A RIDE TO REMEMBER
I’ve always known I had a relative who died in Italy during WW1, but I didn’t know the full details of what happened to my Great Uncle until earlier this year when I dug deep into my ‘memories box’. My life has seen massive changes recently. I’ve gone from a senior executive role to riding motorbikes, having adventures and doing what I love – philosophising and writing. I know I’m lucky, my new journey is just beginning, but for so many they never had a chance at even one life. I believe that to remember them is to honour them, so with this in mind I undertook a bike ride of remembrance, from the South Downs to Italy, to a coastal town where they still, every year on May 4, lay a wreath to the souls that perished at sea there a hundred years ago. This is their story.
MAY 4, 1917 – GULF OF GENOA
It was a quiet and balmy ocean scene that around 4,000 mixed regiment troops and a few dozen nurses awoke to aboard the liner SS Transylvania. But all that was to change in an instant. They were sailing to Alexandria in Egypt, on a top spec Cunard passenger ship procured by the Admiralty. Most of these men were reinforcements for the Egyptian Expeditionary Force who had
