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Gay Gibson: Murder on the High Seas
The disappearance of a young actress aboard an ocean liner leads to one of Britain’s most sensational trials.
It was around 2:58 a.m. on Saturday, October 18, 1947 when Frederick Steer, a duty watchman for Union-Castle Line ship Durban Castle, was awakened by a summons from cabin 126, a first-class cabin on the B deck. Upon arriving at the cabin, Steer noted that the lights for both the steward and stewardess had been rung by the cabin’s occupant, something he found strange as normally a passenger would ring for one or the other but not both.
He knocked on the cabin door and as he started to open it, it was slammed shut but not before Steer recognized the man who closed it. He was James Camb, a thirty-year-old steward working on the liner. Steer wondered if, since Camb was a steward, he had arrived for the summons before Steer himself had — but his uneasy feelings about the situation led him to report the incident to the night watchman, James Murray. Steer and Murray returned to cabin 126, where all was quiet. Murray relayed the events to the officer of the watch but without mentioning James Camb’s name. The officer on duty believed it to be a private matter and not of any concern to the ship’s officers and that appeared to be the end of it.