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It was just before the Italian landings that several Landing Craft Tanks (LCTs) were brought into Belfast to be fitted out as Landing Craft Guns (LCG’S). They were in several of the dry-docks, and the work was so urgent all the trades were working together, so there was controlled chaos, which meant that I had to work at night when thing had quietened down. The modifications to the LCGs consisted of making living quarters in the centre of the ships which would house the gun crews of Royal Marines and would also act as the support for the 4 inch guns they proposed to use for shelling the shore before the landings.

To enter the dry-dock one passed through huge wrought iron gates, at least twelve feet high, supported on Gargantuan pillars. The gates were most impressive and were opened every morning and closed and locked every night. When I had finished work at two one morning, I found the gates were closed. It was dark, and no street lights due to the blackout. With a torch I managed to see enough to tie all my tools, meters and equipment, together with a length of flex. Wrapping the flex round my wrist I climbed to the top of the gate, hauled the gear up one side and down the other, and finally clambered down the gate, safe and sound – just – it had been a hazardous experience. The jolt came later. As I was walking back to the hut I found the walls on either side of the gate had been blasted away in the Blitz – I could have walked round the pillars and out of the dry-dock. I was l told the unions insisted the gate keeper was an essential part of security and he was to be retained. to continue opening and locking the gates morning and night. Such are the rocks of precedent upon which our war effort was buil

When I arrived back at the hut I was too tired to put up the blackout, instead I put on the electric fire and crashed out on the couch. After a while I woke thinking I was taking the flu, coughed, turned over and went to sleep again. I awoke twice more, but on the third occasion I lifted my torch to see the time only to find the beam of the torch was no longer than two feet, the room was filled with a white choking smoke. Immediately I went to the door, I was both sick and dizzy. It transpired that someone had leaned a coil of rubber-covered telcathene cable against the fire and it was burning. I am convinced if I had gone to sleep just once more I would never have awakened

A young married woman complained to me the other day that for a long time she and her husband had been trying to obtain a mortgage, and now the mortgage rates were going up yet again their target was vanishing over the horizon. They are a hard-working couple, he with a university degree in Media Studies for which he cannot get a job, and still has a postgraduate loan to pay back. This little occurrence raises a number of questions in my mind. Why is it that the money people, the banks etc, who must be aware that every action that they take has often grave repercussions especially to those on low income levels and choose to ignore the fact?

I often hear of students selecting to study subjects that I believe have a limited requirement in the job market, sometimes because there may be a cache in studying the subject, or because it is easier. I can remember when I used to train graduates who came straight from university with good degrees, having to bring them down to my level because that was what the job required. At university they had been trained to design some of the latest, costliest and most complicated structures, which they would never come across unless they were working for a very exceptional, specialised firm.

In the world of commerce one of the rules that all people generally have is that of supply and demand. It is only a fool who stocks up his shop without reference to what he is likely to sell and yet I question whether there is an assessment of the universal demand of the various subjects being studied related to the demand by industry, the government and the private sector. When you get the sort of credit crunch that we have at the moment, when well educated, well trained specialists are actually losing their jobs, not to have some knowledge of supply and demand of the various trades, professions, and opportunities is surely inadequate. That information will be of considerable help to those advising youngsters what they study, or if indeed a university degree is the correct option. These advisers must be able to give sensible advice, based on facts, not as I suspect, guesswork. These kids are entitled to at least choose the better of several options, even if those on offer are not what they had hoped to find. Education is going to cost them money that they can ill afford, and only if they get a job at the end of their training are they going to get out of the quagmire of debt. By the same token, any student who does not finish the course, or fails to obtain work in his chosen subject is wasting the bursary.

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.

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.

When I arrived in Portsmouth barracks, known as Pompy, 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.

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, which 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 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.

