To clear up the maths, Arthur Priest had survived two crippling collisions and four sinkings in his short nine-year career at sea. In that time, he had been torpedoed, mined, shelled, rammed… and iced. Cats have nine lives, Priest had already used up six.
The Breezer - A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me exploring historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week.22nd February 2026.
Happy Sunday Reader! There is a particular kind of bad luck that attaches itself to certain people and simply refuses to let go.
I have previously written about Roy Sullivan, a Shenandoah National Park ranger in Virginia, who somehow survived being struck by lightning seven times.
I’ve also shared the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a marine engineer, who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, caught the train home to Nagasaki, and survived an atomic bomb there too.
More recently, Melanie Martinez of Braithwaite, Louisiana, lost her house to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Then to Hurricane Juan in 1985. Then to Hurricane Georges in 1998 and to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In 2012, a reality television crew arrived and spent $20,000 renovating her home. Eight days after they left, Hurricane Isaac flattened it.
For Arthur John Priest from Southampton, England, luck was less a bolt from the blue than a slow, persistent tide—a relentless companion.
Whether it was good or bad rather depends on your point of view and, one suspects, on whether you were the one being fished out of the North Sea at the time.
Priest was born in August 1887, the ninth of twelve children in a working-class family headed by his father Harry, a labourer.
Southampton in the late Victorian era was a city defined by the sea. The docks were the city. They were the jobs, the identity, the backbone of the local economy.
If you were a young working-class man in Southampton at the turn of the twentieth century, the sea would eventually claim you one way or another.
For Arthur Priest, that meant going to sea as a stoker on passenger liners.
Out of Curiosity
I mentioned above that Arthur Priest was working class. Most people who didn't grow up in the British class system tend to view it with bewilderment.
The idea of class is a throwback to a duke from northern France, William the Bastard, who invaded England in 1066.
The English drew the line at having to say 'Bastard' out loud in perpetuity so, over time, the Duke of Normandy's title became William the Conqueror.
William granted swathes of the country to his rapacious Norman barons, creating a two-tier society before the dust had even settled.
The French became the haves and the English... the have-nots.
The Normans owned and consumed the animals, so our words for meat are French: boeuf, porc, mouton, veau (veal). The Saxon peasants herded and slaughtered them, so our words for living animals are English: cow, pig, sheep, calf.
The third tier—the middle classes—swelled during the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturers, bankers, lawyers, doctors and accountants found themselves with lots of money but no titles.
And that’s pretty much how it is today. At the ‘top’ sit the upper classes; the aristocracy, the landed gentry and other people whose families were once important for reasons no-one can remember.
At the other end of the scale, the working classes do all the hard work while the middle classes sit uncomfortably between the two.
But it’s not all about money. To talk about how much you earn or have stashed away is taboo. A person can be a millionaire and still be working class, while another could be completely broke and indisputably upper class.
Your class is determined by your accent, education, how you hold a fork and whether you call the evening meal dinner, tea or supper.
The upper classes use napkins, the middle classes use serviettes while the working classes don’t bother with either.
The middle classes worry about class incessantly. The upper classes don’t think about being upper class because… they just are, while the working class think the whole fuss is completely ridiculous.
In short, the upper classes have the titles, the working classes have the numbers and the middle classes have the anxiety.
That’s it.
The Black Gangs
Nineteenth century engine-room crews of the great steam liners were called the black gangs—men who spent their working lives in the bowels of a ship, stripped to the waist in ferocious heat, shovelling coal into furnaces around the clock.
On the big ocean liners, 29 boilers cried out for 600 tons of coal every single day.
The work was brutal, the noise deafening. The air was constantly filled with the smell of coal dust, engine oil and sweat. It was thankless work: not glamorous, not celebrated, not even particularly well paid, but essential.
Without the black gangs, the great liners wouldn’t move.
In terms of safety, the stokers were in the worst place imaginable; in the depths of the ship far below the waterline, connected to the upper decks by a maze of gangways, corridors and companionways. In other words—a very long way from a lifeboat.
This was Arthur Priest’s world.
Arthur John Priest, c.1912.
HMS Alcantara
Priest had been at sea for six years when the First World War broke out in 1914.
