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I am writing for my father who died in 1995. Trevor Williams was a pre-war merchant seaman who served as a merchantman on several Royal Navy ships after 1939. His first Royal Navy ship was HMS Salopian, an armed merchant cruiser which was torpedoed and sunk in May 1941. After this excitement he ended up on mine layers and it was on a minelayer that his D Day experience began.

My father was a steward and so had little opportunity to know what was happening. At the end of May 1944 his ship sailed from Scotland. I can remember him saying that he had no idea where the ship was going and he spent most of his time below decks as they steamed slowly along laying a mine barrage. However, early on the 6 June 1944 the Captain invited the hands to come on deck. The sight which met his eyes remained a vivid memory until his death. ‘The sea was full of ships and the sky full of aircraft’ and the shores of France were ahead. He told me that his heart jumped at the scale of the whole thing and he felt so proud to be part of such an enterprise. Near to his ship was HMS Belfast and the Captain had just enough time to warn them that the barrage was about to begin when the guns fired. His ship seemed to leap in the water as the concussion of the nearby guns hit them and the coast of France disappeared in a cloud of flames and dust. I can see him now, flinging his hands forward as imaginary shells with a ‘whoooosh’ sound as he tried to demonstrate the violence of the whole thing!

His ship remained off Normandy for many days, with the crew getting more and more fed up as the weather in the Channel deteriorated! Then one day the Captain piped all hands on deck. It was raining and the weather had been miserable. Along way off the bow, in the distance steamed a large battleship ‘His Majesty and the Prime Minister are on board that ship’ the Captain explained proudly via the tannoy. ‘Three cheers for His Majesty’ and the crew, standing in the rain, not knowing why they were there or when they would leave, booed and jeered, safe in the knowledge that only their ‘pukka Captain’ (his words) could hear! They were a mainly Merseyside crew!!!!!

Soon after that they resumed their usual task of laying mines close to the enemy coast to protect the channel shipping. A dangerous task, and people being as fickle then as they are now, he told me that they looked back at the time of boredom of the Normandy coast with affection! He was 25 years old then and had already been torpedoed twice.

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