Mrs Ferguson, so she told me, the only woman. Rounding South Africa far to the south of Cape Town, keeping well clear of shipping routes, they sailed up the Atlantic unobserved, finally in March 1941 to slip into Bordeaux. Here they were separated. Alan with the trunk of crockery went to a camp in northern Germany near Hamburg where captured merchant seamen were held. Violet went to a woman’s internment camp near Ravensburg in the south. Finding that the camp was desperately short of tableware she wrote to Alan. The trunk was TEA CUPS AND TOKYO 65 sent to her; but when the International Red Cross came to the rescue the crockery was repacked and sent back north. In March 1943 she was repatriated to England and later Alan too, a frail man, in February 1945. With the war over they returned to Singapore. On the eve of their departure they were informed by the British military authorities that they had received Violet’s luggage from Germany. It had been kept in a large warehouse outside Hamburg. Not a single item had been lost or broken. It followed them back to...