The Royal Navy needed ships. Specifically, it needed vessels to sweep 200,000 square miles of the North Sea to strangle Germany’s access to Atlantic trade routes.
This meant commandeering passenger liners, stripping out the chandeliers, bolting on some guns and sending them back to sea as Armed Merchant Cruisers—keeping many of the crews who had signed up to serve canapés, not their country.
HMS Alcantara, a handsome Royal Mail liner, had only been in service for a few months when the Admiralty came calling.
Arthur Priest was on board as a coal stoker.
By 1916, the British naval blockade had tightened its grip on Germany’s jugular. Much of its merchant shipping was bottled up in port and civilians were feeling the squeeze of real shortages.
Desperate situations need desperate measures. The Germans needed ‘raiders’ to get in amongst the British shipping in the open Atlantic and create havoc.
One such raider was SMS Greif. A former German-Australian cargo steamer, she sailed under the name Rena, flying Norwegian colours and displaying Norwegian markings on her hull.
To all intents and purposes, she was a harmless Scandinavian cargo ship going about her business. She was not.
Hidden behind false walls and removable panels, the Greif carried one 105mm gun, four 150mm guns and two torpedo tubes. The idea was simple: let any British inspection party get close enough and then let ‘em have it.
One hundred and ten years ago next Sunday, 29 February 1916, HMS Alcantara was patrolling northeast of the Shetland Islands when her lookouts spotted smoke on the horizon.
Captain Thomas Wardle manoeuvred to investigate. At 5,000 yards, he ordered the vessel to stop for inspection. The Rena obligingly did so.
Alcantara closed to 2,000 yards. Then, at nine forty in the morning, Greif made her move.
The Norwegian ensign came down. The steering house at her stern vanished in favour of the 105mm gun. Along both sides of the steamer, hidden gun ports fell open.
Greif opened fire. The first shell struck the Alcantara’s bridge, taking out her steering gear and all lines of communication.
Down in the engine room, Arthur Priest felt the impact of those first shells before he heard anything. Then the alarm, the rush of orders, the flooding.
The visceral urge to get out of the stokehold must have been overwhelming.
For about fifteen minutes, the two ships hammered each other at close range—sometimes as little as 750 yards, which in naval terms is practically a bar fight.
The German ship had got her torpedoes away and one hit Alcantara amidships on the port side. The engine room began flooding. She slowed to three knots and began listing heavily to port.
At 11:02 in the morning, HMS Alcantara rolled over and sank, taking 68 crew with her.
The destroyer HMS Munster arrived as the Alcantara went down, pulling survivors from the water. Priest had successfully negotiated those gangways and corridors, managing to escape with nothing more than a few shrapnel wounds.
This was no victory for the Greif—she too was finished. Riddled with shells and ablaze, she succumbed to the weight of fire from arriving British warships.
By the end of the day, both ships were gone.
HMS Alcantara (left) engages the German raider Greif on 29 February 1916, in the North Sea.
The Britannic
Nine months later, November 1916, Priest was back at work. This time in the boiler room of HMHS Britannic—the infamous Titanic’s younger sister ship and currently one of the largest hospital ships in the fleet. The war was still raging.
HMHS Britannic was on her way to the Mediterranean to collect casualties. On the 21st, near the Greek island of Kea, Britannic struck a mine.
Once again, Priest fought his way up from the lower decks. He reached a lifeboat—just as it was dragged into the still-turning propellers. He jumped. The water closed over him.
The blades spun him like a rag doll and moments later he resurfaced into a tangle of wreckage and bodies. A drowning man grabbed at him. He shook him off.
HMHS Britannic sank in under an hour. Thirty people died. Priest survived.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, when confronted with Jack Worthing's orphaned childhood, Lady Bracknell sniffs…
“
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
You wonder what Lady Bracknell would have made of Arthur Priest. His crew mates christened him The Unsinkable Stoker. Others called him Jonah. Some refused to sail with him altogether.
The Donegal
Four months later, April 1917, Priest was serving as a fireman aboard the hospital ship SS Donegal, crossing the English Channel, when she was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sunk.
This time, Priest didn’t escape entirely unscathed. However, despite being pulled under by the suction, he came up under wreckage in the water, suffering a serious head injury.
