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ROUND THE WORLD WITH THE RNVR --1940-1946.

This was written at my brother's instigation, shortly before my father's death.
My father decided to sign up rather than wait to be called up, thus giving him the choice of service. He had heard tales of the awful trenches in the 1914-18 war and he was determined not to end up in the Army …..he wanted to have a solid deck beneath his feet! He signed up as an ordinary seaman as he wanted to have something to do i.e.study, to while away many long boring times at sea. Of course it also meant he had shore study leave of several weeks! JB.

I saw more action in Portsmouth Barracks during the three months I spent there at the beginning of 1941 than throughout all the rest of the war. This was the height of the blitz, and the Barracks is right in the centre of Portsmouth. I saw the Guild Hall go up in flames and it's huge copper dome melt away in the same raid that reduced the Commercial Road, the main shopping street, to mountainous heaps of smoking rubble that extended almost as far as you could see. We sailors did duty as shovellers of rubble, fire watchers and odd-jobsters, and the main lack as the weeks drew into months, was sleep. We were on duty alternate nights, and on our free nights, first priority was to find someplace to sleep away from the Barracks, because everyone inside would almost certainly be called out at some time during the night. I was better off than most, having Bill Post's house to resort to very often, but at other times I would join the queues for a bed at Toc H or at Aggie Weston's sailor's home. The latter unfortunately caught a direct hit fairly soon and quite a few chaps were killed there. The Barracks was also hit several times, and the worst night I remember was when a bomb penetrated one of the air raid shelters under the parade ground and killed thirty or forty chaps in it. I was thankful I was not in the working party that brought the bodies out.

March, 1941, I was sent with three other CW candidates to do our minimum three months sea time aboard the Fleet minesweeper SPEEDY, a BRAMBLE class ship of some 1200 tons and about 110 of a crew. She had two 4" guns, two .5 machine guns, half a dozen depth charges for dropping over the stern, and nothing else. And yet she was sent out as a convoy escort on the Atlantic at a time when none of the escorts had radar and we didn't even have an asdic. We might as well have been blind and deaf. We took slow convoys bound for Newfoundland halfway across, because that was then the limit of U-boat operations, then joined up with an east bound convoy and brought it home. Highlight of this period was a narrow escape, I think in May, '41 when we were steaming west with 106 ships at 6 knots just south of the Denmark Strait, and the BISMARK came down through the Strait just 50 miles ahead of our bows. We heard about the sinking of the HOOD and RENOUN almost as soon as it happened and spent an anxious day scanning the horizon.

We had been operating out of the Clyde and Londonderry, and in the late summer of '41 we were sent to Liverpool and the buzz went round that we were to be sent somewhere mighty cold. Sure enough, steam heating was piped to the for'ard winches, and we were all issued with long johns and sheepskin coats. We sailed for Scapa Flow, and there joined up with PQ2, the second convoy bound for North Russia. It consisted of six merchant ships, and we took them east of Iceland and north by Bear Island and the North Cape to Murmansk. Then instead of returning to the UK, we were stationed at the Russian naval base of Polyarnoe to do some minesweeping duties on the approaches to Murmansk and the White Sea. I was mighty glad to have escaped the job of hauling on ice cold wires, because I had been made quartermaster and spent my duty times on the wheel in the relative comfort of the wheelhouse. Most interesting experience here was a trip across the White Sea and up the Dvina River to a jetty across the river from Archangel, piloted by a Russian woman pilot. We did a boiler clean here and just about froze to death in the cold. With the boilers out of action, the only warm spot in the whole ship was the galley, and not more than half a dozen chaps could get in there at any one time. With my buddy, Bob Stephenson, I made a foray into Archangel. The city was supposed to be out of bounds, but we took a chance, headed downriver till we were out of sight of the ship, then walked across the frozen river to a place called Solambala, where we caught a tram into Archangel. A gloomy city. The buildings in the centre were massive and square, built like forts, and there was so much snow and ice lying about that you couldn't tell whether the streets were paved or not. There was no sign of shops because there were no shop windows, though some of these buildings did, we discovered, contain shops. But they had little stock and were just about as bare internally as externally. The streets were wide, but the whole place had a forbidding look, partly due, no doubt, to the wintry scene.

