Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was the youngest of 10 children. My wife incidentally is one of 9. So life for me was pretty spartan.

Life was pretty simple in Perth. I’m talking about the time before you were born. And Perth was a very simple place. A very nice place to live in. People from Sydney and Melbourne would just say it was a hopeless backwater. Nothing much going on really at all.

And so I used to run around barefoot and I was almost a street kid, although my father was a respectable inspector of schools. Just nothing. I can’t really describe what was going on in Perth. Things changed when I won a scholarship to Perth Modern School. You probably have heard of

that school. In those days you had to win a scholarship to go there otherwise they had this examination which was almost anybody, everybody of the right age in the State would sit for it. But only the first hundred would get a scholarship.

I was 12 when I won the scholarship, 13 when I started at the school.

And they took a hundred each year. And there were 4 classes of 25. It was really marvellous. It was a magnificent school.

Well of course you realise that my eldest sister was 17 years older than I was. So

by the time I started to take notice she wasn’t even there. She’d sat for an examination and she became a doctor. And she finished up in the eastern states. And my second eldest brother got married. My third eldest brother lives in Melbourne, studying medicine. So by the time I was noticing things the family had shrunk. So we didn’t

have so many per room. We didn’t have any room at all. There was one room for the girls and one for the boys. And we slept on beds right around the verandah of the house. Wouldn’t dare do that now, and had these pretty simple cyclone beds, with horsehair mattress, open to all the weather. And that’s how we lived.

And we survived.

Yes, yes, yes. But in Perth we don’t get many bitterly cold nights in the winter. And we don’t get many terribly hot days. On the whole it’s a pretty mild climate. Anyway, we got used to it.

Well, he was born in Parkes as I told you. And he decided to become a teacher. And he went to a very famous school in Sydney: Fort Street. And he qualified as a teacher and he did a few teaching jobs in Sydney. And then,

we're talking about around 1899, 1900 and gold was being discovered all around the place. The population was expanding rapidly and they needed to build more schools quickly. And the director of education in Western Australia went over to Sydney recruiting. And my father was one of the recruits. And his first job was

headmaster, he was never anything less than a headmaster, of the state school in Menzies. And after that he went to White Gum Valley and then to Northam. After that I don’t know what. I think Newcastle Street, Perth Boys. And then Subiaco. And he was

headmaster of Subiaco State School when I was born. And then he went to Claremont as headmaster of Claremont and then he was made an inspector. So from then on he was all over the State inspecting schools. And Claremont was where I started school. At the age of four they had Montessori classes there at that time.

And I was in those.

Well. At that time I didn’t know what they were. It was just school as far as I was concerned. But that’s what they were. And the teacher that ran this remained one of my close friends until just a few years ago when she died.

Well there you are as I just told you I have no idea whether it was different or not. It was just school and I accepted it. It wasn’t until some years afterwards that I found out that it was Montessori classes. And I’m surprised to see that they’re still going today.

Oh well, look at me.

It was a good system.

Well, I didn’t like school at all until I went to Perth Modern School. Unfortunately either because my father

moved around a bit or because he got a bee in his bonnet: I went to so many schools. Started at Claremont, then next thing I knew I was at Thomas Street, then I was at Newcastle Street, then I was at Highgate, then I was at Perth Boys and I was getting quite bewildered by all this. But fortunately I won that scholarship to Modern School and then I was in paradise.

And at Modern School, it would have had to have been one of the finest schools in the Commonwealth without a doubt. And incidentally eight of our family went to Modern School. That’s a record. And so the subjects that I studied there were of course the usual ones: mathematics,

geometry, trigonometry, algebra and then Latin, geography, physics, chemistry, English. And that’s how it was for the first three years. Then in the last two years I was in the, what they call the science classes. I was in Science Four and Five. And there it was

simply mathematics, physics, chemistry and English and nothing else. And the subject I liked most was English. And incidentally I sent Elizabeth, is it? Richard’s at Orange, I sent her something I wrote about the Yachtsmen’s Scheme…

Anyway, my father had decided I was going to be a doctor. And that’s why I went into the science classes. But my favourite subjects were English. But then my father died in my last year in school. So that was the end of a medical

career.

Well looking back, no. My uncle was a doctor, my sister, my brother. And they all reckon the job sucks. And today I think doctors sitting there seeing all these people coming in with their ills, aches and pains, I would get very board with that.

At the time I thought it was a good idea but then there was no money and so I got a job.

For most people a lot. For me, not much.

I’ve never been an athlete. I like swimming and I like walking and I like backyard cricket and so on but I’m not an athlete. A couple of brothers were very good at it but I was not. It’s interesting that all my mates who were at school who were athletes are now dead. So there you are.

I never belonged seriously to any teams. They had tennis teams and football teams and swimming teams and so on. It was a big thing. But Modern School was not big on sport. Pale and Scots they were very much more so. We were much more interested in the academic side of things.

It was excellent.

Well there was no discipline at all in that sense. Nobody standing over you with a rod. You see you have to understand that everybody at Modern School was very proud to be there. They’d passed this examination. All those people that failed, only a hundred

got in so they were proud to be there and no one played up. There might have been an odd-bod but there was no rowdiness. The classrooms were quiet and everybody bent to their tasks, you know. They wanted to get on. Wanted to do well.

Oh he was skiting about it all the time. Not just me, eight of us.

He’d talk about that to anybody who’d listen. Well he was a teacher himself. As a matter of fact he was a hard man to have for a father. He was always looking at my reports, “That’s not quite good enough.” “You could do better than that.” And I used to get a bit fed up with it

as a matter of fact. When I got home from school after tea he'd say, “What did you get for homework tonight?” If I said I didn’t get any he was, “Oh I’ll set you some.” And he would. I never got out of homework.

Oh yeah. As a matter of fact, it’s a rather terrible thing to say but when he died my first reaction was; I don’t have to show him my report. Terrible thing really. I should have been absolutely grief-stricken. Instead for a moment or two I was quite happy that I didn’t have to show those reports. And my reports were excellent as a matter of fact. I passed every term examination with

distinction. That’s an average of over 75 per cent. So nothing to be ashamed of but it wasn’t good enough for him.

Yeah.

I didn’t notice it. The Depression hit in

1929, “30 so I was 12 and 13. I had no idea what was going on. But it affected my father. His salary was cut by 25 per cent. And that was a big cut. So obviously my parents must have been really in distress over that. But we didn’t notice any different. We still got you know three good meals a day and a bed to sleep in and a roof over our heads

and that was good. No doubt my elder brothers and sisters might have been more aware but I was only a kid. I was aware that there was a Depression going on of course. You know unemployment and relief queues and you know the dole and so on and so forth. In these days if you

leave school and you haven’t got a job you’d get the dole. In those days you had to be well and truly, you were living with your family, you didn’t get anything.

17.

No. No.

As a matter of fact by that time, my father had died and we were talking about a career in journalism for me. And I actually enrolled at UWA [University of Western Australia] for a course, diploma of journalism. One of the parts of the course

was you had to have a cadetship on the west. And a family friend, another ex-Modern schoolboy, Paul Hasluck, whom you may have heard of. Well you should, he was Governor General here for some years. He said, “Look don’t waste your time. There’s a waiting list this long for

cadetships. You’ll wait forever.” So I said, “All right.” And that’s when my mother decided I’d get a job in the bank. And I switched from journalism to commerce. I found I couldn’t do it.

Well you see the thing is

I got a job in the Commonwealth Bank working flat out like a slave. Terrible conditions. Until about 5 o'clock. Then hope into a tram, race around to Crawley, go to a lecture, then go to the refectory and have a meal and then go to another lecture. Then go home and do some study. And I just couldn’t cope with it. I’ve never been any good at that sort of thing.

Yes. So I just dropped it. I gave it a try.

It wasn’t hideous. No. It was just hard work. You know you’d get there and you’d have an idea of banks being 10 to 3 - marvellous.

But it’s not like that at all. You start work at 9 o'clock or earlier and you don’t stop. No let up at all.

Oh well. Can you take another day on this? No. Counter enquiries, cheque (UNCLEAR),

ledgers. It’s not actually terribly interesting work to be honest. But it was a good place to work. And after a while I was transferred from the William Street branch to Perth office and that was lovely.

I went onto what they call exchanges.

Exchanging cheques. Teller’s clerk, A&G [?] department and so on. And there were some lovely people there. And there wasn’t such a pressure. It was a good place to work.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes I was talking to one of them yesterday. Elsie

McKenzie. She was Elsie Crawford. And she’d the widow of Eric McKenzie and they were the parents of a well known cricketer; Graham McKenzie. But she was one of the girls. There were some lovely girls there. They were very good quality, what’s the word? Good types. It was considered a very good place to work. If

you worked for the Commonwealth Bank you were almost up with the lawyers and doctors. Quite different now.

Oh nothing. Very little. I started work on thirty shillings a week. Doesn’t sound much does it? It wasn’t enough.

It cost me twenty-five shillings a week for rent, for board. That left five shillings a week for train fares, incidentals, toothbrush, soap, towel, clothes and the pictures. Not much left over for getting into mischief. I was always broke.

No. by this time my mother had died.

Just after I started at the bank she died. So I was boarding.

57. Both of them. About 29 years younger than I am now.

18. I was an orphan.

And I had no one in the World interested in me or cared what I did. I had my doctor brother was in England getting medical experience. I had three sisters in Canberra and a brother up in Marble Bar.

I had a brother living in Cottesloe but he might as well have been Guatemala for all the help. He was not interested in me, my eldest brother. So I was really on my own.

I never thought much about it. I didn’t think I was especially deprived. I was happy enough. I had friends, you know had some good friends.

And I had my interests.

Oh at that time; reading and music. I’m an avid gramophone record collector. Real music. Not the kind of rubbish that your Dad likes. I was also studying the piano.

Even writing music. I had the pleasure of hearing one of my pieces of music performed at the Modern School just a few months ago at a reunion. So those were my interests.

Oh well, I suppose so but I wasn’t brilliant by any means. Considering I had no

tuition to speak of I wasn’t too bad. And then in 1938 I was transferred to Mount Magnet.

Exactly.

