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This story appears courtesy of and with thanks to The Liverpool Diocesan Care and Repair Association and James Taylor.

I started off doing my training as a seaman in a village called Lowestoft, I had to do ten weeks training there. We used to get strafed, they used to come in by the sea and strafe us. That was an aeroplane with machine guns on them, and they would spray loads of bullets to clear the way for the bombers. The village was riddled with machine gun bullets from the strafers, even the cook house, where I eventually went to because I became a chef in the Navy. The planes ( strafers and bombers ) could only come so far in but they were clever. The pom-poms wouldn’t know who to fire at because there was these little planes strafing and they were also a kind of guard for the bombers. The barracks were called ‘Swallows Nest’. I didn’t get any leave, I went straight from there, right up to South Africa. It wasn’t bad for the Army and Air Force, they patrolled the shipping and did their exercises, but all the poor Navy lads got jobs to do. We (The Navy) got all the bad work to do while they (the Army and Air Force) were more or less resting. I finished up working in the bakery at night. The food was marvellous, I used to get a tray, everything was on it, no matter what it was. It could be potatoes, carrots, gravy and sweet. With working in the bakehouse, I went to the mess and was served a five course meal by the Phillipinos who worked on board. The service and the food were great, you couldn’t beat it. It was better than going to a restaurant. I remember these two blokes who I worked in the bakery with, one of them was like a bean pole, he was a great worker, the other fellah was as stout as a house. This stout fellah could actually work and sleep at the same time. He was a marvel. I’ve watched him and even tried to talk to him, kneading dough and sleeping. When we tried to speak to him, he wouldn’t take a blind bit of notice because he’d be fast asleep. When the end of the night was over and the last batch was done, he’d be wide awake, so he’d go for his breakfast and then finish off a bottle of something. He’d be awake for the rest of the day then, and go to sleep on the job, but still carry on with his work.
Well when that job was over, we sailed to a barracks in South Africa called H.M.S. Assagai. They were all Royal Navy Reserves. My first job while I was there was on a trawler. We were on escort for submarines coming into dock. They were that fast, they used to race up ahead of us and wait for us to catch up and we were supposed to escort them. When ships were coming into dock, we used to tow them in as well. Of course, we had all of them, U-boats on the rampage and it was nothing for a ship to be fired at and sunk in the middle of the Atlantic.
My first Christmas, we were doing a towing job, and we hadn’t gone very far, and we just had enough food to take us into harbour and I became ill with scabies, so I finished up going to Assagai.
I worked on the motor launchers, the Valliant was in dock, so I did some work on there. One particular time, on the Rosaline, we were doing a job and a couple of bombs dropped by the side of the ship and this crate I was opening, split open because the bomb drop made me jerk and the steel bar stuck in my eye. I went aboard the hospital ship and got treated, and had an emergency operation. I went to towing when I recovered. When the war ended with Germany on V.E.Day, while everyone else was celebrating with good wholesome food, we were eating dehydrated potatoes and dehydrated corned beef.
We were looking after this towing job and looking out for the Japanese. Even when we finished fighting the Japanese, we still had a lousy celebration dinner. We were in Durban then, and the people of Durban were very good in those days. When we went ashore, they were always waiting for us to take us out for the day to anywhere we wanted to go. If we didn’t feel like going anywhere special, they would take us home for dinner. That was all free of charge, they did like to be hospitable. They were very friendly and generous people. Of course, there were bad places. Take Cape Town for instance, there was no-body who was safe to dock in Cape Town. I’ve known sailors just walking along the Cape and be thrown in the dock, to be stripped naked and robbed of everything they own.
Well as far as the war was concerned, I think I had a pretty easy time. I did see a little bit of action, but nothing compared to what the others saw.
I finished off coming back down to Colchester. I went aboard a mine-sweeper then in the English Channel. They were American mine-sweepers made of timber. We used to mine-sweep across the Channel to Holland, and then back again and carry on back and forth mine-sweeping. We used to buy all the bicycle components that couldn’t be bought in Holland and charge the Dutch the earth for them and they used to pay us because they wanted them. I did about two and half years of mine-sweeping and then they brought the ship back to Colchester. I came back without a bean. All of my money was spent on booze and what-have-you. When I got to Colchester my name got called out, they had a draft for me. I’d just been demobed. They needed a chef and wanted me to do it. I did it because I had no money. I signed up for another twelve months, but I made sure I came back with money. I got a new suit and overcoat, shoes and socks.

We were issued with them. A brown pin-striped suit, a trilby, a shirt, a collar and tie, and a mac. Before I left the ship at Colchester, I thought ‘I’m not leaving all this stuff aboard the ship, and I’m not taking no kit bag to the barracks, I’ll do that when I go on leave and come back to be demobed.’ So I filled up the kit bag with tins of bacon, beans and butter, all sorts, and sent it by rail home, then I got home on leave, and I was home before the bag arrived. The poor postman, he couldn’t lift it, her had to drag it! I was surprised really when I came back. I left home in Guest Street, and during the war, my mother had had to leave. She had written to me to tell me she had moved. God! I had never seen a crummier house in all my life. It was a straight up and down house. There were no back rooms. There was the cellar, nothing in it, then you went up six steps, and came into the front parlour. My mother had no gas cooker, no sink, nothing inside the kitchen. All she had was a round table top in the corner.

She cooked on gas rings, she had what was called a double gas ring, and she did all her cooking on that. The main thing was that her kitchen drains were the oven. The water was outside on the wall, no sink or no grid. You had to go out there in the winter for a ‘swill’, you know, a wash in the ice cold water. We didn’t have time to warm the water up. As I said, then I came home, and I brought one of those big kettles and we used to keep it at the side of the hob, and we used it to warm water up. As you came up the farm steps, the stairs were straight ahead. Then at the top you came to one bedroom, up another few stairs to another bedroom. Mother used to do her washing in the cellar, she had to carry all the water down with her. There was nothing we could do about any of it. We tried to get another house but we couldn’t

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