大象传媒

I was born just before the war, 1938, and my mother died when I was eight months old. My grandmother and grandfather then stepped in, and I lived in Bermondsey with them and other assorted members of the family. My family were lightermen and watermen and lived near the docks. They had worked for Hay's Wharf for years, my grandfather since 1912 - at the start of the war he was bosun at Hibernian wharf, west of London Bridge - and on researching the family history I have found that three branches of our family had lived in London since circa 1585, some 400 years, all watermen, and in the usual tradition, apprenticed to uncles and relatives - the Houghs, the Sholts(initially the Van den Scholtes) and Collins'. All very ordinary people, hard-working and involved in the early union organisations, my grandfather being a friend of Ben Tillet, helping to raise money for the widows and orphans of injured rivermen thru' Boxing matches and socials. They were also keen sportsmen, rowing, of course, to a very high competitive level, Doggetts Coat and Badge, and in another sport, my grandmother's brother, William Hough, was the professional Lightweight Boxing Champion of England in 1902, sadly dying at the age of 19 of cholera- one wonders how far he might have progressed had he been spared? On the day the Germans first bombed London, we were out at the seaside, Margate, having a picnic, and returned to find our house had disappeared -nothing was left and neighbours were dead. we lived for some time under the railway arches in Raymouth Road, then moved down to a cottage my grandfather had rented since 1936 in kent. my grandfather, father and uncles then lived with my aunt Rose in Sidcup, (she was the secretary of Mr Chiesmans' Homeguard detachment in Chislehurst - her husband, a cooper, reserved occupation, served with this Dad's Army unit - after war he became vault keeper of the Rum vault at the Docks and thus had Prince Charles' birthday cask of very special port under his protection, given on the birth of the Prince by the Portugese government. Approaching the date of the Prince's 21st birthday, it was decided to remove this cask from bond when it was to be taken to the Prince's residence. However, my uncle, on dipping the cask, found out that over the years most of it had been drunk by Customs officers and various other dock workers, ostensibly checking that it was still okay...he was then faced with the task of replacing it surreptitiously from sources all over London, friends and companies in the wine trade. He sat down and calculated roughly the ullage - loss of liquid thru' evaporation, and in the finish was even topping it up from petrol cans of port given to him by these associates - the cask was 250 gallons - The great day dawned, representatives of all the famous wine companies attended a celebrative broaching of the cask, my uncle using a silver spiggot and silver schooners to serve them and the Duke of Edinburgh, and the general opinion was that the port was first class!! My uncle then told me that it showed how much the Great and the Good knew about Port...) whilst working on the river and my grandmother and I lived in the kentish cottage. my father slept many nights in Chislehurst caves and the underground stations whilst still working. my uncle Tom was the Captain and pilot on the river fire float "massey shaw" and took part in the evacuation of dunkirk, where the "massey shaw" rescued some 600 odd men from the beaches. He was a trained navigator (Mr George Allagiah, of the 大象传媒, on a report of the Massey Shaw on TV, said that none of the crew were trained navigators...) who had worked on boats up the Seine before the war, transporting cheese(his birthday and name were the same as his father's, and for many years they only paid one lot of income tax by only completing one person's details instead of two...PAYE stopped all this...) My father was then called up for the navy, but decided that perhaps the army was the better bet and joined the Royal Engineers water transport section, rising to become a WO 1. At this rank, he commanded an LCT in the Normandy landings and took some of the Canadian Commandos ashore at Juno beach. He said he was more afraid of them than the Germans- they spent a lot of time on the craft painting their faces with warpaint and sharpening knives -His craft contained Hobart "funnies" and he had some part in placing tanks with ramps on the Corseulles promenade. The landings at this beach took place an hour after most of the other landings because of the tides and the Germans were well prepared - something like 20 out of the first 24 boats to the beach were destroyed. After the initial landings he helped build the Mulberry harbour, and was in Caen after it was rased to the ground.
Following this, he moved up the coast with various craft taking food to the Dutch and Belgians finally thru' the canal system and once took the surrender of a group of SS men who preferred to be taken prisoner by the English (As he approached the town where they appeared, seeing lots of black uniforms on the canalside, he told his sergeant to run up the white flag, but before this could be done, the SS unit ran up their white flag). Before this time, my uncle in the fire service went thru' the massive fire in the docks and carried a scorch mark on his face all his life from the incredible heat of the spirit warehouse fires. The "massey shaw" did sterling work throughout this period and Tom Collins found out that he could knock down walls of warehouses by training the massively powerful hose of the Massey Shaw on them and running the jet up and down - this allowed firemen to access parts of the docks blocked to them by falling debris. Other boats used by the Fire Service at this time were the Alpha, Beta and Delta, but none were so powerful as the "Massey" - now apparently in the London Museum.
In Kent, we lived more quietly, but were still machine-gunned one day by a roaming German plane near Knoxbridge- we jumped in the ditch - and listened to the German bombers every night going overhead to London. In August 1944 a V1 landed some 50yds behind our cottage in Staplehurst and we were thus homeless for the second time before I was six...this same bomb blew all the windows out of the village church.
How we learned to read and write I do not know, as I had attended some six schools before I was eleven, and lived in seven homes. During this time my grandfather had slipped down between two barges which then came together on his ankle...his footballing days were over...he was taken to Guy's hospital during an air raid, set and plastered, and collected by some railmen whom he knew and walked up the ramp at London Bridge railway station on a mail trolley to catch the train home and early retirement. His retirement would nowadays be called "active retirement", as he became involved in the black market and it was known locally in Staplehurst that if anything had gone missing, my grandfather either knew about it, had organised it, or had it...A local farmer who helped with these misdeeds was even banned from Ashford Market. In his younger days, my grandfather had been a King's swanupper, and served for many years in this honorary position under Mr Turk of Windsor. He was an avid hater of Mr Churchill, and told me tales of how Churchill had brought the troops against the miners in Tonypandy, of how he personally had fought with the police and strike breakers in the '26 strike...advised me on how to use ballbearings against police horses in union conflicts. I was told of the King wearing makeup to visit the docks during the war, and of Edward the VIII's drunken escapades... An odd thing apart from this, was that one of our forebears was the Mayor of London during the 1830's, stood as prospective Tory MP for Maidstone afterwards, became the Lord of the Manor of Wateringbury, and has a notable memorial in the village church where he built an additional extension. I can possibly claim also to be the youngest cub scout ever, because I made such a nuisance of myself to the local pack when 5 years old that they allowed me to be the pack mascot with cap and uniform...Despite all this activity, we lost no one in our immediate family so can consider ourselves lucky...My grandfather would turn over in his grave to know that my daughter is now married to a senior German civil servant and lives in Berlin, and my son, a Cambridge-educated doctor, also works in Germany - his great-great grandson is a small German boy, learning two languages and at the moment possessing dual nationality, and on his father's side of the family although no one served in the second war, one was an officer in the Kaiser's army...

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