Monday 24 February 2020

Passport Portraits of Yesteryear no. 41

Continuing the series of passport portraits in my collection.
Peruse and wonder.
Rafael Turina is a 37 year old marine engineer. He was born in Slovenia which is now part of the new Jugo-Slavia created by the Treaty of Versailles drawn up after the Great War.

It is March 1932 and he is on his way from Belgium to Italy where he leaves his ship at Venice. He stays in Italy and in the August of the same year he obtains a British visa in Trieste to permit him to join the Lloyd Triestino liner S.S. Wien in Cardiff, Wales.  He takes the train through Switzerland and France and disembarks from the packet boat at Folkestone in England on 4th September 1932.

The ship he is joining is a 7,700 ton liner, built in 1911. At the outbreak of the Great War it was requisitioned for wartime use by the Austrian government. On 1st November 1918, it was sunk by the Italians and after the war, raised by them and recommissioned as a liner. This is the ship that he is joining. Ironically, in the Second World War the liner was requisitioned for war use by the Italian government and sunk by British bombers off the coast of Albania on 4th March 1941.
 

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