大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Dunstable At War Team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with his permission.

After I left school I went to work in Reigate, Surrey in a publishing business called World Books, one of the earliest book clubs. This was an interlude between leaving school, my eighteenth birthday and being called up. I asked to join the Air Force and went along to a medical but to my surprise they turned me down, because during my later school years I鈥檇 had attacks of migraine. This left me in a quandary because I could see the army looming up very quickly indeed and I didn鈥檛 particularly want to join with all due respects, so I argued for the navy and was accepted. In the spring of 1943, I was called up to start a naval career.

We went first to a receiving camp, I think the name was HMS Gloucester in Bristol, where we were kitted out; the first steps to getting into one of the services during the war. That was a very rude awakening because on the very first day there were about 12 of us at the dinner table in the mess. The food was brought to the table - meat, potatoes and peas and action started immediately. Most of the people round the table didn鈥檛 wait, they just got hold of the meat with their hands and helped themselves, which left me completely bewildered. I had never seen this happen before! I remember absolutely my first night as a naval rating, so the next night I made sure I was nearer the meat dish than anyone else!

I think we only stayed there a fortnight; it was a case of signing on, making sure you had all your kit, did some square bashing and things of that nature. We moved on to another shore establishment called HMS Glendower on the Welsh coast. It was there that we started our training. Again we did a lot of square bashing, assault courses and on Saturday mornings we would be taken for a run over the dunes and have to go out into the cold Welsh sea. We got ashore generally on Saturday afternoons and evening. It was an interesting place, most people settled into it, learning, etc. If we didn鈥檛 want to stretch our legs for a bit we just picked up a piece of paper and walked around the camp trying to look very official, as if we were delivering important information to someone elsewhere on the camp!

During that time we were taken out in one of the large ships for about 3 or 4 days off the coast of Scotland for some 鈥榮ea experience鈥�. Somewhere along the line at Glendower, the powers that be, sorted us out in their own minds and decided that there were several of us likely to make officer material and I was put on this list. I look back on Glendower with interest as I met many good people.

Starting on my officer-training career, we were sent to HMS King Alfred in Hove. We attended lots of courses and lectures and every now and then we had to give a talk ourselves. We did a lot of practical work, man-management, etc. I was very fortunate as my digs were based about a mile from my sister and her husband who were living in Brighton at that time. We also attended Lancing College, which had a magnificent school chapel. When we had passed various examinations at King Alfred we attended a two to three week finishing course at Greenwich College. We came out with success; I was in the Effingham Division if I remember rightly. I came out as a newly pledged Midshipman. Snotties as they were called. On my lapel jacket was a little maroon strip of cloth with a little gold piece on the maroon. So here I was, a newly pledged officer in the RNVR, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves, the wavy navy!

Home on leave, it wasn鈥檛 very long before I received my sailing orders to report to HMCS Lunenburg in Londonderry, the C being Canadian (a Canadian Corvette). I went aboard and followed instructions issued to all young officers that go aboard a new ship for the first time, to salute and say, "come aboard, Sir鈥�.

I was very pleased to be on one of these ships. The Corvettes have quite a bit of history attached to them. In 1938 when war seemed very close, the navy had very few escort vessels, so the powers that be approached one of the shipping construction firms and asked them to put forward a plan for a vessel to carry out anti-submarine and convoy work. They came up with this particular Corvette; it started out with a tonnage of about 750 and a ships staff of about 48 officers and crew. As the immediate years progressed (1939/40/1), it was so important to build as many of these Corvettes as possible. As they improved them the tonnage went up to 940 with a crew of 80. They were built in England, Canada and India.

We were an escort vessel, carrying out convoy duty. The Flower Class Corvettes were referred to as uncomfortable in their extreme! It was also known that if you could stand a Flower Class Corvette you could probably stand anything! That was right because when we did get started, and I went out on the first sortie I think I was seasick for about a day and a half but was all right after that. The Corvettes proved their worth over and over again as they had very credible results in sinking u-boats in the North Atlantic and Artic Convoys. They had a sharper turn than a u-boat and a very good radius of action. They were called Flower Class Corvettes because each Corvette was given a name of a flower. During the First World War, ships of a similar vintage were called the herbaceous class. The particular firm that was approached to produce a plan for a Corvette was also involved in building warships in the First World War, so it was decided by the Royal Naval establishment to call them flowers. We had Hyacinth, Starwort, Snowberry, Meadowsweet and so on; all sort of flowers. The Canadian ships were not called flowers, quite often they called them after towns in Canada, hence the Lunenburg, which is in Nova Scotia.

