The perilous journey
Another "Brave Women" page
Eye
Witness, Margaret
Hamilton, O.A.M. (nee Setchell)
Empire Star evacuee
and member of the Australian Army Nursing Service.
Eye
Witness, Margaret
Hamilton, O.A.M. (nee Setchell)
Empire Star evacuee
and member of the Australian Army Nursing Service.
On 12th February 1942, sixteen vessels of various type and size left Singapore carrying evacuees including many women and children. The Empire Star was one of only two ships that were not sunk.
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Please send us an account of your experience! This is a voluntary service by Angell Productions and there is no charge. We want to include as many eye-witness accounts as possible. Please visit the page on the "Vyner Brooke" - just Click Here then click on the Back Arrow to return here. It will show you how we are building a vivid picture by publishing eye-witness accounts. If you have the diary of a relative who was aboard the "Empire Star" a photostat of the relevant pages would be acceptable, plus permission to publish extracts, with an acknowledgment. E-mail: |
Margaret
Setchell Hamilton's eye witness account:
"During the second
world war I was stationed with the Australian army in Malaya. Our
hospital
(13th AGH) was established in part of the Johore Mental Hospital. The
Japanese
marched down the Malayan
peninsula and
it became necessary for us to be evacuated from Johore Bahru onto
Singapore
island. At the time we had approximately 700 patients in the hospital,
but this evacuation was carried out in a period of 48 hours and very
shortly
afterwards the theatres were working at our new site in St. Patrick's
School,
Katong.
"As the Japanese advanced, allied troops were brought onto Singapore island and the causeway was blown up. The "powers that be" decided that all the nursing sisters and physiotherapists should be evacuated. On 10th February, 6 sisters plus 450 patients were evacuated on a ship called the Wah Sui which went first of all to Jakarta and later on to Ceylon where the wounded were transshipped and sent either to Britain or back to Australia."
duty,
and the days were full of bombing and shelling. Even when our hospital
was hit some days before we were evacuated it didn't seem to make me
fully
aware of the danger we were in. We just kept on looking after "our
boys".
There was damage to the hospital building but fortunately no
casualties.
Working all night, and between the daily bombing and shelling we had
very
little sleep and had reached the stage of such exhaustion that we were
like zombies, just too tired to be aware of our surroundings.
"On 11th February Matron Drummond drew up a list of half the members of the staff and said 'These girls will go onto a ship today.' I think we were given something like an hour in which to get ourselves ready. I was on night duty at the time and so was hurriedly wakened and packed just a little case about 18 inches by about 12 inches (47 cms by 31 cms). A very small suitcase.
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"We did not sail on the 11th because by the time everyone was on board (the ship had accommodation for 23 passengers plus the crew and there were 2160 on board) it was too dark for the captain to sail through the mine fields. The light buoy was missing from the entrance and it would have been far too dangerous to sail without the guidance of that buoy so we waited until first light on the 12th. We sailed as soon as it was daylight."
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A miracle
of seamanship...
"Around about 9
o'clock, the Japanese found us and from then till about 3 p.m. they did
all they possibly could to sink the Empire Star. At
one stage I
remember the bombs were such large ones that the ship seemed to jump
out
of the sea. Down in the hold we really felt the reverberation. In fact
one of our girls, both her ear drums were ruptured. Afterwards we
learnt
that they had dropped 2 bombs simultaneously and due to the
skillfulness
of Captain Capon one fell on either side of the ship.
"We had 3 direct hits. Had one of the bombs that hit the ship fallen just 10 feet in one direction, the master told that it would have meant complete destruction. We wouldn't have had a chance of being saved, being down in the hold with one ladder for an exit. During the bombing and shelling, 13 men were killed and 37 others were badly wounded."
"I do not remember
having anything to eat. With so many on board it was impossible for the
crew to feed us, but I do remember drinking tea from a Players
cigarette
tin. I also remember during the worst of the bombing, one of the air
force
personnel who was on board passed around a bottle of whisky which we
all
just drank neat."(Regarding the
food supplies, Captain
Murray's report states: "The ship did not carry anywhere near the
quantity
of food necessary to sustain such a large number of people, so the crew
were ordered to go ashore and salvage what they could from the
bombed-out
waterfront warehouses.")
"During the bombing there was absolutely no sense of panic or anything. In fact we sang.... we sang, and sang, and sang, and sang. A lot of the wartime songs but mostly "Waltzing Matilda" which is more or less an Australian national song.
"We arrived at Tanjong Priok, the port for what's now Jakarta (then Batavia) we were taken off the Empire Star and put onto a Dutch ship for the night. It was absolute bliss because we were able to have a shower and also a meal. We remained in Tanjong Priok for nearly 48 hours while some repairs were made to the Empire Star. Then we were put back onto the ship again, this time sleeping on the deck, and we continued our voyage."
Fremantle
at last!
"When we arrived
in Fremantle we were met by members of the Australian Red Cross who
gave
us a change of clothes and a few necessary things like that. We were
held
up in Perth for 3 weeks. We were waiting for the other girls. Alas,
it was three and a half years before we found
what
had happened to them.
