What Happened to the Bech Family?

 In this series, I'm sharing some of the stories not covered in my new novel, Even If I Perish.

Not all the passengers aboard the SS City of Benares were part of the CORB program. A few private fee-paying passengers booked passage on board for various reasons. Some were VIPs on government business, others were continuing their flight from Nazi-occupied Europe. A few were mothers taking their children to North America and leaving their husbands behind to continue their contributions to the war effort.

Among the mothers was Marguerite Bech, along with her three children: Barbara, 14, Sonia, 11, and Derek, 9. Marguerite had vivid memories of Zeppelin raids during WWI and had become more and more terrified as air raids began in their small town of Bognor. As overhead dogfights took place on the Sussex coast where they lived and bombers crashed on the beach, Marguerite made the decision to take the children to Canada, where they could spend the remainder of the war with old family connections.

The Adelphi Hotel

The first leg of their journey on September 11, 1940, took them to Liverpool’s premier hotel, the luxurious Adelphi, where the children were impressed with a whole suite just for them and an ensuite bathroom—something they hadn’t seen before. They gladly settled into their beds, only to be disturbed by a knock on the door. The air-raid siren had sounded, and they were to evacuate to the basement—the former Turkish baths, or hammam. So, they packed up and spent the night on wooden benches surrounded by mosaic tiles, the crashing and banging of bombs dropping around them. Near morning, they were allowed back to their room, where they tried to grab a couple of hours of sleep before having to leave for the docks. Sonia, 11, admitted to a sinking feeling as they boarded the Benares, but in the rush and excitement around her, she quickly forgot her misgivings.

Although housed at the opposite end of the steamship from the CORB children, the Bechs were equally as impressed with the posh liner and the abundance of food onboard. They quickly made friends among the other first-class private passengers, barely aware that so many children were on board.

Marguerite made sure her children took the daily lifeboat drills seriously, wore their life jackets at all times, and kept an emergency bag packed and ready to grab in the event of an emergency. Barbara Bech later wondered whether the drills left the children with a false sense of security. Sure, they knew what to do if the alarms sounded. But they never did the drills at night or during a storm, and they never lowered the boats. “Nobody would have dreamt of discussing not getting to Canada,” she said. “We were on our way and that was it.”

When the ship was torpedoed on the night of September 17 in the middle of a storm, they felt ill-prepared indeed. They dressed and gathered at their muster station, where they awaited further instructions that did not come. Finally, a crew member burst in, shocked to find the room still full of people. “Get to your lifeboats because the ship’s going down!” he hollered. The Bech family clambered up to the lifeboat deck, but the boats had all been lowered to the water. Barbara volunteered to go down on the ropes. She’d learned to climb up and down ropes in gym class, but didn’t realize her stiff, lace-up shoes would not grip the rope. Hand over hand, she managed to lower herself to the boat below, already filled with passengers. Soon, her boat drifted away from the sinking ship without her family.

Marguerite, Sonia, and Derek ended up on a rickety raft to which they spent several hours clinging by their fingernails. At daybreak, another lifeboat picked them up. Not until they were rescued by the HMS Hurricane around six p.m. on September 18 did they learn that Barbara had survived and were reunited with her. From Scotland, the family caught a train to their home in Bognor Regis where they remained. Only Sonia eventually made it to Canada, where she taught school for three years before returning to England.

Their story can be read in more detail in Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack, by Tom Nagorski.