To mark the 70th anniversary of the Arandora Star disaster and the unveiling of the Arandora Star Memorial in Wales at Cardiff’s Metropolitan Cathedral, BBC and ITV Wales News correspondents Nick Servini and Marie Claire Ceri Jones made personal reports on the tragedy and how it affected the Italian community in Wales.

BBC Wales correspondent Nick Servini reported from Bardi and ITV Wales correspondent Marie Claire Ceri Jones reported from Wales. Watch all four reports below and find more articles from the BBC and ITV via the following links:
BBC – One family’s story of World War II liner tragedy
BBC – Service marks 70th anniversary of ship tragedy
BBC – Survivor’s story of Arandora Star tragedy
BBC – Remembering the Arandora Star 70 years after sinking
ITV – Arandora Star Tragedy

Arandora Star Memorial – BBC Wales – Part I

Arandora Star Memorial – BBC Wales – Part II

Arandora Star Memorial – ITV1 Wales – Part I

Arandora Star Memorial – ITV1 Wales – Part II

The first Welsh national memorial to the Arandora Star tragedy will be unveiled in a ceremony in Cardiff’s Metropolitan Cathedral of St David, Charles Street, Cardiff on 2nd July, 2010. The memorial is being created by the Welsh-Italian artist, Susanna Ciccotti, from Swansea and world-famous stone carver, Ieuan Rees, from Ammanford.

Doors open at 10am and various items will presede a 12 noon Mass. The memorial unveiling will take place during Mass.

Would any disabled persons attending please inform Romeo on 01443 773 028 or Maria on 01443 771 397, well before the day.

To all of you who may have a personal connection with the Arandora Star… You can learn more about the tragedy by visiting www.arandorastarwales.us .

I want to draw your attention to a very important anniversary coming up on July 2nd, 2010. This date marks the 70th anniversary since the WW2 sinking of the Arandora Star, carrying interned civilians from Britain to Canada. The ship was torpedoed and sank with terrible loss of life off the north coast of Ireland. The majority who died were Italian.

My own Welsh-Italian family were touched deeply, with the drowning of my great-uncle from Swansea and my father’s cousin (who was actually one of the ship’s crew). My grandfather, Giuseppe Pelosi, a cafe proprietor from Swansea, was an internee on the ship. However, he miraculously ‘hung on’ for hours in the freezing, oil-laden Atlantic waters with his friend, Angelo Greco, and other men with Italian surnames so familiar to people throughout the communities of Britain. For those who survived, on returning to Britain, they were immediately shipped to a prison camp in the Australian outback.

I am a member of a small group of volunteers committed to raising funds to create the first Welsh national memorial to the Arandora Star tragedy. The memorial will be unveiled in a ceremony in Cardiff’s Metropolitan Cathedral of St David on 2nd July, 2010. The memorial is being created by the Welsh-Italian artist, Susanna Ciccotti, from Swansea and world-famous stone carver, Ieuan Rees, from Ammanford.

We desperately need to contact those Welsh-Italian families with connections to the tragedy. Families with surnames such as Conti, Lusardi, Pompa, Rabaiotti, Rossi – and many more. We want as many family members as possible to attend the unveiling ceremony, to celebrate the memory of their loved-ones. To find out more, and to receive a personal invitation, they should contact the following:-

Bruna Chezzi, Committee Secretary: Flat 6 Partridge Court, Partridge Road, Cardiff CF24 3QP Tel: 07825265406; arandorastar.wales@yahoo.co.uk

or

Paulette Pelosi: ‘Vallegrande’, 17 Clyne View, Killay, Swansea SA2 7EA Tel: (01792) 427774; paulette.pelosi@ntlworld.com

Finally, we urgently need to raise more funds to pay for the memorial – if anyone is able to help us please, they should make cheques out to the ‘Arandora Star Memorial Fund in Wales’, and send to the Treasurer: Cav. Raimondo Zavaglia MBE BA AIL, 6 Quarry Dale, Rumney, Cardiff CF3 3BR; raimondo.zavaglia@justice.gov.uk; Tel: 07793 392684

Please pass this message on to all you know, as soon as possible.

Thank you very much,
Paulette Pelosi

BBC Wales News online has featured an article about the Arandora Star and the lives lost when it sunk during WWII.

Read the article here: Innocents killed on sunken liner

Each Summer the Welsh (and English and American) -Italians take time out of their busy schedules and return to Bardi. With more bars per square inch than San Antonio, Ibiza, festas like Festa del Imigrante or bands like Jam with Robina playing, there is always something to do.

Here are some pictures of Bardi and the surrounding villages taken by Delucia Sidoli during her Summer there.

