大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by David Singleton Edwards and has been added to the site with my permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
My father, Arthur Frank Edwards, was born in 1925 in Portsmouth to a serving sailor and had the sea in his blood. He joined the navy during the war at the age of 17 and served in the Fleet Air Arm on a number of aircraft carriers in the North Atlantic, escorting convoys from Canada to England. The carriers on which he served were very basic, the first being HMS Alexia, a converted oil tanker onto which a simple flight deck had been added and which had a complement of Swordfish aircraft which he helped to keep in working order in mountainous freezing seas with the constant threat of U boat attack. He used to sail from Halifax in Nova Scotia, sometimes directly and sometimes down the Hudson river to New York and then across the North Atlantic to various British ports. For a time he was based at Scapa Flow and he told me of the hut in which they slept, its only heating coming from a "tortoise" brand stove which they used to stoke up with coke until it glowed red hot. One of his fellow crewmembers tried to dry his greatcoat by wrapping it around the stove and left it there too long. He spent the rest of the war with the impression of a tortoise on the back of his coat!
At the end of the war Frank served on the "bomb boats" which were dumping the unused ammunition in the Irish Sea between Larne and Stranraer. The boats used to call into the Cumbrian port of Silloth and it was on one run ashore that he met my mother Wilhelmina Singleton working in my uncle's cafe, the Ritz. They soon married in Silloth church and he got a job as an aircraft fitter on Silloth aerodrome, later transferring to Spadeadam to work on the Blue Streak rocket.The rest, they say, is history!

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