Category: Royal Navy

Within a very short time of being in Barracks I was given my draft to Belfast, some place in Ireland I had never heard of, in a country I knew nothing about. My mental image when I received the news was of being sent to a windswept, featureless bog with small white houses dotted about. I was not well pleased. The trip from Portsmouth to Belfast was long, unpleasant and unmemorable. We were met at the railway station in Belfast and taken to the Caroline, an old grey has-been of a ship, allegedly with a concrete bottom, which was used, and still is, as the titular Base of the Navy for Belfast. It was here we were assembled to be taken to find lodging in the grey Admiralty bus. To say we were miserable as the few of us got into that empty, dull bus and were trundled through the narrow, dark, wet streets in late December, would certainly be no over-statement . Why the powers, that were in charge, thought dumping me and my mate Bunny in Belfast on Christmas Eve, was likely to further the war effort, was beyond our understanding.

The bus had hardly stopped in a street before women rushed out with cries of “I’ll take two”, or one or three – whatever. We were dished out like food parcels to the starving, with no idea of what we were being let in for. Bunny and I were allocated to a Mrs Plump, a sharp lady of ample proportions, hair pulled back in a bun, arms akimbo, a toughie all right, but fair – well at first anyway. What subsequently followed was of our joint making. That first weekend was an eye opener. Strangers in a strange town rarely see the best. Unlike tourists, who generally have a foreknowledge, we had no such guide, it was dark, blacked-out and raining. Having dumped our kit, had a cup of tea, we left to reconnoitre the City. Naturally we went into the first pub we found. When that got a bit hairy we crossed the road to a dance hall where Yanks were being bloodied – literally. Unpromising and depressing.! The lot of us had been fed up when we arrived and what we saw as we peered out the partially steamed-up windows of the bus made our future look bleak and in those first few days our first impressions seemed to be confirmed.

The following day, Christmas Day, the town was empty, public transport was practically non-existent, and we were to be welcomed at the HMS Caroline for Christmas dinner, an equally dismal affair, as most of the Navy in Belfast were living ‘ashore’ and had their corporate feet firmly planted under civilian tables about the City. There was only one way we could go and that was up, nothing could conceivably have been worse. From the depths of despondency we started to reassess the real Belfast and more to the point, the real Belfast people. We had a small office, really a shed, on the edge of the largest dry-dock in the shipyard, the Thompson Dock. From there we telephoned our headquarters, Belfast Castle, and reported to the Port Wireless Officer, (the PWO), that everything was going well, even if it was not and enquired what his pleasure was at the same time. The Castle had been the property of Lord Shaftsbury and had been used for public functions prior to the war. When I joined the crew of HMS Caroline, the Castle had already been taken over, divided into small offices and ours was one of the nicest, with a view over Belfast Lough and was part of what had previously been the old ballroom. There is a tower at the North end and in that tower was a large signalling lamp, which Wrens used for asking ships coming up Belfast Lough to identify themselves.

The shed on the dry-dock had a couch which doubled as a bed, the usual office equipment, together with our tools and spares for many of the radio sets we were intended to fix. I was not the best riser in the mornings, and as I often had to work through the night, as the shipyard was on a round-the-clock shift system and there were only two of us. It could also be said that my extra curricular activities sometimes kept me out late also. Anyway, I considered that provided I was efficient and diligent, I should be able to run my life as I liked, rather than on the preconceived tramlines of the Navy’s way. Once I was in the routine I had little compunction in bending the rules. One of the slants I employed was to get up, throw on enough clothing to appear in public, walk down the road to the corner shop and use their telephone to inform the PWO that everything was all right and make the standard enquiry. It was only years later that the daughter of the person he was billeted with, the daughter I later married, informed me that he knew of my deception. He was a close one, he never said anything to me, perhaps his views on the Naval straight-jacket coincided with mine. Apparently he said to her, “Riggs telephones me from the shop at the bottom of his road and he thinks I assume he’s at the shipyard,” – sneaky I call it – on both sides.

