Towards the end of the
autumn 1938 cruise the H.M.S.
Revenge returned to
Devonport, where we learned that she was going to be
swopped with the H.M.S. Repulse at Portsmouth
after Christmas leave and that most of each of the
ships companies would be involved in the
changeover.
One would imagine
that the transfers would involve taking a ship to her new
port and bringing back the other. But no; in January
1939, the ships company of the Revenge
together with kit entrained at the Naval Barracks Station
and journeyed to Portsmouth to embark in the Repulse.
The traditional meal en
route was a typical pussers bag meal, consisting of
something like a bread roll and cheese, a hard-boiled egg
and an apple; nothing to drink, and restaurant cars on
trains were unheard of. Being a troop train, it did not
stop at any station long enough for a dash to a buffet
for a cuppa, so we went thirsty. When we arrived in the
dockyard we discovered the Repulse was in dry
dock, being extensively overhauled and a general moan
went up, because it meant the dockyard heads
or toilets would have to be used. In the Navy that is one
discomfort which can well be done without. It meant
having to go out of the ship every morning for ablutions
and visit the dockyard heads for every call of nature.
HMS Repulse prewar. Later lost off
Malaya with HMS Prince of Wales, December 1941
We were allocated our messes and jobs;
my part of the ship was known as the D.B. Party. D.B.
stands for Double Bottoms, which meant I was
in the work party responsible for furnace fuel supplies
to the boiler rooms. As the Repulse had forty
two boilers, each with a furnace, the D.B. party would be
fully occupied when the ship was steaming. Once settled
in the mess, kit locker numbers were given out, and
probably most important was the disposition of the
hammock hooks. With kits stowed and hammocks stacked, the
next task was to prepare the mess for the first meal. As
usual the messes were ship-side: that is one end of the
table attached to the hull, with stools each side, long
enough to seat a half of the mess members. In the Revenge
the stools were made of plain wood and accordingly, like
those in the training division, were scrubbed white every
morning. Surprise, surprise, our mess stools were covered
in white rubber, providing a somewhat softer seat. The
old three-badgers amongst us were heard to comment that
the navy was becoming soft: "Dont know what
the Andrew is coming to."
We subsequently learned we were to
become "Kings Sailors", and that King
George VI and Queen Elizabeth were to visit Canada that
summer and would travel in the Repulse.
My first job in the Repulse
was in the fuel oil tanks, squeegeeing the sides of the
tanks to remove oil and bucketing this residue to already
clean tanks. As you can well imagine, this work was messy
and our dinners were brought to us to be eaten on the
tops of the tanks; we had a half an hour for this and
work ceased at 3 p.m., which allowed us to use the
Dockyard wash place before the remainder of the
ships company. The washing of underwear and
overalls each day was simple enough; the problem was to
dry them. January in a Portsmouth Dockyard did not
present many dry days for clothing to be hung in the air.
Life in the early months of the year was grim, to say the
least. I could only look forward to a long weekend of
liberty, which occured once a month, when on Friday
evening I could travel on a coach to Devonport Barracks
and be back outside at 2 a.m. on Monday morning for the
return to Pompey. The coach was known as the Pash
Bus (short for Passion) and cost fifteen shillings.
Travelling on a Friday evening would result in plenty of
banter amongst the liberty men; going back on the early
Monday morning would hardly generate a "Good
Morning".
The
official card issued to all members of the crew in
May 1939, when it was planned that HMS Repulse would
carry the King and Queen on their official tour to
Canada and the USA
The refit progressed steadily and after
completion of cleaning of the fuel tanks my next job was
the supply of lead paste for the jointing of the
underwater valves to the internal hull. With a small
handcart I would journey to a Naval Store and collect
hundredweight drums of white lead paste together with
packets of red lead powder, and then in the
engineers workshop mix these ingredients into a
pink-coloured paste, ready for use when required.
Doesnt seem very thrilling, does it? But once the
job of replacing the valve boxes began, those drums of
paste were soon empty and eventually had to be delivered
by van in order to keep up with demand. At last the
external hull refit was completed and the dry dock was
flooded. The Repulse was floating once again.
When all the internal connections were found to be
watertight the ship was manoeuvred out of the dock and
moved round to Farewell Jetty. We were at last
self-contained and I no longer had to run to the Dockyard
heads wearing an oilskin coat early in the morning, when
it was pouring with rain and nature would have its way!
