Raising the Arandora Star: history and afterlife of the Second World War sinking

Abstract

Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.

Italian summary

Dall'affondamento della nave Arandora Star, avvenuto 84 anni fa, la memoria di questo tragico incidente di guerra è stata fortemente conservata e sviluppata all'interno della comunità italiana britannica, passando attraverso diverse fasi, dall'oblio al riconoscimento e alla commemorazione, fino a una più recente consapevolezza in una più ampia comunità mnemonica di interesse. L'obiettivo di questo numero speciale è triplice: far conoscere meglio l'Arandora Star; stabilizzare e consolidare le incerte basi storiche dell'evento; far avanzare la storiografia introducendo nuovi fatti e prospettive e rivelando aspetti precedentemente nascosti o sconosciuti sia del passato che delle sue manifestazioni ‘postume’ ancora in continuazione. I sei articoli presentati si muovono logicamente attraverso la storia e le fasi dell'evoluzione della memoria: l'internamento e la deportazione, il naufragio stesso, gli aspetti materiali, culturali e politici del panorama della morte, le storie orali, ‘l'archivio’ multimediale e, infine, una lista d'imbarco per colmare una grave lacuna di conoscenza.

‘It was war. These things happen in war.’ (Rando Bertoia, 1992)¹

This special issue on the sinking of the Steam Ship Arandora Star focuses on two interwoven threads of research: the history of Italian migration to Britain and the internment by the British government of ‘enemy aliens’ during the Second World War.² The main aim is to raise awareness of the Arandora Star disaster and to enhance scholarship in these two related areas. By bringing new research and perspective, giving a thorough exposure to the topic, the profile of the Arandora Star (AS) is elevated and a more substantial position within the study of internment and British Italian history thus achieved.

The AS was sunk by a German U-boat torpedo in the Atlantic Ocean north-west of Ireland on 2 July 1940 when transporting Italian, German and Austrian enemy aliens to internment in Canada, with the Italian civilian internees on board sustaining the greatest losses. Over 60 per cent of their embarked total perished, 442 of 707 men (Pacitti this issue), compared to 37 per cent for Germans and Austrians (Gillman and Gillman 1980, 209); over 50 per cent of the total number drowned or killed were Italian. These historical facts, set alongside the well-established and relatively stable nature of the Italian presence in Britain, resulted in severe impact and collective ‘tragedy’, and an ensuing dynamic whereby the Italian community assumed ownership of the memory, becoming largely responsible for its defence and development (Pistol 2019a, 42; Colpi 2020, 390).³ Publication of this special issue by Modern Italy underscores Italian-driven interest, reinforcing the historic significance of the sinking, and marking a first in academic journals dedicated to a specific aspect of recent British Italian history.

Accordingly, the six papers presented in this volume represent the span of AS history, from the circumstances that led to the sinking, through its ‘afterlife’ manifestations to the present, primarily as these affect and intersect with the Italian community. The first two articles and the final contribution are broadly contextual, while the middle three relate more to culture and legacy. Content and discussion ranges from arrest, internment and deportation, to the ship itself and the sinking, to traces of materiality, memorialisation and commemoration, to memory amongst Italian community members, and finally to the wider and more nebulous ‘mnemonic community’ or ‘community of interest’ (Colpi 2020, 2023). This latter collective, although again mostly Italian-fuelled and Italian in its constituency, now incorporates a diverse body of interested individuals and, to a large extent, can be understood as the immaterial space that AS memory now inhabits.

The intention of the special issue is to both consolidate and secure, but also to advance AS scholarship by introducing new research and analysis, and in so doing to raise academic and popular awareness of the sinking and the cultural phenomenon that the AS has become in recent years. While no longer ‘forgotten’ or submerged, the event is nevertheless still immersed in historical uncertainty and some controversy and, over the years, a buoyant raft of mythologies has surfaced and been kept afloat. These collected papers therefore seek further understanding of the AS, before and after, and take forward its historiography by introducing untapped dimensions, uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects and tackling myths from different perspectives.