Quite near the ship was a stockaded Russian village. Why stockaded we never discovered, but there were women sentries on every entrance, armed with rifles. Inside was a haphazard collection of timber houses and one little Johnny a' thing shop. And pervading everything, in Murmansk and Archangel too, was a heavy musky smell which I have come to think of as typically Russian. There was, of course, no communication with the Russians, except in sign language and with the smattering of Russian words that we picked up. But we did meet a fellow in the Fleet Club in Polyarnoe who spoke French and he was the one and only man we were ever able to talk to.

After two weeks of boiler cleaning we were at last able to get up steam again, but we had to have an ice-breaker to clear a way for us from the jetty and down the river. The ice must have been more than a foot thick then. But we had the luck to take aboard a British Admiral ( I think Bevan was his name) who required passage across the White Sea and up a Lapland river to a little place where he could catch a train on the Murmansk-Moscow railway. That was a wonder trip, especially up the Lapland river, breaking our way through 4 or 5 inches of ice and tossing bars of chocolate to young Laplanders who skated alongside the ship. (Chocolate and cigarettes were our Russian currency. We could swop them for all the roubles we needed.)

Back to our minesweeping duties, we ran into trouble one dark afternoon in the Arctic smoke, the latter a bank of heavy mist caused by the Gulf Stream waters meeting the icy Arctic air. It lies on the surface, less than mast height, and perhaps it was because our mast stuck up through it that disaster hit us. I was playing chess down below when there was a helluva bang and all the lights went out. Action Stations sounded, and we scrambled up on deck to find an awful shambles of wrecked and twisted gear, and the after gun lying at a drunken angle. There was another bang and we were hit again up for'ard, and the motor boat went on fire. By this time we were making smoke and zigzagging inshore at full speed, and somehow we got away. We discovered later that we had either been sighted or pinpointed on radar by a couple of German destroyers. Their shooting was mighty accurate. Their first salvo from their 5.5's knocked out our after gun, and the second salvo jammed the for'ard gun, besides doing a lot of superficial damage. We had one leading seaman killed and several men injured, but were mighty lucky to get off so lightly. The whole ship's company marched to the dead man's funeral at Polyarnoe, where he was buried in a bare and outlandish cemetry outside the town on a snowy hillside. We had to wait for him outside the base mortuary, and he hadn't even been coffined when we arrived. I remember all of us lined up there in our sheepskin coats and balaclavas staring gloomingly at his bare feet visible just inside the doorway. I remember also being startled to learn that his Christian name was Roy. I had never before heard him called anything but Shits.

A week or two after that we were ordered home for repairs, but on the way to join the convoy ran into the father and mother of all Arctic storms. We lay hove to in Iokanka Bay for four days, with both anchors down and engines running half ahead the whole time. SPEEDY was a bitch of a weather boat, with no keel and a bottom flat as a billiard's table. ( I know because I saw her in drydock in Cardiff in the summer.) It required tremendous concentration to hold her head to the wind, and after every four hour trick on the wheel I was exhausted. The ship's coxwain stood by the whole time and gave me a ten minute break every hour and an extra tot of rum at the end of the watch. By heavens, I needed it. Fortunately the convoy was held up too, and we sailed for Scapa in the end, and from there to the Thames where I left the ship for good. Long afterwards I heard that SPEEDY's next duty was on the Malta convoys, and I was glad to have escaped that. She was a gallant little ship, and she took a tremendous battering, I believe.

My next assignment was to KING ALFRED about March 1942, first of all at Lancing College, where I lived out in the village and my wife and daughter joined me. The college I enjoyed. It is a most handsome place. But I didn't care for the K.A. place at Hove, down on the seafront. I shall always remember our snobby Divisional Officer looking us all over the first time we donned officer's uniform. He sniffed the air, and said " You even smell better!" It was a relief after that to go to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich to learn on a fork and knife course how to become a gentleman! This was in May 1942.

