The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Ship of the Month - cont'd. 10. Capt. W. J. Hawman in command. The barge VALENCIA was moored at the govern ment wharf in the area, and GLENDOCHART attempted to head off the STRONG by passing around the barge first, thus placing the STRONG, with the current at her stern, in a position of danger. For this, Dominion Wreck Commission er Capt. L. A. Demers castigated GLENDOCHART's master and suspended his cer tificate for a month. Demers was also critical of the fact that GLENDOCHART had failed to respond to the STRONG's duly-sounded passing whistle signal, and severely viewed the excuse given by Capt. Hawman that whistle signals were prohibited in the vicinity of a nearby hospital, the existence of any such rule being news to the Wreck Commissioner! Fortunately, the damage sus tained by EDWARD L. STRONG in the collision was not of a serious nature. EDWARD L. STRONG did not serve the Hall fleet for very long, despite the fact that she was one of the company's best ships. In 1 9 2 6 , she, along with the rest of the existing Hall fleet, was sold to Canada Steamship Lines Ltd., whereupon Hall proceeded to build an entirely new and more efficient fleet of canallers. In any event, the STRONG passed into C. S.L. colours, and her hull became all red, including the forecastle, with the letters 'CSL' in white inside the white outline of a diamond. Her cabins were white and her funnel was red with a white band and a black top, the same stack colours carried to this day by C.S.L. vessels. In 1927, EDWARD L. STRONG was renamed (b) SHERBROOKE, in honour of the city of that name situated in the Eastern Townships section of the Province of Quebec, which is located southeast of Montreal and below the St. Lawrence River. In fact, all four vessels of the Fraser, Brace class were named after communities in this area, for N. H. BOTSFORD became (b) KNOWLTON, the FRANK A. AUGSBURY became (b) GRANBY, and JOHN C. HOWARD was rechristened (b) MAGOG. It was also in 1927 that the C. S.L. ships lost the diamond insignia on their bows. At the same time, their forecastles became white, and the legend 'Ca nada Steamship Lines' was painted, billboard-style, in large white letters down the sides of the vessels. SHERBROOKE and her three sisters were very useful additions to the C.S.L. fleet, and although the big company soon cast off many of the old and wornout ships that it had accumulated from various sources over the years, the four Fraser, Brace boats were almost always in operation. There were times during the Great Depression when they spent some in idleness, usually at Kingston, but even the very best of the C.S.L. steamers were relegated to lay-up status at various times during those trying years of the early 1930s. SHERBROOKE survived the lean years, and she and her sisters found themsel ves more and more busy as economic conditions improved and as the years of the Second World War neared. After Canada and Great Britain entered the hostilities in September of 1939, usable vessels were much in demand to carry materials to aid in the war ef fort. Many of the Canadian canallers went to salt water during the early years of the war, and C.S.L. was particularly unlucky in that a large num ber of its canallers were lost on salt water. SHERBROOKE, GRANBY, MAGOG and KNOWLTON all went to salt water, but C.S.L. got none of them back on the lakes after the conclusion of the conflict. GRANBY was back on the lakes for a few years as (e) LAWRENCECLIFFE HALL (I) in the early 1950s, but she wandered away again and was lost by stranding near Churchill, Manitoba, in 19 6 0 as (g) ITHAKA. The KNOWLTON wound up in West African service for Elder Dempster Lines after the war, and was scrapped in Britain in 1951. It was MAGOG's lot to be the first Canadian merchant vessel to be sunk by enemy ac tion in World War Two; she was damaged by a torpedo and then was sunk by a submarine's gunfire off the Irish coast on July 5 , 1940. SHERBROOKE, like her sisters, was chartered to the British Ministry of War Transport in 1940, and she was taken across the North Atlantic for service around the British Isles. She remained under this charter through 1945, and came through the war unscathed. She was returned to Canada Steamship Lines