At this point, you can see that Arthur John Priest was developing a rather complicated relationship with the sea. Saner men would have moved to the Midlands and found a desk job.
If you were in Priest’s stoker boots, would these three sinkings have caused you to reconsider your career choice?
Before you answer, I should come clean—there's more.
RMS Asturias and RMS Olympic
In fact, Priest’s first brush with disaster came before the war even started. In 1908, his first ship, RMS Asturias, managed to collide with another vessel on her maiden voyage. Nobody died and the ship limped home. As a career opener, it wasn’t particularly encouraging.
Three years later, in September 1911, Priest was serving aboard the RMS Olympic—the other sibling of the RMS Titanic.
Sailing near the Isle of Wight, close to his home port of Southampton, the Olympic collided with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke.
The Hawke’s bow tore two large holes in the Olympic’s hull, above and below the waterline. Two of her watertight compartments were flooded and one of her propeller shafts was mangled. Nonetheless, both ships made it back to port.
Two near misses in three years. Remarkable, but not yet extraordinary.
It turned out to be quite difficult to find licensable photos of a stoker’s life during World War I. This is HMAS Australia, c1914-1918. Pretty grim.
Then came April 1912.
RMS Titanic
The maiden voyage of the world’s most notorious ocean liner was never likely to be short of stokers. In the spring of 1912, there was a coal strike across Britain and many black gang crews had been laid off as ships sat idle in port.
Not so for Priest. He was one of the ‘lucky’ few to secure a berth on RMS Titanic.
On 14 April 1912, just before midnight, Priest was off duty, resting between shifts in the firemen’s quarters, when Titanic struck an iceberg.
The odds were not in his favour. The route from the sleeping quarters to the open deck would have been tricky enough in daylight—but this was the middle of the night amid the escalating chaos of a ship taking on water.
By the time Priest and his fellow stokers emerged into the freezing night air on the boat deck, most of the lifeboats had gone.
Priest had no choice but to jump into the North Atlantic wearing only the shorts and vest he worked in. The water temperature that night was close to freezing.
As you may have guessed, Priest survived, pulled from the sea by a lifeboat, with frostbite as a souvenir.
Some 1,500 people did not survive.
Decision time
To clear up the maths, Arthur Priest had survived two crippling collisions and four sinkings in his short nine-year career at sea.
In that time, he had been torpedoed, mined, shelled, rammed… and iced. Cats have nine lives, Priest had already used up six. What to do after the sinking of the SS Donegal?
Well, he retired of course—duh! The sea didn’t want Priest. Or perhaps it simply couldn’t quite get hold of him.
Arthur moved back to Southampton with his wife Annie and their three sons. He never went back to sea.
Priest lived out the rest of his days quietly. He died of pneumonia on 11 February 1937 and is buried at Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton. His grave is unmarked.
Someone should really sort that out.
Dates with History
Monday…
Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. Keen to populate its vast northern territories, it invited settlers into Coahuila y Tejas—an area that includes most of what we now call Texas.
By early 1834, 30,000 settlers—most of them from the United States—had made their home there. However, in 1835, Mexican President Santa Anna tore up the constitution and imposed centralised rule.
Coahuila y Tejas objected and the Anglo-American settlers—known as ‘Texians’—took up arms and drove the Mexican army out of San Antonio, the largest town in the region.
But Santa Anna was not a man who took humiliation quietly.
He massed his army and marched north. 190 years ago tomorrow, 23 February 1836, Santa Anna arrived at San Antonio with around 1,500 troops, surrounding the old mission on the edge of town that the Texians had fortified.
The old mission’s formal name was Mission San Antonio de Valero. It is etched in history as the Alamo.
Inside the Alamo were 200-250 defenders—among them former US Congressman and celebrated frontiersman Davy Crockett, who had arrived two weeks earlier.
Thirteen days of siege and bombardment followed. While Santa Anna continued to swell his army to perhaps 6,000 troops, no substantial reinforcements appeared for Davy Crockett and his comrades.
The siege lasted 13 days. The resistance ended with the Battle of the Alamo on 6 March 1836. The defenders were almost wiped out to a man—Davy Crockett included.
The Fall of the Alamo or Crockett's Last Stand. Painting by Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, c1903.