There was gold up there but also pastoral. Lots of sheep stations around there. And

it wasn’t really a very interesting place. And there were four of us on the staff. The manager was a pig. He lived at the hotel across the road. The accountant was a drunk and he lived with me on the bank premises. And

I just really didn’t like that business very much.

Four. I was that junior.

I’ve just told you what we did. Same again you know, just looking after ledgers and

looking after customers and arranging drafts and opening accounts and closing them. It was not a good place for a fragile person like me to try to exist.

Oh, it was easy. Britain declared war on Germany. And

so I joined the navy. As a matter of fact I didn’t get out of it that way because Mount Magnet was what they call a two-year station. You’re expected to be there for two years. No more, no less. But they recognised it was a lousy place to work. So two years. And my two years was just up when I joined the navy. And so

I knew I didn’t want to join the army. I was absolutely sure about that.

Well I was in the militia before the war. You know horses and guns and so on. Not my style.

Once a week. And then we had weekends.

And then every year we went away for a couple of weeks. I just didn’t like it.

Actually it was futile really. We had horses pulling guns. World War I guns. As soon as war broke out

all of that was obsolete. There’s no way in the world we could have gone to war with that lot. So it was training of a sort but it was not the sort of training I liked.

Guildford. In amongst all the hot sand.

Much too sensitive for that.

No idea. I just thought it was the manly thing to do. And I realised it was a mistake but I couldn’t get out of it. but I was transferred to Mount Magnet so I did get out of it. so when the recruiting people came around trying to get people to join the army I said, “Nothing doing.” But I saw an advertisement

in the paper for young men with certain educational qualifications, which I had. Had a leaving certificate in mathematics and physics and so on. To join the Royal Australian Navy as sub-lieutenants in anti-submarine. So I wrote down

and applied for that. And I got knocked back. So then I thought I’d join the air force. I wrote down to the people at St Georges and said, “Well here I am.” Told them who I was, what I could do and said, “I’m prepared to join the air force in any capacity what-so-ever. I’m prepared to come to Perth at my own expense,

in my own time.” And they wrote back and said, “Unfortunately there were no vacancies in the particular section for which I had applied. Which was an absolutely ridiculous reply to mine because I hadn’t applied to any. I said, “Anything.” and then I got a phone call from a friend of mine, named Dave McCulloch, who was ex-Commonwealth Bank but was now in the navy.

He was talking about this anti-submarine thing. He said, “Look, you would not have had a chance. They only advertised it as a matter of form. They only want six all together. And they’ve already got them earmarked anyway.” But he said, “How would you like to join the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman, with a chance of getting a commission? I said, “Yeah.” And so the upshot of that was the day I left the bank

for my two years were up, I went to Fremantle and I had interviews. And I had the most gruelling tests: intelligence tests and eyesight and mental and Lord knows what.

No just the morning. And I passed them.

They were very impressed with me, they said. Naturally. And so that was the morning of September 23rd. at 4 o'clock in the afternoon I was on the Strathnaver on my way to England.

I suppose so. You got a sort of feeling: I really ought to be doing this. You know it’s my duty to prepare yourself to defend the country and this kind of thing. Silly stuff really.

I can’t answer that intelligently. You just get sort of a bit of a feeling of what’s going on around you. What people are saying and you think, “Oh well, perhaps I should do this.” And I did. But I didn’t like it.

Yes. Sailing on the Swan River. And that was the idea of the Yachtsmen’s Scheme. I forgot to mention that. One of the qualifications for this joining the Royal Navy was that you were a yachtsman. And I never owned a boat but one of my brothers owned a boat and I

used to go sailing with him for some years before the war. And so I was a yachtsman.

Well, you should have read my talk. Well it was simply, they were looking for young men with certain reasonably

high educational qualifications to join the Royal Navy. As a matter of fact we joined really as it happens under false pretences. Britain was expecting an invasion at any moment from the Germans. There were

barges all lined up across the north coast of France ready to invade Britain. And they said, “We’ve got to do something about this.” And so they were busy building small boats, MLs [Motor Launches] and torpedo boats and so on. And they needed people to man them. And there was a desperate need for this.

And so they went to Canada and New Zealand and Africa and Australia and said, “Look we want men and they’ve got to be experienced in small boats. They’ve got to have a few clues to train as officers.” That was the idea. And I was one of the first.

I was in the very first batch that went. My number was 10. That’s not bad. FV10. But as it turned out, Hitler decided that before they invaded they had to soften Britain up with air raids. And so there were monster air raids happening on the big cities and so on and so on.

And they got well and truly trounced. You’ve heard of the first of the few? Perhaps you haven’t. The spitfires you know they were shooting down German planes. They lost hundreds and hundreds of planes. It was a failure. They couldn’t do what they thought they were going to do so they called the invasion off.

So they didn’t need all these small boats and people but they still needed officers. And I never actually went to a small boat. I went to a cruiser when I got my commission. And the only time I went to a small boat was when I went back to Australia. So that was what the scheme was all about.

And I think they got about four or five hundred people all together from Australia. Then they cut the scheme out in May 1942 because they didn’t need it any more. But the Royal Australia Navy were not taking anybody at all. They didn’t have enough ships and had no used for anybody at that stage. So

that's the scheme.

Yes.

Well it just happened. It just coincided with the fact that the Strathnaver arrived in Fremantle that very day. And the Strathnaver already

had on board people like me from Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. All doing the same thing. And we were the Perth contingent so it just sort of worked out like that.

Not until we got to England. We went as civilians. Private cabins. Morning

tea and fruit in bed. Stewards waiting on us at the table. It was lovely.

We did. We had a lovely trip. And of course I soon made friends with the people that I was travelling with. And some of them are friends to this day.

Yes. They were Yachtsmen

Scheme candidates from the other states. There were about 68 all in a batch and there were 9 from Fremantle. Why my number was 10 I don’t know but obviously there may have been originally ten and one dropped out somewhere. I never worked that one out.

The Strathnaver? Well have you been on a trip as a tourist? It was just like that. Well we were in tourist class cabins

of course. Three of us in a cabin. And we were just tourists. We really were. And we went to Durban and we went ashore and had fun there. Then when to Cape Town and enjoyed that and then Free Town where we could not go ashore. And Liverpool.

I think the expression they use today; just hanging out with your mates. That’s about it. You see we became very good friends and we were just talking and mucking about and so on. There were some officers on board, we were ratings of course although we weren’t in uniform. And we were supposed to be given some sort of you know

routine discipline but they didn’t bother. They were having a good time themselves. It was just like a pleasure trip.

No. nothing. Of course when we got to Liverpool we arrived in the middle of an air raid and then we realised that there was a war on.

Well, my trip on the Strathnaver was my first overseas trip. I’d been up the coast once but we went right down south to avoid submarines.

It was very rough. It was so rough that you could hear the propellers thrashing thin air when they you know. And then it calmed down. And one day, the sea was calm, we just saw a row of buildings sitting on the water so it seemed. And that was Durban.

Durban was a very exciting place. And of course we didn’t have the money to enjoy some of the delights that Durban was offering. But we had some fun there. And there were things like rickshaws that we’d never seen before. So we did a bit of running around on that.

No good? I beg your pardon. I didn’t even know what to do in those days. I’d had no drinks, no cigarettes, no drunks, no sex, nothing. We were just innocent tourists.

We were all the same. There were some amongst us that went off to some place called District City or something. And I think there might have been a few brothels up there but I didn’t go near them. Knowing how wrong it is to do things like that.

That’s an interesting question because the Australia army did behave abominably in places like that. And they did things that they thought were very amusing but actually did quite a lot of damage. And on one particular occasion they lifted a car off the roadway and

deposited it in the general post office. But we just did innocent things. And we had quite a lot of fun in that way.

Oh only a couple of days. Same at Cape Town.

Oh it was very exciting. Terribly exciting to think that you know a few days before I was in the Commonwealth Bank and all of a sudden I’m in Durban.

Durban was an exciting place. But Cape Town was much more interesting. Cape Town had that magnificent Table Mountain. We went up that. Cape Town is a lovely place.

On a, what do they call them? A cable car.

Oh yes. A completely new experience for us. We went up there and we got around up there. And never at any time did it enter our heads to do anything that wasn’t just harmless tourism. No, we were good lads. We were nice boys.

Oh yes all the way to England.

Not to my knowledge. I think the place looked pretty intact to me.

Oh yeah.

Well we didn’t notice it. But there was a difference.

I’ll explain later. Because of that. Australians have a reputation for being wild and unruly. And so when we got to England, well I’ll come to that later.

Yes. Air raid. I don’t mind admitting I was a bit scared. I think there’s an expression that I can’t repeat

here. It means being scared.

Oh yeah. I thought; cripes, there’s a war on. I’d forgotten about that. Anyway, we disembarked were put into a train and we

trained all the way across England to a place called Fareham.

Oh all night. It was at night time.

Sleep? No I don’t think so. Might have dozed off but we were sitting up of course. And when you looked out the window you could see flashes of bombs and anti-aircraft guns and things.

Anyway, we got to Fareham.

Yeah. Oh yeah. And there were occasions when they were. One occasion very seriously inconvenienced me because that train line was wrecked when I was in London.

Yeah.

anyway we got to this place called Fareham and from there we went by bus to a place called HMS Collingwood, which is a naval training establishment. And then we found we really were in the navy at last.

Oh quite O.K. You know there was nothing brutal about it. It was you know, “Thanks for coming

you blokes.”

No I think we just marched into huts where we were going to live. But because Australians had this fierce reputation our group of 68 Australians had been allocated two particularly

easy-going friendly chief petty officers to look after us. Two men that they thought had the right personality to deal with ruffians like us. And we weren’t. We were well behaved. We got on very well with these blokes and it was a very happy relationship. And it was good place.

Oh not really. It was just a

huge, flat area with huts all around the place. A parade ground. Big dining hall and canteen.

It was brand new. It was only just established

that very year. So it was quite new.

There was a certain amount of brick but the huts were timber. Timber and asbestos, that sort of thing. You know they were put up in a hurry.

Yes. It was clean. The

ablutions were beautiful; hot showers and that sort of thing. We Australians used them. The English blokes didn’t use them much. And we slept in double bunks you know. All the way down.

Yeah.

