Remembering the sinking of Ciotat as Armistice Day approaches
When war broke out in August 1914 between the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) and the Central European Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) both sides expected a quick victory. The German Army’s risky dash across neutral Belgium toward Paris failed and was halted at the Marne River. Within a few months, lines of trenches stretched across Europe from the English Channel to the Swiss border (Switzerland remained neutral) as a brutal war of attrition began.
Both sides desperately needed young men to feed into the ‘meat grinder’ as they fought largely useless battles for a few yards (metres) of battered land. Britain, with its many colonies, was well-suited to raising troops, and the call for patriotic young men to ‘join up’ rang out in corners of the Empire ‘on which the sun never set’. Many countries set up ‘War Passage Funds’, which raised money from the public to pay the costs of volunteers travelling to Europe to enlist.
The survivors: The Ville de la Ciotat contingent and right, the ill-fated vessel
Ceylon, tranquil, unthreatened, at peace for many decades and quite prosperous, was no exception. An early group of volunteers was known as the ‘Milward Contingent’, after its leader Phillip Henry Milward, who embarked for the war with a group of fellow patriots on the ship SS Derbyshire in November 1914. This group, comprising British men drawn from the planting and mercantile elite of the island, joined the British Army once they reached Europe.
Remember, this was more than a hundred years ago, when travelling to Europe was a long journey by ship, far removed from the fast airliners that today’s passenger experiences. Rather than ten hours or so in the air at speeds unimaginable back then, the steamships of the day plodded their way across the Arabian Sea to Aden (in Yemen), then through the Suez Canal and across the Mediterranean Sea to Southern France, or all the way to Liverpool in England. Passage took three weeks in a fast ocean liner, and much longer in an itinerant ‘tramp steamer’, which offered a cheaper option to the traveller.
Despite the long journey and the news of huge casualties, many groups of young volunteers, including Ceylonese (as opposed to British) boys, left Colombo for Europe on a regular basis, helped by the War Passage Funds.
Often, groups were known by the ships they sailed on, such as the Lotus in April 1916, the Porthos, the Mantola and the tragic Ville de la Ciotat.
The Western Front was mired in a horrific stalemate by 1915 with neither side being able to break through the lines of trenches and fortifications that bisected France. At sea, the German Navy’s fleet was largely confined to the North Sea as the (British) Royal Navy concentrated on a distant blockade of German ports, while escorting scores of civilian ships carrying men and material to Britain across the Atlantic Ocean.
In order to attack these merchantmen and strangle the British war effort, the German Navy deployed a large fleet of submarines. The feared Unterseeboots (U-boats) were a scourge to allied shipping, often attacking undetected to sink their prey. Their numbers were concentrated in the North Atlantic, attacking shipping enroute to British ports. The German raider Emden was a threat in some areas of the Indian Ocean, but for the most part the route between Asia and France was relatively tranquil.
The MM Ville de la Ciotat was named after the French city where it was built in 1892. By 1915 it was a ‘tramp steamer’ plying the Shanghai, China and Marseille, France, with numerous stops in between including Colombo, Ceylon.
Sometime in early December 1915 (the exact date is not known), the Ciotat sailed from Colombo with a large contingent of young men who had volunteered for the conflict. The ship’s manifest describes them as ‘Voluntaires anglo-cingalais’, or British-Ceylonese Volunteers. Their names are often recorded incorrectly, sometimes comically so, but from what we can gather there were at least 45 young Ceylonese on board, though other contemporary accounts put the total at 49.
The sheer diversity of the volunteers is a stark reminder of how patriotism for the Empire cut across all racial and ethnic boundaries. The names range from Aiyadurai (a boy from Jaffna educated at Trinity College, Kandy) through the De Vos brothers, include well known Burgher names such as Arndt, Misso, Lourenz and Speldewinde. Tamil names (Ramanathan), Sinhala ones (Weerakoon and Obeysekera) and Muslim/Malay (Saldin) are mixed in with Englishmen in this motley group that represented the demographics of colonial Ceylon so well.
The Ciotat made its way across the seas, stopping at Djibouti on the Red Sea, Suez, Cairo and Port Said, picking up and dropping off passengers and cargo before entering the Mediterranean Sea. There are no accounts of what the mood onboard ship was at this stage, but the date was December 24th, so we can imagine that a Christmas party was in progress – after all what group of young men off to war would miss a chance at carousing? Was the ship ‘blacked out’ as would be normal in wartime? We do not know, but since German submarine activity in that region, just to the south of Greece (a neutral country), was almost unknown, we can surmise that it was not.
Tragically, the hand of fate had decided that German submarine U-34 was waiting for just such a target that day. The Ciotat was struck by a torpedo at 10.15 p.m. on Christmas Eve and sank almost immediately.
Records state than 35 passengers and 46 crew members died that night, while 208 people were rescued and brought to Malta. Among the dead were 15 of the volunteers, with a further 21 being recorded as having survived.
Those that did survive the sinking of their ship arrived in London as minor celebrities. There is a contemporary photograph, rather blurred, that shows them marching in London. In that photo we can count at least 30 young men, which roughly tallies with the original number of survivors on the manifest. A Pathé film clip shows the group marching in good order to ‘join up’.
Sadly at least four of those who survived death by drowning, would go on to be killed in battle. Aiyadurai, Mellonius, Lourenz and Jacotine did not survive the conflict, their luck having run out.
These four are honoured by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) as having made the supreme sacrifice. However, the CWGC, the official custodian of British war dead, does not recognize the boys who drowned as ‘war casualties’ as they had not officially enlisted at the time of their deaths.
However, bureaucratic niceties were ignored by the Ceylonese community they came from, and all these brave young lads were acknowledged as war casualties. Their names are engraved on the Kanatte memorial. To the credit of the colonial government, they are also included in the ‘official’ Cenotaph which is in Colombo, and numerous memorials in their hometowns throughout the island.
As this column, the last in the series is published, we will be approaching Armistice Day. November 11, 1918, was when the warring parties agreed that hostilities would cease at 11:11 a.m. in Central Europe, allowing enough time for the rather primitive communication channels to get the message to all the men in the trenches.
The Cenotaph and the Commonwealth War Cemetery on Jawatta Road are usually the focus of sombre ceremonies on this day. It would be fitting if the ‘powers that be’ were to include the Kanatte memorial too, so that poignant tribute made by the public over a hundred years ago is not forgotten.
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