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Work started on the third and last of the
White Star Line’s Olympic class
ships November 30th 1911. The White Star
Line had intended to name this ship
Gigantic. After the sinking of her
46,328-ton sister ship Titanic,
they decided Britannic was a more
suitable name. New safety requirements
after the Titanic disaster led to
Britannic’s double skinned
hull and bulkheads being extended to
above the waterline. She also had to be
fitted with enough lifeboats for all the
passengers and crew. At the time of her
launch, Britannic was the largest
ship to have been built in Britain. The
British Government ordered work on her
fitting out to be suspended after the
outbreak of World War One in August
1914.
Nearing the end of 1914,
Britain’s First Lord of the
Admiralty ‘Winston Churchill’
made a catastrophic miscalculation by
planning the invasion of Turkey (the
Gallipoli Campaign). Over the eight and a
half months of that battle, 141,000
Allied servicemen were either wounded or
killed. At that time, the Cunard liners
Mauretania and Aquitania
were unable to keep up with the transport
of wounded soldiers from the
Mediterranean ports back to Britain. This
forced the British Admiralty to
requisition Britannic to serve as
a hospital ship. Britannic’s
interiors were divided into wards at
Harland & Wolff before she set out
for Liverpool to be loaded with beds,
medical equipment, a staff of 52
officers, 101 doctors and nurses, 376
hospital attendants and a crew of 675 men
and women. The conversion gave her the
capacity to carry over 3,300 patients.
Before entering service, the Admiralty
gave her the title ‘His Majesty's
Hospital Ship Britannic'.
On December 23rd 1915, she set out on
her maiden voyage from Liverpool - Naples
and the Greek Island of Lemnos to pick up
wounded soldiers. During her sixth voyage
on that route, while passing through the
Kea Channel/Greece on route to Lemnos
November 21st 1916, she either hit a mine
or was torpedoed. It is thought
Britannic’s crew must have
had the bulkhead doors open to change
shifts at that time, as she began sinking
bow first at an alarming rate. After she
came to a stop, the crew began lowering
lifeboats into the sea. Her captain had
the engines restarted at that time
thinking he might be able to run his ship
onto a beach. This led to the death of
most onboard one of the lifeboats after
it was sucked into the propellers. About
55 minutes after the explosion,
Britannic’s stern rose
hundreds of feet into the air as she
slowly disappeared beneath the sea. Of
approximately 1,066 people on board, 30
lost their lives. One of the survivors
was a nurse’s aid Violet Jesop. She
had also worked as a stewardess on
Olympic when it collided with the
British cruiser Hawke and survived
the sinking of Titanic after being
transferred to that ship for its maiden
voyage.
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