大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by Jan Moore for Kent Libraries and Archives and Canterbury City Council Museums on behalf of Mr Peter Hewett and has been added to the site with his/her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Two men went into a pub. As they went through the door, there was a tremendous gust of laughter & somebody called out 'Number 48'; there was another gust of laughter. One of the men said, 'What's this all about Fred?' & Fred said, 'Well, they are all old & they enjoy their reminiscences so much for they've told them so often, that they all know each others, so by calling the number it saves telling the story!

I am not a native of Whitstable, having only been here for forty years, since I was born in Margate, where my father was a jeweller. In 1939, I was only sixteen, having two years before I was called up at eighteen. I accidently went into a bank as a junior; as the tiny staff were called up, I rose to the dizzy rank of cashier. My two oler brothers, ten years older than me, went into the Army & the Navy in 1939. I followed them into the Navy on January 8 1942 & went with twenty nine other youths on the train to Ipswich to join HMS Ganges. The ship was a frightening, terrible place which was called by the Navy 'a stone frigate', meaning a shore base - in peacetime a training camp, with a very harsh regime. I was very frightened. So, after two weeks, I volunteered to be a signalman & went with a number of others to HMS Royal Arthur, a Butlin's holiday camp at Skegness.
One vivid memory there was that once a week, the class of would-be signalmen were marched out of the entrance gate, onto the green lawns outside, where we practised semaphore - to music, the rhythm of the Teddy Bears Picnic. The natives of Skegness, as passers by, thought the world had gone mad, I guess.
Five months in this comparative rest home as a base, we were then qualified signalmen & a number of us were sent off by train to Southend-On-Sea, to join HMS Leigh, another name for a base, made out of a row of several hotels, where everyday convoys of merchant ships were planned & routed up the coast, to ports on the Tyne or in Scotland. There were usually six of us, led by a commodore & his staff of perhaps four sailors in the leading ship & others further down the line. These were little merchant ships, generally colliers & very dirty, bringing down from the north coal for the southern power stations.
Harking back, when we arrived at Southend station we were piled into waiting cars including funeral cars, to be delivered to our billets, which were the typical seaside boarding houses.
After about two years, a misguided convoy commodore reccommended me for a commission, so I was sent down to HMS King Alfred at Hove, a half-finished leisure centre & car park for three months, when my class was churned out as sub-lieutenants, aged twenty.
At the end of the course, two of us volunteered for a navigation course at Greenwich Naval College, the classic building on the river, with its dining hall & famous painted ceiling, where we enjoyed four course dinners, while Britain was making do with meagre rations & brown bread, including Woolton pie.
I was then sent to a mine sweeper, working around the British coast & ultimately on training exercises, prior to D-Day. HMS Larne, a Fleet sweeper, worked in a flotilla of six ships. We had 140 crew & 6 officers, of which I was one. We left on D-Day from the Solent, at about 1am on the 6th, after the one day postponement, all credit to the weather forecasters who forecast a window in the bad weather, which enabled the operation to be carried out. We arrived in France, about ten flotillas of six ships, swept ten channels which were then widened to enable this vast invading armada to make the landings. We were off Arromanche, fortunately a quiet area compared to Omaha beach, where there were awful casualties. we spent two weeks there sweeping to widen the channels for better shipping access, then back to Portsmouth for three days for stores, the replacing of broken gear, a night's leave for the ship's company & a good sleep.
Back to the French coast for another fortnight, anchoring at night on what was called 'the Trout Line', an area off the coast used by sweepers as guardships against e-boats or other German small forces. Noisy nights from German aircraft dropping parachute mines.
Then back to London river, then to Poplar dock for a month's refit, after which we sailed for two years in the Med., sweeping off Sicily & Sardinia before joining the forces for the landings on the south of France, then on to the Aegean in time to sweep ahead of the liberation forces. Unfortunately, there we hit a mine ourselves & were towed out of the way of the following forces to an island called Poros, about 30 miles from Piraeus & where we lived on the island for three months, while the ship was repaired. The ship, patched up, steamed up to Piraeus, having been written off as 'a constructional total loss' & sold I believe to the Italians, the crew being drafted to other ships in the Med.
I was sent by air to Malta & via Cairo, on to join a small minesweeper at the top of the Aegean.
At the end of my two years naval service in the Med., I was returned home for demobilisation.
Not wishing to return to the bank, I was able with a government grant, to study as an architect at Canterbury, qualifying in 1951. I joined Canterbury City Architect's office for four & a half years, then to Dover local authority, a most uninteresting office, which caused me to leave local government & work in Sweden for a year; a most interesting experience, a delightful country with good design, I learnt a lot.
I then returned home to Britain working in various offices around the country, retiring in 1988, now involved in a number of things locally, the Whitstable Society, the Abbeyfields Society, the Castle centre & the Whitstable Improvement Trust.

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