Alexander Ross Ainsworth
In Peter Hohnen’s youth, his father’s mother often spoke about how her brother Alexander Ross Ainsworth, a merchant navy engineer, spent nine months as a prisoner of war on a German raider called the Wolf. Apparently, so the story unfolded, he then spent another nine months, in a prisoner of war camp, in the Harz Mountains in Germany. Some time later Ainsworth suffered a stroke, while at sea near Indonesia aged 48, and died in hospital, a year later.
Unbeknown to Peter’s grandmother and other Australian people, her brother's ship, an Australian merchant ship known as the Matunga, was intercepted and captured by the Wolf on 6 August 1917, near the New Guinea Islands, to the north of Australia.
Until late February 1918, relatives of the Matunga's crew of 60, and it’s 40 passengers, were informed that their loved ones were believed to have died when the ship sank, due to "an oceanic earthquake ".
Alexander Ross Ainsworth
- Chief Engineer of the SS Matunga.
This ship was one of the Burns Philp Shipping Line based in Sydney, Australia.
Alexander Ross was captured by SMS Wolf near Rabaul, New Guinea in August 1917. The Wolf's crew subsequently stripped Matunga of coal, food and alcohol.
It was then steamed, under a German crew, to northwest New Guinea and sunk in Waigeo Harbour.
Peter's very own Great Uncle.
Alexander Ross Ainsworth (aged about 21) when he first joined the Burns Philps Shipping Company, in 1907 after qualifying as a Marine Engineer.
