大象传媒

THE MAN I NEVER KNEW ON HMS KELLY.

I was born in 1946 and as a child was very curious about the past war, the signs of which were all around me, as I grew up. Unfortunately, each time I approached the subject, my family elders met me with a hard stare and profound silence.
I did pick up one crumb of information, my mother鈥檚 family was bombed out of their house in Grace Street and were very lucky to be rehoused in a recently vacated property in Perth Street, but this was the only morsel I was able to consume.
It would be over fifty-five years later, when my uncle Billy sadly passed away and his home was being emptied, that I stumbled across a photograph album on the top shelf of his wardrobe. I later found from long stored family photos, that he had served in the Army stationed in Gibraltar during the war, although in all the time I knew him he never mentioned the war or the part that he himself played.
What was more intriguing was that he also had a brother called Christopher, almost a twin, who I never ever knew existed and who was killed in action in 1941. From the jigsaw of photographs he collected on his travels, I was able to piece together that he joined the Royal Navy as a Stoker in the mid 1930鈥檚 and served on HMS Eagle on a voyage through the Suez Canal, then on to the Far East in an Imperial show of strength to take part in King George VI 鈥榮 Coronation celebrations.
The Commonwealth War Graves puts my uncle鈥檚 brother on HMS Kelly at the time of his death. At about 8 a.m. on the 23rd May, during the evacuation of Crete, on their way to Alexandria and having twice been attacked from the air without damage, twenty-four dive-bombers attacked the Kelly, Kashmir and the Kipling. The Kashmir was hit and sank in two minutes. A large bomb hit the Kelly, steaming 30 knots under full helm. She listed heavily to port and capsized, still moving through the water. After floating upside down for half-an-hour she finally sank. The German aircraft, before leaving, subjected the survivors of both ships in the water to the usual hail of machine-gun bullets. The Kipling at once closed to rescue the survivors and remained on the scene for three hours in the face of six high-level bombing attacks. She picked up only 279 officers and men from the water.
At what stage in the fighting my uncle鈥檚 brother was lost is known only to God. I can only hope that being a Stoker, he would have been in the bowels of the ship and that therefore his death was both swift and merciful.
As an Uncle myself now, I can only wonder, if he had survived the war, what influence he would have had on my own childhood and if, like the remainder of the family, how reticent of his part in the war he would also have been?

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