Amongst members of the Andrew, Farewell Jetty is a
well-known part of Portsmouth Dockyard, for it was from
here that many warships sailed to all the oceans for very
long durations. Whilst at the Jetty the ship took stores
onboard, was fuelled and, with steam being raised, life
inboard became more comfortable.
As in the Revenge, there was
little on board the Repulse in the way of
entertainment on the messdecks in the dog watches. One
did ones dhobeying, wrote letters, read, or
sometimes played or watched the national game of Ludo,
known in the Navy as Uckers. This was played
by teams with skill, vitriolic exclamations and plenty of
advice from observers. Ucker boards were made of large
pieces of canvas, painted with the necessary markings.
Chippy made a large dice of wood and a bucket became the
implement for shaking the dice. When matches occured
between various departments, tension could become high.
In the hilarity a thrower would be fanned by a supporter,
a brow mopped with a damp cloth and onlookers would
chant: "Gilly, gilly for a six". To achieve two
pieces of the same colour on a square was called a
blob. One endeavoured to blob up
because it held up all the opposing teams counters
and only by shaking a six could a blob be
removed. Skill and strategy brought the playing of this
game to an art, and it often went on for hours. More
sedate was the game of Mah-Jong, played chiefly by the
old China hands, whilst bridge, whist and cribbage were
also means of entertainment, but dependant upon the
demands of watchkeeping. Being based at Portsmouth, I was
able to follow Portsmouth Football Club and remember
being on the steps of Portsmouth Guildhall when the
victorious team returned from Wembley with the F.A. Cup.
So sea trials in the Repulse
continued, working up to the day when the King and Queen
would embark for the journey to Canada. The paintwork on
the messdecks had been finished in white enamel which
reflected a white light around each mess, and kit musters
became more regular. All leading up to the day which
never took place! Due to the European situation, where
Adolf Hitler was flexing his muscles, it was decided that
the Repulse could not be spared as a royal
yacht. Their Majesties would take passage to Canada in a
liner and the Repulse would become the escort
half way across the Atlantic Ocean. So much for the
glamour of becoming a royal yacht! We didnt go to
Canada then; we journeyed so far and then turned back to
concentrate on the more serious drills in preparation for
the probabilities of war.
Early that summer in 1939 the
Repulse
went to her home port of Devonport, where fourteen days
summer leave was given. H.M.S. Norfolk had
returned to Devonport at the end of her foreign service
commission, so all preparations were under way for
Mabels sister, Lily, to be married to Gilbert Kime.
By now, Mabel had become a full time member of the Civil
Defence and had trained to be an Air Raid Warden,
necessitating that she be on duty at staggered hours. The
preparations for Lilys wedding proceeded, taking
top priority. The date had been fixed for a certain
Sunday in July. What a dead loss that day was! The powers
that be decided that the Repulse would sail that
morning, and so I missed the wedding. That weekend would
have been my turn for a long weekend leave. I had
consolation in a letter from Mabel, learning that the
family had been on Plymouth Hoe to see the ship sail. So
on that Saturday afternoon, instead of attending the
wedding, I was busy transferring fuel oil.
Again our destination was Scapa Flow,
the nearest anchorage to the North Sea, and here in the Repulse
we waited. Communications between Prime Minister
Chamberlain and the Fuehrer of Germany, Adolph Hitler,
had been long and frequent and doubtless your knowledge
of history will remind you what it was about. From Scapa
Flow the warships had been on exercises into the North
Sea, carrying out shoots from the large guns and
generally working up in preparation for war. Then on
Sunday 3rd September at 11a.m., we all heard
the Prime Minister speak the memorable words: "And
so, this country is at war with Germany." I know I
was a member of the armed forces, but I joined the Navy
with the intention of improving my prospects and seeing
something of the world. I confess that Chamberlains
words sent a shiver down my spine; then the Action
Stations alarm was sounded, which brought the whole drama
into reality. Later, in discussion with other members of
the mess deck, several of them admitted they had
experienced feelings similar to mine. There it was, and
we were committed. At our last visit to Devonport, radio
speakers had been fitted on each mess deck so we were
able to hear the news broadcasts each evening. Because
the invasion of Poland was the cause of us being at war,
we had a daily bulletin, aptly called "Up The
Pole", printed and displayed on notice boards.