"After this we went by train across to our respective States and were allowed to have some leave to re-equip ourselves before being posted to various units."
Good-bye to Captain Capon.
"We said good-bye
to the master of the Empire
Star and thanked him. He told us that his ship had been in
the evacuation
of Crete and Greece, but he maintained it had never been in such a
tight
spot as it was coming from Singapore. We knew that it was only by the
mercy
of God and the good seamanship of the ship's master that we managed to
get home. As we said good-bye to Captain Capon he asked us to do two
things
every day of our lives: we were to thank God we were alive, and never
to
forget the Merchant Navy - as if we could!"
Public Reaction.
Sadly, some of
the girls were given white feathers by people in the street
when they
returned to their home states.
Presumably this happened because
they survived the
home journey whereas some
of the Nursing Sisters on the
Vyner
Brooke lost their lives.
Return
to Singapore...
Margaret Hamilton
returned to Singapore from Labuan, Borneo, in 1945 to assist in the
repatriation
of "our girls and boys".
The
fate of the Empire Star:
The Empire Star
was torpedoed north of the Azores and sunk on 23rd October 1942 by
submarine
U615. Captain Capon and 38 others were in a lifeboat which was not seen
again.
Submitted by Derek Emerson-Elliott I was aboard the Empire Star when she left Singapore just before the surrender. I was two-and-a-half at the time, but have three, possibly four memories of the voyage. The probable memory is of seeing an ack ack gun firing, and then going into a sandbagged shelter with my mother and brother, and sitting on the floor listening to the sound of diving aircraft. I remember all the women in the shelter were fanning themselves with Chinese paper fans. They all looked frightened except my mother, who smiled a me. I was told that this happened on No. 4 wharf just before we boarded the vessel, but otherwise cannot conect it with the Empire Star. I am certain that
the other three memories are of
The last memory is
of my mother, father (who was a lieutenant
My mother, Tony and
I had been put on Empire Star by
We remained with Empire Star until disembarking in Fremantle on 23 March 1943.
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I was at RAF AIR HQ in the
centre of Singapore Island.
The Japanese were less than half a mile away and there was the
continuos
noise from enemy shelling and one of our Bofors guns banging away close
by. "Get in this truck" someone shouted. We boarded the truck which had
a machine gun mounted midway in the front and careered off down to the
docks where everyone was crowding onto a ship called the Empire
Star:
civilians, British and Australian servicemen, with and without their
rifles.
Civilians had abandoned their large luxury cars on the dockside and
black
clouds from the burning oil refinery filled the sky.
Soon after we sailed on the
12th February, we were
attacked by a formation of Japanese bombers, perhaps the same ones who
had so recently sunk the Prince of Wales. When the
bombing
started I went down the nearest hold, which I found was full of
vehicles,
many obviously with petrol in them. I felt very vunerable so each time
the noise lessened I attempted to escape up the metal ladder, only to
be
driven back by a hail of bullets from the planes and the noise of our
own
machine gun manned by soldiers and mounted on a wooden turret.
Eventually
after several hours the mayhem ceased, when I looked out of the hold
again
the machine gun turret had disappeared and presumably the soldiers with
it.
The following day was Friday
the 13th and we thought
that surely they would come back and finish us off, but it did not
happen.
A small service was held and the bodies of those killed in the attack
were
slid down a shoot covered by a flag, to be burried at sea. We continued
on our way to Batavia with no other troubles, other than lack of food
and
toilet facilities. Due to the skillful action of the captain in
zigzagging
and taking avoiding action, the damage to the ship seemed remarkably
little.
One bomb had hit the front end and another had hit the raised cabins in
the middle, the top of which had been opened up like a tin can.
Once ashore (at Batavia, now
Jakarta) we spent some
2 weeks sleeping on the concrete floor of a school performing various
tasks.
Amongst others who had managed to escape from Singapore were soldiers
and
sailors who had not been as lucky as us; their ships had been sunk and
they had spent days in open boats or rafts and were very badly
sunburnt.
Some unlucky ones were posted to Java to help the Dutch, who
it was
thought would put up a much better fight than we had done. How wrong
they
were ! Eventually we are put on a train to Tjilatjap, here we got on
another
merchant ship and sailed uneventfully to Colombo.
I consider myself very lucky
to have been on the
Empire
Star, and for me Friday the 13th is a lucky day!
ANOTHER MEMORY IS RECORDED:
My father, who was at the time a 21 year old airman
was on the Empire Star. In his diary he writes of the tremendous
courage of the nurses and their skill at helping the wounded after the
ship had been bombed. He was 'proud to be the same race as them'. He
was one of the airmen manning the guns on the ship. He writes of the
aweful overcrowding, the fires, the relief at getting away, the hunger,
the behaviour of some of the women evacuees, the difficulty in
relieving oneself and of the immense skill of the ship's captain and
crew. I very much enjoyed reading your account. Well done. God Bless
you for your work well done,
Irene Croly
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