Australians at War Film Archive

Oh I was born in the West Country, the west milling town of Kidderminster, in Worcestershire. The town itself was well renowned for its carpet manufacturing business. I was born on the 16th of March,

1923, and my father worked on the Great Western Railway and he was a – at the time what they called a shunter. The Great Western Railway was also known as ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’. It was one of the best railway companies in England at the time. Dad was what five years older than Mum. Mum was slightly built, not a very big person at all, but she was pretty

handy with the wooden spoon. My oldest sister she was six years older than me. She was very talented, a water colour artist and played the piano, classical music and another sister was three years older than me, my sister Joan. She was a tomboy. She could climb trees with the best of the boys and argue and fight with me all day long, if it came to the push.

She’s still alive now and as I say really life began when Dad was moved to Worcester as a guard on the railway and we moved on the outskirts of Worcestershire, outskirts of Worcester, which is a cathedral city. We lived in what you would say is a lane. It was called Green Lane, but it was a street, would be half a mile long and down one side would be

a hundred council houses all the same, all the same design, the whole lot and we were number forty six, which was about half way along. Opposite the, we all had a little front garden, say about twelve feet and a good back garden which stretched right down to another area, which was allotments. Beyond that was a big grey wall which was a church wall,

Astwood Road Cemetery. I mention that because when I moved there at three years old, several times a week, at first, you’d hear the Last Post being played, mostly the old soldiers, the service men passing away from their wounds I suppose and that went on for several years. It slowly got less and less. Opposite the house, opposite the street,

a street went parallel called Church Street and the houses, the backyards from their houses came onto the other of the street, the land, and also a bit of a strip with an orchard in it. And that land went right the way, practically the whole length towards the top end of the street and at the bottom end of the street was the infants’ school, a church, St Barnabas Church and the school that I attended, Red Hill Boys’ School,

and the other half was a girls’ school. We were separate in those days. The distance from myself to the school would be about three hundred yards so it was very handy and of course there was no school buses in those days. Everybody either walked to school or if they were late they ran to school. I didn’t have very far to go but some children were two or three miles away and the lunch hour used to be from twelve o’clock till half past one, which allowed children to get home,

have their dinner, ‘cause you always had dinner there. There was no thing as lunch. Breakfast, dinner, tea and supper and they would go home to a cooked lunch, a cooked dinner I would say and back to school at half past one, through to half past four. The street itself was very, Dad as I say was a goods guard. The next door neighbour was a fireman on his trains and there

were drivers, there was bus drivers, conductors. No-one had a car in the street, bar one and he was a technician that worked for the new wireless place at Droitwich and he had a bull nosed Morris. And the first time I ever had a ride in a car was a bull nosed Morris, in what they called the dicky seat in the back. It used to lift out and no safety belts and that was enjoyable.

Later. Well I spent my life at, my school days, I was thirteen years old at the Red Hill Boys’ School and

then Dad got moved back to Kidderminster again as a yard foreman and I finished my school off at the district school, at a mixed school of boys and girls. I left school at fourteen and got a job as a storeman, a junior storeman at the new maintenance unit, the RAF [Royal Air Force] maintenance unit they built. I think they were preparing for war then in 1936, and got a job there as a storeman in the clothing store. It was a big site, a five unit site. It

was all camouflaged. From there I went to a – I got a job with Short Brothers in the office there, working on the cost accounting of the Stirling bomber. My sister and her husband worked there too. Then I volunteered at eighteen for the navy. Just before my nineteenth birthday they called me up for fleet air arm. Fleet air arm was where I wanted to get in.

I wanted to be an engine mechanic and I got all those wishes granted. Initial training on HMS Duke in Malvern. Then moved then to a base in the Isle of Wight, that was sort of a transit base. From there I moved back to a course, Locking, RAF. There was no maintenance, no training for the navy. The RAF did all the training for the fleet air arm and I was there for twenty weeks on

this course, this engine course. From there I went to another depot, Dunfermline in Scotland. From there I moved up to Crarae and did my training on the 785 Squadron. Excuse me.

And then the next move was to join 816 Squadron on HMS Dasher.

Unfortunately the Dasher blew up in the Clyde and so we never got aboard that so we came back to Lee on Solent, reformed, went down to Exeter in Devon to cover the Channel for E Boats. We had nine black Swordfish, ten black Swordfish and they’d do all the night flying. From there I went up to Ireland, Londonderry and started training to – for bombing

and deck landings and that, ready to go on board HMS Tracker. Went to the sea in the Tracker on Friday the 13th of August, 1943, and did Atlantic convoys and we finished up over in the States, to get repaired after storm damage. Came back and went on leave, Christmas leave. That would be ‘40 – ‘43 and ‘44; I joined HMS Jason and did Russian convoys.

Came back, I’ll say convoys, we did one convoy because we came back and ran aground in Scarpa Flow and we had to leave the ship and start again. Finished up down in Perranporth in Cornwall. Was operated on for appendix while I was down there, and I came home on sick leave and met the wife and after that, yeah the squadron disbanded and

I was sent to do workshops in Belfast, aircraft workshops there. From there I went to 822 Squadron which was a Barracuda and Firefly squadron and we were getting the work up to come out here on the Pacific Fleet but that fell through, because they dropped the bomb on Japan. And in 1946 they demobbed [demobilised] me, I went back into civvy street [civilian life]. Got a job at the maintenance unit again and

the times weren’t very good after the war in England. There was staggered hours and you sort of worked three days one week, and had the day off and probably worked the next couple of days and it was very erratic and I got married in 1947. And we decided then, there was an advert in the paper, to have recruits for the fleet air arm out here, the RAN [Royal Australian Navy], so I decided to volunteer for the RAN and I come out here in

1949 on the Sydney. Here a couple of years, went back to Narberth in Scotland to a mechanicians course, came back from there and did a couple of trips on the Melbourne. Send back again in ‘62 to do a Wessex Aircraft course on the helicopters. Came back, got on the Melbourne, then onto the Sydney, the Vung Tau ferry and I retired in 1969.

From then on I, in the meantime the wife had produced a son which was on the 13th of February 1951. That was before I went on the next course in ‘52 and a daughter was born in ‘54. The next, let’s see. I got a job, when I left the

navy, the pension was not the best and I did twelve months with the local undertaker here and took up the, became an assistant funeral director and there was an opportunity to join the Superintendent Aircraft Maintenance Repair in Sydney with a technical officer 2 job, and I put in for the examination. Six of us put in for it and I was offered the position, so I was back

into the navy again, more or less, as a civilian and I finished up down at Jervis Bay missile range on the targets, the targets down there, the radio control targets, Jindiviks and retired again in 1983. I was sixty then and since then I’ve retired and that was it.

Kids grew up and got married, excuse me, and here I am today. I more or less keep myself busy with hobbies. You’ve got to have hobbies. I mean I did wood turning and I’ve got a model railway out there in the garage and also I belong to the model railway club now which we’re always building new sets and new ideas. And that’s about my life at the moment.

The wife died last year with cancer and that’s it.

13th of February 1951 in Flat 13 in Marrick Waters. So I think thirteen is my lucky number. I went to sea for the first time on the 13th.

That’s fair enough, isn’t it?

You want that detail all over again?

Worcester.

I was three, three years old.

Yeah, well prior to that, I mean let’s face it

I can remember tripping up and down the stairs somewhere and playing in a yard somewhere and watching Mum turn the mangle over, the old wooden mangle in those days, had wooden rollers, but it’s all very hazy.

Oh yes, I’d say that, they were very friendly. In fact on one occasion I was about seven years old and I’m going on ahead a bit, but I got German measles and the next thing the lady up the road said could her daughter come and snug up in bed, just to get the German measles, and she was about fourteen.

And I’ll never forget it. She was there in her little pants and her vest and she got into bed and she’s cuddling me up. I wish I’d been a little bit older. And that’s the sort of community it was. It was a cross section of bus conductors, bus drivers and I said about the fellow who was a technician. He was about the richest man in the street and he had a car. No-one else had cars.

Oh yeah, that was sort of a position

of importance if you had a car. I mean the wages, I think my Dad was earning about five pound a week then and the rent on the house, I think was five shillings. I mean to have a car you were earning quite a bit, and of course he was a technician in a new sort of field, a new wireless station. They didn’t call them radio stations in those days. It was all wireless and he had a good job.

Oh definitely working class. The whole area was working class, as I say there was train drivers, Dad was a guard. There’d be tradesmen that worked in the factories around there, steelworks and Innings and Prouds was a big steelworks there and yes, they were a friendly affair. Towards, when I was about seven or eight old, towards the Depression days, I don’t know whether it was a general strike or whether the Depression came through, I don’t remember a lot about it,

but people got together and worked together and helped each other out. I mean Dad was a good gardener. He had quite a good garden at the back of the house and we were never short of vegies. I think the only thing we ever got short of was food and coal for the fires, because the miners went on strike and everybody went on strike, abattoirs. I mean the doctors and school teachers didn’t go on strike mind you. You still had to go to school

and yes, it was a happy days as far as I was concerned. I don’t think the children of today would put up with what we did in those days, with regards to school. I mean the overflow from the school, I went to the infant school when I was five and six and seven I went to the big school and when I was eight I had to go to an overflow school which was a big iron shed, about two miles from the actual school itself.

It was a big shed and –

Too many kids.

And we had a very tubby, nice looking teacher. She was very good but I don’t think the kids would have liked paraded on the pavement every morning and getting inspected like a sergeant major. She used to go up and down the line and she used to check your fingernails, check your hair, check your shoes, make sure they were polished and then walk round the back and check your haircut and check that the heels of your shoes were

polished and that’s the sort of person she was. And then you went into school. I mean on a wet day that wouldn’t happen, but nine times out of ten you’d be there on the pavement lined up in the morning. And she was a good teacher. I was lucky really because Dad used to clean his own shoes to go to work and he used to clean all the kids shoes, so we all had good, clean shoes to go to work. That was when he was at home because when he did work he was working on the coal trains, which South Wales Coal

was one of the finest coals you could get for burning in railway engines, especially on the Great Western Railway, and the Great Western Railway owned most of the area down there. And Dad used to go to work at five o’clock of a Monday and we probably wouldn’t see him until Wednesday because he’d be working double hours they called it and he’d have to live in digs down in Wales. And probably come home and then he’d go away again on the Wednesday and he probably wouldn’t come back again to the Friday, but nearly every weekend he was

home. He would be in the garden or mending the shoes. He had his own shoe last and he used to repair all our shoes and –

Well he was a – he was born in Aldershot Barracks. His father was in the Royal Horse Artillery. That was my grandfather. He’s on the wall up there and he was born there. I think he went to work on a farm. That’s right, his father

came out of the army, Grandfather came out of the army and was the blacksmith in the little village of Shenstone, just outside Kidderminster, where my Mum was born too. He was the blacksmith there and he was also Master of the Hounds and he used to take charge of the hounds for fox hunting and my Dad was a farm boy. He worked on a farm until after he joined the railway when he was about eighteen or nineteen.

No, it would be before then. He’d be about seventeen when he was on the railway and of course being there, he was excused the First World War – but I’ve got a certificate in my precious belongings to say he was excused because he was needed on the railways. And from then, as I say, he was a shunter. But Mum was born in Shenstone and when she was ten years old she became a part time worker. That meant to say she did the morning work in the factory

and in the afternoon she went to school. That was at the age of ten and I thinks that, I don’t really know much about her life as it was then but I think she must have met Dad when she was working on a farm and eventually they got married.

She was very small, neat, clean and looked after us kids and of course when Dad was away

she was the boss. And if we played up she used to, as I said, get the wooden spoon out and give a pat across the bottom or across the legs but she was never cruel. Joan and I used to fight occasionally and at one time I blacked Joan’s eye. She got me in the corner with an elbow in my throat and I lashed out and blacked her eye and when Dad came home I didn’t get a hiding. He never hit us.

He said to me, “You don’t hit girls and you don’t hit women,” and he cuffed me up the back of the head. He used to rub the back of your head up there and I found out later he never hit Mum and he never hit the kids, the girls. As I say he used to cuff me occasionally but I realised that, when I was about fourteen I went into the bathroom and Dad had just got out of the bath and across his back was great white streaks. And I said, “Oh what’s that on your back, Dad?”

He said, “Your Grandma, or my Mum, horsewhipped me.” And I didn’t ask him why but apparently that’s why he never hit women. Because she was a real cruel, I think she was a rather cruel person, my Grandma, so that was just one of those things. I never found out what he did. I wasn’t game to ask him. Yeah, the children, there were never any overweight children when I was at school.

Not like there is today and I think that was due to the fact that there was no McDonalds, no Hungry Jack’s, no Colonel Chicken [Kentucky Fried Chicken], no outlets at all for any of those types of food. The food you had was what was cooked at home and there was no school canteens. There was no school buses, you just, as I say, if you were late for school, you ran. Sports, we used to,

I didn’t like cricket. I didn’t mind fielding but when I got to bat I usually got ran out because I was always trying to make the runs, but I loved football. I played football near most of my schooldays. I think the children are far healthier and fitter than what they are today. See there was no TV,

no calculators, there was no computers, all your fun was outside, running or jumping or skipping. I mean the kids today wouldn’t do what I used to do, was get a hoop, a cane hoop and a stick and belt it up and down the street, or a steel one or an old tyre. They wouldn’t do that today. They’d think that was stupid. It was stupid but there was nothing else to do. Excuse me. Another

game we used to play was we’d get a stick about an inch in diameter, about six inches long, taper the ends and get another stick and hit the tapered end till it shot up into the air and then hit it and see how far we could hit it. Well I couldn’t see children doing that today.

Tip cut, tip cut, oh we had a game of skipping the rope or a game of tag or what we called rounders, which is the same as the old,

what they call it now? Where they hit the ball?

Baseball, rounders was very similar to baseball, yeah. In the winter we used to, when it was really bad, the old snowball fights amongst the whole street used to turn out and have a fight. We’d take sides, parents and all the children would join in, good fun.

Oh it was cold. All the ponds and pools

round the place would freeze over. We’d go skating on them. And then of course there was another thing, summertime was the Three County Show. It was like the Easter Show at Sydney. It was an agricultural show and it was for Shropshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucester and every third year it would be Worcester and a place called Colwall Park used to hold the show and it would last about three or four days.

And during that time my sister and I, Joan, would get up about five o’clock in the morning and sneak across with a couple of cans and they’d milk the cows first thing in the morning and one can per household, so Joan and I used to split up there. She used to go in before me or I’d go in before her and get our cans filled up, come home and by the time we’d get home, we’d have about two inches of cream on the top, lovely cream. There should have been three inches but we’d lick most of

it off the top on the way home but that’s the sort of thing we carried on. In the summertime we’d go in the hay fields and help the farmer rake the hay or rack corn stooks for the wheat and oh as I say, that was roundabout August. We only had one big holiday a year and that was August. That was a month’s holiday, had about a week off at Christmas, well from Christmas Day, Christmas Eve till New Years Day and a couple of days

off at Easter. Being a church school, Lent was always spent having the first hour of school in the church, singing old Easter hymns and then we’d go to school. We had prayers every morning and prayers every night.

Not really. They didn’t go to church, but they made us go to Sunday School.

I think it was so they’d get the afternoon off. About the only time they got away from the children I think was when we were sent to Sunday school but no, they weren’t really religious. Dad never used any foul language. He’d say ‘bloody’ and things like that, ‘bugger’, but nothing, any four letter words at all and Mum didn’t swear at all.

Oh, a lovable character. He liked his beer and he always rolled his own cigarettes.

He always treated us fairly and I mean, you asked him for something and he’d always try his best to give it to you if he could. I wanted a billy cart one day and eventually I got a billy cart. No, he was a practical, down to earth sort of person. He loved his veggie gardens and as I say, during the Depression they came in very handy. Meat was in short supply too, I’d say in the,

we often used to have rabbit and – ‘honorary chicken’ as we called it, rabbit for dinner. Otherwise we always had a roast on a Sunday, usually roast beef, the old Yorkshire pudding and the veggies. Always had the sweet.

Yes, well try to maintain it. As I said the meat was in short supply. Instead of a roast beef, it might be a roast rabbit or something like that, but chicken, you never had chicken. You only got chicken at Christmas. That was a luxury I believe. But of course, the farmers couldn’t go on strike during the Depression. They still had to milk the cows, so you more or less had your milk and cheese, but meat and coal, fuel. I mean the

trees that were on the opposite to us during the Depression disappeared. They all got chopped down for fuel for the kitchen and that. The house that we lived in, the Council house, we had a wooden floor in the lounge but, it was two stories, but the back kitchen and the bathroom or the laundry as it was, were concrete floors and we just had mats on the concrete floors.

We bathed every Saturday, whether we wanted it or not, and Mum used to have to stoke the old copper up, for the fire, a great big copper in the corner of the bathroom and our bath consisted of hot water being ladled out into the bath for a bath. I was usually first in, my sister next and Mum and Dad after, but

they renewed the water. We didn’t use all the same water like.

That was once a week, oh yeah. As I say, whether you needed a bath or not, you had one once a week and of course, wash time. When Mum did the washing everything was boiled in those days. I mean there was no, all the whites were boiled, all the sheets were boiled and ladled into the bath, into the cold water to cool off and then taken down to the backyard and hung on a line between two posts,

and a big prop to hold the lot up.

Oh yes, she’d be flat out all the time. She was always cleaning and scrubbing and washing and cooking and she was a good cook. As I say we didn’t starve. She used to make a lot of our own clothes on the machine for us kids. As I say, Dad used to repair the boots.

Yeah, it was a happy childhood really. I mean even in the summer holidays there must have been some wet days, but I can’t remember them, and we used to play in the fields and there was a canal that used to run from the River Severn, up to Birmingham and Stafford and Worcester Canal I think it was called. I’m not quite sure but about two miles up away on a country road was Cadbury’s factory. They

used to make all the chocolates and they weren’t the plain bars, they were all the fancy ones in the boxes. And the barge used to come along on the canal and we used to operate the lock for them, to save the old bargy getting that, we’d operate the locks on the canal and if he was carrying any ‘crumbs’ as he called it, chocolate for the factory, he’d give us a bag full of this. You know Cadbury’s Flake chocolate? That sort, it was like that only it was in lumps and he’d give it to you probably a couple of pound of chocolate there, just hand it to you.

They didn’t miss it. Yeah they were good days.

In those days? Not really, no, no, no. You sort of didn’t need hobbies. You were always out playing, doing something. I remember one day they dug a hole in the road outside the school. I still don’t know what the hole was for, but the old nightwatchman came along in his

little hut to guard the hut at night. That not there was much traffic in the road and he had a big brazier in front of it, full of coal burning, keeping him warm and all little oil lamps around this hole on planks and we used to gather around there and it happened for two or three nights and then we forgot it and he used to tell stories, ghost stories. And you’d be there roasting the potatoes in the bottom of this fire, the front of you would be burning up and your back would be freezing cold. You’d tell ghost stories and then he’d tell

stories, war stories. He was an ex-army bloke, I think he was, the old nightwatchman, and that was good. I mean it only happened once, but I never forgot it. He was there for about three nights, then they filled the hole in and away they went.

Not really. My Dad had thirteen volumes, bound volumes, books, worth a fortune now but unfortunately he gave them to my nephew and he couldn’t care less about them, but

Dad used to let me have a read through these books, one at a time and I learnt a lot myself about the war. But there were a lot of good pictures and that but no real stories, not that I can remember now.

No, as I say he, in the eighteen hundreds he was with the Thin Red Line, that mob,

the Battle of Waterloo and he died rather young actually. As I say he was a blacksmith at Shenstone and he got blood poisoning through a faulty nail or something from one of the horses and he didn’t, he died young. I never met him. Now where was I? Oh the Colwall Park, it was a big park where the three county show was on,

and we used to get an old aviator called Allan Cobham with his flying circus and he had the old World War I planes, fighter planes and that, and they used to come and give us an exhibition and flights, free flights and his main transport was an aircraft called a Hannibal. It was a twin engined, twin winged fighter plane with engines in the struts, a double bi-plane at the back and Hanley Page Hannibal, Hanley Page paid them.

It was one of these old war time bombers I believe but that was all a good laugh. Every other year he used to come and do his exhibition.

Yes, and no. I was always interested in boats, always interested in boats and then of course there was the circus, not the,

the fair used to come around, the old fashioned fair. The old tractor engines used to pull the old, a series of different shows and that behind it and up the streets. Pitchcroft was the old race course at, down by the river at Worcester. He used to, the fair used to be there. Actually nothing like the show grounds they’ve got today with all the attractions that they’ve got. We had what they called a helter-skelter, which is a

real thrill with a slippery dip around the what’s it? The horses used to go around and up and down? The dragons, a sort of a dragon shape in a circuit they used to go around, all driven by steam and steam organs used to play the music. The side shows weren’t very different now to what they were in those days. Still

have the old coconut shy and I think the presents might have been a bit different, the prizes might have been different, but most of the shows are what we’ve got today really. It was just the actual showground, the roundabouts and things were entirely different now. I mean but there’s no fun on going on some of those, they’re bloody frightening too. And in the summer there was swimming

in the river. Nearly every Sunday night, Sunday evening, Dad and Mum and I and Joan and some friends of theirs all used to go for a walk and we’d finish up at the Chequer’s Inn, which is a pub at the end of the lane where we lived and they’d have a couple of beers and Dad would buy us a Vimtail, which is like a Coke and a chocolate biscuit.

And that was really the usual Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening walk and where we ended up.

Average. I won a couple of prizes for drawing. I’ve still got one now in the cupboard somewhere around here. 1935 I think it was, first prize for drawing.

Scenery, mostly scenery. There was no, anything that attracted me. I’d draw a train if I thought I could draw a train but I wasn’t terribly good, but I was better than most. Yeah, I liked school. I was only ever top of the school once, and that was when we were in the iron room with Miss Jones. I got full marks for dictation and they put me top of the class, but that was the only time I ever got there.

I was usually about half way down. Yes, I liked school and I enjoyed it.

Oh I’d say geography and history, not maths. I used to struggle through maths and of course when I left school the furthest I advanced in maths was long division and multiplication, that’s all we did. Didn’t do decimals or anything like that. I got that training later on in

life in the navy. Yes, as I say I used to like the odd game of football and that’s how I found about Santa Claus when I was a kid. I was about eight years old and I heard Santa Claus come up the stairs and the next thing I heard Dad say, “Open the crib,” and I heard my football, wrapped up in paper, bouncing down the stairs. He’d bought me a football and a pair of football boots. I never forgot that.

I thought I was. The last game I played was in nineteen, when I was forty six years old I played in the navy out here.

No, no, no, never that good. I just used to enjoy the game. Rugby and all that sort of stuff, no, that was, yeah.

Oh I’d say when I was about that age, about eight or nine. I used to make boats and sail them on the lakes and that. I used to make yachts and at one stage a friend of ours, hang on, he was a chemist and he had a six foot long yacht with a full mast on it and he used to loan it to us.

It used to take two of us to carry it down to the lake and put it in the water and we used to sail that. Yes, mostly sailing boats, and of course Mum always liked the navy because her favourite brother was in the navy and he died in the Battle of Jutland. He was in the First World War on a big battleship there in the big Battle of Jutland and

at the end of the 1918 War he got drowned there and I think that’s why I’ve got such a name that I’ve got, George Stephen William Meacham. George was after my father, William was after my grandfather, and Stephen was after my mother’s brother. I didn’t know much about that though when I got christened. Yeah. I think life was good in those days. I don’t remember anybody ever getting really

sick, but as I say, I told you when I got the measles and finished up with the young girl in bed with me trying to catch it.

