Rescue at sea against all the odds

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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29 April 1941 - SS City of Nagpur torpedoed by U-415 - radio put out of action - two dead. All into lifeboats. Emergency radio? Batteries flat. We looked like joining earlier survivors who spent weeks drifting on the Atlantic before discovery - if we were lucky. But at dawn a Catalina flying boat hunting the Bismarck spotted us. Out of thousands of square miles of ocean it just happened to overfly our huddled little group of lifeboats. By nine that evening we were all aboard HMS Hurricane and on our way back to Glasgow, which we departed from just 4 days earlier. Fast forward to this new millenium when we read in the Falmouth Packet, our local paper, of a diamond wedding ... the bride having been nearly lost at sea when the SS Nagpur was torpedoed. We and they are now good friends.
Total votes: 372
Date submitted:Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:49:36 +0000Coincidence ID:3877

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Sat, 14/01/2012 - 11:06am

At lunch one day in 2003 our fellow guests included Terry and Jean from Nairobi. Terry is a noted sculptor of African wildlife. We had reached the pudding before I heard their surname was Matthews. It rang a bell. I asked Jean: "Do you by any chance know a Tom M who lived in Kenya in the forties?" Jean: "Why" Me: "We were at school together." Jean: "Which school?" Me: "Bedford." Jean [digging Terry in the ribs]: "You'd better listen to this!" Christian names were rarely used in public schools back then; even brothers were called i, ii, and iii. So it turned out that 'Tom' had actually stood for 'Terence O'Neill M' and, yes, Terry (who had been very badly gored by a rhino many years earlier) was, indeed, my old chum. Six decades had made us mutually unrecognizable.

Anonymous (not verified)

Sat, 14/01/2012 - 11:17am

For decades I had been searching for a lost half-sister - and she, unknown to me - had been searching for our family, too. I tracked her down at last just before the turn of the century and there is a petty sort of coincidence in that on the evening when I, in Ireland, first telephoned her, in Zimbabwe, she and her husband were entertaining a friend who had tracked one of her long-lost relatives via the Salvation Army and she was dining with them to share her know-how. But, in catching up on fifty years when we finally met on the last night of the old century, she told me that she and her mother had actually passed within two miles of our house on a visit to Ireland in 1990 after spending the night in our town.