A tale of a little girl and her ship

TERRY HUTSON THERE CAN’T be many schoolgirls in South Africa who can tell their friends that a ship has been named after them, but for nine year old Samantha Sutton of Durban this is not only true but the ship carries added significance for her parents in addition to historic ties with the country. Earlier this year Samantha, the daughter of Mediterranean Shipping Company’s traffic manager Dallas Sutton and his wife Faye, and a grade 3 pupil at Our Lady of Fatima Convent School in Durban North, was invited to ‘lend’ her name and perform the naming ceremony for MSC’s new acquisition, the former Safmarine container ship SA Vaal. The recently acquired MSC Samantha has begun trading for MSC between Las Palmas, Turkey, Greece and Senegal in West Africa. The SA Vaal spent many years on the South Africa - Far East service with Durban as one of its regular calls, but the 34 098dwt ship was not the first to carry this name. That honour belonged to the former Union-Castle mailship Transvaal Castle, which became SA Vaal shortly after being transferred to Safmarine in 1969. Which is where Samantha’s parents come into the story – they were both pursers on the mailship between 1973 and 1977 and were on board when she sailed from Durban and Cape Town for the last time - the final mail ship in fact to sail from South Africa. In addition the Suttons were the first and only couple allowed to sail together as a working married couple on the same ship – until then it was not company policy. But after marrying in 1975 Safmarine was already aware that the line was coming to an end and asked the couple to stay on. It took another twenty years before Samantha, their only child, was born but now her name lives on in the ship that took up the name of another that meant so much to her parents.