J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY C6

Chapter 6 The Navy at Sea

(a)Convoy Signalman.

Coastal convoys were assembled in Southend anchorage and sailed daily to the Firth of Forth and twice a week to Portsmouth. From the fall of France in 1940 until after D-day in 1944 the English Channel was closed to deep-sea ships and they either discharged at west coast ports or came round the north of Scotland for ports on the east coast and London. In due course a high proportion of Convoy Signalmen were drafted from Southend to Liverpool which was the assembly port for many deep-sea convoys including those across the Atlantic and the deadly route to Russia across the top of the world.
Escorts on the coast were a mixture of old V. and W. destroyers from the First World War, newer Hunt Class destroyers and some of the vastly inferior American four-funnelled survivors oft he First War and about 20 years of moth-balling.
It was a fundamental rule that the Senior Officer of the Escort (S.O.E.) was in overall command of the convoy and on the coast where S.0.E's were either Lt. Commanders or Lts. R.N. and Commodores were Commanders R.N.R. this was certainly enforced.This reflected the great gulf fixed between regular officers and reservists. The saying was that an officer R.N. was a gentleman trying to be a sailor, an R.N.R. was a sailor (fromthe Merchant Navy) trying to be a gentleman and an R.N.V.R.was neither trying to be both. It is fair to say that each straight ring (R.N.) was worth two wavy ones (R.N.R.) and any number of R.N.V.R..
I suspect that S.O.E’s on deep-sea convoys handled Commodores rather more warily as the latter were apt to be retired Admirals with friends in high places, but I never saw this at work as I remained based on Southend until I was demobbed. My chalet-mate Bert from Skegness finished up in Liverpool and was once the lone signalman on the ship acting as Vice-Commodore on a trip across the Atlantic eastbound. They had a radio-telephone for use at night, when flashing lights about was frowned on, and at dusk each evening Bert's friend on the Commodore's ship made test call on it, usually of a humorous nature. One evening Bert picked it up and a voice said; "This is the Commodore here" to which Bert replied "That’s a good job you've got there. Don't get drunk and lose it" and the caller rang off. A little later Bert's mate rang to make the test and Bert spent the rest of the trip in mortal fear that had nothing to do with the enemy. On the harbour boat taking them ashore at Liverpool the Commodore said to Bert "Were you the signalman on the Vice - well take note that I've still got that job". He never mentioned it in the Base. Really senior officers were like that.
At Southend we were broken in gently by trips on ships down the line, usually only as far as the Tyne. My first trip, which I shall never forget, was on a 700-ton collier called the Whitley. As coal only moved from north to south all northbound colliers were shown as in ballast although they were never actually ballasted. Most of them were built like small tankers with their engines aft in the hope that the weight would keep the screw in the water most of the time.
I was put aboard overnight in Southend and slept on the settee in the saloon. Breakfast was served before we sailed, and I was turfed out while the table was laid. From outside I heard the Captain ask the officers if they would allow me to sit downwith them, which they did. He asked me if this was my first trip to sea and then said; "Make a good breakfast, from the look of the weather forecast it will be your only meal this trip". How right he was. Years later a clerk in the Customs office on the Tyne asked me if I had ever come across a collier called the Whitley on the east coast. Her Captain in 1942 was his father.
By 1942, E-boat attacks were only spasmodic, most of the aircraft we regularly fired at were friendly and the worse the weather the less the likelihood of enemy action. More importantly, I discovered that I was one of the lucky ones who missed most of the action that there was. E-boats attacked the convoy ahead of mine or the guns on Cap Gris Nez were in action the night before I went through the Dover Strait. As somebody once said: ‘In a dangerous situation the only thing better than presence of mind is absence of body'.
I was on a training trip on a collier in the Channel on the day of the Dieppe Raid. We lay off Shoreham waiting for the tide and thinking there was a lot of air activity. As we were going in about teatime German aircraft were bombing the landingcraft as they arrived back with the Canadian survivors and whole squadrons of fighters were roaring out to drive them off. Later rumour had it that this raid was only mounted to make use of the thousands of Canadians who were frustrated by lack of action in England and it was a ghastly failure. Others have since maintained that it was an essential trial run for the eventual invasion and probably saved more casualties in 1944 that it cost in 1942. I expect the truth lies somewhere in between as it often does.
Once I had stopped being sick quite so often, I became a regular member of the team, so to speak, usually on the Commodore's ship but occasionally on the Vice. Coastal convoys formed two columns once they were clear of the Thames estuary, the Commodore leading the port column and the Vice the starboard. There was a Leading Sig. and two signalmen with the Commodore and one signalman on the Vice, the latter working the daylight hours only. Their duty was to maintain contact with the escorts by lamp and with the other ships in convoy by flags and sound signals on the siren.
Navigation was assisted by lighted buoys anchored in the centreof the swept channel which were identified and listed in theroute book. The signalmen worked 4 hours on and 4 off, theleading hand was up as required day or night and all signalsand the time of passing each channel buoy was logged. Strong and irregular tides and frequent gales made navigation much trickier that it sounds and watch keeping officers usually welcomed an extra pair of eyes. Nearly all the ships were coastal colliers at that time and I remember the winter of 1942/43 mainly for the weather.
On one trip we had a full gale from the North West and took three days to reach the Tyne instead of the usual 36 hours.We were on a 3,000-ton collier with the engine aft and she pitched heavily in a big head sea. From midnight to 4am one night I logged only one buoy were only about five miles apart, but with the wind and tide against us a speed of some 8 knots through the water was only about one and a bit over the ground and we were virtually bouncing up and down in thes ame hole.
She also 'milestoned' continually. This was an alarming phenomenon caused by the bow rising and the stern being kept down by the weight aft and the drag of the screw causing the bow to hang in the air and finally come down not in the trough but across the next wave. This jarred her from stem to stern and felt just like striking a ledge of rock. The credulous newcomer to the coast was told that there were actual milestones in the channel as an aid to navigation and the ship was scraping over them. The mate told me not to worry until the siren sounded continuously which would mean that the ship's back was broken and the connecting wire from the siren to the bridge had tightened. I was not reassured.
When we did make the Tyne we discovered that the convoy which had sailed 24 hours before us had only just beaten us to it.The Commodore of the one before that had met the worst of the storm when he attempted to round Flamborough Head and been forced to run for shelter in the Humber with his funnel beaten flat and lifeboats carried away. So I had missed the worst of it again.
One of my best trips in that period was on a 700-ton Norwegian coaster which was acting as Vice-Commodore. It was my firsten counter with Norwegians, who appear to be a race of courteous giants. I slept on the lockers in the saloon as was usual on small ships, but the steward made me up a bunk with sheets. Normally it was my duffel coat as a blanket and life-jacket as a pillow. I was awakened by a man giving me a cup of lovely coffee and as he disappeared into the pantry I realised that it was the Captain. Apparently his steward had brought him a tray as usual and he had poured the first cup for me and was off to find another cup for himself. On Norwegian cargo boats, the officers have a mess room and the Captain eats alone in the saloon, but on this trip I ate with him. This was not due to any mistaken idea of my status but because the Captain spoke perfect English and we could thus have ordinary conversation, whereas I should have been an odd man out elsewhere in the ship. I really think they must be the politest nation on earth.
We spent Christmas 1942 in the Tyne but not much of the YMCA. As it got light at sea on Christmas Eve mustered the usual party aft to hoist the White Ensign only this time it was a huge flag bearing the slogan; 'Guinness is good for you'. At the same time she ran up the signal;' Home for Christmas – the convoy will proceed at 30 knots.' We would have burst a few boilers at eight.
When it was my turn to see how the other half lived, I was put aboard the Hunt Class destroyer 'Whaddon' and had a very pleasant trip in a flat calm with no untoward incidents although it was perfect E-boat weather. I felt much more uneasy on a warship than I normally did on a coaster because the mess deck was down below in the bows and in certain circumstances getting out would have been a major problem. Thank God I never became an E.R.A. The Whaddon's signals staff, who were much more experienced than I was, were very friendly and pleasant to me and, strangely, so was the Captain. He was just the type of Lt. Commander R.N. who could be firm with convoy Commodores and his signals to junior escort Captains were quite curt, but to me, the lowest of the low, he was always courteous.
Between convoys we were apt to be put on shore duties or jobs on the harbour craft operating around Southend. One of the least interesting of these chores was 'back door sentry' at the baseon Royal Terrace. The sentry was duly equipped with belt andgaiters, the traditional gear that indicates that a sailor is going to play at being a soldier. He also carried a World War One rifle in a dubious state of repair. When one sentry came to the 'Present' to salute a brasshat his rifle butt fell off. What would have happened if the thing had been fired is anybody's guess. Prospective sentries were briefed by the Chief Yeoman, who read them the standing orders including the requirement that the sentry should walk his post in a seamanlike manner. The Chief said that from what he had seen of seamen that should mean 'three-parts pissed with his cap flat aback' but it didn’t. The Signals Branch always expressed contempt for all other branches of the service.
Harbour duties were rather more entertaining even if less comfortable. There were a number of Thames tugs with civilian crews, a Sub. Lt. R.N.V.R., an R/T operator and a signalmanon board used to patrol the Barrow Deep ushering convoys inand out. Sometimes they performed a trick called 'buttoning on' which involved going alongside ships of an incoming Channel convoy, swapping over their papers and tacking them on to a departing northbound convoy. In windy weather this could be exciting stuff.
The R/T operator was actually a seaman and he received and sent messages between the various tugs and Southend base (Call Sign32.) With the set switched on all tugs heard all messages which passed whether they were concerned or not, and also ones from warships coming in to Sheerness. These were mainly in coded groups of letters but sometimes in exceedingly plain language.We once heard an incoming destroyer read a lengthy coded message to Sheerness and then some incompetent there asked for repeats of bits and pieces until the exasperated operator on the ship said; "I will repeat my message in its entirety for the last time. Can't you hear me, you fatherless child".
One of our R/T operators asked for leave because his wife was expecting their first child at any time, but was refused. Later we heard the Wren at the base pass him a routine message incode and add at the end - 'A girl. Out.' The new father came on in great excitement 'Hallo 32 32 - say again please last word'. The Wren did so, and being overheard by the P.O.Telegraphist, was put on a charge. She was marched in to theFirst Lt. charged with passing a private message on the official set and the P.O. described the crime at some length. Jimmy said"Is this true"? and she replied "Yes, Sir, Very well" said Jimmy, "Case dismissed". Collapse of miserable old bugger.
Another job regularly performed by the outer patrol tug was putting a signalman aboard an outgoing destroyer for an educational trip. This was usually abandoned in bad weather but I was on the tug once when the officer insisted on trying it on a very rough morning. As we closed in the signalman grabbed the destroyer's guard rail and hung on as the tug rose and the ship dropped away leaving him standing on his hands with his feet in the air. Before he could fall to almost certain death between the two vessels, a couple of heroes on the destroyer grabbed him by his clothes and hurled him inboard.

(b) Leading Hand - Acting Up.

