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A PASSENGER aboard the Blue Star Line cargo liner Avila
Star en route from Buenos Aires
to Britain,
where she intended to volunteer for service in one of the Armed Forces, Mary
“Johnnie” Ferguson was one of those who survived to take to the lifeboats
when the ship was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic
on July 5, 1942. Within
three days of the sinking, three of the Avila Star’s lifeboats
carrying 110 men and women were spotted by the Portuguese destroyer Lima
and spirited to safety in the Azores.
But the 19-year-old Ferguson
and the crew and passengers of lifeboat No 2, which had become separated from
the main group, were to endure an ordeal of 20 days as they sailed and
drifted east-south-east towards the coast of Africa.
It was an ordeal that only half the boat’s complement of 28 were to survive,
as rations and water ran low, and man after man succumbed to injuries,
thirst, starvation and in some cases despair.
Then, as Ferguson and her
fellow survivors were at last resigning themselves to death from starvation
and thirst, they were spotted by a Portuguese maritime reconnaissance
aircraft, which dropped them water and a map, and radioed their position to
naval units. Even then, three more days of privation awaited them before they
were picked up by a sloop of the Portuguese Navy, and taken to Lisbon.
For her bravery first in nursing four injured men in a damaged and
waterlogged lifeboat throughout the night following the sinking, and for her
sustaining and cheerful deportment during the terrible days that followed, Ferguson
was awarded the British Empire Medal and the Lloyds War Medal for Bravery at
Sea.
Her open boat ordeal was very far from putting Ferguson
off. Once recovered from a plague of saltwater boils, emaciation and the
general havoc wreaked on her system, she applied to join the WRNS —
specifying deployment as boat’s crew.
Born in Argentina
in 1923, Maria Elizabeth Ferguson (she was always known as Mary in England)
had an upbringing that tended to inure her to hardships. As a child she grew
up in the wild country round the upper reaches of the Paraná River,
where her father planted green tea. Wandering round her father’s plantation
in dungarees, she always pretended to be a boy and at an early age awarded
herself the nickname Johnnie. She went to school in England,
but on the outbreak of war her mother, then in London,
thought Argentina
would be a safer place, and sent her back out to join her father.
As soon as she turned 18 she decided to return to Britain
to play her part in the war. At that stage she thought she might become a
ferry pilot — there was no record of naval service anywhere in the large Ferguson
family. When, in May 1942, she heard that the Avila Star was sailing
from Buenos Aires bound for Liverpool
via Freetown, Sierra
Leone, with 5,000 tons of frozen beef for Britain,
she booked a berth and embarked on June 12.
In spite of the war, the voyage at first had something of an idyll about
it, as the ship cruised via Rio, and champagne was
brought out to celebrate Johnnie’s 19th birthday. The turbine-powered
Avila Star could make 16 knots, a speed thought to render her safe from
submarines. Her officers (though not her passengers) were, however, well
aware of the German propagandist Lord Haw-Haw’s threat, broadcast early in
the war: “We warn you that we are going to sink all five A-class ships of the
Blue Star Line.” The Germans had so far partially made good this boast in the
sinking of Arandora Star, by a U-boat in July 1940 as she took German
and Italian PoWs and internees to Canada.
Seven hundred lives were lost.
July 5 was a Sunday, as Avila Star, steaming now at full speed
since Freetown, drew level with
the latitude of the Azores on her passage northwards. Ferguson
was talking to the assistant purser in his office after dinner when the first
torpedo struck the ship’s starboard side just forward of the beam, between
engine and boiler rooms.
With her propulsion machinery wrecked Avila Star was dead in the
water and began to sink. Ferguson
made her way up on deck to her allotted life boat, No 7. This had not pulled
away from Avila Star’s side when the second torpedo struck the ship’s
hull almost beneath it.
She was flung 15ft into the air, cracking her head against a block, an
impact that momentarily knocked her out. She came to in the oil-covered water
and swam in the dark to the nearest floating object, the remains of No 7
boat, which was still afloat thanks to its buoyancy tanks, its bottom having
been blown out.
