Dan Snow's History Hit - The Scottish Island, The Shipwreck and The Whisky

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

In 1941, the SS Politician ran aground off Eriskay in the Scottish Hebrides Islands, carrying 260,000 bottles of whisky. As war rationing gripped Britain, Hebridean islanders saw the wreck as a godsend. Under cover of darkness, they salvaged thousands of bottles, hiding them in caves, haystacks, and peat bogs. A cat-and-mouse game ensued with customs officers who were determined to stop the whisky smuggling.  Dan is joined by Laura Boon-Williams, Lloyd’s Register Foundation Senior Curator in Contemporary Maritime at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, who recounts the true story behind the beloved movie Whisky Galore and tells us about the spirit of this Hebridean community during wartime, merchant shipping in WII and why a seemingly endless supply of whiskey wasn't entirely a blessing.You can find out more about Lloyd's Register Foundation's history and its work that supports research, innovation and education to help the global community tackle the most pressing safety and risk challenges. Just go to https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Peta Stamper is the production manager for this series, 'Ships that Made the British Empire'. 

In the midst of the Second World War, a seemingly ordinary shipwreck off the remote Hebridean island of Eriske captured the imagination of a nation. The SS Politician, quite an unremarkable cargo ship really, it found itself at the centre of an extraordinary tale of resilience, defiance and the enduring spirit of a community, pun intended. On February 5th, 1941, the politician ran aground on the treacherous rocks of Eriske. A hull breached, her precious cargo spilled into the unforgiving sea. But this was a very particular shipment. The politician carried 22,000 cases of whiskey and a staggering £3 million worth of Jamaican banknotes. A fortune.

More money than anyone was likely to see, particularly in that war-torn time. As news of the wreck spread, the islanders of Eriske found themselves embroiled in a battle against the elements, the authorities, their own moral compasses, and their appetites. With rationing and scarcity were harsh reality, the temptation of the politicians' liquid treasure proved too great to resist. This story, the basis of the 1949 comedy movie

Whiskey Galore, starring Basil Radford and Bruce Seaton, is more than just a curious wartime anecdote turned folklore. It's a reflection of the resilience of an island community, but it's also a window into the complex history of Britain's empire. That cargo of banknotes bound for Kingston tells a story about Jamaica's history, once a jewel in the crown of Britain's empire, at the centre of Britain's grip on the Caribbean. You're listening to Dan Snow's History in collaboration with Lloyd's Register Foundation, whose archives hold some of our greatest maritime stories.

This is the fourth and final episode of our Ships That Made the British Empire, with the true story of the SS politician and Whiskey Galore. So I'm here back in the incredible Lloyd's Register archives. Now, long-time listeners of this podcast will be aware that I do have a little weakness for maritime history. And if, like me, you love the ships and the sea, this place is nirvana. I could spend days in here.

But even more exciting than the books is the fact I'm joined by Laura Boone-Williams, Senior Lloyds Register Foundation Curator, Contemporary Maritime, who is from the National Maritime Museum Greenwich. Laura, how's it going? I'm great, thank you. So tell me about The Politician, this infamous ship. So The Politician started its life in 1923. It was built by the Furness Shipping Company and it was originally called the London Merchant. This was an order of

six ships to take advantage of the huge boom in trade that was happening following the First World War. So initially the ship was used as a mixed cargo ship across the Atlantic carrying goods to and from various ports in America. Okay, so Laura, great. It's the peace dividend. She's going back and forward across the Atlantic carrying all sorts of different cargoes. What made her famous? So it's her escapades with whiskey. Now, actually, her first whiskey field incident occurred during the Prohibition era in America, which lots of people don't realise. They remember her for her later adventures, where a cargo of whisky was detained by a local governor who'd opened up the caskets and discovered

that they were full of whisky. This caused a little bit of a diplomatic incident with officials from Britain based in Washington, D.C., getting involved, and eventually the federal authorities returned the whisky. And kind of the ship continued this trade till the beginning of the 1930s where we see the depression and suddenly there's this drip in a global trade and the ship was laid up with around kind of 60

other ships in Essex but this wasn't the end of its story it was purchased by a second company in 1935 and renamed the Politician. And people know this ship more for its adventures as a politician. And it was quickly and affectionately referred to by its crew as the Polly. Great. And so she's been brought back from mothballing during the Depression. And what kind of jobs is she doing? So again, it's a mixed cargo ship, mainly with trade with the US.