When I arrived in Portsmouth barracks I found yet another illustration of the practical use of psychology, and while it was on a more lowly plane it was no less effective, it was the axiom of the ‘Messenger’. Those who wished to remain in barracks without let or hindrance, as the lawyers might say, fully vitalled, fully paid and with their rum ration intact, possessed themselves of several ports-of-call and a piece of paper. The specification of a port-of-call was firstly a place one could legitimately be heading for, with said piece of paper. Secondly it also had to be near a ‘caboosh’. A caboosh was somewhere one could disappear into, sleep in, was personal to one or shared with someone one trusted, and had been forgotten. It could take many forms. It might be a tiny room amounting to little more than a very large cupboard, rarely used and large enough to sling a hammock. It could be a small room or even a separate building, in which generators or some other self-operating piece of machinery could operate without much, if any, maintenance. It had to be forgotten by the establishment, or surplus to requirements, and it had to be lockable so a new lock could be fitted, for obvious reasons. Cabooshes were often shared.

It was then merely a matter of passing from one caboosh to another throughout the day, making sufficient appearances to be known by sight by authority and therefore become accepted as an essential part of the system. The Messenger had to travel so fast it was unlikely he would be stopped and questioned, and the paper, probably one of many, if it was examined at all, should fit any situation and would add that final patina of legitimacy. Authority, with its hundreds appearing and disappearing, every week, could never have policed the assemblage.

At nineteen I was obtaining an education which in future years made me the most suspicious person Soph had ever encountered. I was not in barracks for long, but it was an unforgettable experience. For a start, up until then I had either bought cigarettes at six pence a packet on the ship or rolled my own from my tobacco ration which consisted of a pound of tobacco, cigarette or pipe, once a month, in airtight half-pound tins, for about one shilling and sixpence. However, somewhere in the bowels of the barracks was a small community, who manufactured cigarettes out of the standard tobacco issue and sold them in boxes of 400, at three shillings and four pence.

The quarters had varied little since Nelson, steel framed buildings like warehouses, with tall factory-like windows and rooms so high one had to put one’s head back to see the ceiling. In the centre were lockers and running down the centre and two sides were the rails on which the hammocks were tied. This in itself was interesting as on rare occasions, drunks would come ‘off shore’ – navalese for coming back from a night out – quietly tie a sleeping man in his own hammock as he slept, using his hammock lashing, then they would climb up onto the beams and raise the poor devil until he was about ten to twelve feet from the floor and tie him there. It would only be when he wakened that he would be aware of his predicament and by then the drunks would be too fast asleep to enjoy the joke. He, meanwhile, would be scared to move in case the hammock was not secure.

By the time you have read this you will appreciate that there is more than one meaning to ‘passing out’ and the one in a military sense is not intended. We had suffered more than our fair share of bad weather and our convoy duty had not been so much dangerous as stressful as well as extended, with the result we were ‘chocker’, lower deck slang for disgruntled and fed to the teeth, and when chocker is said with venom, and is preceded by an epithet, it can hold considerably more emphasis, as it did then.

For some reason we dropped anchor at Southend, the only time we ever did, and those off Watch could not wait to belly up to the nearest bar, yours truly included. To get from the ship to the pier we were ferried in small boats we called ‘trot boats’, manned by locals. We then had to take a train, the one mile length of the pier and no sooner had we arrived on the promenade than we surged into the first pub we reached. Because the trot boat’s capacity was small, the number disembarking at any one time was also small, hence, when we reached the pub we found a crowd had already beaten us to it, and this was the story of the whole afternoon.

At that time there was a distinct lack of booze available of all descriptions and the landlords of the inns and pubs liked to keep most of it back for their regulars. It was not unheard of for a publican to aver that he had run out of beer or spirits or whatever, which often proved to be a lie, but who could blame him, we were there for a round or two, his regulars were there for life. The first pub where we achieved success said they had no beer, only a limited supply of gin, in the next it was only beer, in some it was even only port, with the result we had a brew swilling about in our stomachs which represented everything in the vintners list, consumed in the shortest possible time because we only had a few hours ashore; this was topped off with a greasy mix of fish and chips; but the real trouble was, we were still all as sober as the moment we had stepped from the train on arrival, and fed up about it, to boot – chocker!

