大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education鈥檚 reminiscence team on behalf of Jack Cockrill and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I joined the Navy on May 2nd 1938 when I was fifteen years old. I was a Shotley on HMS Ghanges for nine months doing training before going to the Naval Barracks at Chatham for a fortnight. From there I joined HMS Curlew, another training ship, where I did extended training. I left the Curlew in July 1939 and joined the Emerald. She was commissioned for the reserve fleet review which was held in Weymouth that year. We steamed down to Weymouth with a crew of reservists, some of whom had been in World War I. We were only 16 to 17 year olds, still doing our training, so we were set apart from the ship鈥檚 company because of our age. We worked in various parts of the ship. I was in the Quarterdeck Division, and was given menial tasks to do. At Weymouth there were about 200 vessels in reserve, including 5 R-class battleships and 4 Queen Elizabeth class battleships.

After that we went to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. At the end of August we were on Northern patrol. In September, north of the Shetlands, the weather worsened, and we had no special clothing to protect us against it. I had to keep watch on the bridge for four hours, as a lookout: between midnight and four in the morning, in bad weather, this was not very pleasant.

After two months we went from Scapa down to Devonport, and took the first shipment of bullion over to Canada to Halifax in Nova Scotia. The bullion was kept down in one of the showrooms. We were in Halifax for a week after landing it. We escorted four troop ships back over to England. This contingent of Canadian troops ended up in Flegburgh in Norfolk, close to where I was from.

We then returned to Chatham Barracks where we stayed for about a month. I was then sent on board the Resolution, an R-class battleship, and was with her for three years in the Eastern Fleet. During this time we were torpedoed beneath the funnel and had to be towed from Dakar to Freetown. Here the ship was listed to flood the starboard bilges, and a coffer-dam was built over the hole, with a cement backing on the inside.

We went from there to Gibraltar, to Portsmouth. We spent nine months away being repaired and then returned to Plymouth where we escorted a convoy of liners with members of the 8th Army on board. From Cape Town the liners made their own way up the East Coast of Africa. We went to Mombassa and became part of the Eastern Fleet until 1943. We used to patrol into the Indian Ocean, and were there when the Japanese Fleet broke out into the Java Sea. The expected battle didn鈥檛 materialise for us, although other ships were sunk and the survivors of these ships came into the Maldives.

We came back from the Far East in 1943, and after some leave, steamed down to Southampton. I came into barracks again before being sent to north Russia in the dead of winter. This was a shock to the system after three years in tropical climates. Bu now I was a Leading Seaman. I did about six months in Russia, and then returned to Chatham. Here I went on a course to become a sail maker, something I had always wanted to do. I was in barracks for 9 months. By now it was 1945. After qualifying I was drafted to a repair ship in Vancouver, Canada. When I got there I found that the keel of the ship hadn鈥檛 even been laid, so I was put ashore in private accommodation and I found myself a job in the dockyard that was building my ship. She was eventually commissioned after the end of the war, and I returned to Chatham.

When I finally left the Navy in 1963 I was a chief sail maker.

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