But realistically, it's taking kind of whatever cargo it can get. And then the war breaks out. Yes. So at this point in 1939, it was requisitioned by the Admiralty. And this is the case for pretty much all merchant Navy ships at this point. And it was used to support cargo traveling across the Atlantic, trading with North America. So at the beginning of the war, there's this huge pressure to get goods, so food, but also goods needed for the war effort to Britain. We're an island. We need to import lots of the goods that are needed. And this is an incredibly dangerous task.

dangerous task. So at the beginning of the war, up to kind of 1941, we've got really kind of the peak of the threat of the U-boats. And the merchant navy seafarers would have been really very aware of the risks that they were facing in supplying Britain with the goods that it needed. And so when we hear about losses of ships to U-boats, we're talking about exactly this, the politician and ships like it, you know, a couple of decades old, might be a little bit slower than some of the new ships, and they're just plodding back and forth across the North Atlantic, terribly vulnerable to German submarines. Yeah, definitely. And to try and minimise the losses, the kind of criteria to get through this is they'd have as many ships travelling together at one time. So you'd have about kind of 40 to 60 ships travelling in convoy,

which is why we refer to it as the Atlantic convoys. On the fateful day when it finally ran aground, what was it up to? So the irony is this is a ship that's kind of facing huge dangers, but actually it was the weather that it's come up in. So on the 4th of February 1941, the ship left Liverpool docks with a mainly Liverpudlian crew bound for Jamaica with a mixed cargo of cottons, medicines, biscuits, Jamaican banknotes, which are a bit of a mystery that we'll get to later, and most notably, an incredible 260,000 bottles of very high quality Scottish

whiskey. So this whiskey had been stored in a bond house. But because of the huge amount of bombing that was happening at this time, the owners took the decision that actually they would sell the entire shipment of whisky, effectively send it to safety. And also at this time, there's a huge pressure in Britain for foreign currency. So this isn't just that Jamaicans drinking a lot of whisky. This is almost getting it all offshore to protect it and then it can be sold on. Yeah. Ah, OK.

Right. So it leaves Liverpool and it turns north, I imagine. So it's going to go out via Northern Ireland and the west coast of Scotland. Yeah, so she's sailing past the Isle of Man, heading north towards the Hebrides. But the weather takes a turn, the winds increase and seas become really rough. So the captain, Beckinsfield Worthington, who was a very experienced captain, he's in his 60s at this point, plotted a new course that would take them past the Skeveror Light and onto the Barrowhead Light before crossing the Minch. It should have been a really easy passage. And actually, at the point that the ship caught the rocks, the captain wasn't even on the bridge.

Oh, really? So he wasn't expecting trouble? No, not at all. But unfortunately they did hit the sandbanks and the rocks off the coast of Eriskay, a small island to the northwest of Scotland. The ship started to list. Luckily none of the crews were injured. They were able to kind of retreat off the ship and get ashore in the lifeboats and the crew spent their nights on the nearby small island. Okay, so they're spending the night on the Isle of Eriscape. Now that, ironically, is one of the few places

I have ever crashed into rocks on boats as well. So I have great sympathy for the captain and crew. So we know what was on the politician. We know some of the senior officers. What about, do we know anything about any of the other men on board? So the story of the seafarers themselves on the ship has often been kind of eclipsed by the huge story of whiskey galore and the islanders. But there's a 1980s oral history recorded with Morris Watson, who at the time was a cadet.

