大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Pam Riding on behalf of Mr Robinson and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
I suppose it is an experience really. Lots of things happened. I think the first of them was being notified that you were going to be called up-going to Lady Lane in Leeds, having a medical and being told what you could and couldn't do. Then you would find yourself going with all your papers etc. You would get a train ticket. I went to Skegness to join HMS Royal Arthur for a few days. I did one job there and that was fire fighting. We had to learn all about fire drill and things like that. There was a concert on at the time and it was conducted by Stanford Robinson (and my name's Robinson). I didn't get to the concert because we were on the perimeter (with nothing happening). That would be 1944.
I didn't see a lot of things done in anger-I wasn't amongst it. A lot of people never saw much of the war- they were there but were not involved. For some reason or another, they were not involved in actual fighting. The term was "in anger". We then had to go to Great Malvern-that was HMS Iron Duke. The parade ground there was at the bottom of a hill. All the accommodation was at the top of the hill. Anyone who stepped out of line was punished. The discipline was rigorous. Young people nowadays have no idea. Being disciplined at home it didn't really bother me-you were just following on what you had done at home. My life was fairly regimented anyway. I started work at the post office in Holmfirth at the end of 1939 and I was there for 46 years. I finished up as the manager. I started as a telegram boy with a red bike and resplendent uniform and I progressed then and it was all part of the Civil Service. Going into the armed forces it was still a government department. That was regimented too. You were provided with a uniform and you had to go before the post master each morning to make sure you were dressed properly, so it wasn't hard for me.
I remember I got vaccination fever and I spent three days in the sick bay with a high temperature. We moved on after a week or so. You were in Classes. I think we were called Class 29. When you ended the course, they used to take a photograph of you all together and the only thing which I have ever seen which appertains to this is the Eden Camp in North Yorkshire and there is one little section in there on the Navy. There is a picture of this Class 29 and I thought I recognised myself in it. There is also a reference to a minesweeper. We went from Great Malvern to Chatham and I became a Chatham rating-that was Nelson's command.
At the time that I was called up they weren't wanting a lot of people in the Navy-you couldn't choose what part you wanted to go in. I was put into a cook, a ship's cook and I was trained to cook at Chatham on HMS Duncan. From there we went into the Mediterranean which was very interesting. The flotilla leader of the minesweepers was HMS Coquette and they were named after rivers in the north and there is a picture of it at Eden Camp. We went to North Africa, down the Gulf of Tunis. I saw the ruins at Carthage. Before that we went up to Italy and I went onto an Italian cruiser as a liaison, keeping the Italians together. The Italian fleet had capitulated and we took it over and the particular ship we used at this time was used to ferry drafts of men and to take the others off so they could have leave.There were twelve of us and a chap called Tug Wilson and the next in command was a chap from Leeds and was called Hinchcliffe. This Italian ship was called Pompeii o Magno and we were to go from Malta to Laverna, but we didn't go so far. But during this voyage, I saw something that a lot of people will never have seen and that was the fact that Mount Etna was covered in snow, but I also saw another thing as we were going up towards Naples and that was the Volcano Stromboli was erupting and at night we saw the ashes coming down. I also rode a little naval boat from Capri to the mainland. We stayed in Naples for three weeks and at that time the royal palace in Naples was used as a recuperation centre for wounded soldiers. Because the war was still going on even though it was towards the end of the war in Europe-there were still wounded men and it was a wonderful place. I actually sent my good lady (she wasn't my wife then) a silk bedspread. The NAAFI was in there and I sent her father a cigarette box don't know if that was to keep in his good books, or what! There were things like nuts and raisins, nylon stockings- you could get all manner of things on the black market. The Italians there looked after us-they did everything-cleaned our fingernails and cut hair. Donkeys took all the goods. Naples itself had some terrible sights. There were children sleeping in doorways dressed in rags and tatters, begging, and the only job I did there was to go with an army wagon (we were Naval personnel but we had to go with this army wagon) and take a grand piano to a large villa on the outskirts of Naples because there was going to be a big conference of leaders. I think there was Alexander and Clark of the Americans-there was a big gathering. After they must have been going to have a social event. They also had sports going off all the time, even though there was fighting still taking place.
I remember, being a cook, you were on working order all the time - four hours on and four hours off because you always had a job to do providing food for men-preparation or cooking. I was on HMS Vulcan at that time. On small ships you had to make do with all sorts of things. There wasn't a lot of space. On larger ships there would be libraries and all manner of things. People set up trades like washing- they would have a laundry. Some people would get together and they would wash people's laundry for so much money and all manner of things like that. That was a good thing about the Navy. It was very much different in a sense because they didn't do things that the other forces did. You were allowed so much per month for food, clothing and all the rest of it and then you could spend it as you wished. If you got a good person in charge, you were all right. There was a lot of interesting things went on. For example a person could set himself up as a hairdresser, or sewing. One of the things in the Navy was they had dress uniforms but they had to buy their own. Some people spent a lot on their rations. Some of them bought doe skin, which was like a very smooth cloth and all the bits and pieces that went with it like gold braid. They would go ashore in their "Tiddly" suits as they would call them and would have a good time. They would be rather inebriated when they came back and had made a mess of their suits!
