Sightseeing Immigration?

Composition Ruins Pompeii

“There are something like 2,000 people aboard – over 350 children of all ages including babies only a few weeks old. The two lower decks are filled with immigrants.” – SS Otranto Wed. Dec 22/54

Those were words that May wrote back to her sisters in Canada. Harold and May Chambers may not have been among the immigrants to Australia but their names were still captured on the passenger arrivals index which I found through the NAA (National Archives of Australia) site www.naa.gov.au I was surprised to see the index also included passengers arriving by air.

This was a pleasure trip for the Chambers couple and, I would imagine, their experience was somewhat different than that of those on the "two lower decks". Among the ephemera for the Otranto, Sydney Heritage Fleet https://www.shf.org.au/ had photos of passenger common rooms and menus that were probably more indicative of the couple's surroundings and fare on the voyage to Australia. The ship that they took on the return journey, the Orsova, doesn't have any similar information on the database as yet.

As with many pleasure trips, their journey included sightseeing. While in Naples they took a tour of Pompeii which led me to wonder if any of the immigrating passengers did as well. It also changed my understanding of immigrant voyages which I had always thought of as the quickest possible journey between two points.

May describes the tour of Pompeii as follows:

“Our drive took us close to Vesuvius which appears close to the harbour but is really miles away. The ruins of Pompeii are most extensive. You go through the archway where the old City Gate used to be and walk the ancient cobbles all through the narrow streets solidly built far into the distance. The ruins are partially Grecian partly Roman. The Forum, etc. are most interesting. I was particularly interested to find the Grecian columns I always thought built of marble were of brick construction washed over with stucco. In the museum they had skeletons dug from the ruins filled with “liquid plaster”, then covered with plaster as they were found lying with hands covering their faces to try to protect themselves from the gases thrown off from the eruption. In one place there were thousands of clay jugs looking good as new. Jugs for wine, water, etc. etc.”

Does that description of Pompeii hold true today? I don't know but it is nice to travel for a change even if it is vicariously.

Sources:

Chambers, M.C. Letter to Miss Margaret Gilchrist written Dec. 22 – 23, 1954 SS Otranto nr Port Said

Images:

By Jebulon - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44313039

 

 

A Voyage of Discovery

When the outgoing passenger lists first came out on Find My Past, I looked for Harold Chamber's 1911 immigration to Canada right away. On my own, I came up with the wrong Harold Chambers but a later search by one of the staff at the Library and Archives Canada booth at Pier 21 came up with the correct one. The timing of that entry better explained why he was on the Saskatchewan 1911 census and not anywhere on the English census for the same year.

He made a life for himself in Canada, married his wife in 1918 and they had one child, a daughter. They started in Regina, but were in Winnipeg by the time their daughter was born. Later he took his family back to England when the economic downturn happened in the 1930s. Although there were rumours that they received assisted passage for that voyage, I have never found any records to prove it.

At one point, I decided to check the Find My Past outgoing passengers to see of the Chambers family had made any more voyages and came up with more entries with various members of the family going across the Atlantic nine times.

By 1954, Harold Chambers and his wife, May, were seasoned travellers. This time they weren't going to take the same route across the Atlantic, this time they were going on a voyage of discovery. They departed the port in London on December 14, 1954 on the Otranto bound for Sydney, Australia, according to the outbound passenger lists on Find My Past.

To find the parameters of their trip, I checked Ancestry for the incoming passengers lists to Britain. The ship this time was the Orsova, and the arrival date was July 13, 1955. The point of departure was Sydney, but the route back took them by way of Auckland, Honolulu, Vancouver, San Franciso, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Colon and Trinidad. I wonder how long that took and how long they got to stay in Australia.

I was able to find out more about the ships on a site called "Passengers in History" which is put on by South Australian Maritime Museum and can be found at http://passengersinhistory.sa.gov.au/node/933331. Their ship back to England, the Orsova, was a more modern ship than the Otranto, the one that took them there.

To fill in the details of the trip, it looks like a close read of Harold Chamber's travel diary is in order. A fast run through was a bit confusing because there were test scores, complaints of how hard it was to find the scores and cricketers names mentioned; red herrings when searching for family names. I also have a stack of letters written while the Chambers couple was on their protracted voyage. The letters are now in date order and I am ready to dive in to see what I can find out about the trip while  hunting for clues about family members at the same time.