The remarkable brush of a lifeboat with the Mouchoir Banks and TCI.

Story & Illustrations By Eric Wiberg & Andrew Warren

In previous editions of Astrolabe we documented how, from over 130 ships attacked around Turks & Caicos Islands and The Bahamas during World War II, at least 72 survivors landed in the TCI and a further 334 men landed in The Bahamas. It is tempting to add the 23 men in the SS Hardwicke Grange lifeboat, who came within one mile of the rocks off Grand Turk and heard the surf breaking on the Mouchoir Bank before being picked up by the ship Athelprince on June 23, 1942. 

This is their story, as told mostly by the witnesses, the captain, the rescuers, a skilled and determined Second Officer Edward Lionel Warren, King’s Commendation, later an esteemed Trinity House Channel Pilot, and his son Andrew Warren in Italy, who recently found and shared the charts and logs which his father kept for all these years.  

The Hardwicke Grange was a 9,005-ton, 430-foot British-flagged refrigerated passenger and cargo ship.

The British-flagged refrigerated passenger and cargo ship Hardwicke Grange was launched on April 20, 1921 by William Hamilton and Company of Glasgow. At 9,005 gross tons, she was 430 feet long and 61.1 feet wide. Her owners were Houlder Line Ltd. of London. It was named after a country house in Hadnall, Shropshire, which was built for Viscount Sir Roland Hill before 1808 and destroyed in 1931 due to “insufficient wealth.”

At the time of her sinking Hardwicke Grange was under the command of Captain Timothy McNamara and had a total crew of 78 persons, including 5 gunners, 2 of them army and 3 Royal Navy. The ship left Newport News on June 8, 1942 with an incomplete cargo of 700 tons of refrigerated goods. Her destination was Buenos Aires via Trinidad.

She was sunk by Hans-Ludwig Witt of U-129. McNamara intended to bypass the Caribbean Sea altogether, and instead opt to head east of the Windward Islands. The course of southeast was taking the ship past the Windward and Mona Passages, and the Anegada Passage as well. This was the route as dictated by the Naval Control Service Officers (NCSO) who were instructed by the Admiralty in London. The routing may have been to avoid the U-boats reported to have been ravaging ships in those areas since March and April.

Watch-standers on Hardwicke Grange were brought to extra alert on June 11, their fourth day at sea. Though Second Officer Edward Lionel Warren stated that they “received no warning of submarines and were not expecting to be attacked,” they held a zig-zag course during the day. Soon after sunrise the First Officer sighted an aircraft, probably on patrol south of its base in Bermuda. Spotted about three miles away and too far for identification purposes, the plane kept its distance, did not investigate or challenge the Hardwicke Grange, and ultimately flew out of sight.

At midnight the ship was heading south on a straight course roughly midway between San Juan and Bermuda. Though the night was very dark, the air was light and variable and the seas were smooth. The ship continued at 13 knots until at 2:30 AM local time it was struck by a torpedo that hit the starboard or west-facing side of the ship. Though the only sound was a dull thud, the concussion which followed rocked the ship and everyone in it. The torpedo killed Greaser Henry Catterall, 21, Third Assistant Engineer John James Lancaster, 36, and Greaser John Joseph Lynd, 45, all in the engine room. After a huge column of water, smoke, and debris showered the bridge the foretop mast collapsed, followed closely by the two derricks. The insulation for the refrigerated holds was cork, and the refrigerating units operated on a particularly pungent gas, leaving a strong odor of burnt cork throughout the ship.

Second Officer Edward Lionel Warren kept charts and logs of the sinking of the Hardwicke Grange and subsequent rescue at sea of 23 men in lifeboats.

Warren witnessed a second torpedo strike the Hardwicke Grange between the engine room and the #4 hold, the hatches of which were blown off. The engine room was flooded, the alarm sounded, and the ship listed 20 to 25 degrees to starboard and began to lose momentum. Yet as more water rushed in from the second torpedo, the ship slowly regained an even keel and began settling down very low in the water.

