There was a framed photo of a Liberty ship that had broken in half on
the front room wall at 17 Beddington Road. Snapped clean in half. She was afloat
but where the break had occurred she was only roughly planked up with boards.
Although not the ship shown in the picture above it was very similar.
Liberty ships had a habit of suffering this fate as they were all welded
construction and the technology had not been perfected at that stage.
When I looked at the picture I
couldn't see why the water wouldn't leak in through the roughly planked repair
and sink her. So I quizzed Grandad on it. "Oh that was only a temporary repair to stop her guts
falling out of her."
I didn't follow and he could see I still didn't properly understand, so he
explained that the ship had broken in half, but she had consisted of a number of
watertight
cargo holds, each with a dividing bulkhead. As the bulkhead behind the
planking was not perforated, she remained afloat.
I remember I assumed that she was
another ship that he'd taken to the breakers and I asked him some further questions. He
laughed, "She didn't go to the breakers, she's at the bottom of the
Atlantic."
I was now really intrigued and I kept asking questions.
Sometimes you had to drag things out of him. Actually, come to think of it, I
think he enjoyed teasing me sometimes. He winked and touched the side of his nose knowingly,
"That was a secret mission. I can't tell you about that one." And he
didn't.
I remember he called her the Elina Majeska, but I could never
find any reference to a ship of that name when I did any research. Years later I was talking to my Uncle Bob about the
ship, as I thought he might have known her actual fate.
"The "Old Man" sunk her in the Atlantic trench
where no-one would ever find her. It was all hush-hush, but the Greenies would
never let the Government get away with it today," he told me. I was even
more intrigued. "Well, they filled her up with all their old poison gas
shells they wanted to get rid of, all the old out of date armaments from the
first World War that was getting dangerous, and anything else they couldn't
sweep under the carpet. Maybe even a few of Churchill's old love letters for all
I know. We thought he was bloody mad and were expecting to hear every day he
was gone that he'd blown himself up."
When I remarked on the ship's strange name to Bob, he told me
she was named after a film star and that gave me a lead that
ultimately lead me to discovering her origins.
When I researched her history, I found that the Helena
Modjeska was a WW2 liberty ship that ran aground on the Goodwin sands off
the Kentish coast. They couldn't re-float her and she broke in half. The
official records show she went to scrap. But there were two halves
weren't there!
I was intrigued by the name; it was the practice to name
liberty ships after well known Americans, but I'd never heard of a Helena
Modjeska. It turned out she was a notorious star of the stage
from the early part of the 20th century, who scandalised society by
keeping a well stocked stable of young studs at her Californian mansion.
Grandad would have heard of her and maybe that had something to do with
the wink he gave me and the stuff about the secret business!
The story of the sinking of the Helena Modjeska was completely in character for
Grandad. But Dad was more responsible.
Maybe that's another reason why they were always fighting.
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