Walking in the footsteps of heroes

As the Express offers readers the chance to win an unforgettable trip marking the 80th Anniversary of VE Day, with Leger Battlefield Tours and a British D-Day veteran, a leading historian reflects on our greatest generation

- Phil Craig

THE survivors and the children walked solemnly down the aisle, hand in hand. Beth and Kumar, Marge and Tracey, Bernard and Isha. The old helped the young recite the names of the youngsters who didn’t make it through those nights on the open ocean: James Spencer, five; Betty Unwin, 12; 15-year-old Joan Irving... and 90 others.

It was 2000 and I was in the congregation at a service of remembrance to honour evacuee children who died when the British ocean liner SS City of Benares was struck by German torpedoes on September 17, 1940.

Led by a purple-haired headmistress, this multi-ethnic group of Londoners old and new sang rousing hymns — the same hymns the boys and girls in the lifeboats had sung to keep their spirits up: He Who Would Valiant Be, O God Our Help in Ages Past and Abide With Me. People were openly weeping.

I was there with my friend, Bess Walder. In 1940, aged just 14, she clung to an overturned lifeboat for almost two days. On the other side of it was another teenager, Beth Cummings.

They saw other survivors drift into unconsciousness, lose their grip and slip into the water but they held on to each other and to the rough wooden slats, until finally they heard an approaching Royal Navy destroyer.

Above the sound of the storm, they could catch "Hold on, hold on we're coming!" shouted by seaman Albert Gorman from HMS Hurricane. It took him several minutes to prise Bess’s hands away from the lifeboat, so tightly had she been gripping for so many hours. And Albert was with her 60 years later at the service, too.

The repeated battering of her body against the underside of the wooden boat left Bess with internal injuries so serious that she could never become a mother.