The wireless operator attempted to send an SSS or SOS on the emergency set, the main aerials having been destroyed, but is not thought to have succeeded. The firemen whose job it was to feed the boilers with coal could not come up through the engine room and had to clamber up through the stokehold chute where the coal was loaded.

McNamara ordered “Abandon Ship,” the idea being that the boats would be manned and lowered to within a few feet of the surface of the sea until the ship stopped moving, then lowered the final distance so that they would not swamp. Two of the boats on the starboard side were useless: #5 was smashed by the explosions and #1 could not be broken free from the davits. As a result, four boats were lowered: #3 on the starboard side and #2, 4, and 6 on the port side. 

Warren received a scare when he left #3 boat on the starboard side to ask the captain for final instructions on the port side, only to find that the three portside boats had cast off. He ran back to the starboard side and found that the boat he had helped launch was now only attached by a line called a painter. He just managed to clamber aboard before the line was released from the ship.

Though all of the lifeboats sank as deep as the benches due to the timbers having dried out and the seams having become permeable, all four boats managed to clear the ship by 3:00 in the morning. As soon as the boats were clear, Witt in U-129 moved in with the submarine’s deck guns to finish off the large ship. The men in three of the boats were astern of the ship on the port side, on the northeast quadrant, and the sub surfaced and began firing from the southwest quadrant, or the starboard bow of the ship. However, the first shots were too high and landed amongst the boats on the opposite side of the ships. Alarmed, the boats moved further off.

This newspaper clipping shows seamen from the Hardwicke Grange in the lifeboat under Edward Warren, who were within sight and sound of the Turks & Caicos Islands following a submarine attack during World War II.

Meanwhile three men—the Third Officer and two other men—cast off from the doomed ship aboard a raft. After roughly half an hour of shelling the vessel caught fire amidships. By 3:30 AM the silhouette of the ship disappeared and the Hardwicke Grange had been sunk.

Witt took the submarine over to the three men on the raft. He told them that there were four boats astern and provided them with Dutch milk tablets. Witt was flanked by two sailors with machine guns while he spoke to the men on the raft. The fear amongst U-boat officers was that merchant ship survivors might stow weapons in their lifeboats and use them against submarine officers when they approached to question them. After telling the raft survivors that they would be picked up by the boats at dawn, Witt and U-129 motored off on the surface.

During the balance of the night the boats and raft stayed close by the site of the sinking, and in the morning they all rendezvoused and split into four lifeboats, taking the three men off the raft. Warren transferred to the #3 lifeboat which had a total complement of 23 men in it, including all three Royal Navy gunners. McNamara’s boat had 20 men, the Second Officer’s boat had 16, and the First Officer’s also had 16.

Warren provided each boat with a course and distance to The Bahamas from his last plotted position. Before heading southwest, they searched the debris field and discovered a sentry’s box with binoculars and (low and behold) a bottle of whisky. Of course, all of the gunners denied ownership of the whisky, so Warren used it later to purify some putrefying fresh water, and mixed it with raisins and prunes to create a concoction which was popular with the men.

After two days, Warren’s boat fell behind and the Third Officer said that he would take his boat south. By the third day (June 15) all the boats had separated. McNamara’s boat made it to Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic by June 25. The Third Officer’s boat landed at Mole Saint Nicholas, Haiti, and the First Officer’s boat was picked up by an Allied ship and the crew of 16 officers and men were landed in Jamaica. For all the survivors being landed in so many different ports, McNamara was awarded an OBE.

This chart shows where Warren’s lifeboat brushed the north coast of the Turks & Caicos in 1942.