No. half went in one, half in the other.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

No, I tended to stay with the West Australian boys. I guess you’d call that a clique. But it was natural that I should stay with them on the whole. Although I you know was quite friendly with others. But there were

some in that 68 that I never spoke to at any time. Never even knew their names you know. So we did stick together to that extent.

No. No I don’t think so. No. well I didn’t notice it anyway.

No. No I don’t think so.

But Collingwood was a nice place.

We were. When we got to Collingwood that’s when we got our uniforms.

No. I don’t remember it. They just gave us uniforms and we put then on. Not a very vivid description is it?

Yeah

I’ve got photographs of them if you want. Just blue bell-bottom trousers and a white vest and a blue jumper and lanyard around your neck and a hat. How’s that?

Oh no, no.

No. Not there. No we never got into any situation where you got them dirty. But Collingwood was a good spot. While we were there they had an air raid.

We used to buy from the canteen or from the shops in Fareham things like jam and chocolate and milk to supplement our diet. The food we got in Collingwood was quite good but it was pretty basic.

I can’t remember. Just basic food, you know stews and kippers. Oh, I can’t remember.

They were pretty standard. Pretty basic meals. Anyway, one morning we lined

up outside our juts waiting to be marched into the dining hall for breakfast. Clutching our bottles of milk and jam and so on and so on. And all of a sudden these German planes appeared and just swooped down upon us and started to batter the depot. And immediately we all

melted away into the nearest air raid shelter. All except one man who thought he had to do something to protect his two bottles of milk. And he rushed back into his hut right down the end to his locker, put the milk in his locker and then raced out again to join the rest of us in the shelter. I said to him:

“Why did you do that?” and he said, “I’m f'd if I know.” You see if he thought his milk was going to be safe in his locker he should have stayed by his locker and if he thought he was going to be safe in the shelter he should have taken the milk there. And we were laughing about that for quite a time afterwards. And that boy,

he subsequently got his commission and he was out in the Far East in the Timor Sea as a matter of fact and his ship was bombed by the Japanese and he was flung into the water along with others. And they got into a boat and they were drifting

for days, for weeks and he just perished in the boat. That was the way he finished up.

I don’t remember that. No idea. I’ve probably got a record of it somewhere. Where he went but I can’t tell you now. So it was very sad. But he was a nice bloke.

But he reckoned he was a complete idiot for… so that’s what you do when you’re under stress. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

I’d say about two months.

Well you were woken at 6 o'clock. Have your

shower and so on. Get into uniforms and go onto the parade ground and get mustered and given instructions for the day. Then were would go off to lecture rooms or a gymnasium as the case may be. And we had lectures every day

on how to be seamen.

Well general seamanship, boat handling, knots: tying knots. Signals, Morse code. Just everything to do with being a seaman. Oh we liked it. And

we got a lot of kindness from local residents too. You know we’d be told somebody wanted to entertain us at private homes. It was lovely.

Oh as often as you wanted to be. But the padre attached to us: he was a Church of Scotland padre I think it was.

He spoke to a few of us and said, “How would you like to come to my home for tea when you knock off?” We knocked off at 4 o'clock every day. From that time on we were free until 10 o'clock when we had to back in the depot and in bed. So we said, “That’s great.” So I think there were 4 of us and we walked into town and

somewhere up out of Fareham to his home. And we got there about 5 o'clock I suppose. And there was a really sumptuous afternoon tea waiting for us. You know sandwiches and cakes and all that sort of thing. And we thought; well that’s terrific you know. We hoed into that. And we thought, “Well we wonder what tea’s going to be like?” What

we didn’t realise was that was tea. We’d had it. And we sort of sat around waiting and waiting and waiting for our evening meal. And of course all the time he was just wishing we’d get the hell out of it. And we didn’t know. So after a while I think they gave up and produced a

meal for us. Which was actually supper. We were worried that we weren’t going to be fed in time to get back to the depot by 10 o'clock. We found out afterwards that we had been invited for tea and we’d had tea. We had not been invited for supper, which was their evening meal. Of course in Australia tea is the evening meal. Supper is something that you might have or

might not late at night. A cup of coffee or malted milk or something.

It was. Terribly. Particularly later when we realise what an awful mistake we’d made.

No we never talked about it to him. But we talked about it amongst ourselves. And some of our Pommy [British] friends told us you know, what we’d done.

And it was, “Oh cripes.” You know, how awful. So anyway we finished up at Collingwood and we were then sent to….

English? All right. Yes, quite good. We didn’t have much contact with them.

Of course the only contact we did have in fact was due to the fact we had three or four extra British sailors to make up the numbers to get a hut full you know. That’s all. But I don’t think we had much to do with any of the rest of them. But our relations with these fellas were quite good.

I don’t think we needed to adjust. We were doing pretty fine I think. Anyway, they were quite funny these fellas. They had no idea what Australia was. One of them said, “Oh it’s good to see the neutrals [countries that didn’t take sides in the war] joining up.” You know, neutrals.

And another one couldn’t believe that we were volunteers. These blokes were all conscripts. They couldn’t believe anybody would volunteer to join anything.

Well I realised these poor blokes… I felt sorry for them. I’ll tell you what though, they were a dirty lot.

They wore their underclothes that were a sort of rather heavy singlet: short sleeved like that. And long johns right down to their ankles. And they lived in those. At night they’d peel off their uniform and just hop into bed with their underclothes on. In the morning they’d get out of bed,

put on their uniform. Splash some water in their faces. That was it. And their feet gradually got dirtier and dirtier. You’ve probably never even heard of this but they’d get these rings around the ankles where the shoes you know mark. They were dirty people. I realise they live in a very cold country and there’s not a lot of big inducement to

you know strip off. They couldn’t understand it, we were under the showers there stark naked and oh lovely you know. And they’re splashing water in their face.

No.

Oh no. No I don’t think we’d thought we’d made a mistake by doing that. I was just something we wanted to do. And I’m not talking about blind patriotism or anything like that. It was just going on at the time and we thought we might be in it. I had three brothers, they were all in the army. And you know

I thought: Oh I’ll be in it too. I never thought much about it. I remember one of my mates when we got to Liverpool in the middle of the air raid, he said, “Cripes.” He didn’t say cripes he said, “Christ. If I’d known it was going to be like this I wouldn’t have joined up.” He said, “This is dinkum. I didn’t realise it was going to be like this.” Jokingly.

No I never thought about it. But they were to a man, conscripted. Didn’t have a choice. And I’m quite sure there’s be a few blokes there that really didn’t want to be there and were not happy about it.

I don’t know. It

was just what I thought. I assumed there must have been. Must have been quite a few. After all if you’re conscripted, you were told you had to join the army, navy or air force and you didn’t particularly want to do it you’d be a bit disgruntled wouldn’t you? I never thought about it. I didn’t have much to do with them. We were

pretty well a tight-knit group. Anyway, we finished at Collingwood and we were qualified sailors then. And we went to a place in Portsmouth called the Royal Naval Barracks.

Dreadful. Oh it was a fearsome place. It must have been hundreds of years old, ancient. Everything was ancient. And the discipline was very oppressive. And oh gee, these petty officers shouting order at you all the time. And we were there to late drafting to

sea. And as I said in my article, we decided that the only reason for the existence of this awful place was to make us keen to get to sea as quickly as possible. Because that’s how we felt. While we were there we did drill, drill, drill, drill. Marching through the streets. And in

overalls and shovels cleaning up after air raids and debris. Including the occasional charred body. And it was really a hard routine.

Oh it was dreadful.

I was talking to another naval officer here. I gave him my lecture to read and he said, “Oh that bit at Portsmouth. You were absolutely spot on. Exactly what I thought.” But one day we were at drill on the parade ground and we found ourselves in the charge of a petty officer by

the name of Pitcher. He was retired from the navy and brought back. A World War I man you know. And he was brought back for the duration of the war. And he was giving us drill. And he really didn’t know much about it. A very mild mannered man. And

we gave him a bad time. You know misunderstanding his orders and turning left instead of right and so on and so on. In no time at all our section of the parade ground was a shambles. And this poor bloke he’s trying to make us do things. Anyway, “stand easy”

came along. Do you know what I mean by that?

Yeah. And we went back into our mess deck to have a cuppa [cup of tea]. And around the walls of this room were lots of photographs and paintings and so on depicting certain historical naval events. We’d never taken much notice of them. And this particular day it just so happened that one of us did

take notice of a particular picture. And there’s Queen Alexandra, Edward the VII’s widow, awarding the Victoria Cross to none other than Petty Officer Pitcher. And we’d been rubbishing this bloke. When we went

back to the parade ground we were a model squad. We did everything right. We were very, very smart. He was obviously delighted with this astonishing improvement. He’s a Victoria Cross winner. And some years later through a friend of mine in the War Museum here we looked up this chap. I’ve got his citation out there.

In addition to the Victoria Cross he’d won the Distinguished Service Medal and a French decoration the Croix de Guerre. I felt just a little bit more ashamed of my behaviour all those years ago. Quite extraordinary. Nice man. Shortly after the

war he died I found, according to my records. But the Royal Naval Barracks was really hammered by the Germans. And they had an air raid shelter. It was a series of tunnels under the parade ground.

And you were perfectly safe down there unless the parade ground got a direct hit. And the bomb would go straight through. And I don’t mind admitting when I was down there my teeth were chattering. I was really frightened. It’s when

you’re not on duty you don’t like it. If you’re on duty, you’ve got something to do, you know you don’t mind so much. We were given a lecture in navigation. Anyway, we knocked off for the day and that night

the barracks were attacked and of the whole town of Portsmouth was attacked. And they did a tremendous amount of damage. Anyway, the next morning we got up and got washed and dressed and so on and went back to the lecture room, where we found one entire wall of the lecture room had been blown out. Everything was there. The desks were in the right place. But this wall had just gone.

And the officer giving us the lecture came in and he went up to the dais and he said, “Now as I was saying yesterday….” Made no mention to the fact that half the room was missing. So they were pretty cool customers.

Portsmouth? Oh it was dreadful. It was a naval establishment you know. Portsmouth, Southampton, London, Coventry, Plymouth: they all got a terrible pasting. I was in London on leave the night they just about destroyed the city.

