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Written up by Karen Rouse-Deane for the ´óĎó´ŤĂ˝ Open centre Hull.

We left the Humber in the company of half a dozen other small ships heading North for the next rendezvous in North West Scotland. Running the Pentland Firth in the old ‘Egyptian’ was a struggle, flat out we might make our 71/2 knots with the friendly tide and this one wasn’t!
Our destination was still supposedly secret, final orders to be received at Oban, but small leaks and a few clues had already revealed West Africa as our destination. I had spotted the name ‘Lagos’ painted out, but still readable, on a crate in No2 hold — amongst other assorted freight including a Bren-gun carrier and a couple of crated Spitfire wings — before the hatch covers were sealed!
Another couple of days elapsed after anchoring at the assembly point before we were finally under way in a convoy of sixty or more ships of various sizes. The ‘Egyptian’ was in the last row and the sixth line — we all knew the old ‘girl’ would never aspire to any other position than end of the line.
It was almost November, seas were calm and I was enjoying myself. Apart from two aircraft alerts — both apparently enemy ‘spotter’ planes as there was no attack, we settled into our daily routines.
A flurry of flag signals at the Commodore’s masthead late on the third day and our convoy split, the major part proceeding West whilst about twenty vessels turned South heading for Gibralter. We steamed along with them for some time, the Chief Engineer ‘mad as hell’ when the flags delivered a reprimand for making too much smoke, I just received the message and decoded it but the Chief still blamed me. The next signals ordered the ‘Egyptian’ to put in for refuelling at Huelva, the Spanish port from which Columbus sailed.
The coaling station — ‘Cory’s’ I believe — consisted of rows of hulks lined up along the shore. Stripped bare, coal-dirty and depressing, this was the graveyard of many 19th Century Clippers, the most beautiful vessels built by man. Stunted, with cut off masts still sprouting from the gutted, copper-bottomed hulls, nothing could destroy the graceful lines of those deepwater greyhounds. Some festivities were going on in the town but we were forbidden to go ashore, being told that El Presidente General Franco was visiting and since Spain was considered a hostile neutral, maintaining the peace was a priority!
After filling the bunkers we quietly slipped out the following night and coasted around to Gibralter harbour — hardly a peaceful place. All night long the anchorage thumped and shook from the impact of small depth charges dropped around the anchored vessels by navy pinnaces patrolling against frogmen and midget submarines. Two or three ships holed and sitting on the bottom showed the attacks could be effective. The Mediterranean was closed off to through traffic by the North African military activities and the Italian navy plus a number of U-boats operating off Gibralter (we didn’t know then but the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the battleship Malaya were both torpedoed and severely damaged in the vicinity at this time). Ignorance may not be bliss but it helps! It was also better not to know that we were heading into waters patrolled by German raiders. The heavily armed Odenwald and the Atlantis were both captured or sunk about this time in African Equatorial waters.
It was almost a relief to get under way again in the company of a half dozen merchant men escorted by a couple of corvettes and an armed trawler (Hull or Grimsby from the look of her). One day out we ran into trouble. The night was very dark, the sea like a millpond and the aroma of Africa was in the air. The only light came from the luminescent wake trailing each ship in line.