The impact of the sinking and the socio-psychological affect of its aftermath left a long imprint on the wartime generations and their children. The unrequited memory that lingers on in the present day, whilst no longer identity-forming, is nevertheless still potent within segments of the historic community, the descendants forming cores around which other community bodies, for example, the Mazzini-Garibaldi Foundation in London or the ItalianScotland entity, often circulate and draw meaning. Yet, the memory has seeped out from these Italian-based circles, travelling multi-directionally beyond the nuclei and merging with other remembering (Rothberg 2009). The growing consciousness around the AS has been largely due to the dedication of the key actors in pursuing recognition and in communicating the story to wider audiences. By the 2010s, 70 years after the sinking, the guardians of AS memory succeeded in creating a nationwide infrastructure of monuments and memorials to the Italian victims (Chezzi 2014). This spirit of curation and raising awareness persists, even as temporal distance from the sinking increases; post-generation heritage activism continues to originate a constant flow of projects and initiatives including, for example, this special issue of Modern Italy.⁴

As a consequence of this ‘memory choreography’, the special issue has its genesis principally in the sequence of happenings that occurred around the 80th anniversary of the sinking in 2020. Arandora Star remembrance events were either cancelled or postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, giving rise to a proliferation of online meetings, encounters and gatherings. Transnational mnemonic communities representing a range of memory both in this country and Italy congregated in digital spaces, creating dynamic forums for discussion, and bringing together individuals and institutions that otherwise would have been unlikely to convene or meet in a single physical location (Colpi 2023).⁵ An historic message of political support to victims’ families issued by the President of Italy was widely shared at all levels of interest, further galvanising vigour for memory recovery and its expansion (Mattarella 2020). One significant outcome of these 80th anniversary energies was a realisation of the sustained, growing and diverging interest in AS memory, and consequently, a commitment to organise a milestone and unprecedented conference to mark the anniversary, retrospectively.

In November 2021, a one-day symposium, entitled ‘Arandora Star Remembered’ took place at the Italian Cultural Institute in London.⁶ Participation was wide-ranging, including members of parliament from the House of Commons who, for the first time, came together with parliamentary members of the Camera dei Deputati to make statements on the tragedy, thus bestowing a level of political recognition not previously attained. The Italian ambassador attended, conveying a message from President Mattarella of Italy in addition to conferring, on the president's behalf, the Medal of the Italian Republic upon the event. The title of the conference was a deliberate echo and desired historical link to the landmark ‘Internment Remembered’ conference of 1990 (Pistol 2019b, 93),⁷ which at the 50th anniversary with its historical ‘turn’ had spotlighted the then still obscured facet of Second World War history. The proceedings and papers from that meeting were subsequently published (Cesarani and Kushner 1993),⁸ opening the way for further new research (Dove 2005; Pistol 2017). Likewise, the Arandora Star Remembered meeting of 2021 envisaged a capacity to collate and advance knowledge, and itself to contribute to memory and history making – an ambition realised though Modern Italy.

Representing a broad spectrum of research interest and expertise, all six contributors to this special issue attended the Arandora Star Remembered conference – three giving presentations, upon which their papers are based, and the three others subsequently adding their articles to enhance the breadth of research presented herein. The first two articles reference the history, giving context and detail of internment policy and of the ship and its sinking. The following three discuss both past and present manifestations of AS memory and materiality, and the final short paper and appendix offers, for the first time, a reconstructed listing of all Italians embarked onto the ship, alongside an analysis of this data.

History

The opening article, ‘Enemy aliens, internment and deportation policy in Great Britain, September 1939–June 1940’ by Rachel Pistol, offers a clear and concise explanation of the internment and deportation of enemy aliens by the British government during the Second World War. For anyone unfamiliar with this complex subject, it forms an important contextual introduction outlining the historical backdrop of the early period of internment, providing both a policy and a person perspective. Drawing upon her previous research (2015, 2017, 2019a, 2019b; Carr and Pistol 2023) and a wide range of primary sources and personal testimonies, Pistol aims to elucidate, in a comparative way, how the internment of Italian civilians intertwines with the broader early wartime narrative. As she points out, much of the initial work on this subject tended to focus on the experience of Germans and Austrians, the majority of whom were refugees to this country from Nazi persecution. In these seminal works (Gillman and Gillman 1980; Stent 1980; Kochan 1983; Lafitte 1988), Italians are only mentioned en passant and with very little oral history testimony incorporated. By contrast, later research often focused solely on the Italians; similarly, these writings barely mention the German narrative (Sponza 2000; Di Felice 2002; Ugolini 2015; Colpi 2020). Although studies such as Cesarani and Kushner (1993) and Dove (2005) include chapters on both groups of internees, the material is not integrated or readily comparable.

