HUNG over from a party the night before, Roger Dillon’s parents were woken by a steward banging on their cabin door and ordering them to abandon ship.
With the gangways hot from the flames engulfing the Empire Windrush and toxic smoke threatening to overcome all on board, everyone headed to the lifeboats.
Roger, then aged seven, watched as those unable to get into the rescue boats of the stricken craft in the middle of the Mediterranean leapt into the sea.
It was a “miracle”, he says, that only four of the 222-strong crew died and all 1,276 passengers survived the disaster 70 years ago.
Looking back at the history of the famous vessel — long synonymous with bringing post-war West Indian immigrants to Britain — it is perhaps more surprising it lasted until that fateful morning of March 28, 1954.
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The diesel-powered ship had twice been bombed during World War Two when the Germans owned it — first by a squadron of Allied fighter planes then by Norwegian resistance fighters.
It was also twice damaged by mines during the conflict and survived a fire on board during peacetime in 1949.
But the later blaze, following an explosion in the engine room, caused such extensive damage the vessel sank two days later.
HMS Windrush’s tragic end made front page news in 1954.
But there was no mention of the 802 people who had sailed from the Caribbean to Britain on it six years earlier.
During its 24-year lifespan the 500ft ship’s passengers had also included Nazi holidaymakers and Jews being sent to their deaths at extermination camps.
When Roger, now 77, was on board it was a troop carrier for the British military.
‘It was miraculous’
His family had been returning from Hong Kong, where his father, Major Brian Dillon, had been stationed for two years.
Recalling their escape, he said: “We got a bang on the door at 6.30am. My parents were hung over because they’d been at a party.
“There wasn’t much panic. It was more a case of getting a hurry on because the deck was very hot and there was smoke.”
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His father, who had been parachuted behind enemy lines during World War Two to assist the Greek resistance against the Nazis, put on his uniform.
His mother Miriam, who had served in the British secret service during the war in Cairo, Egypt, grabbed her jewellery.
All their other worldly goods were left behind.
With “women and children first”, Roger’s dad was separated from his family during the evacuation.
Clutching their teddy bears, Roger and his five-year-old sister Tipi were led through the heat by their mother then their rescue craft was lowered into the water, 30 miles off Algeria.
Hampered by smoke and a lack of electrical power, only 12 of the 22 lifeboats were launched and some passengers were forced to leap overboard or scramble down ropes.
Crew members GW Stockwell, JW Graves, A Webster, and L Pendleton died in the engine room blast.
But thanks to the organisation of Captain Wilson, no other lives were lost.
Roger said: “The captain had been torpedoed in the war, so we used to practise our emergency drills quite often. It was miraculous we got off.”
The ship was clear 45 minutes after the order to abandon it.
It took an hour and a half for Roger’s lifeboat to reach the ships that responded to the distress call.
They were transferred to an aircraft carrier and taken to Gibraltar.
Attempts were made to tow the wounded Windrush back to port but it sank on March 30 and is now more than 9,000ft below the surface.
There has been talk of recovering the anchor, but Roger thinks it would be “disrespectful” to dive down to a ship that is the resting place of four brave men.
He believes the Windrush was probably not seaworthy enough for such a long trek which took in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Egypt.
He said: “It was probably an accident waiting to happen. They’d had small fires and problems before.”
The vessel began life in December 1930 as Monte Rosa, one of German shipping firm Hamburg Süd’s passenger ships.
At first it took Germans to South America, where the Nazis attempted to spread dictator Adolf Hitler’s vile doctrine of racial purity.
But at the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 it was requisitioned by Germany’s naval forces to carry troops for the invasion of Norway.
During its time shuttling between the occupied Scandinavian nation and Germany it carried Jewish men, women and children who had been rounded up by the invading force.
All but two of the 46 people taken forcibly are reported to have died at Auschwitz concentration camp.
The Monte Rosa was also used as a support ship for the Nazis’ mighty Tirpitz battleship, which made it a target for Allied bombers.
On March 30 1944 — exactly a decade before it sank — the troop carrier was attacked by British and Canadian aircraft.
It suffered direct hits by torpedoes and rockets off the coast of Norway but managed to limp to safety.
Norwegian resistance fighters Max Manus and Gregers Gram also tried to destroy it in June 1944.
They paddled out to it while the ship was in the port of Norway’s capital Oslo and attached limpet mines to its hull, aiming for them to detonate as the vessel ferried German troops home.
The mines exploded a few days later, but by that point the Monte Rosa was near a Danish port and could be saved for further service.
At the end of the war, in May 1945, it was captured by the British and taken into the service of the Ministry of Transport.
It was renamed HMT (His Majesty’s Transport) Empire Windrush in January 1947.
The following year it docked in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, to pick up service people during a trip from Australia to Britain.
With plenty of space on board, tickets were offered to locals who took the chance to travel to London.
The arrival of those West Indians at Tilbury docks in Essex on June 21, 1948, was a huge news event, but even though Britain was in desperate need of workers following the war, the newcomers were often shunned.
Those who followed them on different ships became known as the Windrush Generation.
The shocking way they were treated, with many deported by the government despite working here for decades, is well known — unlike the fate of the Empire Windrush itself.
Roger hopes that will change, and said: “It is an important story and I wouldn’t want those four men to be forgotten.”