Not really, not really. I think the war decided that. I really didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. I wasn’t very happy when I left school at fourteen as a storeman.

I left school when I was fourteen and got a, the Air Ministry had made this big maintenance unit at Hartlebury, just outside Kidderminster. It was five big units and it would all come apart. This was 1936 when they built this so they must have been anticipating the war. That happened in

1949, oh 1939 and I got a job in the clothing store. Which was you got orders in from different units, different wings wanting overcoats, and trousers and flying jackets and that sort of thing and also used to get the orders from the WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] for their clothes, underwear and etc. And it was rather strange because the WAAF, the ordinary WAAF, lower deck sort of thing, they had

cotton underpants, cotton knickers and all the officers had silk ones, that sort of thing. It was rather distinctive between the different people in the same unit, sort of thing. If you were an officer you got the best, if you were the lower deck you got the ordinary stuff. It was a good job. I don’t whether I should say this but we used to get orders

for a set of manhole covers. This is rather rude, because actually what they were sanitary pads for the WAAFs and used to say, “A gross of manhole covers for number six,” and all took it in good part, but it could be embarrassing for some people. I used to have to ride a bike to work. It was about four miles to the actual site where I worked. I was Number Four site and

I used to ride a pushbike there everyday and in foggy weather the buses taking the workers to the site used to latch on behind the cyclists because the bus didn’t know where he was going in the fog, but as long as he could see the cyclist in front of him, he’d follow him. But it was rather dangerous because if we’d come off our bikes he would have run straight over us, but that was the sort of thing that happened. From there Short Brothers were making,

the Short Sunderland flying boats down in London, Rochester, in London they got bombed out and they moved into Kidderminster in one of the old carpet factories, which by then was turned over into munitions anyhow. Nearly all the carpet works were making tanks or munitions, not carpets and my sister, my elder sister Edna and her husband were working in the office there. He came up from Rochester and my sister met him and they got a job in the office there in

the costing accounts for the Stirling bomber and they wanted another assistant so they asked me if I’d like to join them at the desk and get better pay. So I left the RAF maintenance unit and went to work for Short Brothers. That was only for about twelve months because I’d volunteered for the fleet arm unit when I was eighteen and of course on February 1942, February ‘42, I left Short Brothers.

They couldn’t have me as a reserve occupation and I didn’t want to because I wanted to get into the navy anyhow, and I joined the navy. I was sent to HMS Duke, which is about twenty miles from Kidderminster in the Malvern Hills. I was so near, so far. I didn’t get home, I couldn’t get home at all. I was there for five or six weeks and having been in the Sea Scouts I knew all the knots and splices et cetera, et cetera, and my mate

Frank Marsden, he’d been in the Sea Cadets and he knew all about knots and splices and a bit of naval tradition.

I joined the Sea Scouts when I was about sixteen. Actually we were river scouts but we were Sea Scouts, 4 Bewdley Sea Scouts and we used to have fun on the river. We made canvas canoes and we used to go up the river, cruising and

doing general scouty things.

It’s a scouts, it’s the same as the Boy Scouts only they call them Sea Scouts because we’re on the, should have been River Scouts, but there was no River Scouts. Either Sea Scouts, Boy Scouts and we just did nautical things. We learnt all about knots and splices and how to tie a bow line on a boat and do a sheep shank and a sheep bend

and that sort of thing, but our main thing was canoeing. We built our own canoes, canvas canoes and we used to go up and down the river in them. We had a couple of huts, used the shoot the rapids. There were some rapids down the river where we were and Settley race and rapids and well we had just general good fun every weekend. We’d go away for the weekend, take our own food and have our own little fires to cook them on and it was just good fun.

Oh yes, oh Scouts and the Guides and the Brownies and Cubs, they were far more popular then than what they are today. I mean you don’t see many Scouts these days, do you?

There were two Sea Scout troops actually. There was Bewdley and

Stourport, there were two lots. After that I left the Scouts and joined the Home Guard.

Home Guard, and my Dad was in the Home Guard. I’ve forgotten this. He was in the Home Guard in the Worcester Regiment and I joined the same regiment and got kitted out with a khaki uniform and boots and issued with a .303 rifle and forty five rounds of ammunition. And Dad had the same so we were pretty well armed

in Kidderminster and of course we were there training, shooting, throwing hand grenades and all that sort of practice. And I think if Gerry had invaded us he would have had a warm welcome anyway because we were all pretty keyed up. And then from there, as I say, I did join the navy and went to HMS Duke. I forgot that little incident.

Not really. The Sea Scouts, no, everybody wanted, some people liked the Scouts, some people liked the Sea Scouts. It was just a boy’s thing, put it that way.

Yeah. I mean prior to that when I was fourteen I was in the Boys’ Brigade and that’s another thing I’ve forgotten.

It was a church lad’s brigade, more or less, and we used to put the old hat on, the band and the pouch and go to church and we had a band. Used to have parades, march in parades. Used to do physical, at night time physical training and that sort of thing. I was pretty good on the parallel bars in those days. That was when I fourteen, fifteen and you did these things.

You had a go at this and you had a go at that and left there, left the Brigade, went to the Scouts. Left the Scouts and joined the Home Guard and then I say from the Home Guard, I finished up in the navy.

I couldn’t sit still.

No, Yeah. I even ride a bike now. Yeah, every morning I get on my bike and go for a ride,

but that’s going in advance. No I say I went to the Duke and the Duke was about twenty miles from where we lived and I had five or six weeks there. I say we knew our bits and knots and splices and the leading hand that was supposed to be teaching that course used to let Frank and I do the teaching.

Yeah. All the knots you could think of, reef knots and bow liner, graph and point, splice and back splice and side splice and I used to be able to do the lot

and so we sort of started our naval career pretty good. From the Duke I was sent down to HMS Medina which is on the Isle of Wight, which is off the south coast of England. Tom Worsley, used to be an actor way back in the – you probably wouldn’t remember anyhow, and he had a holiday camp there, little chalets and we had a chalet each.

All issued with a .303, forty rounds of ammunition and I was taken ill there. I got a skin complaint, impetigo, and all my face and mouth was full of runny sores.

And my hands and I went in the sick bay there which is a private house, about half a mile from the actual camp itself and I was there about six weeks and didn’t get any better.

I had what they called a latos paste. It used to be a thick paste they used to paste all over my face and I used to wear a mask, with eye bits cut out and I was in a pretty bad way and they decided to send me to Harlow Hospital which was in Portsmouth, to see a specialist there. And he stripped me off, had a look at me and what I’d been doing was using sulphur. I had a few blackheads when I was a kid, in the twenties, I had a few blackheads

and I was using sulphur soap to get rid of them and that’s what caused the problem. Anyhow he ordered this special ointment for it and within three weeks it had all gone, cleared up.

I think it was called Antipiol but I wouldn’t swear to that. Antipiol was the ointment and it did clear it all up in the end and I went back to the camp then, into my chalet again, with my rifle and worked in the post office there and I was

the ship’s postman there at Medina for about two or three weeks. And then if there were any air raids on, which was pretty regular because the Jerries [Germans] were there bombing Portsmouth at the time, all down the south coast and I used to man the anti-aircraft guns down there.

Do you want to go back to the Duke do you?

Sorry, I couldn’t remember. It wasn’t a very good pay, no. No, I don’t remember what the pay was. In any case I gave it to Mum and she used to give me pocket money back.

Oh yeah, I was still living at home in Kidderminster.

Oh yes, I wanted to be in the navy,

yes, I wanted to join the navy but I wanted to go in the engine room artifice, but I didn’t have the education for that and not like my son, so as I say I volunteered. Because if you volunteered you got your choice, but if you got called up they could have put you in the army, the air force, navy or anywhere and I didn’t want the army.

Oh conditions in the army always seemed to me to be untidy, dirty, especially after reading

old war books about trench warfare, living in mud and dirt and no, the army, I didn’t fancy the army at all. The air force, well not really, I wasn’t very particular about flying at the time. And the navy was the one I wanted. In the navy you had a clean bed, good food, and it was a good clean life I felt, in relation to the other services. That’s why I joined the navy.

No, not really, no. As I say, the war sort of made your mind up you. If you wanted to do something and it fitted in with the war you were right but if it didn’t, you’d never do it, see? No, I had no ambition to travel at the time but I was interested in other places mind you, in the world itself. And my Dad always

wanted to travel but of course the only travelling he did was on the back of a guard’s van on a train but he always wanted to go abroad but I think the farthest he went abroad was the Channel Islands on a holiday one time, just before the war started. No, it wasn’t until, the navy decided, the war decided what my future was going to be and I wanted the navy and I got the navy.

Oh yeah. My other school mate, Derek Lamb, his father was a railway driver and of course he followed in his father’s footsteps and went in the railway as a driver and he didn’t go to war. He was excused. Preserved occupation they called them in those days just the same as my father was a preserved occupation on the railway but Dad wanted me to go on the railway.

He didn’t say that. He wanted to get me

on the railway as a driver but of course a driver in those days on the Great Western Railways, if your father was a driver you invariably became a driver yourself. You went through a cleaner, a stoker, a fireman, as they called it and then you became a driver and so I couldn’t follow in my father’s footsteps. I didn’t want to be a shunter and a guard. He finished up an inspector on the railway in the end but no.

I wasn’t really interested in trains in those days. It’s only in my later life I got interested in trains. No, I wanted to go to sea and I did, I went to sea in the end. As I say I left Medina after, I was behind the rest of the crowd that I was with. I sort of, they’d all gone on before me, they’d all gone onto the course and was in a squadron, so I was more or less three months behind them owing to this skin complaint I

had. From Medina I went to a place called Dunfermline, in Scotland, which was another depot camp, a transit camp and we did a lot of rifle work there, rifle drill and firing rifles and lectures. And because it was winter, it was November, December and Scotland’s pretty cold then and my job was to get up at five o’clock in the morning, go down to the guard house and draw

the keys to pay office, the captain’s office, the victual’s office and the ship’s office. Go down to the stoke hall, get the wheelbarrow out and the shovel and take the hot embers from out of the fire in the boiler house and put it in the barrow and re-stoke the fire with fresh coal and then walk round to the offices, open them up and light the fires, all the coal fires in all the offices, so it would be

nice and warm for all the people when they came to work at eight o’clock. That was my main purpose of being there. I was only there for a month, thank the Lord.

Oh yeah, it was all right. We were living in Nissen huts and everything was communal. The big, you had a big pot belly stove in the middle of the Nissen hut and you used to put our coffee on there, at least our mugs of cocoa on there or tea to keep them warm and a couple of planks either side, we used to sit on and

they had bunks on the outer periphery. Everybody got on well together. Well you had too, didn’t you? There was no sense in arguing. You had to put up with each others problems but it was pretty cold there and as I say I was quite glad when I left there. I didn’t like getting up at five o’clock in the morning while all my mates were still in bed until about six.

I don’t know. It was just detailed off, “Meacham, you will do this,” and, “You do that.” We all got sort of jobs to do.

Oh yeah, all navy, yeah. We were in the navy then.

This would be November to December, 43.

Yeah.

Oh yes, yes. The war started in 1939,

and I didn’t join up until 1942.

I joined the navy on the 28th of February 1942.

Oh sorry, I’ve missed a section of my life. Just hang on a second.

[tape stops] 8th of February, about a fortnight before my nineteenth birthday.

When the war broke out, as I say, in 1939, I was still working at the

RAF base then and the best I can remember is the garden opposite us, it was quite a big garden and we put air raid shelters in there. We dug our own air raid shelters and we used to, it wasn’t very often that we got an air raid warning in Kidderminster but when we did we used to go in the shelters.

Oh, a hundred and twenty miles.

Our nearest city was about forty miles away which was Birmingham and Coventry. They both got a hell of a pasting. See what the Germans used to do, they’d come across the Channel, follow the River Severn up, which they could see and when they got to Kidderminster they used to turn right and head straight to Birmingham and Coventry. And if any of them were, we weren’t a target really but if any aircraft came back slightly damaged and they decided to jettison the bombs, well

they sometimes fell on Kidderminster, in that area. One or two bombs dropped near us but nothing serious as far as we were concerned. We were lucky really.

Well they did drop a couple of land mines in a marsh where about a mile away from us and fortunately the explosion got

shoved upwards and not exploded in the bog. It could have spread up and flattened everything but the blast went upwards and didn’t do much damage at all. We had a couple of bombs near the railway line, near the big viaduct at the bottom of our road, there’s a rather a large viaduct which is covered by the Caulfield Brook. It was a marsh land, sort of level stream that ran through there and they built this

viaduct to take the railway over that. They tried to bomb that but they missed it. And of course they never dropped any bombs on the maintenance unit, because they couldn’t find it. It was all camouflaged and it was spread over a big area. I think there were five sites to the area that the maintenance unit was on. As I say we were the clothing store, but there were all the aircraft engines, aircraft airframes, propellers

and food store supplies. They were all different sections and as I say all different jobs to do.

They were built in the country and their roofs were actually camouflaged painted. You wouldn’t find them unless you were looking for them. Very clever done and as I say that was in 1936, before the war started. As I say,

during the war I worked there and then I worked for, as I say, for Short Brothers.

No. 1937, I was fourteen, twenty three, that’s right, 1937? So I left school in 1937,

went to work for the Air Ministry there. 1938, in 1938 when oh, I’m trying to think. No, it was, I’m sorry Kylie [interviewer].

The continuation, the continuity.

As I say, as the tempo of the war increased, so did our work load increase.

I mean, as I say, there I was also part of the fire brigade there. They used to have a great big barrel, a fire extinguisher, on wheels and a couple of handles, actually like a cart and if you could get the balance right you could get it going and you feet would only just touch the ground and you’d end up at twenty mile an hour if it got away from you. As I say I was in the fire

brigade. Yeah, as I say that was the job that went on until I eventually left there and went to work for Short Brothers when they moved up to Kidderminster. That was just before the war, nineteen thirty? No, just after war they moved up because they got bombed out down in London, and they moved up to Kidderminster, and that’s when I joined them, which would be 1939,

about 1940 when I got there.

Well but that was London. As I say Kidderminster didn’t get much bomb damage at all. We only got the loose aircraft coming back, if they wanted to jettison their load.

But they used to fly over, we used to hear them going over. We got the shelters in case but they were heading for places like Birmingham, which is a big industrial, and Coventry, which got a hell of a pasting during the war. As I say I worked there until about 1940 when I moved to Short Brothers and worked in their office there. And in 1942 I left there and

I joined the navy. We used to have to do fire watching on the roofs of the place, on Short Brothers. Used to have to go up there and look out when the sirens went, get on the roof and look out for fire, what they called fire watching.

Well just getting on the roof and keeping your eyes open in case they dropped incendiary bombs.

Yes, of a night time. We used to spend the night there, all

night. Used to sleep there. Used to take it in turns to go and watch on the roof, girls as well, from the office staff. It was quite good at times, we had a bit of fun.

Yeah.

No. No thanks.

No. As I say the war didn’t

really affect the area that I was in until I joined the navy and things started to happen. As I say there were air raid shelters build all around the place and pill boxes on the roads. They built, they got in placements against the invasion. Some of the pill boxes, the fellow that lived opposite us was the master of the arts school and

he camouflaged all these pill boxes with artificial trees and things like that so you’d go up the road and you wouldn’t even see it. You could practically walk into the damn thing until you hit this great big brick, more or less fortress with slots in.

Oh they’d be eight or nine feet in diameter. Usually round, built of concrete and they’d be divided into sections and as I say, he camouflaged them, so if you looked that way

it was mingled in with the background and if you can from this side it mingled with the background that way. Very clever and there were quite a few of those around the place, all against the invasion. As I said, being in the Home Guard during that period of time.

Yeah, the Home Guard.

Oh really, as I say, I think in the previous one I talked about the Home Guard with my father. He was in the Home Guard and he had a .303 rifle in the house with

forty rounds of ammunition and I had the same thing and we were both in the same regiment.

Yeah, yeah until I joined up.

I was only a private in the Home Guard. We used to do exercises and as I say, practice throwing live hand grenades in the designated area, in what they called the Avonlea Valley, which was

sort of a recreational space but they used to cordon it all off and we used to go there and throw hand grenades. And fire rifles and shoot and do marching, the proper military training really but it was all voluntary. I think you had to be sixteen or seventeen before you could join the Home Guard. They wouldn’t have you when you were young, and as I say I was in there until I joined the navy in the end,

which I was almost nineteen when I left the Home Guard.

See the Home Guard was, remember Dunkirk when the Brits, we all got thrown out of France, sort of capitulated and Dunkirk took place and they expected an invasion by the Germans at any tick of the clock, which they didn’t do. They missed their chance there.

In the meantime, you’ve probably seen the show Dad’s Army? Well that was the Home Guard but it wasn’t that stupid. They were quite serious about this and we were serious in those days. I mean if the Germans had invaded they would have got a real hot welcome because we knew the areas where we lived. We knew every gully, tree, pot hole if you like, places we could hide and they wouldn’t find you. We knew the complete terrain of

each area. Each Home Guard knew his home territory, sort of thing, which would be completely strange to any invaders. And I say that was serious. We did our training. Nothing like Dad’s Army at all and as I say I finished up in the navy.

About once a week they’d have an exercise of some sort or other, usually of an evening but weekends you

would go and throw hand grenades or shoot and firing, you’d do it in the daytime, probably a Saturday or a Sunday.

Well I won’t say it changed. It just advanced. I mean I got a little bit older and a little bit wiser. I can’t say it changed that much. Your sort of grew into it.

Oh yes,

food was rationed, clothes were rationed. I believe a manual worker was allowed a couple of extra ounces of cheese or butter but the average office worker wouldn’t get that. Yeah, rations were pretty tight but I think we were far healthier for it. We didn’t have so much to eat. Once again there were no fat people round in the end. Yeah clothes were rationed.

You couldn’t, as I say it was more or less, that side of the thing was your Mum and Dad in regards to the vittling [victualling] and that sort of thing. It didn’t really interest you as long as you got something to eat but it was rationed, definitely, yeah.

Not really, no.

I know what you’re getting at. You didn’t talk about where you worked really. You knew each other. But I mean when you finished work you didn’t go out talking about it. You wanted to get home and get to bed. I mean you didn’t go, if you were socialising or having a drink in a pub somewhere you didn’t talk about your job.

No, nobody asked. Everybody was, I wouldn’t say secret, but the people I worked with I didn’t see actually when I went home. They all went their different ways. I mean we all used to come to work on bikes and I think I was about the only one in our street that worked there in the maintenance unit. No, it

wasn’t kept secret at all really. It was just nobody talked about it.

Menzies? You sure, you’re Australian, I’m English?

You mean when?

No, it wouldn’t be Churchill. The Prime Minister at the time?

Oh, in thirty eight he went over to and had a yap to Hitler. Now what was his name? Oh gawd. They decided there wouldn’t be a war but backed down on it in the end. Chamberlain.

Chamberlain, get the right one in a minute.

Chamberlain was the Prime Minister. Churchill took over from Chamberlain. Yeah I was at home at the time when the announcement was made, “– that we are now at war with Germany.”

September the 3rd was it? 1939.

Yeah. Yeah, I was at home. I think it was in the, why would I be at home? No, I wouldn’t have a clue. I’m sorry, Kylie. I know it was Chamberlain and it was September the 3rd 1939 when he declared war but, no that was when

we started digging the air raid shelters and things were starting to look up then, prepare for war. They were preparing for it because we more or less had twelve months warning and actually the armed forces were being built up then, prior to the declaration of war. They were sort of, the maintenance unit they were dishing out propellers and engines and parts for aircraft and different kinds of directions there.

It was all kind of getting ready for it and that was it, it happened.

Oh a bit exciting. I’d say anticipation. Nobody wanted the war, but they knew it was going to come and that was it and when it did come it was a sort of a relief. Everybody said, “We’re into it now,” but otherwise nothing

really exciting. It was just nervous tension.

Well in some areas they issued what they called Anderson shelters. They were tin sheds which you buried underground and covered with dirt for mostly private backyards and so people could get to them. Our air raid shelter was just across the road. It

was a low brick building with a thick concrete roof on the top, pitch black inside. It was only against shrapnel falling down. I mean any direct hit no air raid shelter would take it. A lot of people in Birmingham got killed, buried in their own air raid shelters, buried with a direct hit. It was only to protect you from shrapnel and stuff that was falling around from anti-aircraft guns or shrapnel from bombs that were exploding nearby.

A direct hit, hopeless. Yeah, we had an air raid shelter built directly opposite us but we made our own little trenches at the same time.

Oh yeah. Dad turned two and the neighbour and spade and shovels and dug a trench and covered it all in and made quite a cosy little air raid shelter there but they put a big brick one opposite, on the golf course. As I say we very rarely used them,

because where we were there were not many, didn’t have many air raid warnings at all and if they did it was usually aircraft flying over to a different target, but we weren’t a real target at all.

Oh, there wasn’t real

steps. As I say, I volunteered.

I didn’t. I filled in a form and posted it away to the War Ministry or the navy. I didn’t front up for any check. Front up like a recruiting office or anything like that.

I just filled in a form and they accepted it and as I say just before my nineteenth birthday they called me up and I went to HMS Duke. Then I had all the interviews and medicals and injections and inoculations, all the things you get when you join up.

Oh,

not really. I mean health wise they’d ask you whether you’d had whooping cough or measles and that sort of thing and whack the old needle in your arm with the injection and vaccination and oh they give you a good medical. I mean quite a few people that had come from some of the places, say slums and places like that, they had crabs or scabies or something like that and they all had to be treated. But

I was pretty clean when I joined the navy. No, you got a lot of lectures and the actual training was mostly physical training, marching, ‘square bashing’ we called it.

Square bashing, that’s parade drill. We had most of it was physical training. They really hammered that with the exercises and I

was jumping out of my skin by the time I finished there. The Malvern Hills, actually the main hill was a beacon. It was just under a thousand feet high and it was a beacon that they used during the Roman conquest. They used to light a beacon on there and say five or six miles away there’d be another one hill and they’d light a beacon on there and that’s how they’d let them know there was an invasion on in Roman days. It was

quite an ancient sort of place, the Malvern Hills, and we used to run up there, right up to the top of the mountain as it was and back again. I couldn’t do it now. Yeah we were pretty fit. We had a lot of lectures and as I say, knots and splices and naval traditions. Learnt all about what’s keeping, the different watches, the four to noon watch, the afternoon watch and all that naval sort of routine. Learnt what

eight bells was and four bells and.

The time on board a ship is usually done by bells. Every hour and every half hour the bell would alter, say twelve o’clock was eight bells, half past twelve would be one bell. Two o’clock, sorry, one o’clock would be two bells and used to go right through till you got the eight bells which should be four hours, more or less,

so twelve to four, four o’clock again was eight bells.

Oh yeah, I loved the training in the navy. The navy was where I wanted to be. I wanted to be a sailor and the uniform was a – to get into bell bottom trousers and a jacket was hell sometimes, especially if you’d had inoculations. You couldn’t move your arm and they were all pretty tight fitting clothes. The trousers, there was no fly on the trousers. You had a

flap and a belt and –

Yes. As I say I filled the forms in, sent them away

and the next thing I knew they were calling me up and we were to report.