Thus, a better understanding of how, when and where Italian internment fits into the broader context, and even more, how this directly compares with the German experience, has largely been absent from the literature. This is a gap Pistol seeks to fill and her paper exceptionally gives equal space and analysis to the two groups, discussing them in parallel and on an equal footing. She highlights how the treatment of Italians by the government in some areas conformed to and in others differed from the treatment of Germans and Austrians, for example, in the hitherto unmentioned different processes of naturalisation in the 1930s.

The second article, by Robert Rumble – ‘Hunters and hunted: the sinking of SS Arandora Star within the wider context of the Battle of the Atlantic 1939–1940’ – segues logically on from Pistol but is ground-breaking in its divergence from the existing historiography. Unlike previous literature, issues around internment policy and selection of prisoners for deportation, or the cultural legacy of the disaster, are far from the substance of Rumble's argument. By contrast, being the first research to interrogate the sinking within the military arena of the Battle of the Atlantic, it is pioneering in the study of wartime deportations generally and with regard to the AS in particular. The point of departure is the embarkation of the crew, military escort, prisoners-of-war and civilian internees, with the viscera of the article focused almost entirely on the short voyage of 1–2 July 1940. Much of the article's content will be unknown to scholars of internment, perhaps especially those well versed in the Italian tragedy. As editor, I am delighted to include this contribution in the special issue since I count myself amongst those hitherto under-informed on the importance of the naval conditions in which the AS set sail and therefore lacking in understanding of the maritime context that led to the sinking. The full value of inter-disciplinary approach and content is conveyed by this contribution to Modern Italy.

Almost devoid of the human element that pervades the subsequent articles, Rumble nevertheless works through the controversial topics regarding the ship and seeks to explain why casualties were so high. The central focus, however, is investigation of the previously unexplored frame of British and German strategic and logistic factors at play during the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic, and how these affected AS. The consequences of the extreme shortage of Royal Navy escorts for merchant and other shipping are explained, and in so doing one of the indefatigable issues voiced within the Italian community – why the AS sailed alone – is discussed and fully explicated for the first time. In a balanced overview, German Kriegsmarine strategy and the drift towards unrestricted submarine warfare by the summer of 1940 is charted, within which U-boat Captain Günther Prien's actions are scrutinised, shining light on whether he contravened international law in his torpedoing of the AS. The further recurrent question, of why the ship did not fly an international Red Cross flag or display Red Cross livery is succinctly explained, and hence definitively answered. The more complex subject of why these relatively straightforward questions have, until now, remained controversial and unanswered within the traditional narrative that came to hold mythical power within the Italian community, is also briefly touched upon by Rumble. That such issues have, until Rumble's article, also remained un-investigated and seemingly ‘accepted without questioning’ by historians and others, further indicates the commanding strength of the myths, taking 84 years to address and decipher.

Afterlife

The following three papers, by Terri Colpi, Simona Palladino and Derek Duncan are engaged, in varying degrees, both with aspects of AS history and aspects of afterlife and how these have manifested. All three are concerned with memory, and make reference to the lack of access to information and relevant documentation and how pervasive knowledge gaps affected development of the narrative and afterlife. Duncan's description of the AS as an ‘unstable point of historical knowledge’ resonates with Colpi's ‘inconclusiveness of the historical event’, leading to cavities, mythologies and elasticity of interpretation.

In ‘Deathscape, materiality and memorialisation: Arandora Star remembrance in Scotland’, Terri Colpi builds on earlier work (1993, 2020, 2023). Although the primary focus here is Scotland, since not only did some victims wash ashore on the country's west coast but the most important of the AS memorials is located in Glasgow, much of the paper's content has universal relevance across the panorama of death surrounding the AS. Introducing the paradigm of the deathscape, AS remembrance and remembering are re-contextualised by exploring cultural practices and spatial accumulations. The affective-emotional impact of the sinking in the immediate and later aftermath periods are illuminated through discussions of loss, silence and disenfranchisements, which also help to explain why questions arose and answers were elusive. Probing the many absences in AS afterlife, both material and immaterial, Colpi utilises the philosophical and cultural paradox of absence-presence (Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen 2010; Maddrell 2013), to assess memory resilience and heritage activism.