123►

Arandora Star Memorabilia gallery pictures prodived by collector John Sidoli.

A South Wales commitee has been formed to come up with an action plan soon to be published, to put a significant memorial to The Arandora Star disaster here in South Wales.

—–

On 10th May, following Dunkirk, Churchill had succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister and set up the Home Defence (Security) Executive. This a remit to act on the prediction made by the Chiefs of Staff that Alien refugees were a most dangerous source of subversive activity and recommended that they all be interned.

In consequence a terse note sent to Chief Constables requested them to intern any German and Austrian men and women of Category C where they had grounds for doubting the reliability of an individual. This mean MI5 were able to nominate its own arrests and local forces follow their own initiatives and prejudices.

No one was safe. Maybe it was this blanket internment and the crowded camps which decided the government upon deporting internees to the new world. A policy always favoured by Churchill who would have referred no aliens to remain within the UK. As early as November 1938 government had proposed settling refugees in the Empire.

Now, in to the camps, new seeps of the sinking of the Arandora Star on its way to Canada, loaded with 1,700 internees and guards in addition to the normal ship’s crew. 374 British men, 712 Italians, 478 Germans, 1864 souls compressed into a ship built to take 250 passengers and extended to take 200 more. The majority of the Italian expatriates who had lived in Britain most of their lives, the Germans a mixed group of Jews, Nazis and merchant seamen.

The Arandora Star on its second day out from Liverpool, somewhere off the west coast of Ireland, slowly swims into view and frames itself on the crossed hairs of the periscope sights of a German U-boat’s Captain:

“The torpedo struck the Arandora Star fair and square amidships, erupting in a roar of sound and towering wall of white water that cascaded down on the superstructure and upper decks, blasting its way through the unarmoured ship’s side clear into the engine room. Deep inside the shop, transverse watertight bulkheads buckled and split under the impact, and the hundreds of tons of water, rushing in through the great jagged rent torn in the ship’s side, flooded fore and aft with frightening speed as if goaded by some animistic savagery and bent on engulfing and drowning trapped men before they could fight their way clear and up to freedom…”
- The Lonely Sea by Alistair Maclean: Collected Stories published by Wm. Collins 1985 Fontana Paperback 1986.

Not enough like-jackets had been provided, the rafts were lashed immovably to the ship, there had been no life-boat drill and all decks were partitioned by impenetrable barbed wire, cutting off access to the life-boats. The Captain, named Moulton, had protested resolutely against the erection of this wire:

“You are sending men to their deaths, men who have sailed with me for many years. If anything happens to the ship that wire will obstruct passage to the boats and rafts. We shall be drowned like rats and the Arandora Star turned into a floating death-trap.”
- The Lonely Sea

The Captain’s pea is ignored. The government knows better. Prisoners must be surrounded by barbed wire at all times, even when on the ocean! Therefore, 1,000 men drown, including brave Captain Moulton who goes down with his ship together with Second Officer Stanley Ransom and Fourth Officer Ralph Liddle. The three officers standing together on the sinking bridge-wing to await death.

At last the Arandora Star was gone “but almost a thousand of its passengers., guards and crew… still lived, scattered in groups of singly over several square miles of Atlantic… but the sea was bitterly cold. Before long the number of swimmers and those supported only by planks and benches became pitifully fewer and fewer… Their pathetic cries of “Mother!”, repeated over and over again in three or four languages, grew fainter and gradually faded altogether…”
- The Lonely Sea

The evening the first news of the sinking is broadcast on BBC’s nine o’clock news, the number of dead explained away by the claim that the Nazis on board had swept everyone aside in their rush for the lifeboats.

The Daily Express states that “the scramble for the boats was sickening”. All reports give the impression that the Arandora Star had carried only Nazis and Italian Fascists, there was no suggestion that there were refugees on board the liner. And for the population as a whole and for the families of internees, this was the first intimation by the authorities of the deportations.

Most of the 800 survivors picked up out of the ocean by the St Laurent are to spend two nights in a draughty warehouse where for almost 25 hours they stand and sleep barefoot on cold concrete. A local priest in Greenock hearing their plight, brings to them buckets and soap and towels and on each subsequent trip he carried buckets filled with hot water supplied by local housewives. This priest and local clergyman assisted by Salvation Army workers and Red Cross officials. After that, still numbed by shock, the prisoners are taken to Edinburgh where they are shipped aboard the Dunera sailing with internees to Australia.

“The whole camp grieved” says my mother. Each woman mourns for a husband or son, or both, she sees as drowned. A pall settles over the camp, the houses and streets falling into an unnatural science and the women go about their daily tasks heavily and with bowed heads.

