The Oceanliner Era

A project I've been working on has allowed me to research the golden age of the Transatlantic ocean-liners. There's something memorizing, yet frightening about the shear size of the ships. Looking at pictures of their construction, and imagining the craftsmen who built them is amazing.

Looking at some of the old pictures gives me the feeling of how cold these ships mght have been in the winter, or how the smell of the cleaning solutions might have been. I grew up hearing stories of when my grandparents came over from Ireland, and how the whole upper deck was covered in ice. About ten years after, the ship that brought them over, the Lancastria, was bombed and sunk off St. Nazaire, France. While lying at anchor in the Charpentier Roads, five enemy German planes dive bombed the ship which sank in twenty minutes taking the lives of nearly 3,000 troops and over 1,000 civilians. The Lancastria had been converted into a troopship and set sail from Liverpool on June 14th. to assist in the evacuation of British troops and refugees from France.