And I was on the way back to Portsmouth at the end of my leave, standing on Waterloo Station waiting for my train and all of a sudden an incendiary started falling through the glass roof. They were all around us you know. So we thought we better get out of there. And we were taken down to the Underground railway station,

which was a very good air raid shelter. We found lots of people lived there every night; civilians. They slept on the platform every night. Anyway, we were there until about 3 or 4 in the morning. And then we were told to come up. And we were taken across the road to a

Union Jack Club, which was still standing and we were bedded down there for a couple of hours. Then at 6o'clock we were told to get moving. We couldn’t go back to the train because the train wasn’t running any more because the line between London and Surbiton had been demolished. But there were 6

buses lined up outside this place. All ready for us that took us to Surbiton Railway Station. And I thought, “Well at least we know they’re marvellous.” All this clamour, all this destruction, noise bombs etcetera. All that going on and somebody had organised those buses. I thought it was

brilliant. Very impressed.

Underground? Well I’ll say it was full of people and just concentrated BO [body odour] as a matter of fact. They were sleeping all along the platform and all the way up the stairs as well. Sleeping you know.

They were frightened to stay in their homes and they were safe down there. I’ll never forget those scenes.

Yeah. The lot. Let’s go to bed, down to the Underground. They didn’t bother to wait for air raid sirens they just knew there’d be one so they just spent the night there.

Very little. There was just about 2 feet between their feet and the edge of the platform. Very dangerous really. You know, one false move and you’re squashed under a train.

Oh, we didn’t find anyway to lie down. Is that what you mean? No, oh no, we just had to

sit where we could. There was no space for lying down. That was all taken up by the regulars. Couldn’t blame them.

Oh shovels mainly. A pick axe. The destruction was real woeful, really.

Whole buildings just reduced to rubble. And when you find underneath this rubble a human body, which is so crushed it’s impossible to tell whether it’s male or female without a really minute examination. I tell you, after a couple of those I used to find it really hard to eat my midday meal.

Oh yes they were all around the place. We were just doing hack work. You know just shovelling up rubble and putting it into carts and trucks. It was terrible. No one who has not been there and seen it could really truly appreciate the destruction. Utter destruction

of these bombs. Just whole streets just reduced to stones, bricks and mortar. Anyway, we eventually went to sea.

When we were waiting to go to sea we were not really very keen to go to small ships for our first sea experience with the navy. We found that if we fronted up to the able seaman and the drafting office,

identified ourselves and mentioned our preference for cruisers, battleships and anything bigger than that at the same time passing a ten shilling note over the counter we usually got what we wanted. And I well remember the day when four of my Australian mates

all of whom had parted with their ten shillings, came rushing into the mess deck almost hysterical with excitement and delight. They were going “woo-woo, woo-woo” around and around: doing a war dance. It was terrific. Because they were drafted to the [HMS] Hood. Now the Hood was Britain’s largest battleship.

It was a legend: the mighty Hood. Everybody else was green with envy. And a few months later the Hood met the German battleship Bismarck and the Hood was blown up. Do you remember anything about this? Probably never even heard of it.

Well I wasn’t there of course, thank goodness. But the Bismarck was in fact the largest battleship in the World. Marvellous ship. Huge, bristling with guns and a beautiful ship too, lovely lines. Anyway,

when that came out from Germany everybody was absolutely petrified. If this battleship got amongst the Allied shipping they would just blow everything out of the water and they wouldn’t have to get within 20 miles to do it. and so when the Bismarck

came out spies told us of it happening. And the Bismarck went up the coast of Norway, across Iceland and down like that. And the British sent out ships to meet it and one of the ships was Hood. And they met somewhere in the

Iceland Sea, just southwest of the British Isles. Early morning on the 23rd of May. My birthday. And in about 5 minutes the Hood didn’t exist any more. A lucky shot. Just came down through the Hood’s decks into a magazine. It was like a… it just vaporised.

This beautiful ship. There were 1,400 people on board. 3 survived. My four mates perished. And that was that.

Well it so happened that the ship I was sent to was a cruiser,

HMS Fiji. Beautiful new ship. 9,000 tonnes, very fast: 36 knots. You imagine a ship like that. 45 miles an hour. Anyway, we were sunk off Crete.

Nothing.

No but, winding back again, when we were sunk we were eventually picked up and taken to Alexandria.

And in Alexandria we heard that the Hood had been sunk. We were sunk on the 22nd of May and on the 24 that off May, in Alexandria, we were told that the Hood had gone. And we were very, very downhearted. We’d lost our own ship and half a dozen others as well during our particular engagement.

And to hear that this marvellous ship, the Hood had gone, couldn’t believe it.

Oh yes. The navy in Alexandria would have all this information. And the only information they gave us, all that we needed to know was that the Hood had been blown up. When this happened,

it was a very thrilling period in naval history and there’s a film made called Sink the Bismarck. Churchill said, “You must sink the Bismarck.” And they detached everything they could lay their hands on, ships from

all over the place were sent, tearing towards the place where the Bismarck was. And this beautiful Bismarck, it’s very first voyage, it’s very first time out of Germany it was sunk too by our ships. And there were 2,000 on board the Bismarck. And only

about 100 survivors. All those lovely young blokes. You know the Bismarck was reduced to a wreck. Everything was firing at it. it’s a long story. A very interesting story and I think for entertainment purposes, get that film Sink the Bismarck. It’s a wonderful film.

Well I can give you a photograph of it. I’ve even got it on my computer. Well it was built in 1939,

9,000 tons, had 12 six-inch guns, 8 four-inch guns: a very modern ship. Very fast. A very fine captain and commander who both reached the high rank of admirals and they became knights in later years. And I had the pleasure of

corresponding with them after the war. I even went to meet one of them in England when I was over there. The other one had died. It was a very smart ship. It’s hard to describe it.

Absolutely non-existent. They were built to accommodate 600 and there were 800 people on board. My sleeping quarters was in a corridor next to the gunnery officer’s captain, on the steel deck. I had a hammock but I couldn’t swing it. No room to swing a hammock.

I would lay it out and I slept on that. And I always had an idea that for ideal sleep you want perfect quiet and perfect darkness. And I was under brilliant lights and my head was next to an electric motor, a dynamo or something that was going flat out. And I slept. I was so tired.

Of course wartime you see. They needed all those extra people for all the extra duties that had to be done.

Now you’re getting technical.

Well,

a simple example would be in peacetime for instance, they wouldn’t need to post lookouts with binoculars. And there’s 8 of them on at a time in 3 shifts: that’s 24. So that’s just one aspect. Because of wartime you have to have all this extra people doing

lookout duty. It was a very important duty. They’re sitting there with these huge binoculars, scanning the horizon looking for submarines and anything else. And so through other departments, where in peacetime they’d get by with a certain number in wartime they have to have more so that they’d have everybody doing a proper amount. So that’s why.

Yes well of course the cruiser is now obsolete. They don’t have cruisers any more. Cruiser is somewhere between a battleship and a destroyer. A cruiser would be for

convoy duty, you know with big guns that can do some damage. A cruiser also had anti-submarine radar , asdic and so on. They were like a sort of mini battleship. And also for shelling shore establishments and that kind of thing. Just something extra.

Battleships do that as well, cruisers also do that. They’ve got these six-inch guns that can do an awful lot of damage.

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.

The mess deck, that’s where we eat and sleep. That would be a couple of decks sown and then of course a couple more for the

machinery, the computers that control the guns. Then down a bit further is what they call the lower steering position. And that’s right down. And during an action, you see normally the ship is steered from the bridge. They’ve got a helmsman up there and they’ve got an officer that tells him which way to go

and how fast to go and so on. It’s all done from the bridge. But during the action they wipe that all out and it’s all done right down there somewhere. And that was my action station. And not a very nice place to be when the ship’s being bombed, particularly when it take on a dangerous list. You know you’re going to go for a sink sooner or later.

Well there’s a group of people down there and they have the engine room telegraphs there. They have the steering wheel, compass and so on. And they simply do what they’re told. What the officer says,

“You steer the ship” or put on the revolutions and make it go faster or slower. And you realise when the ship’s being bombed, they’re going all over the place trying to dodge bombs. And it’s quite bewildering down there, trying to keep up with the instructions from up top. Now go faster, go slower, go left, go right, you know port, starboard and so on. And the ship managed to dodge quite a few bombs but it got hit a few times and

finally it just got a fatal blow and rolled over and sank.

It’s service life. It’s tolerable. I didn’t have any problems with it.

Of course there was a problem. Our mess mates knew that some of us were going for commission and this caused a little bit of resentment, you know. A little bit because we were different. You know, we

were just passing through on our way to better things you know? So with some people. We were called CW Candidates: Commissions and Warrants. It wasn’t long before they started to call us WC [Water Closet] Candidates. And after a while it became something else, which I can’t repeat.

It was very rude, describing a toilet. But we all the same had some nice fellas and some good friends.

Only four.

On the ship or where? There were only 4 of us. Only 4 candidates. That was enough to stir things up.

No. as a matter of fact I don’t know how long I would have been on that ship if it hadn’t blown up.

And of course once it sank, that was the end of my sea time. I was sent back to England.

No. I was naval seaman on the Fiji. That was in May 1941. I went back to England

and I got commissioned in December of ’41 after a course. And I was a submarine lieutenant then. And a year later I became a lieutenant. And that I remained until the war stopped.

On the 22nd of May from daylight until dusk. All day long. The sun had gone down. It was still light when the ship started rolling over and we were told to get off, which we managed to do.

Oh it was easy. We were only about 20 miles from Crete and the Germans were well and truly established on Crete. And I was up on deck, very early in the morning at first light. And we saw these planes. That’s all you need to know.

I can’t tell you. Plenty. I didn’t stop to count them.

Well you didn’t have to raise the alarm you just saw these planes. We knew we were going to be attacked. So the officer watch would say, “Action stations.” And away we went.

I went down to the lowest deck and I stayed there all day long.

Nothing to eat. Just working the ship the whole day. It’s a pretty nerve racking experience.

Nothing. We were in a compartment down in the bowels of the ship. We had no idea what was going on except that we knew that we were getting battered.

We weren’t the only ones of course. There was the whole Eastern Mediterranean Fleet was being attacked. You know warships and cruisers and destroyers. There were 6 ships sunk that day. And many others badly damaged. It was a devastating attack. There was a young marine, nice young kid, they had Royal Marines on board this ship.