That was 1942.

Oh it was pretty grim, because Dunkirk had finished. They’d got back from Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain was raging around

1941 when “so much was owed by so many for so few for such as long time” – as I think Churchill was saying. They were shooting down the aircraft right and left. I mean the pilots were getting trained in Tiger Moths and their next step was into a Sea Fire or Hurricane, Spitfire or Hurricane and they didn’t last very long some of the pilots. They didn’t have the training but we eventually won in the end, but yes

it was pretty grim in those days.

And of course, the Germans were coming over and bombing hell out of London and Coventry and all the ports down the coast. I mean we didn’t have the fighter escort to really shoot them down in those days. I mean things were getting a bit thin.

Well probably my parents would be more worried and concerned than what I was. I mean I was young and I wouldn’t say it was a game but we still didn’t take it seriously. I mean we knew we were going to win in the end, put it that way. See some of the young lads that were in their nineteens and twenties and were pilots

they hadn’t got the – they were full of the youth and youthfulness and wanting to do things and they hadn’t got the training for it. We could build more aircraft than what we could build pilots. They had a certain amount of training, usually I’d say in Tiger Moths and the next thing they’re in a fast moving, fighter machine. I mean a lot of them survived like Bayder, tin legged Bayder, he was one of the aces that shot down so many German aircraft but there’s quite a few that

only had one flight and they’d finished. No, things were pretty grim but as I say I was young. And of course I think the war in Africa was going against us too. We got driven back. I think the Aussies out there got driven back to Tobruk. Rommel had almost cleaned Africa up until the forces got in there

and forced them back again. Yeah, it was pretty grim around 1940, 1942.

It never entered, I knew I was going to war put it that way, but nobody ever thought they were going to get killed, put it that

way, and I was lucky I didn’t. No, you went and that was it. I mean there were times during the war when I was scared but most of the time I shouldn’t say, but I enjoyed it. It was an excitement all the time and no, I, put it this way, I wasn’t frightened to go and I got what

I wanted.

To be an air mechanic in the fleet air arm, to work on aircraft.

Oh I was always interested in engines, internal combustion engines. I mean let’s face it, I loved engineering on the general outlook. I mean I had a terrific Meccano set.

Most kids had the, well most kids these days aren’t interested in machinery or engineering but I was just interested in engineering and I wanted to be an engine mechanic and I got it.

Well I didn’t know much about aircraft engines or

even car engines. I knew about pistons and cylinders and spark plugs but how and why it worked I wouldn’t have a clue. And anything with regards machinery or tools, put it that way, hand tools like files and drills and anything, I knew there files and drills but what they were made of and what they were for was a different thing.

And I eventually got taught that. No, I was just generally interested in, I was interested in railways and engines and motor cars but not exactly into detail of how they worked. I always wanted to be a mechanic of some sort and I thought, “I don’t want the army, I’m not fussy about the air force and I like the uniform for the navy and Mum wanted me to go in the navy I think,”

so I volunteered and that was it.

Appealed to me, yeah.

I was going to learn all about aircraft engines. I wasn’t really fussy about flying but I knew I wanted to be on a ship of some sort. That was the main thing. I’d be in the navy and I’d be going to sea.

And that was about it, that was the main attraction for me, was work on engines, be on a boat and go to sea and hopefully go places.

Not really because I’d had a touch of the Home Guard and you had a little bit of military training in the Scouts. Let’s face it you’d go marching and things like that and no, to me it was easy. I mean I didn’t mind square bashing. In fact I used to like marching and it came hard to a few people that didn’t like it but they had to put up with it.

But no, I enjoyed my training. I know being told what to do and take orders well you’ve got to get used to doing that but it’s all part of the job, put it that way. If you can’t take orders and do as you’re told, you’re not a fighting force are you? You’re just nothing. No, I didn’t mind it at all, put it that way. But the physical training side, well it was terrific,

yeah.

Oh yes.

Oh the HMS Duke I was just thinking that was in the January,

February, March, we wouldn’t be wearing white fronts, put it that way. Now the recruits got a navy jersey you wore under your jacket or in the summer you wore a white front. What you call a ‘dicky front’. It was a white shirt with a blue banner on the top and we’d be wearing jerseys at that time because it was still early spring when I joined up. The uniform consisted of black socks, boots. You got issued with two pairs of boots and one pair of shoes.

Your shoes were used for when you had your good gear on. That was your uniform with the gold braid and your walking out rig. You normally had your boots for the marching and that sort of military square bashing as I called it.

Oh yes, spit and polished them. We used to put the polish on and get a hot spoon, and rub a hot spoon over them and that used to tighten the

leather up, and they used to look like patent leather when I’d finished. Just most of the toe caps, but the rest were all spit and polished. The trousers weren’t quite big enough in the bottom for bell bottoms trousers. They weren’t quite big enough for the usual rig and in the refs’ mess there were some chairs with a curved back and we used to wet the trousers and force them over the back of this chair

and make a nice bell bottom for it. And of course if you had what they called a tiddly suit made, that’s a tailor made suit. Later on we had tailor made suits and we used to get the nice wide bottoms and in the seams around the bottoms we used to sew pennies to make the weight in there, so they’d swing when you walked. But I say that was later on. The basic uniform was the ordinary blue serge and with that you were issued with a set of underwear

and by the time you’d worn your blue serge over your white singlet and pants for a couple of day, your singlet and pants were blue. The dye used to come out of the works, oh it was shocking, and as I say to get into your uniform after you’d had your inoculations and to get your arms into the jacket and pull it on, it used to be agony. They all had to be folded up a certain way, because all your gear was put into kit bags. And your trousers had to be folded

in seven folds in each leg and then into a roll, into a sausage shape like that and then you’d used to curve it round the inside of your bag, your kit bags. The seven folds were supposed to represent the seven seas but it was the most convenient way of doing things. And also when you put them on, they all opened up and they were nice and round.

Oh yeah.

That’s right. Your collars had to be folded up into four folds, that way and put in the side so when you opened it up the actual collar was four creases across the back. When you got your original issue, the collar was a nice dark blue with a white three stripes piping round

it and we used to go and get some bleach and take some of the blue out of it so we looked like old salts who’d had their collars washed for several months, but you’d only had your collar for three or four weeks but you bleached it. Some blokes used too much bleach and it rotted the white piping round the collars and it all came adrift. And of course, you had to buy your own clothes in the navy, they never supplied, they gave you your first issue and then they used to give a clothing allowance of threepence

a day to buy new clothes when you needed it. And you had to go to, what they called slops, it was the issue centre for clothes and you’d go in there and buy your shirts, your collars, your shoes, socks, towels. All bought yourself after your first issue. Yeah, as I say, there was a way of doing everything in the navy and if you did it the right way you were

right, but if you did it the wrong way, well you were in strife. That’s what it boiled down to.

Oh absolutely. I mean if you were going to put your overcoat on, at the door you’d ask any girl around you if they’d put their arms onto yours and hold your collar down while you put your overcoat on the top otherwise your collar used to come up. Other than that you used to have to get your overcoat and throw it over your head and drop it around that way to keep

the collar in place. Oh the girls used to come up and hold your collar down while you put your coat on. Very handy, yes it was. I think there’s no doubt it I think the navy uniform, the sailors uniform was about the most attractive one of the lot and especially a real tight pair of bell bottoms on. I mean your bottom stuck out like that and tapered down to your legs and your jacket was nice and trim round your. I mean I didn’t have a belly in those days.

Yes, it was a good uniform. Bit of a horror to get on. I mean everything had to go over your head. Anything above your waist went over your head. There was no jackets or anything like that and the collar on the silk and lanyard used to tie on your collar and down here. You had a lanyard hanging round. They stopped using the lanyard in the end because it was quite possible for somebody to put their hand under your collar and pull the lanyard and

throttle you round the neck, but if you had your dress uniform, you usually had your lanyard on but in normal circumstances you wouldn’t wear it.

No, there was no initiation at all. Not like there is today. I think there is quite a few horrible things go on, but no, they wouldn’t have time for it. No, I joined the navy and that was it.

You went straight and did your training. There was no initiation ceremony at all.

Isle of Wight, yeah, and that’s when I got the skin.

That’s good.

From there I told you I went to Dunfermline and was doing the hot coals for the officers.

Now what I missed there was the fact that I went on training at Locking with the RAF because the navy had no training facilities at all, and the RAF used to train all our aircraft technicians, electricians, the whole fleet air arm.

Yeah, this is where I learned about files, what sort of files they were, different cuts, about drills, how to sharpen

drills, chisels, how to sharpen chisels. How to temper steel, temper the actual metal before you sharpened it. How to read a micrometer, and various scales for information for things and got the basic information side of that over and started to work on the actual engine itself,

learning all about spark plugs, crank cases, springs, valves, everything that was a part of an engine, you learnt all about it. You learnt how to measure it up for sizes. You eventually stripped a Gypsy Major down to the last nut and bolt.

Yeah.

Yeah, well it was in most in most of the Tiger aircraft, most of the training

aircraft had engines of a similar type as their driving force. A four cylinder engine, just a, it’s a basic engine and we stripped that down, measured it all up, re-assembled it and put it into a testing frame, put a prop on it and it went the first time. So we learnt how to strip an engine down, measure it all up and put it back together and make it run.

Oh, as a team, as a team.

There would be about six to eight in the class. A flight sergeant or a corporal would be taking you on that sort of thing. Yeah, as I say you learnt about magnetos, carburettors, oil systems, oil pumps, anything applicable to

the engine itself.

Towards the air engines. That was an inline engine and then you did the old Pegasus engine which is in the Swordfish. We learnt how to dismantle that and put that back together. That was quite an achievement because it was a different kettle of fish altogether.

Because you’ve got nine cylinders in a circle and each cylinder has got it’s own

push rods, valves, tappets and they run off a big cam inside the engine, just up and down. It was as I say quite different from the straight four cylinder engine. You had nine cylinders there and –

Oh yes. Far bigger engine. It had the super charger in.

Oh, a super charger, boosts

the pressure in the engine itself. It’s like a air pump, put it that way. Your ordinary atmosphere pressure is say 14.7 pounds per square inch, but when it goes into the engine it goes in at that pressure and you can only go so far up into the air before the altitude causes a loss of air pressure, and your engine starts to die. So what they did was super charge the engine, pressurise the air into the cylinder so it would go higher.

Oh super chargers had been around for some time then. I think Rolls Royce had got the super charger in their Kestrel engine, which was a forerunner of the Merlin and the Griffin. Some of them were two speed, two stage super chargers in the end where they used to not only have, go to two super chargers but they also used to have two speeds.

And they’d pressurise what they called the – pressurise the – normally the air pressure is zero pound boost, they could boost up to four or five pounds per square inch and that was a hell of a lot of pressure in the engine to enter the cylinders. And sometimes the air got that warm they used to put an inter-cooler in and the hot air from the compressors used to go through the inter-cooler and cool it down before it went to the cylinders because the air in the cylinders, if you put it in warm, it would lose some of its efficiency,

didn’t it? I mean it’s already preheated so the colder the air you can get it into the cylinder before it’s ignited with the fuel, the better efficiency you get from the engine.

To double the pressure, more or less. I mean if you had two speeds and as you climbed in altitude you could go from your lower speed to your higher speed and they could get altitudes up to

twenty, thirty thousand feet in the end, which came much later. I mean the old Swordfish, if he reached five thousand feet, he was running out of breath. He only had a single staged super charger on it.

In the navy?

I’d say it was the backbone of the fleet arm in those days. It was used in the raid of Toronto when

they cleaned the Italian fleet up, in Toronto. It was all done by Swordfish with torpedoes. To sink the Bismarck, they damaged the Bismarck so she couldn’t get away during the war. She was used, like we used them in the convoy escorts for anti-submarine hunting, so it was a very useful aircraft. It would carry a

sixteen inch torpedo, carry rockets, depth charges and bombs. You’d get two hundred and fifty pound bombs, two under each wing or two two hundred and fifty pound depth charges under each wing.

One or the other, couldn’t, I mean the Swordfish wasn’t an all metal aircraft. It was all fabric and steel and wood and you could only have a certain amount of weight on her with a steel frame

with the canvas fabric. It was a terrific aircraft. Very slow. Its maximum speed was about a hundred and twenty in a dive and cruising speed of about ninety. I mean if you got a strong wind it would go backwards but they used them quite a lot. There was quite a lot of Swordfish made during the war.

Pardon?

No, it was an asset because most of the guns

that fire at aircraft are doing a hundred, two hundred mile an hour and along comes the old Swordfish struggling along at ninety mile and they couldn’t hit it and it could fly that low that they couldn’t drop the guns down low enough to hit it on the ships. ‘cause they used to use them to torpedo. I’ve got a little model out the back. You’ve probably seen it, have you?

Not yet.

Yes, it was made by, who made the first one? Fairy made the first

Swordfish and Swordfish Two were made by Blackburn Aircraft. They were an improved version of the Swordfish.

About 1934, no, yeah, yes it would be about, the Swordfish came in about 1934, long before the war. Blackburn started making them about 1940, 41. All the big, even the big aircraft carriers like the Ark Royal,

and all those, they all had Swordfish on board.

Three, had a pilot, an observer, and an air gunner who fired a Vickers gas operated air gun. That was a World War I machine gun, that was, on the back of the aircraft. There was no telephone, no air phone connection between the pilot and the observer. It was done by a blow voice pipe. Used to blow down the pipe, sound the whistle and ‘yes’.

It was really old fashioned.

Well the pilot would fly the aircraft; the observer would do the navigating and the telegraphist/air gunner he’d have the radio to communicate with the ship. They didn’t use it very much because it was a dead giveaway.

Most of the signalling was done by Aldis lamps, so the observer would be able to operate an Otis lamp, the air gunner would do the same thing.

An Otis lamp is a signal lamp. It’s a lamp with shutters in it and the lamps there all the time and as the shutters operate the old Morse code.

Oh yeah, yeah. Always Morse code. As I was saying most of your communications at sea was by light,

by Morse Code because once you started using radio anyone in the vicinity could pick it up and get your location. Because they did have radio direction finders in those days.

Oh yeah. Real emergencies, it would be an ‘SOS’ job using the radio.

We’re digressing.

The observer’s task was to more or less to navigate and observe looking for things, observe, looking for submarines the majority of the time or aircraft but he’d also act as a navigator. He plotted the course of the aircraft so they could turn around and get back.

They shared a big cockpit between them. The pilot was on his own with the controls and the

TAG air gunner and telegraphy observer would share the same cockpit between them.

Not a lot of room, because you had your harness on with your parachute attached to the bottom of that and that was attached to the bottom of the aircraft by a steel wire in case they turned upside down, they wouldn’t fall out. It was all open cockpits. All had to wear the old flight jackets, helmets, trousers,

and boots, all fur lined boots, both the observer, air gunner and the pilot. Yeah, there was no seats. You stood up most of the time. If you did sit down you’d be sitting on your parachute pack anyhow. The maximum time limit for a Swordfish in the air, under normal conditions, could three and a half to four hours but during the war if you’re up there a

couple of hours, that was probably enough anyhow. The old fuel tank held, the fuel tank capacity of the aircraft was about a hundred and eighty-seven and a half gallons. A hundred and seventy-five in the main tank and twelve and a half gallons in the reserve tank and that would keep them in the air for four hours, which was a pretty good fuel consumption.

A special what?

Anything over ninety octane, had to be over ninety octane. Usually about a hundred, which was a greeney coloured looking fuel.

Not much it was, oh I’m trying to think, the cockpit was what, yeah, almost a metre wide in the cockpit.

Oh no, it would be not quite that wide and of course there was a seat, a bucket seat. He sat on his parachute. The bucket seat would take his parachute and he’d have a separate harness to strap him in. Very simple layout in the cockpit. He had an altimeter, had a clock, must have a clock. They are a precious possession if you can get the clock out of an aircraft before it was thrown over the side, you were lucky.

No, they had the usual controls, joystick, foot pedals, trims, throttles, and your basic altimeter, speedometer, knot-o-meter in knots, boost gauge, petrol gauge. The petrol gauge was one in the front on top of the tank and was controlled by a spiral shaft and a cork on it and as the

petrol went down so did the gauge rotated. It was that primitive. Not like they’ve got today. Yeah, they were the basic flying instruments in front of him, that’s all. The earlier models had a machine gun on the side which fired from the prop and that had to be timed by the – a timing device fitted to the engine so that the prop didn’t get shot off. But the later model didn’t have any

machine guns on the side. The pilot very rarely used it anyhow. It was all left to the tail gunner to do any firing like that.

Yeah, the Swordfish was a forty five feet wing span, double wings. What’s that? Round about eleven metres? About fourteen metres and the length was about thirty five, thirty six feet. That would be about eleven metres, the length,

fourteen metres the span. And it was all steel and wire framed with canvas cover, fabric cover.

Well I think we’ve covered most of it. It had a fixed undercarriage. It was fitted with a deck hook for landing, the usual tail.

You couldn’t retract the undercarriage, that was fixed. It had struts in between the wings with landing wires and flying wires, crisscrossed, often used for tying the bicycles if they went ashore. When on leave, they’d tie a bicycle or something into the wings, onto the struts and they used to fly ashore with that or under the torpedo bay they’d put probably put some oils barrels there if that was part of the squadron equipment and they’d fly that ashore. It was very versatile.

I mean I think some of the, not that it happened to us, but I think some of the Swordfish had an extra tank put in the back instead of the observer and was used for long distance flying but I think they had those that were on the aircraft that were on Malta and the George Cross Islands during the war. They had three Swordfish there, Faith, Hope and Charity. Yes, it was a very useful aircraft.

What? When I was on the course at Locking?

Oh yes, I was into it right at that time and I’ve still got my notebook there if you ever want to look at it,

with all my notes that I took during the course. It would be fifty years old now and I enjoyed it because I was interested in that sort of thing. I liked getting my hands dirty and oil under my fingernails and yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the course.

No, the Swordfish wasn’t touched on the course at all.

It was just an engine course but what actually happened was the engine that was in the Swordfish was on our curriculum, that was the Pegasus 18 which was how we got there.

We digressed.

We did not only the engine itself

and the components but there was also things like I said magnetos, oil pumps, generators, electrical generators, filters, they were all part of the assembly of an aeroplane, of an engine as an unit and that engine was attached to the bullhead, a fire proof bulkhead of an aircraft. And beyond that was

the pilot and the aircrew, so that the. No, the engine was, well both the inline engine for the Tiger Moth, they all had their own complete sets of components. I’m trying to put, the generator and the tachometer, which was a rev [revolution] counter, all connected up to the instruments in the cockpit.

Some of the flying instruments were driven by a vacuum, not by electrical motors. They had a vacuum pump attached to the engine which would suck the air through a control valve, to the instruments to make them work. So as well as vacuum pumps there’d be generators, oil pumps and the carburettors, which we had to learn.

Everything, everything.

Oh yeah, it was a twenty week’s programme and I’d say the first couple of weeks were basic engineering tools but the rest of it was aircraft engines. I mean you learnt all about carburation in the carburettor. You learnt all about how the magneto works, ‘cause there was no core ignition like there is in the cars today. Even today an air engine

is run by two magnetos, two plugs.

Oh a magneto is you can say an electrical generator which generated a very high spark for the plugs. There was no voltage, no ampage in it, it was voltage, up to ten thousand volts. Have you ever had a shock off a spark plug in a car at all? Well that’s about the same voltage

that you’d be handling there, about ten thousand volts, but it didn’t hurt you, because there’s no ampage behind it, no pressure. The magneto used to generate that. It was rotated by the engine, with an armature inside, what you call a primary winding, which is a thick winding and it was connected to a set of points which opened and closed. And when the points opened at a certain point

the primary winding collapsed in a field of electricity and when it collapsed it put, it collapsed into the winding of a very finely wound coil on the outside and that finely wound coil turned that low voltage into a high voltage and sent it to the plugs. And that was timed when the valves were in the right position, in other words they were closed, and the piston was coiled on a compression stroke and just before it reached the top, dead centre they called it, a spark would

occur and that’s when the points would open, all instantly. Can you follow that?

Basically I’d say three. There was the Cheetah, which was a seven cylinder radial engine, the Pegasus 18 and the inline

Gypsy Moth engine. That was basically the three.

It means that all your cylinders are in one line, same as a car engine. See you can get an E line engine and you can get the V engine, which is the Merlin and the Kestrel, which is the same as your Holden V8, only they were V12’s, they were six cylinders either side

and they naturally would have an inter-cooler to control, to cool the hot air from the compressors, from the super chargers into the cylinders. I’m just trying to think, they’d be about five foot long I’d say, yeah a good five foot long, the V6 Merlin, the Rolls Royce Merlin engine. And there were two banks of the six vees.

We touched on the – yeah we did touch on the Kestrel engine, but that’s right we did do the Kestrel engine. That was the V6 but it was a very basic engine. I think it was only one super charger, one speed super charger on the Kestrel. That was a Rolls Royce engine, that’s right. We did do Kestrel, the V6, the inline and the two radials.

No, there was no other training. It was just basic, when you left the school you went home and did all your notes. Although we did have a band there at Locking, a naval band and my friend from Duke, was Frank Marsden, I said was in the Sea Cadets and we did lots of splicing ropes, well I caught up with him there. He’d formed a band there. Mind you he was a few classes ahead of me because I’d

got delayed at Medina and it was a, all the perks, they did no other duties. He just had band practice every night and of course I couldn’t play a thing, so he said, “Righto, you can be our drum major.” So I fronted up to the next band meeting with the old stick, what they call it now? Can’t call it a baton.

It was what the drum major carries in front of the band and of course every Sunday they had church parade and the navy band turned out and I was the drum major, walking in front, swinging the stick. It was quite good. I got off all the extra duties that you normally get.

Oh yes, it was good. We had white gaiters. The navy uniform, all dolled up. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

Only made one blue. I though I’d, the mace, that’s what they called it. I thought I’d toss the mace like the guardsmen do and I was twiddling the thing and I tossed it and didn’t toss it forward far enough and it come down and landed on the big drummer. I thought, “Here we go, I’ve lost the job now,” but they all thought it was very hilarious, especially the RAF people. They had the RAF bands as well and they thought it was very funny

but I didn’t at the time. I was a bit embarrassed. But it was all past.

Well as I say once I escaped from sick bay and was fit to mix with the mob they put me into the post office to help the post staff there, which was another petty officer and myself to run the mail office. We used to handle parcels coming in, dish out stamps and

handle registered mail and sort the mail out for the different messes, like the ward room, the chief’s mess, the POs’ [Petty Officers’] mess and of a lunch time I used to stand on a table in the mess deck, amongst the boys and call out the names and toss the letters to them. Basically that was about it. It was a nine till four job and the navy usually packed up work at a quarter to four, cleared up decks at a quarter to four. I don’t know what navy

you were in, you packed up work then. I think the post office must have carried on after that. It must have worked civil hours, but it was an assistant postman, put it that way. And the other job I got was of a night time if any air raids came I used to stand at the anti-aircraft gun and act as an ammunition supplier for the gun if it was being used.

See Portsmouth was only about six miles across the Channel from the Isle of Wight and they got a regular lashing, at least two or three times a week along the coast and there were always action stations of a night.