A verse of chilling beauty from Shakespeare’s Tempest runs continually through my mother’s head:

Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made
Those are pearls that were his eyes
Nothing of him that doth fade
Into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Hark! Now I hear them – ding-dong bell.

31 maggio – E arrivato, ospite di Bardi, per tre giorni, proveniente da Montidelli dove ha tenuto il suo primo spettacolo nella chiesa di San Donnino Martire nella serata del 30, il famoso CORO MASCHILE DI CWMBACH GALLES che si e esibito, in serata, nella sala germitissima dell’auditorium di San Francesco. Il primo giugno poi hanno cantato all’Eucaristia della Santa Messa e hanno reso omaggio ai caduti del l’Arandora Star nel momento della cerimonia del Ricordo nel nostro cimitero. Nel primo pomeriggio poi si sono trasferti a San Remo dove in serata hanno concluso la loro tournee italiana. Speriamo di averli ancora graditi ospiti in un prossimo avvenire.

Pictures from the event…

By Mario Basini

Location: Liverpool, England

Along with thousands of others in Italian families throughout Britain, part of my mother died beneath the cold waters of the Atlantic one grey morning in July 1940. She had arrived in Wales 16 years before, a wild-eyed peasant girl from the hamlet of Pietranera on the road north from Bardi, then in the Province of Piacenza, to Boccolo dei Tassi. She had come to help her brothers and their wives run the family’s series of cafes, fish and chip shops and grocery stores in the upper Rhondda Fawr. By the outbreak of World War II, she was a handsome woman in her early forties, still unmarried and apparently happy to remain a career business woman.

She, her three brothers – a fourth spent most of his time in Italy running the family farm – and their families had found themselves a place in the hearts of their Welsh neighbours. Sixty years after she had moved from the Rhondda to Merthyr Tydfil to start her own family, people in Trehebert and Tynewydd remembered her with affection. But in a few short hours in June, 1940, that relationship and much of the business the Basinis had spent decades creating had been destroyed.

On June 10, Mussolini in a long, ranting speech from the balcony of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia declared war on the UK. In an instant, Britain’s Italian community, perhaps 18,000 strong, became “enemy aliens” to be treated with suspicion, sometimes reviled and their property attacked. Anti-Italian riots broke out in cities including Swansea, Cardiff and Newport and in parts of the Rhondda.

At dawn the next morning the waves of arrests of Italian males destined for internment began. Four thousand two hundred were taken, 300 of whom were British citizens. Among those who were still Italian were my father, then a widower in Merthyr Tydfil struggling to bring up three young children, and two of my mother’s brothers. The eldest, my uncle Giuseppe, Jack, and my father, Marco – another Basini – were lucky. They were interned for a few brief months on the Isle of Man before the authorities realised the absurdity of their decision and sent them home. My mother’s youngest brother, her beloved Bartolomeo, Bert, had no such luck. Aged 31 and startlingly handsome with huge brown eyes and a winning smile, he had married gentle, gracious Anna, from the village of Grezzo, two miles down the road from Pietranera. Their twins, Johnny and Mary, had been born the previous November. Caught up in a process that even British politicians and civil servants at the time labelled unjust and “chaotic”, he found himself among 1500 Italians destined for interment camps in Canada. The list was supposed to contain “the desperate characters” representing a particular danger to Britain.

The selection process was hopelessly bungled by the British security service, MI5. Its criterion for determining whether an Italian represented a significant risk to Britain was membership of the “fascio”, a series of clubs set up around the country by Mussolini’s government. But for many, anxious to protect their families and property back home in Italy, membership of the fascio was obligatory. In most cases membership was merely an expression of a patriotism and pride in Italian culture. While convinced fascists remained at home unmolested, famous anti-fascists were earmarked for deportation. When the authorities arrived at their camps to pick them up, many of those not chosen swapped places with others on the list in order to remain with brothers, fathers, sons, uncles. Some were victims of mistaken identity. When nowhere near the intended 1500 could be found, people were plucked at random from the camps.

The Arandora Star, a luxury cruise liner converted for war use, sailed from Liverpool for Canada early on July 1, 1940. It carried 478 Germans and Austrians as well as around 250 escort soldiers and 180 crew members. By far the biggest contingent was the estimated 712 Italians, most, like my uncle, entirely innocent café proprietors, waiters, fish and chip shop owners. At around 7am the following day it was sited and sunk by a German submarine, U- 47, 125 miles off the northern Irish coast. One hundred and seventy five Germans and Austrians died, 58 crew and 91 soldiers. The Italians bore the brunt of the tragedy. Around 446 died, more than 60 per cent of those on board. Among them was my uncle Bartolomeo.

