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ON MINE-SWEEPERS

ANTHONY (Tony) REYNOLDS

Navy — Signals, Escort Duty, D-Day, Home waters, VE/VJ Day

This is an edited version of an interview by Jo Kelly on 28th April 2004. The original recording and full transcript are held in the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, ref. BAHS 108. © Basingstoke Talking History

WAR DECLARED
My name’s Tony Reynolds and I was born and brought up in Chester and I was fifteen back when the war started. I remember being very disappointed to find out that on the first day the tanks weren’t hurling through the streets. It was just like any other quite Sunday afternoon.

CIVIL DEFENCE
When I was sixteen I joined the Civil Defence Messenger Service. Having been in the Scouts, we were naturally recruited as being ideal people for this sort of thing and quite prepared to hare through the streets in the blackout on bikes with very inadequate lighting, taking messages.

NAVY VOLUNTEER
At eighteen and a half I went into the Royal Navy; you weren’t ever conscripted into the Navy, you registered and volunteered. I was a wireless telegraphist and the total learning period, including how to be a sailor for a few weeks, was thirty-three weeks. When I’d finished my training, which was about September 1943, I went off to Portsmouth and then to Petersfield, which was the signals area for the Navy in the south of England, and a few weeks later I was sent off on a troop ship to Algiers.

SERVICE ABROAD
The ship was called The Urang of the Union Castle Line. There were over three thousand soldiers, and about seven or eight hundred sailors, quite a lot of nurses and ATS, and all other people aboard. The normal complement of the ship would have been about nine hundred and something, so you can imagine how crowded it was. We went through the Straits of Gibraltar on the 4th November and arrived in Algiers on 5th November, to find that the base had been moved to Malta and eventually we were put on a cattle ship called The Murray, which was rather unpleasant, and we ended up in Malta where we were living in tents on what was then the site of the Naval barracks that had been bombed. Everybody got dysentery and I eventually went on a trawler called The Coriolanus, and the first trip was to Algiers. We had mine-sweeping gear and we also had Asdics and depth charges, so we mostly did escorts and eventually we moved along the coast, first to a place called Bougie, then to Bône which was a lot bigger, and ended up in the Bizerte. We used to take convoys across from Bizerte to Naples for the Anzio beach head which was then still in operation.

VESUVIUS
In fact I was in Naples when Vesuvius was erupting in March 1944 and it was rather spectacular. The deck was continually covered in grit and it was like walking on sugar. We’d wash the deck and ten minutes later you were back walking on ‘sugar’ again.

CRUISER ESCORT DUTY
We did quite a few trips; in fact we went to Corsica and Sardinia and an island called Maddalena, which is between the two, and eventually one trip in May 1944 we went across to Naples and were given a cruiser to escort. She’d had her stern blown off at Anzio and she’d drifted around on the tide, and it was just as though it had been cut off between the two gun turrets. She had auxiliary engines, she had power for guns and lighting, but obviously no propulsion, so we escorted her across the Mediterranean to Maserta, and from there to Gibraltar. There were a couple of tugs towing her on the way to Gibraltar and just off Iran, when I was on watch twelve midnight to four in the morning, which was called the dead watch, a convoy coming the other way from Gibraltar to Alexandria, was actually attacked by U-boats. I rather suspect they were looking for us but got the wrong one and it was quite chaotic because they were going down considerably fast and I couldn’t listen to it all on the radio. They were supposed to give us a wide berth, and one of the ships actually hit one of the tugs and damaged it. We eventually arrived in Gibraltar and there they dry-docked the cruiser. She was called The Polamoris by the way; she was a merchant ship that had been converted to an anti aircraft cruiser and she looked just like a cruiser.

