Like many of her sisters her commercial trading life was foreshortened by the outbreak of WWI, when she was commissioned as a hospital ship HMS Lanfranc. Capable of carrying 403 wounded. from the battlefields of Northern France back to England.
On the 17^th April 1917 at 19:30 hrs while bound for Southampton she she was torpedoed by the German Submarine UB-40, some 4 miles northeast of Le Havre. At the time she had 387 patients of which 167 were German POWS. Of these 326 were cot patients. Some 570 survivors were picked up by the destroyers HMS Badger and HMS Jackal aided by HMS P 47 and the French patrol boat Roitelet, and taken to Portsmouth.

The Booth Line ran passenger services from the United Kingdom right up to Manaus - 1,000 miles up the Amazon. Founded in the 1860s, they took over the Red Cross Line in 1901 and the Iquitos Steam Ship Company in 1911. In 1946 the Booth Line was sold to the Vestey Group of companies and in 1975 all the group's ships were pooled under Blue Star Ship Management Ltd and the Booth Line ceased to exist as a separate entity.