A Widow's Battle

The regatta at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, on Aug. 6, 1921, was a gay and notable affair. King George V and Queen Mary appeared amid pennants and bunting, and the town swarmed with bluejackets from the U.S. battleship Utah, which lay offshore. One of them, Chief Yeoman Ralph Everett Crawshaw, a quiet young man, was mail clerk on the Utah. Whether or not he exercised a sailor's prerogative and got drunk that gala day was a question which for 30 years was to bother Navy brass, four U.S. Presidents and seven sessions of Congress.

When Yeoman Crawshaw returned to the Utah he was dressed down by an officer for not bringing the ship's mail from Cowes. Next morning Crawshaw could not be found. A board of officers decided he had become "mentally demoralized by the use of intoxicating liquor or a drug," had crawled through a porthole and been lost at sea. The board ruled that Crawshaw's death was a result of misconduct.

To Clear a Name. Back in Melrose Highlands, Mass., comely, 34-year-old Ruth Alice Crawshaw, a former Navy nurse, was both grief-stricken and indignant when she got the report. To everyone who would listen, she told what a devoted husband and father Crawshaw had been. She pointed out that her husband suffered from stomach ulcers and had frequent attacks of violent nausea. Her theory was that he had fallen overboard while standing at the ship's railing during one of these seizures. Because the Navy had ruled that Crawshaw died from his own misconduct, his widow got no Government insurance. Neither she nor her daughter would receive a pension. Ruth Crawshaw, who went back to nursing, was determined to clear her husband's name. She began to bombard the Navy, the Veterans' Bureau, Congressmen and the White House with letters. Some powerful allies, including the American Legion, came to her aid. In 1926 the Navy reopened the case, but nothing came of it. Mrs. Crawshaw appealed to Presidents Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt. Bills to correct the record in Crawshaw's death were introduced in six sessions of Congress; they died in committee.

The Navy Retreats. The Utah, sunk in her old age by Japanese bombers, lay rusting on the floor of Pearl Harbor when, in 1947, the Navy decided that Mrs. Crawshaw was entitled to a partial pension. She was not satisfied with a halfway victory, and continued to fight. In 1948, she forced the Navy to list Crawshaw's death as an accident.

Last week, 30 years after she began her long battle, Mrs. Crawshaw won a full victory. Congress passed a bill making her pension retroactive to 1921. She will receive, tax exempt, more than $10,000, possibly $20,000. Now a grey-haired 64, Mrs. Crawshaw said: "It's wonderful to know that my husband has been vindicated beyond the slightest shadow of doubt."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.