COLOURED MAN’S HEROIC CONDUCT

Southland Times, Issue 24338, 20 January 1941, Page 7

COLOURED MAN’S HEROIC CONDUCT

\ LONDON, December 1. , After the crew of a bombed and t blazing British ship had taken to a life- [ boat, the captain decided that his ship . still had a fighting chance, recalled his I men, put the fire out and brought his ship home. One hero of this story is a coloured man, George Taylor, whose ■ home is in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa. With a bullet i wound in one eye and half-blinded in > the other he stuck to the wheel on the 1 bridge, obeying his captain’s orders, as the slow-moving ship did her best to elude the raider. Taylor, one bright brown eye peering

from a bandaged head, insisted that he had done nothing. “Captain Thomas, my skipper, was great,” he said in a Scottish eye hospital. “He did everything for the ship and her crew that any man could have done. If I can go back with one eye I’d like to sail with him again.” “For an hour we dodged as the aeroplane came tearing down to us with its machine-guns rattling,” Taylor said. It was at this point that he stopped a bullet and became a hero. Crouching on the deck, clutching the spokes with one hand and with his brain just able to interpret his captain’s orders, he carried on for another hour. By that time the whole ship was blazing, and orders were given to abandon her. “We had one lifeboat and a dinghy left,” Taylor said. “Everyone got into the boat except the captain, the chief and second engineers, two radio men, the cabin boy and myself. After the boat had got away, Captain Thomas inspected the damage, decided that his ship was not yet lost, and with a signal lamp recalled the boat. A warship which had answered the ship’s SOS before her radio had been blown to pieces was told, ‘We are managing nicely, thank you, and do not require help.’ ”