RMS Laurentic was built by Harland & Wolff at their Belfast yard No. 394 and went down the slipway on 29th April 1909. A few months later, the same Belfast workers began construction on her famous cousin, Titanic.

Laurentic entered service between Liverpool and Quebec City on 29 April 1909. She normally served on the Liverpool-Canada route, and gained notoriety in the capture of murderer Hawley Harvey Crippen, in which Chief Inspector Walter Dew of the Metropolitan Police used the Laurentic's speed to arrive in Canada before the fleeing suspect on the SS Montrose.

Being in Montréal when the Great War began, Laurentic was immediately commissioned as a troop transport HMS Laurentic for the Canadian Expeditionary Force. After conversion to armed merchant cruiser service in 1915, she struck two mines off Lough Swilly in the north of Ireland on 25 January 1917 and sank within an hour. Only 121 of the 475 aboard survived. In addition to her crew, the ship was carrying about 43 tons of gold ingots stowed in its second class baggage room. At the time the gold was valued at £5 million, approximately £250 million in 2007. Royal Navy divers made over 5,000 dives to the wreck between 1917 and 1924 and recovered all but about 1% of the ingots. Still to this day 22 bars of gold remain on the sea bed, perhaps under parts of the hull, the last of the gold recovered by the Royal Navy was some 10 metres (33.8 feet) under the sea bed, thus the remaining gold would be difficult to reach.

A ceremony will be held in Buncrana on Friday 10th May 2013 to commemorate the loss of mainly Royal Naval Reserve (many from Ireland} and Canadian Naval Reserve who formed the bulk of the crew of HMS Laurentic.

Crew List HMS Laurentic (1917)

NOTE

The second SS Laurentic was an 18,724-ton ocean liner built in 1927 by Harland and Wolff, Belfast, for the White Star Line.[1] She served the White Star Line from 1927 to 1936, undergoing two collisions during her career. The ship was then transformed into an auxiliary cruiser for the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Laurentic was torpedoed by the German submarine U-99 on 3 November 1940 off Bloody Foreland, County Donegal, Ireland, but she remained afloat. But after two more torpedoes hit her, she sank with the loss of 49 lives. This was the second ship of the company to have worn the name LAURENTIC