For those they left behind it was the beginning of a lifetime’s pain. Overwhelmed by feelings of loss and confusion, their grief was deepened by the British government’s callous indifference. Families were informed of their loved ones’ fate by a perfunctory telegram sent many weeks after the sinking. Their healing was impeded by the fact that for most there could be no funeral and the closure that comes with it. Almost none of the few bodies recovered could be identified. The resounding silence in which the British government shrouded the tragedy continued after the war. The Arandora Star and its victims had, for all intents and purposes, been consigned to oblivion.

For those most intimately affected – wives, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters grandchildren- this lack of recognition meant that they have since lived in a limbo of loss and frustrated emotion. “It is as if we have been wrapped in a thick fog,” explains Mary, Bartolomeo’s daughter, now living in Bridgend. For the rest of her life my mother cried when she remembered her baby brother.

At last, things have begun to change and official recognition of their loss has begun. On June 30 a day of remembrance was held on the Scottish island of Colonsay where some of the bodies and wreckage from the Arandora Star washed up in 1940. A memorial to those who died was unveiled there three years ago. On July 2, the 68th anniversary of the sinking of the Arandora Star, Liverpool, the port from which the ship sailed, hosted a series of events to commemorate its victims. A moving service at Our Lady and St Nicholas, the “sailor’s church” was addressed by the Most Reverend Mario Conti, Archbishop of Glasgow who also unveiled a plaque that will eventually stand on the Pierhead at Liverpool. The Italian ambassador, H.E. Dr Giancarlo Aragona, read from The Book of Wisdom. A representative of the German Embassy read from the First Letter of John. The Lord Mayor of Liverpool, Councillor Steve Rotheram, also attended.

Among the most moving aspects of a memorable service was the contribution of the superb Cwmbach Male Choir who held the congregation spellbound. The presence of the choir at the service and the ceremonies that followed was an indication of the particularly heavy price the Italians of South Wales- especially those from Bardi- paid in the tragedy. Representatives of the provinces of Parma, Piacenza and Lucca, where many of the victims originated, also attended. The service was followed by a buffet lunch and the launch of a new book, by Maria Serena Ballestracci who is rapidly becoming the most important historian of the tragedy.

But the highlight for the relatives was a ceremony on the River Mersey at the spot where many of the internees would have had a final glimpse of the famous Liverpool shoreline as the ship steamed for the open sea. Wreaths in memory of the German, Austrian and British victims, as well as one for the Italians, were laid on the water.

At the dinner in the evening a moving speech from Graziella Feraboli, the daughter of victim, Ettore Feraboli, summed up what the day had meant for the loved ones. “It is as if the door of a tomb had at last been opened and some light let in.”

* Relatives of victims who wish to have the names of their loved ones entered in a Book of Remembrance for those who died at sea can contact the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas, Liverpool’s Parish Church where the book is kept.

Jam with Robina do Bardi (again)

It is that time of year when half of the South Wales valleys empty and head for the sleepy village of Bardi (which is fast becoming the “Monte Carlo” of Italy).

With that in mind Jam with Robina are proud to announce the details of their annual motherland concert!

Date: 11th August 2008
Venue: Bar Centrale, Bardi
Time: 8pm – 8am

They will be playing a collection of their old hits as well as some brand new material and, in true JwR at Centrale style, also the customary collection of sing-along / dance-along covers for a full night of entertainment.

If the past few Centrale performaces are anything to go by this will be a night to remember and is without doubt an event not to be missed. Everyone is welcome, spread the word, be there or be square! Check out past JwR gigs at Centrale’s website: www.caffecentralebardi.it.

As a final note JwR would like to add the following:

When it comes to footwear there is only one thing you should be wearing this summer – Hot Rods baby! With “I Am The Man” containing the immortal line of “Hot Rods on, I am the man”, we fully expect to see each and every person strutting around in their finest Rods, with a prize for the person who makes the best effort. This is YOUR chance to show what you’re packin’ in the boot department so get ‘em on!

This is going to fully rump!

Cheers,

Mark and Ro
Jam With RoBina

Peter Marenghi is today running the London Marathon and hoping to raise £10,000 for The Multiple Sclerosis Resource Centre (www.msrc.co.uk). At the recent A.V.C. Cena we raised £125 towards his cause, we could like to thank all those who dug deep and helped Peter towards his goal. He is very near his target, having so far raised £8,945.73; if you would like to donate, you can do so by visiting his fundraising page at www.justgiving.com/petermarenghi. Just because the Marathon is today does not mean donations have to be in by today! There is still plenty of time to show your support.

We would like to wish Peter the best of luck for today.

Buona fortuna da noi tutti!