Lightholler - Nine Trades of Dundee

Lightoller's next assignment was to the Campania, a 13,000 ton Cunard liner converted to seaplane carrier. Lights
now found himself as the observer in a Short 184 seaplane. In June 1915, during a Grand Fleet exercise off Iceland, he
was the observer on the only plane able to get into the air. They located the Blue Fleet, and for the first time in
history, a plane sent up by a fleet at sea succeeded in locating an enemy fleet.
Just before Christmas 1915 Lightoller got his own command, the torpedo boat HMTB 17.' During his tour with this
boat, on July 31st 1916, Lightoller attacked the Zeppelin L3 1 with the ships Hotchkiss guns. For his actions Lightoller
was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and he was also promoted to commander of the torpedo-boat-destroyer
Falcon.
On April 1 st 1918, Lightoller was again off watch, lying in his bunk, when the Falcon collided with the trawler John
Fitzgerald. She stayed afloat for a few hours, eventually sinking just about same time, six years to the day as the
Titanic sinking.
Lightoller was now given a new command, the destroyer Garry. On July 19th 1918, they rammed and sank the
German submarine LTB- 110. The ramming, damaged the bows of the Garry so badly that she had to steam 100
miles in reverse to relieve the strain on the forward bulk-heads as she returned to port for repairs. For this action
Lightoller was awarded a bar to his DSC and promoted to Lieutenant-Commander.
At the end of 1918, Lightoller came out of the Royal Navy as a full Commander. On his return to White Star he was
appointed Chief Officer of the Celtic having been passed over for a position on the Olympic, the new management
wanted to forget the Titanic and all those associated with her. None of the surviving officers from the Titanic ever got
their own commands. Lightoller was not interested in remaining Chief Officer of the Celtic indefinitely, so, after well
over 20 years of service Lightoller resigned from White Star Line.
As these were the depression Years, the first few years were hard. The Lightollers opened a guest house and after a
few years had some minor success in property speculation.
In 1929, the Lightollers had purchased a discarded Admiralty steam launch, built in 1912 by G. Cooper at Conyer. She
was 52 feet long by 12,2 feet wide, powered by a petrol-paraffin Parsons 60 hp. Commander Lightoller had her
refitted and lengthened to 58 feet, converting her into a 62hp Glennifer diesel motor yacht that was christened
Sundowner by Sylvia. Throughout the thirties she was used by the Lightoller family mainly for trips around England
and Europe. In July, 1939, Lightoller was approached by the Royal Navy and asked to perform a survey of the
German coastline. This they did under the guise of an elderly couple on vacation in their yacht. When World War II
started in September 1939, the Lightollers were raising chickens in Hertfordshire. The Sundowner was kept in a
yacht basin at Chiswick.
Then in the closing days of Mav 1940, after eight months of quiet known as the "phony war", Britain found itself on
the edge of military disaster. The German armies blitzkrieged through Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Northern
France in just over two weeks. Allied resistance had disintegrated and almost the entire British Expeditionary Force
(BEF) was penned into a tiny pocket on the French Belgian border.
On May 24th 1940, some 400,000 Allied troops lay pinned against the coast of Flanders near the French port of
Dunkirk. German tanks were only ten miles away. Yet the trapped army was saved. In the next 11 days over 338, 000
men were evacuated safely to England in Operation Dynamo, one of the greatest rescues of all time.
At 5 p.m. on May 31st 1940, Lightoller got a phone call from the Admiralty asking him to take the Sundowner to
Ramsgate, where a Navy crew would take over and sail her to Dunkirk. Lightoller informed them that nobody would
take the Sundowner to Dunkirk but him.
On the 1st of June 1940, the 66 year old Lightoller, accompanied by his eldest son Roger and an 18 year old Sea-Scout
named Gerald, took the Sundowner and sailed for Dunkirk and the trapped BEF. Although the Sundowner had never
carried more than 21 persons before, they succeeded in carrying a total of 130 men from the beaches of Dunkirk. In
addition to the three crew members, there were two crew members who had been rescued from another small boat,
the motor cruiser Westerly. There were another three Naval Ratings also rescued from waters off Dunkirk, plus 122
troops taken from the destroyer Worchester. Despite numerous bombing and strafing runs by Luftwaffe aircraft, they
all arrived safely back to Ramsgate just about 12 hours after they had departed. It is said that when one of the soldiers
heard that the captain had been on the Titanic, he was tempted to jump overboard. However his mate was quick to
reply that if Lightoller could survive the Titanic, he could survive anything and that was all the more reason to stay.
Following Dunkirk, Commander Lightoller Joined the Home Guard, but the Royal Navy engaged him to work with
the Small Vessel Pool until the end of World War H. The Lightollers youngest son, Brian, was in the RAF as a pilot.
On the first night of World War II, he was killed in a bombing raid on Wilhelmshaven. Their eldest son, Roger, went
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