WWII TRAGEDY
Campaigner given MBE in New Year’s Honours for raising awareness of wartime disaster
Fiona Symon MBE pictured proudly wearing the Lancastria Medal, issued after many years of the action group she chaired, The Lancastria Association of Scotland, calling for justice
Most people have heard of the Titanic – often cited as Britain’s worst maritime disaster.
Many have heard of the Lusitania, credited with bringing America into the First World War, after she was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
But very few are aware of an event in 1940, a British maritime disaster with more victims than the Titanic and Lusitania combined.
Fiona Symon’s father Andrew Richardson was on the HMT Lancastria when it sank in 1940. But the disaster remains a mystery to many to this day.
Fiona was only a baby at the time of the sinking, but she has spent much of her life trying hard to raise awareness of the disaster.
Many years ago Fiona, now 81, made a promise: “I pledge my word to do all in my power to ensure that my father, and the thousands who died with him on HMT Lancastria, are at last acknowledged, and remembered with honour, for all time, by the country they gave their lives for.”
“It is said that you never miss what you have never had,“Fiona said in one interview. That’s not true. I was 10 months old when my father died in the Lancastria disaster, and all my life I have missed the presence of a father.”
Speaking to the PA this month, Fiona expanded on some thoughts on the terrible childhood experience of missing a dad who was not able to be there.
“As a small child it was a puzzled feeling of being somehow different – the only child in my class without this person called a father,” she said.