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This contribution is from Paul Nicholls and is added to the site with his permission.

I think the war first had an impact on me when my father was no longer at home so often and I realised he was training with the Royal Navy to go on one of their vessels. he had hoped to get a job that would have meant he would have lived at home with the Fire Service but the papers were processed slowly and didn’t arrive in time and he was drafted into the Navy. That’s what I really remember about those times.
Unfortunately my father’s ship met its Waterloo in the Mediterranean in 1941 and there was only one survivor and that wasn’t my father. But I do have a memory when he was in training in Plymouth that he’d come back once or twice….on one occasion I remember him coming up the path…I was playing in the front garden. That’s probably the most vivid memory I have of him.

His ship HMS Neptune was on duty in the Mediterranean and their job was to try and interrupt the convoys sending supplies to North Africa by the German and Italian fleets. On the day of the 19th of December in 1941 a message was received by his ship and by another ship the Kandahar that they should proceed into the Mediterranean from their base and they set sail. Unfortunately they ran into a minefield and my father’s ship didn’t survive that it sank with a loss of life. There were 764 crew members of that and only one survived. The Kandahar also sank and 73 lives were lost. It was one of the worst losses of life that was incurred in World War II at sea and on my father’s ship the crew had a huge proportion of New Zealanders and South Africans and for both of those countries that was the single largest loss of life in World War II for those countries. So it had a tremendous impact in those countries and they remember that much more than it is remembered here. There are questions that are still being posed about that incident because very little information was available and is still available. The one question that vexes people in a way is whose mines were they? And the Ministry of Defence has never come up with a clear answer. There is an association called the Neptune Association which is trying to forward the flow of information to provide a clearer picture and to properly recognise the event that took place then. But basically I grew up without a father and I guess that’s made an impact on my life, I can’t say whether it would have been a positive impact or a negative impact because in my adult life I’ve had a very fulfilling life and a very successful life and I sometimes think to myself that if I met my father now we would be strangers. And that’s a bit frightening I guess.

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