So I joined this ship; I never knew why I had been posted to this particular ship, they dotted the officers around. There was a radar officer there, a petty officer; he and I were the only English officers on board. The crew were super and very enjoyable to work with. I know that there was more informality on board this ship then there would have been on one of the major RN ships.

From the point of view of weaponry, they had a gun fore and aft, mainly on the port side and pom, poms (anti-aircraft guns). They had a thing on the starboard side called a hedgehog that shot missiles over the side, which wasn鈥檛 entirely successful because sometimes they didn鈥檛 go off. But all the ships had depth charges. They had a set of two depth charges at the back, so if they were attacking a submarine or anything of that nature using radar, they could drop them over the side and detonate them at a particular time.

Being a Midshipman and being a very young raw junior officer, I wasn鈥檛 allowed to take any watches myself; my job was a sea-going officer, looking after the ships office and so forth. Of course I did my share of watchmenship but I wasn鈥檛 allowed to do one myself, quite understandably and rightly, otherwise there may have been total disaster. So first of all, I shared the midnight watch with a Canadian who was about 6 or 7 years older than I was, his name Tom M and we became very good friends and kept in touch throughout our lives until he died about 2 years ago. I had the privilege of being asked to be godfather to his fourth and younger son, which I did with pleasure. I mention this because it shows how ties can be held together when you meet someone in circumstances of war service. I remember Tom with great happiness and I recall that there was a particular song called, I Wish I had a Paper Doll to Call My Own, which he sang endlessly during watches. Another thing I remember about these watches was that 2 hours into a 4-hour watch, one of the ratings would bring up 2 mugs of piping hot Ki, which was literally thick black chocolate with hot water poured onto it.

We went out with convoys, sailing down the river Foil to meet them before taking them over to America, then we鈥檇 meet another convoy coming out of North America and take them back to Ireland. We would be at sea for about 2 鈥� 3 weeks, have a few days in port before taking another convoy out again. We didn鈥檛 on that particular ship, tie up with any submarines. We saw one or two flashers overhead, a plane came down and a merchant ship caught fire one night. I remember very vividly the phrase that I think of a lot, while getting caught up on motorways that was, 鈥榯he speed of the convoy is the speed of the slowest ship鈥�. But we were very fortunate, we did the job and I found it very interesting to do this kind of escort work.

After about 5 or 6 months we had orders to sail down to Weymouth in England. We came into Weymouth Bay to join a whole group of ships all over the place; of course this was leading up to D-Day. With sealed orders no one knew what was happenin. No shore leave apart from the Captain and the number one (First Lieutenant). To stop the boredom setting in we gave games to the crew to keep them occupied and played endless games of Monopoly ourselves on the bridge. Eventually orders came and we escorted ships, Mulberry Harbours and equipment over to France. In this small way I was involved in the D-Day landings.

Very shortly after this, while we were back in harbour, I had an order to report to a submarine base in Blythe, Northumberland. This came as a terrible shock. I had long, long, forgotten that for some extraordinary reason that I cannot remember, I鈥檇 thought that it would be good to serve in submarines. This had been registered somewhere in naval offices but which quite frankly, was the last thing I wanted to do but there was no getting out of it!

Blythe on the Northumberland coast was a bit cold, a bit dark and wasn鈥檛 the sort of place that you particularly wanted to be in during the war. Although I wasn鈥檛 very happy about it, I went along and did this submarine course. After taking the examinations I found myself hovering between the people who had passed and those that had failed by about one point. An officer in charge came up to me and said, 鈥測ou鈥檝e worked hard at this but I don鈥檛 think submarines are your forte, do you?鈥� I replied by saying that I entirely agreed with him. He responded by saying, 鈥淚 hope it鈥檚 done you some good, but we don鈥檛 think you should carry on with submarines, what would you like to do?鈥� Now it was very rare that any officer asked you this question. My instant reply was that I wanted to go back to serving on the Flower Class Corvettes. 鈥淔ine, go home on leave." So I went home and very shortly I received sailing orders to Gibraltar.

