大象传媒

Mr. Ramage understands that his story will be submitted to the 大象传媒 People's War website and agrees to this.
When the War started I was a clerk in London. I was living in Tottenham and travelled in to London to work. I lived at home with my parents then.
I went on working in London until I was called up in December 1940 and was therefore working in London some of the time during the Blitz. When I was called up I had to give that up and was taken into the Navy.
They sent me to Portsmouth to the Royal Navy and I did my basic training at HMS Collingwood at Fareham where I learned to be a signaler. Learning all the signaling was quite difficult but I passed the tests, so I got the idea in the end. After basic training I was posted to the tug Resolve based at Portsmouth. It was a salvage tug but did all kinds of other jobs around the harbour.
The Resolve was moving ships around the harbour in Portsmouth and also attended to ships which had run aground. The bombing was very bad at times, but didn't make a lot of impact on the harbour itself - more on shore.
We were called to any small accidents that were necessary. The whole crew messed together as we were not a large crew (not including the officers of course). I could go home from Portsmouth on weekend leave if I could find a way to get home without too much expense. I used to go outside Portsmouth and see if I would get a lift to London from a passing car - if not, I'd sometimes have to go back to barracks. I still had to take the train coming back again.
I next moved to Drake IV station on HMS Brocklesby, a Hunt class destroyer, where I continued as a signalman. I remained at different stations in Brocklesby until May 1943.
Brocklesby was a destroyer employed on convoy duty. We went from Milford Haven to Yarmouth LO.Wight and then Sheerness to Leith. That went on for a while and then we were sent to Gibraltar where we were convoying from Gibraltar to Oran, Algiers, and [Bone ?] and back. We were accompanying ships supplying the North African campaign which was being centred on Algiers. We passed Malta on the way to [Bone ?].
There were incidents on the convoys but nothing serious as far as our ship was concerned. We were lucky enough not to be torpedoed although we were engaged in occasional searches for submarines in the Mediterranean. In Brocklesby we were involved in the raid on St. Nazaire with Campbelltown. Our ship and Cleveland were sent to reinforce the flotilla and to render assistance. The Campbelltown headed for St. Nazaire while we took a decoy course to distract the enemy. Campbelltown was scuttled in the harbour at St. Nazaire to prevent it being used by the enemy any more.
Brocklesby also covered the Dieppe landings. When the Canadians were trying to withdraw, the landing craft could not come in very close because of the tide and the risk of getting stranded. Therefore the Canadians had to cross about 200 yards of open beach and a number of machine gun units were cutting them to pieces. Brocklesby was instrumental in saving many lives by firing on the shore batteries and preventing them continuing to fire on the retreating soldiers.
Whilst in Brocklesby, one incident I remember was one of those unfortunate sudden events where something quite ordinary turns into a serious situation in seconds. We were coming out of Plymouth one day and part of the procedure for leaving harbour was the crew lining up on board and saluting the ensign. While we were doing that business, German aircraft came over and fired on the ship and we lost one anti-aircraft gunner who was killed.
The atmosphere in the services was still upbeat. Most of us wanted to get the job done and succeed and therefore we were quite optimistic.

I came back from Gibraltar after service in Brocklesby, being transported to Belfast in an aircraft carrier, and then went to HMS Tedworth which was a diving tender based at Gourock in Scotland.
I found being in the Navy quite all right. We all just got on with it and did our duty. It is true to say we generally didn't go around being scared all the time, but this was partly because you wouldn't act like an idiot in front of the others, and partly because you had to concentrate on what you were trained to do and that took up all your attention.
In Tedworth, the submariners and their craft attached to Tedworth were setting up a situation which existed in Norway where one of the German battleships, Tirpitz was in a fjord. Their idea was to practice here in a Scottish lock (Edrakillis bay) and HMS Malaya was their practice target which was supposed to be the German ship. They went out to sea on the midget subs. and tried to get back in to attack Malaya and attach mines to it. It was all highly secret at the time. We had no shore leave while we were doing that.
I stayed in Tedworth until I had an accident. I was signalman and part of my duty was to go ashore first thing to get information from the office at Gourock. It was a pitch black foggy morning and our ship instead of going alongside harbour had to moor alongside City of Omaha, a US Navy ship. To get from Tedworth to the office on the dock, I had to cross the Omaha and in thick fog I lost my way on the top deck and fell to the next deck and broke my leg. I was then in hospital in Scotland for some time.
When my leg was mended I went back to barracks in Portsmouth for a short time and was then posted to a shore signal station at St. Abbs Head, in the wilds of Berwickshire. I remember one new lad from London that I collected from the rail station at Eyemouth asking me where the nearest Cinema was! I'm afraid he got a rather rude awakening. Like many lads from big towns stationed in these out of the way places, he had to learn that entertainment was not a short walk down the road any more.
The signal station where we were stationed was communicating with East coast shipping coming in and out of Rosyth and Leith. I remained there until the end of the war when I was recalled to London for discharge.
If we had Saturday evening leave from the signal station we would go up to the local pub and meet the local lads who were all fishermen and when we came out the local girls were all waiting outside to take us to the church hall to the dance. When the dance was over, some of us had to be taken home and if one of the girls was kind enough to see that we made it back to the signal station, we had to be nice to them next time we met!!
I met my future wife in Scotland at that time. She was a local girl, the daughter of a local fisherman. We were married in Scotland at the end of the war but we had to come down to London at the end of my service because that was where the work was.
When I came back I went to my London employer but I couldn't have my job back. Some lads came back to jobs which were definitely kept for them; some even continued to be paid a small amount while they were in the services, but unfortunately I was not lucky enough to be in that situation. However, I found a similar employer to what I had been doing before and started back to working again. We started off in not very good accommodation as that was hard to come by for many lads just out of the services.
Eventually the employer I did go to couldn't offer me much of a future regarding pension etc, so I decided to join the Civil Service. I passed the exam and entered the Civil Service for the last 13 years of my working life.

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