£170
A SILVER VESTA CASE OF HISTORIC WIRELESS INTEREST, 1900
silver vesta case, by Walker & Hall of Sheffield, the front engraved with a broadside titled view of R.M.S. Lake Champlain, with Elder, Dempster & Co. on hinged lid and the back engraved Souvenir of Trial Trip, May 4th 1900 -- 2in. (5cm.) high
Lake Champlain was built for Elder, Dempster’s Beaver Line (Liverpool – Quebec – Montreal) in 1900 and had a remarkable career lasting virtually 50 years. Bought by Canadian Pacific in 1903 for their first trans-Atlantic sailing, she was renamed Ruthenia in 1913 but was soon requisitioned by the Admiralty in August 1914, initially as a cross-channel troop transport. Relegated to an oil storage hulk in Singapore in 1929, she was scuttled when that city fell to Japanese forces in February 1942 but quickly raised and employed as a troop carrier named Choran Maru. Finally, used to transport Japanese P.O.W’s, however, her ‘claim to fame’ – now long forgotten – is that, in May 1901, she was the very first British merchant ship to be fitted with wireless telegraph.
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