I wasn’t scared. We were all issued with a tin hat, a gas mask and anti-flash gear, which is anti-flash gear was sort of white, arm length gloves,

and a hood that went over your head with like a knight in shining armour with eye holes and a mouth hole to breathe through. And that was all sort of asbestos material, bully asbestos material and that was against the flash on the guns or anything like that because you can get quite burnt if you’re near the end of a gun that’s being fired and that was anti-flash gear. So you had your gas mask, your tin hat and your anti-flash gun.

Yes, it got a bit hairy at times but I was only there for another couple of weeks, so I didn’t really do a lot of duties at night but occasionally we did.

A quarter to four, yeah.

It was just a routine that, that was basically, well you sort of finished

work and it was time for tea because you used to get fed about six o’clock and that was the last meal of the day. You didn’t get any more after that and clear up decks. Whatever gear you got out using was put away. What tools you were using and it was time to wash your hands and start relaxing but that was a normal routine for a shore base. Now

once you got at sea you were in watches and if you were on watch duty it was four o’clock and duty watch was stop time you didn’t, back at work. And with regards to fleet air arm you were put in the watches, say port and starboard watch and blue and white was divided into four parts but if you were working on an aircraft

you didn’t stop work until you finished the aircraft because you couldn’t hand, the work you were doing on an aircraft you couldn’t hand it to someone else to do. Because you officially signed for it and it was a legal document, when you signed the A700, that you’d done a job on an aircraft and that job was satisfactory and something happened to that aircraft you could go to gaol. Now, no other service ever did that. The RAF did. They had to sign a document to say that they’d done the job

but a motor mechanic or anybody in the army did something, they didn’t have to sign for it, did they?

Yeah, and you had to ‘qualify to sign’, what you called QS, actually I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Qualified to sign, you did a QS board, they give you an examination on the aircraft that you’re working on and if you’re fit enough to know enough about it they

made you qualified to sign. That was to say you could sign the A700, which was the log card, the log book for the aircraft to say that you’d done the job. Mind you there was always a supervisor that had to sign over the top of you as well, so he was just as responsible if something went wrong.

No, I wasn’t qualified at all in anything. I was just an air mechanic that was

just finished the course. I couldn’t sign anything. That was the next section of what we’re getting to when I finished the course I went to a training squadron.

I told you about the depot at Dunfermline when I lit the fires for office workers and that took me through from November to December and I was only there for about a month.

Dunfermline. It’s just north, on the east coast of Scotland, just north of the Firth of Forth and it was called Camp Hill. It was just a transition camp more or less.

Yeah, yeah, and I was allocated to an air station called Crail, which is right on the east coast

of Scotland, to 785 Squadron, which is a squadron of Albacores and Swordfish and that’s where I more or less learnt all about the aircraft, having never seen it till then. Learnt all about the aircraft and became eventually qualified to sign, so then I could do work on the aircraft and sign for it.

Not a lot because

it was a slightly larger aircraft. Basically it did the same job as the Swordfish but the cockpit and the rear cockpit were all enclosed, so it was covered in. It was a closed in cockpit for both the pilot and the observer. I don’t think it had an air gunner. Hang on, cramp. It was a bigger aircraft. It had a Centurion engine in it which was a bigger engine than the

Pegasus, and it’s safe to say it was a different type of engine all together. It was a sleeve valve engine.

Well it’s very hard to describe a sleeve valve. It didn’t have any actual in and out tappets, valves, like the ordinary cars got and the cam shaft, the valves would open and close. It had a sleeve and that sleeve went up and down and rotated and as it rotated it opened and closed ports in the actual cylinder itself

and acted as an inlet and exhaust valves car in a car and it was actually a rotating sleeve. And that was worked by cranks off a timed gear shaft off the back. And as a piston went up, say on a compression stroke, the sleeve would rotate and close the ports off, so it got compression and then as it came down to go onto the exhaust stroke, it would rotate a little bit farther and open the exhaust ports and let the exhaust gases get out.

And then as the piston was exhausting and coming down to the induction stroke it would open the inlet ports and let the mixture come in and repeat the action all the time and there was nine cylinders doing that. They used a lot of oil because of the friction between the piston inside the sleeve and the sleeve inside the cylinder going up and down. It was a real, it was a

very economical engine and a lot more powerful but it was the intricate working of these sleeves and the valves was quite good actually. Bristol, Bristol made it, they made both the engines and I’m afraid to say in the end they, I’m digressing a bit here but the Sea Fury aircraft, which I worked on in the RAN, had a Centaur

engine with double sleeves, so instead of nine cylinders there were eighteen cylinders with sleeves inside of them, but that’s getting ahead. But it was a very powerful engine. It had a three bladed prop and I say it was used in the same way, it still had canvas wings, fabric wings, a fabric body but with this enclosed cockpit. That was about the only difference.

Only just a pilot and observer in there. They didn’t have an air gunner and they carried depth charges and torpedoes, the same as the Swordfish.

Bombs, yeah, bombs. It might have carried three bombs under it’s wings instead of two. Because it was a more powerful aircraft it had more lift. As I say I really didn’t know a lot about the Albacore.

Speed? Oh I’d say it would cruise at about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty. Probably might even get up to a hundred and eighty in a dive. It wasn’t really very fast. It was just as really ugly and cumbersome as the Swordfish and as I say just as old fashioned really but it was, they didn’t use them a lot. The Swordfish could do just as much as what the Albacore could and they were

an easier aircraft to fly and a less expensive to run I presume.

I really don’t know. I really don’t know. I was never interested in the Albacore but if you go through the records they were used in the war, off the carriers but we never used them.

I don’t think so, I don’t think so. The only advantage they’ve got over the Swordfish they had an enclosed cockpit and it was a bit more comfortable for the aircrew, but basically they could only do the same as what the Swordfish did and use more petrol doing it and more oil. Because they used to use a hell of a lot oil for lubrication.

My training was,

my teacher was a RAF corporal and he was pretty fastidious if he started doing the job. If you didn’t do the job properly you did it again. And everything on an aircraft engine is actually locked so it can’t come undone. If a nut got a tab washer on it, the tabs were turned so it can’t come undone. Any unions that have got holes drilled in the corners, we used to have to put a piece of wire in there and put it out

and twist it to lock that union so it couldn’t come undone. And on the Swordfish they had an oil filter with a big wing nut on the top and there was a hole in one of the wings of the wing nut and you put a wire in there and twisted it and twisted it and anyway it was about six inches of wire to wire it to the airframe, so it couldn’t come undone. And of course, he’d come along and “Not tight enough George,” and he’d pull it off

and it would take you five minutes to really get a wire off on the filter but everything was wire locked. I finished up I made myself a wire locking tool in the end. It was a thing about this long with two little holes in the end, so you could put the two bits of wire into the holes and twist it like that and yeah.

Oh yeah as I say

I loved it. We used to refuel the aircraft, re-oil them and invariably the air crew that were going to fly them were young blokes about nineteen or twenty and same age as me and they had a better education so they became pilots. That’s what it boiled down to, but they couldn’t even start an aircraft and we used to have to go and start the aircraft for them and that was good fun.

Oh yes, but as I say, it was rather strange. There were one or two petty officers and what they call a chief petty officer as pilots, but the majority of air crew were people that had secondary education. They, I mean I had only ordinary elementary education so I wasn’t good enough to be a pilot.

So if I had the brains they wouldn’t have accepted me because they were all officer material. They were all ‘Wavy Navy’, put it this way, they were all on the reserve. They were all volunteer reserves, but they weren’t straight navies, so they didn’t have straight stripes on their sleeve. They had wavy ones.

Oh the difference between a reserve pilot and a regular

pilot is because of the wavy navy rings. They call it the ‘Wavy Navy’. But they were all reserve blokes, all young blokes, nineteen or twenty that learnt to fly in Tiger Moths and then graduated to Swordfish. Of course I had one occasion when I signed the 700 to say that I’d re-fuelled the aircraft.

The A700 which is the log book, the certificate which if you don’t get it right

they, if anything happens they’ve got your nail, they’ve got your signature in that book see and the aircraft took off, the Swordfish took off, just got off the runway and had a forced landing. Run out of petrol, run out off fuel, and of course, big inquest and I’d signed the book to say that I had refuelled it. But what they’d done instead of turning to the main tank, they’d turned to the auxiliary tank and they took of on twelve and a half gallons of fuel and just got over the water and in they went. They weren’t hurt but they still had an inquiry to see what happened.

I was off the hook there. The tank was full.

Oh they’d have, I don’t know if they would have hung me or shot me or what, but I don’t know quite what would have happened but you would have been hauled over the coals for it and wanted to know the reasons why, ‘cause you hadn’t done the job, I hadn’t refuelled it at all, that was it. I can’t say a court martial because only officers got court martialled.

I’d probably lose my rate, put it that way. If I’d have been a leading hand and that happened I’d probably have my rate taken off me and back to an Ordinary [Seaman] again.

See a leading hand is your next step up in promotion, one hook on your sleeve, that’s a promotion. That’s like a corporal in the army or the air force and as I say you usually got punished by the loss of your rate. But it did happen during the war, not to me but to a friend of

mine.

As I say, I couldn’t tell you, it wasn’t used very much. It wasn’t a very popular aircraft. See even the raid on Taranto when they sank the Italian fleet, it was all done by Swordfish.

Not by Albacores.

The main, well the reason we had a Swordfish on an air carrier was for escort duty and mostly anti-submarine work.

It was also used off the bigger carriers for raids on different places. The main thing was for sinking subs. That’s what the escort carrier was for and as I say I finished my training at Crail and in the December, sorry, March, the 23rd of March I think it was, 43, I got sent to 816 Squadron,

which is an operational Swordfish squadron attached to HMS Dasher. That was an escort carrier. We’re going to war now. We’re on shore at Macarenas with six aircraft training the pilots for deck landing practice. As I say to land on a deck you’ve got to catch flying wire, landing wires across a deck and a hook caught the wires to stop the aircraft

going forward. The pilots had never been on board an aircraft carrier so they used to practise deck landings on the land. We’d have lines marked across a runway and they’d come in to land and try and get say the first wire. If anything happened to the wires and if anybody could land and get the first wire they were pretty good. And they used to practise this. We practised this almost a week with these air crew.

A wire on the aircraft carrier is raised up by hydraulic lifts and is stretched tight across the deck. Right? So it’s about six inches, a foot above the deck and when the aircraft comes into land he drops this hook and this catches the wire and slows it down. I’ve got a good example of that on video with aircraft on the Sydney but we’re digressing again. We train

the pilots to do this and they got pretty good at it and Saturday afternoon we packed up because we were due to fly on board the Dasher on the Sunday and half past four we got a signal to say the Dasher had blown up in the Clyde. She’d sunk.

We don’t know who sunk her. She sunk herself we believe. It wasn’t enemy action. What actually happened was it was half past four on the 27th of December,

of March, there was a big explosion on board. They think it was either depth charges or a fuel tank exploding and the it blew the bottom straight out of the carrier and she, within seven or eight minutes she’d gone up on end and straight down. Unfortunately we lost half the squadron on board because most of us, some of the aircrew escaped and some of the maintenance crew

like myself were, I wasn’t there but they were in their boat coming into shore, in the ship’s cutter and they were saved because they were in the ship’s cutter. But what actually happened the oil caught fire on the water and then the tanks, the fuel tanks burst and that fuel came up from the sea bed and ignited. And

let’s see, there was about a hundred and forty-nine rescued and three hundred and seventy-nine got killed.

Uh?

In the Clyde. In the middle of the River Clyde. It was a safe area really and she was anchored there, off Gourock, the town of Gourock and more or less waiting for us to come on board and that’s what happened, so I missed that by the skin of my teeth.

I wasn’t thinking anything really. I was glad I wasn’t on board, that was all ‘cause as I say we would have flown on board on the following day, on the Sunday and it could have happened. It had one or two problems that ship and it was never really up to scratch. It did

a lot of work. It was down in the Med [Mediterranean] and places like that before we were to join it but as I say that’s what happened, she blew up and it wasn’t enemy action. Now what actually happened there, we were sent on survivor’s leave. I lost some of my gear on board. I lost my tool box and some clothes and we were sent on survivor’s leave and told not to say a word about it to anyone. So it was totally hushed up and the fact

the Dasher sank wasn’t released until after the war?

Pardon?

The Admiralty didn’t want it known that the ship had blown up in the Clyde and sunk, and there was such a great loss of life and –

Three hundred and seventy-nine.

And a hundred and forty-nine were saved.

And I’ve got a video see, it was made after, some fifty years after from photographs of taken of the Dasher on fire when she went down and the experience of some of the crew that escaped, the air crew that escaped on the squadron. It’s quite good. It runs for about twenty minutes. ‘cause in the end at last they recognised about fifty years later that

there was no cenotaph or anything like that for the ship and so they made one in the end at Gourock and had the ceremony there and as I say we’re advancing now to, but that’s what happened. My first ship got sunk and we went to re-assemble at Lee on Solent, which is down near Portsmouth, re-assembled the squadron and we

had nine black, no, hang on, yeah we had nine black Swordfish and we were sent down to Exeter in Devon and to cover the Channel for E boats. So all our Swordfish did was fly at night and with depth charges or bombs on board and we were looking for E boats in the Channel.

E boats, they were a German patrol boats, very fast patrol boats and they had a habit of picking, if there were any air crew in the Channel, they had a habit of picking them up and

taking them prisoner if you didn’t get there first. That sort of thing and they had torpedoes on board and they could torpedo any boat that they could find. They were pretty rife in the Channel at the time and the only way we could find them was to look for the wash in the water, the wash from the boats and go in and bomb it. And that’s what we did for a couple of months. Just night flying every night.

Night flying, flying every night, night flying with black Swordfish.

We were on a land base at the moment. We were at a RAF aerodrome now at Exeter and this is where we were doing our work, sort of thing and well you’d re-fuel the aircraft, re-oil it, help the armourist

to put the bombs underneath it or depth charges, whatever it was and?

Lift it up and clip it into the bomb rack.

Oh two hundred and fifty pound, a couple of people. One on the tail fin, one on the nose and lifted it up and clipped it into place. I mean the bigger bombs they used to have proper jacks. The RAF had proper jacks to put their big bombs on, but we could manage two hundred and fifty pounds.

Just had to hook it onto the carrier and there’d be two under each wing and they’d take off at dusk and do four hours probably around the Channel, three or four hours, come back and then the next lot would take off and we’d do that to daylight till everything disappeared again. The E boats had gone back to the ports in France, to their little hidey holes and that was it. We did that for a couple of months.

They climb up into, there’s foot steps on the side of the plane and they’d climb into the cockpit and then you’d have to turn around and strap them in with a harness. They couldn’t get hold off a harness and do that. We used to put the harness over their shoulders and strap it to a buckle in the centre and that was called a sudden harness and that used to hold onto pilots. The air crew, the observer and the air gunner would look after themselves.

Fuel and oil

and everything was working all right, yeah.

Signed the 700 for a before flight inspection or re-fuelling or whatever it was and of course during the course of the time you get inspections on the aircraft, hourly based on flying times or count based where things had to be checked. I think every forty hours we used to do what you called a mine inspections. Everything had to be

stripped down and both tappet services checked and the tappets greased because there was no covers on the tappets. Both services were out in the open air on top of the cylinders. Nothing was covered in. That sort of thing. Check the oil level in the vacuum pump was okay and the air compressor and general before flight inspection as they called it.

Oh not too bad. We were young and fit. We used to sleep half the day and play up again before we went on duty at night. No, it was no problem. Used to get a meal at night. See a squadron, the navy operates a squadron as absolutely self contained. It had its air crew, the maintenance crew; it had its own mess cleaners. The people who looked after the mess

and cleaned it up. They had their own store supplies assistant. Their own writer for keeping the signals and that in order and their own cooks, so we could, the squadron could be lifted up and put anywhere and providing they’ve got the facilities they could look after themselves.

Oh yeah, yeah, we knew everybody but

we didn’t know, one or two had nicknames, like the best mate at my wedding, he was with me. He came from the same town, Kidderminster. He was Lofty. He was a tall bloke. He was called Lofty Pole, but mostly everyone was called by their surname, Walker, Meacham, whatever it is and that was it.

I don’t know. It was just, I mean in my biography you’ll find there’s no Christian names in it, it’s all surnames. You just,

I mean ‘Air Mechanic Meacham’, they wouldn’t say ‘Air Mechanic George Meacham’, it would be ‘Air Mechanic Meacham’, so I was ‘Meacham’. I never ever got a nickname. One or two got a nickname, Speedy was one and Lofty was another. The writer with a touch of Scotch would be called Scribes and that’s about all.

I think everybody mixed in together. It wasn’t like the general service, an officer was an officer but most of these blokes were say were ex-public school boys and RNVR [Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve] and they were just a friendly type. I mean they’ve got to keep in with the mechanics ‘cause they wanted to fly the aircraft and get back with it. No, we were a pretty friendly lot. Probably the CO [commanding officer] and the senior observer they would be straight navy and

they would be a bit off standing but all the same they’d speak to you, discuss things with their aircraft, if there was something wrong with it that they wanted fixing and that was it.

No, but I had an observer that didn’t come back but that’s a bit more in the story, isn’t

it? That’s ahead. We reformed the squadron at Fern in Scotland. We finished up with nine Swordfish and six Sea Fires. Now a Sea Fire was a Spitfire converted to aircraft carrier work. In other words the tips of the wings would come up so they could get down the lift well because they were a bit too wide for the lift well.

On the carrier, so we had six Sea Fires and nine Swordfish and we did our work up in Fern in Scotland and then flew across to Northern Island, near Londonderry, a place called Maydown and finished our work up there. That was the beginning of August.

Oh rocket

firing, not rocket firing, practise bomb dropping and practise deck landing. You always had to keep this deck landing practise up and things like that, general getting ready to go on board the ship.

Oh target areas. They used to have target areas out at sea or floating targets and had to go out and drop bombs on it. Usually smoke bombs. They wouldn’t drop the full size two hundred and fifty pound bomb. They’d

drop a eleven pound smoke bomb which is a white coloured bomb and they’d put a couple under each wing and the pilot would go up and practice dropping his bombs and getting things lined up.

No, that was the armourer’s job. See you had an air frame mechanic, engine mechanic, which I was. You had an armourer, an electrician and a radio. Now each aircraft

had its own engine mechanic and air frame mechanic. Probably an electrician would share a couple of the aircraft and the armourer’s would share the whole lot actually. They’d be the armour’s for the whole lot, say about half a dozen armourers. And your electrician and your radio bloke and the air chief, you could say. The chief in charge of the maintenance operations was a flight sergeant

from the RAF. They didn’t have any supervising ratings then so we had a flight sergeant from the RAF was a tormentor, more or less.

Yes, a tormentor, yes.

He’d be the one that detailed you off what to do and went to do it and if you didn’t do it quick enough he’d give you a blast, sort of thing. He was the chief in charge of maintenance, that was the flight sergeant from the RAF. He wasn’t no navy bloke at all.

And we did our work up at Maydown, Londonderry and on the 13th, Friday the 13th of August I went to sea on HMS Tracker, that was an old escort carrier. An escort carrier was a converted merchant boat built in the States. We called them ‘banana boats’, because they were originally built for the banana trade from Bermuda and around there and they were refrigerator ships.

But what they did was knock the super structure off the ship and build a flight deck on top. The flight deck was what? Four hundred and forty feet long and eighty two feet wide, which wasn’t very wide, and they were wooden, wooden sections. The funnels naturally being a merchant ship were removed and the funnels on the escort carrier were level with the flight deck,

one either side and the fumes off those funnels used to be shocking because they didn’t go up very high, used to sweep across the deck and whoa. And they had a little island where the control for the aircraft and captain more or less, what would you say? The ship’s navigation side

things, only just an island on the side of the ship and underneath the flight deck was a, there was a cat walk around the flight deck and when you jumped over the side you jumped on the cat walk. And underneath that was carly floats. They were cork, wooden floats about eight foot by about four foot and they’d be anchored on the side of the ship all along under the flight deck. A couple of sea boats, one either side and that was your carrier.

It was just a big, merchant boat converted and that was HMS Tracker. There were sponsons either side. The rear sponsons had a four inch gun out the back and the sponsons up the forehead all of them had machine guns as anti-aircraft guns. As I say it was four hundred and forty foot long and from two thousand feet, it looked like the edge of a match box.

You know the striking edge of a matchbox? About that size. And I went to sea and the aircraft landed in the Londonderry Loch, which is pretty cold water, and they all landed on safely and off it went to sea.

Now we’re in the war.

I spent the first, my breakfast in the morning, my first breakfast in the morning I never forgot it. We had what they call cafeteria service.

You had a tray, a steel tray divided into partitions and your breakfast, say your porridge was there, whatever else was there and something else there and breakfast that morning was tripe and onions and porridge and by then the ship was rolling nicely. In fact the, any escort ship would roll on wet grass. They were very unstable and my porridge was running round the tripe and onion and the tripe was running round the porridge and

I looked at it, turned green and shot straight up on the deck and I finished up in the hangar on the main frame of a Sea Fire. It was one that they had pranged, but it wasn’t one that we had flew on board. I think it was on board when we got there. Anyhow I finished up there and I was out for about twelve hours and they left me there and after that I’ve never been seasick.

Yeah, never been seasick after that.

Lofty, my mate, he used to get seasick when it got very rough and he always used to have his tot of rum and we put to sea and joined up with a Captain Walker. Now he was an RAN captain that was known as a submarine hunter, a submarine killer. He’d sunk quite a few submarines in the Med, the Mediterranean around there.

During World War II and

we’d got him. He was Escort Group No 2, Captain Walker and his sloops. Now all these little boats were named after birds. Walker had his headquarters on the Wren, there was the Woodcock, the Wild Goose, the Shrike, and the Woodpecker. I think they were the six ships that were with us then and we used to go out in the Atlantic, pick up a convoy

and take it through the Gap.

The Gap was an area in the centre of the Atlantic that the aircraft from England or from Newfoundland couldn’t cover. Liberators could come out so far and Catalinas so far, the Sunderlands so far but they couldn’t actually meet in the middle. They was a gap of what two hundred miles that was just freelance for the submarines. German subs would muster in there and trap the convoys when they coming through.

Because they didn’t have, sorry, their range, their fuel range wouldn’t allow them to come that far. They’d have to turn back.

This was an area where the Germans were and that’s why before the escort carrier came on the scene we lost millions of tons of shipping in that area. But see, supplies from the States to England to keep us going, had to come through the Gap and that’s where they slaughtered

the merchant ships, so Captain Walker, Captain Stalker and his sloops, as they called him, Captain Walker and his sloops, we joined up with him as an escort, to fly aircraft off and we used to cruise up and down the Gap, wait for a convoy to come through. We’d escort the convoy through the Gap, come back the other way and when we had nothing to do we’d just cruise between Iceland and the Faroes,

Iceland and the Azures, and cruise up and down looking for submarines. Now you asked me about air crew? We used to, it’s pretty rough actually to try and land on an aircraft carrier like that because as I say rolling wet grass it used to roll, it used to pitch and as I say it was very unstable and this particular day I remember it quite well. It was the third of October.

On the Tracker it was a day I won’t forget because it was the day I lost me first aircraft. Eight o’clock in the morning the seas were just about marginal for take off. She was rolling and pitching a bit and at eight o’clock they took off on dawn patrol. It was four aircraft.

