Old Gaffer

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  • Royal Navy, Belfast Shipyard Part 2

    Shipbuilding is probably the most complicated and detailed engineering exercise, outside aeroplane design. The size of a ship, various hull designs, its use, all give multitudes of options from the thickness of the plates, to the design of door handles. All the equipment has to be installed which involves designing the positioning, the fixings and the power. Multiply this throughout the ship and the complexity of design is mind boggling, and is transferred to construction on the day the contract is signed It is therefore no wonder that in 1943, Belfast shipyard, Harland and Wolf, among others in Britain was working flat out with an enormous workforce.

    The shed on the dry-dock had a couch doubling as a bed, the usual office equipment, plus our tools and spares for the radio sets we fixed. Our job was to inspect all the radio wiring and installations, make sure the equipment was in order, sail on the first trial and approve the work, – ships as large as the cruiser The Black Prince, and as small as landing craft. Sometimes I would also have to go to places like Greencastle, County Down, to repair sets for the Coastguard.

    Belfast Shipyard Part 3There were other rackets, the pokers with the multi-coloured handles were in nearly every house in the city and most workmen carried a cigarette lighter, which had been made either in the ‘yard or the Aircraft Factory.
    Sailors were not averse to rackets either. There was a ferry, which ran from Pollock Dock to the shipyard. Naval vessels, which came in for minor repairs sometimes went to Pollock Dock, where the Customs officials were a dour strict lot. The sailors would then take the ferry to the shipyard, still ostensibly being within the precincts of the Harbour, and then take a tram out of the shipyard gate with their cigarettes and rum intact,
    When in barracks, and at sea, we lived on tinned milk to such an extent that I have never been able to drink it since, I hated it so much. There was a saying that the ships at Scapa Flow could run aground on the milk tins, which had been thrown over board over the years. This meant that crates of milk tins were forever being brought aboard or transferred from naval vessels.
    There was a story going the rounds in Pollock Dock which while seeming far fetched, was sufficiently technical and detailed to be true. With plenty of time at sea it was a simple matter to collect carefully opened and emptied tins of milk, solder the lids back on, another one inside about and inch from the top, and after filling the small compartment at the top with milk, finally sealing it with a lid taken from another tin. The perpetrator had therefore created a tin with two hidden compartments, one shallow and one comprising the rest of the tin, with the smaller one containing milk. All that was required then was for the larger compartment to be filled with rum and this was allegedly done through holes in the tin beneath the label and sealed with some form of glue as soldering would have caused an explosion. Once made the tins could be used repeatedly.
    It only remained for the crate of rum to be carried through the gate in a Naval vehicle. If the Custom’s men were suspicious, the tins would seem to be the real thing in all respects and if pierced would spill milk. The excuse for the transfer would be that the milk was thought to be off and was being replaced. Whether it was actually true I never discovered, but as I heard it from a number of quarters I am inclined to believe it. Rum, after all was fetching a good price, with shortages in every pub.

  • Royal Navy, Belfast Shipyard Part 1.

    To those who hate technicalities I apologise for this entry, For me it records something gone and lost never to be recovered. Whether that is good is debateable. In ’43, I was drafted to Belfast to supervise the radio installations on the warships being built there. The shipyard was vast, there were at least six dry-docks functioning concurrently and ships of every size were issuing continuously. Today the area is almost a wasteland. Then, no sooner was a ship off the slipway than the keel plates of the next were down. The noise was deafening and vibrant. The very place itself seemed to be alive. One could see it transforming day by day, ships grew, they changed colour, they left, others were planted, while the men, tens of thousand of them, were like insects, dwarfed by the ships, the cranes and gantries which they served and which served the ships.

    The men were working round the clock on some contracts, so it was only at the end of a shift that one realised the size of the workforce when the men issued in their hordes from every gate, running for the trams which were lined up along the Queen’s Road. Every day, at knocking-off time, it was like the end of the match at Wembley on Cup Day. The trams were old, many with no cover to the top deck. As they gathered speed men came from everywhere along the road, from design offices, accounts, drillers, platers, electricians, joiners, rivet boys and me, jumping onto the running board, and when the inside of the tram was full, which included the stairs and standing on the upper storey, we would then stand on the heavy steel bumper round the back and hang on as the tram swayed and rattled over the tracks set in the granite blocks. This was all standard practice and just to show there was no favouritism, the conductor would collect the fares of those hanging on as well as those impeding his ascent of the stairs.

    Many would have a small haversack slung over one shoulder carrying the remnants of their ‘piece’, the midday snack, the little tin for sugar and tea, and, perhaps, something which should have remained in the shipyard or been shown to the Customs Man at the gate. I was advised to get the little tin. It consisted of two of the small size, oval Coleman’s mustard tins, soldered together by their bottoms to form two compartments, one for sugar the other for tea. Most people also had a can – a tea can. I had a tea can, a disused food tin, blackened by use and with a wire handle – an essential piece of equipment as necessary as my Avometer with which I tested the radio sets. Holding just over a pint of water, managed by the rivet boys when they were not heating or throwing rivets, they would take the cans at break time, fill them with water and put them on the rivet brazier.. When boiling they would bring them to the men who would stand, hold the tin by the wire-loop handle, put the tea and sugar in and then, with a back-and-forth swinging motion start the build up of momentum and finally complete the ritual by swinging the tin in a vertical circle, described by their arm fully rotating round their shoulder, so the ingredients went to the bottom – the principle of the centrifuge. The tea ceremony was then complete and all that remained was to drink it out of a stained enamel mug

    The skill of the rivet boys had to be seen to be appreciated. They were apprentice riveters. One would heat the rivets to orange heat and then grasping one with long tongs, hurl it up to another boy, the catcher, standing precariously high on the scaffolding, who would catch it in a bucket, remove it with tongs and fit it into holes in the two plates which were to be riveted, so the riveter and the holder could then together hammer it to a tight fit. Targets aren’t new. Men, although officially on the workforce of the yard, worked in gangs selling their combined services to the Company, contracting the work and being paid as a group. A man was paid a rate for producing a product in an agreed time, based on a Rate Fixer’s assessment having watched the man work, and the man under scrutiny was very particular to cut no corners. Once the rate had been agreed the man upped productivity to get a comfortable wage and set aside enough products to go to a Wednesday match without being missed, while a mate was handing in his work.

  • Royal Navy, War-tine Belfast

    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.

  • Royal Navy, Pompy and Psychiatry

    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.

  • Royal Navy, Pompy Barracks’ Lost Navy

    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.

  • Royal Navy, Leavong ‘Home’ for the unknown.

    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.

  • Royal Navy, The Witchita and the Tuscaloosa

    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.

  • Royal Navy,’Hell’s a poppin’

    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..

  • Royal Navy,The dispicable incident of the grandfather clock

    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.

  • Royal Navy, The Golden River

    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