WW2 Memories
At the age of seventeen I fronted up with my shiny new
certificate of
proficiency (second class), at the East Ham Depot of the Marcomi
International Marine Communications Company and was told to join the Almeda
Star (Blue Star Line) in London Docks. We sailed for
a near escape in the
on (so the mates told me later), but our superior speed enabled us to
escape. Continuous radio watch was demanded with only two operators; six
hours on and six off, which was too much for my tender years. We
reached South America safely (despite the fact that I was caught by the
chief asleep on watch) having heard several RRRR messages in the South
Atlantic on the way, and when we reached the port of Montevideo there was
the cause of it all lying alongside a wharf and looking a rather the worse
for wear, the pocket battleship Graf von Spee.
Cameras were not permitted on
board, and like an idiot I had left mine at
home. We watched as she got
under way and steamed out of the harbour, only to
erupt in a great column of
smoke on the bank just outside. Soon we were joined by the R/O from the
Doric Star who kept watch with us on the trip home.
Back to the London River and off again soon on the Waipawa
for New Zealand,
a pleasant but uneventful cruise as I recall it, and then another trip to
the River Plate on the Pacific Star, this time marked by a visit to Freetown
harbour for convoy home, where I acquired a dose of
recurrent malaria which
was to last for years.
Now my apprenticeship was over, and it was my turn to be Chief Radio
Officer, so, from the sublime to the gor' bli'mey, I fell from the luxury
liners to the bottom of the maritime heap. I was told to report to the
Cardiff Office and there instructed to join the SS Andre Thome in Cardiff
Docks, I went to the appointed place with all my
baggage and looked around;
but it was not until I approached the edge of the wharf and looked down that
I saw her: the archetypal Dirty British Coaster with her Salt Caked Smoke
Stack - only she was a dirty French coaster which had recently been
liberated. She was empty, and bound for
middle of winter for iron ore. If I had known just a little better I
would
have gone sick with malaria on the spot, but I didn't. I went on board
and
stowed my gear. She was an old fashioned steamer of 2000 tons gross
with a
single tall, thin , vertical funnel amidships and an engine that would drive
her in a forward direction at about five or six knots in calm water. We
lost the slow convoy the first night out. It just wasn't slow
enough. My
cabin was soon awash with water, the Captain got drunk and stayed drunk, I
had malaria once a fortnight regularly, and we took twenty-eight days -
going backwards a good part of the time - but we got there; with a single
ton of coal left in the bunkers. I dare say if a sub had spotted us the
skipper would have thought us not worth an expensive torpedo. It was
bitterly cold and the steam heating was non-existent, so I rigged up a
couple of carbon filament lamps as a sort of under-bunk heater. It was
quite snug until I turned over one stormy night and heard one of them go
pop. I paid no regard and just went to sleep again. Sleep was all
we
thought about then, because we were all on watch and watch. My slumber
was
brought to a sudden end when I realised that the
mattress was on fire, so I
had to leap out and start ladling water on it. Fortunately there was
plenty
of that to hand, swishing about on the deck.
Going home was downhill all the way and she managed that all right. We
were
sent to the East Coast to carry coal frae Methil,
power stations. Having taken her across the dreaded "Western"
in mid-winter
this looked like an easy job, with as much time laid alongside as actually
at sea, and sheltered waters at that. Piece of cake we thought. By
that
time I had become great friends with the second mate, a Scotsman from (frae,
sorry)
Dee and the Don. He was full of information that second mate. In the
coastal convoys there was no need for every ship to keep a radio watch so I
stayed out on the bridge to keep a lookout, and in the process we talked and
we talked. He told me all he knew about seamanship and nautical knowledge,
and I suppose I reiprocated with radio, and a bit of
scientific knowledge
too. We had a new captain now replacing the sozzled
Captain Jones, Captain
Manley - Gentle-Manly we called him.
We stayed on that run for the best part of a year running the gauntlet of
E-boats and Stukas, up and down that coast until we
knew it like the backs
of our hands. At night the second mate liked to keep his eyes
dark-adapted,
so he left the chartwork to me, I didn't mind
that at all. It was nice and
warm in the chartroom. I learnt to watch for the set of the tide and
which
buoys to tell the second mate to look out for. They were the only lights
of
course, and very dim ones. Otherwise it was all jet blackon
moonless
nights. One night there had to be a sudden alteration of course, I forget
why. The helmsman put the wheel hard over, and it jammed there. The
SS
Andre Thome veered to starboard right in the path of the inshore column of
the convoy. The next ship in line hit us amidships with
an awful crash and
judder. All this in total darkness.
The water came into the bunker-space
and flooded the engine-room and the tunnel and fortunately that was all, so
we were taken in tow by one of the trawler escorts and proceeded south
getting gradually lower in the water. The trawler kept send lamp signals
like "Please be ready to cast off if you founder", but we
continued until
some misguided person started shovelling coal away
from the point of damage.
The fothered hatchcover we
had laboriously draged into place was sucked in ,
the water level, which the motorised pump on
deck was reducing nicely,
started to rise again, and soon we were in dire straits. The trawler gave
us a quick heave in the direction of
drifted gently to a stop on the sands, just in time.
