The ‘Mauritania’ was one of the class of ships able to compete to this end and, like the ‘Titanic’ was a four funneled luxury ocean going liner. With the merger in 1934, between the ‘White Star Line’ and Cunard the successful ‘Mauritania’ was retired and later scrapped in 1935. Other vessels in this class included the ‘Aquitania’, the ‘Lusitania’, the ‘Britannic’ and the ‘Olympic’, although this particular ship never really entered the race, being more of a floating mansion, it was considered to be in a class of its own. The H.M.S. ‘Olympic’ only had two funnels, the keel laid in 1897, and built by 1899 under the supervision of its designer, the famous Shipwright and founder of the ‘White Star Line’ more properly known as ‘The Oceanic Steam Navigation Company’.

Thomas Henry Ismay had rescued the company in the 1870’s, and his first ship of the renamed line was also christened the ‘Oceanic’ but had been scrapped before 1899. The second ‘Oceanic’, of 30,000 tons displacement was launched as part of a prestigious celebration at the turn of that Century and was to become known as the ‘Queen of the Ocean’, it was to cost nigh on one million pound Sterling, and even with the use of the most modern labour saving devices still required 1,500 Shipwrights to complete, and was launched with great ceremony on the 14th January of that year. ‘Nothing but the very finest’ was Ismay’s policy toward this new venture, she was constructed at Harland and Wolff'’s yard at Belfast, as was the tradition with ‘White Star’ Ships.

~ The White Star liner LUCITANIA: The Lairds tale

At a comfortable speed of 12 knots this ship was capable of circumnavigating the globe without refueling, the ‘Oceanic’ was built to accommodate slightly over 2,000 passengers, including the 349 crew. In the early days the ‘Queen of the Ocean’ had acquired the happy reputation of being a ‘lucky’ ship, due to no one having suffered serious injury or fatality during her construction and launch, an unexpected bonus in days when safety standards at shipyards were questionable.

In 1907 ‘White Star’ swapped ‘Oceanic”s English base from that of Liverpool to Southampton, and in 1912 an ominous portent to disaster may have signalled that her luck was about to change! Whilst still moored in port, amidst the throng that had assembled to see the ‘Titanic’ off, on its maiden voyage this great ship required a slight turn to astern on her port engine, yet such was the power of Titanic’s thrust that a terrific suction was generated in the shallow waters so much so that the ‘Oceanic’ and another ship moored beside her, the ‘St.Paul’ were dragged toward ‘Titanic’, yet to his credit, Captain Edward Smith, seeing what had happened, put his port engines ahead and drove the moored vessels back toward the wharf, with only the loss of ‘Oceanic”s ‘gang walk’, which fell into the Harbour.

‘The Oceanic’s fate, however, was sealed shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. for, albeit the patriotic thing to do, Ismay had negotiated, as was common practice with smaller ships, a deal with the Admiralty, whereby during the construction of passenger ships, the Admiralty made an annual grant toward the maintenance of any such ship on the condition that it could be called upon for Naval work, during times of war. Thus such ships were built to particular Naval specifications, so that, in the case of the ‘Oceanic’ her construction facilitated the quick and easy mounting of the 4’.7” guns she was to be given subsequently. ‘The greatest liner of its day’ had thus been pressed into Royal Naval Service. It was on 25th August 1914, that H.M.S.‘Oceanic’ set out of Southampton for the last time, to begin a Naval Service that was to last a brief and fatal two weeks!

Oceanic’s job had been to patrol the waters from the North Scottish mainland to the Faroes, in particular the area around Shetland. she was empowered to stop shipping at her Captain’s discretion, and to check cargoes and personnel for any potential German connections. The Marines on board were to carry out these duties, although alongside the Naval Captain their was also the erstwhile Merchant Master and many of his original crew.

Thus ‘Oceanic’ steered directly for Scappa Flow in Orkney, Britain’s foremost Naval anchorage, with easy access to the North Sea and the Atlantic. From here she proceeded north to Shetland traveling continuously on a standard ‘zigzag’ course as a precaution against the potential targeting of U-boats. this difficult manoeuvering required extremely accurate navigation, especially with such a large vessel, and in the event it appears to have been the woeful navigation rather than the enemy submarines that was to be the doom of ‘Oceanic.’

