I was born at the small village of Greenham near Wellington in Somerset on
31/10/1921. My family and I moved around a great deal during my childhood because
my father, an agricultural worker with a responsible job, was unable to
hold down a job for any length of time because of recurring illness.
I left school at 14 and because of my interest in radio, electrics and mechanics
I tried in vain to get an apprenticeship. Employers at that time expected to
be paid for the privilege of training their apprentices which was economically
out of the question for my parents.
So I started work as a gardener in a Manor house called Grantlands in the village
of Uffculme nearby. I worked at Grantlands for four and a half years and did
quite well. The elderly lady of the house had three sons. When she died the
sons had a sale and disposed of the majority of the contents of the house and
when the Army approached the sons about the house, Grantlands was sold and the
Army moved in. It was not long before the Army reduced the Manor House to a
shadow of its former self.
I left Grantlands when the house was sold, and was unemployed for a fortnight.
I had a five-mile cycle ride to draw unemployment pay, which was a princely
sum of 8 shillings (40p)! That made somebody bloody laugh!
I decided to join up as a volunteer rather than waiting for the inevitable call up. As a volunteer I would be able to choose which of the three services I wanted to join. As I was already 19 years old call up would soon have happened anyway. I believed that the Navy was the best of the 3 services and what appealed to me was that naval sea battles often took place up to 20 miles apart so we wouldn’t be at close quarters with the enemy. Another reason I decided to join the Navy was that I thought it would be safer than the Army. I also very much liked the uniform and my girlfriend’s father was an ex Royal Marine with a lot of stories about the First World War. As I was a volunteer, had I failed the Navy medical I could have simply gone home and waited to be called up in the normal way.
I signed on in Exeter on 28th February 1941 passing my medical A1. After joining up, my parents thought I had been looking around for another job but I had actually decided to join the Navy. A few days later I received a railway warrant and orders to report to HMS Royal Arthur in Skegness, a former Butlin’s holiday camp in peacetime. I was nearly 20 years of age and this would be the first time I had ever been away from home so it was going to be a great adventure for me. We arrived in darkness. Each of us thought we were on our Jack Todd, but when we stopped at a branch line for Skegness we realised that there had been lots of us all going to the same training camp on the same train. There we were kitted out, and received basic training square bashing, swimming tests etc. for eight weeks after which I was sent on leave and went home to Waterloo Cross for a week.
I did my practical training at HMS Cabot, a former orphanage taken over by he Navy in Bristol. When this phase of my training had ended I came, eventually, to HMS Drake, my Depot in Devonport, Plymouth. I had not been in Plymouth more than a few weeks when I was drafted with various other people from different departments up to Hebburn, Newcastle on Tyne, to join my first ship HMS Dorsetshire. She was a County class cruiser. I was flabbergasted at her sheer size floating there in the harbour. I had never seen Navy boats or ships and knew nothing about them, but I was very keen to know, very interested. I went aboard with the other lads and were shown our mess deck where we were to live and sleep, and given our watch. The crew was divided into starboard and port watches - I was in the starboard watch. I was taken down to the engine rooms and saw the size and pressures of steam that were used. There were four “Parsons” turbine engines driven by super heated steam.
My first night aboard I was given a hammock position that was about 7 ft above deck on rails; this was my sleeping position for the time I spent on board. My hammock was allocated above the end of the mess table where we ate. On the table below my hammock our tea and sugar boxes were stored. Everyone slept in hammocks in our mess and there were about ten or twelve of us in each mess. I had been shown how to tie in the clews of my hammock and to re-make it on rising. They came round and checked it and passed it. They said, “Yes boy, that’s all right, you can do it up now”, they wanted to see me ”lash up and stow” as they called it. It did look good when it was “lashed up” but when I slung it up and hopped up on the pull rail to get in I tipped myself ass-over head landing on the table and knocking over the tea and everything. Everyone thought this was bloody funny, except me - there were tears in my eyes.
Most of the others seemed to get away with it but some of their hammocks looked
very twisted as well and not very safe to sleep in. Then an old timer, a three
badger who would have done a considerable time in the service said “Don’t
worry, I’ll show you how to have the best hammock on the mess”.
He went and got a spreader to spread one end of the hammock to allow space for
a pillow and give me headroom. He knew his stuff and in an hour he had everything
done.
The Navy asked me what my trade was, I told them I was a gardener, They said
they couldn’t give me a job as a gardener but as I was interested in mechanics
the best place for me was the engine room. This suited me down to the ground.
After about a fortnight in harbour we sailed to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, a
very desolate, cold, place at that time of the year. I soon achieved the position
of stoker first class on promotion and that made a few extra bob a week difference
in my pay.