When I returned from Cookham in 1943, and started acting up as Leading Signalman, there was a steady increase in the proportion of deep-sea ships in East Coast convoys as Allied mastery of the air in the area made it less dangerous and enabled the overloading of the west coast ports, and the consequent idleness of those on the east side, to be eased. From the middle of 1944 Southend became an assembly port for new convoy routes, first to Arromanches in France and then to Antwerp in Belgium. On the east coast one normally went north on one ship and returned on another but round trips to France or Belgium were usually made on the same ship both ways. Either way a Convoy Signalman saw very little of the real Navy, except an occasional daunting look at Chatham Barracks, but he saw a great deal of the Merchant Navy, being on as many as 50 ships a year, though only a few days on each.
From our point of view, small coasters were the least desirable- with a few honourable exceptions - having little or no spare accommodation and not being victualled on the scale of deep-seaships. They did not carry duty-free cigarettes either. A Commodore frequently had an unfortunate preference for some of the regular coasters because their officers knew the routes thoroughly giving no cause for concern about navigation and, of course, they found a cabin for him. As these ships were regularly lumbered with the job, they had little time for signalmen, who were a strange animal to the Merchant Service anyway. In the Royal Navy both Visual Signalmen and Telegraphists are lower deck ratings. In the Merchant Navy Sparkers are officers, visual signalling is done by the deck officers or apprentices and there are no signalmen as such. They never knew quite where we fitted in.
Deep-sea ships had more space, were better victualled and carried duty-free stores. They were usually much more pleased to see us, or less displeased anyway. We were less trouble to them and most deck officers were not too proud to accept a little help in buoy-spotting which was the basis of coastal navigation. Deep-sea men professed to despise coasters, the traditional jibe being 'What do you do if you lose sight of the land?' The answer was 'The same as you do if you see it. Shit myself.' I never saw a coaster officer deep-sea but deep-sea men on the coast were usually nervous wrecks.
Merchant Navy officers accepted the risk of being sunk by enemy action without worrying about it too much. They were more concerned about running aground or any other mishap which migh tbe attributed, however unfairly, to professional incompetence.When we were in a north-westerly gale once on a coaster the Commodore suggested that if it got any worse we might shelter in Bridlington Bay. The skipper was horrified. He said that if the wind shifted a ship in the bay might be driven ashore and he would rather go out of the swept channel and ride it out in the open sea. He preferred to risk being mined, in which case nobody could blame him and he would probably be dead anyway, to going aground and surviving to face the Board of Trade.
There was one tanker running regularly up the coast which was a deep-sea ship relegated to coasting by age and infirmity and still having a full complement including apprentices so from a Commodore's point of view she was the best of both worlds. She was frequently used and bitterly disliked by the signalmen because she not only had the largest and bleakest bridge on the coast but also a very unpleasant First Officer and a senior apprentice to match. Most apprentices were eager to assist the signalmen and thus to pick up knowledge of morse and flags which they needed for their mates ticket exams but this lad was superior to all that. One windy morning the signals staff was a bit pushed and my regular Commodore, a kindly man who had been a liner Captain in peacetime, hauled down a hoist of flags himself. The wind got hold of them and thus the ship's Captain arrived on the bridge to see a senior officer struggling with a stream of bunting while an apprentice stood looking on with his hands in his pockets. A lifetime at sea had equipped the captain with the right vocabulary for dealing with that situation and we saw very little of the unfortunate lad for the rest of the trip.
But the answer to every signalman's prayer was a 'Yank'.
Generally speaking the Americans got a very bad Press in England during the war. Much of it was undeserved, but they brought it on themselves. Long before we saw their Air Force I remember boastful tales of a bomb-sight that could drop a bomb in a barrel from 30,000 feet. We didn't take this literally, of course, but it shook us a bit when on one of their early daylight raids on Germany they dropped bombs in Switzerland. Bombing was never a very exact science but you were expected to hit the right country.
The real trouble started when the Yanks began to accumulatein England in 1943/44. There were brawls in pubs, of course, just as there were between our own soldiers, sailors and airmen, but the main trouble centred on girls. All women seem to be fascinated by foreigners, presumably because a change is as good as a rest. Lads from their own village have no chance; boys from another part of their own country are better but anyone from overseas is tops. Our girls had been running after Frenchmen and Poles and, given the chance, Italian prisoners-of-war, since 1940, but the Yanks scooped the pool.
In those days the cost of living in America was two or three times as high as in England and by our standards they were handsomely paid. Their bases were loaded with ice-cream and nylon stockings and food and cigarettes were also in unlimited supply. With these advantages I never understood why they didn't carry off the flower of British womanhood. I have nothing against G.I. brides but they were rather a mixed bunch so I suppose not all G.I.'s were good pickers. They doubtless handled a lot of goods they didn't eventually buy, so to speak, but that has happened all down the ages.
The general public saw the Americans at their worst when they were apt to be a bit drunk and behaved as though they owned the place. Convoy Signalmen saw them at their best on American ships which were commonly dry and they did own the place. They always behaved as though we did. It was not only their open-handed generosity, which even their worst enemies could hardly deny, but their great sense of hospitality. They treated us with a consideration we rarely received on British ships, for example.
Merchant ships generally serve meals rather earlier than places ashore and convoy conferences followed by embarkation usually meant that the signalmen were afloat too early for lunch ashore and arrived on the ship too late to get any there. This was no problem to the Americans who invariably enquired if you had 'et' and if you hadn't they made sure that you did regardless of the time of day. The food was unlimited and magnificent by British wartime standards. One of our lads who was married had two children and mentioned on a Liberty ship that neither of them had ever seen tinned fruit. The steward said 'Come and see me before you go and I'll give you a can'. The can produced looked nearly as big as an oil-drum and we wrapped it in a duffel coat and lugged it ashore. When the signalman got home he alerted all the neighbours to line up with basins when he opened it and there was enough for the whole street.
My first Yank was a pre-war ship named 'Marina'. She was superior to the Liberty ships which became so common later on but the set-up was standard on all their ships. They were much more heavily armed that ours and carried about 20 U.S. Navy gunners commanded by an Ensign - the equivalent of a Sub. Lt.- and also two U.S. Navy signalmen. They were notoriously bad navigators and station-keepers in convoy because they had built up their fleet so quickly that most of the officers had little or no sea experience. It reminded me of the man who crossed a homing pigeon with a parrot so that if it got lost it could ask its way. That was what the two Navy signalmen were for.
The first myth to be exploded on the 'Marina' was the idea that Americans had no respect for their officers and called them by their first names to their face. The Gunnery Ensign introduced us to the riotous assembly in the gunner's mess room in the evening. When he walked in his men immediately fell quiet and came to attention, because he was obviously a good officer and was treated as such. One gunner went to rouse out the steward- because we hadn't et - and another showed us to a real cabin with bunks. Thereafter we had a steady stream of callers with magazines, cigarettes - in cartons of 200 - and candy.
I soon found that the one thing to be avoided was the tea, which didn't matter once I had convinced them that I was the only Englishman in the world who preferred coffee. Their coffee was great. They had a machine in the mess room which had two taps,one for coffee and the other for hot, but not boiling, water. To make tea they scooped up dry tea from an open chest in a wire mesh tea strainer, placed it over a mug, ran the hot water through it and then threw the tea leaves out. The water was barely discoloured though each mug used several ounces of tea at a time when the ration ashore was, 2 ounces a week per person. I sent the signalman of the watch down one morning on a Libertyship and asked him to bring me one when he came back. He was gone longer than expected and finally staggered up with a tray carrying a huge coffee pot, about a quart of milk, a couple of pounds of sugar and a pile of biscuits. Apparently the steward was cleaning out the machine and wouldn't hear of the signalman going without his coffee.
Our ideas about Americans mostly came from Hollywood films, and although they didn't act like film stars they generally sounded like them and I always had the odd sensation that I was on a movie set. In conversation they showed a nice dry sense of humour and they didn't mind if the joke was on them. On one convoy one of the escorts was one of the famous 50 old destroyers that Churchill got out of Roosevelt for a piece of the Empire, and it had the usual four funnels. An American officer asked me 'Why has she got four stacks?. I said 'You tell me. You built her. The theory over here is that there's one for smoke and three for bullshit'. He loved it and passed the crack round the bridge where it was universally well received.
One gunner came of a military family and proudly informed me that his eldest brother was a Colonel in the Air Corps, hisother brother was a Major in the Marines and he himself was a seaman - First Class. Another gunner on the same ship was a farmer from the mid-west and he told us that they had a free and easy attitude to property there. If they were short of anything they helped themselves to each others. One season he was short of corn and went to his neighbour's barn. But everyone was short of corn that year and on the way back with a sack on his shoulder he met his neighbour coming the other way with a sack of his corn of his. Someone said 'What did you do?' He said 'What could we do? We said 'Good evening' but we never did it no more. We figured we wasn't getting no place'.
The Yanks usually hadn't been ashore in England before and asked us many questions about prices. One asked me if it was true that beer was very dear and I said that by his standards it was cheap. But a 'buddie' had told him it was half-a-crown(12p) a half pint. This showed how shamefully the Yanks were ripped off as the going rate was actually about a shilling (5p)a pint. I suggested that it would pay them to chum up with a couple of our lads and let them do the buying. Even if the Yanks provided all the money it would be much cheaper all round.
During the last couple of years of the war virtually all American ships seen round the coast, and an increasing proportion of British ones were Liberty ships. They were clumsy-looking ships of about 7000 gross tons with a high centre structure and a short funnel amidships. They had been pre-fabricated all over the States and the large sections welded together in conventional shipyards. They were not as stoutly built as coastal colliers, for example. Their ribs were lighter and set further apart and their longitudinal strength was questionable to say the least. They were also great rollers even in a moderate sea. Ironically, I believe the man behind all this was a genius named Kaiser. Not the Kaiser, of course, he was on the other side in an earlier war.
These ships were turned out by the thousand at an incredible rate and this accentuated the shortage of qualified officersso they were notoriously bad navigators. They used the convoy system not so much to protect them from the enemy as to prevent them getting lost and even in convoy they sometimes did. Their reported structural weaknesses did not create much of a problemon the coast where we commonly had what was called a short sea,with confused motion due to conflicting wind, tide and currents and the presence of shallows and sandbanks. In the long rollers of the Atlantic they had a tendency to break in two - as tankers occasionally do even today - due to being unevenly supported either across two waves which made them sag in the middle, or one really big sea which broke them in two as one might break a stick across ones knee. Nevertheless, if two could be produced in less than the time taken to build one conventional ship a small percentage of losses in heavy weather to be added to the much greater losses due to enemy action was reckoned to be acceptable. At least by the powers-that-be ashore, I'm not so sure about the crews. I heard of an Atlantic convoy which lost five in one night when the weather was too bad for enemy action.
They went in for heavy deck cargoes too. I have seen full-sized locomotives on their decks, and we once boarded one at Methilwhich had a marked list to port even in the anchorage. She had set off from the States with four bulldozers stacked square on her after hatch in huge packing cases secured by steel wires. When she began to roll the top two cases smashed down through the bottom two and thus slackened the wires. The whole mass was continually being flung into the scuppers on one side and then clean over the hatch into the other and threatened to capsize the ship. Instead of cutting the wires and letting the whole lot go overboard, the Captain turned up all hands, waited until the mass of metal and wood crashed over to port and then jammed it there with balks of timber between it and the starboard bulwarks and hove the wires taut. I bet the unsung heroes who did that cursed the Old Man.
For diplomatic reasons U.S. ships were used as Commodore or Vice-Commodore whenever convenient, usually when they were carrying a North Sea pilot, which they did whenever they could get one. The poor man faced about 48 hours on the bridge with his ticket at stake if anything went wrong but no doubt he was well rewarded.
At one Methil conference a U.S. Liberty ship which we will call Hiram. K. - they were all named after people - was made Vice despite the protests of the skipper of a British tanker called the Bombardier who had already followed the Hiram across the Atlantic and said her station keeping was dreadful. However, she had a pilot and all went well until we were off Flamborough Head where we had to make a big turn to starboard. As we were leading the port column and Hiram was abreast of us in the starboard line, we signalled her to drop back on to our quarter so as not to run ahead of us when we made the turn, and she did so. The Bombardier instantly increased speed and signaled that the Hiram was astern of station and he wanted to take her place. We told him not to but he had passed her by then and was well ahead of us.
We hoisted the flag signal 'Stop Instantly' which was repeated by the leading destroyer and acknowledged by the Bombardier, but the latter was still going ahead at full speed. The destroyer closed her at speed and fired a burst from a heavy machine-gun across her forward deck just in front of her bridge. Bombardier stopped and resumed her proper place explaining that her engines had jammed. I often wondered what would have happened if that excuse had been true. If she had been fired into she might well have caught fire and although the Articles of War empowered escorts to enforce their orders by force of arms and indemnified them for any damage or loss of life which might result I doubt if Their Lordships would have been very pleased.
In the build-up to D-day many Liberty ships carried very nasty cargoes. We did a run to Methil on one with a full load of aerial bombs. She rolled heavily all the way and I had a mental picture of large round bombs rolling from side to side and clanging together. I don't suppose they did but I was haunted by the thought. On another occasion we were alongside an ammunitionship in Southend anchorage when a flying bomb passed close overhead on its way to London. The Yankee skipper laughed heartily, a thing I couldn't have managed at the time.
After D-day we did a few runs to the artificial harbour at Arromanches usually in British managed Liberty ships, all of which had names beginning with 'SAM'. They were not nearly so well regarded as the Yanks, but the trips, like most of mine, were without serious incident.
Towards the end of 1944 the port of Antwerp was opened up to us and we made regular runs up the Scheldt, usually on Sam boats.We rendezvoused with the escorts in Margate Roads and our Vice Commodore was sunk there on one occasion. There was a tremendous explosion and the destroyer signaled 'Lisita mined or torpedoed.
Extinguish all lights and proceed at your utmost speed'. We needed no second bidding.
Returning from Antwerp once we were moving up the line to ourstation when another Sam boat we had just passed was torpedoed and all hell broke loose. By the time the column of water and debris had subsided she had broken in two at her after mast and the stern sank at once. All the other ships, including ours, were firing at a periscope which had been sighted near an old wreck, while the leading escort came pelting down the line through a hail of shot flying the 'Cease Fire' on one halliard and a black pennant on the other. The attacker was a one-manmidget submarine. They each carried two torpedoes slung one on each side of the hull and nobody wanted the other one. The black pennant meant 'I am attacking an underwater object' and the destroyer made a tight turn round the wreck and dropped a pattern of depth-charges. Water, sand and pieces of wreckagewere hurled high in the air and it was incredible that anyone could have survived, but the midget was actually forced up and the intrepid one-man crew picked up unhurt. We later saw him walking on the escort's deck apparently on the best of terms with her officers. The ship sunk was one on which we had done a previous trip and I feared the worst for her gunners whose quarters were near the point of impact, but we learned later that there were only a couple of deaths in the actual explosion and all other hands were quickly picked up. This was the nearest I ever got to being in action.

