In case you're wondering why I always seem to write about sunken ships and disasters at sea, my best attempt at an answer is that my interest was piqued with my first taste of history as a child through the story of the Titanic, and throughout my studies I've repeatedly stumbled upon similar tragedies.
If any of my readers follow History at Western University, you might recognize this week's topic, but I assume most of you understandably do not, so I'll fill you in on how I got acquainted with it!
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a gal named Claire Halstead on Twitter who is a PhD candidate at Western researching British child evacuees in Canada during the Second World War. She recently featured excerpts from original letters and quotes of accounts related to the sinking of the ship the SS City of Benares in 1940. I found these tweets to be especially moving and made a mental note to someday research the topic for a blog, but then I saw in the news the other day that Claire successfully defended her dissertation on the topic two days ago and officially earned her PhD. Congratulations, Dr. Halstead, and thanks for inspiring this post!
