´óÏó´«Ã½

My father's war started in 1938. He had left the Navy on pension in 1935 and worked in the Naval Dockyard. When Chamberlain was negotiating in 1938 he was recalled by telegram and instructed to report to HMS Excellent (Whale Island) - no problem, our family had lived five minutes walk from there since my father's marriage in 1919, because he was in gunnery and had always been based there since he left HMS Ganges (training ship at Shotley on the East Coast).
He reported and was given an outfiting allowance and told to report back immediately on any declaration of war. Since he had only left the Service three years before, he did not need to buy a new uniform and instead bought my mother a chiming clock - something she had always wanted!
Consequently, when war was actually declared on 3rdSeptember 1939, he prepared to report - but as it was a Sunday, he waited until Monday.
In 1939, my father was already 44 years old; as a Naval pensioner he was not to old to be recalled to the colours but too old for sea service - for which he was grateful, having been at the Battle of Jutland in the First World War.
He was drafted to HMS Excellent (Whale Island), the Gunnery School, which had always been his base as a gunner and later a gunnery instructor, and appointed Chief of the Footbridge. Whale Island was an island, and was approached over a single track bridge with a footpath on one side. Chief of the Footbridge was responsible for the control and direction of traffic, plus the supervision of the ratings and preparation and organisation of duty rosters, subject to the approval of the Officer in Charge. As in most servces, the non-commisioned officers dealt with the practicalities.
When he arrived at Whale Island and walked into the mess, he was greeted by a cry of ’Biff’’ ; he often met people he had known in the service; having been in since 1912, and he had served in battleships and destoyers in many parts of the world; his ship had been Cock of the Fleet when he served in the Mediterranean, with my father coxswain of the Captain’s jollyboat. People who knew him then called him Biff, because he boxed for hs ship in the tournaments.
They produced a lot of their own food on the Island, and the man who ran the piggery was an old oppo of my fathers. He had his spaniel bitch there; she had been ‘on the wander’ and we had one of the puppies, Toby.
Chief of the Footbridge was called a ‘cushy number’, but it did not last. My father and several other gunnery instructors were ‘translated’ to the army as Sergeant-majors, each to take a team of soldiers and a Naval towing gun around the east coast to try to catch the incoming enemy aircraft, training the gun crews as they went. My father had once been in the competing gun team and was a ‘dab hand’ at dismantling the gun, getting it into an enclosed space when necessary.
They pitched their tents in all sorts of places around the east coast and the aircraft seemed to follow them. On one occasion they were in a wood not far from a church and a bomb hit their site, throwing the men into the air and over the church wall. My father was draped over a tombstone but, luckily, nothing was broken but his ribs were very bruised and the bruises took a long time to disappear, as we saw when he eventually came home on leave.
Camping out in tents, the men had no decent toilet facilities and became dirty to the point of filthy, their meals were very scrappy and they had little sleep, even though they were organised into watches. Eventually my father took them to HMS Ganges, the Naval training centre at Shotley, where of course he found another ‘oppo’, and got them all a bath, a good meal, and a decent night’s sleep, but they were soon back on the job.
Eventually the army organised its own teams, guns and leaders, and the naval personnel were returned to HM barracks, Portsmouth - with a well-earned week’s leave.
His next trip was, as an Instructor, back to Ganges where they were taking a massive number of personnel from the commonwealth, and my father found himself working with Newfoundlanders from Canada. They were magicians with small boats, not bad at gunnery (although not so good at dismantling and reassembly) but found it extremely difficult to learn to march. While he was there, my father started an allotment and introduced chicken keeping (whether officially or not I never discovered!) and used to bring us some vegetables when he came home for a long weekend.
It was during one of these long weekends that he got caught up in the bombing of the Guildhall in Portsmouth. As servicemen left the train at the Town Station, they were asked to leave their gear in left luggage and join the teams trying to save the Guildhall, which was caught by incendiaries. Despite all their efforts, the building was burnt out and continued as a shell until well after the war. Most of the city records were lost. My father did not get home until the early hours of the morning and he was filthy.
