IN THE ALCANTARA

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21184, 6 August 1940, Page 4

IN THE ALCANTARA

ENGINEER FROM CHRISTCHURCH EXPERIENCE WHEN TORPEDOED (By Telegraph.—Special to Times) CHRISTCHURCH, Monday A Christchurch man, Russell Isherwood, aged 22, son of Mr and Mrs F. G. R. Isherwood, of Sumner, was in his second naval engagement against the enemy when the auxiliary cruiser Alcantara attacked a German raider in the South Atlantic. The previous encounter was when the motor-vessel Cedarbank, in which he was on the engine-room staff, was torpedoed in March in an action off the Norwegian coast. “We had a narrow escape, those of us who did get saved,” he wrote to his parents concerning the experience on the Cedarbank, “and was the water cold? We were in it for an hour and a-half swimming around. We were off the Norwegian coast.” Following this action, Mr Isherwood received official notification that his son had been landed uninjured at a United Kingdom port. It was apparently after this that he joined the crew of the Alcantara as a member of the engine-room staff. A cousin who is in the Royal Air Force, Squadron-Leader H. N. G. Isherwood, has recently been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, while an uncle is a colonel in the British Army.