I have mentiond the first part of this elsewhere, but this is the full picture. , The Wichita and the Tuscaloosa, two American cruisers arrived at Rosyth. The Americans had only recently entered the war and, I suspect, this fact affected the American’s attitude, they were doing us a favour coming over to help. Our Skipper invited a contingent to come aboard as a good-will gesture and we entertained them. They were aghast at the conditions we were living under, conditions we were accustomed to but hated. None the less it made us feel that we were ‘hardy chaps’ which might have done nothing to alleviate the discomfort but helped the ego. With the result we were generous to a fault, giving them a taste of our valuable rum, cigarettes and, in my case, spare badges as keepsakes, and my response was the norm rather than the exception.

In return we were invited aboard their ship. I think in between we had entertained them to a meal in the canteen. Anyway, we went on board their ship and discovered that while everyone in the world is born equal, that is where it stops. We had to eat, sleep and rest in our tiny Mess. These colonial cousins, each, mark you, had the choice of a hammock place or a proper bunk running fore and aft, not seat lockers from which one could roll on to the deck in a calm sea. They then took us to the canteen where they had a choice of food placed in sectioned, stainless steel trays and a separate place to eat, Not only that, they had a recreation area.

The Royal Navy, in its wisdom, used to decide on the size of a ship, put in all the armament, ammunition, then all the gubbins like Asdic, Wireless, Radar, and only then did they remember they had to squeeze the men round the bits and pieces. The Americans apparently put the men in, made them happy and then, as an afterthought put in the essentials. Jealous? You’ve no idea! The final straw came when we left their bloody ships with our hands empty, no souvenirs, no badges, no tobacco, no nothing!

The following night we were up the Noo – Edinburgh and found the Yanks cuddling the girls, in all the pubs, and, you’ve guessed it, war broke out. I was on the periphery and saw little but I was told later of the main engagement which took place on Prince’s Street. Apparently a number of our chaps, with some from other ships in our flotilla, were walking along peaceably when they were confronted by Yanks. A few pleasantries were exchanged and then our chaps carefully stacked their rain coats and hats against the pavement wall and waded in. The battle was fierce and short, broken up by the appearance in wailing jeeps of the US Naval Police who were entirely selective. They would grab a body, if it was American they would cosh it with a club, if it was one of ours they would shove it back into the brawl and grab another body. It was all over in seconds once the MP’s arrived. Our chaps brushed themselves off, carefully collected their caps and coats once again and went looking for a pub. The tales after that were long, tall, tedious and kept the Mess decks alive for weeks.

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 ‘Hells-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 ‘Hells-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 clichés 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

We had just come back from the Atlantic and were a day ahead of schedule so the Skipper, who was a Scot to his finger tips, decided we would drop anchor in a fjord in the North of Scotland, which we did. He went ashore to see some of his cronies. Apparently it was a favourite venue for his fishing trips and he was well known at the hotel. It was Sunday. In Scotland, at that time, nothing moved on Sunday, unless it was going to the Kirk, in the Kirk, or returning from the Kirk. One thing, definitely off limits was the hotel bar, it was locked up tight.

We received a signal and in due course we were told that the Off Watch had been invited to come ashore as guests of the locals. Not only that they opened up the bar and joined us – gladly I suspect. They told us that our appearance at the head of the fjord had prompted near panic, that reigned because they thought we were the vanguard of a defence force to inhibit an invasion in the North of Scotland. The Home Guard had rushed up into the mountains and the ARP were on Red Alert.

I don’t know whether it was relief or just typical Scots generosity but the drink was free and they gave some of us salmon fishing flies from a case on the wall. By evening we had dined and drunk well and were back on board. That was not the last of the matter – unfortunately. The Skipper was informed that night that the hotel had lost a grandfather clock and a hall carpet. Some inebriate had stolen the clock and wrapped it in the hall carpet to bring it onboard. All hell broke loose but no one owned up. It was then decided to search the ship and the Officer of the Watch accompanied by the Boatswain went from Mess to Mess searching. They reached the forepeak, where the Stokers had their Mess still with no luck. Things were looking bad. The ship was swinging at anchor and had turned across the current, and the story was that the search party was about to leave the Mess when the ship gave a slight roll and the clock chimed once. With the ‘dong’ reverberating through the Mess, there was no doubt what was where. In fact the carpet wrapped clock was hidden behind the hammocks in the Hammock rack. The search had not been diligent enough.

