It’s been 16 years now. 16 years since mum died. Being the collector that I am, I felt a responsibility that none of the old papers were thrown away until I had looked through them. My siblings did not feel the same need and threw everything they found unseen. But I was able to save most of it. Everything was put into storage along with my own old papers which also had to be sorted before possibly being thrown away. Three years ago, I grabbed myself by the neck and began the tedious task of sorting the papers. I started with my own boxes. Most of it turned out to be junk, but every now and then I found a few gold nuggets. Not gold literally speaking, but I did find an envelope with money. It wasn’t a lot of money, but an envelope containing a good weekly salary. I also found some first editions. Not books, but first edition Playboy Magazine if nothing else. Those were in my boxes I must add.
My mother wasn’t a very systematic archivist either, it turned out. In one and the same box I could find old photographs, telegrams from the late 40s, bills that had been paid in the 80s, papers from the house they built in 1957 and everything in between. Now I was sitting there with the very last box. I found some papers from when they built the cabin in 1970. They had obviously not received a building permit before they started. There was a sharp letter from the municipality ordering that the work had to stop immediately. The reply from the builder made me smile. The builder claimed his innocence by spinning a story that he thought the municipality was closed for the summer, and that the materials had arrived and that he didn’t know what else he could do with them but start construction. The municipality actually bought the explanation and asked for a temporary halt so they could approve the papers. Furthermore, I found congratulatory telegrams from when my parents got married in 1949. There were many funny poems and some that didn’t quite work out.
And in the middle of all this, I found my father’s old service papers from when he was at sea. I knew that he had been a sailor in his youth but knew little about the circumstances surrounding this. He died when I was seven, so I never really knew him. In any case we had no details about what he had done in his youth or where he sailed with his ship. He had obviously been on several ships, according to the various service papers. From the oldest it appeared that he had signed on a general cargo steamer in Newcastle in July 1937, at the age of 16. I have some pictures of him from a Christmas celebration in 1937, and some from Rouen and La Palise in 1938. Rouen is on the Seine almost halfway to Paris far inland. It may well be that they sailed all the way to Paris as well. My father was at Notre Dame on one occasion during this time. I still have a locket he bought there.
In the last of the service papers in the pile records show that he signed on a new ship in May 1939, and that he was discharged in the far north of Scotland in October of the same year. I thought this was a strange and desolate place to leave a ship. An online search for the ship’s name turned up little except for a photo taken by the Royal Air Force RAF showing a ship of the same name stranded on a reef off Scotland.
I gradually found more information about what had happened to the ship and the crew. In the beginning, the story was driven by curiosity about what my father had been involved in but never talked about to any family members, it turned out. It has developed into the discovery of not just one, but several stories that unfolded during the early weeks of the Second World War.
Normally, you stop looking when you have searched and sorted the last box. This box, however, left so many unanswered questions in our family saga that the search had to continue in other peoples´ boxes and archives. We have found documents that have been classified until our time, maritime enquiries, newspaper archives, historic photographs and much more. The story now beginning to take shape involves an armed hijacking, submarines, the loss of hundreds of sailors, propaganda wars, strange suicides, false flag liquidations, court cases and ever new details emerging.
People we have contacted around the world have been incredibly helpful and genuinely curious about the over 80-year-old history we are now stitching together. We have even managed to track down objects from the ship such as construction drawings, the sea chart where the last course is drawn and the binnacle compass to name a few objects.
The ship is lost physically, but this ship’s last journey has become entangled in so many known and unknown stories that keep providing new discoveries and details as the stories are brought to light.
Everyone has a final journey. This ship’s journey is not over until the story is gathered and told in its entirety.
Billy Bronco is telling you 