There we were in the rain, waiting for the next train, apparently sober, chocker to the ‘n’th degree, after a shocking time at sea and the worst run ashore imaginable. The grumbling was vicious and the mood bad. If the Skipper had thought to release some of the tension by letting the Off-Watch ashore, it had misfired. In due course the train arrived and we boarded and sat silent through its long slow run to the end of the pier, at which point in the story I have to rely on reports as my memory of what took place is not so much vague as non-existent. Apparently I stepped from the train stone cold sober and then, without a sound, measured my length on the deck of the pier , out for the count, the alcohol fumes and the witches’ brew had caught up with me.

My comrades manhandled me into the trot boat and from the trot boat into the ship and down into our Mess where I was stretched out on a bunk, non compis, but my Samaritans had a problem. Immediately prior to the anchor being raised, it was part of my duty to examine the radar and radio gear and report to the Captain on the bridge. I was in no state to stand up, let alone look intelligent or talk sensibly. They drowned me in black coffee and salt water alternately until I surfaced, at which point it was ‘Show time’, I was due on the bridge. I remember saluting and mumbling something, but my condition must have been patent. The Skipper gave me one chance by asking was everything in order. My reply of “I’m —–ed if I know”, helped my case not one jot and I was dismissed. The fact that I then proceeded to trip over him, he was only about five foot in height, was the last straw. “Get off my bridge,” he shouted. “Clap that man in irons”, he roared, and they did. That is to say, I was not handcuffed, instead I was unceremoniously dropped through the hatch of the tiller flat on to a greasy steel deck where the chains leading to the tiller were connected to the gearing, and I was left there, in the dark, in the stink of oil and in my best suit – my ‘Tiddly Suit’, my pride and joy, made to measure of the best doeskin and embellished with badges picked out in gold braid and gold wire, while the ship set off on convoy once more.

I have to admit, I slept like a baby and next day appeared before the Officer of The Watch charged with being ‘drunk and incapable, ship under sailing orders’. I received a bit of a rollicking but I suspect the true circumstances had reached the ears of the Wardroom because I was awarded a loss of privileges for a period which meant I would lose one run ashore. I later found that the incident was not recorded on my papers, another sign of leniency

Pompey Barracks – Portsmouth To You! After leaving the ship, in due course I reached barracks in Portsmouth to await another draft. It was the first time I had been there to stay for more than a couple of days and I soon discovered it was a world of its own.

Immediately on arrival in barracks everyone went through the ritual of keeping appointments at the various departments in which records of his career were held. These records followed the service men and women round the world and no matter how short the stay, or even if it was a return visit after only a brief departure, the tradition of the appointment was an essential part of the first few days. It was a game – that was for sure – as the appointments were more a ritual than having any serious intent, it was a game which was an amalgam of ‘The Stations of the Cross’ and Monopoly, and those who were good at the game, the nefarious rogues, who never went to sea, never did any work, they were the lost legion, who had, in their eyes, won the game. If they were very good they kept it up for the whole duration of the war, never having to pass ‘Go’, never going to ‘Jail’, just picking up their cash and cigarettes, drinking their tot and being bored out of
their minds.

That was the key to failure, being bored. To be a single minded rogue requires ingenuity and intelligence, being part of a gang requires only obedience to the head rogue. The ones I came across were single, running their own rackets and trying to remain anonymous while being ostensibly part of the system. The real rogues were the ones on the strength who were never transferred and never drafted. Sometimes this was a bookkeeping error, sometimes as the result of greasing the right palm, but these men were legitimate members of the barracks and as such received their full pay, their rum ration, their cigarettes and even their leave

A Brush With Psychiatry My first encounter with psychiatry was in my last year at school to find what I was best suited for. In Pompey Barracks I had my second, there the Psychiatrist was universally called the ‘trick-cyclist’. I was on my way round the Monopoly board. I had arrived at the building housing the medical staff where I was due for yet another cursory examination. There I sat in a queue waiting my turn while others were there for many reasons

