Big Seas

Like Job, the British people had been "made to possess many months of misery." They had suffered sorely and patiently until it seemed that Satan must surely run out of afflictions with which to smite them. But last week came more blows.

Gales boiled over the British Isles, at hurricane force in many areas. Fallen trees blocked many main roads. Bomb ruins crashed into bomb-weakened houses, and rescue squads went to work as they had in the nights of the blitz. At Shrewsbury a gust snatched a man and carried him to death in the Severn River. Mountainous waves rolled aside a sea wall in Hampshire and flooded many cottages.

Ashore, the death toll was small (5), but at least 62 men lost their lives as shipping wallowed in one of the worst storms of the century. At Sker Point, in Wales, hundreds watched helplessly as the 40 crewmen of a tanker, breaking up on the rocks 300 yards offshore, were swept to death by huge waves. A lifeboat, which set out to the stricken ship, was swamped and its crew of eight men lost.

Britannia's pride took a beating as the waves ruled. The liner Mauretania, refurbished for the transatlantic run, was caught in the storm during her trial run. Unable to berth because of the rolling waves in the Mersey River, the big (35,000 tons) Mauretania was stranded for four days off Liverpool, while her 400 guests fretted. Among the passengers was Sir Alexander Maxwell, head of the Government's Tourist Board, who missed 14 meetings at which he was to speak on the joys of travel on British ships. The undamaged Mauretania (she is due in New York this week) was finally docked--on the same day that the old (33 years) Aquitania made port with 22 injured and 1,100 more or less battered passengers.

Britons talked sadly about the inglorious end of a once proud vessel, the 34-year-old battleship Warspite. The old lady had come to be a sort of symbol of British fortitude through two wars. In 1916's Battle of Jutland, her steering gear jammed, the Warspite had run around in circles, taking terrible punishment from German shells. But she had come back. In World War II she had been seriously damaged in action off Salerno, but had come back to fight again on D-day off Normandy. Last week the "miracle ship," stripped of her fighting gear, was being towed to a scrapper's yard when the gales hit. The Warspite was swept aground near a Cornish town named Mousehole. Then the big seas lifted her close to shore. A lifesaving crew, risking destruction, got the crewmen safely ashore. But the Warspite was doomed to final breakup on the jagged rocks.

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