Thomas Alexander Robertson

Thomas, aged 18, joining the merchant navy

You're on Scotland Street in Glasgow, driving back to Bearsden via the Kingston Bridge. You turn left at the east end, past West Street subway station and go under the M74 extension, then left again onto a slip road to the M8.  But as you do, you might see this on the left:

The gate on the left with the red sign (which says "Advertise Your Business Here") marks the start of what used to be Gloucester Street.  Looking at this map, Gloucester Street runs left to right just below the centre:

The 'slip road' photo above is taken at the junction in the bottom right hand corner above and the line of the street can still be seen from the modern slip road:

At this point (about a hundred yards on from the previous slip road photo, you are driving over the site of a public house, seen here in 1962:

Gloucester Street is on the left, Laidlaw Street is on the right so we can tell that of the two pubs shown on the map, this is the more westerly of the two.  

Just out of shot on the left was number 124, the birthplace of Thomas Alexander Robertson.  This took place in 1900 - which is as distant in time before the above photo and the above photo is from today!  His birthdate was 10th May and his parents were Thomas, a butcher, and Mary.

The 1901 Census revealed Thomas had four older sisters and his father's job was now described as 'sausage maker'.  His father's birthplace was Gibraltar and while his mother was from Glasgow, her mother (who was also living with them) was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia (which will feature again later in Thomas's story.).  Business was good enough for them to have a servant, Sophia Falconer, and with four adults and four children in a tenement flat it must have been a squeeze.

Ten years later and the family (now expanded by one extra child but without the mother-in-law or servant) lived across Gloucester Street at number 81.  The two eldest daughters had left school and were a clerkess and machinist.

In 1918, shortly after his 18th birthday, Thomas joined the merchant navy.  The First World War was still six months from the armistice but the submarine threat to shipping bringing food, goods and American soldiers across the Atlantic was evident, so this was not a 'cushy number'.  We can also speculate he was inspired by his grandmother's stories of Nova Scotia.  His papers describe him as having fair hair, brown eyes and being 5 feet, 2 inches (157 cm).  

By the time of 1921 Census Thomas was still learning his trade, now as a cadet on a ship called the Polish Monarch, working for Raeburn and Verel, the shipowners.  The address was given as Garelochhead; this may be what we call Faslane today.  He lived onboard with another cadet, the ship's master, his wife and child.

As ships were traded they could change names - this is the Polish Monarch in 1912.

William Raeburn and John Verel founded the Monarch Steamship Company Limited in 1902, carrying cargo such as Scottish-mined coal going out and bringing grain back.  Their office was at 45 West Nile Street:

While this photo is from the early 1960s, it shows West Nile Street looking from St Vincent Street - the building in the right foreground has been demolished and is currently All Bar One (formerly the Scottish Design Centre?)  Number 45 is ringed in red at centre left; it is currently called Gresham Chambers.  The Post Office is Rosa's Thai (once Long Tall Sally!) and Vroni's Wine Bar is on the other side of the entrance.  (Does anyone know if the lady running for the trolleybus to Clarkston made it?)

In 1911 the company had eleven ships but losses in the First World War had reduced the fleet to four by the time Thomas was in Garelochhead.  The firm was taken over by Harrison's (Clyde) Ltd in 1960.

Thomas would probably have been in the merchant navy all his working life.  In 1929 when he married he gave his occupation as "master mariner" and his address as "On-board SS Caledonian Monarch, of Glasgow".  Jessie Wardrop Brown, who was a year younger at 28 was his wife.  She lived at 165 Butterbiggins Road in Glasgow and gave her occupation as tailoress.

Of all the original properties on the north side of Butterbiggins Road, only two survive, the one nearer the camera being Jessie's home.  The ceremony took place on 9th July at Victoria Place Baptist Church, Govanhill.

Thomas and Jessie lived at 139 Archerhill Road, just to the west of Knightswood Park in 1935.  In 1937 they may have had one child, Eric James Wardrop Robertson.  (I cannot be certain but believe he died in 2003 in the Inverclyde area and his wife, Mary McGregor Barr, died in Saltcoats in 2019.)  By 1940 they lived at 1 Killermont Avenue in Bearsden.

In 1941 Thomas was master of another Monarch ship, the Norman Monarch.  This had been built in 1937 by Caledon Shipbuilding and Engineering in Dundee:

The Tay rail bridge would be to the left of the photo - the railway station is just in the bottom left corner and the main shopping area is just above that and to the right.  The road bridge reaches the north bank just to the west of Victoria Dock.  The yards stretch along the river, including Caledon's Stannergate Yard, seen here in 1932:

The Norman Monarch was designed for cargo work, weighted 4718 tonnes and was 432 feet long:

The ship was part of Convoy HX-126 sailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool leaving on 10th May 1941 (Thomas's 41st birthday).  'HX' denotes it was sailing from Halifax and '126' that it was number 126 in the sequence.  There were 33 merchant ships.  Incredibly, given the threat from German submarines, there was only one navy escort and this was a cruise liner that had a number of guns fitted for protection against German ships; she had no defences against submarines.  

The Norman Monarch was carrying 8300 tons of grain, a crew of 48, and had originally been scheduled for the previous convoy.  

On 20th May, the convoy was spotted by a German submarine in the western Atlantic and the Norman Monarch was the first to be torpedoed (location A on the map below):

Courageously, the Harpagus (another ship in the convoy) stopped to help and everyone on board was safely transferred, including Thomas.  This was extremely dangerous for the Harpagus because she was stationery and thus could have been a very easy target were the German still to be present.

Thomas and his crew were safe, but this took time and the rest of the convoy did not - could not - stop, so now Harpagus was on her own, trying to make up the gap.  This took most of the day and by this stage five more ships in the convoy had been sunk as a 'wolf pack' of five submarines attacked.  Just as Harpagus had nearly rejoined the battered convoy she was torpedoed as well and became the seventh ship sunk that day.

This time there was no safe rescue and of the combined crews of 98 on board only 40 survived; Thomas was not among them.  A surviving officer said that when the crew of the Norman Monarch had come on board they had taken off their wet clothes and life jackets; when the Harpagus was hit nobody knew where these were.

The Register of Deceased Seamen has two pages for those who died on the Harapgus; Thomas's name is one the first page with three other Glasgow men.  Two other Glaswegians are on the other page.

The attacks on the convoy continued over the next two days but with reducing ferocity.  In all, nine ships were sunk and 189 people died.  To the east, the German battleship Bismarck had tried to breakout from its base in Norway into the Atlantic with the objective of destroying convoys like HX-126, which would have been steaming straight into its path.  The German submarines attacking HX-126 were called away to help the Bismarck as it tried to shake off the Royal Navy pursuers.  After initial successes on the 24th May, Bismarck was damaged and eventually sunk on the 27th.

Thomas is commemorated at Tower Hill in London, on the Merchant Seamen's Memorial for civilian sailors killed in the Second World War with no known grave (23,765 names).

Jessie, Thomas's wife, died in Dalbeattie, Kirkcudbrightshire, in 1984.