As I have previously said, I was a Wireless Mechanic, also only in for Hostilities Only, an HO, a new type of rating , dressed in what was picturesquely called ‘fore-and-aft rig’, a suit with shirt and tie and was generally ignored by the ‘real sailors’, who tended to talk to one another across an HO as if he was not there and this happened at the medical wing. I recall that at least one of the men in the waiting room was handcuffed to a sailor in gaiters, which would indicate he was a prisoner in custody, he had offended in some way, committed a violent act, jumped ship, stolen, anything which could result in a sentence of imprisonment to be served either in a naval establishment or a civil jail. Men in this category were automatically sent to the ‘trick-cyclist’ for examination prior to arraignment.

The conversation between the man in handcuffs, and others there for the same reason but not under guard, was enlightening to someone who had barely heard of the word psychologist at that time, a not uncommon state as the profession was in its infancy – but not as far as these sailors were concerned. They not only knew why they were there, having in most cases been there before, they knew the questions which would be asked, could reel off the right answer for standard Rorschach tests, knew the various other tests they were to undergo and advised one another on the answers the psychiatrist would need to be given if they were to be declared unfit for duty at sea. It was a fascinating approach to delinquency, one I never forgot, but more, it was a salutary illustration of the triumph of experience over theory.

By the time I was drafted I looked upon the destroyer almost as home and the prospect of Barracks made me even sorrier to leave. However, I had no choice and was sent back to Barracks. I suspect it was at the behest of a shore-based officer whose feathers I had ruffled. I had had an exasperating voyage, struggling with a silent set in which I knew the location and the result of the fault but not the cause, and short of totally stripping out every component I was unlikely to find the cause, so the odds were against success. Today there are rooms stacked with TV sets and computers under guarantee with similar irredeemable faults, it is a hazard of high-frequency technology.

In this instance, tiredness, cold, and being fed up, having spent hours fault-finding, only to be told it was something else, when the evidence I had put forward was transparent, forced me to tell the officer in words of one syllable exactly what I thought of his competence. – an act which probably saved my life, because shortly after I left my Hunt destroyer I heard it had been blown out of the water on the Malta convoy run in the Med.

For whatever reason, I found myself alone, on the wharf at Sheerness. I was the only one leaving the ship and so received ‘sippers’ in nearly every Mess on the ship and from nearly every rating in each Mess with the result that I was dumped on the jetty like a sack of potatoes, along with my hammock, my kit bag, suitcases and all – totally out for the count. I ultimately came to and when I put my hand in a jacket pocket I encountered it full of aspirin. Feeling in the other pocket, I was surprised to find it full of contraceptives, cynical farewell presents from the Sickbay Tiffy, a ‘friend’. There was a story which I believe was true and concerned sippers of Rum as celebration. On a larger ship than ours were twins and it was their 21st birthday. For twins to become 21 on the same ship would have gone round the lower deck like a whirlwind with the result everyone would be keen to wish them well, which meant sippers and the rest, from all over the ship – even, possibly, the wardroom. The following morning they were both found dead in their hammocks from alcohol poisoning. It doesn’t bear thinking what their parents felt, and there would have been a very subdued crew for a long time on the ship.

When I looked round Sheerness Docks I found the ship had gone. I pulled myself together and set off for the dockyard gates and the station to take me to London and then Portsmouth. Earlier I had filled my kit bag and hammock with cartons of cigarettes to stand me in good stead at the barracks but I had estimated without taking the Customs Officer into account. “Have you just come off that ship?” he asked, politely,. “Yes,” I whispered, hung over. “I take it your kit bag and hammock are filled with duty-frees?” He did not wait for a reply but just finished the statement. “Go back into the Yard and get rid of them and then come back here and be searched.”