The article's central argument emphasises the fragmented materiality of the AS deathscape. By investigating the previously neglected individual memorialisations, both family erected gravestones and bespoke Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones, Colpi reveals not only overlooked materiality but also hitherto unrepresented cultural and political elements of the deathscape. The final section of the article considers the cultural and material ‘apex’ of the deathscape – the Italian Cloister Garden and Arandora Star Memorial in Glasgow – and explores its significance in social history, the role of Archbishop Mario Conti in its creation, and the activity of individuals considered to be ‘embodied texts’ of the AS in continuing to promote the memory.

In the next paper, ‘Oral histories of Italians in the North-East of England: the sinking of the Arandora Star’, Simona Palladino begins by setting out an historical overview of internment and deportation from the extant literature (prior to this publication),⁹ and highlighting how the AS affected the Italian community. Then, drawing on interviews from earlier field research (2022), she utilises personal testimonies of elderly community members which demonstrate considerable knowledge gaps, but yet a simultaneous desire to piece together any known fragments of the AS story in order to make sense of the past. Cognisant of the challenges of memory work and its changing subjectivities when viewing past events through the prism of the present-day context, Palladino articulates how living with perceived trauma and injustices as enemy aliens shaped the way her participants narrate their wartime experiences and reminiscences of the AS. Furthermore, in discussing oral history and the role of misremembering and seemingly ‘wrong’ or historically inaccurate detail, Palladino explains how such versions of history are understood to be valuable because ‘they lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings’ (Portelli 2010, 2). Inventions and myths thus tell us a great deal about how individuals view and interpret the past and even reveal underlying desires. As readers, it is possible to apply Palladino's expositions to the wider Italian community, and perceive the underlying aspiration to reintegrate into British society after the war, a positionality which, although unmentioned by Palladino's respondents, inevitably sat uneasily alongside a deep-held belief by many that the British government and its deportation policy was to ‘blame’ for the tragedy (Chezzi 2014, 386; Capella 2015, 1–14), few accusing or denouncing unrestricted German submarine warfare. Perhaps equally unavoidable, this interpretation of the historical event became part of the mythology, offering another reason for the lack of inclination in seeking out more detail of the maritime context.

In her conclusions, Palladino points to potential possibilities for future projects in AS memory recovery and evolution, again indicating a vibrancy of ideas, such as collaboration with Liverpool Maritime Museum to install historical information and exhibition alongside their recently redisplayed, large-scale model of the AS (Robertson 2020).¹⁰ Or, employing forensic anthropology techniques to identify known-to-be-Italian, but unidentified, bodies in Scottish and Irish graveyards. Scholars and others are aware of these burials and judging by the collaborative research activity and news generated around the ‘discovery’ of victim Francesco D'Inverno in an Ayrshire cemetery last year, with the subsequent installation of a headstone (BBC News 2024; Figure 1), ¹¹ forensic anthropology and DNA analysis could well represent another area of afterlife for heritage activists.

Figure 1. Newly installed headstone of Arandora Star victim Francesco D'Inverno. Doune Cemetery, Girvan, Ayrshire, 17 April 2024. Photo: Epic Sky Media

The penultimate article by Derek Duncan, ‘Shades of complicity: archives of the “implicated subject”’, explores the expansion in AS knowledge, particularly in the wider mnemonic community, by extracting two entangled strands from the growing corpus of information and data. In order to situate his discussion, he innovatively and valuably, not only for his own paper but also for future research, conceives and introduces the idea of an ‘Arandora Star archive’. The hypothetical archive acknowledges and gathers both existing details and the growing cultural production around the AS, allowing Duncan to ‘delve’ in to discover and analyse some of the disparate contents. The first of two constituents he picks out is a photograph, which facilitates articulation of AS memory as well as the processes by which the fragmented, ‘messy’, and never complete archive, constructs, stores and communicates. Secondly, by selecting and reading two novels based on the AS story (Stock 2000; Soffici 2017), a methodology and medium initially explored by Duncan earlier (2022), in this article, he applies Rothberg's concept of the ‘implicated subject’ (2019). Protagonists who were indirectly involved in some way with the AS and for whom the past holds ethical uncertainties, create the lens through which Duncan's chosen authors try to unravel the ambiguities of the past.