He was down there and he just snapped and said, “I’m getting out of here.” He deserted his post. Went for his life. Couldn’t stand it. Anyway, years later I learned that he was one that didn’t survive. So whether he was killed or drowned I don’t know.

I don’t think anyone took much notice of it. We were all pretty keyed up and I probably thought; oh I wouldn’t mind doing the same thing but you know, we understood.

My word yes. Every time a bomb hit the ship or even hit near the ship the whole ship would feel the explosion, would tremble and shake. It was a shame because it was a beautiful ship. Just getting battered by…

Up in the bridge? Well all I can say is that the officer watch there and his mates scanning the skies, looking for planes and

if they’d see one coming our way they just alter course. And they did a very good job. They were being bombed all day long. And they missed a lot of them. Another cruiser, the Gloucester it didn’t last any time. They were just rolled over in flames. There were only a handful of survivors form that. We had a bout 600 survivors out of

800.

You could hear the bomb hit. Woomph, you know. It’s a terrible sound.

And I don’t blame that little kid. He was only 18, 19 years old. Losing his nerve. But of course eventually he lost his life. How I can’t say.

It was hit constantly all day long. Not only hits but indirect hits. Hits to the water alongside which can do a lot of damage. And the one that sank us went straight down the funnel. They were very lucky.

My word. Everything.

It was an ear-shattering, nerve-racking experience. And not very pleasant. Just cooped up in this cabin which would be about the size of that dining room and nothing to eat all day. Just

certain that sooner or later that we’re going to cop it.

We just climbed up every ladder we could find and got out of there. That was it. Another thing that impressed me was sometime during the day the powers that be,

anticipating the final result, had strung ropes all the way along the corridors. Because the ship’s like this. Not like that, it’s like that. And you can’t walk like that so there’s ropes to help you. And somebody had strung these all along the corridors. So that was very thoughtful. And when the time came to leave the ship

you don’t jump, you just walk down the side……

Well of course you have to understand the Royal Navy is a very old service. They’ve had a lot of experience and they know what to do. And so somebody, when the ship was on a very acute list, somebody realised that if we

had to abandon the ship we’d never be able to walk along those corridors. Because you know, so they string ropes up all over the place. And they’re essential. Without them you’d be slipping and sliding all over the place.

Oh that wasn’t very difficult.

We got an order from up top, “Abandon ship.” So we said, “Right, that’s a good idea.” And we climbed up through the various ladders and along the corridors and out onto the deck.

Water.

Well,

it actually, it was really quite sad because British sailors many of them just simply could not swim. In peacetime that’d be impossible. You wouldn’t get to first base if you couldn’t learn to swim. But in

wartime they haven’t got time to train people and so quite a number of the casualties were drownings. Not killed. And there was one, something I’ve always been a bit ashamed of, there was one sailor there. We all had these rubber tyres,

tubes. They called them Mae Wests and we had them inflated all the time and they help to keep you afloat. But they won’t on their own keep you afloat. You just can’t let go and you bob up. And there’s this sailor who’s absolutely panic-stricken, arms flying all over the place. And

I went over to try and help him……

I swam over to him to try and help him. And the next thing I knew he was all over me. I was under water. He was standing on me. I said, “No, I can’t help him.” Every time I touched him he’d be clambering over so I left him.

And I have no doubt that he drowned. But I’ve always thought back to that and I’ve always thought that I really didn’t handle that very well. I should have made some kind of an effort to support him. I had no life saving training though I had a bit of an idea. I could have done something. And of course I was worried about myself as well. And I didn’t want to be drowned by this bloke standing on top

of me. But I’ve often wondered if I could have done, handled that better. So.

No I didn’t jump. I walked.

Just a gentle slope down the steel side of the ship. And

but it was quite funny in a way because when I got up on deck I sat down on a bench for a moment over there consider my situation you know, and decide how to spend the rest of the evening. And I realised that I would be better off without my boots. So I took them off. And anybody else would have just flung them

overboard, you know. But I picked them up and looked around for somewhere to put them where they’d be neat and tidy and not get in anybody’s way. So I’ll just put them down there. There’s fine. And I’ve no doubt they’re still there. Neat and tidy at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Now that’s going back to that boy with his milk. The sort of thing you do when you’re not thinking straight. You see

I thought I was in control of the situation and I didn’t think I was panicking or anything but it was a silly thing to do. And when I got into the water I realised how silly it was so I started laughing. You know; oh what an idiot you know. And a couple of sailors around me, they said, “Not a bloody laughing matter mate.” Which of course it wasn’t.

But I thought it was at the time.

Well that’s all. There were only two or three of them and I left them. I swam across. I could see a raft in the distance and I swam across to that.

There were only 2 or 3 around me in the water at that particular moment. They were all over the place but around me there were only a few.

But on the raft. A great big huge thing about 10 feet by 5. Huge tubes like that. And this raft was 5 feet under water with the weight of the people on top of it. Just

hanging onto each other supported by this raft. So we stayed there.

I’ve got a photograph of that too. Just on it’s side.

No. No. It did sink I know but I wasn’t there.

Well you see by

the time I got to the raft it was dark. Pitch dark. And we were just there in darkness wondering what the hell was going to happen to us. Were we going to be there for a few hours or a few weeks?

Not too bad at first. This is the Mediterranean, not the North Sea thank goodness. Up there you’d last 10 minutes. You wouldn’t even last that long. But

after a while we heard this sort of, the unmistakable sound of ship’s machinery coming up out of the gloom you know. And it was a destroyer. There were two of them picking up survivors.

I don’t know. I wasn’t interested. I just swam to the side of the destroyer and they

pulled me on board, helped me down below and gave me some cups of hot chocolate. I drank 5 cups of hot chocolate then I just passed out. And took no further interest in the proceedings.

No idea. I had no idea that we would be rescued at all.

See the Germans were machine gunning survivors in the water. And so ships didn’t stop to pick them up. It was dangerous to stop anyway because then they’re sitting targets. And so they just took off.

Oh yeah. You could see the destroyers and other ships

just going off into the distance and we thought; oh we’ve been deserted. They couldn’t stop and they couldn’t pick anybody up so they left. And we had reason to believe that they’d just simply keep going until they got to Alexandria. But apparently some of them were detached to come back after dark and look for us. And fortunately they found most of us.

Oh yes, these dive bombs and joosh-joosh-joosh-joosh. Dispose of as many as possible. And fortunately they were not near me.

Oh it would be half a mile, a mile.

Big area. It was a very large area of battle. The fleet was spread over miles.

No not really. It happened that the captain of that ship was on that

Raft. And he tried to cheer people up by having singing. Singing songs. Some of them were rather bawdy I’m afraid. And they were just about the only songs that most of knew.

Oh I think it must have. If any of these blokes

just sat there or lay there just doing nothing you know they’d start thinking things. I never thought about sharks for instance. There are sharks in the Mediterranean but there weren’t any around. I think probably with all the bombing that was going on the fish would be frightened away.

Very high.

A very fine man. I’ve got a photograph of him in there. He was a wonderful bloke. And I was very proud to be serving under that man. Captain William Pallet and Commander Gladstone. They were two first class men, you know. You couldn’t find a better type of man

than the regular Royal Navy officer.

I can’t tell you that. There were 2 destroyers. All I can say is that those 2 destroyers and possibly others picked up about 600 survivors. Whether any were left to perish

because they couldn’t be found I don’t know.

Well there’s nothing to describe. We were just on the raft, just there, singing and trying to keep our spirits up. And then a ship came along in the middle of the night. We climbed on board and that was the end of the rescue.

There was nothing really very exciting about that part of it.

There’s rope ladders but we were also hauled aboard. They lowered ropes and you hold, you know hold that and you’re dragged on board. Because we were pretty weak by that time.

Although the Mediterranean is apparently warm by the time we were picked up in the middle of the night we were really quite cold and almost so cold that we could hardly move our limbs. Now I was quite a strong swimmer but it took every ounce of my effort to swim

from the raft to the ship. A distance of about from here to over the road there. I was very weak. And no doubt the others were the same. You talked about getting up to no good: if you were that way inclined Alexandria was the place to be. There was sin on every street corner. It was a

really bad place. Of course there’s an awful lot of talk about sex on the ship. You’ve got all these men together, they’ve got nothing else to think about. And some of their conversation is you know, pretty rough. So you get a sort of a mind set on this particular subject.

I remember I bought a, some Arab came up to me and offered me a set of dirty postcards. And they were absolutely filthy. Dreadful. I’d never seen anything like it in my life before or since. Anyway, I had to have them so I bought them. He just folded them up and gave them to me.

So I went back to the Fleet Club and ordered a cup of coffee and got a corner table just to have a perve over these pictures. And I found that I had 10 picture postcards of the Cairo post office. Now how he did it I don’t know.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if they had been 10 different post offices. Dreadful. Then I didn’t know an awful lot about sex. At the age of 23 nowadays that would be considered quite a ridiculous statement to make. Back in those days

it wasn’t so strange. But of course you heard all these stories and so on and you think you’d like to try something. So there’s another sailor and I, we decide to visit one of the brothels in Sister Street. Anyway, we went to this place and there’s a queue about

25 yards long. And we got into that and slowly working our way towards the… the girls must have been getting through them at a pretty fast rate because we weren’t long in the queue. But when I got to the door I chickened out, I fled. And that’s the first and only time I’ve ever been to a brothel. I wasn’t game when I got back to the ship to say that I’d been there and didn’t do anything.

Because I don’t want to be treated as an utter wimp. But that’s the story. It was very easy to get into mischief in Alexandria. So yes, we tried to get up to no good but we failed.

I suppose so. Oh, partly. Partly that, partly that I really didn’t have any idea what to do anyway. And I thought, oh fear.

I should have done it. Once you’ve done it you know you’re right for the next time. But I’m one of these freaks. The only girl I ever slept with was the girl I married. And that’s an extraordinary statement for anybody to make these days. But in my case it’s true. I had

the good fortune, when I came back from overseas during the war, I met this nice girl, I fell in love with her and married her. And it was very successful. And she's the only one.

None. No she's the most incredible, remarkable person.

