SURVIVOR OF LUSITANIA

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25305, 3 October 1947, Page 6

SURVIVOR OF LUSITANIA

ADVENTUROUS LIFE AT SEA MR W. J. SAVELL VISITS LYTTELTON Mr W. J. Saveli, a donkeymangreaser in the Port Line motor-ship Port Huon, now at Lyttelton, believes himself to be one of the few surviving of the crew of the Lusitania, which was sunk by German submarines off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, on July 15, 1916. Those picked up by rescuing vessels included 275 of the crew. Mr Saveli, whose home is in Faversham, •Kent, began an. adventurous career at sea by being bom off Cape Horn in the American barquentine Southern Belle, pf which his father. Captain J. W. Saveli, was master. At the age of 14 he signed on his first ship and it was two years later, as a boy in the Lusitania, that he experienced his first torpedoeing. In the Second World War he was on three ships that were sunk. On September 29, 1939, only 26 days after the outbreak of war, the steamer Clement was sunk by the Graf Spee off the Brazilian coast. Mr Saveli spent seven days in a lifeboat before being rescued. Of 23 of the crew who set out in the lifeboat only 11, including two stewardesses, survived.

In 1942, Mr Saveli was torpedoed twice in the Caribbean Sea. The first ship to be sunk was the Ocean Picturer and the second was the Ocean Vixen. These were new ships, built at Portland, Oregon, for Britain, and were two of many such sunk by enemy submarines lying in wait lor them. Mr Saveli served in the Merchant Navy in most of the war areas. He was in Russian and Atlantic convoys, an j ?! North Africa, Dunkirk, Crete, and Italy. His only wound was received while minesweeping in the

North Sea in 1917. He was struck on the head by a piece of shrapnel. In Denmark a German doctor inserted a metal plate in his skull The plate is still there.