
On Monday, January 29 1917, the passengers on His Majesty’s Troopship Caronia were preparing for a revue the following Saturday. How do I know this? Because it’s all in a copy of The Comet, a daily magazine produced on board. The Troopship had left England on January 5 and would arrive at Bombay on March 3. It’s not much of a magazine, a sheet of A4 folded in half to give four pages, but getting even this out each day – written, edited, laid out and printed – must have been quite a feat.
The Caronia had a busy war. She was requisitioned right at the start and fitted with eight 4.7in guns at Liverpool for service as a merchant cruiser. The ship was refitted as a troopship in August 1916. This service included carrying troops between Halifax and Liverpool. After the war, the ship repatriated Canadian troops and then returned to trans-Atlantic passenger service. She was laid up in 1931 and scrapped in Japan.

The Comet editor was A Claude Brown, assisted by the business manager, Harry Holloway. Claude Brown, appeals for ‘clever topical articles’ in his note on the front page – getting articles in is always a battle. His experience on the Caronia does not appear to have put him off publishing – for he wrote The Ordinary Man’s India, published by Cecil Palmer in London, ten years later.
In fact, the Comet provided good practice because Claude Brown became editor of The Empress in Calcutta. This was an illustrated fortnightly magazine of social, political, sporting and dramatic events produced by Tracker, Spink & Co in what is today called Kolkata, in West Bengal. The city was India’s capital under the Raj from 1773 until just six years before this copy of the Comet was published.
Confirmation that it was the same Claude Brown – and that the ship arrived safely after setting out from Devonport – comes from the first chapter of the book:
It was during the war that I first went to India. The Cunard liner Caronia, converted for the time being into a transport, took some five thousand of us to Bombay.
Five thousand troops on the ship! Her usual complement was 1,550 passengers. The Caronia was part of ‘a great convoy’ for the first part of her two-month journey to Bombay (now Mumbai). The first port of call was Sierra Leone. The convoy continued to Cape Town and Durban, after which Caronia steamed on alone to Bombay (now Mumbai). Claude Brown was sent on to Mesopotamia. Three years later he went back to India and stayed for six years.
The early part Claude Brown’s book, with its discussion of buying trunks, tennis racquets, cholera belts, umbrellas and pith helmets reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot off to Abyssinia in Scoop (though no cleft sticks!). He sums India up as ‘the paradise of the middle classes and the land of snobs’. The book also has themes in common with the Comet. For example, ‘Indian life is not conducive to the writing of long and intimate letters’ is an echo of the ‘Curt Corres’ poem.

Two of the articles, amounting to a third of the issue, were written by L Wynne Davies. The first is a continuation of an article about the first port of call, Sierra Leone. It has the sense of being by someone who has been there before, with a section of objects viewed from the ship, including canoes form the Susu people with their large sprit sails from the Bullom (northern) shore of the port. It then mentions barracks, a mission hospital for native nurses, the cathedral, various municipal buildings and the large mango and melon trees.
There is then mention of Sierra Leone as ‘the white man’s grave’ a century before when the death rate from malaria among British troops was 362 in every 1,000. By 1907-11 it was down to 11 per 1,000. Knowledge of such statistics suggests medical experience, a clue that led me to Llewlyn Wynne.
By fitting together snippets from websites, it appears that Llewelyn Wynne-Davies was born in 1874 or 1875 in Llansilin, Wales. He was the son of Rev David Davies, the town’s rector. Wynne-Davies graduated in medicine from Edinburgh in 1897 and continued his studies until 1905. The year before, he sailed through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean in the S.S. Rhipens. By 1911 he was a medical officer in Nigeria, a position he held for at least a decade on a salary of salary of £960.
He joined up in 1914 and held the rank of army captain two years later. Presumably he was going back to Lagos in 1917 and once he left the Caronia in Sierra Leone faced a 1,000-mile journey on to Lagos. In 1929, he was assistant director of medical services in Nigeria. He was named an OBE and served as a judge after he retired. He never married but had two nieces who were medical practitioners. Wynne-Davies died on 24 April 1955, aged 80. He bequeathed several items from West Africa to the British Museum, including a pottery fragment of a statue.
That’s all pretty dry stuff, but then I came across a lovely tribute by Dr Lynn Robson at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, to a woman called Ruth Wynne-Davies:
One of her uncles spotted Ruth’s intelligence and drive, and encouraged and supported her in her decision to apply for medical training. In his honour, Ruth took his surname of Wynne-Davies [she had been Ruth Blower].
The uncle was Llewelyn Wynne-Davies. Ruth went on to become an important figure in orthopaedics, using research into genetics to gain an international reputation for her expertise in developmental disorders of bone.

I mentioned the Curt Corres’ poem earlier. This was by Gerald H Hatchman. He was a corporal in the Royal Engineers, but it’s difficult to be definite about his time after the Caronia voyage. However, an ‘erudite wordman’ called Gerald Hatchman, was credited by Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. The poem certainly fits the erudite bill, and the military has always been a hotbed for slang.
In addition, an online copy of The Life and Music of Eric Coates by Michael Payne mentions Gerald Hatchman of the PRS. This was the Performing Right Society set up in 1914 by music publishers to protect their copyrights. Hatchman was with Coates on board the Highland Brigade bound for Argentina to attend a conference of the International Confederation of Societies, Authors and Composers in Buenos Aires. AP Herbert was also on the boat, possibly the novelist, playwright and poet, Punch staff member and later MP.
That bring us back to the business manager, Harry Holloway. There is a saloon pantryman named Harold James Holloway on the crew manifest for the RMS Caronia in 1950 – but that is a different Caronia, launched in 1947. Nothing else online seems to fit.‘The Do’s and Don’ts for the Tropics’ by an Old Timer contains advice that stands up well today. This and the articles by Wynne-Davies suggest a fondness for India and Africa. In contrast, the poem ‘Coal Dust Coon’ by ‘Private P.W.’ of the 4th Devons suggests the sort of casual racism that was widespread at the time.