Samaria

The ship

Samaria was one of a group of intermediate liners Cunard ordered after the First World War, sisters to Scythia, Laconia, Franconia and Carinthia, built for economy rather than speed. The published figures give about 19,600 to 19,700 gross tons, 600 feet by 74 feet, twin screws driven by double-reduction geared turbines and a service speed of 16 knots. Original accommodation was 350 first class, 350 second class and 1,500 third class.12

The Royal Navy requisitioned her in 1941 and she served as a troopship until 1948, carrying more than 20,000 servicemen and steaming 250,000 miles, and she was still bringing Canadian troops and their families home in 1948. She was returned to Cunard and refitted that year. The refit was austere: the ship was not restored to prewar class divisions until 1950, when accommodation was set at 250 first class and 650 tourist.12

The Canadian charter

From September 1948 Samaria worked a service arranged between the International Refugee Organisation and the Canadian government, loading at Cuxhaven and Le Havre for Quebec in summer and Halifax in winter. The museum's arrival records show the pattern clearly. In 1948 she reached Halifax on 28 September with 1,614 passengers, on 31 October with 1,581 and on 3 December with 1,609. Through 1949 the monthly arrivals ran between 1,448 and 1,674 people.3

The movement tailed off in 1950. Arrivals fell from 1,556 in February to 939 in May, and the last Cuxhaven sailing recorded in the database reached Halifax on 8 October 1950. When Samaria reappears in 1951 the German port has gone from her itinerary, which now reads Southampton, Le Havre and Cobh to Halifax and Quebec, and the passenger lists have halved. The displaced-persons work was over and ordinary emigration had taken its place.3

Canada admitted nearly 200,000 displaced persons between 1947 and 1952, and more than a fifth of all postwar arrivals at Pier 21 were displaced persons or political refugees. Many were admitted as farm or industrial labour under bulk labour schemes that tied them to an employer for a fixed term. A customs officer at the pier remembered arrivals carrying almost nothing of value, their belongings in sacks and battered cardboard suitcases.5

The crossing

No official inspection of conditions aboard Samaria was found for this page, and the surviving evidence is what passengers remember. What they remember is weather and seasickness rather than the disorder recorded on some of the chartered ships. One passenger who was six years old on the crossing that left Le Havre on 25 November 1948 and reached Halifax on 3 December recalled a really stormy passage on which everyone except he and his older brother was sick. Another family remembered April 1949 as a stormy North Atlantic crossing from Le Havre to Halifax.2

The numbers themselves describe the conditions. A ship rated before the war for 1,500 in third class was carrying more than 1,600 people on a nine or ten day passage, in an interior that had been stripped for trooping and not yet restored. Families were separated by sex in the dormitories, as on the American transports, and the ports of call along the English Channel and the Irish coast lengthened the voyage.13

Ukrainians aboard

About 34,000 Ukrainians reached Canada between 1947 and 1954, chiefly out of the camps in Austria and Germany, and Samaria was one of the ships that carried them. The passenger manifests give nationality by state rather than by nation, so Ukrainians from interwar Poland appear as Polish and those from Soviet territory as Soviet or stateless. No Ukrainian count for any Samaria sailing survives in the sources read.63

One family's testimony held by the museum at Pier 21 shows how a place on the ship was obtained. A Ukrainian family from occupied Poland, four women after the deaths of the father in 1945 and the grandfather in 1947, had been living in a displaced persons camp at Heidenau. The mother wrote to the Ukrainian-American film actor John Hodiak asking for help in tracing a distant relative in Canada. Hodiak placed notices in Ukrainian Canadian newspapers, an uncle answered and sponsored the family, and they landed at Halifax from the Samaria, by their own account on 27 March 1949; the museum's arrival record for that voyage is dated 28 March. They were put straight on a train for Regina.43

Afterwards

Samaria stayed on the Canadian route until 1955, by then carrying British and European fare-paying emigrants rather than refugees. She represented Cunard at the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in June 1953, made her last transatlantic crossing in November 1955 and was broken up at Inverkeithing on the Firth of Forth in 1956. Her bell was presented to the officers' mess at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the port where most of her displaced passengers had landed.12