When they came back two hours later the weather had got really bad and the aircraft carrier was bouncing all over the place and my aircraft came in first, B for Miss Blandish, and as she came to touch down the deck came up and smacked her on the undercarriage and broke the starboard oleo off. And the aircraft pivoted round to the starboard side of the ship, where the bridge was and I was standing in the signals locker,

just after the bridge, and I saw the aircraft coming towards me, so I dropped down onto the catwalk. The next minute the main plane of B hit the signal box and there were international code signals all over the place, over me and down the deck and in the sea. The Tracker went full astern straight away and the aircraft landed in the water alongside the ship and I could see the crew there getting out of the aircraft, ‘cause it was still afloat and the

pilot was there on the top port main plane, turning the dinghy out. It was a canvas receptacle in the top of the main plane and he got the dinghy out and they all got in the dinghy and by this time Captain Walker and HMS Wren had turned around and were heading towards the accident and Wild Goose was there too, she came in and the Wren came in a little bit too fast and

hit the dinghy and with the result that the pilot, I think it was Lieutenant Bennett, and Johnny, the air gunner, escaped but Lieutenant Stretton they didn’t see him again. He got killed, presumed drowned, hit by the boat. Anyway they got the air crew out, the remaining pilot and the air gunner and Johnny Bennett was the air gunner and they got them back on board again, by boat, the ship’s boat and they were okay, but they lost the aircraft and that was it.

Right, the next aircraft came in, landed quite safely, the third came in quite safely. We got a wing folded and got them aft. Now between the landing wires and the fore-ward storage for the aircraft, they’ve got a thing called the barrier and once you’ve got aircraft stowed fore, they put the barrier up in case the aircraft coming in hits the wire. Well the last aircraft coming in didn’t miss the wire, he caught the last one and it

broke loose and finished up in the barrier on it’s nose. So by then there wasn’t a sole on the deck because we were refuelling the aircraft and we saw it coming and straight on the cat walk. Very handy those cat walks. Right, that was that.

Yeah. We had the, one aircraft crash, the third, the fourth aircraft that came in we managed to repair it. We

managed to repair that one because we carried a lot of spares on board. Right, the next incident was the first of November.

You actually all work, as I say you work on the, the air framer does his air frame part, I’d do, it wasn’t my aircraft so I didn’t really work on it.

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

Well you give them a hand if they want something lifted or done but you look after your own aircraft and your own aircrew. I mean they’re relying on you and that was it.

Pardon?

Yeah, two,

the airframe and engine mechanic was allocated to each aircraft. So we had nine aircraft so we had about eighteen air mechanics, well nine engine mechanics, nine air frame mechanics and then aircraft would be split up between the armourers and the electricians and the radio blokes, so that was your specific aircraft.

Nine.

And six Sea Fires, well six

and one crash, that was seven actually. There was one on board when we got there.

The aircraft that crashed?

They were all Swordfish.

String bags. Nicknamed string bags they used call them, string bags. They were all Swordfish.

String bags. They were all canvas and string, put it that way. I mean all the canvas on the wings was all sewn on by string.

I mean it’s very hard to explain if you’ve never seen one. They were an old fashioned aircraft, put it that way, but they all did the job. [tape stops]

Oh yeah, it did. Because you get to know them personally, especially your own air crew and he was only a young bloke in his twenties. I mean that was it, you never knew

when it could happen to you anyhow. It upset you but it was all course, part of the job. You had to get used to it.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean that carrier, I’ve got some photographs there, the actual barriers, the flight deck would be

practically touching the water when it was pitching. And you imagine an aircraft trying to land on a deck, the aft end of a deck, and that’s going up and down like this, and they’ve got a judge because they didn’t have the modern technology they’ve got today. You had a batsman with two bats and he stood on the side of the flight deck and he said, “up, down, left, right, down,” or if there was no chance of you touching the deck he’d give you a wave round, wave off and you’d go right round again. And you’d keep going round until

you managed to get down. As I say if you were lucky and you caught the wire, it was good. If the deck came up and did damage but you still caught the wire, you were pretty right but if the deck went down when you were coming in you missed it all together and had to go round. It was very dodgy, very dodgy. It was a wonder there weren’t more killed and more accidents.

Oh terrific flying, yeah.

You mean the arrester wires?

I think there were six, but I’d have to look at the photos and have a look at them. That was one of the tricks that the deck people used to do. If you were walking along and of course the wires being stretched and if you’re walking along and you didn’t watch it, they’d suddenly tighten it and trap you around the ankles. Because it was about that far off the deck, about eight or nine inches off the deck. They’re strong, steel cables attached

to hydraulic nut winches with hydraulic pistons on either side, which allowed it to stretch.

Converted from a merchant one.

No, they did the conversion. They did all the conversions on the escort carriers.

No, the US. Kaiser Shipyards I think did a,

made a lot. I think the one we had was made in Seattle. One of the last carriers they built, the Tracker. She was built in 1943.

No, we just worked with the converted ones. The Royal Navy had quite a few

properly built carriers like the Ark Royal and Pyrenees and stuff like that and the Courageous and they had properly built carriers, but they weren’t any good for escort duties.

Well they did do escort duties but they were mostly down the Mediterranean area. They weren’t built for joining a convoy. They were built more or less to go on their own with their own escorts and do what ever they had to do but this ship was designed just for

convoy duties. And your position when you were on convoy duties was in the middle of the convoy and to take the aircraft off you had to turn round and swing at the convoy to turn into the wind to get the aircraft off and land them on and then you’d go back into the centre of the convoy again. That swinging on convoy duties, when we were with Walker and his sloops we were sort of our own hunting pack. We could go anywhere we wanted to without, they escorted the carrier, the sloops did as well as hunting for submarines.

We were doing convoy duties occasionally when we took them through the Gap and when there was no convoy around we used to, as I say, tour between Greenland and the Azures, which is right up the centre of the Gap, looking for subs.

Oh look I really couldn’t say.

Oh, fifteen hundred.

With the air crew, the maintenance crew, the ship’s crew, the handlers, yeah I’d say about twelve to fifteen hundred.

The sloops would only have about thirty each. They were only very small boats.

Right, I’m glad you got round to that.

I wouldn’t like to say the size. You could say about forty feet by twenty and in that you’d have about a hundred and thirty people. Now we were slung in, we didn’t have hammocks, they were bunks and they were five tier high. Say well they’d be standard single bed width and then they’d be about a distance of about

four feet and there’d be another row of bunks, so you’ve got, and they’d be five high, so you’ve got ten, five blokes there, five blokes there and when they went to get dressed they all had to get dressed in this little space in the middle. The bunks were never folded. They were always laid up and there would be row after row after row across the mess deck and there’d be a hundred, a hundred and twenty people in this space. And then alongside the, facing the bunks would be a passage way with lockers, a row of lockers,

and each side would be a wooden hatch into the first deck which was the, more or less the galley, the cook, the big mess deck was in there and above that was the flight deck, so you were actually below the water line when you were in the – oh, we had a recreation space against the ship’s side, which when you were on Russian convoys used to get frozen.

But it was, it was packed and a bit sweaty too. I mean you get undressed and get into bed and people had sweaty feet and people were snoring and I had a top bunk so I caught the lot from down below, but it was pretty hectic.

It was, it is claustrophobic yeah, but we coped.

Above the sleeping quarters of course there was the POs’ mess, and the chiefs’ mess. They had all different messes. They had a bit more space, a bit more room and different beds but the sailors, the OD’s like me, the naval hound, they had the bottom of the list. Yeah, above that would be the galley, the mess decks, store rooms, all on that level and above that would the hangar deck where the aircraft were

kept. And the hangar deck was about ten feet above the water line, the hangar deck. The flight deck would be at least about sixty feet above the sea level. It was quite high.

Oh the toilet set up, if you could call it a set up, a typical Yankee boat. The toilet consisted of a trough with water running in it, divided into about four partitions and the wooden slats

were a seat, so when you went to the toilet you sat there and the water was running all the time past you. It was great fun to get a piece of newspaper and light it and let it float onto their bare bum. But anybody that was squawking as we called it, getting in there and doing a job, they got a burnt bottom. Didn’t happen very often but it has happened, I know. Just one of the things to keep you amused when you’ve nothing else to do.

And we had this recreation room on the side which was for reading and a bit of a library and you write your letter there but it wasn’t very big. Yeah, the laundry, we had a laundry there. What we called a bag wash. We all had a little net bag with our name tag on it and we used to put all our dirty clothes in the bag, it would go to the laundry and you’d get it back in the wash bag.

If it needed ironing, well hard luck. I don’t remember any irons being on board.

Oh you got your ‘wakey wakey’ call in the morning. That would be about half past six. You’d head straight for the ablution block and you’d get a wash, a face wash and you didn’t get any showers I’m afraid. Face wash, hands

and get yourself dressed. Usually you wouldn’t get all your proper gear on. You’d just have your bell bottoms and your top and shoes and socks, no hats. Never wore a hat, especially on the flight deck and you’d go up for breakfast and have breakfast. By eight o’clock you’d have breakfast. Breakfast would come on at seven, and by eight o’clock you’d have had your breakfast and you’d

be falling in at your action stations or your duties in the hanger to work on your aircraft. And that would take you through to about a quarter to ten when you’d have a stand easy. You’d stop for a cup of tea or a cup of coffee, oh sorry, cocoa, something like that and then midday, between twelve and one you’d get your lunch, or dinner. You used to get a break about two o’clock in the afternoon for a cuppa

and then at a quarter to four it was clear up decks. That’s if you weren’t night flying or you had any work to do. If you were working on your aircraft, if you’ve got a repair job like the rigger might want a hand to sew up a hole in the fabric, you’d give him a hand to do that and you’d pack up when you’d done that and sign the 700. And you’d go and, either read books or if they managed to get a film on board, they’d

put the film in the hangar, they’d put the screen up and they’d show a film. Usually something pretty old but that wasn’t very often. That’s a typical day. Ten o’clock you’d be in bed.

Well it was the sea. I

mean you went sideways to some gigantic waves, seventy five knot wind on the North Atlantic you’ve got waves up to thirty foot high and she must have caught a major one of that because it literally pushed the ship right over, it recovered and rolled back the other way and it was slowly took the roll out of it and got back into the sea and we more or less stood still in the sea, we headway, hove-to.

Yeah, fifty-two

degrees. A little bit more and she would have turned right over. Captain Walker sent the signal, “Don’t attempt that manoeuvre again. We’ve got no room for survivors.” And it was quite true. They were under water half the time, the little sloops, so that was that.

With the debris loose in the hangar it was just a shambles. I mean

as soon as got back on course we had to lash everything down again. See the aircraft had to be lashed to ring bolts in the hangar deck every time you went to sea and you only released them when you were putting them on the lift to take them up. Yeah, so that was that and on the 6th of November Walker decided to look for some decent weather because we’d had nothing but gales, one after the other, just gales and gales and he thought he’d go up towards the Azures where the

weather might be a bit warmer and there was no.

Up towards the Azures, sorry, down towards the Azures, which is down south of the Atlantic, the southern part of the Atlantic.

You’ve got an area from England, Ireland and Scotland, right? It came out and it was covered by Liberators,

Catalinas, American Catalinas or Sunderland Flying Boats and then Newfoundland, which is practically opposite across from the Atlantic, that was another area that came out and was usually covered by Liberators and Catalinas and they could only go as far as their fuel would allow them and they could cover the convoys the most of the time, through that. See the submarines would only come up at night, to re-fuel and recharge their batteries, not re-fuel, recharge their batteries and during the day they were down, all the time.

So our job was more or less a dawn patrol, to catch them before they went down, or a dusk patrol to catch them as they came up and as regards the Gap was just that area between the two land masses. Yeah, on the 6th of November, Walker decided to see if we could get some decent weather and that day he managed to sink two submarines.

We didn’t have any part of it. He was with his sloops and he went away and I think it was U-226 and U-842 that sank with no survivors. I think there was about fifty odd in the crew, so that was a successful day for Walker, that was his job, and he had another feather in his cap. Actually, it was unfortunate for Walker because he was

one of the finest really Naval men there was as a captain and he didn’t last very long. The next year, in 1944, the 9th of July, 1944, he died with a cerebral haemorrhage, due to his active war service. It just wore him out but that’s going ahead I suppose.

Forty-seven.

Forty-seven. I’ve got a picture of him there in his, in my book.

Oh yeah, he was renowned both in the States and back home for his prowess in sinking submarines. The Germans hated him. If any of them could have got him they would. The next episode.

Yeah.

Well they ran on diesels, their engines were diesels, diesel engines

and while they were submerged they were on electricity, on batteries and they couldn’t run the diesels because they couldn’t get the air down below, so as they got charged at night they’d pop the old periscope up and have a look around and if it was pretty clear they’d surface. And they’d also allow fresh air into the submarine because it must be pretty shocking in a submarine, on canned air all the time but they let the fresh air into the surface and charged the batteries on the surface. And they’d go all night on the surface, as long as they could to get the batteries and get the crew up,

in turns, to the conning tower to get a bit of fresh air. They eventually, later on they fitted what they called a snorkel. Now we used snorkels when we are skin diving. It was the same thing. They could stop below the surface, use a snorkel and still charge their batteries, so that was an asset to them.

Oh, I wouldn’t know, I’d say round about forty-three, forty-four,

because they were starting to get hammered by the escort groups. They were losing submarines right and left then but prior to that they had the run of the place.

I’d say so. I don’t think there was much fighting between submarines. There was an occasion I think when one of our subs

did torpedo a German one but we had no part in that. No, they’d only be, if there was an English submarine in the area, the Admiralty would notify the Tracker or Walker and his group that there was one there so they didn’t make a mistake. Yeah, the next episode was on the, a little bit later on the 8th of November. The 6th we sunk the

submarines and on the 8th of November we were about a quarter to seven of a night, quite dark, a gale blowing as usual and there was a terrific explosion about a thousand yards away from us on the port quarter. And of course, the alarm gongs went, everyone action stations and it happened to be a German submarine had fired a torpedo at us and it was one of their new torpedos which had an acoustic head to it.

It followed sound and it was usually aimed at the propellers of the enemy aircraft, enemy ships and of course the din of the storm and the gale that was blowing, it just self exploded. It didn’t get anywhere and that was the explosion. That was the first action stations and about an hour later second action stations and I was in the hangar at the time when an aircraft caught fire. I headed for the first

doorway out of the hangar and I realised I’d got nowhere to run so I went back and grabbed a can of foam, foam powder, the RPO [Repair and Propulsion Organisation] of the squadron came along and shoved its tank pipe into it and someone else connected it up to the fire hydrant and the next minute we had foam all over, in a couple of minutes we had foam all over the main plane and that was put out. Now that was called by an armourer doing his pre-flight inspection, well DI inspection for the next day for flying and he was a

leading hand, leading armourer and what he’d done was pulled a Verey pistol out of the pilot’s cockpit and pointed it at the ground and pulled the trigger. What he hadn’t done was look inside to see if there was a cartridge in there and it was a red flare. And of course it went straight and set fire to the dope filled bloody main plane and she went up and as luck we put it out. The next day he was no longer leading hand, he was

an OD. He lost his rate, but that was a bit of a panic when the fire was on. As I say I panicked and realised there was no where to go, so and –

No, no, the canvas on the planes they used was to tauten the upper fabric. Meduclin, I think the fabric was called. It was a very thin canvas and

they used dope to tauten the actual canvas itself. It used to go dead tight and it was very brittle and it was inflammable. Not only was the tautened dope inflammable, the actual paint they put over the top was also inflammable and of course the Very cartridge hit it and that was flaming anyhow. That was a nice red

danger one and away she went. And of course it only damaged the rear butt of the main plane because we got it out too quick. If it had got to the top it would have set fire to that and the next minute been at the fuel tank. So the next morning we had a complete box of main planes to change on the port side, but it was changed.

Yeah. And then they decided we’d had enough and Walker said, “We’re going to

Argentia in Newfoundland,” which was a lease lend base from the Yanks and the sea breeze there had took the top off the mountains and put them in the valleys and built an airstrip there and they had air conditioned hangers and a real nice little spot was Argentia for a break. And we pulled in there and as we went in they played Roll out the Barrel and as Walker come in they played For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, ‘cause he was well known. They

waited to greet him in there.

Yeah, the Yanks had a band out there. There had the band, they had ice cream, they had everything. Bananas, chocolate, silk stockings, the whole works so we stopped for Christmas there. That’s where I bought my album, my photograph album there I bought it in Argentia. It was fifty years ago, what is it? 2003, yes sixty years ago, around this time and we

stayed there a couple of days. Picked up some, got a load of wrecked aircraft and they’d also got a set of new aircraft to take with us. They’d already worked on them and we got those. They flew on board when we left and we left on the, we had to go down to Norfolk in Virginia, the ship yard there. I think we left Argentia on the 19th of November

and I think it was about the 28th, I think it was the 28th when we got into Norfolk in Virginia and they started working on repairing the ship’s side and a generator needed coming out so they took that out to the flight deck and the whole place was well lit up. They didn’t know there was a war on. And as we went down the coast there was a glow in the distance of a night, and that was New York. That’s all we saw of New York was a big glow in the sky, ‘cause by the activity that was going on there was nothing

to say there was a war on. They had no blackouts at all, not like in England. You walked round in the dark there.

Not really, no, no. The Emden was a light fleet carrier which got torpedoed in the Med and that was in dry dock there, with a great big hole in it’s side. They were repairing that. They towed it from the Med all the way down to Norfolk in Virginia and the band from the Emden

came and give us a concert one lunch time on board the Tracker, while we were getting fixed up. We were there what, just over a week, maybe more, almost a fortnight. I didn’t go much on America ‘cause it was war time and they, were walking round the streets and all I can remember of there was a little hovel of a hut on the roadside and a damn great shiny new car outside, a Buick, or something like that. It seemed ridiculous

really, they lived in a hovel and they had a car that even looked better. But I wasn’t very impressed.

Yeah, we still lived on board but we were just allowed to go ashore if you were a non-duty watch, you were allowed on shore to have a walk around. I went to a couple of concerts there but I wasn’t very, seemed too many, the streets were cluttered with telegraph poles and posters and signs.

Just like round here at times, still got the old telegraph poles, power cables I mean hanging around.

No, they were all to busy.

They didn’t, no rations, they

weren’t rationed and as I say they worked day and night in the shipyards, everything was lit up. The streets were alight and the war didn’t really touch them and when they sent the US Army to different places, that’s where the war took place. After the Pearl Harbour, that was the only war they had, was Pearl Harbour. In fact that’s what even bought them into the war. So they fixed us up.

They resprayed the camouflage on the carrier and resprayed all the carly floats and renewed the lifeboats.

The carly floats, yeah. That was the one’s that got wrecked. Replaced all those, replaced the ship’s boats and we headed back up towards Argentia, I think on the, be about the 10th of December we started back towards Argentia to pick up Captain Walker and

his sloops. We picked up a convoy on the 15th of December and started back homeward bound, back to England, with a very odd convoy. Fairly big, and it took us, what ten days and got home into Glasgow, Scotland on Christmas Day. The 15th of December to the 25th, yeah, ten days, we had.

I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t tell you but we didn’t lose any ships. We pranged a few aircraft. We had about one good day flying and about four that weren’t good and we had about five prangs but no casualties. Part of the way through the convoy there was a bit of a panic on. Enemy aircraft was sighted, so we did a hundred and eighty degree swing out of the convoy,

launched a Sea Fire. In about four minutes we had a Sea Fire launched, took off and arranged another Sea Fire behind it ready and it was a Liberator, it was a friendly one. And the ship gave a lurch and tossed the Sea Fire on its back and it broke its back. So that one went down below and its mate that went to fight the enemy it came back and made it home quite safely

but that was the only incident on the way back. We took a Liberator for an enemy aircraft but I couldn’t see how an enemy aircraft could be across that far over into the Atlantic Ocean, but you never know.

Yeah. Then we arrived into Glasgow Christmas Day, had Christmas Day and I think it was the 27th, the 28th.

Oh yeah,

yeah it was, we had a bit of a concert party too. They put a bit of a show on and we put to sea and the squadron took off and flew to, oh gawd, Donibristle, that was a repair base in Scotland, northern Scotland, just above the Firth of Forth and we went ashore to Donibristle and then went on two weeks leave, Christmas leave, so I was home just after Christmas.

Then I got recalled to report on board HMS Chaser. It was up in Scarpa Flow so I caught the train, Lofty and I caught the train at the local station and got into Birmingham and caught the express up to Scotland. Used to get our rail tickets from the RTO, which is the rail, not the road transport officer, was a sort of regulating transport officer.

They had a regulating PO officer there and he used to say, “Where you going mate?” And he wrote the ticket out for you and you got the clearance to go then.

Yes, the police came round.

We were the only two from the local, from Kidderminster. Everybody got either a telegram or the police came round and you were told to report so and so, so and so.

No, just the squadron.

Sorry, 816 Squadron was assigned to the Chaser. The Tracker went to sea again with another squadron on board and I think also did Russian convoys too. But we went up to, caught the train up as far as Perth, changed trains

at Perth and went up to the Thurso, which is about farthest spot you can get in Scotland. This is right up the top of Scotland, right on the edge of the Flow. We then caught a boat out to Dunlouise Castle which is a depot ship, which was full of cockroaches on sandwiches and cold tea and we sat there until the boat came from the carrier to pick us up and take us on board. And we went on board the Chaser.

Oh identical, identical, yep. The same sort of mess and the same sort of, same layout completely. They were all practically identical. We took off out of the Flow and the squadron flew on board. They’d given the Sea Fires away as regards a fighter aircraft on the carriers and they replaced them with Grumman Martlet which was an American aircraft. It was like

a little bumblebee, a real radial engine and their undercarriage was sort of a cantilevered undercarriage. When they hit the deck it squabbed out and didn’t bounce. See the Sea Fire when it landed it landed on it’s holy hose and that used to bounce you back up again. So it was landing on an aerodrome but these little Martlets used to land on, squab down and catch a wire and they were good.

Not really, I mean the Sea Fire was just a modified Spitfire and the Spitfire had proven itself in the Battle of Britain. The only modification to the Spitfire was the deco on the wing tops. It was a nice little aircraft and.

No, they were just attached to the squadron and we still had Swordfish.

And the Russian convoys still were the 818 Swordfish squadron and we had nine Swordfish again there.

No, no, what actually happened with the American planes they belonged to a previous squadron and they loaned them to 816 and their crew came with them, the pilots. And there was only a pilot, no observers on them and the ground crew come with them as well, their mechanics as well.

They were part of the Squadron but they were separate.

Oh yeah, referring back to the Tracker one person on board was an Australian and his name was Smith. He was a two and a half, a lieutenant commander, a two and a half we call them and he was operations officer on board the ship. I never personally met him but I saw him several times and I say he

was a two and a half and I was just a mere air mechanic. He appeared in later life, which you will find out but he was a very well known Australian in the end. That was all I want to say, that was all I was referring to. We go back to the Russian convoys, the Chaser now?

Oh he’s dead now, unfortunately.

Yes, I met with him again in the Australian navy. Would you like the story now?

That was in 1943. I’d say seventeen years later.

The aircraft flew on board

while we were in the Flow. We joined one of the largest convoys that ever went to North Russia. It had forty two ships in the escort and forty two merchant ships, and about a quarter of a million tons of stores, which was guns, planes, engines, medical supplies, food. That about covers the lot I think that we took up there.

