So good the story wrote itself all over again ……..

Now if you are going to run a successful railway company and indeed brand yourself “The Premier Railway” there should be no half measures.

SS Anglia, circa 1899-1914

And that pretty much was how the London and North Western Railway went about its business.

Its routes traversed the country from the west country, through London and into the northwest and out across the Pennines into Yorkshire, and as befitting such a grand enterprise it ran its own steam ships to Ireland from Bristol, Holyhead, Liverpool and Glasgow.

And when it merged in 1923 to form one of the “super four” it retained that air of superiority by becoming part of the grand sounding London Midland and Scottish Railway, thereby trumping its three rivals whose names announced them as seemingly just regional English railways. *

But as the LNWR our railway could boast that it was once the largest joint stock company in the world.

Just what the company did

So, no surprises that it also marketed the business in a huge range of picture postcards of which SS Anglia was but one of many which included their railway locomotives, trains and stations.

There had been three ships with the name of Anglia working for the LNWR and its LMS successor, from the first built in 1847, the second launched in 1899 and the last which came into service in 1923, was damaged a year later and was scrapped in 1935.

Ours is the second and my Wikipedia tells me was “requisitioned for use as a hospital ship during the First World War. On 17 November 1915 she hit a mine laid by the German U-boat, UC-5. n 17 ."

HMHS Anglia, 1914-18

HMHS Anglia “was returning from Calais to Dover, carrying 390 injured officers and soldiers. At around 12:30 pm, 1 nautical mile (1.9 km) east of Folkestone Gate, HMHS Anglia struck a mine and sank in fifteen minutes. 

The nearby torpedo gunboat HMS Hazard helped evacuate the passengers and crew. Despite the assistance of the nearby collier Lusitania, 134 people died in the sinking." 

I don’t suppose I would have gone looking for story of the SS Anglia, or its troop ship reincarnation had it not been for a neat little piece of porcelain made during the Great War and sold as a souvenir.

The Manchester version, 1914-18

Such pieces were common enough and accompanied porcelain tanks, battleships, and ambulances in the catalogues of porcelain manufacturers.

Both the picture postcard and the porcelain piece are owned by David Harrop who had a huge collection of wartime memorabilia some of which are on display in the Remembrance lodge in Southern Cemetery.

An account of HMHS Anglia appeared recently on the blog and when David also offered up the picture postcard the story just wrote itself.

Pictures; the SS Anglia circa 1899-1914, and the porcelain figure of HMHS Anglia, circa 1914-1918 courtesy of David Harrop.

*The Great Western Railway, The London North Eastern Railway and the Southern Railway.  To be fair the LNER also ran routes into Scotland as far as Aberdeen and owned its own docks in 20 locations across England and Scotland as well as heaps of canals.

**HMHS Anglia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMHS_Anglia

***The little reminder of the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-little-reminders-of-great-war.html