Under better circumstances the disaster may not have occurred at all, as it was at the time their had been some confusion in navigation, hampered by thick fog. Although difficulties with the proper management of any ship’s Command, shared by two Captain’s was certainly a consideration in this case, perhaps uniquely, it clearly illustrates this folly, so boldly overlooked. The newcomer, one Captain R.N. William Slayter with overall charge and the other a merchantman of the Company Captain Henry Smith, with two years former service aboard the ‘Oceanic’ did not detect the navigators derivation from the scheduled course, although it had placed them on the wrong side of the Isle of Foula and directly in the path of the ‘Terrible Shaalds’, until it was too late and they beached upon the reef. 

The confusion and division between the two top Commands seems ultimately to have been the cause for the loss of ‘Oceanic’. Despite an accurate fix on their position given by the Navigator Davy Blair, the night before and everyone on the bridge thinking they were well to the South~West of the Isle of Foula, they were in fact an estimated 13/14 miles off course.

Captain Slayter had thus retired after his night watch unaware of the real situation, with orders to steer to Foula. Captain Smith took over the morning watch, and with his former knowledge of the ship was only really happy with her when it was out in the open sea, and having evidently previously disagreed with his Naval superior about dodging around the island he instructed the Navigator to plot a course to open seas. Slayter must have felt the shift in direction and reappeared on the bridge to countermand Smith and make what turned out to be a hasty and ill-informed judgement of the situation, leading them directly onto the ‘Shaalds’.

On the same latitude as Leningrad lies hidden the bleak and yet spectacular Island of Foula, Britain’s remotest permanently inhabited island, owned since the turn of the Century by the Holbourn family.  

Lying some twenty miles west of Shetland main the island is a place to be kept well away from, with such a large ship as was the ‘Oceanic’. A major threat to shipping nearby, being the ‘Hoevdi Grund’ or the terrible Shaalds of Foula, a reef that comes to within a few feet of the surface, but which in calm weather gives no warning sign to the unwary mariner. The Shaalds lies just over two miles east of Foula between the island and the Shetlands.

At the time of the disaster it would not have been good form to publicise the event, being at the outset of the war with Germany, and the matter was hushed up. What with this world famous 1st class ship, the ‘Queen of the Ocean’ now being a Naval Ship, in perfect operational condition and without any enemy duress, in home waters whilst proceeding in calm seas the fact that it still managed, within a fortnight of beginning her Maiden tour of duty to run forward and become ‘incompetently parked’ onto a charted reef, the occasion was of particular embarrassment to the Royal Navy and must have amounted to one of the least glamorous moments in the proud Naval traditions of British History.

The revelation of such gross incompetence at this early stage of the war would have done nothing for National morale, and despite the way it was done may be one of the occasions when such a ‘whitewash’, typical of many naval blunders was wholly justified.

It has been reported tradition for centuries that the Captain of a ship, in overall command would honour his position by taking full responsibility for any disaster regardless of the circumstance, yet this was plainly not the case with Captain William Slayter RN, and he was quick to point out to his Employers that he shared the responsibility with Captain Smith, who argued that technically having no Orders, actual, oral or written and with ultimate command being naval, despite all his experience of the ship he was to find himself but ‘a glorified look-out man’. At the Court Marshal both Captain’s were exonerated with navigator and ‘scapegoat’ Davy Blair reprimanded on a technicality!

Yet for all this ‘the Queen of the Ocean’ had been even more magnificently luxurious, stronger and steadier a ship than the fabled ‘Titanic’, lost in 1912. Unlike the ‘Titanic’ and the ‘Lusitania’, the ‘Oceanic’ did not suffer with great loss of lives, she sat squarely on the reef ‘almost as though in dry dock’.  