I joined HMS Jonquil, a very happy ship with lots of different nationalities on board. We had people from Rhodesia, South Africa and Norway, a very happy crowd. This was followed six months later by joining HMS Bellwort, also a Flower Class Corvette. There I met another officer who had been to a school that played a good class of hockey (as I had in Dunstable), and we decided to form a hockey team to keep the crew entertained. We bought black and yellow shirts, got hold of some hockey sticks, gave lessons and off we went to play a match against another ship. I put a football goalkeeper into the hockey goal and started. The team did really well but when the first ball spun towards the goal, the keeper picked it up and kicked it out into the air like a football! The referee blew his whistle and looked on in horror; I tore over from my inside left position and explained the situation. We went on to blend ourselves into a nice little team, played about 15 or 16 matches and only lost 1 match, and that was by default.

Of course going out to Gibraltar, getting away from the weather, blackouts and so forth in England was absolutely marvellous. There were streetlights everywhere, the cathedral to visit, theatre, lots of different things to do.

We were tied up in the harbour and at the end of the war and from time to time we would go out on a few patrols. During one of these we picked up some u-boat survivors from the mouth of the Tagus off Lisbon. Towards the end of the war I was transferred home again and that was the end of my Flower Class Corvette saga, which I so much enjoyed one way or another.

I received orders to get myself up to Arran in Scotland to join a Landing Ship (Tank), LST3015, totally different. By this time the European war was over but it was still continuing in the Far East. This ship was entirely different to the Flower Class Corvette; a long ship with all the tanks ahead of you, the bridge at the end. A different set of people but again a very happy ship. We went out to India from our base and sailed through the Med, the Suez Canal and up through the Indian Ocean reporting to the Naval authorities in Bombay. Before arriving at our destination, I was on watch one afternoon (on my own, by which time I was a Sub-Lieutenant). We were going across the Indian Ocean and I saw out of the corner of my eye, a flash in the water on the port side, and I thought, torpedoes. I rang the bell for action stations, yelled full speed ahead to the rating down below and of course everything happened all at once, as it does when everyone is half asleep in the middle of the afternoon. The Captain came running up, 鈥渨hat鈥檚 the matter?鈥� By this time I realised that my flash of light wasn鈥檛 a torpedo, it was in fact a pair of dolphins. I said, 鈥淚鈥檓 sorry sir, I thought the dolphins were torpedoes." 鈥淭hat鈥檚 all right, you did the right thing, don鈥檛 worry." Everyone was told over the loudspeaker system to go back to whatever they were doing and actions were closed off. Of course I got it in the neck for that over the next 2 or 3 days!

While in India we operated from Bombay down to Trincomalee, Colombo and up to Madras. VJ was now over and independence was taking place and we had to get rid of a lot of things, don鈥檛 ask me why, for some political reason we just took things out to sea and dumped them. I remember dumping half an aircraft and lots of casement windows, it was unreal! We also did a bit of service going down to Trincomalee.

From there I was demobbed and I was asked to take a message down to Colombo by train before going home on the cruiser HMS Diamead. We sailed back through the Red Sea where I got a lot of sticky heat and through the Suez Canal to home. So that was the end of Navel life.

Back in Dunstable, the town hadn鈥檛 changed much. I went back to my old job at World Books but found it was completely different and didn鈥檛 enjoy it. At that particular time Index Printers who were timetable specialists in Dunstable, started a new publication in June 1946 called The ABC Air Guide. I joined them in January 1947 and stayed there for nearly 40 years working on the Air Guide, the history of civil aviation and scheduled services across the world, on a monthly publication that grew from a journal of 200 pages to one consisting of 2,200 pages.

All the Corvettes some 300 or so, are no longer with us at all, except for one. There is one Flower Class Corvette still in existence in Sackville, Canada called HMS Sackville. They kept it as a reminder of the Canadian Corvette and as a reminder of Flower Class Corvettes everywhere. It was only through the Flower Class Corvette Association, of which I am a member that we heard about this. I wrote to my friend Tom saying that I understood that there is a lone but looked after Corvette in Sackville. He wrote back confirming this and sent me a parcel containing a tankard with the outline of a Flower Class Corvette and HMS Sackville written on it. That was the last letter that I had from Tom because he died shortly afterwards.

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