By Terrie Todd
John Baker was only seven years old when he boarded the SS City of Benares with his 12-year-old brother, Bobby, and 88 other British children. Together with their adult escorts, they would sail to Canada to avoid the bombings occurring almost nightly back home. They set sail on the evening of Friday, September 13, 1940, after two days and one night waiting in the Liverpool harbor for conditions to be safe.
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| The SS City of Benares |
Aboard the former luxury liner, John quickly earned the nickname The Lost Boy. “The thing was,” he explained in later years, “I found the ship a very confusing place. It was huge as far as I was concerned. I wanted to explore, as kids do, and the number of times I got lost was unbelievable.”
Fortunately for John, his brother Bobby had been instructed by their parents to look out for him. Bobby did so with such dedication that when the ship was torpedoed on the night of September 17, he made a life-altering decision.
John recalls being the first in his cabin to hear the alarm bells and wake up. The children had been told that drills can happen at any time, and he assumed it was a drill. “I had my blankets wrapped round me Navy-style in a sort of cocoon, so I was trying to kick my bedding clear,” John remembered decades later. “I fought my way out of bed and ran around, waking everybody up. There were four of us in the cabin, and I woke my brother up and the boys in the other bunks.”
Alarm bells and chaos continued as the boys made their way out into the corridors and up onto the deck. Only then did John realize, despite knowing the correct procedures, that he’d forgotten his life jacket.
“So I said to Bobby, ‘I must go and get my life jacket,’ and off I went like a rocket. Fortunately, Bobby very sensibly grabbed hold of me and kept me close. He restrained me forcibly from going down there and getting lost again,” John said. “Instead, he gave me another life jacket. Now, whether he gave me his own life jacket in place of the one that I left behind, I do not know, and I shall never know. But he knew the drills, and it was drilled into us every time, to bring your life jacket and to put it on. So he put a life jacket on me.”
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| A WWII Kapok Life Vest |
After a horrendous ordeal wherein the boys’ lifeboat mislaunched, plunging them into the sea, they had to climb rope ladders back onto the sinking ship. Their lifeboat was pulled up and loaded a second time. All of this was taking place during a vicious storm, with the crew and passengers scrambling for their lives, many screaming and dropping into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. In the pandemonium, John lost track of Bobby.
Some 20 hours later, the HMS Hurricane rescued those remaining alive. Once names were collected, little John knew for sure his brother was not among the survivors, though his tender heart was too young to process the truth. He returned home to his parents, the only survivor of the nine children from Southall, Middlesex, who’d been aboard. In a time when it was believed that not talking about trauma was the healthiest directive, only in later years, when the survivors held reunions, did John allow himself to think or speak about the tragedy.
“Bobby gave a great gift to me,” he said in 2005, “and I shall forever be grateful. Because of that life jacket, he has given me 65 years of life that he didn’t have. So I’m grateful.”
Source: Menzies, Janet. Children of the Doomed Voyage, John Wiley & Sons, 2005
Even
If I Perish releases
November 5, 2025. It is Terrie’s novel based on the sinking of the SS City
of Benares and on the heroism of escort Mary Cornish and the six boys she
cared for in a lifeboat for eight days. Terrie is the award-winning author of ten
historical and two split-time novels, most of which have won Word Awards
through The Word Guild. Her 2023 release, April’s Promise, was a
finalist in the ACFW Carol Awards. She lives with her husband, Jon, on the
Canadian prairies.
All is well aboard the SS City of Benares until September 17, 1940. With a storm brewing in the North Atlantic, a German U-boat releases its torpedo and breaches the ship’s hull. Do the Nazis know ninety children are on board?
In the scramble to save as many lives as possible, Mary lands in a crowded lifeboat as the only female among crew members, passengers, and six young boys. In the storm’s aftermath, two things soon become crystal clear: that Lifeboat 12 has become separated from all the others, and that Mary has been placed here for such a time as this—even if she perishes.
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