He was around 16, 17, who was on board the ship. He'd had three previous voyages to the States and back as part of the kind of Battle of the Atlantic. He'd had three previous voyages to the States and back as part of the kind of battle of the Atlantic. And interestingly, on his previous voyage, his third time across the Atlantic on the Diplomat, a sister ship of the politician, this was sunk by a torpedo. Luckily, he made it safely into the lifeboat and was given six weeks rest back at home. That's quite generous. Yeah, it's important to note at this point, as part of the Merchant Navy, as soon as you stepped foot onto the lifeboat, your pay stopped. Yeah, exactly. Which is always pretty brutal. So yep, so he'd had six weeks unpaid leave back at home to recover and he'd joined the politician about three days before it set sail from Liverpool. So he was very

new on the ship. It was his first time on the politician. Heads down, what's supposed to be quite the easy part of the voyage, you're in home waters and first time on the politician. Heads down, what's supposed to be quite the easy part of the voyage, you're in home waters, and suddenly they hit the rocks, which sounds pretty unlucky. He's four voyages into his career. It's really interesting reading the transcript from his oral history when he talks about the experience of hitting these rocks, because he actually describes that it was pretty calm on the ship. He had a very experienced captain, a very experienced master. They knew what to do. There was never this kind of sense of panic. Obviously, they knew that they were quite close to shore. The first lifeboat that was put in was swept away, but they all made it to land. And with him was another cadet. And tellingly,

he says that he feels like the other cadet was calmer than him because he hadn't experienced the kind of previous sinking. I see so he was actually traumatised. Yeah he doesn't say it I think with a modern interpretation we'd potentially describe this as kind of a triggering incident because you think it's just six seven weeks previously he'd experienced a pretty traumatic experience. We don't know that much about the rest of his kind of war effort, but he continued to work for that line. And he didn't actually leave until the early 1980s. So he spent all of his career continuing to work for that shipping line. And he was made redundant in the early 1980s after 15 years as a master.

So despite these pretty traumatic two experiences at the beginning of his career, he stayed with it. Incredible. What happens to the politician? Does it go down or is it sort of high and dry? So the ship is listing, but it hasn't gone down. There is some water damage. So the hold that actually holds the whisky is one of the most affected. It's full of water, there's oil. So it's considered that quite a lot of the cargo

in that space has been damaged. So the crew themselves had a very warm welcome from the island. This isn't an island that's set up really for visitors. So they were billeted across the island. They stayed in the schoolhouse. People took them into their homes. Obviously, they had shock. So they were given hot drinks laced with rum for the shock. And the islanders shared with them the food that they had. So the following morning, however, when the captain and the crew went back to assess the damage of the ship, they discovered that some of their belongings and also some of the cargo were missing. So cargo officers on the ship ordered that the ship be put under guard

in order that further cargo was not stolen. As I said, however, the whisky being kept in hold number five was flooded with water and also kind of dirty fuel oil. And so believing that this was contaminated, it would be of kind of little salvage value, Captain Kay, who was put in charge of the salvage operation, made no attempt to save it and did not place it under an armed guard. Right, so they just assumed that was written off? Yeah.

Okay. So the salvaged cargo that they thought could be saved was loaded onto another ship, which sailed back to Glasgow. Divers looked at the ship, and the wreck was declared unsalvageable, and it was decided that the SS politician should stay where the ship was. So there's no point trying to tear off the rocks. It was a lost cause. Okay.

And one of the reasons we have such great detail on this is presumably, well, this archive, the Lloyd's Register. The Lloyd's Register is this amazing archive where we can really learn about these kind of dramatic events. And similar to in the First World War and the Second World War, many Lloyd's Register staff were either asked to support government departments or were sent overseas to supervise the construction of new vessels for the British government. In the UK, a number of surveying staff were dispersed to Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle, where they were close to the Admiralty's merchant shipping department.