She’s a nice person. So I was fortunate. But she was the only one. But I tried hard to get into trouble in Alexandria and I lost my nerve. It’s very sad.

It’s hard to know what to say to something as stupid as that.

Admirable. Oh thanks. But it’s very hard. It’s easy to sort of take a holier than thou attitude to these things when you’re not exposed to them.

See people who are just brought up in the normal way, having no outside influences and they fall in love and they get married and things, they have no idea what it’s like to be in the navy surrounded by men who are talking about almost nothing else but sex. You know they’re a randy lot. There’s no doubt about that. And you get thinking along those

lines yourself. And there’s a lot of talk about homosexuality on board ship and I certainly heard talk about it but I never actually saw or heard of any actually cases. I’ve no doubt there were. And when we got to, we survivors

on the ship that took us from Alexandria to Durban. There was a particularly nice, fine-looking young man, sailor. He’d be about 18. And I’d had some dealings with him. I knew him. And he asked me if I could lend him some money because he wanted to go ashore in Durban and he had no money. So

I said, “Oh yes. I can fix it.” and I had plenty of money and I gave him a five-pound note. In those days a five-pound note was about this size, white. You ever seen them? anyway he said, “I’ll never be able to pay this back.” I said, “Look, forget it. It’s a gift.

Go ashore. Have fun.” He said, “Well, I’ll do anything for you for that. Anything.” The emphasis on the ‘anything’. And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind what he meant by anything. And I’m not too proud to say that for a moment I thought it might not be bad idea. I was 23. He was 18.

And I thought for a while I might take him upon that. Only for a few moments and then I shook my head and dismissed those improper thoughts. I said, “No, forget it. Go ashore.” And I’ve often thought about it since.

How you might judge people who indulge in homosexual activities. And I certainly can’t because when the opportunity presented itself I considered it. If I’d been given a bit of a nudge I would have gone to bed with him. But I thought: no, I better not do that. And the interesting thing

is that the rest of the voyage to England I never saw him. I think he was keeping out of my way in case I changed my mind and said, “Oh, yes. O.K.” That’s how close you get to doing things that other people might consider improper, when you’re in that kind of situation.

No I don’t think he was

embarrassed in the slightest. I really think he would have been quite happy to do it. He may have already done it with other people for all I know. I don’t think it embarrassed him. I didn’t say, “Look you must not make that suggestion. That’s improper.” I just said, “No. No you go. Take the money and run.” You know? So

you can’t preach to other people about how they should behave. Particularly when you’ve been exposed.

Where? In Scapa Flow. Do you know where that is?

Way up in the North of Scotland. We had a long train trip from Portsmouth to a place called Thurso, right up in the tip of Scotland. We were just going forever. Snow and ice. And we caught a ferry from there to Scapa Flow. And Scapa Flow is like a group of islands

and so on. And there’s a beautiful natural harbour in the middle of it all. And that’s where the Fiji was. That’s where quite a few of the warships were. That’s where I boarded her. And from there we went up patrolling between Iceland and the Faroe Islands up there. Bitterly cold and frightful. I thought I was going to freeze to death.

Then we got the good news that we were going to be stationed at Gibraltar so we came down to Gibraltar and we were in the Mediterranean from then on until we got sunk.

Well not only in the Mediterranean but from Gibraltar we did convoy duty up and down the Coast of Africa between Gibraltar and Freetown and back again and so on. Convoying merchant ships.

We did a bit of that in the Mediterranean itself, where we were attacked by aircraft on the way through but managed to survive that. Then we finished up in Alexandria where we joined the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet. And from there on we were going between Alexandria and Crete, doing whatever had to be done you know. Various duties.

Well the British needed reinforcements on Crete and so we loaded a few hundred British soldiers. And

they were sitting around, lying around on the decks. And we just went flat out to Crete. And the ship was going very fast. And the water was very choppy and there was a horrible motion. And most of these poor soldiers were seasick. I felt so sorry for them. We got to Crete. We unloaded them there.

I have no doubt that most of them were taken almost immediately into captivity because by that time, in the meantime the Germans had become pretty well established in Crete and that’s where their aircraft were operating from. We were on our way back from Crete having done the job, on our way back to Alexandria when they came after us. So that’s what we were doing.

Yes. Not a very pleasant surprise. But as I was saying I got up this morning early, oh didn’t get up I was already up I didn’t go to bed, and saw all these

aeroplanes going after us, these dive bombers. So that was a surprise. We didn’t like that. And that was the beginning of a day of terror really. I didn’t like that either.

How long had I been?

Oh several months. Why?

No, there were no difficulties. They were pretty easy to get along with really. There was just this element of a little bit of resentment

in a way. I suppose it might have been, you’d call it good natured ribbing because these few of us, it got around that we were counted as for commission. Not like the rest of them. Not like the great unwashed because we were there for you know better things. Apart from that there were some good blokes. Had some good fun.

I can only remember there were some absolutely fearsome jokes and the language was really ripe.

These sailors came from all walks of life. All sections of humanity from up top to the dregs. There was some really a lot of low-life among them. And their language was appalling. It was very strange, having been exposed to this all that time I never acquired the habit myself.

I don’t use bad language. I might use a bit if I’m telling someone about something else but in ordinary conversation I don’t use four-letter-words and things like that. But these blokes, they can’t utter a sound, utter a sentence that isn’t riddled with obscenities of all

kinds. You get immune to it after a while but still. And we had a leading seaman who was particularly foul-mouthed. He just could not carry on a conversation without you know the usual f's.

But he was a very bad man. And if you ever let him get close to you he just had to fondle your buttocks or your genitals, depending on which way you happened to be facing at the time. He was just evil.

Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t like it. Of course if he’d been very good looking I might not have minded. The funny thing is, when the ship was sinking and I was sitting on that bench wondering what to do next, this fella came out on deck. He didn’t see me. And he

just walked to the side of the ship, flung his arms to heaven and said, “God help me.” And I distinctly remember thinking if God helps him I’ve got nothing to worry about. Actually he was quite a nice bloke. Quite pleasant. He just couldn’t help being what he was.

Oh, more than rough. He was

horrible. But as I say, to talk to him he was quite a nice bloke. He was a leading seaman after all. He must have had a few clues. And he was in charge of our mess.

Well as I told you, I was helped down below. And they had this huge copper full of steaming hot cocoa

They called it chocolate. And they gave me a mug and I drank 5 of these. I was well and truly dehydrated and then I just passed out. And I didn’t wake up until the nest morning well and truly. And then we didn’t get any special care, just left to our own devices.

And I think we were probably given some food. I can’t remember that. I was able to witness several burials at sea. Quite a few bodies lying around the place that had to be buried. And it was quite a ceremony. They put the body in a bag and put it on a, sort of plank,

about that wide, covered with a Union Jack. And the padre, everybody’s around, and he’ll recite a few holy words and they’ll commit him to the deep. They tip the plank up and he’ll just slide out, underneath the flag into the water. It’s quite a moving ceremony. But I’ve been reading

a lot about Nelson’s day. Ever heard of Nelson?

God, Admiral Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar. You’ve never heard of him? Well way back in the 1800 and something

Napoleon was all set to invade England. Heard of Napoleon? No? Yes? Well Lord Nelson (I’ve got a picture of him out there too) he was a brilliant naval commander.

And he was responsible for many brilliant victories of the British Fleet. In this particular occasion he met up with the combined French and Spanish fleet, off Cape Trafalgar in the 21st of October 1825. And although the French and Spanish fleet was superior in numbers Nelson just

wiped the floor with them. Just practically destroyed the fleet. And that was the end of the invasion, Napoleon’s invasion. And that gave Great Britain naval superiority for the next 100 years.

Yes. No one dared to try to get the better of the British navy. But unfortunately Lord Nelson was killed on that day. And this is why we celebrate Trafalgar Day of the 21st of October. And I run a luncheon for,

Trafalgar Day Luncheon for the Naval Officers’ Association. But getting back to what I was saying, reading about Nelson’s day, when a sailor was killed they just picked him up and threw him overboard.

Yes. They just went through the ship and anybody that was dead they just threw overboard. No ceremony.

Well Nelson’s ship was the [HMS] Victory and the Victory is now permanently stationed in Portsmouth. Have you ever been to England? When you go, you’ll no doubt visit Trafalgar Square. A very important area. And there’s a big column there

and in the middle of it is Nelson on the top of it. He was an incredible man. But he was also a bit of a womaniser. He didn’t seem to mind who he womanised with. So all the great men have their flaws you see? Like Clinton [US President].

Well I had no interest in maritime history before the war. You were right I have felt a bit since

but of course I was very proud to have served in the Royal Navy and so it was natural for me to join things like the Naval Officers’ Association, the Naval Historical Association, the Lord Nelson Association and the Royal

Overseas League. Apart from the Returned Servicemen’s League. I joined all these things and through them of course I began to take a bit of an interest in all aspects of naval history and maritime history and so on.

What have they offered me?

No money. I think camaraderie of mixing with like-minded people. Most of whom have heard of Nelson.

No I think that’s about it really. The pleasure of associating with people who like myself had a career in the navy and had something to think about, something to talk about. Last night I was at a naval dinner as a matter of fact. And as a matter of fact today is a special day for me.

It’s the 4th of December. And on this day 62 years ago, this was the day I got my commission in the navy. The 4th of December in England. So it’s a special day.

Oh, let’s have a glass of wine. That’s all.

My wife, oh we’re always celebrating something.

Well I think it was the [HMS] Kandahar. There were two destroyers doing the job. One was called

Kingston and the other one was called Kandahar. But Kandahar is interesting because if you follow some of the stories about the problems in Afghanistan, Kandahar is one of the towns mentioned. Kandahar in Afghanistan.

Well sort of. It was something important to Britain

at that time. Anyway, the ship I was rescued by was the Kandahar.

Alexandria. In rags, you know just what we were standing up in.

Nothing. They had nothing to give us on the destroyer. But when we got to Alexandria

we were issued with some dry clothing.

Oh, at the naval depot there but I don’t remember where it was. I wasn’t very observant you know, I just went where I was told to go with the mob and somebody gave me something and I took it.

Ah, I was in pretty good condition but

when I was hauled on board the destroyer that night I was in very low condition. But I recovered pretty quickly. I was 23. At 23 you can understand that I was not in bad shape.

