Peter Costello
H.M.S TARA,
by Richard Burnell, edited by Gareth Rowlands
(Holyhead Maritime Museum, £7.95 / €9.50 approx.)
The RMS Leinster, an Irish ship operating as a mail-boat, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on October 10, 1918, while outward bound for Holyhead. She sank some 4 nautical miles off the Kish Lightship.
The exact number of dead is now thought to have been at least 564, making this the single biggest loss of life ever in the Irish Sea. Her story is well-known and disaster well memorialised on the sea front at Queen’s Road, Dún Laoghaire.
Fate
Less known, if at all, is the fate of another ship on the cross-channel service, SS Hibernia. The ship was requisitioned by the British Navy in August 1914 on the outbreak of war and was renamed HMS Tara. After a year working in the North Sea she was sent out to the Mediterranean as as patrol boat along the coast of Egypt.
Ninety four survivors of the
Tara were landed in the Libyan province of Cyrenaica”
She too was a victim of a prowling U-boat, but in her case off the coast of Libya. On November 5, 1915 she was attacked and sunk, with a crew of 109, some 74 of whom were from Holyhead, who can be said to have Irish connections of one kind or another working where they did.
She was sunk while about the enter the Libyan port of Sollum, near the Egyptian border with Libya. At this date Egypt, though nominally a part of the Turkish Empire, was under British occupation. Libya next door was. since 1912, an Italian colony. Britain and Italy were both in a state of war with Germany and her ally Turkey.
Ninety four survivors of the Tara were landed in the Libyan province of Cyrenaica. Here the local Senussi tribesmen were in revolt against their Italians overlords, in a sort of ‘holy war’ spurred on by their Sufi religious beliefs.
The U-boat commander was towing two schooners filled with German war supplies for the Senussi, along with some Turkish officers to liaise with the. .
When the survivors of the Tara were landed they were handed over to the Senussi by the Germans, quite contrary to the Red Cross regulations on the treatment of prisoners of war as they were strictly prisoners of the Turks.
Survivors
There now began a harrowing experience for these men, some of whom were in poor state of health after the sinking.
Starved by the captors who stole much of the food sent in by the Turks for the POWs. There was little that the ship’s doctor, George Robinson, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, could do for them. Eventually they were rescued by Major Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster no less, commanding a set of Rolls Royce armoured cars mounting machine guns, which the duke had personally paid for and which were later to prove their worth elsewhere, as in 1920s Ireland.
It is an instance of how the Great War, once started, developed within it all kinds of smaller wars”
The prisoners were, according to local intelligence, at a small place called Bir-el-Hakim, though this was not quite certain. The Duke’s column finally reached the survivors of the Tara on, of all days, the Feast of St Patrick 1916.
All in all this is an extraordinary story. This little book is a grim account, well illustrated by a photographs, many from an album of one of those involved, which Richard Burnell has patiently pieced together.
But this affair was a mere side show to the General Staff back in London. It is an instance of how the Great War, once started, developed within it all kinds of smaller wars, which in turn sowed the seeds of future wars.
In World II these Senussi, by an ironic turn of fate, were on the side of the British against the Axis powers. Today many of them ardently believe their exiled leader, Crown Prince Mohammed El Senussi, to be the rightful ruler of Libya.
All proceeds of the sale of this book go to the Holyhead Maritime Museum, Newry Beach, Holyhead, Anglesey, LL65 1YD. Wales; maritimemuseumholyhead.