Although sick with the oil she had swallowed, she spent the remainder of a
cold night, sitting in water and tending the four men in the stern of the
boat, two of whom subsequently died from shock and burns. When, next day, it
was decided to abandon No 7 boat, she was the last off, swimming as it sank
to No 2 boat.
Although the Azores, to the west, were the closest
dry land, the risk of missing them, with only dead reckoning available to
them, was great, and so it was decided to sail the longer route to the
Portuguese coast.
After a series of mishaps, No 2 became separated from the other five
surviving boats, one of which was never seen again. When the lucky three
arrived in the Azores to make their report, it was
assumed by Ferguson’s mother and
brother in London and Buenos
Aires that she had perished.
In the terrible days that followed, Ferguson
and the only other woman in the boat, Pat Traunter, resolutely refused to
accept any positive discrimination in their direction. When offered more
water than the strict ration due to them, they stoutly declined it. The water
ration had by that time declined to 3oz per day. Dehydrated tissue made it
difficult to chew what nourishment — chocolate and biscuits — was available. Ferguson
sucked on a button to keep the saliva coming, so that she could eat. Painful
seawater boils spread relentlessly over the bodies of all of them.
Men began to die. One passenger became delirious and flung himself
overboard. After an hour-long battle to try to locate him in the heavy swell,
the others were forced to give up. Nursing another passenger throughout the
night, Ferguson woke at dawn with
him dead in her arms. Body after body was given a terse burial at sea, with
what appropriate words the survivors could muster in way of accompanying
liturgy.
No one liked to voice the unmentionable — that the dwindling of their
numbers gave more space to the living, and more opportunity to get some
sleep, in the overcrowded lifeboat.
July 22 dawned, with the ritual disposal of yet another man who had died
during the night. Then, miraculously, in mid-morning came the throb of
engines. Soon, two Portuguese aircraft were circling their frail craft and
dropping canisters containing life-giving water and a chart, on which was
scribbled in English a good luck message and an assurance of speedy succour.
Once a water ration had been dispensed, the chart was perused, and
revealed that their course had been more southerly than they had reckoned,
putting them on the latitude not of Lisbon,
but of Rabat in Morocco.
The apparent certainty of rescue made this error seem unimportant. Yet the
passage of another day, and then another, depressed and then dashed the hopes
raised by the aircraft. The ocean was a vast place; they were a tiny object;
and a searching ship might easily miss them.
And then, on July 25, 1942,
20 days after Avila Star had been sunk, there appeared first smoke,
then a mast, then, attracted by a frantic burst from boat No 2’s remaining
flares, a warship, the Portuguese sloop Pedro Nunes. They were then to
learn how lucky they had been. Having fruitlessly quartered the co-ordinates
given by the aircraft, her skipper had been on the verge of giving up his
search.
Even so, tragedy was not over for the survivors. Avila Star’s
assistant steward was so far gone that he died at the very moment of reaching
the sloop’s sickbay. Two other survivors died in hospital in Lisbon.
Reduced to a skeleton, Ferguson
made a slow but steady recovery from a total of 48 seawater boils covering
her body, nurtured by mesmerising offerings of fresh fruit. At the end of
August she was pronounced fit, and she and Traunter were flown to Bristol
by Dakota.
Her BEM was gazetted on November
24, 1942, but she was no less proud of her Lloyds Medal for
Bravery. Almost immediately afterwards she volunteered for the Wrens, and
served in libertyboat crews in Plymouth
harbour for the rest of the war.
After demobilisation she took a secretarial course and was variously
secretary to the chairman of Booker McConnell and, later, to the headmaster
of Uppingham School, besides looking after her brother’s household after the
death of his first wife. She remained steadfastly reticent about her wartime
exploit.
Mary “Johnnie” Ferguson,
BEM, war heroine, was born on June 20, 1923. She died on June 16, 2006,
aged 82.
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