:: Waratah ::

WAS YOUR ANCESTOR ON THE WARATAH?

On Sunday 25 July 1909, a passenger ship of Lund's Blue Anchor Line put in at Durban, homeward-bound from Australia. Her name was the Waratah. At 9 339 tons she was an imposing vessel, though her extra promenade deck gave her a somewhat top-heavy appearance and distinguished her from the rest of the ships of this line. She hadn't long been in commission: built on the Clyde, the Waratah had made her maiden voyage from London to Cape Town the previous November. Designed to carry 128 first-class and 160 third-class passengers, she was commanded by Captain Josiah E Ilbery.

At Durban, the Waratah replenished her coal bunkers and took on cargo. Some passengers (about 29) who hadn't intended continuing on to Cape Town or London disembarked. One saloon (first-class) passenger, an engineer named Claude Sawyer, whose destination was London, also left the ship. He had had disturbing dreams during the otherwise uneventful voyage from Australia and made no secret of the fact that he considered the Waratah unsafe. So strongly did he feel about this premonition, that he forfeited his onward passage money and waited for a berth on another vessel, eventually departing a week later on the Kildonan Castle.

When the Waratah left for Cape Town at 8 p.m. on Monday 26 July, she had 92 passengers on board, most of them from Australia though some (about 40) had joined the ship at Durban. She wasn't carrying her full complement of passengers but it was late in the season and most travellers had left for England several weeks previously. Her crew numbered 119 - so there were 211 souls in all.

The pilot, Lindsey, went on board at 'C' Shed, and the tug Richard King shepherded the Waratah out of Durban Harbour. Early the following morning, near Port St. John's, the Waratah overtook the Clan MacIntyre which had also left Durban the previous day for England. Signals passed between the two ships, identifying each other's names and where they were bound. The Waratah remained in sight of the Clan Macintyre for about three hours and at about 9.30 a.m. about 12 miles off the Bashee River mouth, the Waratah was lost to view below the horizon.

She was never to be seen again. Her fate remains one of the great mysteries of the sea.

In 1909 not many Cape or Australian ships were equipped with wireless; the Waratah certainly had none. It was expected that she would dock in Cape Town on the morning of Thursday 29 July, and when she didn't arrive it was at first presumed she had met with heavy weather. When there was still no sign of her by Sunday the local agents for the Blue Anchor Line contacted the port authorities, who sent the tug T E Fuller out to try and locate the ship. It wasn't until Monday 2 August that the press carried reports about the Waratah being overdue. That was the beginning of an anxious time for relatives and friends of those on board, but there was no undue alarm: there had probably been some mechanical fault, she would undoubtedly be towed into port in due course, and she was known to be carrying provisions for two months.

In June 1899 the Waikato, of New Zealand, had suffered a mechanical breakdown 150 miles south of Cape Agulhas and for three months had drifted until a steamer found her on 15 September. A similar scenario was now imagined for the Waratah - bad though not completely disastrous.

But several coastal weather reports came in mentioning gales and mountainous seas. The Illovo, one of Rennie's liners, was about 24 hours overdue at Cape Town having left Durban some 50 hours before the Waratah. The Illovo had met such heavy seas off Danger Point that she was listing and had to jettison 30 tons of coal. Her captain, Kinloch, attempted to take shelter in Struis Bay but the weather made it impossible, so the ship continued to battle onward against the elements and instead of her usual eleven hours from Danger Point to Table Bay, took nearly a day and a half to traverse the distance.

Durban reported the arrival on Sunday 1 August of a Norwegian steamer, Solvieg, which had encountered heavy seas off Algoa Bay on her way up the coast. The decks of this ship had been swept clean by the storm and she was fortunate to reach Durban at all.

The captain of the Clan MacIntyre added to the deepening gloom by reporting that not long after losing sight of the Waratah his ship had had to ride out a south-westerly gale and enormous seas. The Clan MacIntyre, too, had no wireless - so this report was only received on 31 August when the ship finally reached London. Culverwell, captain of the steamer Guelph, reported that at almost 10 p.m. on 27 July, off Hood Point, East London, the lights of a vessel had been sighted by his Chief Officer. The other ship's signals were not clear but it was thought her name ended in 'tah'. However, the location and time did not appear to fit in with the Waratah's last sighting by the Clan MacIntyre.

By now, speculation as to the Waratah's disappearance had assumed epic proportions. Sawyer, the man who had left the ship at Durban, had safely arrived at Cape Town and his story as related to the press lost nothing in the telling. He had been alarmed by the ship's excessive rolling, and the reluctance of the ship to 'recover' after each roll.

The general opinion (which may not necessarily have been correct) was that the Waratah was top heavy, and people now recalled that on her arrival at Cape Town after her maiden voyage one of the newspapers had remarked that 'her navigating bridge is so lofty that it is practically of the same height as the commodious sheds on the East Pier'.

Stories began to come in of sightings of the Waratah, but details were contradictory. Then two vessels reported bodies floating off the coast. Tugs were immediately sent out to the Bashee mouth where these remains had been seen, but nothing was found. All shipping was keeping a look-out for the missing liner but there was no trace of her, nor indeed any sign of wreckage, no floating lifebelts or other buoyant articles usually found following a shipwreck. After a month had passed a Union-Castle steamer, the Sabine, was chartered to search the southern ocean. She left Cape Town on 11 September, carrying towing apparatus, searchlights and medical supplies, and returned on 7 December having covered 14 000 miles within an area of 3 000 square miles without seeing so much as a single piece of wreckage which could have come from the Waratah.