I was starboard watch on board and I could be allocated to either A or B boiler
room
which meant that I could possibly be attending either boiler in either boiler
room on the starboard side. The duty allocation was allotted at the start of
each watch.
The boilers were triangular shaped made by Babcock and Wilcox, Yarrow.
Steam was produced as saturated steam then re-heated as superheated steam to drive the ship’s turbine engines. Between the three triangular-shaped tubes were thirteen cones with high-pressure oil jets vaporising heated black oil into a vapour and pressurised through the jets into the main furnace. My job was to watch the chief stoker’s hand signals. When more revs were required in the engine rooms the chief stoker would give a hand signal, up two fires, up four fires etc. The top speed was twenty-eight knots which is thirty-four miles an hour or so. When the order was given to increase speed I immediately opened up the jet by pulling a lever which opened a flap on the top and bottom of that particular fire and that would ignite one furnace between the triangular tube sections. That was my normal job.
I was also required to check, in spare moments, fire and bilge pumps, and other small bits of equipment. When I first joined as second-class stoker I was also required to make the cocoa in the middle of the watch. We used to pinch potatoes from the potato locker and place them under the pipe lagging in the boiler room to bake them. Certain engineering officers would come down, ignoring the lovely smell, pick up my decarbonning rod I used for cleaning off the cones and poke the potatoes out treading on them so they were inedible. That happened at times.
Security and discipline was very strict on HMS Dorsetshire and I was not immune.
I wrote letters regularly to my girlfriend (now my wife of course). The officers
censored all letters, they looked for any factual information that might have
been innocently written down and obscured them with a red pen. As I wasn’t
a great letter writer, and writing so regularly, I found it difficult to think
of new subjects and news to write about that had not been mentioned in previous
letters home. On one occasion I wrote a letter to my girlfriend that would have
gone as an air-graph letter. I started thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice to
tell Rene where I was and what we were doing? I had no more sense than to write
down some words on a scribble pad to check the spelling and see if they looked
right. On the same scribble pad I wrote the places on route from Newcastle down
to Ceylon. Because I had the scribble pad on top of my letter the pressure came
through to my letter. The imprint of the various names I had written down was
discovered in my letter when it was censored and I was put on Commander’s
report and scolded rather badly. They accepted my explanation but said that
we no way wrote down any names of any ports or gave details of what we were
doing. I received 5 days stoppage of pay, which was quite a lot of money and
I thought was very unfair - going to see the Commander, double march, off caps,
stand at attention, tell him your story, the reasons why, get scolded, on caps,
and double off quickly. I felt quite humiliated.
We all had the option to receive or decline the traditional daily tot of Navy rum known as grog (because it was diluted with water). We indicated our preference by entering “Grog” or “Temp” in the log. “Temp” stood for temperance. The tot cost 6d (old money) and 6d a day times seven sixpences or 3/6d a week was deducted from my pay but I always had my tot of rum which was very nice after a tiring middle watch to help me kip. The ratings below petty officer received a rum ration of “three and one” that was one tot of one hundred percent volume rum to three of water. Made especially for the Royal Navy it was strong, blended Rum from all over the world that couldn’t be obtained by anyone but the Navy. If it was someone’s birthday on the mess they had sippers. If you were not on watch you had a little sip from the other members of the watch as well as your own tot. Many of the lads had four birthdays a year and sometimes it wouldn’t be noted and they went off laughing! The rum issue was made at eleven o’clock every morning because of the people going on watch at noon. You’d have your tot then eat your dinner fetched from the galley.
If you were on watch you changed into your heavy equipment, boiler suit and boots to go on watch for four hours at a time, changing around every two or three days. Because of the four-hour watches around the clock, one four-hour watch was split in two and was known as the first dogwatch and the second dogwatch. The first dogwatch was from four ‘til six and the second dogwatch was six ‘til eight. So watches were swapped every forty-eight hours.
Captain Agar VC was our skipper. You didn’t see very much of him but
he made all the important decisions. Our Captain was very well thought of by
the crew. He was a gentleman who had seen great service in the First World War.
Whilst he was stationed in the Baltic during the Russian revolution he had sunk
a troublesome Russian Bolshevik Cruiser the Oleg with his coastal motorboat
armed with mines/torpedo sometime during 1919. That was why he won the VC.
I saw the actual remains of his boat at Duxford in the 1980’s on a visit
to the Imperial War Museum. He was a very nice, quiet man, and spoke to us at
Church services on Sunday etc. which we all had to attend.
Commander Byas was our commander who virtually ran the ship and dished out the punishment. He wasn’t too well liked and considered a bit too strict and a little unfair sometimes, but he was a good Commander and had control. No one could grumble about the way he ran the ship.