There is little doubt, as Ortner, Andersen and Borčak contend, that literature as a medium supports memory to travel multi-directionally (2022), perhaps having potentially greater reach than academic research. Fiction in particular can keep war memories alive and has, moreover, the capacity to capture and induce prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004). Yet, it could be argued that it can also perpetuate myths and introduce new inaccuracies to narratives, intertwining seemingly credible inventions with the historical realities.¹² The insecure historical foundations of the Arandora Star with the lack of detailed information during the long silence and a craving for knowledge have made the story ripe for imaginative treatments. Nevertheless, as Duncan concludes, these ‘counter-histories’ act to reassemble lost elements and as forms of ‘public pedagogy’ that serve to stimulate debate. They also represent creative interventions that generate new textures of memory and express ‘intangible but powerful affective attachments to the sinking and its afterlife’ (Duncan 2022, 240), which are especially potent for inter-generational and transnational communication. As the archive grows and diversifies, its multi-dimensional contents of both pre and afterlife inevitably change, as do the subjectivities of its collectors and users. Assessing the archive's growth, content and reach, perhaps most especially the vast cache on the internet, forms a potentially fascinating research topic for further consideration.

The final contribution by Alfonso Pacitti, ‘Arandora Star: analysis and “Embarkation Listing” of Italians’, is in many ways similar to that of Rumble in seeking to present historical facts – in this case, by providing a listing of Italians embarked on the AS. Pacitti is concerned with recovering data that has never been available to the Italian community, or others, and hence filling a considerable lacuna of the past. By consulting manifold primary sources, tracing and corresponding with numerous AS families and casting his information gathering net into the ‘archive’, he researched and reconstructed the flawed contemporary government lists of both victims and survivors.

To situate Pacitti's contribution, some additional context and editorial commentary may be useful. As noted, the preceding articles mention various gaps in AS knowledge, one of the most impactful stemming from the poor quality of government record-keeping in wartime, in a pre-digital age. Inaccurate, retrospectively compiled lists of victims and survivors were available after the sinking, but only for authority-administered individual name checking, and were kept secret in their totality for between 30 and 50 years. Yet, as Duncan (this issue) affirms, ‘Lists matter’, urging the absolute necessity of getting them right. Pacitti's appraisal of the original lists, getting them right in the present, provides unprecedented knowledge for relatives, genealogists, archivists and historians.

In the hurried conditions of secrecy, confusion and pressure surrounding internee deportation, tantamount to state panic, it seems that no ‘embarkation list’ as such was ever compiled prior to the sailing. The majority of Italians selected to board the AS were purportedly named on an MI5 list of Fascists, considered ‘dangerous characters’. According to Lord Snell:

A copy of the list of ‘dangerous’ Italians was sent to each of the five camps concerned, and the Camp Commandants were instructed to mark for deportation any person named on the list who might be in their camp. (Snell 1940, 3)

Pistol (this issue), in fact found that Italians from nine camps were sent to be boarded onto the AS. No trace of the Security Service's list can be found in government files at The National Archives, and unusually, nor can any ‘copies’.¹³ Of relevance here would have been the War Office, as the department responsible for the transit internment camps and the selecting for deportation. It is perhaps possible that the copies of the list mentioned above by Snell (1940, 3), ‘marked’ with the names of those internees found in the camps to be deported, accompanied the military guards who transported the prisoners to the docks, and that these lists subsequently went down with the ship. However, no survivor testimony references names being checked/checked-off at the point of embarkation. It seems likely that only a ‘number’ or total of internees were sent for boarding; surviving officers’ reports of the sinking give totals of men for the different groups boarded. The AS ‘Embarkation Lists’ of internees compiled by the Foreign Office were retrospective, presumably, for name-checking survivors and missing, with access to the original MI5 list, or even the ‘marked’ lists from the camps. The lists occurred in various editions, as the fate of individuals became known, with the final, printed rather than typed, but still ‘error-ridden’ version also available in the files of other government departments.