Now came the salvage tug, a bigger ship than we were,
with a mighty pump
that sucked us dry in minutes, and a beatifully made
patch complete with
hooks and butterfly nuts which clamped it firmly over the hole. He put
his
insurance wire on board and stood off. The huge wire snapped off our
fairlead like a carrot, sending it spinning alarmingly through the air like
a cannon ball, but gradually off we came. And so, though I didn't realise
it at the time, I made my last entrance into the
referred to it as the
sunken ships that lined the narrowing channel. "If you're hit - get
out of
the channel", was the order. It was like a
royal wedding procession
between the rows of guardsmen. A few trips before we had been steaming up
here when a German fighter had screamed over spraying us with his machine
guns. One bullet had gone through the forward bulkhead and hit the mate
in
the back of the neck while he was shaving. He was dead when we found him.
So it was a funeral procession for the dead mate really .
So the Andre Thome, the dear old Andre Thome, went into drydock,
I went home
on leave, got another bout of malaria, and she sailed without me, A sad,
sad day for us both. I never saw her again, or the second mate. It
was
just back to the Marconi Office at East Ham for another ship. This time
it
was the Baron Vernon, one of the much maligned Baron Boats, but a distinct
step for me up the social latter of steamships I did two trips on her,
Cadiz for iron ore and again to West Africa. I had made great friends
with
the second sparks and when we came into
Whitehaven in Cumberland I had a
look at the chart which showed we were very close to the Lake District which
was our favourite holiday place whenI
was little, so I grabbed the second
and hauled him on to a bus for Keswick, followed by another to Seatoller.
From there we walked over
stayed the night at Ravensglass and just caught the
ship as she was about to
leave in the morning. It was a lovely walk, only slightly marred by the
fact that we both had carbuncles on our legs. The one on his knee burst
on
top of
at the Office later they said he was drowned on his next voyage. I can't
even remember his name now. It was like that. Things happened, and
then
they stopped. You just started again.
The next trip was in the luxury class once again, the Birchbank,
one of the
Bank Boats run by Andrew Weir of Glasgow. She was one of the better class
of cargo liners, otherwise tramp steamers, which went on extended voyages to
places like the
and Stukas and pocket battleships. We went
round the Cape to Mombasa, up to
Suez with munitions for the Eighth Army, then to Colombo, over to Perth,
Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle and back by the same long route - a
fourteen-month trip. If this was seafaring it would do me all right. At
French doctor had come off and given me some magic tablets called
(in French) Plasmochine which cured my malaria
for keeps.
But fate had other things in store. The office said they had just the
thing
for me - an aircraft carrier - yes, a Merchant Aircraft Carrier, a macship.
But first I must go on a Navy course in
signalling. So off I went to a nice seaside
hotel in Southsea just by South
Parade Pier. There was a mob of Marconimen and Siemansmen there and
natuarlly we gravitated to the local pub each evening
where I met the man
who was to change my life. I heard the people he was with calling him
doctor. "Oh not a medical doctor" he said when I quizzed him
about it, "I'm
a scientist with the Navy at their laboratory here". I was mightily
impressed. I had always liked science at school and if the war hadn't
interrupted me I might have gone on with it. "You still could, you
know".
"But I haven't even got matric."
"Here, write to this place, the
war will be over by that time". It was 1944 and it seemed a good
idea so I
sent off. Meanwhile the Naval signalling course
was finshed and off I went
to the
overall flight deck to carry three swordfish aircraft lashed down on deck,
Near the forward end of the deck was a barrier rather like a very strong
tennis net. For a plane to take off all three had to be pushed aft, one
took off, the the remaining two were pushed forward
and the barrier raised
to protect them. When the third plane came to land on again he had a hook
which caught one of the wires in deck which (usually) pulled him up before
he got to the barrier. The Fleet Airarm lads
were a fine lot at she was a
very happy ship. There were five radio officers, and I was the second,
There was also a very powerful and complicated shortwave transmitter such as
out number one had never seen before. Nor had I, but I had read lots of
American amateut radio or "ham" magazines
which talked about such monsters,
so I knew how to tune it. We were the loudest of the MAC-ships in the
during the "working-up" period which did a lot to cement MN/Navy
relations
on the Miralda. After that is
was like a bus-service, back and forth across
the
correspondence course lessons) every six weeks. The war was pracrically
over by now and the U-boats had been defeated apart from a desperate few,
which the stringbags were ready to polish off with
their rockets. At the
end of the year I applied for leave to sit the exam which I passed easily,
being vastly over-prepared.
At the Glasgow Office they were quite impressed
with my scholastic success.
They again had just the thing for me. "She never goes outside the
boom-defences, so you will have nothing to do but
study", they said. This
was the Saint Seriol, a pleasure steamer from the
job was to ferry homeward bound American troops out to the Queen Mary ad the
Queen Elizabeth at the Tail of the Bank in the
alongside at
quay with bands playing and colours flying. It
was all very grand. One lot
left behind a small dog. I suppose he was not allowed on the ship or
something. He looked so sad and lonely there by himself on the big parade
ground I went down and gave him a pat. That was it. From then on he
was my
dog. I called him Roger, because the fifth sparks of the Miralda was a chap
called F. J. J. de Ramer and known as DR, which, in Naval
terms was Dog
Roger. Roger was with me till he died of old age. He liked the parade
ground and used to sit there. When he hear the band coming he would start
to howl, louder and louder as the music approached, so that I had to dash
ashore and snatch him up as the band came round he corner.
When all the Yanks were gone we went on the Larne-Stanraer
ferry run. The
war was over and I had a place waiting for me at King's College,
September 1945 to do the Intermediate Science course. I was concious of a
feeling of renewal as I got off the train a Wembley
complete with my dog and
golf-clubs and heap of luggage. From five years of war I went on to six
years of study culminating in a Ph.D. just like the man in the pub in
Southsea said.