Survivor of attack on ship was born leader
As SS Athenia sank after being torpedoed, she climbed into a lifeboat and helped row
Anne Baker Cravens was returning home with her friends from a European tour, a gift her father gave her following her graduation from the University of Texas. It was the evening of Sept. 3, 1939 — two days after German forces invaded Poland and only hours after Britain declared war on Germany, commencing World War II.
Finding passage back to North America had not been easy, and Cravens and her friends were thrilled to be aboard the SS Athenia, a British passenger liner bound for Montreal.
“It was almost too good to be true,” Cravens wrote after that night. “And — it must have been just that, for such a very short time after that, we were no longer the same happy group homeward bound.”
Indeed, their joy quickly turned to sadness. “The dreaded thing had happened — the Athenia had been torpedoed,” Cravens wrote after the attack in which 117 people died.
Last month, at 99, the longtime Houstonian died of natural causes after escaping her brush with death 79 years ago.
A memorial is scheduled at 2 p.m. Thursday at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, with a reception afterward in the adjacent Bagby Parish Hall. She and her husband, Rutherford, were founding members of the church.
Cravens’ niece, Beth Baker Callaway, said one of her aunt’s most distinctive qualities was her willingness to lead.
“She just glowed,” Callaway said. “She had a sparkling personality. She was witty, funny and entertaining. She was the person you wanted to be around.”
Cravens was involved in many social and charitable activities but gained local fame for surviving the wartime tragedy as described in her letter weeks after the attack to members of her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, at the University of Texas. Her family allowed the Houston Chronicle to use excerpts.
That night on the Athenia, Cravens and her friends were in the dining room preparing for dinner when they heard “a terrific explosion, the lights out, a violent lunge to the left…dishes crashing, people screaming.
“It was quite a long eight hours that we floundered about in that black water,” Cravens wrote. “None of us knew anything about the sea; everyone gave orders, none took them.”
After the attack, Cravens wrote, she fumbled her way in utter darkness to the door of the dining room, climbing over chairs and tables, and felt her way from the belly of the liner to the deck.
With trembling hands, she fastened her life belt, then climbed over the railing into a crowded lifeboat to be lowered into the cool, black water.
“And so the long night began,” Cravens wrote.
She sat in a boat with 41 others, all but three of whom were women and children. Not one of the few men possessed knowledge of the sea. Amid the confusion, a woman asked if someone would please take charge. Cravens, at only 20 years old, stepped up to the challenge.
Cravens, with other members of her family, were sisters of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. At the Beta Xi chapter at the University of Texas, Anne was president.
“It was a very high honor and a huge responsibility,” said Callaway, also a sister of the sorority. “You can’t just get that position by being liked, although it certainly helps.”
Passion for philanthropy
Cravens was born in Philadephia but moved to Houston as an infant with her family. At around age 16, Cravens briefly met Rutherford Rector Cravens II in Tennessee. Rutherford was a student at the Sewanee Military Academy, where Cravens’ grandfather was headmaster.
“It was quite a long eight hours that we floundered about in that black water.” Anne Baker Cravens, in a letter to her sorority weeks after the attack on the SS Athenia
They parted ways, but rekindled their relationship years later in Tennessee at a formal ball.
On Christmas night in 1942, Cravens married Rutherford, a first lieutenant of the Tenth Army Mountain Division in Italy during World War II. Rutherford, known as “Ruddy” to friends and family, died in November 2015.
“My parents were married for 74 years,” said Cary Cravens Doggett, one of Anne’s four children. “And they were in love for every minute of it.”
Doggett said Cravens inherited a passion for philanthropy from her parents, Burke and Bennie Baker, who donated money to various Houston institutions. One of the family’s most notable donations is the Burke Baker Planetarium, in Houston’s Museum of Natural Science.
‘A real selfless life’
The Rev. Martin Bastian of St. Martin’s will officiate at Cravens’ memorial Thursday. He described her as a kind woman with a “servant’s heart” whose death is “devastating” to the church community.
“We are who we are because of people like her, and the church itself was really built not only on her shoulders but on the shoulders of those that began the parish back in 1952,” Bastian said. “So it is a tremendous loss for us anytime we lose a charter member like that.”
Cravens and her husband were founding members of the church and made up one of its 263 original families. Cravens was an active member for 64 years. St. Martin’s has grown to become the largest church of its kind in North America, with over 9,000 members.
In 1966, Cravens was president of the Episcopal Church Women at St. Martin’s. In that role, she organized different forms of outreach and had a hand in the church’s educational programs, pastoral care, service and worship.
“The most important thing to us is her example as a servant,” Bastian said. “She lived a real selfless life … Not only was she a pillar of this church, but she also contributed to so many people joining the church, and especially with her work with women.”
After the Athenia’s sinking, Cravens helped row her lifeboat for eight hours during the night. The Southern Cross, a Swedish yacht, rescued the lifeboat in the morning, and later that day, Cravens was transported to whiskey freighter City of Flint to continue her voyage home.
Cravens is survived by her four children, Doggett, Rutherford R. Cravens III, Anne Cravens Bartley and Ben Baker Cravens, as well as numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
Cravens collected newspaper clippings from 1939 telling the story of the torpedoed ship, telegrams from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson to her father, her own letter to Kappa Kappa Gamma detailing her experience and more. The collection of artifacts will soon be donated to the University of Texas Libraries, Doggett said.
“They lived very interesting lives, and because of that, we’ve lived very interesting lives,” she said.