When did the Canadian liner "Duchess of Richmond" arrive in Halifax with the "most important cargo ever to reach the shores of the New World" ?

The epoch-shaping voyage of the SS Duchess of Richmond definitely ended in Halifax Nova Scotia sometime in the first week of September 1940, but I have seen the date given confidently as either the 5th, 6th and 7th of that month.

(The date as being the 6th is from the Official Chronology of the US Navy and it gives a convincing amount of detail to support this claim.)

Among them, that Winston Churchill himself remarked on the strange coincidence that the first US destroyers and the Duchess of Richmond carrying the British sailors destined to man them arrived the same day in Halifax.

One of those first vessels, the USS Buchanan - HMS Campbeltown , later became famous for successfully ramming and blowing up the drydock at St Nazaire.

The cavity magnetron that made microwave radar work was not the only interesting cargo the Duchess of Richmond transported to Halifax during the WWII period.

Obviously, as a troop carrier, it transported tens of thousands of servicemen and women safely back and forth.

It carried the thousand British sailors set to man the 50 destroyers the Americans were exchanging for bases on British colonies in the New World.

That is why the Tizard Mission was on the same vessel , for it was to seal that bargain by giving away - free to America - all the best British scientific secrets.

But it also, earlier, secretly carried the British gold reserves to Canada.

As it also transported British children sent away to avoid the Blitz.

(Their ship choir director was comic film and singing star Gracie Fields !)

A Canadian liner and a Canadian port in exciting times :

 troops off to fight, gold bars, cute kiddies, Gracie Fields, the place where destroyers for bases were exchanged, the beginnings of the complete exchange of scientific information that most definitely ensured it was the Allies and not the Axis that won WWII.

It definitely sounds like the makings of an excellent academic conference (and a three nation anniversary ceremony) to me.

And if we wait till the one hundredth anniversary to mark this event, no one will be left alive who was there at the time ....