SS Avila Star, originally SS Avila, was a British turbine steamship of the Blue Star Line. She was both an ocean liner and a refrigerated cargo ship, providing a passenger service between London and South America and carrying refrigerated beef from South America to London. She was built in 1927, renamed Avila Star in 1929 and lengthened in 1935. She was sunk by a German submarine in 1942 with the loss of 84 lives. Building In 1925 Blue Star ordered a set of new liners for its new London – Rio de Janeiro – Buenos Aires route. Cammell Laird of Birkenhead built three sister ships: Almeda, Andalucia and Arandora. John Brown & Company of Clydebank built two: Avelona and Avila. Together the quintet came to be called the "luxury five". John Brown & Co launched Avila on 22 September 1926 and completed her in March 1927. Her sister ship, Avelona, quickly followed, being launched on 6 December 1926 and completed in May 1927. As originally built, Avila was long, had a beam of and a draught of . She had 32 oil-fired corrugated furnaces with a combined grate area of heating three double-ended and two single-ended boilers with a combined heating surface of . Her boilers supplied steam at a pressure of to four Parsons steam turbines with a combined rating of 2,007 NHP or . Her turbines were single-reduction geared onto the shafts to drive her twin screws at about 120 RPM, giving her a speed of . Avila was fitted with wireless direction finding equipment. Avila was painted in Blue Star Line's standard livery of the era. Her hull was black, her boot-topping red and her masts white. Her stokehold ventilators were black and her deck ventilators were white, and the insides of her ventilator cowls were red. She had two funnels and they were red with a black top, with a narrow white and a narrow black band and on each side a large blue star on a white disc. In her original form Avilas funnels had a type of cowl called an "Admiralty top". Early service Avila made her maiden voyage in April 1927 on Blue Star Line's route between London and Buenos Aires via Boulogne, Madeira, Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Montevideo. In 1929 Blue Star added "Star" to the end of the name of each of its ships. This may have been partly