D-DAY + HOME RUN
We were in Gibraltar for about a week and they decided to have us mine-sweeping in the Straits and I was actually on watch while we were mine-sweeping and listening, and the news came through of D-Day and also Rome fell, I think, on the same day. So I was able to advise all the crew. So we waited in Gibraltar until we got what was supposed to be a favourable weather forecast before setting off. Two days out we hit a sixty-mile an hour gale that lasted for six days, this being the one that wrecked all the Mulberry Harbours in the Channel, but we eventually got through it all. In that six days, of course, we didn’t have any hot food because the galley was coal-burning and we couldn’t keep anything on the stove. So we used to have cold food and we were also rationed on water. We weren’t allowed to wash or shave in the ordinary water because we needed it for the boilers and it was quite an unpleasant experience. We arrived off Milford Haven off the Bristol Channel and a couple of destroyers came along and said, '‘Thank you for your escort, proceed into Milford Haven, we are now taking the escort over.’ And they took it from the Bristol Channel to Birkenhead where The Polamoris had been built by Cammel Laird. I was rather disappointed because I was expecting to get on a bus and be home sixteen miles away.

HOME WATERS
Eventually we went right into a loch in the north of Scotland, then through the Pentland Firth, down to Granton seven, and we were there for a few days and were then sent down to Hull where the ship was paid off. We just left it there and she was eventually re-fitted and sent out to the Mediterranean again and was sunk in April 1945 in the Adriatic. I then ended up on a minesweeper in Aberdeen. She was a converted Fleetwood fishing trawler called the Harry Melling, after the owners. There was one in fact called the Hanna Reynolds which was in Aberdeen. I then was sent down eventually to North Shields and I joined a trawler called the Suma. She’d been a fishing trawler and we were clearing mines off the end of the Tyne. We’d laid minefields all round the UK and there were secret channels supposedly but I reckon the Germans knew where they were. They were the swept channels and that’s what minesweepers mainly did, they swept the channels to make sure if there were drifting mines or the Germans hadn’t dropped any of theirs.

VE AND VJ DAYS
Incidentally, on my 21st birthday I was in hospital in Lowestoft on VE Day. I was on the Suma in North Shields earning a shilling a day extra for clearing minefields on VJ Day. When VJ Day was announced and the war was over we all started firing signal rockets, and firing blanks, and shining search lights, and all that sort of thing. All the civilians came to the harbour although the sentry was supposed to keep them out, but he couldn’t really do it, so he opened the gates and let them all in. The Hanna Reynolds had come in that day and the gunner had unloaded the oerlikon gun and covered the gun over with a tarp, but then unfortunately there was one left up the spout and a kid playing with it fired the gun and the shell hit the gantry crane and one of the pieces of shrapnel killed Mary Glass, a twelve year old girl. The Suma couldn’t tow a sweep any more so we left her up in Rossyth and I went back to Lowestoft and ended up in the base concert party and was doing that until May and I started my demob routine on 17 May which was in fact my 22nd birthday. I actually came out on the 20th.

AFTER THOUGHTS
I was basically brought up in slums and we didn’t have much food and in fact I suppose we were better off, to some extent, during the war than before the war. Up till then I hadn’t even been into London, and then when I first went up to Scotland it was like going to a foreign country. And then I got to go out to places like Algeria and Tunisia and Malta. I’d been to an elementary school where I left a fourteen and we were rather lucky, I think, to be able to read and write, but that was it, and I think the war was a tragedy for a lot of people. For people of my age groups, for very many of us, it opened our eyes for the first time. It was interesting and I met an awful lot of people from different walks of life, one of the wireless operators on the Coriolarnus was an Oxford undergraduate, and of course then we had the opportunity to travel. It wasn’t all fun though.

[Additional note by Barbara Applin: Tony Reynolds tells me that his minesweeper rescued stretcher cases from the crew of a 4-funnel destroyer, the Rockingham, half a mile inside the minefield between Aberdeen and Dundee. In the process atrocious weather slammed them up against the Rockingham and the minesweeper was so badly damaged that the crew were granted 3 weeks’ leave. They were also (quite against rules) sent down a bottle of whisky but were shaking so much that it took a long time to pour any out.

In December 2005 he was one of a group of ex-servicemen who were given a week’s holiday, paid for by the Gibraltar Government, which included a grand parade through Main Street amid cheers and waving flags.]

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