Gradually the Navy managed to bring in younger (more agile) personnel as instructors, and the older men were moved on to various other stations around the country and a variety of duties. My father was sent to Coatdyke/Coatbridge, near Ayr, in Lanarkshire, Scotland, where the Navy had established a prison for military offenders, ranging from deserters to attempted attacks on senior officers, with a whole variety of other offences.
As soon as my father arrived, he found three former messmates, Steve Cripps, who in civilian life ran the Morning Star pub in Portsmouth, Steve (can’t remember the surname) who ordinarily ran the Tramway Arms in Portsmouth, and another man whose name I don’t remember who ran a pub in Long Acre; needless to say, father was co-opted on to the Mess Committee with them and they organised the social life for the staff.
Social life was very necessary because Prison Officers become alsmost as institutionalised as the prisoners, so the Committee organised all sorts of activities. Not least of these were the Saturday Open Socials, when staff, who mostly lived in lodgings in the area, could invite local residents to come and enjoy the entertainment. This was a good PR exercise because not all the local people were happy to have a large Naval prison on their doorstep, but this gave them an opportunity to meet the staff and find they were human and not monsters.
In the summer of 1944 Olive Cripps left the care of the Morning Star to her mother, Mrs. Keith, and, with her son Keith, joined my mother and me on the long railway journey (14 hours) to Scotland.
The husbands had found accommodation for us, bed and breakfast, and, during the day we went exploring, sometimes led by a member of the family where we were staying. We had the opportunity of going to both Glasgow and Edinburgh, and various other places in the area, sometimes accompanied by one or both husbands if they had a 'make and mend' (time supposedly spent on laundry and mending - but the husbands had craftily persuaded their landladies to do that for them!) What I remember most were the magnificent Italian ice-creams in both Glasgow and Edinburgh!
In the evenings we went to the CPO's mess for a quiet drink and chat, as family, we were priviledged during the week. The high point was Saturday, a combined social and ceilidh (if that is the spelling), when lanladies and local friends were invited, where people danced as well as chatted, and anyone who could do something was encouraged to entertain the company.
Saturday afternoon was something else altogether - our landlady's flat overlooked Albion Rovers, and was crowded with supporters, both Naval and civilian! That was when I learned about the passion for football which inspires the Scots.
My father stayed at Coatdyke until the end of the war, although he was nearly killed on one occasion. Staff were not supposed to enter the cells singly, always in pairs; on this occasion, my father went first and, as luck would have it, tripped and slipped sideways; the inmate had been hiding behind the door with the leg from a wooden stool in his hand and brought it down with real force (my father was only 5ft 6in, the prisoner was over 6ft and solidly built), just missing my father's head and catching his shoulder, paralysing his arm. The partner quickly dragged my father out and locked the door, rushing my father to the sick bay in case anything was broken. Luckily nothing was (but my father had arthritis in that shoulder in later life).
The good spin-off was that he got 14 days sick leave and was able to come home to Portsmouth.
There were several stories about prisoners trying to get over the barbed wire, and people throwing tools from a nearby bridge over the wire, so prisoners could try to escape, but, as far as I am aware,there were no successful attempts.
As soon as the Navy was able to replace the pensioners with regular serving men, the pensioners were drafted back to their originating barracks, in father's case it was RN Barracks, Portsmouth - the one place everyone knew well, because they went there for a short period whenever the Naval Authorities wanted to send them elsewhere - and where everyone found long-lost friends.
My father was one of the earliest discharges, at the age of 50 years. When he started the war he had a head of thick dark hair with a few threads of grey. After being blown over the tombstone in East Anglia, he started to go grey quickly and then white. when the war finished in 1945, at the age of 50 he still had a head of thick hair, but it was white.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.