So they're working really hand-in-glove with the government during the war. Yeah, definitely. And at this point, there's a pressure from the authorities to relax the load line regulations, so the amount of cargo that you can put on a ship safely in order to carry more cargo, because there's such a demand for resources for the war effort. And this gave Lloyd's Register a challenge in how to support that in a safe way. So you had to go and look again at every single ship and say,

actually, we think in extreme situations they could carry this much cargo. Yeah. And so the society was also involved in supervising the construction of a huge variety of craft for the Admiralty. And they supervised the construction of over 2,000 naval craft, including frigates, minesweepers, arm trawlers, landing craft, tugs, salvage vessels and lighters. So pretty much anything you can imagine that's needed at this point.

So they were pretty busy. A number of surveyors were also seconded to the Sea Transport Department of the Board of Trade, where they oversaw the conversion of ships into troop carriers. Because again, you've got the sudden need to have a kind of disbursement of troops all across the globe. This is a global war. Also hospital ships and then merchant cruisers. And others helped carry out surveys on requisitioned ships. So it was incredibly busy time. Indeed. The work was intense. They were working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And we know from the records that

this took the toll, unfortunately, on a number of the Lloyd's Register staff. I think often when we think about the impacts of war on a personal level, we're thinking about these really dramatic events, kind of armed conflicts. But for most people, it's just this kind of continuation of effort and just the exertion on a day-to-day, in and out, and just the huge toll that takes on kind of an individual level. So what does this archive tell us about this shipwreck and what happened after that? So the Lloyd's Register classed the ship, meaning that it was built and maintained to a set of rules and regulations to ensure the vessel's quality. In our collection online, there's the memo to the

chief ship surveyor regarding repairs required on the politician on the 12th of February 1941, where basically it notes that it's got a buckled stem and a stem plating that should be repaired to the owner's convenience. So detailed correspondence like that would all end up in your archive as well, about thousands of ships. Indeed, it's an amazing archive. And actually, in our records, we can look at the vessel's earlier life. So when it was still the London merchant,

doing those kind of prohibition whiskey rungs that we talked about earlier, including the profile and the debt plans among other things. So in the Lloyd's Register archive, there's 1.2 million digitised records that are all freely available online. So there's just this huge wealth of information still waiting to be explored. And does the archive tell us about the whisky incident that followed the shipwreck, or do we have to go to other sources for that? It tells us that the ship was considered unsalvageable, but in order to learn a little bit more about the story,

about what happened once the whisky was in the water, as it were, we need to look to other sources. You listened to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. As well as gallons of whiskey, the politician was also carrying £3 million worth of Jamaican shillings headed for Kingston. Why? Well, Jamaica had been the jewel in the crown of the British Caribbean Empire. The wealth generated for the British Empire from sugar plantations was staggering. Almost every island in the Caribbean had been covered in sugarcane fields and refining mills.

The profits helped to finance the Industrial Revolution. They helped to make Britain powerful and wealthy, paying for a good chunk of the Royal Navy, for example. But they also represented a measurable human toll. It's believed that at least a third of the estimated 12 million Africans forced into slavery in the Americas were taken aboard British ships and forcibly transported across the Atlantic. On August 1st 1834 slavery was finally officially abolished in Jamaica following a number of slave rebellions in the Caribbean and abolitionist campaigning in Britain. But real freedom remained elusive. The British imposed what they called an apprenticeship

scheme that still looked a lot like slavery. Former slaves were forced to work for their old masters, and those masters had been compensated by the British taxpayers for their lost property. As the plantation system slowly collapsed, formerly enslaved people began to establish their own farms, but Britain's grip on Jamaica remained tight through the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its economy struggled, social unrest simmered. Jamaicans would fight for decades for their independence, which did eventually come in 1962. But in the meantime, during the Second World War,

when Jamaica was still part of the empire and the call went out for volunteers and recruits, Jamaica answered that call. Over 6,000 Caribbean men volunteered for the RAF. They served as ground crew, air crew, and 80 Caribbean women joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. They made up a small contingent of Britain's imperial forces. We know that these British imperial forces played a crucial role in the Allied victory. It's possible, in fact, that the war would not have been won without their