Dead ahead the darkness was suddenly split by a vivid flash, white to yellow then red, mushrooming into the hellish fireball a hundred feet high as the large tanker ahead of us exploded onto flames, the ‘Egyptian’ shook and rattled from the explosion. The alarm was clanging away but the Old Man was already on the bridge. Pandemonium reigned for a minute, I was off watch so took up station at the starboard machine gun, more for a feeling of security than effectiveness. The Captain was striding up and down the bridge — he had a problem and we depended upon his coming up with the right answer! We were about three hundred yards astern of the burning tanker, now almost dead in the water and closing fast. Was the U-boat to port or starboard of her victim? If we went to port to pass, would the ‘Egyptian’ be silhouetted as a target starkly against the flames or should we pass to starboard hoping the U-boat was to the left blanked out by light and smoke! The captain hesitated, made a decision, countermanded it and then we veered to starboard. At seven knots, time moves very slowly, for the next five minutes no-one breathed. As we drew alongside then passed the burning ship a few men clustered at the bow cried out before jumping into the flaming sea. We could do nothing but watch and pray that we weren’t next.
A flurry of depth charges shook the ocean behind us as our ragged group fled to the South. The next night was disturbed by a series of depth charge explosions, it appeared that we were not the only ones shaken up by the loss of the tanker, our escort was alert. After zig-zagging for about ten days we skirted the Cape Verde Islands and headed south-east for Sierra Leone, steaming into the anchorage at Freetown around the end of November.
After six weeks on board the crew was somewhat restive. It did not help that we anchored about a mile offshore from town, that we were short of provisions having no refridgerator, and the ice box was rapidly depleted in the 105 degree Fahrenheit temperature. The chief worked on an old fan for the saloon — a blessing until the motor burnt out! The captain insisted on a dose of quinine for everyone on board every night followed by a tot of rum (shades of Nelson). The rum unfortunately did not kill the quinine’s bite, I found it the most horrible taste I’d encountered and getting rid of it was a priority. For what it’s worth — a crust of old bread smothered with jam from the galley — sort of worked!
The heat was oppressive and at night the mosquito nets sealed you in like a steam pudding. A roster was made up for shore leave, the liberty boat called about every two days but since the harbour is so huge it took hours to get ashore, then it was near time to get back. It was tricky getting around as Freetown is situated at the mouth of two rivers generating an 8knot flood tide. Close to the far shore, a sunken liner (the Umona I believe) bore witness to an encounter with a surface raider, she survived the attack but not the damage, sitting on the bottom, her superstructure was the target of pilfering locals.
We lay there for days and the galley was reduced to serving up salt pork, weevil-rice and ships’ biscuits. Curry for breakfast, curry for lunch and curry for dinner rather affects the taste buds after a while. Fortunately we had a quantity of Mango Chutney, the only redeeming feature — when we finally ran out of that, in desperation we used a mix of marmalade and H.P. Sauce — not recommended! It was rumoured the salt pork came from barrels stamped with the ‘R.N. motif and H.M.S. Victory 1812’. Since a piece of it held aloft, shone green and cast enough light to read by, I tended to believe it.
At slack tide every day, hordes of native in dug-out boats surrounded the ship. These were the ‘bumboatmen’ crouched in their flimsy shells, sporting white painted names ‘Jesusloveme’, ‘Redeemallnow’ on the bows, phrases from the missions! Stacked with stalks of bananas, mangoes and oranges they jockeyed for position alongside and fights were numerous.
These people were very black-skinned, obviously very healthy and very primitive and whilst they would dive for coins, didn’t want to trade for money. “Changee - for-changee” was a continuous chant. We soon found out that old under vests, underpants and worn summer shirts were golden capital. I hauled up a huge stalk of bananas — a dozen hands or more — close to a hundred bananas, in exchange for a decrepit old vest I’d used for a duster. The Mate had decreed in no uncertain terms that no ‘bumboatmen’ were to be allowed aboard under ‘pain of death’ and apparently they understood either the words or the manner of the threat.
Unfortunately he had some difficulty explaining this ‘figure of speech’ to the authorities when a death did occur about a week later. Two of the strokers just off watch, tried to do a deal for fruit, using an old once-white shirt.
I honestly believe they intended some skull duggery for as the banans came up and the shirt was being lowered down, a large piece of ‘clinker’ followed it down — it would certainly have gone straight through the bottom of the dugout, except that the unfortunate native got his head in harm’s way.
When the shore police arrived to investigate, they were very large and officious men,there was not a lot of argument and one of the stokers — an Australian, departed with them. We never saw nor heard of him again and a couple of weeks later a ‘D.B.S.’ replacement came aboard.
Distressed British Seaman was a term used abroad for survivors from sunken ships, and also seamen left behind at foreign ports through illness, bad conduct and anything else that might make a captain want to dump him — in the old days it was simple to maroon such characters on a desert island but in civilised times such as during a world war, the responsibility fell to the nearest British Consulate. Sometimes weeks and months passed before a friendly captain could be persuaded to ship these ‘derelicts’ back to ‘Blighty’ — the paperwork and inconveniences was daunting! In our case the new stoker was so grateful, so profuse in his thanks for the berth that it was sometime before he realised he’s jumped from the proverbial frying pan!
Nearing the fourth week of swinging at anchor we began to face some medical problems amongst the crew — we had some malaria and dysentery aboard — to be expected along this once-feared fever-coast, heavily overgrown with mangroves and buzzing with mosquitoes, though I suspect malnutrition figured in there somewhere and contributed to the sick-list. The steward had played doctor so far but he was not popular and after another attack by his nemesis (and mine) the big stoker; he refused to do the job.

A conference at highest levels — the Captain (A.K.A.God), the Chief Engineer and the Mate decided that the Second and Third Radio Officers — apart from being obviously the most intelligent men aboard, were also the ones most incapable of raising any serious objection. So it came to pass and we received the Medical Supplies — a bag of assorted bandages (new and used), a bottle of Iodine, one of Dettol, a tin of Vaseline and two large glass pharmaceutical bottles — one contained hundreds of Aspirin tablets and the other — a gooey black mixture with a label reading ‘BLACK DRAUGHT’. A booklet entitled ‘First Aid for Beginners’ from the St. John First Aid Society accompanied the supplies with a brief instruction, short and to the point. “If pain is abopve belt, take two aspirins, repeat four hours if necessary. If pain is below belt, take a tablespoonful of Black Draught and retire, repeat after four hours if necessary.” From what I observed and later learned from subjective sources — it might just as well have said ‘Light blue touch paper and retire to safe distance’.
The Mate delivered the news and the medical supplies to us — the grin splitting his face made him look almost human. He slapped me on the shoulder saying, “You can put up a shingle, Sparky M.D.” I turned, his grin was wider still, “Mentally deprived!” — and he was out of the door!
Strangely enough, I was enjoying remarkably good health and put it down to the amount of fruit I was eating — it most certainly wasn’t our shipboard sustenance, such as it was. I had this wild theory, eat the local fruit and get immunity to the local bugs — somewhere deep down I still believe it. The Mate however didn’t, and spent half his time watching for his predictions to come true, the malaria and dysentery were nothing to his horrendous forecasts. We were not the best of shipmates but got along reasonably well until one night he cut down a line of my dhobi — a week’s washing, because it was hanging after sunset! Now I agree with the rule, after dark with a black-out, a line strung across the deck is doubly dangerous in an emergency. So, I’d forgotten it and I was wrong! and I resented being wrong with the Mate, more than I was mad with him for mucking up my wash!

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