This is January 1944, freezing cold. We went practically up north

of the Arctic Circle, we had to clear the decks, chip the ice off the decks every day to get the aircraft airborne, with Swordfish, open cockpits.

It was cold. They’d be away for a couple of hours, come back and land on board. We’d literally have to lift them out of the cockpits; they were just frozen and run them round the deck to warm them up. And we couldn’t, no bare hands. Everything you touched was, especially the metal,

you daren’t touch it with your bare hands, you’d lose the skin on your fingers.

The frost, minus frost, minus eleven degrees frost. In fact some of the staunching around the ship would be minus twenty degrees and if ever you touched that with your hands, you’d just pull the skin off your hand. So we all wore gloves, duffle coats, wrapped up warm. I got issued with what we called Scarpa scanties. It was a

merino wool, long johns. They’re greasy, bluey coloured long johns. I used to wear one pair where I should wear it and I used to wear the other round, I used to put my head through the fly, put my arms down the legs and wear the other, that was next to my skin, ‘cause if you fell in the water there it would be just above freezing. Salt water takes longer to freeze, a lower temperature to freeze salt water but the wind chill factor.

If your body came out of the water the wind would hit you and you’d just about, that was it.

Those long johns would protect us and then you’d put your own clothes on, on top of that and then their own overalls and then a duffle coat. We really didn’t get cold but you daren’t touch anything with your bare hands. And the poor old pilots they’d been sat there for two hours in their, admittedly they had fur lined boots and fur lined jackets and trousers but it was still pretty cold. And

of course we had to fold the aircraft wings and put them away and work on them and you couldn’t really work on them until you got down below and they thawed out a bit and you could take your gloves off and start doing the things you should be doing to the aircraft, in a maintenance way.

We had to lift them out of the cockpits, go up and help out of the cockpits and one either side of them, run them around the deck, just to get the use back in their legs. They’d be sat in the cockpit there, just with their feet on the rotor pedals and the control column and that was it.

The Albacores, no we didn’t have them. We had Swordfish and that was it, open cockpits. The oil cooler on the side of the aircraft we used to have to cover that with a plate because otherwise the oil would have got that thick it wouldn’t have gone round the engine, so that was more or less sealed off completely. But yeah, they had a pretty rough trot I think, the aircrew.

We eventually caught up with a submarine wolf pack that was waiting for us. And also we were shadowed nearly all the time by flying boats, German Blohm und Voss boats. They shadowed the convoy all the time.

They didn’t come in, the fighters chased them off, they damaged a few but they used to keep them away but the weather was that bad anyhow that they really couldn’t do that much.

There were snow storms and quite big seas and the submarines had a hard job. The officer in charge of the convoy was a Rear, sorry, a Vice Admiral Glennie and he was in the latest British cruiser ahead of us, Black Prince, quite a fairly large ship. We were all in the centre of the convoy, they were ahead of us, we were in the middle and the tribal

class destroyer was behind us, HMS Mahratta. One dark night a submarine got in and torpedoed her and she went down. There were only seventeen people saved.

The HMS Mahratta.

The submarine somehow got into through the escort group, that was round the outside, the escort ships, and they probably fired at us or the Black Prince but they hit the destroyer behind us and she went down and in minutes she’d gone.

I don’t know how many lost their lives but only they saved seventeen, and there would be at least two hundred on board.

Well yeah, as I say once again once you got a head in the water but one of the ships came and did rescue the seventeen that survived it. They survived but the rest went down with the ship. And we started fighting submarines ourselves. Our aircraft

actually, I don’t know the numbers of the submarines that were sunk but we definitely claimed three submarines sunk in the convoy.

These were German subs, yeah, and the descriptions in the, we had a reporter on board in both cases by the way, on the Tracker and the Chaser, a newspaper reporter and they report to the paper, and I read the reports in the local paper when I got home. Anyway we literally, we definitely sank three

because the aircraft contacted the escort ships and they went over and picked up the survivors at the German submariners off the boat, but what one reported that the captain came in his own little dinghy off the submarine to be rescued.

Yeah, by himself. His crew had to swim but he came off in his own private dinghy to get rescued and they rescued, as I say, three lots of submarine crews.

About fifty, somewhere about fifty, fifty of them.

No, Captain Walker wasn’t with us this time, we were on our own. Walker with still with the Tracker I think in the Atlantic again. See, Walker didn’t die, he would still be at sea, because he didn’t die till June or July that year. Anyhow, actually we reckon we sank seven submarines on that trip. We claimed three, we know we sank

two, but no survivors so we couldn’t claim it and we damaged up to three at least.

Oh yeah, they’d go on board one of the ships and come back as prisoners of war.

No, it wasn’t a battle. It was just convoy action, yeah just action in convoy, doing convoy duties. We went as far north as Bear Island and then,

came down again to avoid the actual aircraft activity but as I say the weather was that bad they couldn’t do that much and we arrived in Calder Inlet twelve days later. It took us twelve days to get there. While we were there they sent the Cossack Dance party on board to entertain us, you know the old, have you ever seen the Cossacks doing there dancing with their arms folded

like this and kicking their legs around?

Yeah, they sent those aboard to amuse us. The actual crew room where our library and that was on board the ship, the condensation from our breaths used to freeze on the inside of the ship’s side and about every three or four hours somewhere in the convoy especially at night, they’d drop a depth charge, and if one was near it was like being in a forty four gallon

drum and somebody hitting it with a sledge hammer and if it was pretty close all the ice inside on the walls, on the ship’s sides used to fall on the deck.

The ships around the convoy, say every half an hour or more one would drop a depth charge there and one over there and one about here, and if it was one near us, like I say, it was like being in a forty

four gallon drum and somebody hitting it with a sledge hammer. Oooh.

Oh yeah, oh we survived. And as I say the inside condensation would be about half an inch thick on the inside of the ship’s side because that was I’d say about three quarters of an inch thick steel and the other side was salt water and that used to freeze on there and then eventually it would get shaken off. Yes, it was rather exciting.

Oh absolutely, they weren’t sinking as many ships, merchant ships as they were. They didn’t really get a chance at us. As I say they only got the Mahratta and coming back they only hit one little merchant ship, which had a load of timber on board, ‘cause that was about all the Russians could send us. We used to go back more or less empty handed and they took the crew of that and sank it with gun fire, just for practice because it wasn’t worth taking back. Spend ten days getting

back to Scarpa Flow.

Yeah, that was. We were due to do several but fortune happened to be our way. We got to Scarpa Flow, anchored in Scarpa Flow to a cable to the sea bed and they bought the boiler crew from what they called Floto, one of the depots there, on board the ship to clean our boilers out. So all the steam was let out of the boilers and they started the boiler clean. This gale blew

up and the cable to the sea bed parted and we went to ground and did a bit of damage to the prop and the keel and that was at full tide and as the tide went out the ship slowly listed. We got used to being listed anyhow, so it went over and over and that was on my twenty-first birthday. I had a tot of rum all round off the boys and a corn beef sandwich for dinner and that was about it. There was no steam and they couldn’t do any cooking

or anything like that so the next thing they did was to get the aircraft off. So they bought the tug around and while the wind was still blowing pretty strong they swung the bows into the wind and arranged the aircraft off and they all took off to an airstrip called Hudson, which is up in the Orkneys. We eventually got pulled off and it was towed down to Rosyth, in the Forth of Firth, under the Forth Bridge and we went ashore at Rosyth,

the squadron went at Rosyth, we left the ship. And that was the end of my sea adventures, that was the Chaser finished, otherwise we would probably have had another convoy up there.

The war was getting towards the end. I mean our next session was down in Cornwall. The squadron was sent down to Cornwall just before D Day to cover the Channel again with night

fighters, to cover the Channel and that’s more or less where I. That’s right I got drafted off the squadron then and from there and got sent to a repair yard in Belfast, back in Ireland, in the Belfast – Sydenham was a repair depot for damaged aircraft and we used to more or less repair them, test fly them and

Oh yeah the war was still on yeah. This is the end of ‘44.

I was promoted. Actually I picked up my hook. I became a leading hand. That’s why I left the squadron. If you got rated up in the squadron, you moved, because you couldn’t supervise the friends that you knew all the time. It’s, see what I mean, it’s rather difficult to tell someone what to do when he’s been your mate for the rest of your life, so I got promoted to a leading hand and was sent up to the workshops at,

station flight, at Sydenham in Belfast and I was there oh, I don’t, I was there for quite a while, a few weeks, a few months and the next draft I got was to an operational squadron, 822 Squadron, which was a Fire Fly squadron. Now that was a real modern, all steel or aluminium aircraft with a Griffin engine in it.

A Fire Fly.

Yeah we finished with them out in the navy here in the end.

It was a mono plane, low wing mono plane with say a twelve cylinder engine in it. It was supposed to be a bomber aircraft. It had a crew of observer and pilot, all covered

in nicely and it was used more or less as a sort of fighter bomber aircraft in the fleet air arm. I don’t know what action they took part in at all because we were getting, we were working up at a couple of aerodromes in Lancashire, near Liverpool, ready to go on board the HMS Campania to come out here to the fleet out here, to join the fleet out here.

In Australia and

we were all worked up and about to go on board and they dropped the bomb on Japan, so the whole thing was squashed. So we actually finished down in the Macarenas with the 822 Squadron but we didn’t do very much and the squadron got disbanded in the December of forty five and I got de-mobbed in March forty six.

I got demobbed.

Paid off from the navy. I was a volunteer for the service so at the end of the war, in 1946 when the war finished I got demobbed. Issued with a suit and underwear and socks and shoes and a hat.

No, I finished with the navy then. I was out in what you call Civvy Street.

Oh yeah, let’s face it. Everyone

had had enough. The war was over and that’s right, but 1946, March 1946 I left the navy. They discharged me, put it that way. They didn’t want me anymore.

Oh absolutely. Wasn’t everybody? I didn’t go much on the way they finished it. I mean that bomb must have been a horrible thing, but you know what the Yanks are?

They’re going to do it, they’re going to do it big and they did. And that more or less finished the war out here too. I mean the Pacific Fleet out here was more or less wrapped up and I went and started earning a living in Civvy Street again.

I went back to the maintenance unit at Hartlebury, didn’t I?

Back to the maintenance unit at Hartlebury but in the engine section this time.

I did a fitting test, filing in a vice and using files and drills and stuff like that. No problem, passed that and I started working on Aero engines again for the RAF and I stuck that for quite a bit. The pay wasn’t too good, things were still being rationed back in England and there were power cuts and staggered hours and all that sort of thing.

I left there and got a job as an inspector in a grinding factory where they made the car liners for cylinders for cars, diesel engines and things like that, and in 1947 I got married.

Oh yes, I forgot that. When we were down in Perranporth, after we came off the Chaser, I was down in Perranporth covering the

Channel, I got took with appendicitis. Excuse me, and was operated on in Truro Hospital in Cornwall, went on convalescent leave. Pearl’s brother was on a squadron down there with the Avengers, down at Perranporth too, and of course, he came from Kidderminster. We got talking and we knew each other too and I said, I went back to the squadron and I said, “I’m going on a week’s leave, back home.” He said, “Good-o, I want you to take a parcel home for me for Dad.” So I said okay

and went on sick leave with Ken’s parcel and they had a hairdressing shop in Mill Street in Kidderminster and I knocked at the door and who should appear at the door but a nice little blonde girl. She was sixteen. I was twenty one and that was it. Every time I went on leave I took her out and eventually we got engaged and in 1947 we got married and there was, as I say the work

in England it was shocking. It was staggered hours, everything was still rationed and it wasn’t very pleasant at all. And they put an advert in the papers for ex-RAN Fleet Air Arm people to join the fleet arm, the Australian Fleet Air Arm as a nucleus to start their fleet air arm up. So I volunteered, did a medical and went down to join HMS Glory, which was the depot ship at the time. It was

an English carrier that was more or less in mothballs or dry dock and it was in dry dock, as a matter of fact and lived on there for about a week or so until the Sydney was ready to come out. That was in Plymouth. I went home on a weeks leave and shook hands with the missus and said, “I’ll see you out there.”

She wanted a new life. She was only twenty-one and she was living with my folks, in-laws

and then she went and lived with her own Mum and Dad in the end and as I say eventually she got a passage on HMS Cheshire, not HMS Cheshire, SS Cheshire, and she came out here. She got here, I got out here on the Sydney, arrived her in Sydney in ‘49, May ‘49, and she came out in the New Years Eve ‘49.

Absolutely. So many facilities had been wiped out. As I say half the generating systems were on half power and you couldn’t get any

work. Well nearly all factories and things that relied on electrical power and stuff just couldn’t work full time. They had to share it sort of thing. The power would go to this factory that day or that business that day and until they got things back on the ground and there was still petrol rationing and still food rationing, still clothes. I mean you couldn’t go and buy any clothes then. You still had to have clothing coupons. It was hard

but Pearl and I were young and let’s face it, this was, I met Ken’s brother, Pearl’s brother Ken, he’d been out here with the Australian fleet, with the American fleet. He was with the Victorious out here with the Avengers and he reckoned Australia was a beaut country.

Oh, he was, I think he had taken the Sydney Harbour Master’s daughter out. He never got his leading rate. He was still

a sailor all the time but he got around and met people and I think she came from Burwood, this girl and he reckoned it was a terrific country. He said, “if you go out there George, I’ll think you’ll enjoy yourself,” sort of thing, so that was it, the deciding factor. I joined the navy.

I came out on the Sydney. It was the maiden voyage of the Sydney.

On the Sydney was the 20th Carrier Air Group and who finished up in Korea ‘cause this was ‘49. I got into Albatross in May ‘49, which is down here. Went to work in the empty section at the time, just to fill in and eventually I started working on the aircraft, the Sea Furys and the Fire Flies. They were all wrapped up

in mothballs. They came out on the Sydney in a sort of silvery skin for protection.

Oh yeah. Sorry, we went to Fremantle first. We did the tour. Fremantle first and then round to Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. I forgot that, yes, that was the actual dates I can’t remember. I could if I looked the reference up.

Yeah, we stopped there. I thought Perth was absolutely fabulous. It was warm. After the, I mean leaving England in March it was still snowing occasionally and to get down there and it was absolutely beautiful.

The what?

Well I didn’t see much of the city. I mean we were in Fremantle and we spent most our time in Fremantle. We were only there for about a week so the

Western Australian blokes could get off and go on leave. No, I didn’t really see much of Perth but it looked, I mean it was a clean, nice, it was a beautiful city. There’s no doubt about that but the Swan River there was definitely an asset for the whole of the city. I mean it’s different now. I’ve been back since and there’s skyscrapers and buildings here and building there. It’s very hard to recall actually

what Perth was like but like every city today it’s not the same as it was like fifty years ago.

Oh disembarked in Sydney, yeah. We called into Melbourne and let the Victorians off and Adelaide, the South Australians. They all went on leave and we were a scattered crew on the ship by the time we got to Sydney. And of course I left Sydney and went down to Albatross.

Which is down here.

Oh I admit the Harbour Bridge was definitely a classic, no doubt about that and of course no opera house and hardly any skyscrapers. I mean Pitt Street and George Street were pretty low level round here. I mean the Victoria Building was still there, been there a long time. I don’t think the railway station has altered very much.

Not from the outside. No, it – oh – of course there were trams running. That was a thing that amazed me. Those trams were really people movers, weren’t they? Oh what do they call? The toast rack ones and the paper boys used to swing along the outside selling the papers. You wouldn’t remember those days, would you? No. It was,

yeah, it was an interesting city. I wouldn’t say that it was clean but it was busy and noisy, no doubt about that and yes, Sydney was okay. And of course leave there to go to a place like this, Albatross, well.

It was a bit of a step back in time I think

to come from a proper, what would you say? It was all country down here. I mean Albatross itself consisted of in my opinion, a mass of tin sheds, ‘cause that’s all they were, just long dormitories of tin sheds.

This is what the naval base was. About the only tin sheds that are left now I think is the gymnasium. It’s still standing but they were called the wind tunnels and we’d have about twenty blokes

either side in the beds. You’d have your bed space, all the beds were stacked either side with a alleyway down the middle and a toilet at both ends and if you opened the doors and the wind blew a westerly it would blow straight through. Yeah, the wind tunnels. And of course when I left the navy I’d been rated up to a petty officer status, an acting PO when I left the navy and when I joined the RAN I joined back as an OD, up to an air mechanic first class.

In August I got rated up to leading hand on one day and back to a petty Officer confirmed the next one. So I changed my rigging to a peak cap and brass buttons and etcetera, so I was quite dressed up when I met Pearl at the Woolloomooloo when she came in on the ship.

Yes.

Well it was

an isolated country town and they didn’t accept the navy very much in those days, country people. They were a bit narrow minded but eventually they did. We weren’t allowed ashore. We were only allowed ashore occasionally to ten o’clock at night.

It was a bit of a hold up but we coped. We used to go hitch hiking round the place, down to Batemans Bay and Ulladulla and round there and hitch hike for a weekend and come back. That was when I got POs. I was allowed ashore then see all night if I wanted to.

Yeah the time passed and there was always plenty to do on board anyhow and plenty of entertainment at the old cinema and had occasional dances and yeah, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do. Accommodation ashore, I eventually got a little flat down at Palmer’s Beach at

the, doesn’t matter. It was a little holiday place down there and I had to pay rent on it to hold this flat over this holiday period till Pearl came out and I used to pay rent on it. It was only a one bedroom flat and I had to share the kitchen. I don’t think even then Pearl could boil water. She wasn’t much of a cook then and as I said I’m getting ahead of

time, but as I said I paid rent on this flat to hold it but never lived in it. I was still living on board and of course it was there when Pearl came out.

Yeah, when Pearl came. She’d never seen me in the rig. She’d seen me in my sailor’s rig naturally before I left and she’d never seen me in a PO’s rig. And a mate of mine, Les Cooper, he was a PO too, his wife came out on the same ship. So they, Pearl came out with somebody she knew in the end.

And got off the ship and when actually we came in on the Sydney the first time, people in Sydney asked for sailors to go and visit with them, stop with them and I picked a place in Rockdale to go to and they made me welcome and took me out and showed me round the place. And I said my wife was coming out and they said, “When’s she coming out?” And they said, “This Christmas.”

They said, “Well we’re going away after Christmas. Your wife and I can stop here with us, with the house while we’re away for the two weeks, while we’re away she can stop at the house.” Which was absolutely marvellous and that was at Rockdale and when Pearl came out we had somewhere to go before we came down to Albatross, down to here. And they were very kind, the sort of people they were in Sydney. They welcomed all the

sailors – “Come to our place and we’ll look after you while you’re on holidays or on leave.”

I don’t think so, no. They’re pretty, they socialise but among their own friends. They’d never welcome a stranger into the house, strange to say. But it’s surprising that when this lady and this husband and there was a boy,

they said they ’re going away to Jervis Bay for their holidays for two weeks over Christmas and the house is yours. And when we got there the fridge was stocked up and there were a couple of cans of beer and all that sort of thing and it was just mind blowing really to think that people would do that, just complete strangers. I mean they’d only met me once and they met the wife before they went on holidays and of course they came back and we were still there

and we thanked them very much and Pearl had done all the washing and that. And she said, “Oh you needn’t have done that,” and Pearl had washed the sheets and the rest of it but that’s the sort of thing, they were very, very good. Pearl came down to the flat at JB [Jervis Bay], and after living in a modern house with flush toilets and bathrooms upstairs and same as what I’d been used to and she came down to a one bedroom flat with a dunny outside. Oh it shook her.

The only pleasure she got I think was the fact that she could go down to Hyams Beach and sunbathe and swim all day because she had nothing to do while I was at Albatross, till I came home at night and she’d the kitchen with Mary Cooper, as I say, the girl she came out with. And eventually it got a bit too much for Pearl. I mean some of the holiday makers would come down and they’d take her out and they’d go places but

it, she was sort of closed in.

Yeah. So we moved down to St Georges Basin, to Jervis Bay and shared a house with a PO electrician and his wife. They came from Yorkshire and had a couple of kids but it was a fairly big house and we still had the hole up the backyard with two planks on it and a shed round it. But it was a bit smelly but we got used to it and she

taught Pearl to cook. Now she was pretty good one. She was always cooking with a cigarette in her mouth but still we all smoked in those days. Actually she taught Pearl to cook and she put her on the right tracks and we got on very well with Jack and his wife. Then married quarters came up at Albatross and I put in for married quarters and by then Pearl was out here with Stephen and

we moved into married quarters on the 13th, on the beginning of January in fifty one. I said to Sean [interviewer] there it was Flat 13 and Steve was born on February the 13th and they were a real palace, the married quarters. There were five ex-PTU huts. They bought in three flats,

so there were fifteen families. There were three families to each hut and we were on the end hut and we had a proper little kitchen and a little lounge with a fire in it, two bedrooms and a bathroom and a toilet and it was a palace.

Back then I was a PO. I was working on the,

as I say, getting the aircraft ready for the 20th CARG and 21st CARG to go to Korea.

Sea Fury and Fire Fly aircraft. One was an eighteen cylinder Taurus radial engine of which I spoke earlier on.

The Sea Fury.

And it was the fastest single engine aircraft in the world at the time.

It was nigh on the speed of sound and it was a terrific aircraft. It was just a fighter.

No, we were taking the protective cover off them and cleaning them down and getting the engines up to scratch before flying them, getting them into working order because they’d been sort of stationary for quite a few months. And ran the engines and tested all the systems out and then handed them over, the actual aircraft to the squadron it self. That’s how

I was employed. That was after a couple of months in the MT section before I went to work on the aircraft.

The MT section, the motor transport section.

Oh, maintenance on the vehicles, got my driving licence, Australian one and navy one. Yeah, it was quite good. It was an interesting job but it was mechanics, so it entertained me but I wanted to get back on the aircraft and eventually I did.

Oh car engines were simple weren’t they in relation to an aircraft engine. No problem there at all. Anyhow as I say we went to married quarters and then I got recommended for a machinations course back in Arbroath, up in Scotland. Stephen was what, eight months old and we

took passage on P&O Stratheden. Quite a few families were recommended for this course. Would be what, about half a dozen of us, complete with families, on this ship, back to England again. And of course, going back there with an eight month old son was their heyday. We got into London, Tilbury Docks, Boxing Day because we

celebrated Christmas Day on board the ship and that’s right, we got stopped in the gale in the Bay of Biscay with the ship and I thought that was going to roll over because she really, was in a foreign sea that was giving the motion of lifting the stern and twisting it over and twisting it back the other way. And I can remember Stephen in his cot in the cabin

and we had an outside cabin with a porthole which was closed pretty quick and watching the dressing gown, which was hanging on the door, swinging like this across the doorway with the roll of the ship and my son was fascinated with this. I wasn’t very happy. Anyway we survived that one.

Yeah, we back into Tilbury Docks and Pearl’s Dad and my Dad met us and we went out to a place called Hounslow

for the night, to stop the night before we caught the train back up to Kidderminster. And of course, went back home and Pearl stopped with my parents for about a week while I carried on up to Arbroath in Scotland and got accommodation for her up there and started the mechs course and Stephen and Pearl came up by train a couple of weeks later and we lived in an old fisherman’s cottage. The walls were about two foot thick, made out of stone, a real old place it was.

Double storey but we only had the bottom storey, bottom half. It was a, yeah it was a bit damp inside and coal was still on ration even then because they were all coal fires and I don’t know what Pearl did but she managed to get two hundredweight of coal every week off this coalman. I didn’t see any black fingermarks on her so it must have been a bit of charm somewhere but I think he charged a little bit extra for the coal.