I was staggered, but did as he said, it was experience speaking, not guesswork. I sold the cigarettes at cost and returned. He searched and then I left. Fortunately he did not do a body search. In the meantime I had put on a pair of sea-boot stocking and filled them with packets of cigarettes, I had some in my hatbox at the bottom of the kit bag and others here and there. When he searched the hammock and found none, that was it, honour had been satisfied, but I nonetheless did wonder if he had a few friends in the dockyard who were privy to his policies – even at nineteen I was cynical.

We were entering harbour with our new Skipper in charge and most of the crew were getting into what was referred to as their Number Ones, their shore-going gear, their Sunday suits, when suddenly we were thrown to the deck. We’d hit the harbour wall. It was at the time when our place at the head of the convoy as Flotilla Leader had been usurped and we were demoted because of the rank of our new Skipper. No one was pleased with the situation and, if by chance he had won the Irish lottery, the crew would have griped that he had managed to do it when the kitty was low, that was how they felt about the state of things. He, the Skipper, had inadvertently called for ‘full ahead’ when he had meant ‘full astern’, or that was the gossip, the scuttle-butt. That was not what annoyed the men, they would have applauded the act if it had come off properly, but the idiot had managed to hit a rubbing strake, a fixed fender made of hardwood which was attached to the harbour wall just for that event, instead of hitting the wall itself. The blow had been fended off to some extent and all that was damaged was the Skipper’s pride and a few of the bow plates; instead of shifting the engines on their mountings and putting us into dry dock for a month with oodles of home leave. He was not popular. What was worse still was that as we were shortly due for a boiler clean they proposed putting a collision mat on the bow and sending us off on convoy next day, with the pumps trying to keep the water down.. A collision mat is a heavy tarpaulin which is tied over the hole and mainly held in place by the pressure of the water as the ship ploughs through the waves. It is a bit more scientific than that, but that’s the main idea. The whole business had been totally mishandled as far as the lower deck was concerned.

During the previous trip I had developed severe tooth ache and as the Sickbay Tiffy was not licensed to do dentistry I had to be content with pain killers until we reached Sheerness. There I went ashore to the Naval hospital and was attended to by a Surgeon Captain Dentist – a four-ringer, no less. ‘Does this hurt?’  he asked tapping a tooth and trying to anaesthetise me at the same time with a waft of stale gin. ‘No!’  I said. ‘Nor this?’,tapping again. ‘Ouch’! I said. I’m no stoic. ‘Right!’ he said, but I could not answer as I had a mouthful of his right fist. There was a push and a pull, a quick tweak, and there was one of my sacred molars at the end of his pliers. He admired it from every angle. ‘Nothing wrong with that one,’ he said, ‘Must have pulled the wrong one’, he added. Had to come out sometime. Open wide!’

I was sore and annoyed and fed up into the bargain. It was raining cats and  dogs. I had missed the rest of the crew who were off somewhere and so I mooched the streets until I espied a cinema with a film called ‘Hell’s-a-poppin”. It is that daft film where a man comes on at the beginning of the film with a pine tree sapling in a pot, and all through the film he reappears with it having grown more and more each time until in the last reel the tree is on its side, on a low loader, with a bear up in the top branches. The film cheered me so much I nearly forgot the incident, the idiot dentist, his halo of gin, but not ‘Hell’s-a-poppin’. Think what I could have claimed from the Government today for incompetence.

If the wide screen is to be believed, in the days of the great railroad expansion in the USA, there was a tradition that on the completion of a section of track, a golden spike was ceremoniously driven into the last tie. In the Navy there was a legend that every wooden warship had a golden spike driven into the keel for luck during construction. This yarn was then perpetuated in steel ships as a ruse to inveigle the young, the unsophisticated and the unwary into the darker corners of the hull for nefarious purposes. The cry on the Mess-decks when a new recruit came aboard was often, ‘Take him to see the golden rivet!’

At the end of one convoy we arrived at Rosyth to find cardboard boxes of knitted articles, most of which were in an unsuitable khaki. There were long scarves which seemed to go on for ever, pullovers, roll-necked sweaters and even long-johns, and many were the epitome of cliches which often accompanies amateur knitting. The articles had been made by the WRACS manning, (if that’s the right word), an Ack Ack battery on the outskirts of Edinburgh. They had asked the Commodore for permission to adopt a ship and we were it. What followed would have made an Oscar Hammerstein musical, it was that predictable.