A counter-myth lingered in the Italian community and has been expounded elsewhere (Stent 1980, 105; Colpi 1993, 179; Ugolini 2015, 92), that Italians exchanged assigned places when names were called at the temporary internment camps in order to maintain family groupings. Yet, as part of his forensic reconstructive accounting of the names on the Foreign Office Embarkation List, Pacitti identified no extensive evidence for this behaviour by researching fathers and sons amongst AS victims and survivors, and across internees sent elsewhere. It is perhaps possible that some switches may have occurred amongst those men allocated to the AS and those allocated to MV Ettrick, departing just over a day later. These name-calls may conceivably have occurred within a similar timeframe, but ‘swapping’ could realistically only have transpired amongst younger men due to the age constituency of the Ettrick assigned contingent (Pistol this issue). Only one case of a swap can be confirmed – by two men with exactly the same name, whose substitution, one for the other, was sanctioned by the British authorities at Warth Mills before departure of the AS (Lo Biundo 2022, 85).¹⁴ A possible explanation for emergence of this counter-myth rests with the authorities who contrived the possibility of exchanges as a way of explaining their difficulties in establishing who was on board, who was lost and who survived, and the inaccuracy of the embarkation list published after the sinking. The idea of ‘impersonation’ was circulated in the Snell Inquiry into selection of Italian internees for the AS, which also stated that ‘difficulties were increased by the fact that a number of Italian names have alternative spellings’ (Snell 1940, 3), thus attempting to further exculpate the bureaucratic confusion. That the Italians themselves appear to have adopted the myth of swapping can be understood as a strategy to help deal with the not-knowingness of the tragedy and the uncertainties associated with the lack of official communication on the missing.

The contribution of Pacitti's ‘Embarkation Listing’ to AS scholarship, constituting a foundational building block, gives not only a sound basis for future research but also acts as a form of recognition to all those to connected to the tragedy. In many ways, it affords a dignity in death, compensating for what Duncan (this issue) describes as the ‘cruel incompetence and contemptuous disregard’ of the flawed official records. The Listing also anchors AS survivors and their families, who suffered in ways as yet unresearched or acknowledged, more firmly within the archive.¹⁵

Conclusion

With the publication of this special issue, the afterlife of the AS has been shown to be well and truly alive, even increasing in vitality. Much light has been shed on the myriad implications arising from the historical instability and inconclusiveness of the sinking event, as well as on dark areas of previously unfathomed detail. The six contributions not only consolidate and secure, bringing up-to-date what we know about the Arandora Star, but also penetrate and reach further into uncharted research territories. Introducing new sources, paradigms and concepts, the papers have probed the mythologies, offered answers to persistent questions and controversies, and plugged some of the knowledge and factual gaps, in addition to opening up unexplored frontiers that will allow the historiography to navigate even further forward. Historians are today of the opinion that it is very unlikely any further revelatory facts or detail on the AS exist at The National Archives; while some files are listed as ‘missing’ or ‘lost’, Security Service files on internment have been released and, as far as we know, only a few files on individual Italians remain closed. Thus it seems timely for the memory and legacy to move on.

Yet, with aspects of the original AS narrative deeply embedded within the historic Italian community, the core AS community, absorption of unfamiliar and the most recent knowledge requires a continuing ‘learning’ and adjustment process. Nevertheless, this learning, or knowledge acquisition, has already been demonstrated by the ongoing attitude in post-generations to recapture missing or fragmentary information. Adjustment of the Italian community's perspective to a potentially realigned understanding incorporating the latest and perhaps challenging insights of this special issue, conjures a timescale that is hard to predict and may be lengthy. Indeed, assessment of this process is an example of another field of enquiry on the horizon. As the AS community of interest widens and diversifies, for example, by including readers of this issue of Modern Italy, ideas are constantly being shaped and connected. The different subjectivities of the expanding membership and also of new generations of Italians ensure that the memory should thrive for at least another decade or two, taking us up to the centenary of the sinking. The role and energies of the diverse media of the AS archive must also be taken into consideration, although here a cautionary note of a new ‘instability’ necessarily attaches, with reference perhaps particularly to the contribution of fiction. The emotional-affective memory of loss and wrongdoing, and the presence of absence are still evident, but the latent positive power of continuing heritage activism in the Italian community alongside the growing mnemonic community and the dissemination of the archive's knowledge, are shifting the legacy's direction of travel.

Ultimately, this special issue has sought to help stabilise the sinking and its history. It has raised the profile of the Arandora Star in ways the earlier Italian community, burdened by connection to Fascism, intense grief and ‘otherness’, could only have dreamed of. To be associated with the AS today is to acknowledge a facet of Italianness, something now fully appreciated in a very different Britain. ‘It was war. These things happen in war’, but ethical questioning and unravelling the past are the responsibility of historians in assessing the decision-making and actions of ‘belligerents’, as well as individuals involved in or touched by an incident. Effects can be long lasting but, as with the Arandora Star, in moving through phases of memory, with perseverance, a turning point can be reached when troubled waters calm, allowing harnessing of the past event to achieve confident meaning in the present.