John Cecil Gibbeson

In 1940, John Cecil Gibbeson was an engineering officer on a ship called the City of Benares:

The ship had been built in 1936 at Whiteinch in Glasgow, by the Barclay and Curle shipyard:

John had been born on 9th April 1910 in Seaton Carew, County Durham, son of John Thomas Gibbeson (a coachman from Newcastle) and Cecily Park; he was the fourth of their five children.

He was studying for marine engineering at the time he was 20 (Shields Daily News of the 23rd May 1930):

When he signed a form for the merchant navy in 1934, he was described as 5 feel, 9 inches, dark brown hair, brownish eyes and fresh complexion.  He gave his home address as 23 First Avenue in the Killermont area of Bearsden.  His health insurance was through the Bearsden branch of the Prudential.

On 13 September 1940, the ship sailed from Liverpool bound for Montreal, carrying over 400 people including children being evacuated to Canada because of concerns about their safety during the Blitz.

Travelling as party of a convoy nullified its speed (the convoy had to stick together) and by later standards the navy escort was light - one destroyer and two other ships.

Four days into the voyage, the Benares was hit by a torpedo fired by the German submarine U-48 just after 10 o'clock in the evening.  Fifteen minutes later and the captain ordered abandon ship; fifteen minutes after that the ship sank.

Possibly on orders, no ship in the convoy stopped because they would then have been an easy target for the U-boat.  The survivors were either in the limited number of boats that had been launched or in the sea.  No help arrived for 48 hours when a British destroyer managed to pick up 105 people.

The photo shows a lifeboat finally located eight days after the sinking.

In all, 258 people died, including 100 of the 119 children on board as well as John Gibbeson.

(This is a highly abbreviated account: the Wikipedia entry is here, and there are many online articles and even books written on the sinking.)