A
moment of relaxation on HMS Repulse in Scapa
Flow, in the far off Orkney Islands just after
the declaration of war, September 1939
Together
with other capital warships and protected by destroyers,
we often carried out sweeps into the North Sea, but saw
no action. Then at last we visited Canada - Halifax, Nova
Scotia to be precise. With an aircraft carrier and
destroyers, we escorted a convoy of liners across the
Atlantic and berthed in Halifax, at the Irving Oil Jetty.
Here we were to wait until the first contingent of
Canadian soldiers was embarked for the journey to
Liverpool. Shore leave was granted and, once on shore, we
found hundreds of private cars, their owners queueing to
take us into town and into their homes. It was in Halifax
that I had my first taste of clam chowder, wonderful
stuff, and my first experience of their coffee, which was
drunk out of thick white china mugs. When going ashore
one afternoon, the ships P.T.I. stopped me and gave
me money to buy a puncture outfit for repairing
footballs. I trudged around Halifax shops but nowhere
could I find puncture outfits. It wasnt until we
were on the way back to U.K. that I discovered I should
have been asking for a vulcanising kit! We sailed in
convoy from Halifax, escorting several troopships
containing the contingent of Canadian troops and stores,
a screen of destroyers around us and planes from the
aircraft carrier ranging far and wide as the eyes of the
convoy.
We struck some rough
weather on that trip; the destroyers were rising on and
disappearing into the troughs of the waves. One must read
stories of lives in destroyers in Atlantic gales to
understand the atmosphere and conditions in those times.
There is a photograph (below) of the Repulse
hanging on the wall in our breakfast room, taken from the
aircraft carrier, showing the ship in one of those gales.
The bow is shipping huge waves and the quarter-deck and
stern are completely hidden as though that part of the
42,000 ton warship is underwater. There were two steel
breakwaters on the focsle to assist in breaking the
fury of the sea, and when calmer weather appeared it was
discovered that both of them had been washed away.
The convoy reached Liverpool safely and
the Repulse had to have new focsle
break-waters fitted, so we had the opportunity to go
ashore. Going ashore? Yes, but this was a completely new
experience, for it was our first walk ashore in a
black-out. There was no street lighting; motor car
headlights had the brilliance of one candlepower, and the
Johnny with the torch was worth his weight in gold. He
decided where we would go and we followed, tethered to
one another by hanging onto the collar of the man in
front. Where we went, I dont know; how we managed
to return to the ship, I dont know; suffice to say
that we did. There were some comical yarns going around
the mess-decks during the next few days, the main one
being about those who said "Sorry" each time
they bumped into a lamp post.
With the repairs completed the ship was
ready to leave Liverpool, but not before a number of
experienced officers and men left us to help boost
knowledge in other ships and some to attend schools
before advancement. These places were taken by
H.O.s - Hostilities Only people, called up for war
service. I subsequently learned that one of those
R.N.V.R. sub-lieutenants was Frank Johnson, who would
later be the Headmaster at my childrens primary
school. The Engine Room Department received its quota of
replacements in the form of H.O. Second Class stokers,
who had received a minimum time of square-bashing and
arrived on board, bewildered and vaccinated. One of them
was allocated to our mess and arrived, lugging his kit,
with a huge piano-accordian in its case. His surname was
Ward, so was automatically nicknamed Sharkey. He could
literally make that squeeze-box talk, so he was a valued
member. One tea-time we were issued with tiny tins of
meat paste and fish paste and Jos Spence, who was our
Messs Leading Stoker, called out to Sharkey, who
was sitting in his junior place at the mess table,
"Sharkey, slide me up a tin of meat paste."
Sharkey duly grabbed a tin and sent it on its way up the
table. "No," said Jos, "I said a tin of
meat paste, not fish paste." So Sharkey duly slid
another tin of paste to Jos who said, "I said meat
paste, cant you bloody well read?" And Sharkey
very calmly answered, "No". So we discovered
that this lad could play any tune on a piano-accordian
but he could not read. We soon took him in hand with
reading lessons.
HMS Repulse
in rough weather somewhere in the North Sea, but earlier
in August 1939
Once again we steamed to Scapa Flow and
swung around a buoy in company with other battleships.
There was a number of heavily-gunned ships and some
aircraft carriers moored with us. From a distance these
ships looked vaguely familiar and yet not really
recognisable. They turned out to be old merchant ships
reconstructed to look like warships and carriers, lying
at anchor to fool the Luftwaffe when they flew over the
Flow taking pictures. Most of the superstructure on these
ships consisted of wood and painted canvas, so after a
heavy gale any damage had to be quickly rectified.