c) Commodores, S.O.E.'s and Gunners.

Having mentioned that Convoy Signalmen saw very little of the 'real' Navy, it is convenient to consider the people they did see quite a lot of as a kind of postscript to my uneventful career at sea.
Shortly after I began to act up as Leading Hand each of us was linked to a particular Commodore. Only a couple of the latter were generally regarded with some apprehension and I did not draw either of these short straws. I was allocated to a mild-mannered, pleasant man in his fifties named Lunnon, who had been a Captain with the New Zealand Shipping Co. pre-war. He seemed as old as the hills to me at the time but we got on very well.
Generally speaking it was the kiss of death to get a bad report from a Commodore but the First Lt. knew enough to make allowances for the two 'arch-bastards'. Only one Leading Hand ever got actual praise from one of them and he did it by a trick. Leaving the Firth of Forth, they had a pre-arranged mock torpedo attack by aircraft and the Commodore had the Leading Hand on the upper bridge with him to note down his report of the attack. 'No.l aircraft attacking ship 12 - dropped two - one hit, one miss etc..' the whole idea was to attack concurrently from all angles so the thing soon got hopeless and the killick gave up after a couple of lines.
When it was over and the Commodore said 'have you got all that',he brazenly replied 'I'll have to make a fair copy, Sir. It's a bit of a mess.' He then retired to the chartroom and compiled the whole thing as a work of fiction. He was a salesman in civil life and could spin a good yarn. The 'report' was sent in to the Admiralty - and the Air Ministry, I expect - and probably formed the basis for attacking ships for the rest of the war. The Commodore was pleased, which was a first, and the Leading Signalman was commissioned as Sub. Lt. which was another.
Most signals were drafted like telegrams for obvious reasons, but one red-bearded, piratical-looking Commodore either drafted them like business letters or in rhyme. Once when an escort ventured to suggest that his ship was off-course he made a polite reply beginning 'My dear Sir, I would have you know that there are on this bridge at present no less than four master mariners.' On another occasion, asked for his ETA (Estimated time of arrival) he startled the S.O.E. with:-
I hope that we shall not be late,
My sweetheart's waiting at the Gate.
According to my ETA,
We reach the boom at noon today.
It was hard work with him but great fun.
An equally cheerful character was one of the regular S.O.E's, the Captain of the destroyer 'Valorous'. She bore the number L.OO and was commonly referred to as the Chinese destroyer Loo.Luckily that word was not then in common use to mean a lavatory.This Captain was promoted out of her to a bigger destroyer and we were subsequently overtaken by his new ship one evening. She came tearing up in a flurry of foam and flags and the Commodore said’ me 'What the hell does that mean?. Look it up in the book.' Greatly daring I said 'Never mind the book, Sir. In plain language it reads 'Hello Boys'.
Apparently several Commodores had frequent brushes with Lt. Cdr. Archer of the 'West' but we frequently had him as S.O.E. withnever a cross word. Cdr. Lunnon remarked on this when we had the West northbound to Methil, and when we started the returntrip there she was again roaring down from Rosyth to greet uslike old friends and take us south. In the meantime we had spent a couple of days ashore and Cdr. Lunnon had been to Rosyth to see his daughter who was a Wren officer at the base there. She was not available, being out on a date with Lt. Cdr. Archer.
When the Commodore's ship northbound was a Tyne collier, theS.O.E. sometimes offered to give the Commodore and his staffa lift to Methil, taking them off the collier by whaler off the Tyne. On one occasion when Lt. Cdr. Archer did this for us the boat handling left something to be desired and he kept up a running fire of acid comment to the coxwain through the loudhailer. Finally he said 'Ship your oars, Coxwain, I'll bringthe ship alongside you', and he did. To anyone of a nervous disposition, like me for instance, the sight of a destroyerbearing down on a boat is very impressive.
Afternoon sailings from Methil were frequently delayed by fog off May Island in the Firth of Forth and there were various incidents, some hairier than others. We anchored there once in'Nil' visibility and a northbound convoy arrived and attempted to force its way in, which would have been reckless if no other ships had been in the Firth. With a whole convoy anchored inthe fairway it was suicidal. Her leading escort glanced off our anchor cable, and a huge loaded U.S. tanker missed us by a few feet, let go her anchor as she passed us at about 8 knotsand brought up without hitting anyone. A clear example of the way the Lord looks out for the daft.
On another occasion, we were anchored in the same area in fog when our escort, HMS. Wallace, came ghosting down from Rosythlooking for us. It was normal for papers from the Naval Controlin Methil to be passed to the S.O.E. by firing a line across.This time the Wallace crept in under our stern to come alongside. I climbed on to our guard-rail holding out the papers but was completely ignored by about 20 men on her forecastle who were busy protecting her paintwork with fenders. However, a weary voice from her bridge said 'Well somebody take the bloody papers. That's what we're here for', and I was nearly snatched overboard in the rush. Then Wallace backed off into the grey and was seen no more until it lifted. I remember reading somewhere that the Duke of Edinburgh served on the Wallace at one time but I do not know if he was on her then. Her Captain's voice put me in mind of Charles Laughton as Capt. Bligh in 'Mutiny on the Bounty
Fog was always a problem on the coast. The normal practice was to anchor and wait for a clearance but this was impossible in places like the Pentland Firth where tides of eight knots were common. Ships frequently arrived north-about at Methil with their lifeboats, which were always carried swung out at the davit heads so as to float off if the ship was sunk, hanging in ribbons due to bumping a Jid boring in fog. With the development of radar since the war, I believe ships now keep going in fog and, in relation to the number of ships at sea, there are more serious collisions than we ever had.
Arriving at Methil after dark involved rousing the Signals Station to get taken ashore, not an easy thing to do. In this situation, a certain Cdr. Hutchins brusquely hailed a passing harbour craft saying ' Come alongside. I want to go ashore’. The Subby in charge, who must have had a hard day, thought this was a skipper looking for a lift and replied 'I'm not running a water taxi here. Who do you think you are? Hutchins, who was a rather fussy little man very conscious of his dignity, fairly danced with rage and roared back 'I think I'm Cdr. Hutchins, you impudent puppy. Get alongside and get up to this bridge before I have the coat off your back'. The fact that the ship's officers were all falling about and the signals staff trying in vain not to, didn't help either.
One of the perils of being, or acting as, a leading hand wasbeing responsible for the gear, aldis lamps, batteries,confidential books, etc. In the nature of things there wereoccasional losses usually overboard in the course of transferfrom harbour craft to ship or vice versa. I was fortunate in that the one time I lost a lamp, value £14-odd - a fortune to me at the time, Cdr. Lunnon backed my report that this was an unavoidable accident. Nevertheless, I was marched in as adefaulter accused of negligence and the Maintenance Cdr. wasnot amused, this being the second such case in a couple of days.He commenced by saying 'The Commodore reported this as an accident, and I accept that, but-------'. He then bawled me out at some length which I bore with fortitude as his opening words amounted to an acquittal and meant that the cost of replacement would fall on the Crown, which was, and is, richer than I. "When he finished, the Jaunty shouted 'Lost due to accident' and marched me out.
One unfortunate Killick dropped an aldis lamp into Methil Dock, luckily the actual dock not the anchorage. It was recoveredby a local diver who was a civilian and asked the officer in charge of the operation if he should complete the usual formof claim for his fee. The officer said 'No, the Leading Hand is personally responsible' where upon the diver, with typical Scottish generosity which is so much at variance with their reputation, waived his fee altogether. He said 'If you see me in the Brig you can buy me a pint'. I don't know if he did so, but if he did I bet the diver bought the next round anyway.
Mentioning the Jaunty reminds of a story which deserves to be true but probably isn't. A rating on a ship about to go foreign had got his girl into trouble and she was seven months pregnant. A marriage was hastily arranged to be conducted by the Chaplain in the Captain's cabin. The Jaunty, who had had his tot and a couple of others, was roped in as a witness and stood throughout the ceremony in a pleasant daze. The surroundings and procedure seemed vaguely familiar but he was not sure of his ground until the Chaplain firmly stated 'I now pronounce you man and wife'. That was the Jaunty's usual cue. He came to attention and shouted ' Rated man and wife. Backdated seven months' and marched the happy couple out.
The only section of the Forces which had much in common with convoy signals was the D.E.M.S. (Defensively Equipped MerchantService.) The gunners were not merchant seamen; they were a mixture of naval ratings and soldiers of the Maritime Regiment of the Royal Artillery, who seemed to serve together with little or no friction. I suppose they were a little better off than us in some small respects but they were certainly worse off in others. Even in quite big ships there were rarely more than a dozen of them under a P.O. or a Sergeant and they saw little of their officers who were based on the ports, not the ships.They did not flit from ship to ship as we did for each trip so they had regular sleeping quarters and messing arrangements. On the other hand they were much more at the whim of merchant skippers than we were and were commonly treated with less consideration ashore.
We got a good deal of short-term leave between trips which the DEMS seldom did. If their ship was in dock for a few days theCaptain could give them leave for a quick trip home for which they had to get pay and ration cards at the nearest base. They were often subjected to the notorious arrogance of office wallahs and I heard of cases where they arrived from sea mid-morning to be brusquely informed that pay parade was at 9am and they stuck until the next day. The presence of an officer, a real officer not a pay Subby, invariably prevented this nonsenseand we frequently drew advances of pay in the Tyne with the help of the Commodore.
My crew arrived there broke one Saturday afternoon without aCommodore - the ship's Captain having acted as such - and discovered that the R.N.V.R. officer who normally checked us in was on leave. We were processed by the Naval Control Service Officer himself, Captain de Burgh R.N. He bore a striking resemblance to Will Hay, especially when ticking off a convoy conference of sheepish coaster skippers, but this did not make him any less intimidating to us. However, spurred on by the daunting prospect of a penniless weekend in Newcastle YMCA, I ventured to mention it to the great man. He picked up a phone and informed the Pay Office that he was 'sending a couple of signalmen down to be paid'. Evidently pay parade was when he said it was.
More seriously, DEMS gunners must have suffered much more than we did on 'bad' ships. On and off every few days we could take the rough with the smooth but they might be stuck with the rough indefinitely. We once did a trip to the Tyne on a dreadful Baronboat where the food was awful and the gunners’ quarters so cramped and filthy that we refused to sleep and used the saloon settees. The DEMS P.O. and a Corporal had a separate room and the others, left to stew in their own juice, almost literally, had become demoralised and made no effort to improve their lot.
At the other end of the spectrum, we once had a southbound tanker on which, P.O. looked and sounded more like a university graduate than a gunner and had the whole system tightly sewn up. The food was good and the quarters spotless and he made very short work of some quibble about issuing extra blankets for the signalmen. I asked him what he would do if faced with a really bad ship. He said he had been in that situation once and had exercised his right to insist on the hoisting of the DEMS flag. This was an International Code flag which, when hoisted singly in harbour, means 'The DEMS officer is required onboard'.The officer boarded the ship and heard the complaints, inspected the quarters and withdrew the gunners. The ship was not allowed to sail until improvements had been made and inspected and then different gunners were put on her.
I said 'That was all very well for you, but they must have had a hard time of it. He said 'My dear chap, you should have seen the gunners they did put on her. The ship's officers were probably terrified of them'. I hadn't thought of it before, but of course a system of general conscription had to take the rough with the smooth and some of the rough were very rough indeed. In the DEMS, as in all service set-ups, the vital factorwas first-class N.C.O.'s.

