HMHS Llandovery Castle, built in 1914 in Glasgow as RMS Llandovery Castle for the Union-Castle Line, was one of five Canadian hospital ships that served in the First World War. On a voyage from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England, the ship was torpedoed off southern Ireland on 27 June 1918. The sinking was the deadliest Canadian naval disaster of the war. 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats. Twenty five people are known to have survived. 24 were the occupants on a single life-raft. The incident became infamous internationally and was considered, after the Armenian genocide, as one of the war's worst atrocities. After the war, the case of Llandovery Castle was one of six alleged German war crimes prosecuted at the Leipzig trials.
Major Thomas Lyon, surgeon with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, was a survivor of the Llandovery Castle bombing and massacre on June 27, 1918. Photo Credit: LAC
Llandovery Castle by George Wilkinson
Anti German cartoon by Louis Raemaekers
A 1918 Canadian propaganda poster used the sinking of Llandovery Castle as a focal point for selling Victory Bonds
The Union-Castle Line was a British shipping line that operated a fleet of passenger liners and cargo ships between Europe and Africa from 1900 to 1977. It was formed from the merger of the Union Line and Castle Shipping Line.
Union-Castle liners in East India Docks, London in 1902
Union-Castle House, Southampton
Gascon was built in 1897
Galeka was built in 1899 and sunk by a mine in 1916