Engines again, we did the air frames. We did brakes, wheels, tyres, pneumatics, hydraulics, electrics, the whole system of both trades of the air craft. Also I learnt algebra, trigonometry. I was twenty-six then. As I say, when I left school, I left long division. I got my education in the navy as I said before. I learnt all the higher education things that you need

to become a mechanician. And English, and as I say the electronics, algebra, trigonometry, geometry and a complete secondary education I got at that age. It was a bit of a struggle but I made it.

Well the radial engine in the Centaurs was a bugger of an engine to work on, because you’ve got cylinders all the way around. So you’re upside down,

on the side or on the top. The plugs were very hard to get out. They were sunk in what they called the junk head, which is the cylinder head of the engine itself and you had to pull out baffles, rubber covers, to check the air because it was an air cooled engine. And all the cylinders themselves were actually ribbed, like your lawn mower engine,

got sort of a water area of veins for the air to pass through to cool the engine down. The plugs were about the worst thing to get out. They were sunk down and they wired up and you needed a great big spanner to get in to get them out. That was all right on the top ones but when it come underneath you were working upside down. As I say, it was not a very good engine to work on at all. You used to lose a lot of oil from the sump down below. As soon

as you dropped the bottom cover you’d have to duck out of the way because of the oil that used to run out of it. Most radial engines were pretty messy like that but the Centaur’s was quite bad for oil loss and they used to use a lot of oil because of the lubrication of the sleeves and pistons more or less had twice the rubbing area then, wearing area. While the Griffin was a nice, clean, straight rowed engine with

a row of cylinders that side and a row of cylinders that side. You could get into the plugs quite easy. There was hardly any mess underneath. They were pretty clean underneath.

That’s the engine that’s in the Fire Fly, sorry, yeah, that’s the Griffin 3 I think that was. We started off with Griffin 1’s in the 822 Squadron in the RN [Royal Navy] and they were an improved version of the Fire Flies that we had in the Australian navy. Yeah they were very good engines to work on.

‘cause they were cooled by radiators. Had radiators in the wings for the inter-cooler. Had radiators in the other wing to cool the engine down because it was sent forced air cooled by the air flow across the veins on the cylinders while the Griffin was shaped like a car engine, more or less. Had wet sleeves, sort a liquid air round all the cylinders

that kept them cool. It was as I say, the Fire Fly was quite a good aircraft to work on. Air frame wise, with regards to hydraulics and pneumatics they were similar, very similar ‘cause they were both British aircraft so, British made aircraft so they used to follow

quite a pattern of the same design for continuity with the spare parts. They were made by different firms. I think the Fire Fly was made by Faireys and I think Bristol made the engines. Rolls Royce made the engines of the Fire Fly and I think the fuselage was made by Blackburn. I wouldn’t swear to that because, the Fury, but they were all metal aircraft, they’re good. And of course they

were fitted with deck hooks for deck landing and they were pretty good at coming in to land.

My course.

Not really, I couldn’t. It was just a term that they gave to a person that could do both trades and also

be trained enough to take charge of a squadron. Also our basic training was fitting and turning so I learnt how to use a metal shoe cutting lathe, how to use a shaper and grinders and how to sharpen tools, make tools for the lathe, all that sort of thing. That was the fitting side of it and that was part of the mechanisation’s course but an aircraft’s anti-artillary system was called an AA.

He did most of the same course but he was an AA and as we started off as an air mechanic I suppose and worked our way through the different stages of promotion and aircraft, they called us mechanisation’s. That’s all I can think of but the same class as an AA, still able to take charge of a squadron..

No, the navy.

No, they had by then they got their own training establishments and everything, yeah.

It was quite challenging for me but I passed, put it that way. I didn’t get any big marks. I think I averaged about sixty percent, but it was enough to pass. But as I say

you don’t need maths or mechanics or electrics or algebra or trigonometry to work on an aircraft. You need to have a bit of common sense and know the system you’re working on, put it that way. And we learnt all about hydraulics and brake coolers and tyres and pneumatic systems. We covered all the systems they use in an aircraft and that was your basic knowledge. You took the individual aircraft itself and the individual

system and you learnt all about that.

Oh no, no, no.

Yeah, nearly all the people who joined the fleet air arm, both Australian and people like myself, if any instruction was to be done, it was done by UK. Eventually they did get their own instructors out here and Nirimba

I think was quite a big place at Bankstown. HMAS Nirimba was the training course then a bit later on for apprentices, in all fields, electrics, electronics, radio, the whole works but until then it was nearly all done by courses in the UK.

Yeah, completed the course, joined HMAS Melbourne.

Now that was the latest ship. I went back to England and done a course, sorry, sorry, take that all back. I came back, I finished the course and I came back to Australia on the Oriana with the wife and a three year old son then. Pearl was pregnant with my daughter by then and we came back and stopped with

some friends in Botany for about a week or so. Got a week’s leave and came down to Nowra and purchased our first house. It was a little weatherboard cottage on what was then the Princes Highway. It is now Kinghorn Street and it was on top of a hill and it overlooked Nowra. I think I opened an account with the Commonwealth Bank while I was on the Sydney and put payments into it. We were lucky while we were over in England, I forgot this,

our pay was still in pounds in Australia at the time, and we got paid pound for pound in Sterling, which means every pound Australian we had we gained five shillings advantage, which was good. And then when I sent it back to the bank here, the Commonwealth Bank, I got another, my pound was worth twenty five shillings Australian, so I made a profit both ways. Eventually I, what we’d done, we’d

got ourselves a thousand pounds in the bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and saw this place up the highway. Went for a loan to pay for it and the Commonwealth Bank wouldn’t give us a loan. So I took the bank out of the Commonwealth Bank and went to the Bank of New South Wales, that’s Westpac now, and the fellow that built the house, he said, “I’ll got guarantor for this young lad,” and that was it. We put the deposit on the house and

that’s where we settled and we were there for sixteen years. But we moved in in the January and Jennifer was born in the June ‘54, and as I say I used to go from the house on the highway up to Albatross either on a bike or get a lift in. Usually used to ride a bike out there until I got the car. We bought ourselves,

in the end bought ourselves a 1934 Austin 10 which had no hydraulics, shock absorbers. They were just a couple of rubber pads rubbing together on a wishbone joint, spoke wheels. It was a real reliable little bomb. She took us everywhere and I used to drive that to Albatross and back.

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

Every time we go back we turn around and say, “No way would I live here anymore.” Yes, we were quite happy to come back and look forward to it actually. The weather, the climate is different. Back in England you do get distinctive four seasons. You get spring, autumn, summer and winter. Out here it’s not quite so vivid, it sort of blends in. You drift into the different seasons. You really

don’t notice so much as you would in England. But the little house up the highway it was good. Admittedly we still had a dunny up the back in a shed but we had, there was no water, there was tank water but eventually the water came on and eventually the sewerage came on and we settled quite well up there. From there I went to sea with

817 Squadron, the Fire Fly Squadron, on the Sydney. Went to sea, did the couple of runs there and came back and got recommended for a course back in England for twelve months on Sea Venoms. My daughter was about six months when I went on the course and the course, I was away there for twelve months, over Christmas. Came back, my daughter wouldn’t know me, didn’t know me. She was

eighteen months and she didn’t know who the stranger was in the house. Of course she soon latched on that Stephen knew me, her brother, and of course I won her round in the end but it was a bit of a struggle. But yes, I did twelve months in Hudson with the Avalon Company.

Yeah, well I went to the course. The Sea Venom had a wooden airframe, a plywood airframe. It had twin

booms out the back with a tail plane across the middle and it had a Ghost jet engine in it. The front half had a radar scanner, a radar scanner in the front. It had a fibreglass nose, had a dome over that. It was a twin cockpit. It had ejection seats. It had four forty millimetre cannons on the underside of the body. That was the armament it had. It was a fighter.

As I say twin towers on twin booms, pressurised cockpit. The jet engine was a real reliable one. The only thing about those days was they didn’t issue us with the proper protective ear muffs. Our protection we had was a rubber plug pushed in the ear and when the engine was around ten thousand five hundred revs it was

you could feel the vibrations in the air. It was sort of electrifying but it was a terrific aircraft.

Oh yeah, it was one of the latest fighters you could get.

Ghost jet engine.

That was the make of the Ghost. There were several, the name of it. It was called a Ghost engine. It was a cylindrical affair with burners in it.

The air came in through the intakes. It was ignited by an electrical sparks and it turned out like a blow lamp in the end. If you can imagine a blow lamp with kerosene when it was pumped up and it defused heat. Well that heat was, the air was compressed by a compressor. It went into a burning chamber, down the tubes,

directed onto a turbine and the turbine was connected to the fan in the front and the faster the turbine went the faster the fan went and of course, if you let it get away it would just implode. So the only way they could govern the speed limit was by governing the amount of fuel they put into it. The more fuel, the hotter it went, the faster it went and basically that was the principal of a jet engine. The jet stream coming out of the tail pipe would be above the speed of sound, but the temperature was that high, it never reached the speed of sound,

if you get what I mean. The velocity was absolutely coming out of the tail end from the burners and the turbine.

Oh yes, she came around in the end. And of course then I went to sea on the Melbourne with the Venoms and did she more SEATO runs. As I say,

this South East Asian Treaty Organisation was an organisation with the countries in that area and Britain and round that and Australia and I think Singapore was in it and a complete sort of nation for that Eastern area. I don’t quite know the actual setup of the lot but apparently we were out there, as I say, just more or less showing

the flag around the area, around Singapore and Hong Kong. Never got to Japan and then the next thing I came back and got recommended to do the Wessex course. So in sixty two I flew over, flew back to England for a six month course down at the factory down at Yeovil and did a maker’s

course on the Wessex engine, the Gazelle engine at Bristol, the Scout aircraft and the Nimbus engine. So I did, learning maker’s manufacturing of those two aircraft, the Wessex and the Scout. Came back, let’s see. ’62, six months,

around Christmas when I came back on the course. We flew back. I flew over on a 707 and came back on a Comet, which was the De Havilland Comet, it was a terrific aircraft that, a jet aircraft. And came back, came back home. I went to work on the Wessex and

eventually took charge of ten Wessex on the Melbourne. I was the chief in charge of the maintenance.

Yeah, dimensions I couldn’t tell you.

It had a jet engine in it which was in the front of the aircraft. The actual drive was not actually connected to the engine. The turbine coming from the jet engine

was impinged on a turbine which was attached to the propeller, so there was a space between the two. They weren’t really attached but naturally the faster the engine went on the turbine the faster you could make the rotors go. Just trying to think. The Suzanne platform on the main rotor head was about fourteen foot

above the ground. The drive from the gearbox went to the tail rotor which rotated the propeller at the tail which had a variable pitch for manoeuvring left and right. I think the main rotors I think could have been about fifty odd feet in diameter and they could be folded back. The tail plane, the rear end could be folded

in and the main rotor blades all ran and folded back so you could stow on board the ship. It was quite a manoeuvre. Actually spreading the planes and knocking the taper pins into the sockets to hold the blades in, was partially about ten percent of the aircraft could be sort of on automatic control. All the operating levers

on the rotor were altered by hydraulics. The aircraft could, had a sonar bye touch to it so that you could put the sonar bye in the water and listen to submarines and that was the main object of the Wessex, was anti-submarine.

I think so, yes, yes. The Brits had been using it for about six months before

we decided to get the same thing and it did the same thing as what the anti-submarine frigates did with sonar system. They used to ping on the submarines in the water and they used to get a reflect back and they could pick the submarine out. This Wessex could do exactly that. It could carry quite a load too, inside. There was usually n observer and the sonar operator

and sometimes if there was a winch fitted to it you’d have a winch operator and you had two pilots. It had twin controls in the front. Sometimes the pilots would fight over who was going to fly the aircraft and it would get a bit awkward at times. I had a go at flying one and it’s not that difficult. It’s a bit hard to bring it in to land in the harbour but it was quite good.

No, not really because none of the planes that I’d been working on were dual controlled, even the Venom had a twin cockpit but it had a pilot and an observer, there was no twin but with the Wessex you had twin controls.

So if I had made a mistake the pilot could take over. Mind you it was quite good trying to fly it.

Yeah, usually for that thing. Yeah and the 817 Squadron they with Wessex they used to go over to JB and did night flying and practice dunking their sonar buoy in the water.

I’d say about twenty, twenty five feet but they used to

hover above the water at about thirty feet and the automatic pilot would take over from the wet length of the cable that was in the water, at least the dry length that was out of the water. So if a wave came up, the aircraft would go up, if you get what I mean? Or at the same time you could put it on radio control and that would do the same thing, automatic pilot would take over from radio height. Now that was only about dunking at night, they’d come back seasick. If the

weather was a bit rough the aircraft would be going up and down with the motion of the waves and actually if anything did go wrong, they’ve got about one second to take over controls, to stop it going in the water. The wheels were fitted with balloons, like the air bag they’ve got in a car today, similar system. One on each wheel and in the rear of the cockpit, in the tail end, was an inflated bag,

a big inflated bag, so if the aircraft did go down into the water the detectors would instantly blow the balloons up and she’d probably float if the sea was pretty calm, with about a foot of water inside the cockpit, so they could get out. And one bloke came back from night flying one night with both his balloons up. He’d gone that low he’d hit the water, just touched the water, and activated the balloons and he came

back with this two eight foot diameter balls on it. And he said “Chief, we’ll get a knife and punch them.” And I said, “No, we’ll pull the pins out, get them to hover and we’ll pull them out, because they’re only fitted on tubes inside the axle of the wheel and held in by what they called a pit pin.” And we pulled the pins out, got hold of it and pulled them off and that’s what we did. He landed on them and we saved the two balloons, buoys to

be deflated and repacked, ‘cause otherwise a few thousand dollars worth of damage would be done if you put the knife into it. Yeah, that was one of the night flying incidents. It was pretty good.

Yeah. I was put on back to 725th Squad, actually 817 Squadron was an operational squadron.

See eight numbers were operational and seven numbers were training squadron. So I went back from 817 back to 725 Training Squadron to train a few more of the pilots up and another chief took over the job I was doing on the Melbourne. I mean I did two three months trips, four month trips on that and

Oh I – chief air mech in charge of the squadron. You were either the chief air mech or a chief AA and I was a chief air mech and put in charge of the squadron and that was it. All the sort of things that you learnt when you were an ordinary sailor all helped you to do the job when it came to put the top job. Which was the top job, you were in charge of the maintenance. You told

everybody what to do, when to do it and how to do it sometimes. Yeah, I enjoyed that position. Anyhow I was drafted back to 725 and they came in one day and they said they wanted four Wessex put on the Sydney to go to Vietnam. It’s got to be self contained. You’ve got to be able to fly the aircraft on and fly them off because there will be no communication between you and Albatross. So I had to work out what machinery I

wanted to, like hydraulic test rigs and electrical rigs and what spares I’d need, seals, nuts and bolts and I finished up with a great box full of stuff and I used quite a bit of it too and I managed to get the aircraft up Vietnam and back to Vung Tau. Now they were doing the same things as what we were trained to do. Going ahead of the ship with the old sonar buoy down

listening for submarines, because I mean it was a war time exercise in the navy that time although it wasn’t like being at war really but it was a war time exercise and we went. The first trip I did was from Sydney and I think it was the Sydney regiment, all Nashos [National Service soldiers] and more or less a straight trip to Vietnam. Took about ten days

and we used to give them a ‘crossing the line’ ceremony, give them the treatment and entertain them on the way up there.

Oh Captain Neptune, Neptune came from the depths with all his slaves to help him and mounted on a pedestal on the flight deck, sort of a stand, and he’d rub all sorts of nasty smelling things all over you and – [tape stops]

Okay? Yeah, Neptune would get this victim on top of his pedestal and rub all this coloured smelly stuff all over him and then pull the trigger and ditch him into a pond, oh what would you call it? A swimming pool, canvas swimming pool, rigged behind him, drop them into the water, washed them all off and he got a crossing the line ceremony certificate to say he’d been over the line. We did that to

nearly all the troops we took up there. It was entertainment, something for them to do. The next trip we did went round to, picked up a crowd from Perth. I was away over Christmas on that one. We picked them up in something, about the, Christmas Day we celebrated off Christmas Island so that would be about three or four days trip before

we got there. Up to Vietnam again, unloaded the ship there with their own cranes, well with the aid of a Chinook sky crane used to lift the great big fire, the same things used for fire fighting here. Remember they hired those big aircraft, Yank aircraft for fire fighting out here? Just like that. Only they had a crane on board and would latch onto a lorry or a van and pick them up and take them ashore to save putting them onto

barges alongside and loading them off their own cranes and loading them onto barges alongside to take them ashore. The troops used to come on board a Chinook. The returning soldiers would come out to the rear of the aircraft, down to the flight deck and the people that were going to replace them, the new recruits would follow in, straight in the aircraft and the aircraft would go, just like that. It was quite a unique operation. We’d only be up there about twenty-four hours and we’d be on our way back.

Same thing again with the Wessex in front checking the sonar buoys and that was it. I think the next trip was from Sydney again with a load of lorries on board and all the flight deck was covered with vehicles all lashed down. We had a little space at the foredeck for landing the Wessex on. And the last trip was we went round to Perth, round to Brisbane and picked the Nasho’s up from Brisbane.

We took them up there. This was the middle of 1957 then. We started in, sorry, 67, 67, get it right and they came back and the Vietnam said they never had a ticker tape reception, but they did in Brisbane because they had to march down the street with a band and there was a ticker tape reception for them. And those soldiers we took up there we landed them ourselves and in our own landing barges.

The Sydney got fitted with four landing barges in Hong Kong and they took them ashore just like the invasion days in the old landing barge and I’ve got all that on film. Yeah, it was quite a good run, an interesting run.

No, no, always aboard, never went ashore. When we were there the divers were always out around the boat checking for Olympic mines and things

like that because they never knew what might float down the Mekong Delta onto a pile of weeds and drift alongside the boat and somebody could put an Olympic mine or something like that so they were checking the bottom all the time.

No, no.

Oh they were enjoying it. They were only young people and it was an adventure for them and I’m sure of

that and I know a lot of the nashos still stayed in the army, or would like to stop in the army when they came back. There were a few disgruntled one, bound to be, but no, they were a happy crowd.

Well glad to get back, yeah glad to get back. They came on board with all their trophies and cases and

things that they got and all the gear that they came back on board in was taken away and either burnt or even the trucks that came back on board were all washed down, all the dirt off them, absolutely clean. All the boots, I think the soldiers had to hand in all their boots back in. They wouldn’t allow their boots back in Australia. I don’t know what happened to them but they wouldn’t have got through quarantine half the time with all the stuff.

There was one or two people were picked up for bringing back firearms, smuggling firearms but otherwise they were glad to get home, glad to get back and of course we had our own service people up there working on helicopters. The Fleet Air Arm from Albatross had a squadron of people up there flying the helicopters but coming back to the

person that I referred to on the Tracker, Lieutenant Commander Smith, well I was an OD at the time, an air mechanic. He came back as Captain at Albatross in 1969, sorry 1959, 1959 and he presented me with my long service badge for fifteen years undetected crime and he was a captain in charge of a ship when I was a chief in charge of a squadron,

so we both – actually he was known as the father of Australian Fleet Air Arm. He did a lot of work in organising getting the Melbourne and the Sydney and he finished up a full admiral and he died in ninety eight and his funeral was done from Duntroon and he had a gun carriage funeral. And he was more of less the father of the

fleet air arm.

Yes, he presented.

That was 1959, 1959.

Oh no, before Vietnam, before Vietnam.

Yes it was ‘59, because Vietnam was from sixty –

Yeah, I was about ‘66, ’67 I was in Vietnam on my run. No, he was captain in 1959, 60 at Albatross.

Oh

absolutely yeah. The fleet air arm, they had an air base here before but the RN had it during the war I think as some base, but basically I was at the start of the fleet air arm and as I say it, well as I say I didn’t go to Korea because I was on the mechs course during the Korean business up in Arbroath and yeah, it was a good life. I paid off and finished in the Australian navy in 1969. I paid off.

I did quite a few jobs, like establish the flexible service system on the aircraft on a pegboard sort of a ranking where the aircraft either had an hourly based service or a calendar based service and I made all the servicing records up for that and set that up. The department they called the Royal Australian Naval Air Fleet Development Unit and I was the chief in charge of that when I left

the squadrons. I went to work as the chief instructor for the school they had out there. They started a school at Albatross and also they started a mechanisations course there and that eventually got transferred to Nirimba, did the mechanisations course at Nirimba. That was a six month course in relation to the two year course I did. We called it minimax. It was a very abbreviated bloody

training but it was good. Of course they had armour mechanisations and airframe mechanisations, well airframe and engine mechanisations and ordinance mechanisations and they trained them all at Nirimba. And eventually my son joined the navy when he was fifteen and a half and he served with me on the Sydney. Just before we started our first trip to Vietnam he came aboard in Sydney and then we went down to Jervis Bay

to finish our refit off. The dockers packed up, the dock yard people had packed up working on it and so they got the apprentices on board to finish up all the fiddly little jobs off like painting and messing about.

Oh yeah. He was on board and the sickbay attendant his son was on board so there was two of us. It was in the papers, ‘like father, like son’ business. It was recruiting business, a recruiting campaign. I was quite proud of that, and he finished at Nirimba and.

I think so, yeah I think so. He was a, from ten years old he liked sailing, he liked the sea, he liked that sort of thing and yeah, yeah.

Not really, no.

He failed, the first time he applied for it he failed the entrance examination, so I took him in hand and he failed maths actually and I got all my old maths books from, see they didn’t have computers and what do they call it, the old?

Calculators, you had to everything by longhand and you had to show how you reached the answers by

all the workings in the margins. They were pretty hot. You couldn’t fiddle it and he didn’t pass the mathematical side of it so I got the old books out and taught him a bit of algebra and a bit of trigonometry and he sat the exams and he passed it with flying colours. They wanted him to be an avionics expert, working on the radar sort of stuff and he wanted to be an air frame engine mechanic and he stuck it for two years. And I bought him a Mini Minor so he could drive

around and that was a fatal thing to do because he started playing up and basically after two years they said, “He’s no good, so what do you want to be? Do you want to stop in the navy?” He said, “Yeah, I want to stop in the navy.” As I say he couldn’t get what he wanted to be in the, as an apprentice so he became an OD and went on one of the frigates as a sonar operator, looking for submarines. And he gave that away and became a

coxswain and he went over to the States and picked up the first of the destroyers over there, the Chatham ships, Adelaide. He came back and then he took a course as a promotion to a petty officer, a coxswain, which he then became the doctor on board and navigator and the steering the ship, the quartermaster of the ship

and also the RPO, the regulating petty officer, in other words, the copper. That was his job on the patrol boats. He loved the patrol boats and he was on the Warrnambool, the HMAS Warrnambool up in Cairns and he served his twenty years in the end and came out. And that’s about it, he retired, he got married and things didn’t work out. I think he played up, his wife played up and they

separated. He had one daughter and he started playing with boats. He was still building his first boat when he was down in Creswell. He was down in Creswell as an RPO in Creswell at one stage and he started building this trimaran there in married quarters. He eventually completed it and he sold it to a doctor up in Sydney and he went and won nearly all the races with the damn thing and then Stephen went and bought another boat then. He went up to Cairns, sorry

Port Douglas. I went up with him and we bought another trimaran up there and sailed it down. Yep, he got shipwrecked on that one off Byron Island somewhere and he then, he got the insurance money for that and he bought another trimaran and he decided he wanted a bigger one so he got the trimaran ashore up to a friend’s farm up in Queensland and put a chainsaw up the middle of it

and opened it up and built his other boat over the top of that.