J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY C5

Chapter 5. The Navy Ashore
a) Skegness.
At the time that I, like my father before me, 'answered the call' the bombing of London had largely ceased, my mother and aunt were still living at Peckham Rye and my sister was firmly established in an Admiralty branch called Seamen's Records in Bath.
She had a knack of getting interesting jobs and in this one she saw files on practically everything of note that happened in the Navy because sooner or later it had to be recorded by hand on the record cards of those concerned. This could be anything from the award of a stripe to the chillingly final 'DD'(Discharged dead.) I remember she had to check the Dunkirk honours list and some of the citations read like something out of the Boy's Own Paper. One man who had saved the lives of 50 soldiers by acting as a human tow-rope between their raft and a destroyer's motor-boat in an air attack had been recommended to be mentioned in dispatches. The King had struckout the recommendation with his own hand and awarded the V.C.
Throughout the time that I was keeping the sea-lanes open, Ada knew far more about the Navy than I ever saw. It is notorious that the rank and file never know what the hell is going on and I am not at all sure that those in command know much more.
Our class arrived at Skegness in dribs and drabs on a dark cold afternoon. The town was plastered with signs saying 'Skegness is so bracing' which it wasn't, and on the main block at Butlin's was the famous slogan 'Our True Intent is all for your Delight’ which wasn't true either. This latter had been made up of illuminated letters which the Navy had removed, but as the words remained quite clear in the plaster they might just as well have left the thing alone.
We were accommodated in the chalets and the large blocks were used as mess-halls, clothing stores, etc. There were some 4,000 men under training there, and there had been three mess-halls, but one had been burned down shortly before I arrived. The Navy had solved this problem by the simple process of pushing the tables closer together in the other two which packed the chairs so tight that one could only get out by walking down the middle of the table.
We spent several days getting kitted out and there seemed to be at least one funeral each day. This was because a sneak daylight raider had dropped a couple of bombs among the ship’s company chalets a few days before, killing a number of night-duty men who were asleep. I heard a sad echo of this sometime later from my sister. Apparently one of the victims was a re-employed pensioner who had been caught smuggling duty-free tobacco off the base a week or two before and had been deprived of a long-service and good conduct medal which had taken him at least 15 years to get. The Punishment Warrant with the medal had been returned to the Admiralty. When the man's effects were sent to his widow she wrote to the Commodore Commanding 'Royal Arthur' asking for the medal. She did not know that it had been’ deprived' and the Commodore did not want to tell her at such a time so he wrote to the Admiralty to get it back, quite illegally of course. The man in charge of the Medals Section, who was a stickler for the letter of the law, took the letter in to the Head of Branch and said 'We can't do this'. The Head, who was older and wiser, said 'Don't tell me you've lost the damn thing*. Assured that they hadn’t he said 'Well don't just stand there, send it off'.
Incidentally, we were never bombed again while I was at Skeggy but we were machine-gunned one afternoon by an R.A.F. Blenheim. He didn't hit anybody and the A.A. gunners on the roof of the Main Block, who instantly returned fire, didn't hit him so in terms of inter-service rivalry I suppose that counted as a goal-less draw.
When I had been at Skegness about a week I was summoned to the Commander's office and told that my mother was dangerously ill. He gave me compassionate leave and I went home to find that she was in Dulwich Hospital dying of stomach cancer. She knew it was terminal and was not deceived by my feeble efforts to lie about the reason for my arrival. She died a couple of days later the brevity of her illness being the only mercy shown her, unlike her own mother who had lingered and suffered for eight years with breast cancer.
Mother died in the firm belief that trials and troubles here below are compensated for in the hereafter. I cannot be sure that this is true but for the sake of people like her it ought to be. If a blameless life under continual adversity can get one into heaven, she is there.
I returned to Skegness to be trained as a Convoy Signalman. Royal Arthur was mainly a reception base and the majority of ratings stayed about six weeks kitting up and square- bashing before going elsewhere for technical training. Communication ratings were fully trained at Skegness and we were there for six months. Visual Signalman used flags, morse lamps and semaphore and were a separate rating from telegraphists whose sphere was wireless. Convoy Signalmen were a war-time animal working as Commodore's staff and borne in merchant ships in convoy. Thus I had, in a sense, missed the Navy again.
Our class numbered about 40 and we were paired in chalets which had been intended for married couples - well couples anyway. Each had a double bed and, the Navy's reputation being what it was, these beds were divided into two narrow halves by several boards set in grooved posts at top and bottom, but there was only one mattress. It was bitterly cold in these flimsy huts in February and the boards made it impossible to tuck blankets improperly. Everyone took out the boards and made up the bed using both lots of blankets and slept in it together, not for any improper purpose, but to avoid frostbite.
Signals instruction was given by two re-called Chief Yeoman Pensioners who were fatherly and easy-going and altogether the regimen was much less strict than that at Holbrook. The food wasn't nearly so good, each meal being served on one plate even if it was porridge and a kipper. At 7.30 breakfast we could see the dinners, each on its plate, being put into electrically-heated wagons whence they emerged at lunchtime either clear cold or burnt black and stuck to the plate depending on whether the heater was working or not. It was an example of good food, which the rationed civil population would have envied, being ruined by mass catering of the worst kind.
We did a bit of marching in belts and gaiters with rifles and I was every bit as bad at it as I had been at Holbrook. Come to that the general standard would not have satisfied a P.O. boy. One day we had a ceremonial parade to assist 'War Weapons Week, a savings boosting effort, at which the Mayor of Lincoln took the salute with the Commodore. We were all drawn up awaiting his arrival when a black limousine turned into the entrance and a Warrant Officer in full fig with sword stepped forward and opened the rear door, stood back and saluted. Out stepped two bewildered rookies under training. It actually was the Mayor's car but he was driving it with his lady in the front and these two had thumbed a lift. They made good their escape before the W.O. had recovered and the rest of the officers present had stopped falling about and restored order in the ranks.
Technical training consisted of learning International Code flags and their significance in the Merchant Ship's Signals Book. (Mersigs.) We also learned the Morse code and the semaphore alphabet and did practical exercises reading a Morse lamp at up to 10 words a minute and semaphore at about 20. The first half of each semaphore exercise was made with the Chief Yeoman facing the class and the second half with his back to us. One of our Chiefs was a fat man and as he wasn't fussy about stretching out his arms one could just see two flags flapping about and not much else. He answered all complaints by saying that if you could read his semaphore you could read anybody's. He was right too. Passing out tests were made by the Signals Bosun who made copy-book stuff. It was like reading large print and we all sailed through.
The Navy always gave everybody the full course on any subject without enquiring about previous experience and as they usually put you on something totally unfamiliar for which you had no natural aptitude this was just as well. But they occasionally came unstuck. We heard of a man on a Sparker's course who seemed to be incapable of reading Morse at beginner's speed on a buzzer. They thought he must be dyslectic or something until it came out that he was a Post Office Telegraphist who could read Morse at 25 words a minute standing on his head. Beginner's dots were longer than his dashes.
Boat rowing, another thing I never really got the hang of, was taught using old Naval cutters moored in the ornamental lakes with four wire ropes secured to the four corners of the lake. We noticed that the oar blades were all perforated with one inch holes. Apparently they had started without these holes and it worked fine for normal trainees but when they got a crew of brawny Norwegian seamen their first couple of strokes tore the stern off the boat. Another case of inferior coals to Newcastle.
In the middle of the course we were given 7-days leave which involved a morning circuit of the ship's offices to get pay, ration cards, railway warrants etc. The arrogance of ship's company to men under training was legendary and as it happened both our Chiefs were away, one on normal leave and the other attending the funeral of his father a Naval pensioner who had died at the age of 90. With only a Class Leader who was one of us in charge we wondered if we would make the train that day. We were saved by our Sub Divisional Officer, a Fleet Air Arm Lieutenant named Latham, who knew all about office wallahs and went with us himself. First stop was the Pay Office where he had us break ranks and line up at the counter in alphabetical order. As we clattered in a stroppy ink slinger shot out of the inner office and snapped 'Who is in charge of this party?' Latham rested his gold braided arms on the counter, gave him a wide grin and said 'I am. Tell the Paymaster I'm waiting'. After a start like that we got round in record time.
This sort of thing was not confined to Skegness, it applied to all shore bases. There were individual exceptions, of course, but generally senior regular officers were less stroppy than junior reserve officers, C.P.O.'s were more tolerant than Leading Hands and shore-based office staff, many of whom had no rank at all, were the worst of the lot. Many of them were Wrens and they didn't usually have much time for anyone below commissioned rank.
I could never understand the adulation heaped on Service women during the war. I'm sure that many of them did a good job and the minority who manned A.A. guns, barrage balloons and the like deserved all the praise they got. But most of them were clerks, typists, stores assistants, cooks, etc. doing the same jobs as they would have been doing in civvies in peace time. This was necessary, of course, but there was nothing particularly noble about it and most shore bases were safer than the towns anyway. The Women's Land Army, on the other hand, worked as farm hands and many of them were town bred girls to whom it must have seemed like a different world. They never got half the kudos enjoyed by their sisters in the Armed Services and were much less favourably treated when the war was over.
(b) Southend.
On completion of training all Convoy Signalmen were drafted to Southend-on-Sea which was in Chatham Port Division. No one could go anywhere in Chatham Port Division without passing through Chatham Barracks and we did so but being new entrants we were escorted round under constant supervision. Thus I did not get much of the flavour of this nautical Alcatraz until later and only one incident sticks in my mind.
Everyone was ex-rayed in a place called K Basement to detect any signs of tuberculosis which was a disease as much feared in the 1940's as cancer is today. Some recovered from it, but mostly it killed or crippled, so when I was 'chitted up' for a further check I was terrified. I reported at Sam but no one knew or cared anything about so I hung around till noon when everyone started bawling my name and demanding to know where I had been. It transpired that there was nothing the matter with my chest but there was some slightly unusual feature about the bones in my neck and the Surgeon Commander was professionally interested. After taking a few more shots for his family album they sent me on my way rejoicing and feeling as though the reprieve had arrived just as I was standing on the trap door.
Southend Naval Control was based in a row of houses on Royal Terrace overlooking the famous pier which was also under Naval control throughout the war. We were billeted on the locals just as we had been in Harrogate but on the whole we were much better received. Many of our hostesses were seaside landladies and as Southend was closed to casual visitors at the time it was us or nothing and most of them made the best of a bad job. I had experience of many middle-aged landladies in one way and another in my younger days and usually got on very well with them, although I had little success with women of my own a geat the time. If it is true that all the nice girls love a sailor it must have been some other sailor. If I had known then what I know now I might have tried my luck with the landladies, but its too late to think of that now.
