“I’m here because of what Bobby did for me. Bobby gave a great gift to me and I shall forever be grateful … he gave me his lifejacket and he has given me sixty-five years of life which he didn’t have.” —John Baker, child survivor, of his brother Bobby

 “There was nothing for us to do except hang on to this rope. So we were facing each other on the side of the lifeboat with this rope between us. And we never let go of that rope in all the time that followed – which turned out to be nineteen hours in all … we knew if we did let go, that would be the end of us. The waves were terrible. We were being thrown one way and then dragged back again. Then there would be a huge wave coming right over us. You couldn’t see and you would be coughing and spluttering … next thing you were up in the air and back again … We were just two schoolgirls fighting the north Atlantic … There is nothing more lonely than being in mid-Atlantic on a boat upside down … Nothing alive except us three.” —Beth and Bess, child survivors

 “It was terrible, you had to fight every minute. My hands were being cut in shreds with these horrible rusty tin canisters. But I was holding on, even though I was only eleven and quite slight, I kept fighting, every minute of fifteen hours in that awful sea – and I know that’s why I’m alive today.” —Sonia Bechs, child survivor

 “He kept diving again and again and bringing back children. And then he dived and we didn’t see him again.” —Colin Ryder Richardson, child survivor, of Laszlo Raskai, Hungarian journalist and passenger aboard the Benares

 “Purvis was one of the crew and he’d been diving in the water over and over again trying to save as many as he could until he was completely exhausted.” —Fred Steels, child survivor

 “I never knew her name, but I was trying to prop her up out of the water. But she became less and less conscious and I found it more and more difficult to hold her head up. Then somebody just said, ‘that lady’s dead, let her go’.” —Colin Ryder Richardson

"...moving personal testimony..." (Blackpool Gazette, Nov 05)

For the first time in narrative, here is the true story of the World War II tragedy of the SS City of Benares,which remains to this day the worst ever sea disaster involving British children. More than half of all those on board this ship full of evacuees were lost after the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat in September 1940. Of ninety very young ‘seavacuee’ children escaping the bombing in Britain to safety in Canada, seventy-seven died.

 Those who survived tell stories of towering seas and near-miraculous escapes clinging to rafts and wreckage for nineteen hours before rescue. One group of children managed to keep going for eight days drifting in an open boat in the north Atlantic. In this moving narrative the child survivors tell their story for the first time directly in their own words. 

Chapter One: Children of the Blitz.

Chapter Two: Dodging Bombs.

Chapter Three: Luxuries and Lifeboat Drills.

Chapter Four: The Eye of the Storm.

Chapter Five: The Sinking of the Benares.

Chapter Six: Beth and Bess and the Lifeboats.

Chapter Seven: Rescue.

Chapter Eight: The Twelfth Boat.

Chapter Nine: Homecomings.

Chapter Ten: The Aftermath.

Acknowledgements.