Greetings one and all and welcome to Family Stories. If there was an Oscar night for podcasts,

this one would have been the award for best original screenplay. That's because you

need to listen as right as script for us. This week, your own family stories take us from

an upturned boat in the Mid-Atlantic to a cold hiding place in a Dutch forest.

We start this week with this tale from Andrew Gerard. Andrew writes, three men in my family

were involved in the war. My father, George Gerard, was the soldier serving in the first

Survey Regiment Royal Artillery. My uncle Robert was in the merchant navy, and my great

uncle, also called George Gerard, was a civilian. Ironically my father had the easiest war, although

he was in the army for six years, he only spent eight months in an active combat zone

and emerged without a scratch. My great uncle was a manager in the Tyco Shipyard in Hong

Kong and was interred in Stanley Camp from 1942 to 1945. The experience changed him forever.

He was a big man weighing 18 and a half stone at the beginning of internment. When he was

repatriated, he weighed less than seven and a half stone and had suffered a variety of

illnesses. The story I'm going to tell is that of my

uncle Robert. Robert was first radio officer on the SS Harpley which sailed from Milford

Haven, bound for Buenos Aires on the 20th of April 1943 as part of a convoy. On the

night of the 4th of May, U-boats attacked the convoy and the Harpley was struck by two

torpedoes on the port side. Damage did not initially seem severe, but a heavy list developed

and the captain ordered them to abandon ship. Robert made it to a small boat which then

capsized. In his report the captain later wrote, I pulled over to the small boat which

had capsized in the heavy sea and found two men clinging to the bottom of it. It was

impossible to go alongside as my boat had already been damaged whilst being lowered and

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