Story of how a Glasgow botanist almost marooned in Amazon was saved by war hero cruise ship captain

Love blossomed between a Glasgow botanist and the war hero captain of a passenger cargo liner after it nearly left her behind after sailing 1,000 miles up the Amazon.

A delay to the vessel’s departure by a dockers’ strike gave Blodwen Lloyd more time to explore the world’s largest tropical forest, but it led to her almost missing its departure during the trip in 1951.

When the Hilary liner was due to leave, its captain, James Binns, became worried and launched a search to find her.

However, as historian Elizabeth Allen related at the Scottish Maritime History conference in Glasgow, the botanist’s “natural charm successfully smoothed troubled waters, for romance blossomed and the widowed captain became her husband the very next year, on his retirement”.

Captain Binns had been awarded the OBE for leading the crew of the Booth Line merchant ship Fort La Maune to safety without loss of life after it was sunk by a U-boat off Yemen in 1944.

Ms Allen, vice-chair of Glasgow’s Tall Ship Glenlee Trust, said the couple set up home in Glasgow where they lived for ten years until the captain’s death in 1962.

He died just months after his wife had retired from the Royal Technical College in the city - now the University of Strathclyde - where she had taught botany and bacteriology for 36 years.

She then decided, aged 63, to return to work and became professor of botany at the University of Limbe in Malawi for seven years. During her time in Africa she produced a dictionary of the country’s plants and set up a national herbarium despite suffering a heart attack in the jungle.

Professor Lloyd Binns retired again aged 70 but continued to work, on the Scouler Herbarium Collection at the University of Strathclyde, and also wrote a botanical dictionary in Welsh. She died in 1991, aged 89.

Ms Allen, who has a special interest in the Amazon after working for 20 years in Latin America, said the botanist had embarked on her Amazon adventure after spotting a newspaper advertisement for the trip and thought it “a fun thing to do”.

She said: “The romance between James, an experienced master, and Blodwen, a talented botanist travelling ‘for fun’ when she saw the advert, was one which developed late in life but gave happiness to both.

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“James, Blodwen and Hilary had all experienced the war but were now beginning to enjoy the peace and the ‘fun’. How tantalising for Blodwen, as a passenger enthralled with botany, to see the tropical vegetation from the ship – so close and yet untouchable.”

The botanist travelled aboard the Hilary, the largest ship in the Booth Line fleet, which had been built for its key route between Liverpool and Manaus in Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon.

Ms Allen said: “The Amazon is both wide and long but difficult to navigate, due to huge fluctuations in water levels, vast quantities of silt and debris changing the channels, and a tidal range for 600 miles from the mouth.”