An Aberdeen trawler the ‘Glenogil’ was the first to the scene, and although she attempted to pull off the massive ship it proved an impossible task, and with the hull already ruptured she would not have stayed afloat long in open waters. Other ships in the area were called in to assist in the rescue operation that was to follow. The ships crew being delivered by the ships Lifeboats to the trawler and then ferried by her to the awaiting ‘Alsation’ and ‘Forward’ standing by.

The 573 ton Admiralty salvage vessel the ‘Lyons’ was dispatched to the scene hurriedly and in the words of the Laird of Foula, Professor Ian .S. Holbourn, writing about the disaster in his book on the Isle of Foula :

‘The launch of the Lyons, a salvage boat which hurried to the scene, was capable of a speed of ten knots, yet was unable to make any headway against the tide although she tried for fifteen minutes. Even then it was not the top of the tide, and the officer in charge reckoned the full tide would be 12 knots, he confessed he would not have believed it had he been told.’

Of the Oceanic’s two Masters; Merchant Commander Smith is said to have come ashore at the remote island’s tiny pier, and on looking back out to sea toward his stranded ship two miles away, he commented that the ship would stay on the reef as a monument and nothing would move it. One of the Foula men, wise to the full power and fury of a Shetland storm, is said to have muttered with a cynicism not unknown in those parts ‘I‘ll give her two weeks’. Remarkably, following a heavy gale that had persisted throughout the night of the 29th September, just two weeks after the incident the Islander’s discovered the following day that the ship had been entirely swallowed up by the sea. Where she remains to this day scattered as she fell apart under the pressure of the seas on the Shaalds.

An ineffectual attempt at salvage was attempted in the 1920’s, but the heavy diving apparatus employed then hampered any significant progress, and in 1924 it was given up as irretrievably lost. It was to be another fifty years during the 1970’s that the two ‘lucky adventurers’ Simon Martin and Alec Crawford rediscovered the wreck, almost as Martin describes it by accident and with much painstaking research and preparation they managed to recover nearly 250 tons of valuable metal from the wreck.76

Simon Martin whose original research provides the details of this account stayed on the Isle of Foula for five years during his prolonged claim upon the wrecked ‘Oceanic’ and describes the island as such: ‘Foula, or Ultima Thule, as it was known as far back as the Roman times, rises impurely out of the water, and from the Shetland Isles mainland its five peaks, the Noup, Hamnafield, the Sneug, Kame and Soberlie stand out starkly and characteristically. The cliffs on the west side vie with those of St. Kilda as the highest sheer cliffs in Britain, 1,200 foot of solid rock towering from the sea. Foula, or Fughley as it was once also known, means literally ‘Bird Island’, with an estimated half million birds of various breeds sharing the rock with the inhabitants.

The island’s surface largely consisting of a peat bog on rock. The Professors grandson Robert Holbourn, otherwise qualified in Naval Architecture acted as the island’s ‘Peet Marshal’ so this valuable resource for heat and fuel was managed. Peet cutting in the Shetlands requiring a certain skill, taking several years to master, resources are not available to be wasted. Those most able islanders to become known as the ‘Cutters’ and in the spirit of a long standing Foula tradition all able bodied men are now and then ‘bid to the banks’ of women who ‘did n't have a cutter in the house.’

Robert’s elder brother John acted as ‘Community Councilor’ for the tiny population to the mainland and would appear to have been the islands meteorologist. Roberts children have grown up to be a part of the resident community on the island, along with their in laws and crafting tenants. The Holbourn’s of Foula are descended from John of Westby (Westbie), Lincolnshire who was the father of John b.1531~d.1598 at Westby whose wife was a Joan Glover (d.1601) this John of Westby (c.1568~d.1612) was a Churchwarden of that village. It is not impossible to reason that this family may have had genealogical links with Roberto de Gateshead who himself I suspect to have been (like~unto/) the father of the Shipwright Robert Holburn employed with Peter Pett on the kings ships in 1544/8.

Otherwise I find no apparent links with my own family tree this side of 1500 but are included by virtue of the strong maritime spirit they have inherited along the way, which is best displayed by ‘the Laird’ himself, the Professor Ian Stoughton Holbourn on the occasion of his voyage across the seas from America in 1915.