Southend was the convoy assembly port for the Thames serving the coastal route up to the Firth of Forth and round the Dover corner to Portsmouth. When between ships at Newcastle-on-Tyne or Portsmouth we were billeted on the YMCA on which I make little comment because it made little impression on me, but in Methil on the Forth we were in civvy billets, easily the best I ever had.
The landladies there were miner's wives, many with sons also down the pit and although taking in sailors was surely unprofitable the way they treated us. They regarded it as their war effort. Perhaps they felt some guilt about their men all being in reserved occupations, but God knows they needn't have done. Miners worked far harder than we did and usually in far more dangerous conditions.
They treated us more like their own sons home on leave than lodgers and even on irregular visits of two or three days at a time we soon became members of the family. Sod's law decreed that if you arrived on a dark wet night your usual digs was ram-jam full but even then they got a meal going and dispatched one of the kids to find out who could accommodate you and show you where it was. Failing that they crammed you in and still made you comfortable and, above all, welcome. We frequently went out to the pubs with our landlords and their sons in the evenings. At the time women were not actually banned from Scottish pubs but they were very severely discouraged. On one such occasion a couple of our lads were being barracked a bit by some noisy locals. Before they could re-act their host stepped across and floored the noisiest one remarking with an air of finality “That’ll be enough about Sassenachs. These lads are with me."
(c) Chatham Barracks.
I had been at Southend some time before I got another look at Chatham Barracks being sent there in connection with a leading hand's course in 1943. This was the nearest I got to the real Navy, I suppose, and it completed my experience of Naval life ashore.
About a dozen of us travelled to Chatham by train and from the station to the barracks by lorry. Most of us were in trouble for a variety of minor crimes before we got over the gangway. I remember that one offence was wearing oilskins on a day when they had not been 'piped' at Chatham. The fact that we had been miles away at the time of the pipe was no excuse. It was pouring with rain at the time but that didn't matter either.
Before we could savour the delights of the barracks we had to do the 'joining routine'. This was a theoretically reasonable idea which had become distorted in practice. Each man was required to visit a number of Departments such as the doctor's, dentist's, chest X-ray, gas mask store, pay office, etc. for appropriate checks.
In order to do this we went to a window in the Drill Shed where a P.O. gave each of us a piece of paper about 12 inches by 4, completely blank. We had to make the rounds finding each place as best we might and each rubber-stamped the chit when theyhad made their check. When we thought we had done them all we returned to the P.O., who was probably a re-employed stoker, and he laboriously counted the stamps and said there were not enough of them. Apparently there were only 18 and we needed 22. So we said "Which ones have we missed, Chief?" and he replied "How do I know? You're four short". This tended to confirm the popular belief that the people behind these mysterious windows could neither read nor write. Be that as it may, they certainly were not picked for their brains.
Incidentally, in calling him 'Chief' we were playing it safe as I believe he was only a P.O.. It paid to address all N.C.O.'s as Chief, except a Master-at-Arms. His title was an ancient one dating back to the days when he instructed the ship's company in the use of the cutlass and he out-ranked all other C.P.O.'s. The proper form of address was 'Master', but as this sounded too much like something from 'Aladdin' most people just called him 'Sir'. Nobody could object to that and as a modern M.A.A. is a kind of chief of police it was better not to annoy him.
We were still standing in the Drill Shed at a loss and one lad said "How the hell do we find the other four?" I was becoming less innocent by the minute and suggested revisiting the nearest four of the eighteen we had already done. This was carried unanimously and when we had done it the P.O. said "That's right. Told you so" and honour was satisfied. I had had a bad moment when the Dental Commander took one look in my mouth and said” treatment" but as soon as his back was turned his assistantsaid "As you are going on to Cookham, get treatment there”. At Cookham, I assured them that I had done the routine at Chatham and thus ducked between two stools, so to speak. Months later when a tooth started playing me up I had it yanked out by a civvy dentist in Southend for half-a-crown.
I have never served on a large Naval unit afloat and whilst I am sure that they could not be as chaotically run as Chatham Barracks and remain afloat, I am quite happy to have missed the experience.
The Navy has a thing about moving at the double, which means running, as distinct from moving at the quick which is walking. Its origin is obscure but it has nothing to do with being in a hurry. Even Skegness had a bit of tarmac which was called the quarter-deck and had to, be crossed at the double. Chatham bristled with such areas. I remember seeing a wartime propaganda film about the crew of a Greek ship rescued from the enemy who were being trained for the Navy at Chatham. In the background of one shot was a huge notice reading:
'All ratings below the rank of P.O. will move at the double in the Gunnery School Area during working hours'
If the Greeks could read English they must have wondered if they had made the right move.
These doubling rules always excluded P.O.'s and upwards and they jealously guarded the privilege. I bet no P.O. ever doubled to the boat deck on a sinking ship. I heard of a Chief Yeoman of Signals below on a battleship when a signals panic broke out on the bridge and the Officer of the Watch sent the bridge messenger to tell the Chief to come up at the double. Assured that those were the officer's words not the messenger's, the Chief said in measured tones; "Go back to the bridge, at the double, and tell the Officer of the Watch that the Chief Yeoman is coming up at the quick. Tell him my doubling days are over". The officer apologised.
There was a strong rumour that two men spent the entire warcarrying a ladder to and fro in Chatham Barracks without being challenged or given any other duties. I don't doubt it, though a piece of paper would have served just as well as the ladder and not been so heavy. This was probably a case of service men putting more effort in to avoiding work than would have been required to do it.
I always had the feeling of being lost in some vast impersonal place controlled by remote gods who were not so much malignant as indifferent. If anyone had murdered me and not left the body lying about where someone could fall over it no one would ever have known. At the height of the war thousands of men idled around there and hundreds more were on 'accommodation leave'which meant that they lived at home until further orders and got pay and ration cards by post.
My impression that the whole place was out of control and no one knew exactly who was there was confirmed by my sister in the Admiralty. In wartime all letters to sailors at sea were addressed to:
A/Seaman Bloggs,
H.M.S. Unsinkable,
C/0. The G.P.O.
If the addressee was no longer on board the Unsinkable the letter was sent to the Port Divsional H.Q. to be re-directed. If they could find no trace of Bloggs in their records they certified that he was not and never had been, in their Divsion and sent the letter to the Admiralty. My sister's branch got so many from Chatham that they selected a test batch of 100 and traced them all. All of the men concerned not only had been, but still were, in Chatham Port Division and 60-odd were actually in the barracks
After this she visited Chatham to discuss the problem with the Drafting Commander and while in his office overheard two revealing telephone conversations. In the first, the captain of a ship rang to ask why a P.O. cook whom he had asked for had not turned up. The Commander said a man had been sent to join the ship in Grimsby a week before. The ship was under repair in Chatham Dockyard. Then the Commander had words with the telephone operator and afterwards said to his Chief Writer "Find out who that rating is on our exchange". The Chief replied; All our operators are Wrens, Sir", to which the officer retorted: "I know the difference between a man and a woman, you fool. Find out who he is and draft him to sea". If anyone finished up on his way to Murmansk as a result of that, I wouldn’t mind betting it was the wrong man.
After one night at Chatham we did the 'leaving routine' which was mercifully brief, and then went to Cookham where the joining routine was nominal. The course was a repetition of our original training in a more concentrated form and to a higher standard.We were given no instruction in the exercise of authority as such and the final tests were on Morse code and semaphore with written papers on Mersigs and Coding. I never had occasion to use semaphore at sea as it was virtually unknown in the MerchantNavy.
It was at Cookham that I had my only experience of being a member of a patrol. Unlike the army, which had its 'redcaps' who were full-time policemen with the authority of one stripe as Lance-Corporals, the Navy used members of the duty watch on shore patrols usually in pairs under a P.O.. Patrols operated in all naval ports and anywhere else where substantial numbers of liberty men were ashore and their main duty was to control drunkenness and arrest obstreperous offenders. Arrests were made by the two members of the patrol not the P.O., so if the drunk hit one of them they simply hit him back and little harm was done. Had he struck a P.O. this was a serious offence and to strike an officer was still punishable by death. Later on the Navy came into line with the Army and created a new rating of Leading Patrolman but I think this was a retrograde step.They had it right in the first place.
The Navy had a policy of leniency towards drunkenness off duty and particularly sought to avoid any serious offence by a man under the influence of drink. Officers and P.O.'s were expected to avoid confrontations and leave drunks to the patrol. One rating was court-martialled for striking an officer ashore. Apparently the man was improperly dressed - coat open, cap flat aback etc. - and was reprimanded by Lt. Brown R.N.V.R,, one thing led to another and he struck the officer with his fist and was immediately arrested by the patrol. At the trial Lt.Brown said that in his opinion the offender was not drunk but the P.O. of the patrol thought he was. The Court took the view that he certainly had 'drink taken' and he was dismissed the service and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. Agreeing with this exceptional leniency, the Commander-in-Chief said he thought that Lt. Brown had been led astray by his zeal for the good name of the service into approaching the man when he should not have done so. He added: "I have interviewed Lt. Brown and am satisfied that he will show greater discretion in future". I felt rather sorry for Lt. Brown. Just a little excessive zeal and he finished up being punched on the nose and then carpeted by a full Admiral.
I remember my mother once told me she saw two sailors in the street in Portsmouth who were absolutely legless, leaning on each other and falling about and she was horrified to see a Commander approaching. As they passed him, however, the two drunks straightened up and saluted him quite correctly, an effort which left them more 'palatic' than ever. Being a regular senior officer, the Commander affected not to have seen them before the salute and did not look round after it. The course finished, successfully as far as I was concerned, we returned to Southend, by way of Chatham of course. Either we were more skilful or luckier in negotiating the routine as I don't remember it as being quite so onerous as before. While we were there I met one man who quite liked the place. He had been put on a foreign draft some months before and given the 'freedom of the gangway' which was normal in such cases and meant that he could pass in and out the barracks unquestioned. However, he was failed medically and taken off the draft without being put back on the duty rosters or deprived of his gangway pass. He lived quite handy and came in once a fortnight to collect his pay and ration cards. I don't know if he stopped doing it at the end of the war or kept it up until they pulled down the barracks.
Shortly after returning to Southend Base I was put on Leading Signalman's duties, acting unpaid, but was never actually rated up. Duties at sea were little different but more interesting as you had the ear of the Commodore. Ashore between trips LeadingHands did little or nothing except play snooker very badly at the Constitutional Club or Shove Ha'penny very skillfully in the Church Hall.

