Military History

Theatre of War	Medals	Commonwealth War Grave or Memorial
Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable
Arrived in Theatre	Medal Citation (if app)	SWFHS Area Memorials
Not applicable	Not Applicable	Lillington
Reason Killed	Date and Place Enlisted	Other War Memorials
Sailing Vessel Englehorn was lost at sea	Not applicable
Place of Death	Previous Regiments or Units
South Atlantic	Not applicable

Circumstances Leading to Death

We are grateful to the Bury Grammar School Roll of Honour website for the below.

Lawrence was a member of the crew of the merchant vessel SV ‘Engelhorn’, a four-masted steel sailing ship built in Whitehaven, Cumbria, in 1899.

She was primarily employed in transporting sodium nitrate from Chile in South America to Britain. This compound, used extensively for agricultural fertiliser and the manufacture of gunpowder, was mined in Chile’s Atacama Desert. On 26th August 1914 the Englehorn sailed from Valparaiso in Chile bound for Falmouth in Devon with a crew of 28 including Reginald Hall. Unusually she was carrying not sodium nitrate but 37,828 sacks of barley, weighing 3,604 tons, as a charter for a London firm. As she was uninsured against war risks, the owners instructed the vessel to take an unusual course, passing 60 miles south of Cape Horn and 100 miles east of the Falkland Islands. She was never heard from again. At first the loss was attributed to enemy action, as the German cruisers ‘Karlsruhe’ and ‘Kronprinz Wilhelm’ were known to be operating in the South Atlantic early in the war. A Board of Trade enquiry in early 1916 considered various possible explanations for the loss, including enemy action, but came to no firm conclusion. With no evidence subsequently emerging that a German ship had sunk or captured her, the loss of the ‘Englehorn’ was eventually put down to a storm and the crew were therefore not accorded commemoration by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on a memorial to the missing.