I don’t, I have no recollection of the morale being particularly low. Of course we would have sooner not have been sunk.

Naturally. But I don’t think there were people going around saying, “Oh no, this is the end,” sort of thing. “God help us we’re finished.” Because I’m a fairly detached sort of a person. You know I just accept what’s coming along and say, “It’ll do fine.” I don’t get too excited about things.

And I remember the day I was discharged from the navy and the end of the war. I was walking out of the depot with a mate of mine and I was thinking about all the times I’d been bombed and suffered air raids and sunk, witnessed all sorts of gruesome

things, hardship. And I said to this fella, I said, “From now on I’m not going to worry about anything for the rest of my life.” And that’s the way I’ve been. But I don’t think I worried too much about what was going on at that time except when it was actually going on and I was certainly worried then.

I don’t think it changed me very much. It certainly had an effect. You can’t have experiences like that and not have something in the background. But I sometimes wonder about these days, for instance a fella joins the navy now

and he gets on a ship and goes up to the Persian Gulf. He’s there for 5 minutes outside the range of any problems and when he gets back to Sydney he’s a hero. Paraded through the streets. When I came back from all my adventures I just went home. No bands, no counselling. I could keep

a counsellor going for weeks on my case.

I’ll just make one remark. The aircraft carrier [HMAS] Melbourne, this happened a few years ago, collided with a destroyer called the [HMAS] Voyager.

Cut it in half and sank it. Now there was a sailor on the Melbourne, he felt a bit of a bump and wondered what it was and looked over the side and he saw bodies and people swimming, debris and so on. And that affected him so cruelly that he started smoking. Years later when he had lung cancer he

sued the government and he got some money. He sued the government because of this incident that caused him to start smoking, which gave him lung cancer. That’s what we’ve come to in this country.

There was a rather funny incident when we were on our survivors’ ship that called in at Durban. And all the good citizens of Durban rallied around and sent on board great heaps of ‘comforts’.

Cigarettes, chocolate, balaclavas, socks, jumpers all that sort of thing. And a heap of books. Hundreds of books. And these were books for which the donors had no further use but they thought that we would get pleasure from reading them you see. And so the method of distributing these books

to the sailors, having regard to the individual tastes of the readers, was very simple. We just walked single file past a packing case full of books. The petty officer in charge just handed everyone a book. Any book. He didn’t ask whether you liked you know fiction or non fiction,

travel or anything like that. You just got a book. And the book that I got, I had a hold of it like this, I could see the title: ‘One hundred ways…’ And I said, “Look. I’ve got hold of a sex manual. This is great.” When I lifted my thumb it was, One hundred ways to mix concrete.

Oh dear. What use would that be to a shipwrecked sailor? One hundred ways to mix concrete. I’ve always been sorry that I didn’t keep that book. I tell the story but I can’t prove it.

Well we were put on a train, across the top of Egypt to Port Tewfik, which is at the bottom end of the Suez Canal. And that’s all. We were just on that train.

All the survivors.

600 of us. And there at Port Tewfik, was waiting this magnificent ocean liner, the Strathmore. And we were marched on board and allocated cabins. It was lovely. And from then on we had a very enjoyable trip via Mombasa to Durban.

No. Weren’t allowed ashore there. We were allowed ashore at Mombasa. But at Mombasa, unfortunately, we were all transferred to another ship.

Yes Durban. Sorry. And the other ship was the Empress of Australia. A really ancient ship. Full of

cockroaches.

I thought I said they were appalling. That’s what they were anyway.

Oh just such and old, it was a beautiful ship a long, long time ago in fact it belonged to the

Germans and it was World War prize, the British grabbed it at the end of the First World War. And it was a lovely ship but it was just ancient and as I said there were a lot of cockroaches as well as passengers onboard. And the living conditions

after the Strathmore was like, was not satisfactory. anyway.

It wasn’t too bad no.

No. No. And we got to Capetown there was some delay there, we had three weeks in Capetown, we had a wonderful time. Three weeks.

Well Capetown was a fascinating city, apart from the scenery’s magnificent for a start. It’s a lovely city; you can spend a lot of time there quite happily. And they’ve got the famous botanical gardens, they’ve got the Table Mountain and then we went driving around the coast a bit

the scenic drive around the coast is unforgettably beautiful. Capetown is lovely. The only problem with Capetown of course they’ve got all these Afrikaners in it. And you know it’s, at the time it was a British possession, now it a Commonwealth. And these Afrikaners they’re a funny lot.

They’re Dutch decent.

They’re strange, surly. But you know, of course they hated the British, that didn’t help. And no anyway.

Who?

Some of my mates

from the Fiji. There were several. One of them Ted Gardner became Sir Edward Gardner, a very prominent Member of Parliament in England. Una and I stayed with him last time we were over there. Incredible bloke but at that time he was just Ted Gardner, one of the boys. And there

were a couple of others, no Australians, English they were these friends and we had a good time. We hired a car and drove around a bit and we managed to prang it and we were very naughty we just drove it into the hire car place and then went for our lives.

Yes,

it’s about the only thing I’ve ever done in my life that I’ve been ashamed of. Everything else has been blameless.

Yes.

Liverpool. Via what, Freetown but of

course we were not allowed there and we went to Liverpool. Now that was the beginning of a rather remarkable experience, Liverpool. And I have enormous respect for the British people for the way they stood up to all that bombing, all that hardship all that rationing but also for their organising ability.

You know I mentioned the buses were waiting for us after that awful night of fire in London.

And we docked in Liverpool at a wharf and across the wharf we could see trains pulled up, they were waiting for us. We just went off the ship into the train.

Yeah. And as soon as we were onboard, we’re off.

No mucking around. Overland, that long trek overland again, this time to the Portsmouth Naval Barracks. And we pulled up at a siding at the rear of the barracks in the middle of the night, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning. And we were told to dismount,

disembark and we were ushered through the gates into a hall, a huge hall. Brilliantly lit in which sat dozen’s of naval personality in rows and rows of tables, at rows and rows of tables. And we just went from table to table,

no delay, we just went straight through and at each table one or another of our needs was attended to. When we got to the other end of the line a couple of hours later we had everything.

Well I went in my survivor rags and my book on how to mix concrete and I came out the other end

complete, a sailor again, complete new uniform from top to boots, pay book, ration card all my pay up to date, everything, everything I needed plus a pass for three weeks survivor’s leave and when we got that we walked out of the gate

And I remember thinking that this awful place Royal Naval Barracks Portsmouth not such a bad place after all. And then I thought about all those naval personnel sitting at those tables they’d been waiting there, waiting for us, we weren’t ask to hang around until daylight they were there ready waiting for us. And I was in a very happy frame of mind

when I left and I went all over England on the train for nothing and

Well no brothels. I’d had enough of that. Well of course I always liked London and I was very keen on

the theatres, concerts things like that and London’s an interesting place just to walk around. But up north I went to Glasgow, Edinburgh mainly, spent some time there. Lovely cities, very, very friendly people and I joined the Scottish Youth Hostel Association and did a walking tour around

the Lochs of Scotland for a few days.

No, I don’t know how I came to do it either but it just somebody said, “Why don’t you join the YHA [Youth Hostels Association] and I said, “Okay, I’ll join anything.”

Well you had to take care of yourself

you know they don’t provide meals they just provide accommodation. And you have to make your own meals.

Oh very, very cheap indeed, half a crown I think. When I was in London I joined the Barry Club, there was a sailor, one of the sailors and

I were wandering around more or less at a loose end and a fellow came up to us and said, “Would you like to join a club, would you like to come to the Barry Club? And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Oh it’s very, very nice he said get drinks and there’s some nice girls and a lovely atmosphere.” So I said, “Oh yeah okay.” So he took us up one street and down another and so on finally came to a narrow doorway

with stairs leading up and he pressed a button at the bottom of the stairs and somebody appeared at the top and we walked up the stairs and for 5 shillings we became life members of the Barry Club. And when I went inside there were certainly plenty of women, but what women, they were females with plenty of grog [alcohol]

but I wasn’t a heavy drinker anyway so that wasn’t terribly important to me and drugs if you wanted them. I didn’t try that either. And after a while I thought this is not my scene I’m much too refined for this sort of thing. So I left.

Trash, harlots I think. Pretty sure.

If they weren’t they ought to be.

Mind you I’m not very good at picking harlots. I haven’t had much experience in that. But the funny thing is that a month later when I was in London I thought maybe I was a bit hasty about this Barry Club you know maybe I should have had a go

at something or another you know and I was accusing myself of being a bit of whimp anyway I went to the Barry Club, I couldn’t find it, I looked all over the place, it’s not there. And I spoke to somebody I said, “What happened to the Barry Club? He said, “Oh the police moved it on he said I don’t know where they are now.” So I was a life member of the Barry Club and I didn’t know

where it was.

It was a, yeah I suppose so yeah. And it’s ideal for a certain type of person and that’s not me. And so that’s the Barry Club. Anyway, after my leave I went back to Portsmouth.

Yes.

You just walk, it’s beautiful scenery. I was with a friend and the scenery’s magnificent, just walking through that.

No, no, no we didn’t need that we just looked around.

And he said I wonder if you can swim in this Loch? And is said, “I should imagine so.” And I put my toe in it didn’t seem to bad anyway we stripped to our underwear and dived in. It was like hitting a wall of ice, just freezing and I immediately got a tremendous headache and an enormous pain in the groin. Just you know.

So we hopped out. So we didn’t stay there swimming for very long. So that’s the answer to that question.

Yes in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Very charming. They were wandering the streets looking to pick up sailors to take them home to and they weren’t pickups they were nice people.

No, no we had somewhere to stay I cant quite remember where we stayed. But I remember one particular home they were such lovely people and they said would you like to hear some music and I said, “Yes” I was pretty tired. I said, “Yeah,” so they put on Dvorak’s New World Symphony, you probably don’t

know it but it’s beautiful and I dozed off and listened to this magnificent music. It’s called from the new world and a lot of it’s based on, the new world being America, a lot of it’s based on Negro music you know, oh it’s so lovely and that’s the first time I’d ever heard that.

