Home - SS Ceramic (original) (raw)
“… on November 23, 1942 (the Ceramic) left the Mersey for Australia, independently routed, with 378 passengers. Her subsequent complete disappearance was at first little publicised at home, due to the general censorship of shipping information, and the Admiralty assumed that she had been sunk without survivors from the 500 or so persons on board.
“It was learned a long time later that she had been torpedoed and sunk on December 6 in latitude 40 deg. 30 min. N., longitude 40 deg, 20 min. W, and that one survivor, a sapper of the Royal Engineers, had been picked up by the U-boat and taken to a German prison camp. The full story, as far as I know, has never been published.”
— J. H. Isherwood, Sea Breezes, November 1963 STEAMERS OF THE PAST White Star Liner “Ceramic” of 1913
The full story, the culmination of six years of research, has now been published by the granddaughter of Trevor Winser, one of the 655 who died when the ship was sunk overnight on 6/7 December 1942. The book tells the story of the SS Ceramic from its construction in 1912, through to its sinking thirty years later.
The story is told directly from original sources: diaries, memoirs, letters, documents and photographs. For the first time, sole survivor Eric Munday tells in full the story of his remarkable rescue by the U-boat and subsequent imprisonment as a POW. Testimonies from some of the crew of U-515 relate the story from the other side, most of these accounts never having been told before.
This 572 page paperback includes over 200 photographs and illustrations, and a list of the individual casualties of the ship’s sinking.
How to order
The second edition is available from Amazon print-on-demand:
To download Kindle reader click here.
For those outside the UK, please go to your country’s Amazon website and search “ss ceramic the untold story”.