Service: Womens Royal Naval Service (UK)
Service number:
Locality on Enlistment: USA
Duration of Service: 1944 – 1946
Prisoner of War: No
Honours: British Empire Medal
Date and Place of Birth: 3 Feb 1910 Colac
Parents: Robert Frederick Maberley SMITH and Fannie Isabel HOPE
Spouse: Crawford Jamieson GORDON (1) Roy Stanley INGHAM (2)
School/s:
Occupation: Teacher Librarian
Date and Place of Death: 9 May 1999
Place of Burial: Geelong Eastern Cemetery
NOTES: In 1936, on her way to the coronation in England, Margaret stopped off at Quetta, India to stay with family and friends. There she met and married Crawford Gordon, a Scot and deputy chief-engineer with the Bengal-Assam Railways. In 1942 as the Japanese drove the British out of Burma, she and her husband fled to the Himalayan foothills by riverboat. When Crawford caught dengue fever Margaret nursed him until she also went down with the sickness. Although she made a full recovery, he was left physically and emotionally debilitated. Medical treatment in the United Kingdom was recommended, and despite the risk of travelling by sea during wartime they sailed from Bombay on 1 October that year on the passenger ship SS City of Cairo. Six days out of Cape Town, on the 6th November 1942 at 8.30pm, a German U-boat fired a single torpedo at the Cairo and the ship sank with heavy loss of life.
Margaret and her husband evacuated, but the lifeboat Margaret boarded was cast adrift from the ship before her husband had time to enter it. Crawford Gordon drowned. Margaret’s boat capsized after the U-boat fired another torpedo and she was thrown into the sea. She was pulled into another lifeboat (No.4) commandeered by the Cairo’s Third Officer, James ‘Knocker’ Whyte. Over the next 51 days all 17 survivors perished except Margaret and James. On 27th December, a Brazilian corvette rescued the pair.
For her gallantry at sea Margaret Gordon received a British Empire Medal. After recovering in Recife, Margaret went to New York, where she became a librarian in the office of the Australian Trade Commissioner. For two years, from 1944 to 1946, she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, first in Washington and then in London. Margaret returned to Australia in 1946 and a year later married farmer Roy Stanley Ingham. They farmed in Victoria until Roy’s early death in 1959 by suicide. At 50, Margaret went back into training and became a qualified librarian. She began as a children’s librarian at South Melbourne, and in 1965 she oversaw children’s library services in public libraries throughout the state. Ref: Australian War Memorial and State Library of Victoria