Ships
- AHS Centaur Master on the last voyage, 12–14 May 1943 · Lost with her
George Alexander Murray was born at Buckie, in Banffshire, Scotland, in 1889, the son of William and Anne Murray. He later made his home at Nedlands, in Western Australia, with his wife, Mary Helen Murray. He served as a merchant master. He held no commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and the people who worked the hospital ship under him remained a merchant crew.
He was already a seaman in the years just after the First World War. On 20 April 1938 he was engaged at Fremantle, with Mary Murray named as his next of kin. In May 1943 he was master of the hospital ship Centaur, and he was in command of her.
Centaur had been fitted out as a hospital ship earlier that year, with wards and an operating theatre. Her hull was white, a green band ran along her side, red crosses were painted on her, and the number 47 was carried on the bow, so her status could be read at a distance. Murray took her to sea from Sydney on 12 May 1943, bound for Cairns and then New Guinea. No patients were aboard. With the merchant crew went army medical staff and men of a field ambulance, travelling north to their own work.
About ten minutes past four on the morning of 14 May, east-northeast of Point Lookout off the Queensland coast, a torpedo struck Centaur. Fire took hold after the hit. The ship sank in less than three minutes, and Murray was lost with her.
Sixty-four of the 332 people who had sailed in her were saved. Murray has no known grave. His name is carried on the Sydney Memorial among those lost in Centaur on 14 May 1943, and he is remembered as her master.