SS Rajputana
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The SS Rajputana was a British passenger and cargo carring ocean liner built at the Harland and Wolff docks on the River Clyde near Glasgow, Scotland in 1925. Named after Rajputana region of western India, she sailed on a regural route between England and British India.
She was requisitioned into the British Navy on the onset of WW II and commissioned in December 1939 as the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rajputana. She was torpedoed and sunk of Iceland on 13 April 1941.
World War II
In the Second Battle of the Atlantic HMS Rajputana escorted several North Atlantic convoys from Bermuda and Halifax under Captain F. H. Taylor, including BHX 42, BHX 45, BHX 49, BHX 52, BHX 54, BHX 61, BHX 64, BHX 71, BHX 83, BHX 94, BHX 101, BHX 111 and BHX 117
On 13 April 1941, four days after parting company with convoy HX 117, she was torpedoed by U-108 in the Denmark Strait west of Reykjavik, Iceland. She sunk over an hour later with the loss of 42 men, including her last civilian captain Cdr. C.T.O. Richardson. [1] A total of 283 of her crew were saved by the destroyer HMS Legion, some of them after spending 12 hours in overcrowded lifeboats. Among the survivors was Daniel Lionel Hanington, who later become a Rear Admiral in the Royal Canadian Navy.
Famous passengers
- On 12 January 1929 Lawrence of Arabia boarded the ship in Lahore, British India, arriving in Plymouth in February 1929. [2]
- On his first trip to England in 1931 Meher Baba met Mahatma Gandhi on the ship.