An invitation to visit was sent by the Captain to the Commanding Officer and it was arranged that at the end of our next trip the WRACs would come aboard. From that point until we next docked there was only one topic of conversation and one outcome. Every section of the ship spent its off-duty hours preparing The place had never been cleaner and tidier. In my section we had a few advantages and we made good use of them. The screen of the radar display tube was a brilliant blue, while the warning lights throughout the small office were a bright red and green. Overhead was a white light. With our resident artist on hand we made a drawing of a voluptuous woman fully clothed in red, green and blue garments. The effect was that, without the overhead light, when we doused the screen or changed the lights, she lost some of the garments in each transformation. After some trial and error it was a great success, well we thought so and the girls were polite enough to applaud.

The crew had organised a meal in the canteen in the dockyard accompanied by a hogshead of beer (54 gallons). In due course a lorry arrived and the ship was inundated with khaki. It was interesting to see how polite the sailors were in allowing the girls to precede them up ladders. Couples and groups were everywhere, in the engine-room, the boiler-room, our wireless offices. They turned the gun turrets, stood on the bridge and conned the ship from the Coxswain’s wheel. And all the time as one sailor passed another, each guiding his bevy of beauties, the question was always asked, “Have they seen the Golden Rivet yet?” followed by a dirty laugh.

The girls were finally dispatched back to camp and the ship got back to normal until it was time, on the following day, for ‘Liberty Men’ being piped and the ‘Off Watch’ to line up for inspection to go ashore. Then the fun started, lies were bandied about with all the sincerity of a politician on the stump. No one was going anywhere near the gun battery, some were going for a walk, some to the cinema in Dunfermline, but there must have been a considerable change of heart because, when it was time for the WRACS to come off duty, there was half our crew lined up at the gate, looking sheepish.

When I left the ship some of the men were still making pilgrimages to Edinburgh and the gun battery. It is amazing what can result from the kind act of presenting sailors with badly knitted woollens, in the wrong colour.

There is nothing more stimulating than sitting on a button on a warship when it is gathering speed. Button is the term used for the round pancake of wood set on top of the mast to protect the end from the weather. Radar relies on signals received through a special cable which connects the set in the ship to the aerial array at the top of the mast and in rough seas water might get in through damage to the copper casing of the cable making the aerial useless. Discovering this condition is simple, locating the damage is tedious and, in this case, hazardous. Normally this sort of testing is a routine carried out in harbour when the ship is still and everything is switched off, doing it at sea is only carried out in extremis, as on this occasion.

On top of the mast and at various points down it are gathered the aerials of a number of electronic devices, including the aerials of the large wireless transmitter If the latter was operating on full power, the current could blow a person off the mast. To avoid this there were safety switches, small metal connectors which were removed from all the various transmitters and handed to the Captain in person, before the ascent was attempted and retrieved only on reaching the deck once more. It is therefore reasonable to assume the Captain is aware that one of his charges is up there sitting on the button fiddling with an Avometer. We were quietly steaming along at the rear of the convoy, at the speed of the slowest ship, about six knots. I had my legs firmly crossed round the mast, my arms wrapped round the aerial support and was busy testing away in the sunshine. The ship’s proportions were about 250 feet long by 26 wide, a midget greyhound of the sea, such, that even in the calm sea on that day, she still rolled and pitched. The crew used to say she would pitch and roll on a wet flannel. One minute I was looking down at the deck to starboard, the next to port, but it was a gentle rhythm easy to become used to.

I was nearly finished when I heard a shout followed by the clang of the engine-room telegraph, and a face from the bridge was looking up at me and gesticulating. He had no need, the shudder of the mast, the rise of the bow and then the wicked sway of the mast told me we had an emergency and I was dispensable. Now I could not only see the deck I could see the sea below me on alternate rolls and I estimated we had doubled our speed and still rising. I just hung on and waited. In the end I think the emergency was solved because the cause was never made clear to me and within minutes we had slowed and were quietly regaining station. I finished my check and then slowly climbed down and retrieved the special key from the Captain. He said nothing and who was I to comment? For an instant, up there, I thought I was in trouble, but as time went on and I seemed secure enough, strange to say I enjoyed the experience.

