St Bees
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St Bees Dead - World War I
St Bees Dead - World War I
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St Bees |
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Publications St Bees Dead - World War I |
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World War I Abel Ashburner William James Ashburner William Ball John Banks Fred Bell Lancelot Thomas Bell Claude L Blair MC William Calvert John William Cartmell William Connors Henry Robert & John Harrington Oswald Rees Keene Stanley Kenworthy William Ewart Mawson Clement Mossop James McKee William Scott McNeal J. Nicholson Ferdinand William Pryor Herbert Hopkin Rees Tom Dalzell Rothery James Stainton J. Nicholson Thomas Robley Steele Alfred Taylor Edward Telfer James Thompson Joseph Varah George William Walker |
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Fred Bell was the son of a coachman living at 2 Abbot’s Cottage, St. Bees. On leaving the village school he worked first for the Whitehaven Harbour Board and then at Lowca Engineering Works. When he was eighteen he moved to Messrs. Chambers, the Castle Line, Liverpool, where three years later he sat for, and secured, his Second Engineer’s Certificate. Continuing his studies he obtained his Chief Engineer’s Certificate, and at the outbreak of war he was about to sit the final grade examination. |
Together with his older brother Ted, who had followed a similar career path, he at once volunteered for the Royal Navy. Both brothers were accepted as Engineer–Lieutenants, Fred being posted to HMS ‘Viknor’ and Ted to HMS ‘Duke of Cornwall’.
These were passenger vessels requisitioned for the war and converted to serve as armed merchantmen. The ‘Viknor’, built in 1888, had previously been the s.s. ‘Viking’, and before that the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s ‘Atrato’, when she carried passengers mainly on the West Indies route. Re-commissioned in December 1914 as H.M.S. ‘Viknor’, she had a crew of 22 officers and 275 ratings.
Joining the Royal Navy’s Tenth Squadron, H.M.S. ‘Viknor’ set off to patrol the waters between the UK and Iceland. On 12 January she was in radio contact with the Admiralty, reporting a very severe storm; from then on nothing was heard from her. It is supposed either that she foundered in the storm, or, being carried off course by it, entered an area known to have been mined by the Germans, and was thus destroyed.
No-one from the 297 crew survived. A few bodies, mainly unidentifiable individually but with Royal Mail Steam Packet lifebelts, were later washed up on the north coast of Ireland, and one was found on Oronsay in the Hebrides.
Ted Bell did survive the war.
Early in the 1920s the Admiralty sent commemorative scrolls to the families of sailors lost in the war. The one sent to Fred Bell’s father was discovered in 2008, in a chest of drawers bought some thirty years earlier at a Harrogate antiques auction. The finder has kindly put it into the care of the
St. Bees Village History Group.
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