Taken from the The Times of London December 13, 2006
Captain Kenneth Cummins March 3, 1900 - December 10, 2006, aged 106 Merchant Navy skipper who saw service in both world wars and later advised the Home Office on marine disasters Kenneth Cummins was the last seafarer to have taken part in both world wars. Born in March 1900 in Richmond, Surrey, the son of a Merchant Navy officer, he applied to join the P&O shipping company as a cadet at 15 and was accepted for training in HMS Worcester. He joined the armed merchant cruiser Morea in 1917 and served in her on convoy duty from England to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
He had a particularly horrific experience when he found the sea covered with the floating corpses of nurses drowned after the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle had been torpedoed off Ireland. “Their aprons had dried in the sun and were blown up by the wind like little sails. I was sick over the side with the shock.� As P&O had paid for his training, Cummins continued with the company after the war, serving on board the Khyber, trading to the Far East. From 1921 to 1946 he served in mail, passenger and cargo vessels, trading to South Africa, Australia, China, India, Japan and the West Indies.
During the Second World War he was chief officer of the former passenger liner Viceroy of India when she was torpedoed by a U-boat off the North African coast during the Allied “Torch� landings in November 1942. Luckily, this occurred after the crowded mass of troops had been landed. The ship then took four hours to sink, allowing nearly all the crew to be rescued.
Next, when chief officer of the French liner Île de France — which had been commandeered by the British — he made a number of transatlantic passages at high speed. These were undertaken outside the convoy system, the ship carrying some 10,000 American troops to Europe on each trip. Cummins recalled that a bad fire on board while the liner was berthed in New York was expertly dealt with by firefighters under the direct control of the mayor of the city.
In 1946 he was promoted to command the company’s vessel Maloja, which was engaged in repatriating troops. After this he commanded the Liberty ship Sam Ettrick, recalling that when he picked up this American-built mass-produced ship at Middlesbrough, she had no ballast on board and no instructions as to how much was required. He therefore had to make his own calculations. When he ran into a violent storm on the way to pick up sugar at Barbados, he kept the ship’s head to sea, thus minimising roll, and was glad he had got his sums about right.
Later he was captain of the Devanha trading to Australia, Somali to the Far East and the vessels Singapore and Socotra to northern Europe. His last ship was the Stratheden, and he retired in 1960. Cummins was known widely as a strict but fair disciplinarian, sometimes described as a “crusty old bachelor� by his younger shipmates. He married Rosemary Byers, whom he met in Australia, in 1955 and became, it is reported, a more human figure under her influence and with the arrival of four children. He was admitted as a Younger Brother of Trinity House in 1947 and at his death was, unsurprisingly, the senior Younger Brother. In retirement from seafaring, he worked for the Home Office for ten years as a nautical assessor on the Wreck Commission, bringing his vast experience to the analysis of marine disasters. From 1962 to 1974 he was the chairman of the Marlborough Rural District Council planning committee.
He is survived by his wife and by their two sons and two daughters.
Captain Kenneth Cummins, merchant ship captain, was born on March 3, 1900. He died on December 10, 2006, aged 106
0 Responses to “Kenneth Cummins”