On this day in 1943, Chief Engineer Charles Herbert Bayne (1894-1943) died when the cargo ship SS Lorient was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat.
Charles was one of 45 crew members who lost their lives aboard Lorient as she approached Cape Farewell, off Greenland.
The ship, part of a 42-ship convoy, was torpedoed during a week-long North Atlantic battle in which 13, mainly British, ships were lost in attacks by almost 60 U-boats.
The 4,737-ton Lorient was the 17th – and final – vessel to be attacked by U-boat 125.
Just two days later, the U-boat sank with the loss of 54 lives after being rammed by the British destroyer HMS Oribi and fired on by the British corvette HMS Snowflake.
Charles, who served in the Merchant Navy, was 48 when he died. His body was never recovered.
Lorient, owned by Thomas Radcliffe and Co, of Cardiff, left London for New York on April 10, 1943.
She sailed to Oban in Scotland on April 22 before heading across the Atlantic to North America as part of Convoy ONS-5.
Her fate was sealed when she became separated from the convoy on May 4, 1943 – 24 days after she had left Britain.
Charles is remembered on the Tower Hill Memorial in Tower Hamlets, London which commemorates more than 50,000 merchant seamen who lost their lives in the two world wars and have no known grave.
Paul Roberts
NOTES
Charles was the son of Edward George Bayne (1869-1947) and Adelaide Donald (1872-1947). Edward was the son of Sarah-Ann Snell (1844-1900) and William Bayne (1842-1910). Sarah-Ann was the daughter of Robert Snell (1820-1897) and Ann Sheppard (1819-1859). Robert was the son of Robert Snell (1790-1854) and Ann Adams (1799-1824). Robert Snell (1790-1854) was the son of Sarah Roberts (1760-1837) and Robert Snell (1754-1838). Sarah was the daughter of William Roberts (1738-), my great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
Charles was born in Portsmouth in 1894. He married Elsie Annie Bedford (1896-1976) in his home city in 1916. They lived at 70, Wymering Road in North End, Portsmouth when he served in the Merchant Navy in the Second World War.
Picture below
The southern face of the Tower Hill Memorial on which Charles is remembered. Picture taken by Ethan Doyle White on August 9, 2020 (CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southern_Face_of_the_Tower_Hill_Memorial_(I).jpg
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