The minesweeper flotilla had a sports day. I did my morning's work and then I ran in the mile and I came in third! There were things like this going on all the time and you hadn't time to think about the seriousness of the situation. Minesweeping was very dangerous. There were quite a few people killed, not in enemy action but because it was very dangerous work. Minesweeping is like fishing in a sense, because you put trawls out to trawl for mines, like people trawl for fish. Being a young man, it was exciting. The ships were a little bit old fashioned. There wasn't all this business of machines, electronics. I think the first ship I went on it was coal that they were burning. A lot of modern things came out of this.
I came back from Naples to Malta on HMS Liverpool, which is the same Class as the one on the Thames, HMS Belfast. It was the flagship of the commander of the Mediterranean, Rear Admiral Cunningham. I had to stand Captain's rounds. The Captain's rounds were each week on any naval ship everything had to be cleaned and all the crockery and knives and forks had to be set out on the table. Then the Captain came round with his party. They would go round with torches and inspect everything. We were coming back from Naples to Malta. I stood at attention with everything in order. I always wore the clothes you were issued with. They looked around and everything was satisfactory. Leaving the mess, the last man, he must have been a warrant officer or a chief petty officer and he had a silver cane (they used to lift things up that way) and as he left he up-ended everything on the table. I thought it was a nasty trick.The Captain wouldn't know about this because he had already left. I really was annoyed about that!
On HMS Liverpool they would have a place where you could go and relax-they would even make ice cream. I came back to Malta on that. There was a lot of banter going on. I enjoyed it. If I hadn't have been in the process of getting engaged I could have stopped in the Navy for a period because it was a good life. They were moving all over the place at that time, of course, with the war coming to an end. . Hammocks were good. If you got it folded right it would float for 24 hours. If it was properly lashed and tied that could save your life because it would float. In fact I have still got a cover at home. You had to print all your names on and I still use it in the garden. In the Navy there were good reasons for doing everything
When I came back to this country, it was towards the end of 1945. They used these big liners, P & O and Cunard. We were coming back on the Empress of Australia. It was so rough, we got down to the landing stage but the ship couldn't get into grand harbour at Valetta. The minesweepers had tied up in Salima Creek alongside one another. They put us onto a landing craft thing and went out to it and it was too rough for that to get out. Eventually we came back on a Victory ship, which was built by the Americans, welded seams, not rivetted seams. They were really just cargo ships, which had been adapted to take men on, and it was absolutely packed with people from the Middle East and it was called Taos Victory. So we had to get on there and sail to Toulon. It was very rough and a lot of people suffered sea sickness although it didn't bother me. We got to Toulon and it was very pleasant there. Then we had to come back across France in a train. There were all sorts of carriages and the only good carriages were the ones the officers went in. It was cold, the beginning of winter. When we got to Dijon, the people on the railway came along and started tapping the wheels. I heard one of them shout"Caput", "Caput" so we had to move then into the officer's carriages. We were lucky. We stopped about halfway across France. We were taken into what was a prisoner of war camp for a meal and the German prisoners had made a meal and served it to us in Nissan hut type things. It was very slow-I think it took us a couple of days. There was a carriage where they had made a primitive cooking arrangement for heating food and making tea. The water boiler was fed by coal and it was enormous to make tea for everyone on the train. I stopped with a sergeant from the Army all the way. He let me stop and it was nice and warm and comfortable. I did the same thing when I got to Calais. It was late on in the evening at it was snowing. Around this place they had all these water boilers. I was in the blanket store there so I was alright.Then we came back to Dover and then to Chatham.
Of course I had seen Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli. I thought Tunis was a beautiful city, with a long promenade. There were lots of things that were good, that you would ever have seen either before or since. Nowadays people go to these places. I have, at home, a little booklet type thing full of photographs. I sent it to my good lady at home and it has pictures of Naples in sepia and the palace was on one of the pictures and I marked it with a cross saying this was where I'd stayed.
Sixty years ago is a long time and some memories fade or they don't seem right somehow. I had to make bread and had to everything that a cook would do. Cook was the rating -ship's cook or officer's cook. They had different ones-ship's stewards, ships cook. They were very keen about these things. Fortunately at home, my mother and father had a big garden and we grew most of our own vegetables so I was used to being amongst cooking without perhaps realising how things were made. I understood what it was all about. I did things that my mother had shown me at home, For example when we had a joint, it would be cooked in the morning for dinner and the fat and the dripping would be scraped off. It would be put in a dish and we would have it for breakfast. If there were bones in the joint, you would take the bones out and make a stew or a casserole. People did these sorts of things. With it being war time people did it a lot more. These things came to me in the Navy. There were lots of small messes where there would be about a dozen people and the cook of the mess would look after these men. It would be a different one every time. I was in overall charge- I would always finish up with a few coppers at the end. It was quite amazing what you could make out of what there was. It seems strange when now you can go and have a choice about everything. If it was only a few pence you got it was worthwhile- you could get a pint of beer for a few pence.

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