I could land on, it didn’t need a runway to land on for a start. I mean you could have the deck

covered with vehicles or but only needed a little space for the helicopter to come down. It was a good emergency, as one occurred on the way up with the people from Perth. Inside Sydney was the old rails for slinging the hammocks and this particular soldier one day was doing lift ups on the hammock rail. And one of his silly friends put a rifle underneath him and he let go, and

of course it pierced the lower side of his bottom and we had to do an emergency run ashore then with the helicopter to get him to Port Moresby. He never reached Vietnam. He was all right, but he was, a silly thing to do but that did happen. As I say it was an ideal thing for using its sonar gear for anything that might have been around. I mean we didn’t know. There could have been submarines there and general purpose, running ashore for the mail and stuff like

that. It was a helicopter that we had that could do it. I mean that was the only helicopter we had then. It was the Sycamores were paid off, the old Sycamore aircraft and it was an ideal aircraft for that sort of thing.

Well but we never went ashore with the aircraft. The old Chinooks used to transport the

soldiers, as I said and we did have aircraft, a squadron in Vietnam, the fleet air arm people but they were more or less specialists for the old Iroquois aircraft because we had Iroquois choppers but they weren’t suitable for being on the Sydney to do what the Wessex did.

Well that’s

all they did. They were part of the ship’s complement to go there but they never went ashore in Vietnam. We did practice dropping depth charges from the Wessex which was quite successful. The Stuart was our escort ship most of the time and she’d give an exhibition of firing depth charges from, I forget what they call it now but used to fire four depth charges over the bows of the ship, from the rear of the ship, over the length of the ship, into the

water ahead and explode. It was just sort of demonstrations of things they could do. That was as I say the escort ship most of the time. It was basically a general purpose aircraft for the Vung Tau ferry.

Oh yes it was an incline engine and it wasn’t straight and level and it was a jet engine.

It had to be air started with a compressor. We had to install an Atlas Copco compressor on one of the sponsons to make the pressure which would be about four thousand pounds a square inch and fit reservoirs to hold the pressure. And then it wasn’t the pressure side of the air that caused it, it was the volume side of the air. The air was forced into a turbine and that touched the engine and that

turned the engine over at it’s required starting speed, which was probably about five or six thousand revs and then we’d switch the air off and she’d be started up. But all that had to be added to the carrier, to the Sydney before we could use the Wessex but it was all prearranged and pre-done.

Well if you’ve got a faulty blade it would give you

vibrations of what they called a whomper, that’s a thump every revolution and this particular case the aircraft thought they had a whomper and so I went up on a test flight and had quite a nice, little trip off the Sydney and around New England, New Ireland I should say and Britain and came back on board and located the problem. It was a blade that was attached to aircraft that had a different modification to the other three. So I sorted a rotor blade out that had the correct modification,

fitted it and then what you had to do was track it. Now what we used to put a coloured crown on the very tip of the blades, say red, white and blue, something like that or probably red, green and blue would be better and stand in an area which would be the circumference of the diameter of where the blades would be when it was spinning. And you had a pole with a canvas flag attached

to it and what you had to do was get underneath the edge of the blade and slowly bring the pole till the flag touched the tips of the blades and it would leave the marks of the blades on the flag. And those marks had to be within an eighth of an inch of each other and if there was any blade out that would be shown by either high or low, which ever colour it was and then you’d have to go out and adjust that blade until it tracked

within that tolerance. That was blade tracking. It was a bit hairy actually, standing under a rotor blade whizzing above your head with this flag but if you whacked it in too far it either wrecked the blade or threw you on your back.

No, never had any accidents. Oops, I’ve got cramp, never had an accident. I’ve got that on video too.

Yeah, I mean once you got onto jet engines that was an entirely

different field altogether.

Well there’s no sparkplugs, there’s no, oh you had ignition points but the sound was different, the actual, I mean it had no pistons or cylinders and all that sort of thing. It was just a, it’s hard to explain. There was no exhaust noise, put it that way. There was just a roar from the

actual jet pipe. Yes, it was easy enough to transfer, go from the ordinary aircraft engine to a jet engine because firstly it was a lot simpler really. A jet engine was a lot more simpler than the complicated things like the Taurus with the sleeve valves. Yeah, basically they’re all the same theory but different designs as regards compressors. I mean some were

like a barrel with different stages of compression. Some are just like a big fan. There were different types of burners, different types of turbines but all basically the same. The air came in at ground level at fifteen point seven pounds per square inch and it went out the tail pipe at that pressure but it was a lot, lot faster. As I say faster than the speed of sound but

the fact that the temperature was that high it never reached the speed of sound. I don’t know whether you can understand it. I’m trying to work, if you, in a lower temperature the speed of sound, which is what? Seven hundred miles an hour, seven hundred feet per second, would

reach the speed of sound, there’d be a bang at a lower temperature say up in the air than say if you were near the ground where it’s a bit warmer, you’d get more velocity before you reached the speed of sound. It’s very hard to explain really, if you get what I mean but the higher the temperature the harder it was to get the speed of sound. And of course the temperature from the jet pipe was fifty thousand degrees centigrade

with the heat. As I say it was a very simple operation. The air came in, the fan was turning which was initially started by your starter motor, your air compressor or in some cases on the Phantom there was a big coffin cartridge. You put a big cartridge into this cylinder and it was ignited and the expansion of the gases from that

turned the turbine that started the jet engine. You had to get about five thousand revs on a jet engine, on a Ghost before you could put the HP [high pressure] cock on and turn the fuel into the system and the Wessex, as I said, we used an air starter. And of course the speeds were different. I mean your revs on the ordinary engine if you got two thousand five hundred revs you were getting near the high revs on an ordinary aircraft engine

and the revs on the Ghost engine was ten thousand five hundred revs. You used to idle at five thousand revs. That’s the big difference. It was an entirely different operation altogether, the jet engines.

Finest? I’d say the Sea Venom, the Sea Venom. It was a neat, clean little aircraft. Well it was little

I suppose really in comparison and it flew well. It had com-pressurised cockpits. It had an altimeter rating of about thirty thousand feet. In fact the last trip I did in the, I went up with CO of the squadron and we were over Batemans Bay and he switched the engine off, well dropped it right back and we glided into Albatross and the angle of glide was about seven degrees

so if your engine failed you didn’t go down like a lead brick, you did have plenty of time to control it. It was a beautiful and it was all the controls, the air runs, the elevators, were all done by hydraulics. There were no cables, or wires or anything like that; it was all done by hydraulics. The wings were rather natty. They folded up nicely. Yeah, it was a very compact aircraft.

Well in war time for a start at night time everything was closed up. You couldn’t show any lights, there were curtains everywhere. And of course in peace time you’ve got open decks, lights, and it’s a far better. You weren’t sort of hiding from anything. You weren’t expecting to be blown out of the water in peace time.

I mean it was a good, it was just the same routine, the same sort of duties you went through but there was no pressure regards being attacked by anything. The peacetime navy was interesting and exciting at times, when the aircraft were coming in but it didn’t have that little sense of urgency or what ever it is you sensed during the war.

The peacetime navy was terrific, I enjoyed it. I mean I did more time in the peacetime. I did twenty years in the RAN and only four in the wartime but the conditions were different.

Well as I say you weren’t on edge all the time. I mean in wartime when you’re landing and flying aircraft there was stacks of action, stacks of excitement and when nothing was happening you were absolutely bored stiff. You got bored

waiting for something to happen, either getting blown up, bombed or anything like that but when you’re operating the time used to fly and things used to go. In peacetime it could be boring all the time if you wanted it to be. You had to find something to do to occupy your time when you weren’t working on the aircraft. We used to play, on the ship we used to play volleyball in the lift wells as a sport or a recreation and we even played hockey on the decks

with the hockey sticks. The landing wires got in the way occasionally but you sort of, you couldn’t do that during the war. You couldn’t do the things through the war that you could do during peacetime, like sitting out on the open deck. And of course it was the actual climate was different. I mean out here the climate was terrific but back home, in the summer it wasn’t too bad but even

in the summer you still got those gales in the Atlantic and you couldn’t sit around and sunbathe and enjoy life at all.

Down time? Oh we’d probably play cards in the mess deck or write letters or read books. You couldn’t do a lot, you couldn’t, I suppose you could have had a jog along the flight deck if you’d wanted too but that wasn’t too pleasing. Probably rolling like this all the time.

No, downtime was practically sleep time because during the day you were on the go doing something all the time except occasionally when there was nothing happening and you got a little bit bored but no, down time wasn’t a lot of recreation. Couldn’t do a lot as regards physical stuff. It was mostly reading, writing or just sleeping, put it that

way. You might do a bit of repairing to you clothes, sewing. They issued you with a sewing kit in the navy, with a needle and cotton and thread and a little pair of scissors and you used to sew your own buttons on and do your own repairs but we didn’t get that in the RAN.

Yeah.

Well for a start once again one was wartime, one was

peacetime. In the wartime the officers and the men used to sort of mingle and get on quite well. Peacetime navy, officers were officers and men were men, the lower deck. They didn’t really like to mix. They were friendly provided you were respectful to them. If you turned around and were a bit cheeky, well you got lumbered. During the war you could have a laugh and a joke with the officers and of course they’re all about your age anyway. Of course when I

joined the RAN I was getting on really in relation as regards the age of some of the people. A lot of my friends that did the mechs course, they went for a commission and they became two and a half engineers when they left the navy. I hesitated about doing it. The wife said, “No, when you’re time’s up we’re getting out of it. I’ve had enough of this.” Most of the time I was away from home, three or four months at a

time and she was looking after the kids and she’d had enough of us being in the navy for a while. She said, “Let’s settle down and get a job in civvy street.” Which I did in the end as I told you. I left the navy. I became an undertaker for the local funeral director and then eventually sat the exam for SAMAR, the Ship and Aircraft Maintenance

Repair, and was told to move up to Sydney where the offices were in Kent Street and so I sold my little house after sixteen years up in the hill in Nowra and moved a caravan up to Rockdale Caravan Park and I used to catch a train in from Rockdale to the offices every morning. That went on for about twelve months and they wanted me to move

the family up to Sydney and I didn’t really want to if I could help it but I still didn’t want to lose my job. Then they asked me to go down to the range at Creswell, down at the target range and set up a library down there and also be the engine mechanic, well air frame and engine mechanic on the Jindivik aircraft. So I jumped at that because once I got down here

I could more or less live down here because eventually it became a permanent job down there and I finished up buying a house on the headland at Gerroa, Blackhead, on the headland there and I used to travel from there down to the range everyday and back.

Jindivik, they’re a pilotless aircraft which was controlled by radar

from the, Barraway Ridge had a big radar transmitter and the aircraft. Well to start off it was a jet aircraft. It carried two turrets under the wing, one was either a radar tower or an infra red tower and the aircraft took off, went out over the sea, out over the ocean there round Batemans Bay. We had quite a big area there to fly in and it was

all controlled by radio from the radio transmitting station up on the Barraway Ridge, which was a high piece of ground above Rhett Bay and the aircraft would level out from the tow from the wings. It was all done electronically by radio, a tow from the aircraft wings and the aircraft from Albatross would come up and fire rockets at it and if it

was a radar tow it would be a guided missile and instead of the missile hitting the aircraft it used to hit the tow and all this was recorded by camera from the wings and that was all more or less classified material, when they got the film back to see exactly what happened. If it was a flare tow, in other words the missile would be directed by a heat source and this flare would burn and when the aircraft pilot fired the rocket at the target

it would go for the flare and hit the flare. On one occasion the fellow told the pilot he was letting the flare out now and he was a bit late pressing this button on the gun and the flare burned out and the missile went into the tail of the Jindivik and shot it down. That was from the Skyhawks were out here at the time, you know the Skyhawks

we sold to the New Zealand navy? That was the sort of exercises we did? It was target time for the fighter aircraft to fire their missiles at.

Practise using the guns, using the armament on the aircraft otherwise they had nothing to fire at. And as I say it was either a radar tow or a heat flare.

Oh yes, it was dry land again. It was a very interesting job. I was down there for thirteen years. I thought you might have interviewed a mate of mine who was down there but I know he was asked to be interviewed. It was Les Madison. I don’t know whether you’ve seen him at all? No? Never mind, he was the storeman down there. Employed by SAMAR and he was what they called a tech, a TA2,

and of course being a technical officer two, I got my wartime status. I was equal to a lieutenant in the navy, if I’d been in the navy.

Oh yeah and I could call captains by their Christian names, people I knew during the service anyhow.

More even, it had been worth my life in the navy. I hadn’t really wasted it, had I? Yeah it was quite rewarding

and the job I had I finished up in the inspections office down there, at the range. See the aircraft really were flown by people from Woomera. They came up and had an operation about twice a year and eventually the navy took it over and we operated the, people didn’t come up from Woomera anymore. They had their own operators up here, a pilot, and I can’t saw

pilot observer. You had two people operating the target. The target was fitted to a trolley. I forgot this. The target was fitted to a trolley, the jet engine was started up and each end of the runway was a tower and the pilot in the tower would control the aircraft along the runway. And it would automatically take off on its own and the trolley, once the target was air borne, as soon as it was air borne, the trolley would automatically put its brakes

on and stopped and of course the trolley was collected and bought back. When the aircraft was coming into land, the pilot would bring it in towards him and down on the ground would be, at the other end, the fellow who controlled the altitude of the aircraft as it came into land. See the pilot saw it coming towards him but he couldn’t judge the distance up and down so the other controller used to bring it into land. And it landed on a steel skid, it had no wheels and of course there would be a great shower of sparks on these skids.

They were forever replacing these skids themselves, the metal pieces that used to wear out and we had quite a few successes and one or two prangs. As I say the other fellow who was a bit late firing his guns, firing his rockets shot the aircraft down.

I couldn’t really say. I don’t know.

I think probably getting my PO’s rate, which is only one more step to go and that was to chief and of course I didn’t stay in long enough. No, I couldn’t say there was really any highlights at all. No, I’ve let you down there, unless I say everything was a highlight.

I wouldn’t like to say. Probably getting demobbed and coming out, I don’t know.

Coming out as a civvy again, I don’t know. I think the highlight was when they rated my PO and I thought, “Well I’m on the way,” and then the war finished six months after that.

I haven’t got a clue what the navy life was like so I couldn’t answer that question at all. I enjoyed it, even though there was a war, I enjoyed it. As I say my family was not quite so happy about the situation but as I say I survived and looking back fifty years ago, it’s all a memory now. No, as I say you really can’t compare wartime navy with peacetime navy. It’s an entirely different ball game really.

I mean you’re more relaxed in the peacetime navy and there’s more chance to see places because in the part of the navy that I was in I only got ashore twice in the whole time. I know I didn’t go ashore at Calder Inlet and the only time I went ashore was at Argentia and again in Norfolk in Virginia when they repaired the ship.

But with the peacetime navy I was ashore at Singapore, Hong Kong, Manus Island, all the oriental places. Never got to Japan.

Well Hong Kong, Hong Kong, that was a fabulous place.

Oh mind you Hong Kong

then, isn’t like Hong Kong today. There were hardly any skyscrapers in Hong Kong. The shopping was good. The beer halls, I couldn’t say beer halls, the Tiger beer was quite nice to drink. You’d get drunk on it.

Let’s see that’s one side was the cheap shopping. You’d get all sorts of bargains down there. The only big store down there was called Daimaru. I think it’s still there now. I went to visit Hong Kong in ninety seven when we did a trip to China, the wife and I and called back in Hong Kong and actually stayed in Kowloon, which is the other side of Hong Kong.

And we got to Hong Kong from Kowloon by tunnels under the sea. They had four tunnels fitted under there. Before that it was a question of getting the Star Ferry and going across. I bought my cameras over in Kowloon. It was cheaper than Hong Kong.

It was still on a camera and we

got the film back and when I got the opportunity I transferred all my films onto video, even the kids when they were kids.

No, no stills at all. It was all eight millimetre camera.

To

record the situation there, to record what we did on the ferry, the Vung Tau ferry. It was to show what we did on board the ship. All the squadron bought it. I’ve got, I recognise some of their faces even now. Mind you, I can’t put names to them but it was just to record what I did.

You’ve got me there.

Oh the unloading of the ship and the fellows going ashore in the barges and the crossing the line ceremonies and the happy faces of the soldiers on board the ship and the general operations of the area around there. I mean all the ships that were at anchor on the Mekong Delta,

I’ve got all of those on film. Yeah, it was just a record of what I was doing.

Oh no, you had your normal, you went to bed at night. There was no problem there. I mean it wasn’t like in a war when you went to bed all ready to get up quick. You did get undressed and put your pyjamas on and get

into your bed. As I say on the Russian convoys you didn’t get undressed, you didn’t have a shower. You went there and back in the same clothes, the same Scarpa scanties that you started out in. You didn’t wash anything until you got back, just in case something happened. But of course in peacetime you had your showers and I mean even the ships were far better. I mean they had decent toilets

for a start or proper toilets. We used to play cards and knuckles and watch pictures. We had pictures in the mess of a night and of course I was in the chief POs’ mess, I wasn’t with the lads and so it was a sort of a different, a more posh atmosphere to what the boys were. I mean you had your own mess steward sometimes and you had your own little

mess deck up in the bows. The accommodation wasn’t the best. My accommodation on the Melbourne was onto the flight deck with about another forty odd chief PO’s. We still had the old bunks, we didn’t sling hammocks. We still slept in bunks. This was on the Melbourne and it used to be right opposite

the hydraulic catapult machinery and every so often they’d get a fire in there where the hydraulic oil used to get hot and burst into flames. And then eventually they got the steam catapult which was a godsend, a different kettle of fish all together. And of course the batsman who used to be on the old flight deck during the war was replaced by a mirror, which with the pitch of the ship or the roll of the ship used to alter its position

so that when the pilots came into land all they had to do was line the green light across this mirror with the two red ones either side and when they got that lined up they were coming to come straight into the deck. And of course as the ship went up and down that mirror would alter and keep that line for the pilot to follow. So he really couldn’t miss the wires when he came into land and of course the deck wasn’t moving around so much as the little carriers. I mean it was pretty steady and a much bigger deck and on the Melbourne they put an angle deck on it so

the, see the Sydney was a straight through deck with a catapult. The Melbourne had an angled deck on it so when the aircraft went to land on – they didn’t sort of land straight up the deck, they sort of landed sideways across the deck, so anything parked by it they would miss. It was a big improvement that for landing on.

We didn’t, we didn’t talk about the war at all. I’m sorry there, you just didn’t discuss it. You really couldn’t talk about the war because you really weren’t in it. You were only supplying the poor devils ashore. They were in the war, the soldiers and the helicopter crews that we sent up there. We really weren’t in the war on the Vung Tau ferry. As I say we were in a war zone

but it wasn’t the same as the bad old days, I’m afraid. No, nobody talked about it. I’m sorry but they didn’t. We just did our job and had a laugh and a talk occasion about funny things that happened. Even when the soldiers came back on the ship we really didn’t have much contact with them, not to say, “Good day

mate, what did you do when you were ashore? How many Vietnamese did you kill?” Or anything like that, we just didn’t talk to them.

Yes, we were all aware of that one.

Oh we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Oh, I always thought that, yep. We poked our nose in and shouldn’t have been there. I mean the Brits wouldn’t

have a part of it, they wouldn’t come in. They wouldn’t even supply us with any, like refuel us, anything like that when the ship was going down. They had their own ships there, oil tankers.

There’s no port at Vung Tau, in Vietnam. The Mekong Delta was just open water with the land there with the radar scanners on top of the hills and

as I say the water around the boats was patrolled by Yankee gun ships and they also patrolled the rest of the vessels that were out there, the cargo boats.

Well they could have done. When we came back down past Singapore they did at one stage come out with a boat called the Tideflow, one of their tankers and give us a token drink of oil just for an exercise for them not us but

the Brit’s wouldn’t supply an escort for us or anything like that. They just wouldn’t have a bar of Vietnam. I mean we got, I’m afraid the Yanks took us for a ride there.

Yes, I thought we shouldn’t have been in Vietnam. It wasn’t their war; they didn’t win the war anyhow, not in Vietnam. I

think the Yanks gave up in the end. I think the actual, what were they? The Vietnamese were breeding faster than what we could kill them anyhow, so could have never won the war.

Oh no. It wasn’t hard, it was a job we had to do. We had committed ourselves to the war and that was it. You couldn’t turn around and say, “I’m not going to do it because I don’t think we should be at war.”

Oh no, we did it and that was it, but personally I mean it’s my view that we shouldn’t have been in the Vietnam situation at all. We got talked into it by the Yanks and I think it’s the same situation we’ve got today.

In Iraq, we shouldn’t have been in it. Mind you admittedly more countries took part in the Iraq situation. I mean you’ve got France, Britain, America, us, Spain,

they all sort of chipped in as regards the fight against Hussein, but in Vietnam it was just the Americans and the Australians.

They did a terrific job. I mean once again they shouldn’t have been there but while they were they’ve done a fantastic job. I mean it’s a responsible and risky job.

War is a waste of money, waste of life and just a waste of time. If things couldn’t be settled in arbitration round a table it would be a far better way of settling the problems of the world I think. I think everyone should be given a balloon on a stick, the

people in charge like to run the wars like give them a balloon on a stick and if your balloon got burst, then you were out of the war, you’re finished and that’s it, and that’s how they should fight wars these days. I mean it’s too technical these days. I mean it was, in my time it was gun fire and bombs and depth charges. Now it’s missiles that can sort of go around corners and all sorts of destructive weapons that were far more

destructive than what we had in our day. I think war should be abolished. I do, honestly.

I don’t think so. I learnt to grow up. It was an experience in the future years especially as regards my

aircraft side but it put me in good stead for my future, but no, it didn’t scar me. I mean admittedly I didn’t see very many bad things. The only person I saw killed was the little subby, Stretton, but I never saw anyone else die. I mean people in Vietnam and the war itself they got their mates killed alongside them but that didn’t happen to me.

So no, no scars at all.

My favourite memories are coming back from up top, as we used to call it. We were away from anything up to six months and come back and the family were there on the wharf to meet you. Now that was terrific.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I don’t know. Some played up, others didn’t, put it that way when they were ashore. I managed to keep my nose pretty clean. One funny occasion we came back from up top as we call it and we were away about five months and writing letters home and

my mate used to write his homecoming letters with the dates that we’d arrive in Sydney, probably in Perth, and we’d get the answer when we got to Melbourne and of course all the arrangements were made then for them to meet the ship when we got to Sydney. And he’d written on the bottom of his letter as a postscript, “Darling, would you meet the ship when we get to Sydney at the forward gangway with a mattress strapped on your back.” He told me he posted the letter off and he got into Melbourne

and he got his answer to his PS [postscript] from his wife, “Yes darling, I’ll be there with a mattress strapped to my back, but make sure you’re the first sailor down the gangway.” But that’s the sort of thing, but all in good fun. You did miss the wife, you missed the family.

Well it’s – we’ve lost our carriers.