J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY C4

Chapter 4-INTERREGNUM.
Having turned my back on the Navy, I found myself at home for an indefinite period for the first time since I was eight. Our family consisted of my mother who still eked out her pension with domestic work, my Aunt Ada who had lost an office job when the business closed after many years and was now a sort of housekeeper to an invalid lady, my sister Ada who had just started work as a Clerical Officer in the Admiralty and myself. For a while I felt rather as I did when I went to Swanley, out of my depth in a hostile environment.
The Civil Service examination was held in Central London and I was in my usual fever of anxiety about bus strikes, accidents or earthquakes which might make me late getting there. Once I was in my seat I was quite at ease, however, and it all went pretty well. I am lucky in exams in that they seem to ask questions on parts of the syllabus on which I am best prepared. In the dreaded English Literature paper there was a question about Sheridan's play 'The Rivals'. This had been the set-play for 6 U.N. and I knew it far better than any other play in the language. The Higher Maths paper, which I was banking on, was
a stinker and I was in despair, but I actually scored about 90% on it so the marks must have been weighted to compensate for the severity of the questions.
While awaiting the results I had to make some small contribution to the household budget and got a job as a junior costing clerk with a firm of confectionery manufacturers. They specialised in chocolate coated raisins etc. and roasted peanuts. Their trademark was 'Sunpat' and their packaging and advertising conjured up a picture of sun-drenched vineyards. Actually they had a rather drab factory in a backstreet in Camberwell, but their products were delicious. I was paid 25/- (£1.25.) for a fifty-hour week and we were expected to work late one week a month without any extra pay. Anyone who objected to this was sacked.
The exam results came out in April, being posted from the Civil Service Commission at teatime and delivered about 9 pm in Peckham the same night. Because of the large number of candidates, some 8000, we each got only one page of the list of results. There were 100 names to a page and I was on page 1, just.
I was asked to name three Departments in order of preference and put the Admiralty first and the Customs and Excise second.I don't remember my third choice but it certainly wasn't the Air Ministry to which I was appointed on the 16th May, 1938.The minimum of the Clerical Officer pay scale was £85 per annumand it took 20 years to reach the maximum of £320. I started in Kingsway and remained at the same desk until the outbreak of war having no formal training and performing minor clericalwork in the Directorate of Equipment. The functions of a Clerical Officer were not nearly as important as the title might suggest. I only remember one job which was of some importance. As the war clouds gathered new aircraft were being delivered by the hundred, many of them short of important items particularly gun turrets. The Air Council required a monthly report of progress in making good this deficiency and I had to collect and collate the figures. I think I had signed an Official Secrets Act form but I had never heard of vetting. This was the only time in 45 years in the Civil Service that I was concerned with a real spy-type secret and it never occurred to anyone that I might flog it to the German Embassy. Not having had the benefit of a university education, I didn't think of it either.
We only worked about 40 hours a week and the conditions were so reasonable that when I joined the Civil Service Clerical Association I regarded it as the merest formality. I must have been naive to the point of feeble mindedness. Then along came the war and I was whipped off to Harrogate and my sister to Bath leaving our household impoverished in London and Ada and I practically destitute in Bath and Harrogate respectively.
The General Secretary of the C.S.C.A. had political ambitions and actually became an M.P. after the war and there was no way he was going to take up the cudgels on behalf of a few thousand youngsters who would mostly be called up into the armed forces over the next couple of years anyway. Up to then I had thought that the government would give its employees a square deal because it was the right thing to do, but as soon as war conditions enabled it to do us down with impunity it hastened to do just that.
We were compulsorily billeted on the startled inhabitants who received 21/- a week for our bed and two meals a day for 7 daysa week. Most of this was stopped out of salaries and if you were on a gross 32/6 a week this did not leave much for one meal a day and all other expenses. As I had been allowing my mother 22/6 a week in London I was granted an allowance of 1/6,the difference between this and the billeting figure, a piece of bureaucratic meanness which I shall never forgive.
I approached my boss with a view to resigning my post and joining up. He talked me out of this because it was a serious step with no guarantee that I could get back in after the war. In the event he kept me going with what overtime he could find for me, at about 4p an hour, until I was called up at the beginning of 1942 and had my second chance to join the Navy. This was a case where the helpful action of an individual mitigated hardship imposed by an uncaring system. Having been at the mercy of such systems all my life I can only thank goodness for this, and the many other similar incidents, which have helped to smooth the way. Years later when it was my turn to try to help people who had got caught in the machinery, I remembered these cases.
The two years while I struggled along in Harrogate, Ada did the same in Bath, my mother and aunt were bombed in London and the country seemed to be well on the way to losing the war, should have been thoroughly miserable, but they weren't. In the first place, our common exile brought the junior staff together in camaraderie almost like school and in the second I had been put in to share a room with a lad named Pat who had befriended me in London.
Like me he was a junior Clerical Officer in the Directorateof Equipment, but there the resemblance ended. He was everything that I was not. He was big and tough and excelled at swimming, boxing and rugby football. Son of an ex-officer from the First World War living in Dover, he had been to a good school and had been better brought up than I had. Not more strictly but better. His father insisted on good manners and correct behaviour. Pat told me that he had once been reprimanded for being out on a date later than his father allowed. He said the picture had run late and his Dad replied that he should have left before the end. Pat got in on time from his next date, not by leaving the cinema early but by merely seeing his girl on to her bus to the other side of town and then coming straight home himself. When his father heard of this he said "You did what?. You took a lady out and didn't see her home?". Pat finished up in deep disgrace, cycling to her home in the middle of the night to see that she had got in safely and to apologise to her father for not having seen her home in the first place.
Pat had an easy courtesy which I envied but never quite managed to emulate. If we were at lunch and anyone, male or female, said "do you mind if I join you", he would rise to his feet and say "Please do". We remained firm friends until he joined the Tank Corps in 1941. He was commissioned and posted to India and thence to the Middle East where he died of meningitis in 1945. Always the best.
In 1940 I had my first real girl friend. I had fallen in love regularly since about 1936 but this was the first time I got any response from the object of my passion. As most of her predecessors were people like Ginger Rogers this was not surprising. The very severe winters of 1939/40 and 1940/41 were each followed by beautiful summers and we hiked around all over Yorkshire, went to the pictures and theatres together and indulged in what would now be called heavy petting and was then termed 'snogging'. She was the only girl I ever dated who made heads turn in the street and other fellows wonder what the hell she could see in me. I sometimes wondered myself, as my monastic adolescence had made me pretty much of an outsider in the romance stakes. The affair died a natural death towards the end of the war but it was lovely while it lasted and so was she. I wonder where she is now. She must be pushing 70.
The war produced one interesting job which was laid to our Branch. At the outbreak of hostilities private civil flying was totally prohibited over and around the United Kingdom and various light aircraft were requisitioned for the use of the R.A.F. The most common type was the Tiger Moth and variants of it and a number of these were actually used to patrol over home waters and look for U-boats. As they were unarmed and had no radios I don't know what they did if they sighted one. Flew home and told someone I suppose.
Having been brought up to regard car-owners as rich, I naturally supposed that the owners of private aeroplanes were millionaires. In fact, most light aircraft were owned by people of moderate means who were buying them on hire purchase. Requisitioning, far from being a hardship, was the best that they could hope for and we were inundated with offers.
I was only concerned with the paperwork, of course, and the legwork was done by a First War flyer named Sqn. Ldr. Reid. He was permitted to travel the country in a 'plane of his own choosing and actually used a civil version of the German Messchersmidt which had belonged to the German Air Attache and been seized as enemy property. He didn't even bother have it given R.A.F. markings until he was forced down near Oxford by 'some damned puppy in a Hurricane'. Apparently the Group Captain commanding the fighter station was an old buddy of Reid's and it turned into quite a party.
We got many abusive letters from finance companies who were in a hurry for their money and thought they could bully the Government the way they did defaulting customers. We used to acknowledge their letters on a formal printed postcard which inflamed them to the point of madness.
Reid's best catch was a thing called the Cunliffe-Owen FlyingWing. As the name implies, this was an experimental aircraftof revolutionary design with the minimum of fuselage and the maximum of wing. Designed to carry passengers, the cabins, and practically everything else, were in the wings. In 1941 theAir Ministry was under political pressure to provide a transport aircraft for the Free French in West Africa and the R.A.F. chiefs were pleading a general shortage. Someone thought of the Flying Wing and the Air Member for Supply and Organisation brusquely minuted "If the French want this damn thing they can have it".
Reid did a splendid deal with Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen and bought the aircraft and all available spares for about a quarter of its assessed value and was then left to get it out to Africa as best he could. As this involved flying a totally untested and unarmed aeroplane through the war zone there was an understandable shortage of volunteers. Finally one Jim Mollison agreed to do it. Mollison was a famous air pioneer and had attracted enormous publicity between the wars as a daredevil, general hell-raiser and husband of Amy Johnson.
Sqn.Ldr. Reid paid him a fee of £250 with his own cheque which Mollison endorsed and handed back for the R.A.F. Benevolent Fund. Prior to this I thought of Mollison as a publicity hunter rather than a top pilot. How wrong can you be?
Most of our gang had been called up by the end of 1941 and several of them had already been killed. The billeting problem had eased as most of those who didn't really want us had managed to get out of it and others had come to terms with the system.Moreover, when the Ministry of Aircraft Production was formed early in 1940 under Lord Beaverbrook many of the staff of theAir Ministry became part of it and those in Harrogate were transferred back to London in good time for the blitz.
At the beginning of February, 1942 I left Harrogate with some regrets and went to join H.M.S. Royal Arthur, Butlin's Navyat Skegness.

Chapter Four: Interregnum– My comments

I commented to my dad much later in life that he had a “monkey on his back” that his family would never go short if he could help it – in this chapter we see that as soon as he was out of school he looked to support his mother first by working in the Sunpat factory then with part of his salary from the Air Ministry. I cannot claim to understand his arithmetic regarding his lodgings and the amount he paid his mother but it is notable that he didn’t even think of cutting her off until he had more means to support her.

Also he displays his ability to understate his successes – by my simple calculations he was in the top 100 out of 8000 in the Civil service entrance exam but he has to add the word just as in” I was on page 1, just.”. His achievement was massive given that many of his competitors had better schools and a purpose made coaching course to equip them for the exam.

It is also vaguely worrying that someone in the top 1.25% did not get one of their top three choices – perhaps other factors - like which school the candidates had attended were allowed to influence the allocation of jobs.

J W Booth AUTOBIOGRAPHY C3

CHAPTER 3. HOLBROOK
The Royal Hospital School was, I believe, an offshoot of a naval hospital which had been established in the reign of William II. The buildings had become out of date and overcrowded and there was little scope for expansion on the Greenwich site. A wealthy New Zealander bequeathed a site in Suffolk and a large sum of money to provide new buildings and thus the Greenwich personnel and boys were transferred to Holbrook near Ipswich in May 1933. I joined this new school in July towards the end of its first term, as one of a draft of about 50. We were medically examined in Greenwich. This was my only glimpse of the old school and was enough to show that the new one was a vast improvement.
It consisted of a main school building with 23 classrooms, some laboratories and offices. At one end was the dinning hall and kitchen and at the other a swimming bath and gymnasium.
The accommodation consisted of 10 houses for 80 boys each under the charge of a housemaster and house-sister. Each house was named after an Admiral and they were linked in pairs, senior and junior, making five pairs having distinctive colours competing with each other in all forms of sport etc. Separately there was a single new entry block, called Nelson, for about 60 boys. I do not know why the most distinguished name was reserved for the least distinguished section of the school.
There was a well equipped infirmary, a wood and metal workshop and a magnificent church seating about a thousand. There were large playing fields on both sides of the site and a parade ground in front of the main building with a full-rigged mast sprouting from the tarmac.
The one qualification for entry was to be the son of a sailor and most boys had both parents living although some priority was given to orphans particularly if their fathers had been killed in action. I believe the whole set-up was under the control of an admiralty official, the Director of Greenwich Hospital and was financed by the crown. There were two distinct chains of command, naval and academic, the result acted as a kind of pre-training school for the Royal Navy. All the boys normally went into the navy unless medically unfit.
In overall charge was a retired naval captain-superintendent. On the naval side a Commander and Lt. Commander assisted the superintendent with a staff of company officers who were Petty Officers pensioners who acted as company officers for PT, swimming and seamanship instructors.
On the scholastic side there was a headmaster, three divisional masters and about 30 teachers. Ten of the unmarried teachers lived in the houses as housemasters and there was a whole village of houses for the others. More directly in charge of the boys outside school hours were PO boys. Each house was divided into two halves of 40 boys each which number included one CPO and one PO Boy.
The classroom side was divided into three divisions. A junior division of eight classes numbered one to eight for younger boys who started in the lower numbers and worked their way up until they were old enough to the senior division classes, also numbered 1 to 8, where the process was repeated. I suppose these divisions taught to ordinary elementary school standards or rather better and the great majority of the boys concerned went to Naval Training establishments as second class boys at about 15 years old.
Separately there was an upper division to which boys were allocated on the basis of a written examination held when they joined the school. This division was called the upper Nautical but I never knew why. The only subject not taught there was seamanship so it was if anything less Nautical than the rest of the school. There were seven classes, class 5UN being a kind of ‘odd man out’ made up of boys weeded out from the main UN stream or creamed off from the Senior Division and destined for the Navy as Second Class Boys. Classes 1 to 4 and 6 and 7 were groomed fort the ERA Apprentice exam to enter the engineering branch of the service. To this end they were taught to roughly grammar school standard, with no languages and little emphasis on the arts subjects but with heavy concentration on mathematics.
Discipline was very strict. Apart from the natural respect which boys wishing to join the Navy could have been expected to feel for a staff which included distinguished Naval officers, Petty officers who had served all over the world in peace and war, and many teachers who had served in the First World war there was a three tier system of encouragement. High, Middle and Low justice so to speak.
At the top, serious offences were dealt with by the captain and the commander on naval lines. The equivalent of capital punishment was expulsion, which was rarely inflicted. For the commoner crimes such as breaking bounds and raiding orchards as much as 12 cuts with the cane was usual. Punishment was carried out by the chief company officer with the victim held down over a vaulting horse in the gym in the presence of the commander.
Class and house masters could inflict three strokes which had to be recorded in punishment books. Some did this almost daily and others hardy ever and the severity of the strokes varied enormously.
The lowest but most effective justice was administered by the PO Boys. Nominally they could only inflict what the army calls ‘Fatigues’. Some PO Boys gave out enormous quantities of lines but after boys were caught scribbling away in class and even church this practice was promptly stamped out. Unofficially PO Boys in general were very free with their hands and although anyone found to have struck a boy was disrated (demoted to the ranks) it went on all the time. This was because no one ever complained to a master about it and, if questioned, victims would cover up by saying that black eyes and bloody noses were the result of fights. PO Boys had the best of both worlds in that though they had a certain authority they were still boys and there was a strong prejudice against one boy complaining about another to a master. Moreover the potential complainant had to think of his future. Edgar Wallace once pointed out that those murderers who kill policemen get little sympathy from those members of the police force that remain alive. Boys because of whom PO’s were disrated had a rough time with PO Boys who were not.
This system might be expected to produce a nightmare life for the small or the weak but in practice it didn’t. On the contrary we soon found out the most heavy–handed PO Boys was preferable to a weakling who allowed a state of anarchy, where boys could be bossed about by anyone big enough to do it. PO Boys normally stamped out bullying not so much because they saw it as evil in itself but because they regarded it as an infringement of their prerogative. Moreover quite a few of them were surprisingly enlightened for boys of 14 – 15 in a position of authority.