I didn't like the idea of going to a big ship, so I volunteered for long range escort duties and was sent to stand by a brand new frigate being completed at Paisley. She was the EXE, first of her class, 10 officers, 115 men, two 4" guns, two depth charge rails, eight depth charge throwers and a stock of nearly 200 depth charges, plus all the minesweeping gear imaginable, oropesa sweeps, Double L sweep (with monster diesel engines to generate the huge electric pulse. It was frightening to be down in that after engine room when the things were running and the lightening flash went out every 11 seconds!) There were kango hammers as well for dealing with acoustic mines, and of course we had Asdics, 271 radar, and a P.P.I. ( Position Plan Indicator, a marvellous plotting gadget which became my baby.)

We did a working up spell at HMS WESTERN ISLES, at Tobermory, under Commodore Monkey Stevenson, then it was off to Londonderry and back on to the Atlantic convoys. Presently our RNR skipper was relieved by an RN Commander, and we became MS6, senior ship of the 6th. Minesweeping Flotilla. But the planners must have changed their minds, because we never did any sweeping. Atlantic convoys once more, though never going farther than about 40 degrees West. For one cruise, we joined the famous Captain Walker on an anti-submarine sweep into the Bay of Biscay, then we were suddenly sent to South Shields to have no less than 10 Oerlikons mounted around the upper deck. Obviously we were going somewhere where dive bombers might be expected -- it turned out to be Operation Torch, the North African invasion. Our section of the convoy assembled in the Clyde, and you never saw such an impressive sight. The whole width of the estuary at Greenock was filled with the biggest collection of monster troopships, none of them below 20,000 tons, plus cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates. My wife came through and we spent a night and a day together, and when she rose the following morning there wasn't a ship to be seen. We sailed under sealed orders and no one knew where we were going. We steered west and south and spent days guessing where we were going. Almost in mid Atlantic we joined up with another huge convoy, an American one---and at last we got our orders. Or rather we nearly got them. They were passed to us on a line from a destroyer which came abreast of us at about twenty feet; but there was a big swell running and suddenly the ships so nearly collided that both skippers veered away--and the line parted and those secret orders vanished into the hoggan! We did in the end get a copy, whole volumes of plans, and read the whole story. Our destination was a beach at Oran, and I shall never forget the awesome sight of this vast fleet passing through the Straits of Gibralter. At Oran we watched the Yanks storm ashore unopposed while we and all the other escorts did an A/S box sweep a couple of miles offshore. Next day we sailed for the UK as senior ship of the escort convoying a whole lot of these empty troopships, and with an escort carrier in the centre. We were expecting trouble and we got it. All the U-boats that had been lurking on the sea lanes to Freetown made for the Straits, and on our second night out we were heading north-west in the Atlantic when the first torpedoes blew up a troopship. That was a terrible night, and we were helpless, steaming ahead of the convoy while the U-boats came in on the flanks, miles away from our station. In all they got five ships, and one of them was the carrier.

At home, we turned right round and steered back the same way with another big convoy, this time bound for Algiers. We steamed through the very same waters, and roughly in the place where we had had our disaster, sailed through miles of dead men, British sailors floating in their life-jackets. I think our skipper considered picking some of them up, for he went alongside one, but then changed his mind and rang Full Ahead. It was probably wise.

Ashore in Algiers, most of us got our first sight of the enemy, hordes of German prisoners being marched along the waterfront to board ship. A nice city Algiers, by the way. I liked it a lot.

I think we did one or two more African convoys, and then we were off to Freetown to be based there. This was '42. We sailed between Freetown and Lagos and some other ports along that coast, but the most interesting week or two was spent escorting the liner ASARIAS which had been tinfished in mid-Atlantic when outward bound for Brazil. She was badly holed, but could manage four knots, and we spent days steaming round and around her throughout the 500 miles to Freetown. Her canteen manager did a good business with our crew. He must have sold hundreds of dozens of pairs of real silk stockings!

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