Once she was a familiar site in Southampton Docks but recently the liner Britanis went to a watery grave. Keith Hamilton looks back at the ship that once flew the Chandris Line flag...

It was an appropriate end for the former favourite of Southampton, the liner Britanis, when she slid beneath the waves off South Africa last month.

The one time Chandris ship, which regularly called at Southampton Docks in past decades, cheated the breaker's yard cutting torch when she sank off Cape Town.

Britanis was making her last, sad one-way voyage, under tow, to the scrapheap when she developed a severe list and went down in deep water.

On October 22, just a floating field of debris, furniture and old lifebelts bobbed on the surface to mark the spot, 50 miles off Cape Town, where the once-great liner had gone down the previous day amid fears of oil pollution from her fractured pipework and engines.

Britanis also left behind a history which had started when she was launched in America in 1932, as Monterey, for the Matson Navigation Company of San Fransisco, before changing its name to Matsonia and then later, Lurline.

After a career sailing among the Hawaiian Islands and in the Pacific the 26,000 ton vessel was sold to sail under the Chandris Line flag as Britanis, meaning British Lady.

A mere shadow of her former glory when she took cruise passengers from Southampton to far off places, Britanis, which had been known as Belofin-1 in recent times, had been laid up for some years in Brazil before starting out, towed by a tug, on her last voyage to Pakistan.

As she approached a point off South Africa the old ship developed a list of up to 30 degrees and portholes were submerged after water began flooding in at her aft section.

South African maritime authorities ordered the tug to keep Britanis 50 nautical miles off the coast, as they feared oil pollution if she have sank in coastal waters.

There was no power on board Britanis and although the idea of landing generators and pumps onboard was discussed, it was felt that the ship was taking water too fast and could not be saved.

Lost aboard her was a large mural, painted in the late 1940s, of particular importance as it was brought over from the sister Ellinis when she was scrapped and many other fittings from other vessels.