POSTCRIPT: The fall of the Alamo gave the Anglo-American settlers of former Coahuila y Tejas a cause they believed was worth dying for. Soon after, their delegates formally broke with Mexico and declared a new nation—the Republic of Texas.
A few weeks later, Texas secured its independence. Nine years after that, it became the 28th state of the United States.
Friday…
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in September 1849, in the central Russian provincial town of Ryazan. His father was an Orthodox village priest and keen to keep young Ivan in the family business.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Pavlov found Darwin’s groundbreaking thesis On the Origin of Species more compelling than Genesis 1:1’s assurance that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.
In 1870, he enrolled at the University of St Petersburg, trading theology for the emerging world of natural science.
Pavlov worked under one of Russia’s most eminent clinicians, Sergei Botkin, who believed that the nervous system governed the body’s functions.
In time, Pavlov turned this conviction into experiment, identifying digestion as a measurable starting point.
Pavlov’s subjects were dogs. By observing dog’s saliva (apologies if you are having breakfast), he opened a window into how the nervous system subconsciously orchestrates the body’s activities.
After some time running a range of tests on dogs’ saliva before, during and after feeding, Ivan noticed something odd; the dogs were now drooling at the mere sight or sound of the person who usually fed them.
This observation became Pavlov’s raison d’être.
Realising that these ‘psychic secretions’ were triggered by signals associated with the food, Pavlov progressed to pairing neutral cues—such as a ticking metronome—with feeding.
Ivan Pavlov contemplating classical conditioning.
Pavlov demonstrated that behaviour could be learned systematically and without conscious thought. The dog wasn’t choosing to salivate. It simply couldn’t help it.
Pavlov called it the ‘conditioned reflex’. Behavioural Scientists today call it ‘classical conditioning’. The rest of the world refers to it as ‘Pavlov’s Dogs’.
In the popular version of the story, Pavlov didn’t use a ticking metronome but a little brass bell. Whether he actually trained his dogs with a bell is debatable, but it lives on as a timeless gag…
Question: Have you heard about Pavlov’s Dogs? Answer: Er…. it rings a bell.
Pavlov’s idea of the conditioned reflex became one of the foundation stones of modern behavioural science. It has shaped everything from how we train animals to how advertisers persuade us to buy things we don’t need at prices we can’t afford.
Pavlov died in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) 90 years ago this Friday, 27 February 1936, at the age of 86. He was still dictating observations on his deathbed.
Talk to me...
I am lucky enough to receive some great feedback about The Breezer from readers. We're all curious and find a wide range of historical characters and events fascinating. But occasionally, a specific subject will resonate all the more. If you have any areas of history that resonate with you, I would love to dig deep and include them in future Breezers. Just drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com and let me know. Thanks, Steve
Question of the Week
While I was in London on Wednesday, I popped into the Courtauld Gallery, a well-stocked art gem inside Somerset House off the Strand.
My favourite painting of the day was this one below.
Who painted it and—for a bonus point—what is it called?
And Finally…
Wandering from the Courtauld Gallery to the National Gallery, I stopped to take a quick look at this. I thought I would share it with you.
The smallest police station in London, Trafalgar Square.
Nestled into the southeastern corner of Trafalgar Square is a hollowed-out lamp post base. It was built in the late 1920s, large enough for one police officer to stand inside to monitor demonstrations in the square. It is affectionately known as the smallest police station in London.
When a policeman lifted the phone for help, the blue light on top would flash, alerting officers nearby that help was needed. Its address is Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DN.
The painting in question is La Loge, painted in 1874 by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It shows a young woman in a theatre box, exquisitely dressed, carnation in hair, pearl necklace gleaming. Her chaperone is distracted by something intriguing—who knows what? He is seeing; she is being seen.
Renoir produced between 3,000-4,000 paintings in his lifetime. In later years, he developed arthritis which prevented him from holding a paintbrush—so his assistants strapped one to his wrist instead.
He died 185 years ago this Wednesday, 25 February 1841.
ATTRIBUTIONS
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Pavlov: wordpress, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Fall of the Alamo: Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Arthur Priest: Edited with PicsArt and published in Commons by HefePine23, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. HMAS Australia: Royal Navy official photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. HMS Alcantara: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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