The Skipper sent the miscreant back to the hotel with the clock, all under guard, to make his own apologies and I’m sure he would have liked to scarper if he had half a chance, what waited him when we reached Rosyth did not bear thinking about, it was the Glass House, notorious and feared.

The day came when more of the new breed of craftsmen were sent to the ship to supplement the work normally done by the regulars and to carry out duties which were occasioned by the advent of more and more new technology. For example, at night, E’ Boats were wont to tie up to the buoys along the swept channel running from the Thames Estuary to past the Humber and even nearly as far as South Shields. They would sow mines then lie there in the dark waiting for the convoys heading North and then to the Atlantic or returning from America. The radar operator would record a signal and shout up the voice pipe that he had “Echo bearing Green 30”, or whatever. The Navigator or the Officer of the Watch would consult the chart and, in the early days would shout back, “Disregard, buoy Number so and so.” and that would be that for a little while until a ship in the middle of the convoy would burst into flames followed by another and maybe more.

The Admiralty then sent us men 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 and as my accommodation in the PO’s Mess had met with such resentment 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 about twelve feet by twelve, 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 in the ways of the sea, even their dress, and their lack of interest in improving it, proclaimed them to be fish out of water. One was a lecturer and the other an Estonian who was a perennial student and had attended a number of colleges both in Britain and on the Continent. We were not resented by the rest of 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-utang for the first time, with similarly inane comments. Slowly the novelty wore off and then we became the focus of attention for a different reason. We were all avid readers and our combined tastes were as catholic as a public library. Slowly, round the tops of the lockers the collection of books grew, 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.

Small ships, like destroyers, frigates, corvettes and mine sweepers had relatively so few crew in each Mess and the Messes were so scattered throughout the ship, that with watch keeping duties it was difficult to feed them in the way big ships did with what was called ‘central Messing’. In the latter case there were chefs and a dining area where the men were fed on the cafeteria system. On the small ships we had what was called ‘canteen Messing’ which would appear a strange name when we had no canteen in the accepted sense. In fact we had a little tiny cubicle about the size of the average bathroom which formed a shop, where the cigarettes, sweets and food stuffs were sold over a stable-door counter and which was run by the NAAFI. It was called the Canteen.

Each Mess was provided periodically with an amount of credit for the number of men to be fed, calculated on a daily basis, and it was up to the Mess to make up its own menus, buy the raw materials either from the little NAAFI shop or the supply Tiffy, or both, and prepare the food. You can imagine that at the end of a period there was either a surplus or more likely a deficit, and so budgeting was a vital art, as was the design of the menus for such small numbers of men. My job on the ship was almost unique because I was in charge of so little equipment that, providing it did not break down, I had hours on my hands with nothing to do. It was inevitable therefore that I was nominated as cook and Mess caterer. The system was fairly uncomplicated. I prepared the food, took it up to the cook, told him when it was wanted by, he cooked it and then I collected it and served it. If the preparation was arduous then others helped and there were occasions when others took over my duties, especially if I had work to do.

Our staple was roast beef and roast potatoes and sometimes I would make Yorkshire pudding. Therefore Toad in the Hole was an obvious choice, we also had stews and fries. I think breakfast was the inevitable bacon and eggs prepared and provided by the cook himself, so long as there were supplies of bacon and eggs on board. When the money or the stores ran low so the meals became more simple, but we managed to keep a high standard most of the time, even to the extent of having jam tart with four types of jam in the quarters to please all tastes.