support. And as Jamaica sent brave servicemen and women to Europe, ships like the SS Politician transported vital supplies to the Caribbean. Talk about the Jamaican banknotes. What's going on there? So this has given kind of birth to a lot of conspiracy theories around why the ship was carrying the equivalent of several million pounds to Jamaica, especially considering that this wasn't a ship that would normally carry banknotes, and it didn't have any sort of additional security, despite having kind of the equivalent of millions of pounds.

So this does seem very peculiar. It's a bit weird. It is weird. So there's been some interesting conspiracy theories. So there's this idea that this was a kind of backup plan for the royal family to set up an alternative Buckingham Palace to be established in the Caribbean, if the royal family and the government were prepared to evacuate the UK. This seems a bit strange. I don't know why you'd choose Jamaican banknotes. It would seem much more likely that

you'd choose something like gold. There's some suggestion that it was being sent to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who at that point were residents in the Bahamas to support their lifestyle. But again, the choice of Jamaican banknotes and sending it to them in this way doesn't quite fit. The most boring explanation is that this is just a continuation of replacing of circulation of currency. Banknotes need to be replaced on a regular basis. But more recent research in 2020 by Jerry Burke gives us one of the darkest possible reasons. He spent a lot of time looking through cabinet records

and he believes that the cargo may have a link to the Moim report, which was buried in wartime because it revealed the terrible conditions of starvation and oppression suffered by the people of the British Caribbean. Among the papers that Burke uncovered, he thinks it may have been linked to the SS politicians' cargo, where the colonial secretary of the West Indies wrote to the war cabinet. In it, the secretary said, we have reached an agreement with the treasury on a short-term plan by which a sum of £350 would be made immediately for the relief of the West Indies.

If it found a place in the white paper, it might have given the appearance of a panicked measure or a bribe. Interesting. Right, as well as those banknotes, we've got the whisky, what, 22,000 cases or something? So how did the islanders respond to this and did the news kind of slip out? So I think this is one of the things that's really appealing about the story of the politician, is we can just all imagine the excitement. This is quite a remote island. These aren't rich people.

And they've already had kind of almost two years of rationing. So suddenly finding yourself with 22,000 cases of very high quality whiskeys, I think we can all imagine how we might react to that. Words of the Polly Whiskey quickly spread and boats began to arrive, not just from the island itself, but from neighboring areas of Barrow,

Lewis, Mull and the mainland. There was even rumors that the whiskey had magical qualities because it apparently didn't cause hangovers. We've all heard that one before. And I think the atmosphere and the subsequent movies of whiskey galore that have been made based on this story are probably pretty accurate this kind

of frenzy to kind of gain as much whiskey as quickly as possible but then this kind of cat and mouse game with the authorities to scavenge it but then to kind of hide it but interestingly when you hear from the islanders themselves, they consider it more of a rescue mission. Of course they do. They were rescuing it. Otherwise, it would just go to waste. I completely agree. But the authorities presumably, well, like in the movies, they couldn't really tolerate this, well, quite anarchic behaviour, I suppose. Yeah, definitely. And one of the main concerns seems to have been that as the whiskey was made for the American market, no duty had been paid.

So it's actually the kind of custom officials that led the charge in campaigning to have punishment of those that had taken the whiskey, but also to prevent additional whiskey being taken. So while the ship waited for the salvage crew, the locals had kind of intervened and in groups, both during the night or during the day, they visited the politician and were taking huge quantities of whiskey. And as we said, like no Islander regarded this as stealing. For their kind of interpretations of the rule of salvage, they felt that the bounty was in the sea and so it was therefore theirs to rescue. Understandable, understandable. But the local customs officer, Charles McCool, was really incensed that the outright thievery,

as he saw it, was going on. None of the whiskey had paid a penny in duty and he was riled against the loss to the public purse. And he really led the charge in whipping up a furore and to make the police to act. I think he's got an interesting character as to why he kind of led this charge. There's some suggestions that he was a teetotaler, so I don't know if that kind of impacted his concern about this sudden influx of whisky onto the island. But once the police began to act, villages were raided and crofts were turned upside down. So they're not just trying to stop people taking the whisky from the wreck, they're actually arresting people and trying to find it on the land. That seems pretty heartless. Yes. So you hear great stories of all the places that people had to hide their bottles.