On 15 December the Waratah was posted as missing at Lloyd's. A further search was made in February 1910 by the Australian vessel Wakefield which scoured the ocean for three months, returning to Melbourne with nothing to report.

It was accepted that the Waratah was gone forever, and in December 1910 an official enquiry was begun at Caxton Hall, London. Evidence was given by crew members who had previously served in her as well as passengers who had travelled in her. Most mentioned the Waratah's ungainly method of rolling; Sawyer again gave his opinion on that point. After lengthy deliberations, the Court found that the Waratah, despite being in seaworthy condition, was lost on 28 July 1909 during a gale of exceptional violence, which was the first great storm that the vessel had encountered; she had probably capsized suddenly.

All theories were carefully examined, including the possibility that the ship blew up because of an explosion due to heating of her bunker coal. Considering the souls on board, this would have been a quicker, more merciful end than another suggested alternative: that the Waratah didn't sink immediately but, disabled for some reason, drifted into the Antarctic Circle where passengers and crew died of cold and starvation, the ship itself eventually being crushed to pieces in the southern ice.

As a direct result of the loss of the Waratah, and the enormous amount of press publicity concerning the subsequent searches and Court inquiry, the Blue Anchor Line lost its reputation. The P & O line took over the fleet and dropped the Blue Anchor name, though the Blue Anchor on the funnel was retained until 1912 and Lund's old flag continued to be flown at the foremast for a year or two.

The impact of the tragedy on the relatives and friends of the Waratah's passengers and crew can scarcely be imagined. Family members, clinging to hope, felt that the systematic searches carried out by other vessels had not covered a sufficient area of ocean, particularly if the drifting theory was correct. In Melbourne, a special committee raised three thousand pounds to send the Wakefield on its search mission, and this ship carried a navigator offered by the Royal Navy, no less, who were convinced at that stage that the Waratah was drifting and might yet be found. It was all to no avail. The ocean had simply swallowed her up and left not a trace behind.

The passenger list gives a glimpse of the human story behind the facts. Entire families were lost, including the Turners and their five children ranging in age from 14 to 3, and the Stockens with their two children under 6 years of age. Both these families had boarded the Waratah at Durban. Charles Taylor, a miner who embarked at Sydney, was travelling with his wife and two children, aged 8 and 5. Of the Australian women on board, several were only in their twenties. The Schaumann sisters were 11 and 10, probably travelling in the care of another family. There's a certain irony in the presence of Mr Wright, who was a master mariner aged 40, travelling with his 30-year-old wife. Presumably, despite his knowledge and experience, Wright hadn't felt as Sawyer did that the Waratah was unsafe or he too might have disembarked at Durban and lived to tell the tale.

The crew, which formed the majority of those on board, were mainly British subjects, including C Owen, the Chief Officer, but there were also one Frenchman (a Greaser and Fireman, B Steiner - he was French, in spite of his surname), 5 Germans (K Lindross, O Schelier and M Seiffert, R Bocker and W Reinsch - these men were Firemen and Trimmers) and 5 Swedes (Firemen and Trimmers J Nelson, C Samuelson, J Jacobson, F Dorander, as well as S Pearson, the Donkeyman - he worked the donkey-engine used for hauling and hoisting on the ship's deck). There were two Stewardesses, Emma Swan aged 40 and Sarah E Whitehorn, 35. Youngest of the crew was Fred Trott, one of the General Servants, aged 16. Several other crew members were under 20.

Josiah Ilbery, the Waratah's Captain, was 69 when he went down with his ship. He had been with Lund's line for forty years.

Josiah Edward Ilbery was the son of Walter Ilbery and Eliza Vachel; he was christened at Saint Peter's, Church Street, Liverpool, Lancashire 13 Jul 1840. At the time of his application for his certificate his address was given as Egremont, Cheshire and his birth date as 22 June 1840.

Captain Ilbery was for many years on the England-Australia run and maintained his contact with members of the Ilbery family in New South Wales (where he owned land) and Victoria. During his long maritime career, he commanded most of Lund's new ships as they came onto the run.

The earliest of Lloyd's Ship's Captain's Registers shows his birth at Liverpool 1840 and that he obtained his certificate in 1865. His first command was Lund's clipper Mikado in 1868, voyaging to China, Japan and the Oriental Archipelago. While master of the Mikado, Ilbery was recognised by the US Government for the rescue of the Grace Clifton. He later commanded the Serapis 1878 and Ocean King in 1879, then in 1880 took command of the Delcomyn, first steamship of Lund's line, on the Cape Australia route. While with this vessel, Ilbery was instrumental in the rescue of the boat's crew of SS Koning der Nederlanden.

For the last thirty years of his life he commanded steamships plying between England and Australia. Before taking command of the Waratah, he was on the Geelong in 1904.

It's likely that Josiah Ilbery was related to William Ilbery, a famous watchmaker working in London who produced exquisitely enamelled and decorated watches for the Chinese market from ca 1780. There were other Ilberys in the watchmaking profession.

[Biographical details provided by Dr Peter Ilbery.]