My first four weeks in this impressive and terrifying establishment were spent in Nelson and the six week holiday followed. I was not homesick but was miserable for other reasons. We marched everywhere and I soon found I had no natural aptitude for it. There were complex rules which were never properly explained – I was knocked down by a blow to the head from the Nelson housemaster for using a door reserved for staff when I had been at Holbrook about two hours and I had never heard of the rule.
I had been circumcised at Swanley two weeks before and was too shy to tell anyone that I was still sore.
The highlight of this period was the official opening of the school by the Prince of Wales, later, briefly, Edward VIII. The sheer hell of preparation which this entailed is fresh in my memory still. The wartime press didn’t know what ‘Bull’ was.
We returned at the beginning of September, not facing 46 weeks of incarceration as at Swanley because Holbrook allowed us home for 3 weeks at Christmas and another 3 at Easter. I had been allocated to ‘Hawkee’ a junior house linked to ‘St Vincent’ and placed in Class 1 Upper Nautical.
I kept no diary then or since so I cannot attempt any chronological narrative of the next 4 and half years. I can only deal with school activities under their various headings and explain how I faired, or failed to fit into them.
The accommodation was generally superior to Swanley, I was in the first half of Hawke, one of forty boys numbered one to forty. There was a day room with 40 numbered lockers and other usual offices. We showered en masse morning and evening and slept in one long dormitory with beds arranged top to tail in 2 rows of 20. We made our beds each morning and the top sheet had to be turned over so that it covered exactly half of the pink counterpane. Thus a pink and white chequered effect was produced as the house sister looked along the line, it also meant that an average top sheet stopped 2 feet short of the foot of the bed inside but that didn’t matter. The covers were tucked in tighter than a sleeping bag and one had great difficulty in getting in without getting one’s long flannel nightshirt around the neck. This was really just as well as windows on both sides of the room were kept open and loose covers would probably have been blown off the bed in windy weather. Once you were in they were beautifully warm and comfortable.
Food was varied and was not only better than Swanley’s but in most respects was better than I could have expected at home. We had butter at breakfast and tea for example, at a time when margarine was normal in all working class homes. We were marched to the dining hall for each meal and each house sat at 4 long tables, 20 boys to each. A PO boy presided at the head of each table and doled out the food brought from the galley in mess tins. The boys sat in order of seniority and seniority was based on time at the school. Years spent elsewhere did not count. The more senior you were, the higher up the table and the better the portions e.g. one slab of butter was cut into 4 portions and the 6 junior boys at the foot of the table got a smaller piece than the 4 at the top. Each member of the group took it in turn to cut the group’s portion into individual parts and the cutter always had last pick.
Efforts to produce a more equitable system were occasionally made by house-masters with very limited success. The thing balanced itself in time by promotion up the table, but if the PO boy took a dislike to a boy he might remain at the bottom for years. In my case, even the bottom seemed like a land of milk and honey.
Most great men’s biographies highlight their backwardness at school. I always excelled in the classroom so I naturally grew up into a non-entity. I was almost totally incompetent at games and not physically impressive although I was rarely ill. In a boys’ boarding school it is a toss up whether it is more unpopular to be good in class or bad at sport: being both I had to work hard to live it down. Naturally my recollection of things which were problems to me is more vivid than of the easy things; we marched everywhere in column of fours and I never became better than competent at it but I soon learnt to get by.
The first real hurdle was swimming; non swimmers were social lepers and they spent their very limited free time, which normal routine allowed, in the baths. By such pressure and physical coercion which included being pushed in at the deep end (literally) I duly ‘passed out’ by swimming one length of the baths. Thereafter I ranked as a swimmer and in normal swimming periods was expected to swim round the baths starting and finishing at the deep end. As far as I know nobody ever drowned which just shows what fear can accomplish.
I always loathe the gymnasium. Class sessions on vaulting horses, climbing ropes etc wasn’t bad; I just wasn’t good at them but house sessions were apt to include competitive team games on an inter-house basis along the lines of ‘It’s a Knockout’ but deadly serious! If a boy lost control of a football for example, he could wreck the team’s chances and I frequently did!
Cricket and football were not nearly so bad. I didn’t dislike either of them although I was never anything like good enough to play for the house, let alone the school.
Every year there was a cross country race, one for seniors and one for juniors, nearly 400 boys taking part in each. One year I actually finished in the first 20 of the juniors, the only sporting achievement of my life, and was cheered home by a crowd of seniors and POs who knew my reputation and expected anyone who excelled in class to run like a cripple.
There was considerable emphasis on organized religion with morning prayers in the assembly hall on week-days and compulsory church attendance on Sunday, morning and evening. Confirmation was arranged for boys about 13 and thereafter Holy Communion was optional each Sunday at 8.00 a.m.
There were two resident naval chaplains. The Reverend Gilbertson was the senior chaplain when I joined and was the kind of clergyman to over-awe grown men, never mind boys. Chaplains in the navy are officers of course, but do not hold any specific rank. This means that no-one, not even an Admiral outranks them in the sight of the Admiralty, let alone in the sight of God! We were not a very wicked lot and probably did not fear God as much as we ought to have done. But we made up for this with a wholesome dread of his representative here on earth.
The Reverend Gilbertson had been at sea for many years and he frequently enlivened his sermons with naval anecdotes. He deplored ‘hell fire’ preaching and recalled a young officer he had known who never attended voluntary church services having been put off for life by a Scot’s minister he had encountered as a boy. This cleric was wont to describe the torments of hell in detail and tell his congregation
‘….and you will cry unto the Lord “Lord Lord we didna ken” The Lord in his bountiful mercy will say “Well, ye ken now”
He also disliked the practice of chaplains under war conditions who preached a gospel of ‘repent today-you may be killed tomorrow’ and he once quoted a war-time poem in which a wretched Tommy pictured the judgment as put to him by his chaplain:-
And if he tried to chance his arm
And hide a single sin,
They got a bleedin’ angel there
With books to do him in.
Gems like these were well received when delivered from the pulpit and certainly fix the point of the sermon in our minds. I remember one occasion however when a local vicar preached the evening sermon. He was presumably accustomed to address either adult audiences on the one hand or small children in Sunday school on the other. He treated us like the latter with one or two exciting stories from the Bible – with actions – and there was an outbreak of giggling. Captain Bruce-Jardyne rose in his seat in the first pew, fortunately out of sight of the preacher, glared round the church and sat down. A reverent hush fell instantly as house masters and PO boys peered along the pews mentally taking the name of any boy who as much as smiled. In an establishment where all adult males were addressed as ‘Sir’ they did not tolerate any disrespect to the cloth.
Revered Gilbertson also took scripture lessons occasionally and I remember him quoting a couple of howlers from exam papers. One boy condensed the story of Judas’s suicide and the selection of his replacement to ‘Judas hanged himself and all his bowel gushed out and the lot fell upon Matthew’ More subtly another lad asked to say when, and by whom, the words ‘Thine art not far from the Kingdom of God’ were spoken, wrote ‘This was said by Jesus to his disciples when they were nearly drowned on the Sea Of Galilee’ As Gilbertson remarked ‘That’s when men think of religion, when its touch and go’
I cannot now think why we were so terrified of him as he must have been a kindly man with a great sense of humour. I believe many of the staff were half afraid of him and this must have got through to us. During my time at Holbrook he became Archdeacon Gilbertson, Chaplain of the Fleet, so he must have been very senior indeed. His successor was a much less towering figure who never made much impression on me one way or the other.
In the house my career followed the usual pattern. I spent about 2 years in Hawke until I was old enough to move to St Vincent, which was a lesson in itself. From being one of the most senior members of a junior house I became one of the most junior members in a senior house. It also meant that for a year or so I didn’t eat quite so well for reasons already explained. I have since discovered that all life is like that.
In both houses I was reasonably happy for most of the time. The disciplined environment soon became second nature and although my eminence in class was despised almost as much as my incompetence at games I was rarely bullied. Considering it in retrospect I was very lucky with PO boys. For much of my time in Hawke our CPO was a lad named England. He was rated PO while I was in Nelson and I first met him when I turned faint on church parade and he helped me off. I expected utter contempt but he was sympathetic and concerned. He was the first and for years the only PO boy who ever treated me with kindness and consideration. He boxed and played football for the school and was adequate in class (I think) but his great strength was that he was a really good NCO.
The CPO of my half of St Vincent was a boy named Houson, son of a retired navel PTI. He was champion of his weight at boxing throughout his school career and also excelled at swimming and football. He would certainly have been Head Boy if we had had one. Despite a certain lack of intellectual attainment, he actually won ‘Best All Rounder’ cup one year. Unlike most boys he seemed to have a sneaking respect for brains and always treated me with a kind of friendly tolerance. This was not only pleasant in itself but certainly coloured the attitude of the community at large in my favour.
I made a weekend visit to Holbrook in 1947 when the school boxing championships were on and both Houson and England were there as full lieutenants RN. This suggests that the naval selection system, whatever its weaknesses with wartime RNVR candidates, was fundamentally sound when it came to regular officers.
It is significant that although I was then 25 years old, I did not venture to speak to any of these great men.
In class I had few problems. Whereas in the house PO boys were all important and the effect of housemasters on the quality of life was marginal, in class the masters were paramount and the PO boys did not come into it.
There were two exams for Engine Room Artificers each year, one about Easter and the other in October. The Easter one was set by the Civil Service examiners on a full range of subjects and was for dockyard apprentices as well as ERAs. The October one was in maths and science and was set by the Royal Navy College for ERAs only. Each boy worked his way up to 6UN where he remained until the year he qualified for the exams when he moved into 7 UN. I made rapid progress and thus spent about 2 years in 6UN and one year in 7UN.
The master of 6UN was a man named Amiss who took both classes for maths and 7Un was under Mr Hirst who taught both classes English, history and geography. Science was taught separately in a laboratory and mechanics which counted as part of science by Mr Perrin who was divisional master of the UN.
Mr Amiss had the vital gift of making the complex seem simple and the standard of maths was far beyond the normal. I recently came across a notebook I kept when I was 13/14 and I cannot make head nor tail of it. He was always an effortless controller of the class although he rarely caned anyone. The Swanley practice of caning for simple errors was never used at Holbrook. I only remember two occasions when Amiss caned anyone and both arose from circumstances outside his control so to speak. Mr Perrin the divisional master was highly qualified and learned but he couldn’t teach. Even in such a sternly run school his classes were often in disorder and mechanics was not only just my weakest subject but most of the other boys as well. At the end of one session he caned a persistent offender named Evans. As it happened Amiss was a couple of minutes late for the next session and arrived as Evans was giving a spirited re-run of the recent ‘execution’. Amiss sent him for the book and caned him much more sufficiently than Perrin had and when he came to record the fact he saw Evan’s name as the previous entry. “You’re becoming a general nuisance” he said, “Bend over again.” That time he really put his heart into it. I suppose nowadays some fool would have referred the case to the European Court of Humans Rights but at the time Evans rubbed it in and resumed his seat rather gingerly.
