million-to-one on our having been hit by a torpedo. This was said to me by both Stanley Thomas and William Wood in Cartagena, the only British survivors of the sunk ship Endymion, when I flew down from Barcelona to this naval base town to see them on Feb. 2 states the correspondent of the "Daily Express."
They were waiting in hospital, a little dazed and shaken, for a ship to take them on the first stage of their journey home to Cardiff.
Thomas, the chief officer, was on the bridge of the Endymion and saw the spurt of water as the bows were blown in.
Wood, chief engineer, was below in the engine room when he heard detonations in the fore part of the ship at 7.15 on morning of Jan. 31.
We were struck on the starboard side, said Thomas. The sun was rising at starboard. To see a submarine there we would have had to look into the sun. That is a favourite tip with submarines.
Not a It could not have been an anchored mine which hit us. We were sixteen miles south-south-west of Cape Tinoso, which is far too deep for mines.
A drifting mine would have been seen by our look-out or one of the Spanish patrol boats floating about there. No, that was a submarine all right that got us, I found Thomas first. As I went lo the hospital director's office ther sat a young man in a kind of navy blue ski-ing suit, shyly and slowly dictating to an old man with wavy. silver hair sitting at a typewriter. His face was rather pale and he seemed nervous, but he smiled cheerfully.
I am just dictating my statement about the sinking, he said, in a slow, deliberate Welsh accent. I am afraid I am the last of the crew to make One. I swallowed rather a lot of water. And he smiled wistfully.
While he was finishing dictating I went upstairs, and there, wandering down a corridor between wards, was Wood, a sandy-haired young man, with pale eyes, whitish face, and hands which were trembling quite a bit.
The moment I heard the detonation, he said, plucking a cigarette from a precious packet, "I rushed to the cabin of the second engineer. Langlois Yes, about fifty I should say he was, born in Jersey. I can't remember his first name. Clarence or Percy, or something. I told him to put his clothes-on and get up on deck But I never saw him again Langlois was one of the three British dead; the ship's captain, A. C. Verano, of Gib itor. and his twenty-six-year-old wi Laura, were the other two.
Then I went down to the engines again. Just as I got there the si mal rang us on deck, The captain fr the bridge had just given orders for the boats to be lowered.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.