LOST LIQUOR BOAT

Southland Times, Issue 21577, 15 December 1931, Page 7

LOST LIQUOR BOAT

DISASTER OFF NORWAY ENGLISH OFFICER UNDER ARREST WIFE’S NARRATIVE (United Press Assn.—By Telegraph—Copyright.) London, December 13. The wife of Walter Denis Savage, the surviving first officer of the rum-running steamer Venus, which sank off the coast of Norway after an encounter with a customs vessel, had not received any official intimation of the disaster when interviewed at her Thames-side house at the start of dockland. She stated that she had been unable to eat or sleep owing to shock. She expressed thankfulness at the safety of her husband, whom she expected home at Christmas. ‘This is his third shipwreck in six years,” she said. "His first was between Antwerp and London and the second in a collision which sank a Continental freighter in the River Scheldt which resulted in his being laid up for two months with pleurisy and without compensation. It cannot go on. He must leave the sea. He would not have shipped tliis time, but he had been out ol work for nine months and hated drawing the dole. I do not understand this rumrunning story.”

Both the Savages come of seafaring stock. The wife has an uncle who is a lieutenantcommander, two uncles-in-law and six nephews who are master mariners. Her husband enlisted in the Second Suffolks at the age of 16 and was wounded in Flanders.

A message from Oslo states that the sheriff, consequent on a statement by Savage, who is over-postrated at having to identify his dead shipmates, has arrested him.

The British consular agent attends the inquest on the victims on December 14. Diving or salvaging will ascertain the exact cause of the disaster, which is not believed to have-been due to the three warning and fifteen direct shots which the cutter fired at the Venus, but to striking two rocks in succession in the terrific gale.

Many barrels of liquor are afloat at the scene of the wrock.