So within kind of hidden cave systems in the crofts themselves, you hear stories of planting it underneath their crops. There's a great story that I don't know if it's true of someone even putting it on the bottom of the anchor of their small rowing boat so that they could pull it up with the anchor. And when the customs excise arrived, several men were arrested and some of the islanders were fined and imprisoned. And the worst thing is when the real salvagers arrived to come and salvage it, didn't they just steal the whiskey as well? Indeed. So many of the bottles that were recovered,

at this point they recovered 13,500 cases of the whisky. The tales are that the salvagers themselves drunk quite a few of them on the way to the mainland, and then additionally some more bottles are thought to have been stolen from the warehouse that they then stored it in. At this point, McCall was so incensed by the kind of continuation of the theory from the ship or the potential that he campaigned for the ship to be basically blown up with dynamite.

And it's estimated at this point there were still around 1,000 cases of whiskey on the ship. And it was blown up. Indeed, which I would argue seems a little bit extreme. It is a bit extreme, but you know, we are making a joke about this. It wasn't entirely funny, the consequences. No. So there's actually quite a strong social impact on the island. As you can imagine, there's this kind of frenzy of trying to take as much whiskey as possible and hiding it. But with that came, it's almost like trying to kind of frenzy of trying to take as much whiskey as possible and hiding it.

But with that came, it's almost like trying to kind of drink the bar dry. People were consuming it at huge rates as well. And for years and decades later, this contributed to kind of significant social problems on the island, including quite a few cases of people becoming alcoholics. On the island, there's also a kind of continuing sense of unfairness at the prosecutions that happened. And there's this feeling that they were kind of targeted by the authorities unfairly. So actually, what appeared to be this great bounty

ended up in this kind of blizzard of alcoholism, injustice, coercion, police involvement. Just actually, I'm not sure it was a stroke of luck in the end. Yeah, I think you could definitely argue it. It sounds like this amazing thing to suddenly gain a lot of whiskey, but for many of the islanders, it had quite a negative and long-lasting impact. And there are still pubs where you can go to on the island

where there's unopened bottles, and people still find them to this day. You still hear stories of when people renovate their homes, for example, digging a new garden path. It's still quite common to come across either empty bottles or full bottles that have been buried and forgotten and never claimed. Well, thank you so much, Laura. It's just been such a treat for me as somebody who loves maritime history to come and explore these archives and talk to you about some of the remarkable stories contained within them. Just tell me, why is Lloyd's Register is clearly one of the great resources out there? I think so often, despite being an island nation, we forget the huge role

that maritime and the people behind maritime, the seafarers, have played in our history. And the Lloyd's Register collection plays a really important role of kind of filling in those gaps to show the impact that seafaring and ships have had throughout our history. And it's really important that we have a better understanding of the past and the importance that trade and exploration has played in Britain's history. And because we don't understand this, I think it's really hard for us to understand our current and future place within a global society. I love that all those ships are gone now and yet they survive in these books and these ledgers in front of us now and in the stories that you tell. So thank you very much, Laura. That's fantastic. Thank you.

Thanks so much to all of you for joining us for this special mini-series made in collaboration with Lloyd's Register Foundation, a global charity that supports research, innovation and education to make the world a safer place. If you want, you can find out more about their funding and the work of the Heritage and Education Centre, which aims to highlight the importance of maritime safety to the past, present and future ocean economy.

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