Mass Murder on the ferry Prins Carl

Many people will have heard of the terrorist attack on the liner City of Poros in 1988 which left nine people dead, but who has heard of the murders that took place on 16th May 1900 on board the Swedish ferry Prins Carl? This was a case that shocked Sweden at the time and led to a brutal execution. 

25 year old criminal Johan Filip Nordlund had just been released from prison following his conviction for theft, something he did not stop at even after multiple sentences for the same type of crimes over and over again. But this time he was going to do something off the scale - so he boarded the Prins Carl in the port of Arboga, bound for the capital Stockholm. 

The steam driven Prins Carl was small vessel; built in 1874 she was 114 feet long and was able to carry out short trips across the inland rivers and lakes for overnight passages between ports. On this night however, the crossing would not be a calm one, as the ship sailed around 2000 hours and headed down river on its journey east. 

At around midnight Nordlund began shutting doors around the vessel, armed with a revolver in each hand, a knife and a dagger in his belt, he began shooting at anybody he came across. Pulling out the knife he then proceeded to attack the captain, Olof Ronngren and one of the female passengers and a young boy, one of the crew being shot in the shoulder in the meantime. In the smoking room a group of men playing cards heard the commotion and tried to get out, finding the door locked from the outside they tried breaking out, eventually being successful - but Nordlund simply gunned them all down as they fled for their lives. The killer ran down to the engine room after he shouted down for full speed ahead, this aroused suspicion as the ferry was already doing that, the engineer barricaded himself in the engine room and thankfully escaped being shot. 

In just a few minutes the Prins Carl was a scene of carnage. Dead and injured lay around the decks, chaos as he smashed the place up as he went around looking for more victims. His aim was to rob the passengers and make away with the ships cash - something that he actually failed to do. By now another steamer was getting close and looked like it was going to investigate, so rather than carry out his robbery instead he single handedly launched one of the ships lifeboats and rowed away from the scene. He had left a total of five dead and eight injured and had only managed to steal a total of SEK 845

Escaping from the Prins Carl, Nordlund got a change of clothes from somewhere and that morning made plans to flee the area. As he waiting on the platform of a train station he was arrested by police following a tip off from a member of the public after news went out with a description of the wanted man. He confessed that he was about to commit further carnage on the train. 

Johan Nordlund did not even try to justify his crimes, nor did he plead insanity or try and avoid the inevitable sentence. On 10th December 1900 he was executed with an axe and later buried. For the Prins Carl, she went to several different owners and photographs of her in 1934 show a burned out hulk of a vessel on t

he stocks under repair. She was sold in 1936 and renamed Lars Simson, before being scrapped in 1939. 

Fire in Shirley Towers

In 2017 Britain was shocked by the images of the burning Grenfell Tower in London in which 72 people were killed, but the fires that have been taking over high rise apartments have been a problem for many years. One such fire occurred on 6^th April 2010 in the 15 storey Shirley Towers in Southampton.

That evening a lamp set the nearby curtains on fire within Flat No 72 on the 9^th floor and very soon a call was made to Hampshire Fire and Rescue at 2010 hours. In less than two minutes burning debris was falling from the window onto the ground below. Firefighters soon arrived on scene just four minutes after the call and rigged themselves up for an entry into the apartments to tackle the blaze, although there was instant confusion as to the layout of not only the flat but the entire building. Entering the flat it soon became apparent that the smoke was reducing visibility to almost zero.

In the meantime the temperatures inside where the firefighters were exceeded 1000 degrees Centigrade and at this point it was figured that the teams would have to withdraw. Four attempted to escape – two required hospital treatment for burns when they got back down, but two others were nowhere to be seen. James Shears and Alan Bannon had been overcome by intense heat and tangled up in a bunch of cables that had suddenly appeared from the ceiling when the fire had caused the trunking to melt.

Trapped in the burning flat, the two firefighters died at their post less than half an hour after the first call. The other teams work hard into the night to extinguish the raging inferno, with success by 2230 hours and now the casualties can be removed from the site.

The tragic deaths of two firefighters hit the service hard, they were popular and hardworking guys who were professional and experienced. To lose their life in a tower block fire was shocking especially when it was revealed that the block did not have sprinklers.

The legacy of the deaths of Shears and Bannon are that sprinklers were ordered to be fitted to several tower blocks and the wiring within these flats will now be encased in metal rather than plastic that can melt. For firefighting equipment, the anti-snagging strap allows things to fall onto the air bottle without hooking on and holding down the wearer.

But for Shirley Towers, the flat was later refurbished and today it looks like nothing had ever taken place. For the two firefighters who perished that night, their names are on the memorial outside Hampshire Fire and Rescue HQ, but the true legacy of these two people is that the memory of their bravery lives on.