Charles Adamson Low

Sinking of HMS Attack

/ Matthew K Barrett / Leave a comment

Lt-Col. Low and the
Sinking of HMS Attack

On 30 December 1917 a German U-Boat torpedoed transport ship, HMT Aragon off the Egyptian coast. Emerging on the wrecked upper deck, Canadian passenger Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Adamson Low witnessed “about fifty men floating in the water, many of them past recall and badly mutilated from the effects of the explosion.” Over six-hundred passengers, troops and crew, including the ship’s captain, drowned. Low and survivors were picked up by an escort destroyer, HMS Attack …

Aragon page 9
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Sinking of HMT Aragon

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Lt-Col. Low and the
Sinking of HMT Aragon

After the 146th Battalion was broken up in October 1916, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Adamson Low transferred to the Forestry Corps in France. While managing the overseas Unionist election campaign in December 1917, he was assigned by General Alexander MacDougall to undertake an important mission in the Mediterranean to investigate the quality of Cyprus timber. He neared his destination on board HMT Aragon in dangerous waters off the coast of Egypt on 30 December …

Aragon page 1A
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The Unsinkable

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Major Charles A. Low
146th (Frontenac County) BattalionLow

Everybody aboard was preparing to leave the ship and glad that the journey was over, as the constant rumors of submarines and the nervous strain which is associated with same is not conductive to comfortable feelings.

At exactly 10.51, while in my cabin, the ship was hit on the starboard side, at the after well deck, close to the engine rooms. I was thrown across the cabin; there was no mistaking what had happened…

(Low to Kemp, 27 Mar 1918)

A native of Kingston, Ontario, Charles Adamson Low was born on 26 November 1874. A fourteen-year member of the 14th Princess of Wales’ Own Rifles, Low enlisted as junior major in Lieutenant Colonel W. G. Ketcheson’s 80th Battalion. In November 1915, he was authorized to raise the 146th Battalion from Frontenac County.

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