Radio officer recalls dramatic rescue 50 years ago

Patrick Gleeson was at sea south of the Azores and about to hit his bunk on the night of December 22nd, 1963, when an automatic alarm went off. The Limerick-born radio officer returned to his station on the small ship Montcalm to hear Casablanca Radio broadcasting an SOS message in Morse code.

A liner named the Lakonia, which had been en route from Southampton to the Canaries, was on fire about 25 miles away.

Gleeson alerted his captain, and he ordered all crew on deck to prepare for a rescue. The radio officer and fellow crew on the Montcalm could see the glow just south of them as they approached the last known position of the ship at about 2.45am.

Closer again, a burning hull was "lighting up the whole sky", as the Montcalm picked up lifeboats on its radar, identified by flashing torches from the ship's deck.

“We were ploughing along, and didn’t realise at first that there were already people in the water around us, so the captain stopped the ship,” Gleeson recalls. The gangway was quickly lowered, rope ladders cast over the gunwales and the deck was floodlit as his crew pulled people – many of them British schoolchildren on a Christmas cruise – from the sea and from lifeboats throughout that night.

Gleeson worked the radio all through those long hours, seeking further assistance, fielding requests by Pathe News and Time magazine among others, while also issuing warnings that the Lakonia had a large amount of diesel oil on board. As dawn broke, the sea was still speckled with lifeboats and lifejackets. US air force planes flew in, dropping smoke flares whenever they spotted a body in the water.

"Another ship, an Argentinian liner named Salta, had been first on the scene with us, and we spent all that following day on rescue," Gleeson remembers, his voice breaking at the terrible memory of it all.

“We saved 236 people, and we had 17 bodies laid out on number one and two hatches, when we eventually left for Casablanca.

“By that time, a British aircraft carrier had arrived and took over, and there was nothing more we could do.”

"877 rescued from blazing ship – 135 passengers still missing," read the lead headline in The Irish Times on Christmas Eve, 1963. Final reports in the following days confirmed that 128 of the 650 passengers and 385 crew perished.

“Thanking their lucky stars – and an unknown thief” – were John Groom (76) and his wife Mabel (73) of Poole, Dorset, who had cancelled their trip on the ship just an hour before it sailed after their luggage was stolen from Southampton docks.

Among those saved by the Montcalm was 67-year-old Jesuit priest Fr Edward Andrews from St Ignatius College, Galway. He had been one of 32 Irish people on board, five from the North, when the fire broke out in the Lakonia's hairdressing salon, trapping those in the stern, who were forced to jump without lifejackets into the sea.

Fr Andrews described to this newspaper how one of two Irish missing, ship’s medical officer Dr James J Riordan from Dublin, had “linked him down” to the lifeboat as the priest was arthritic. “That was the last time I saw him.”

Fr Andrews added that the Montcalm captain and crew "could not have done more for us" in spite of sparse accommodation on the 5,000-tonne ship. Gleeson and colleagues compiled a full list of survivors to transmit to London.

They shared their clothes with the survivors, and “lines of washing began to appear on deck”.

On docking in Casablanca on Christmas Eve, 1963, the ship and its 236 passengers were met by a “barrage of the world’s press and television”.

A US air force officer credited Gleeson with co-ordinating the rescue effort. The British ambassador to Morocco invited the Montcalm crew to a dinner.

Six months later, Gleeson returned home to marry, and in August 1966 he joined the Department of Posts and Telegraphs as an aviation radio officer, based in Ballygirreen, Co Clare.

Half a century later, and that night is still vivid in Gleeson’s memory. Earlier this month, the Radio Officers’ Association (Worldwide) presented him with a plaque at the Naval base in Haulbowline, Cork. Its chairman, Anthony Selman, observed that he “knew of no other radio officer alive who handled the SOS of such a major disaster at sea”.

"I did make a few friends among the survivors, and I got several letters of thanks," Gleeson says. "One mother and her daughter owned a pub called The Chequers in London and they asked me to call, but it was 20 or 30 years before I got there and they weren't around. However, reports about the Lakonia were up on the pub wall."