Amongst us these ships were called Churchills
Fleet. Prime Minister Chamberlain had resigned and
Winston Churchill had replaced him.
Life aboard Repulse became
very monotonous; there seemed to be the same routine day
after day, geared to the eventuality of putting to sea,
which didnt happen very often. With the outbreak of
hostilities, classes for advancement in the Engine Room
Department ceased. This seemed ridiculous when casualties
in action would result in replacements being needed.
Because of this I began to go to various parts of the
department in the evenings to work with and learn from
the watchkeepers of the auxiliary machinery. To me, the
most complex was the evaporating and distilling plants,
where sea water was changed into distilled water -
essential for creating steam in the boilers. A shout such
as "The evaps are on the blink" or
"Theres a cloud in the evaps" would cause
consternation and the evaps maintenance bod
would scurry away down, down, down innumerable ladders to
reach the compartment and rectify the defect. You can
understand the importance of the evaps, since distilled
water was needed to augment supplies to forty-two boilers
and cater for the needs of up to a thousand men. There
was always the joke about the medical staff who doctored
the drinking water to kill the desires of
home. Amongst the younger married men the standing
quip: "Whats the second thing youll do
when you get home?" The old marrieds would reply:
"After drinking this tea Ill need three weeks
notice and a blow-lamp!" The age-old subject of
course.
Besides the distilling
plants I had to gain watch-keeping experience with
turbo-generators, reciprocating engine generators,
hydraulic machinery which traversed the fifteen-inch gun
turrets, rudder steering gear machinery and the huge
reciprocating air pumps which maintained a vacuum in the
main engines turbine condensers. With the
completion of all of these experiences I had to sit a
written examination and visit the various machinery
compartments with the responsible Engineering Officer and
answer questions. One Sunday evening I was told to report
to the Engineers Office and there the Senior
Engineer told me I had passed the examination. I now
possessed an Auxiliary Watchkeeping Certificate; I was on
the first rung of the advancement ladder to becoming a
Leading Stoker. During my periods of watchkeeping on
those machines my opposite number was a Geordie lad
called Doug Scantlebury, and more of him later.
The campaign in Norway
(Norwegian Campaign Summary) had
taken an adverse turn. The aircraft carrier
H.M.S. Glorious was to be used to evacuate our troops. Escort warships
were required and H.M.S. Acasta and H.M.S. Ardent
were detailed. A notice was put on our mess-deck
notice-board for all holders of Auxiliary Watchkeeping
Certificates to append their names, so of course I put my
name on the list. The Acasta and Ardent
were short of watchkeepers and the Fleet had to make up
the shortages. Several of our lads were chosen, but
luckily not me. In the ensuing evacuation both the
Acasta and Ardent were sunk by enemy action
with no survivors. One of the lads to go was a Scottish
Leading Stoker who had recently married a Norwegian girl.
On a leave period there was no hope of him travelling to
Norway so we used to pull his leg about the amount of
leave he would have accumulated by the end of the war,
together with the oft-repeated question:
"Whats the second thing you will do?" He
never came back. The aircraft carrier H.M.S. Glorious
was also sunk and I eventually met two of her survivors.
One of them, a stoker, was in a bad way because of the
immersion in the icy sea. Of the other survivor, more
anon.
At the outbreak of war the
keeping of diaries was strictly forbidden; it is amazing
how many senior officers were able to work around this
rule and publish their memoirs. Because of this order I
cannot recall whether I was in harbour or at sea during
the first Christmas of the war. I do know that whilst at
Halifax the ship had stocked up with enough frozen
poultry to give each of us a good dinner. The arrival of
mail and a photograph was always a well looked-forward-to
event. In the D.B. party during a quiet spell on watch
recent photographs would be shown, compared and
discussed. During one of the quieter night watches my
watch P.O. produced a photograph of a very pretty girl
whom I immediately recognised. "Thats a
smashing bit of stuff. I know her very well," I
said. He looked at me suspiciously until I explained. In
Bass-Hamlyns class was a boy called Baser and he
had twin sisters. The picture was of one of the twins,
who turned out to be the wife of the P.O. All was well
when I explained how I came to know her. I expect I had
even chased her around the bandstand in Devonport Park
when we were growing up - a favourite occupation in the
summer evenings. But I didnt tell him that.