The newly-unearthed log by Warren holds confirmation of what the men endured and their proximity to the Turks & Caicos, in logbook form as were as charts. On June 18, Warren notes dryly, “thunderbolt experienced . . . Momentarily stunning Cadet Cassels. Everybody experienced shock, as though the boat had been stopped suddenly by a blow. We appear to be in the center of a local electrical disturbance.” The following day he records, “I still maintain that we should make the Caicos Group first, which we should do in two or three days.”

On June 20, their ninth day, Warren’s boat “overtook the stranger,” which proved to be their McNamara’s lifeboat. He “believed to have sighted land yesterday afternoon on my port quarter.” Warren opines, “Impossible. Believe myself that we are 60 miles from the nearest land (The Caicos) . . .” That day the men recorded seeing “several flies” and “two strange birds,” including bosun or frigate birds. He records “trouble with sharks” and a “shoal of tiny fish” as well as marlin and tarpon. Warren speaks of creating a lead line to sound shallow depths, which “will come in very useful in case we make the islands and have to make a difficult landfall between the reefs.” 

On June 20 they “sighted large flock of birds, a tiny moth, and several flies. Grand signs. Several pieces of quite new driftwood from trees also seen. We cannot be very far from land.” The next day he writes, “We cannot be far off the land and should sight it within the next four days at the most. On making it, if uninhabited and composed of small cargo as are the Caicos Islands, I intend finding the largest and if satisfactory to stay and rest all hands for 24 hours. If large enough I shall leave the main body under Mr. Charlton whilst I and a few of the stronger make N.W. or W.N.W. along the cays until we strike a lighthouse or settlement. The provisions being divided, I taking just enough for 10 days or 300 miles.” The following day however, the breeze fell and they made less progress, though sighted driftwood and parts of a tree.

This image depicts the lifeboat’s journey towards the TCI.

They sighted the Athelprince at 5:40 in the morning of June 21, 1942, and in calm conditions they were able to row alongside and “all crew boarded safely and without assistance,” which is a matter of pride for a surviving commander. Athelprince survived a U-boat attack earlier in the war, and her sister ship Athelqueen was sunk near Eleuthera by an Italian submarine earlier that year, the survivors landing at Hope Town, Abaco. Captain Roberts of the rescue ship confirmed Warren, the rescued officer’s belief that the 23 Hardwicke Grange men in his lifeboat had in fact “passed within a mile or two of several rocks during the night, and were 5 miles off Mouchoir Bank, so would have made the reefs by 07000 hrs . . .” or dawn. They had to leave the other boats to their fates. However, all the men who made it off the mother ship also made it ashore alive.

The Hardwicke Grange men in the lifeboat under Edward Warren were able to prove that they did indeed come within sight and sound of the Turks & Caicos Islands and Mouchoir Bank, and most likely the boat under McNamara did as well. This means that Warren and his son have re-written history and that rather than 72, in fact 95 Allied merchant sailors at least made it to the Turks & Caicos Islands from German and Italian submarine attack in World War II. As much as they wanted to, Warren and the nearly two dozen others were unable to set foot in the TCI and had to settle for Cuba instead.

Eric Wiberg is from Nassau and lives in Boston. He has authored over 40 books and 1,000 articles, mostly on maritime and aviation history in The Bahamas, Turks & Caicos Islands, and New England. Contact him at: eric@ericwiberg.com

Andrew Warren is the son of Capt. Edward L. Warren, who kept the journal and charts. Andrew contacted Eric in 2024 to tell the story further. An active sailor, Andrew lives in Italy. Contact him at: warren725@btinternet.com

Previously in this series:

Astrolabe, Times of the Islands Winter 2020/21, “TCI in WWII: Fauna, Part II”.

Astrolabe, Times of the Islands Summer 2020, “TCI in WWII: Fauna, Part I”.

Astrolabe, Times of the Islands Winter 2019/20, “Survivors of U-Boats, Part II”.

Astrolabe, Times of the Islands Fall 2019, “TCI WWI, WWII: Stifinder 1918, Vineland 1942.