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This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Don and Betty Tempest of the Lancshomeguard on behalf of Ted Staveley and added to the site with his permission.
I joined the Royal Navy when I was 17years old. When I passed my Medical, the Wren Officer said to me, ‘You’re going into the Fleet Air Arm’. Straight away I said, ‘Oh no! I’m not going to fly’. But she said that I wouldn’t fly, they would train me to be a mechanic and armourer.

During my training I was in Preston and during my stay there, I met a girl who worked in a large store in Fishergate. She lived in a small place called Brock, just outside Preston. We actually met at a cinema one evening. My mate and I had been to see the film showing at that cinema in the afternoon. These two girls, who were sisters, were looking at the billboards outside the cinema, and we told them it was a good film. They said that they were going in, so we said that we would go in with them, because they were two good-looking girls. So my mate and I saw the same film twice in one day.

We courted for a while and the last time I saw her was on Preston Railway Station where she saw me off when I was going abroad. I wrote to her, but she never replied to my letters. I don’t know what happened to them, maybe they got lost.

During my time with the Fleet Air Arm, there was one particularly bad incident. I was on the main Air Craft Carrier, H.M.S Atheling. There were twenty aircraft on board. In those days, after the plane had landed, someone had to sit on the brakes. As the planes were landing those men were ranged at the end of the flight deck.

I was at the starboard side with a Petty Officer. The first aircraft to land was a ‘Seafire’; these were Spitfires that had been converted so that they could land on Air Craft Carriers. It was coming into land and at the side of the Flight deck was what they called a ‘Batman’. The plane seemed to be landing Okay, but the Batman signalled him to fly out. But the plane jumped all the barriers and crashed into the crews that were standing there.

There were eight fatalities and a mate of mine lost his leg. Fortunately for me, the Petty Officer who was in charge of me, and stood next to me, pushed me to the ground, but a piece of the wheel cover came over and split my leg. The Doctors were too busy injecting people, but one of the sickbay attendants told me to go down to the Operating Theatre to see the Surgeon and said he would stitch it up. I knocked on the door and when the Surgeon came out he looked like a butcher. His apron was covered in blood and he had been sawing a lads leg off. The Surgeon said to me, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘Nothing, thank you very much’. I had turned fifteen different shades of colour, and I turned and went back.

The next morning I went back to the sick bay attendant who told me I should have had it stitched the night before, he couldn’t do anything about it now. (Funnily enough my leg never bled.) I said I had been too busy, I didn’t tell him about me changing colour. He said he would stick a plaster on it. I asked him why it hadn’t bled and he said it was probably the shock of the crash and seeing all those bodies lying about.

I’ll tell you a funny story;-

After this crash our Squadron broke up the plane and they put us ashore in Ceylon on this land station at a place called Putlam, 90miles from Colombo, right on the Malaria belt. They sent us there to get over the shock of the crash. The Officer that was over us was called Bryant, from Bryant and May Matches, and he was horrible to us. He had us working in the sun all day and on guard duty it night, and we only managed to get about four hours sleep. We were absolutely exhausted.

The Officers each had there own guns, but they had to leave them in the Armoury. They put me in charge of Armoury and I had to clean all the guns. I said to my mate, (Who I had gone all through the war with) ‘I’m fed up of this Officer’, meaning the one who was over-working us, and after all we were only kids doing a mans job.

We requested to see the Captain of the camp and told him we would like to go back to sea. He asked us why, but we couldn’t very well say it was because of this Officer. He said, ‘O.K. I’ll put your name down for another Squadron’.

I was in the Armoury one day when Lieutenant Bryant came in and said, ‘I want my gun. I’ve been promoted and I’m leaving’. I said, ‘That’s great’. I gave him his gun and afterwards I told my mate that I didn’t want to go back to sea, as I had this good land job. The funny thing is that next day our names went up on the board to report to the Regulating Officer, who told us we were joining another Squadron on another Air Craft Carrier. When we got to the new Air Craft Carrier, who should greet us but Officer Bryant, who said, ‘You two are on my Air Craft’. Well! You can imagine how we felt, but strangely enough he had changed, well he had to, because I was looking after his guns, and my mate was looking after his engine.

The Air Craft Carrier we were on was called HMS Khedive and we covered all the landings, if there were any casualties we sent a boat out and brought them back to the ship.

The first Air Craft Carrier I was on was with the American Fleet in the Pacific.

I went all through the war and I remember Lord Louie Mountbatten visiting our ship. They said he wanted to invade Singapore and he indicated that he didn’t care how many ships he lost as long as he got Singapore back. That didn’t go down very well I can tell you. We were on our way to Singapore down the Straits of Malacca; the Japanese was strafing us as our aircraft were taking off. They didn’t fly during the night, only the daytime. I was on duty and we had to watch the aircraft being ‘hatched’ down because of the rough seas.

One of the seaman who looked after the Officers keys to their cabins, asked if we had heard the rumour, or ‘Buzz’ as they say in the Navy. We told him no, and he said the Americans had given the Japanese an ultimatum. He said they had this secret weapon, but we didn’t know at the time that it was an Atom Bomb. But they subsequently did drop one on Japan, and then they dropped another one, and the war was over.

The Captain told us the war wasn’t over for us, we were still working. He said we were heading back to Trinkcamili, in Ceylon, to pick up this new currency, they must have know what was going to happen to have this currency printed already. He told us that when we got back to Singapore he was going to open up the ships canteen, so that we could buy anything we wanted for our lads who were in a Prisoner of war camp called Changa, and this is what we did. We got a jeep that was on the ship, with a trailer, and went into Changa Camp. The first thing you saw was the prisoners. They were pitiful. They hadn’t seen a bar of chocolate or a cigarette, all the time they’d been there. We gave them chocolate and cigarettes and adopted a prisoner each and took them aboard our Air Craft Carrier. The prisoners hadn’t eaten properly for years, and the first thing the cooks did was make huge meals for them, which of course was overwhelming and they couldn’t eat it. But we did give them all our Rum Ration, which they thoroughly enjoyed, a and we had to carry them off the ship.

This particular chap who I adopted, had worked on the Kwai Railway. He showed me his leg, it was terrible, what had happened was that he’d had an ulcer and all the Japs did was to lay him on a table, without anaesthetic, to put him to sleep. They then got a piece of bamboo cane, split it in half and scraped it down his leg over the ulcer. He said all he could remember was passing out, but he didn’t know for how long. When he woke up, round his leg was a piece of old sacking, covered in maggots, which ate all the bad flesh. So, even though his leg was a mess, he didn’t lose it. So he had to thank the Japanese, and the maggots, for saving his leg.

Another incident I recall was when they said we were going abroad, we went as passengers on a Battleship. We had to load all our gear on the ship, as we were doing this we noticed a queue, and we asked what they were queuing for. Someone said’ Oranges’. A ship had just come back from Gibraltar, and as you know during the war fruit was hard to come by, so we joined the queue hoping to get some oranges, but unfortunately an Officer saw us and pulled us out of the queue to go and finish loading our equipment on board the Battleship. So we never did get any oranges.

I mentioned at the beginning of my story meeting a young lady called Doreen, in Preston. If anyone reads this story and knows Doreen, or her sister, I would love to hear from her, or them. My telephone number is 01482 651150.

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