Another of my classmates,
Jack Cunningham, was a P.O. in the Repulse; he
had joined the Navy as soon as he was eighteen and made
fairly rapid advancement, proving the opportunities were
there. The Chief Mechanician in charge of the evaps when
I was learning about the intricacies of distillation was
Chiefy Binmore and his son joined us as a Second Class
Stoker. The Chief asked me to show the lad around the
Department and generally offer some help when needed.
This I did, helping him to find his feet until he made
friends and found an oppo for himself.
The
Postcard issued by the Royal family to servicemen
Christmas 1939
Early in the war the
Germans introduced an acoustic sea mine which had a
polarity which caused it to be attracted to the hull of a
ship and explode on impact. The laying of these mines
caused some havoc amongst our shipping and a remedy had
to be found. Accordingly, in February 1940 the Repulse
returned to Devonport to have the necessary electrical
machinery fitted, giving the hull of the ship the same
polarity as the mines, thus repelling them. We knew this
as the Degausing Gear. Being in dock saw the ships
company given leave and yet another change-over amongst
the crew. Experienced ratings left the ship to make
backbones in other ships and more H.O.s joined.
Mabel was heavily engrossed in her Civil Defence duties;
when she was on afternoon and evening shift I was at a
loose end, more or less waiting for ten o clock,
when I would walk across Devonport Park to meet her. The
local public house was - and still is - called The
Standard Inn. At that time the manager was Percy Hemer,
not that it has a lot of significance at this period, but
surprisingly the surname crops up again at a later date,
and in unusual circumstances. Anyhow, I found myself a
member of the Standards darts team. They must have
been scraping the bottom of the barrel, methinks. At any
rate, these matches occupied my evenings whilst I was on
leave. I have never been much of a beer drinker, being
content to drink beer shandy.
Being a one-time member of the
Metropolitan Police Force, my Father had joined the
Police War Reserve Force and, much to my surprise and
hilarity, I found him one evening with an 0.303 Lee
Enfield rifle outside the gates of Keyham Gas Works,
where he was supposed to be on guard. I was surprised
because I thought a sentry would have been a soldier. Of
course I asked him what he was supposed to be doing with
a rifle and he told me that he knew all about rifles and
revolvers from his experience in the 1914-18 war. I had a
look at the rifle; the magazine was empty and the safety
catch was on, so he wasnt going to do a lot of
damage with it! Knowing Dad and his exploits on the prowl
in earlier days, being confined to the Gasworks gates
wouldnt suit him for very long. When back at sea, I
learned that ammunition had at last been issued to him
and that one night he challenged somebody and fired the
rifle. He didnt hit anybody or anything, but such
was the furore at the enquiry that he was taken off that
duty, which no doubt suited him perfectly.
So we were at sea once more and again
based at Scapa Flow, which was supposed to be
impregnable. Not so however. One of the battleships
billeted in the Flow was H.M.S.
Royal Oak, a
sister ship to the Revenge, in which I had
served. There were to my knowledge five of this
battleship class; the others were
Ramillies,
Resolution
and the Royal Sovereign, the
last being nicknamed the "Tiddly Quid". One
night the Flow was breached by a German submarine,
commanded by Gunther Prien. That which was always feared
happened and Prien had a dreamed-of opportunity. He
naturally didnt want to hang about, so he torpedoed
the best target he could find, the Royal Oak,
and she sank, taking with her a large number of her crew.
(After the war, whilst on an engineering course, I met
Herbert Johnstone, who had escaped from the ship and was
able to swim to safety. At the time of writing he lives
in Stonehouse.) With the explosions in the Royal Oak,
action stations went off in Repulse, steam was
raised very rapidly and in a very short time we sailed to
Loch Ewe. Prien had found a way into Scapa Flow and found
a way out again, so the Flow was no longer a haven until
all of the channels had been made safe. Loch Ewe was to
be the anchorage for the forseeable future.
In these modern times, the
age of television, video, radio and electronic games, it
is not unknown to hear a youngster say: "Im
bored." And we elder folk find it difficult to
understand why. In those war-time days life in the Repulse
became a bore. The ship went out on patrols, our lives
were spent in watchkeeping, with little in the way of
relaxation when we returned to Loch Ewe. Our war effort
seemed to be on the receiving end in every field. On the
radio we heard a broadcaster from Germany, nicknamed Lord
Haw Haw. His job was to spread despair and despondency
amongst our side, but he uttered such awful drivel that
people looked forward to his daily broadcasts. The number
of warships he claimed to have been sunk were often
complete fabrications, chiefly I suppose to undermine the
morale of people at home.