Merchant Ship Silarus 1924

[janeb]

Hi
Does anyone have any information on the ship Silarus - where it sailed to etc in 1923 and 1924?
My grandfather James Filson was engaged on this ship in May 1924 and I know that he returned in September 1924 via Southampton from Bahia on the Almanzora so am trying to find out how he got to Bahia.
Any information gratefully received

Jane

[MaryA]

I'm finding a great shortage of information on this ship, both on the National Archives site and also by googling, as dates mentioned for it are later.

I wonder if any of these links, given to us by Shelagh who had some success tracing an ancestor through the ships he sailed on, would be of any help to you to follow up?
http://forum.liverpool-genealogy.org.uk ... 14&t=12890

[janeb]

Many thanks Mary I shall look

Jane

[Tina]

Excuse my ignorance but was Bahia in Brazil?
Cheers

[janeb]

Hi Tina

Yes it is - on the River Plate
Family legend has him leaving a ship at Valparaiso so I wondered where the Silarus was heading in May 1924

Jane

[dickiesam]

Hi
Does anyone have any information on the ship Silarus - where it sailed to etc in 1923 and 1924?
My grandfather James Filson was engaged on this ship in May 1924 and I know that he returned in September 1924 via Southampton from Bahia on the Almanzora so am trying to find out how he got to Bahia.
Any information gratefully received

Jane

Hi Jane,
Do you have any details on his 'status' regarding his return on the Almanzora? Was he by any chance listed as a Distressed Seaman?

The cargo vessel SS Silarus was owned at that time by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company so she would have been RMS Silarus [ID 143789], registered London. She was later sold to a Greek shipping company in 1931 and was torpedoed and sunk 17/01/1941 700 miles west of Fastnet while taking coals from Barry to Thessaloniki, sank two days later. Seventeen of her crew lost.

According to this site on RMS vessels etc, http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/royalmail.shtml one of their regular routes from 1850 to 1980 was Southampton - Lisbon - Brazil - Uruguay - Argentina. Another was London - Cherbourg - Vigo - Lisbon - Las Palmas - Rio de Janeiro - Santos - Montevideo - Buenos Aires from 1921 to 1980.

I don't see a reference in the routes to Valparaíso which is in Chile on the Pacific coast of South America.

Note re the RMS... Founded as the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in 1839 to provide services between the UK and the Caribbean, Central America and North America. No mention of the Pacific coast.

[janeb]

Hi DS

Thanks for the information on the ship and its routes
He was down as "Seaman" but no mention of distressed.
I agree that Vaparaiso is on the wrong coast so maybe the South American ports were muddled in the re telling of family tales.
He had previously been on the ships going across the Atlantic in 1917 to bring the US troops to fight in WW1 - he was a Second Class Cook Boy then.
It is such a pity that I did not ask him about this when he was still with us - but in those days people rarely talked about their past. He spent the rest of his life until retirement after 1924 as a goods checker at Liverpool Docks and I had no idea that he had been to sea.

Jane

[dickiesam]

Had a bright idea!
I thought that if RMS Silarus carried passengers she would be listed in the Outgoing Passenger Lists and we could track her voyages. Looked for a Smith, Jones and Murphy, any forename, any gender, between 1920 and 1930... not a single hit!
Apparently RMS Silarus was purely a cargo vessel which did not carry paying passengers.

[janeb]

Creative thinking! Thanks for trying
I guess he was just an ordinary seaman on a cargo ship until he married in 1925 and then decided to stay at home
He was also reputed to have been in Ireland around the uprising and had a bullet wound in his arm but again I have not made headway there either.

J

[dickiesam]

I don't know if you have it already but there's an MN card for your James Andrew Filson [bn 1900 Sep qtr, Liverpool] on Findmypast. You would need to buy credits to see it if you don't have a sub. He was with the White Star Line in 1923, crewing on the SS Adriatic, the SS Megantic and the SS Doric before signing onto the RMS Silarus in 1924.

Wondering about the family story that he was in Ireland during the 1916 Rising because he would have been barely 16 years old at the time. He may have been in the British Army in Ireland during the War of Independence (1919–1921) but probably not in the Irish Civil War, which took place between June 1922 and May 1923, because he signed on to the SS Adriatic on the 23rd June 1923.

Would be worth checking for a Record/Medal Card on Ancestry?

[janeb]

Thanks again DS
I have that seaman's card but could not work out the names of the ships - did you take it from the numbers on the card eg 12406 is that SS Adriatic?
I agree it is more likely the war of Independence but there is no medal card for him on Ancestry

J

[dickiesam]

Thanks again DS
I have that seaman's card but could not work out the names of the ships - did you take it from the numbers on the card eg 12406 is that SS Adriatic?
I agree it is more likely the war of Independence but there is no medal card for him on Ancestry

J

Hi,
Many MN record cards have a list of ships' IDs and dates on the reverse. Sometimes quite extensive. Because you have a date of signing on, if the ship was a passenger vessel you can use the Outgoing Passenger Lists on Findmypast to find out where she was bound by using the 'fictional search technique' I outlined earlier.

You can identify vessels from their individual ID here: http://www.crewlist.org.uk/data/vesselsnum.php
Like-wise you can find a ship's ID as well there. The SS Adriatic is 124061. The 'stroke' at the end of the sequence is a 1.

The absence of a Military Medal Card could mean his card was among the 1,000s destroyed by fire during WW2.

[janeb]

Thanks once again - very helpful all round. I shall do a bit of lateral research now to see where that leads

J