British Forces

RMS Empress of Russia.

Canadian Pacific Line (?)

A humble servant in the war at sea, the "Empress of Russia" was a Canadian Pacific Line passenger liner that, in peacetime, plied the Pacific route between Canada and the Orient. In WW1, she served successively as an armed mercantman and a troopship. In WW2 she was again requisitioned by the British Admiralty, serving at various times as a troopship (for example, transporting Australian and New Zealand recruits for combat flight training in Canada), as a supply ship (making several supply runs to the Allied forces in Iceland), a depot ship, and a dormitory ship. At the end of the war, she was sent to Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, for refit, but was burned out apparently accidentally, leading to her scrapping. The "Empress of Russia" has two possible claims to particular fame. First, between 1941 and 1942, her boiler was stoked by, among others, a then-obscure midshipman called Philip Mountbatten, now Britain's Prince Consort under the style of the Duke of Edinburgh. Secondly, her ship's chronometer - which somehow found its way to an English secondary school's science lab, and was rescued during school renovation from a rubbish skip by one of the teachers - was recently sold at auction in England for a sum in excess of Stg£3,000. Best regards, JR.