DURING THE 1930s, the name Arandora Star was synonymous with good living on the high seas, one of the Blue Star line's "luxury five" cruise liners. On the morning of 2 July, 1940, a U-boat's torpedo ensured that, 70 years on, the ship's name still resonates grimly in the psyche of the Italian community in Britain. So far as the Scottish Italian community was concerned, there was hardly a family who didn't lose a father, husband or brother,
• The Arandora Star in her pre-World War II days as a luxury cruising liner anchored at venice, 1930's
all of whom had been summarily interned as "enemy aliens".
Next Friday, memorial services in Edinburgh and Glasgow will mark the anniversary, the Glasgow event being held on the site of what will be the most ambitious memorial to the tragedy anywhere in the world, an enclosed Italian Cloister Garden currently under construction as part of the refurbishment of St Andrew's Cathedral. It will be an urban sanctuary, where visitors can contemplate the Italian community's inordinate contribution to Scottish life, and no doubt reflect on the madness of war, of which the Arandora Star sinking remains a salutary example.
The Arandora Star sailed from Liverpool carrying some 1,300 interned "enemy aliens", including more than 730 Italian male civilians and 479 German male civilians all destined for internment in Canada, as well as 86 German prisoners of war and a military guard of 200. Headed for St John's, Newfoundland, the vessel got no further than 75 miles west of Bloody Foreland in Donegal, when a U-boat sent a torpedo into her.
"When I heard the thump, I didn't know what it was. It was six o'clock in the morning and I was half-asleep," recalls Rando Bertoia, the 90-year-old retired Glasgow watchmaker who is now the last Italian survivor of the sinking. He had been sleeping on deck. "Some of my friends, who were from more or less the same village as me, were more wakened up than me, and one of them came through the rails, grabbed me and got me into a lifeboat."
It has been suggested that the lifeboats had been deliberately holed by the British shooting into them, to render them useless for escape.
Bertoia simply remembers his lifeboat lurching, "because it hadn't been looked after for many years, but, anyway, we landed on the sea and did our best to row away from the ship. I can still remember the terrible sight of all the wee heads bobbing up and down, and we saw the ship go under and all was quiet. Men were crying for help, although you couldn't do very much.
"And so we floated about, just the sky and the water – no land. It was quite scary."
