Lot Essay
The cargo steamer Ballater, 2,286 tons, had three brushes with fate during the Great War, the last of which proved her undoing. On 21st November 1915, she struck a mine in the South Edinburgh Channel but was towed into port and salvaged. A year later, on the 28th November 1916, she was attacked by a surfaced submarine in the English Channel but successfully fought it off with her own deck gun. The following year her luck ran out when, on the 22nd September 1917, she was torpedoed and sunk by a submarine off Berry Head, South Devon, whilst on passage from Spain to the Tees carrying a cargo of iron ore.