Stimulation has a number of meanings not all pleasant. When we were on convoy on the East Coast we would pass Whitely Bay. On one trip we saw a light in the sky which told us Newcastle was being bombed and this, understandably, always made the Geordies we had on board furious and worried. There was an instruction to the RAF to avoid convoys as the latter had a propensity for opening up first and asking questions later, because it was not unheard of for German bombers returning from an unsuccessful raid to jettison their bombs on ships. Apparently the wake of ships in a cluster is clearly visible from the air on the darkest nights.

One night, we were closed up at action stations when the crews on the guns and the people on the bridge heard a plane. There was a system where we could use a recognition signal through the radar to identify friend from foe and when the Navigator asked we were able to tell him if it was a friendly aircraft, probably a stray limping back from a raid, but unfortunately, in this case and by this time, the itchy trigger fingers of the merchant men had opened up and scored a direct hit. Down below we felt the ship gather speed and turn quickly and we guessed we were going to the rescue. We heard later from the men on the upper deck that they had seen the orange light which pilots had attached to their May West life jackets, which were energised when in contact with the sea, but when we arrived where he had last been seen, there was no sign of him nor the light. We were all subdued and there was even an element of guilt, although none of us had anything to feel guilty about, we had not been the ones to open fire.

The Library I have already described the way we lived in general, with me doing most of the catering for our mess and the E Boat problems and how we were provided with German speakers whose sole purpose was to listen through the hours of darkness for the officers on the ‘E’ Boats communicating in German with one another in plain language, the specialists would then try to obtain a bearing on the ‘E’ Boats and we would be off in pursuit, irrespective of mines. These specialists had to be housed somewhere, so the Skipper decided to start another Mess. To it were added the ERA, the Engine room Artificer, the Gunnery Artificer and a couple of other stray bodies. A small compartment became home to us, it was cramped and uncomfortable, especially at night when most of the hammocks were slung, but we melded and that was the main thing.

The two specialists were German speakers, both straight from University with little or no training, even their dress, and their lack of interest in improving it, proclaimed them to be fish out of water. One was a lecturer, the other an Estonian who was a perennial student and had attended a number of colleges in Britain and abroad. We were not resented by the crew, just treated as one would expect Martians to be treated if they were found to be benign. We would get visits reminiscent of those of children at the zoo seeing Orang-utan for the first time, with similarly inane comments. Slowly the novelty wore off we became the focus of attention for a different reason. Avid readers all, our combined tastes were as catholic as a public library. Slowly, on the tops of the lockers grew a collection of books, and as it grew so men from all parts of the ship came to borrow. We had become a voluntary lending library. Even the Officers came and it was interesting to find that among the crew, the more uneducated the men were, the greater the number of the classical or informative books they borrowed.

Pt Shipboard Style The Navy was never renowned for its physical training, except for the famous gun crews at the Royal Tattoo every year, taking a gun to pieces, carting it from one end of an arena to the other, and firing blanks when it is assembled once more. Also young Boy Sailors run up a rigging and perform feats of daring miles in the air on a replica of a square-rigged sailing ship’s mainmast. But in my experience those were for show, generally there was little in the way of physical jerks in the accepted sense.

It was summer, the sun at its height, we were off to fetch a convoy and so action stations were unlikely to be called. The crew were hot and tired, or perhaps bored would be a better term, so someone, probably Jimmy The One, thought up the idea of something physical for the good of our health. Try to imagine a ship some 250 feet long and some 26 feet wide, with superstructures astern and foreword, guns, a funnel, depth charges, life boats and Carley floats to contend with. What was left was a sort of gangway past all these obstacles where two men could barely pass one another. There was no point then, in having any sort of exercise unless it could be of real interest, not just a matter of expending energy and oozing perspiration – another incentive. You’ve got it! Money, cash had to be brought into the equation and that was what the Bosun and the Gunner’s Mate organised.