The other time was when Gilbertson’s successor was conducting a scripture class and some hot-head presumed in his mild manner and the fact that men of God do not normally inflict corporal punishment to give him some cheek. The chaplain sent him out to stand in the corridor which proved to be the equivalent of the Inquisition’s habit of abandoning heretics to the secular arm. When Mr Amiss arrived for the next session the following conversation took place “What are you doing out here Smith?”
“The chaplain sent me out, Sir”
“Go and get the book” and that was that.
I only saw Mr Amiss really angry once. He had been an amateur footballer in his youth and was said to have played for Charlton Athletic when they were an amateur side. He had been watching a house match between Blake and Drake and when it was over a hefty Blake CPO boy named Conner had accused a much smaller Drake PO of fouling him and had floored him. Amis hauled Conner up in front of the Captain and had him reduced to the ranks. In such cases disrated POs were always moved to another house and Connor finished his time in St Vincent getting very little sympathy from Houson or anyone else.
Mr Hirst was another born teacher who taught the subjects which have proved to be the most important to me in afterlife. He took an interest in me and treated me with real kindness. He knew that I was not very affluent even by Holbrook standards and pushed various small chores my way which brought a shilling or two a term. He also used me to run errands to other teachers and collect things especially in gym periods which I therefore escaped.
He was another man who was sparing with the cane though not quite as much so as Mr Amiss. In common with other masters he did evening duties in a house on a roster and apparently had trouble one night with talking in the dormitory, when the CPO boy in charge was actually present. Mr Hirst called in the CPO boy next morning and caned him. I was not there and when another boy told me about it I said “Was it just a token affair?” and he said, “Oh no He wasn’t half rubbing his arse when he came out”
On another occasion Hirst came into the class in a cold fury one Monday morning and sent me to fetch a senior boy from 5UN. It transpired that this lad was a Methodist and on Sunday evenings a Methodist Chaplain from Shotley Barracks held a service in the assembly hall at which this boy played the organ. However the boy had presumed to fall out with the Chaplain, which was the height of impudence in itself, and had refused to play the instrument. He then piled it on by attending the service and disrupting it. Either he was insane or he did not know that Mr Hirst was a Methodist and was actually substituting for him at the organ.
Mr Hirst gave him an awful tongue lashing and said that he was considering asking the Captain to expel him. After leaving him to sweat for a couple of days he caned him with great severity. I think he would have put the lad up for a more formal thrashing in the gym but he didn’t really wish to see him expelled and had the Captain heard of the matter he might have done just that.
The smooth-running and rather featureless pattern of school life was broken up by a number of distinguished visitors whose impact on us varied enormously. A common feature was the dreadful day of preparation which preceded each one. Normally we did few domestic chores through the week and there was a general clean-up on Saturday morning. This embraced houses, dining hall, gymnasium, swimming bath etc. Each house provided a party to clean the ‘common user areas’. The company officer of Hawke was one Dusty Miller who was also a swimming instructor so we cleaned up the swimming bath. In passing, I later read that Dusty Miller had been a Greenwich School boy who had done 25 years in the Navy and returned as a company officer. The divisional master of the Senior Division, Mr Sheldrake, had been a master at Greenwich when Dusty was a boy. The day before a visit was always like Saturday morning but more so and this went double for Royal visitors. There were two such in my time, the Prince of Wales who opened the school in 1933 and the Duke of Kent who presented the prizes in 1937. The former landed on the cricket field in his private plane and a day or two before his pilot landed there to spy out the land without prior notice while there were several hundred boys on the field. It was said that the commander was very annoyed about this and I remember thinking that the Prince might be in trouble. My ideas of the relative status of a naval commander and the heir to the throne were not as clear then as they are now. My recollections of these two visits are more of the furore they created than of the visitors themselves.
The guest of honour at the annual prize giving was usually an Admiral, the actual presentation being carried out by his wife. My favourite was one named Dunbar-Naismith who enlivened the proceedings with several salty interjections which rather pained the platform but convulsed the boys. His speech was laced with anecdotes including one about Captain Bruce-Jardyne who had served under Dunbar-Naismith in the War as a junior officer. We found it hard to picture the captain as a junior officer. We had a vague idea that he had always been old and in command rather like God, whom he closely resembled as far as we were concerned.
The admiral’s best story concerned an expedition in India in which they were continually delayed by a native guide who would lie on the ground pretending to be ill when they were ready to move off. Apparently they carried a branding iron of the leader’s initials to brand horses and mules and finally someone was so exasperated that he touched up the guide with it. This not only cured his ills for the rest of the trip but enables one to see who he was working for (just like the mules). We did not see anything racist in this tale at the time.
About 1934 the Archbishop of Canterbury came to consecrate the school church. He was accompanied by the Chaplain of the Fleet Archdeacon Peachall a splendid figure in full regalia with war medals including the VC. He was Chaplain of the cruiser Vindictive in the famous raid on the U-boat base at Zeebrugge in 1918. She was secured to the Mole which was swept by a crossfire which reduced life-expectancy on it to a matter of seconds. Throughout the raid Peachall walked up and down it carrying back the wounded and he never got a scratch. Rev. Gilbertson once pointed out how absurd it is to imagine the Lord God Almighty taking a personal hand in the squabbles of mortal men but I sometimes wonder.
We were also visited once by Admiral Tobias of the Broke whose legendary exploits were world famous. He gave a lantern lecture in the assembly hall about Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic where Evans himself was second in command. He and two naval ratings named Lashly and Creen were the last party to be sent back on the fatal march to the Pole. Evans went down with scurvy and only survived by a combination of good luck and the incredible endurance and devotion of Lashly and Creen. I was completely entranced and have been fascinated by polar exploration ever since.
Sadly it has recently become fashionable and profitable to write books denigrating men like Scott and Evans but I am still sure their reputation is quite safe from such people who are not fit to clean their boots. Reading about Shackleton some years ago I noticed that he died on the day I was born – January 5th 1922.
In many ways our most remarkable VIP visitor was Rear Admiral Lyne. He has the rare and possibly unique distinction of having risen to that rank from second class boy. We were told that he had been commissioned as a lieutenant, a tremendous feat in itself, by the outbreak of war in 1914 and was in command of a sloop which broke her shaft off South America and was thus totally immobilized. Scorning neutral assistance, which would have meant internment, he set all hands to work stitching up canvas hammocks etc and brought the ship 2,000 miles to the Falklands under sail. This led to rapid promotion as well it might. There was the usual parade in which he addressed us in a broad cockney accent which I now suspect he might have dropped on the way up and only resumed when, in his own words, he “shipped this ‘ere fat stripe as a Rear Admiral” It so happened that there was a bit of a reign of terror going on at the school at the time; PO boys normally had what was called ‘local leave’ on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. This meant that they could leave the premises for walks and could lawfully buy sweets and unlawfully buy cigarettes. Sometimes with permission they went to the pictures in Ipswich or without permission chatted up local girls. I don’t think they ever got much further than chatting except in their own accounts of course. At the time of Admiral Lyne’s visit a spate of orchard raids had caused this leave to be stopped and thus Saturday and Sunday afternoons had become ‘hell on earth’ for the troops who were hounded by bad tempered POs with ‘wet shirts’ and practice drill. How the Admiral got wind of this I can’t imagine, but he rounded up his remarks by “………..hoping as how we all grow up to be officers” – an unlikely event - and called for “an extra turn of leave for the POs” instead of the usual half holiday. This was no doubt welcome to the POs but much more so to the rest of us. We cheered him to the echo and I feel grateful to him still.
Incidentally he was the only visiting Admiral who turned up in full dress uniform with cocked hat so our officers had to do the same, and very impressive they all looked. I am sure the shades of Drake, Raleigh, St Vincent, Blake, Hood, Howe, Collingwood, Anson, Cornwallis, Hawke and Nelson hovering over their respective houses felt quite at home with them.
I must have been about 14 when it first occurred to me to question the assumption that I would inevitably go into the navy. My experience at Holbrook and seeing, even at a distance, men who served in the service had confirmed my early impression that it was a great life and I never doubted that I could be happy, contented and comfortable in it. I was not so sure about the engineer branch having no aptitude for metalwork; but I suppose I could have opted out of the ERA stream and taken my chance as a second class boy. The snag was the prospect of being pensioned off at 40. Even at 14 I could understand what that had done to my father and no doubt many thousands of others. The chance of reaching commissioned rank from the lower deck was extremely remote and, cocky as I was then, I never thought I was that outstanding. On the other hand outside the navy I had no chance of any job requiring further education and that didn’t leave much. At this time my sister was coming to the end of her schooling at what was then called a secondary school, and hoped to sit the Civil Service exam for clerical officer between 16 & 17 years of age, and I thought I might have a crack at that myself. Clerical officer sounds grander than it was. It was actually the lowest grade in the Civil Service apart from CA (Clerical Assistant) which was only open to girls at that time anyway.
The Civil Service had the same attractions then as it has now, pay at least comparable to similar work outside it, relatively long holidays, short hours, paid sick-leave, security of tenure and a pension you could live on at 65, not a few pounds pocket money at 40. These attractions have since been eroded not so much by changes in conditions in the Civil Service as by improvements elsewhere, but in the 1930’s they were very real.
Once I had worked up the courage to broach the subject the school authorities made no effort to press me into the navy and gave me every assistance to make good deficiencies in my education for the Civil Service exam in July 1938. As useful practice I sat the ERA exams both in Easter and October 1937 being place 2nd in the first and joint first (with another RHS boy)in the second. I was allowed to stay at Holbrook until Christmas 1937 and Mr Hirst in particular helped me to plug some of the gaps in my education. The two compulsory subjects for the Civil Service exam were arithmetic, which was easy, and English including English literature which wasn’t. Optional subjects included languages which I couldn’t touch but I could muster enough by including such things as higher maths and science.
For may last term I was PO boy and a pretty poor one at that. Much as I admired giants like Houson and England I had neither the strength of character nor charisma to follow their example and I must have been a ‘right little Hitler’. In my final report the Captain says “A satisfactory PO boy but shows little sympathy with younger boys” That was putting it kindly! I never made chief, my first disappointment of that kind, but certainly not my last. So just short of 16 I left Holbrook where I had become a senior member of the community and became and became an insignificant particle in the London labour market.

Chapter three: Holbrook School – My comments

It is interesting throughout this autobiography how Dad seems unimpressed by his own successes – which viewed dispassionately are very impressive and his overview seems to be that he failed, if narrowly, in most of life’s tests. It is a deep regret of mine that I knew so little of this view of himself that I never got the chance to challenge his perception. It is often true that we are more critical and unforgiving of our own faults and failings than we would be of the faults and failings of others.

Dad makes little of his academic successes but I know he was in the highest stream in the school long before others of the same age.

Surely the very fact that he simply made his mind up not to follow the school’s blueprint for all its students and this was accepted by the authorities indicated that they realised that they had something exception on their hands.