Firstly there was a shooting gallery at the bow. Everyone paid so much a shot with a rifle at objects thrown into the sea, the person to hit the most took all or nearly all, some of the money went into the ship’s funds. Clearly the more one spent on shots the greater chance there was on winning, it was a bit like ‘Scratch cards, it had that same compulsive element. The other competition was much more physical and weighted against the more sedentary of as, the deck hands and the gun crews were odds on favourites.

We were ‘handicapped’, and, like the shooting there was an entrance fee – it was possible to have more than one go. Someone ran a book so we could bet on the favourites and perhaps recoup that way. One started beside the funnel on the port side, and then ran round the ship twice, which entailed rushing up or sliding down ladders, finally climbing, only using the arms, up a mast-stay to collect a piece of paper from a bundle tied about 12 – 14 feet from the deck, returning to the deck and running over a chalk line drawn there. The ship was still steaming and rolling while the sports were on, so the race round and the climb up the stay were a severe test on the muscles of the chest and arms and on the skin on the hands, especially in the descent. It was unbelievable what that simple competition did for moral, if nothing else it gave us a topic of conversation for days after, as we tended our wounds and ridiculed the more incompetent.

The watch aboard on our destroyer consisted of those men who would normally be on watch at sea. In harbour the rigorous discipline was relaxed and there were hours when one could go ashore; the rest being on leave. Most of the time life was very routine and monotonous. In the first week or so after I had recovered from the seasickness which had put everything else out of my mind, I was a little apprehensive when they battened us down in the bowels of the ship as we sailed through mine- fields, or closed up for Action Stations, but that too became routine, one cannot be apprehensive forever, the stress would be too much to bear.

In harbour, it was a relief to lose about two thirds of the crew and breath once again, with the ship silent and still, one could sleep peacefully on a locker instead of a hammock and the canteen in the dockyard saved any cooking. The monotony though was increased. I was never terribly gregarious so I spent these periods of calm, quietly doing chores which I had no time to do at sea and this included washing the hammock, the bed cover, two blankets and a pillow case, apart from the clothes which were done at the same time. Washing clothes at sea , a necessary evil, was put off as long as supplies of spare garments lasted and then calculations were made to find the minimum requirement to reach harbour.

In contrast, the system in harbour, was most enjoyable, provided no one else wanted to use the shower. There was only one shower tray in each bathroom, or ‘heads’ as they were called, made of fawn ceramic tiles and supporting two or three shower heads.. Needless to say as the toilets had no doors it was unlikely the shower would have a curtain. Privacy was something that simply did not exist, probably for a number of very good reasons. With a bung in the shower plug-hole I would turn on the shower heads until the tray was almost over flowing. Then I would chuck in all the washing at once, copious soap, flaked from the long yellow bars we were issued with every month along with the tobacco. It was the only washing powder available then. With book in hand, I tramped round and round for ages on the washing, reading the while, or with an ear to the BBC forces programme coming over the Tannoy system. Half way through I would rub any dirty bits like the collars and cuffs of shirts, with the remainder of the yellow soap and then tramp again, finally rinsing several times in the same way. I can’t describe how therapeutic that exercise was, even if the soles of my feet were wrinkled with the long immersion. The only ironing I ever did, other than pressing the crease in the trousers, was the collar of my white shirts which were reserved for shore leave, and an area of about six inches round the collar which would be seen below the jacket. Drying took almost no time as the heat of the Boiler Room took care of that.

Another way of remaining sane in that maelstrom of humanity was to take a fish box, set it on deck behind the funnel so I was sheltered from the wind and, with my back absorbing the warmth of the steel heated by the exhaust from the oil burners, I would sit there in the late evening glow as the sun set, and long after, watching the florescence of the bow-waves rush past the ship in their rippling ‘V’ formation and the sluggish merchant men silhouetted in the dying embers of the day. Those minutes and hours were very precious.