You see I’ve never forgotten it, I know I have the record in there now, I’ll play it for you if you like. No they were charming, very hospitable, kind. They’re waiting on the station for you, you know, you’ve got somewhere to go you know, would you like to come home for a meal.

Oh I think there was something of that, I don’t know whether they’d always in peace

time always waiting at the railway station. But we found that everywhere, all over the world. In Africa and London, people going out of their way to help. And there’s one bloke I wont forget in a hurry, we were in Glasgow sitting in the services centre and the

lady behind the desk called out, “Would you like to go to doctor so and so’s home for Christmas?” It was Christmas obviously and I said, “Oh I’d love that.” So we were waiting there for this fellow, he turned up, a very tall dignified, striped trousers,

morning coat, bowler hat, might, no it was a homburg. Anyway, he chatted to us and took us home, very nice home in the suburbs of Glasgow and he took us in the front door, up the stairs to meet his wife. Greetings all around. And with that over there were a lot of

people milling around, part of the party and when we finished that he then took us downstairs to where the servants were and that was our party. And I was, this is another thing I’m bit ashamed about, I suppose a bit snobbish but I thought that’s not good enough, he doesn’t know me but he thinks because I’m a naval rating I’m

lower deck, you know servants. And I was not very good company I’m afraid for these girls, I felt sorry about it because they were quite nice girls and they were expecting some interesting sailors to liven things up and I was like a bear with a sore head because I felt that this bloke had a cheek to assume, he didn’t ask me, he just worked out

I’m a rating therefore I belong to the servants and I didn’t like that. So I stuck a bit of that. I went to, I use to have a crowd that gave servicemen from the overseas weekends in country homes and I fell for one of those, I went to this country home

they were quite nice, they chatted to me and then asked me what I did. I thought since if I’d said I was a doctor or a lawyer or investor or I own a sheep station or something they would have been quite happy but I said, “I work in a bank,” oh down. And

you won’t believe this but from that moment on they left me absolutely alone, alone in that house for the weekend. They didn’t come near me. So I was able to pick a book from the library, from the shelf and read it from, finish it from cover to cover while I was sitting around. And I thought, “Well how the hell do I get out of this

place?” Where my host were I had no idea, they’d gone off somewhere. And this place was on a spur railway line that goes up to the main line. And I said the housekeeper, “I would like to leave.” And she said, “I don’t blame you.”

I said, “Well what about the train?” She said, “There’s no train on Sunday on this line.” And the trains are all running on the main line, no the spur line. And I said, “How far away if the main railway station?” She said, “Eight miles.” So I walked 8 miles through the snow to catch the train to go back home again. But apart from those instances we had nothing but kindness and old fashion

hospitality.

Yeah. This doctor I was already to tell him that my uncle was a doctor and my brother was a doctor and my sister was a doctor, oh that’s interesting you know, he didn’t give me a chance. Anyway, back to Portsmouth and from Portsmouth I went to the Officers Training

in, it’s actually in three places all in the same area, Brighton, Hove and Lancing but that was lovely.

Well everything we had at Collingwood only intensified. Because this time we were training to be

officers and we really had to know what we were about. But probably the main subject was navigation and I did very well in that, I came seventh out of a class of hundred and I was quite proud of that. So well in fact that they gave me a special navigation class afterwards to learn all about the celestial navigation, things like that.

Well nowadays you press a button really.

But you have to know all the other stuff as well in case the button breaks down. And the other stuff entails pages, you take a sun sight or a moon sight or a star sight and you’ve got pages and pages of calculations, which I was quite good at.

But in the first navigation we did a lot of coastal navigation in other words you’re running up a coast and you see a lighthouse and take a fix and then go a bit further and see something else and so on. But out in the middle of the ocean

you haven’t got that you’ve got to rely on star sights, sun sights and dead reckoning of course.

Well you look at your chart, say you’ve got to go from here to here, so I have to steer such and such a course, there’s a bit of a tide running so we’ll change that slightly and so on.

But that’s all you have to go on dead reckoning. You just say that’s where I’m going to go and quite often that’s maybe what you have to do. For instance if the sky is overcast you cant see anything, you had no choice. And even the best navigators can make mistakes.

Well

dead reckoning, like when we were approaching the coast of Africa with a whole fleet in the middle of the night and we heard waves breaking, no good. So they anchored until daylight and there’s a very strong tide sweeping up the coast of Africa and the whole fleet was carried up like that.

We were in fact 30 miles north than where we wanted to be. Certainly, fortunately somebody with sharp ears heard the surf otherwise the whole fleet would have run aground.

They are to some extent yeah. Oh you’d be surprised, they’ve got the most incredible tables in telling you

which tides to expect and where but they’re not 100 per cent reliable. But they have a book that will tell you what time it will be high tide in, what’s some port?

Yes, yeah and on what particular day. It will tell you the state of the tide on

any particular day in any port of the world. They’re most complicated books, really.

No this, we didn’t get onto that until we did the Special Navigation Course which is another 3 weeks. And that’s really solid

and that’s celestial navigation. Very hard going.

Well the difficulty is the calculations. You see with normal coastal navigation there’s no calculations at all. You see something

and you say well that’s there, you move a bit further on and come back to it, well I’ve travelled that distance, it’s easy. Celestial navigation and I’ve still got the stuff in there, pages of very complicated calculations and that’s the hard part, some fellows just can’t do it. That’s the hard part.

Yes I did. Anyway, after this course they said, “now you’ll do an anti-submarine course.” So they sent me and a few others up to Campbelltown in Scotland, this is February, it’s freezing cold.

Well your expected to treat everybody with respect and you expect to be treated by everybody else with respect. I have no

recollection of feeling superior to lads who were coming along behind me. No I don’t think so. But one thing I did learn was they didn’t mess around with you if you’re not working. If you thought you were there for a good time, you weren’t. And there was one fellow there, he was a friend of mine, a very nice

fellow and he was Sir Robert Peel, he was one of our candidates in my class, delightful chap and he had lots of friends, he was having a marvellous time, he didn’t take the whole thing seriously because he knew because he was Sir Robert Peel, that he’d sail through

but he didn’t and he was sent back to Portsmouth as a naval rating. And there was a big, his mother Lady Peel had a, she was staying at a hotel in Brighton and she put on a big passing out party for him, which was a great success only slightly marred by the absence of the

guest of honour who was on that moment of his way back to Portsmouth. A few weeks later when I was doing this special navigation course, one guest night in the wardroom, there’s’ Sir Robert Peel as the guest of the Captain, resplendent in the uniform of the officers of the guards regiment, one of the guards regiments. I said, “How did you manage to do that?” he

just said, “You can’t keep a good man down.” So, but he didn’t get into the navy. So it was a nice feeling to think that there was no favouritism, if you were up to the mark you passed if you weren’t you didn’t.

Oh most of them did. They got

that far. There was one of my mates that didn’t a fellow named Hugh Peplar, his father was a captain in the navy, his uncle was a captain in the navy and he thought he was a sure thing too. And he went into the Admiralty Selection Board just ahead of me and he came out tears streaming down his face. I went over to speak to him and he just brushed me aside and walked off into

oblivion. He was a nice fellow, he didn’t pass.

Yes, three.

On the way through we had three selection boards.

Well there’s usually an admiral, a couple of captains and perhaps a commander or two sitting there and you have to stand in front of them and answer their questions.

That’s all I can’t remember what I was asked or what I said but apparently I satisfied them. But it’s a pretty intimidating situation. They

Yes.

No I can’t remember that.

Yes I was certainly pleased about it. I was more than pleased elated really. And well it was, the course is very hard

and to pass it, I got 81 per cent out of that which wasn’t bad. And to have passed it particularly when they were failing people like Sir Robert Peel and others, it’s a feather in your cap.

No. I don’t think so. I think

probably a few of us got together but we didn’t have a drink, there was no drinking. I might have had a cup of cocoa or something in front of the gas fire.

Yes, oh yes. We got weekend leave every now and again and one of them was this trip to these people in Surrey that ignored me

for the, that was one of them.

I don’t know what it’s like now; it probably doesn’t even exist now.

When we were there it was in three different places. They took over a girl’s school in Hove

for the first few weeks, then they took over a boys school in Lancing College, a magnificent place, we went there and then we went into Brighton itself for the final weeks. And they’d taken over a sports establishment and converted that into a naval

college.

Yes they were. I don’t think King Alfred exists any more. It was for training people like us who were not in the permanent navy, reserve officers. So

anyway

Hmmm?

Well by this time there weren’t any around at all. There might have been one or two but in my year there weren’t any, because they were scattered all over the place. There weren’t that many to start with,

only you know a few hundred. And in Scotland when we finished that course we were then told what ships we were going to go to.

Hmmm?

We went to Scotland for an anti-submarine course.

And when that was over.

Oh horrible. It was cold, cold, cold. We went out in small ships with anti-submarine equipment trying to find submarines.

Well it was what we call asdic, which stands for Anti Submarine Detection Indicators

and they have a little dome on the bottom of the ship that sends out a message, a signal, ding, ding, ding, ding and until it hits something and if there’s a submarine there ‘diiiiiiinnnnnga, diiiiiinnnnnga,’ and that sort of thing and then you know you’ve got something and you just follow that and eventually with any luck you

can find the submarine, get into position where you can sink it, which we didn’t of course but we could have.

Well you’d be in charge of instruments up on deck which shows the, on an instrument the signal going out and coming back and so on and you can by moving this you can move the whole thing around and make sure you get what sort of a submarine it is, how long and so on. And then when it’s getting closer, so you speed up.

It’s quite interesting; the trouble is it’s so flaming cold up there that all I wanted to do is get back to the base and go to bed.

That’s on the anti-submarine course, that’s all you’re taught, how to detect submarines.

No they had real submarines.

They had real submarines. They were told off to take part in these tests. And of course we had no means of sinking the, we didn’t want to do that but we wanted to be able detect and get into position where we could say that we could have sunk them.

And we had three weeks of that torture.

Oh excellent. Yeah. We were onboard a ship which was tied up alongside, it was very, very nice.

A wharf. And they told us, they gathered us altogether and told us, “Right everything’s

finished now, this is where you’re going to go for your first ship.”

About 20.

Oh yeah. Oh they couldn’t handle a much bigger group than that. Anyway, they told me that I was going to an anti-submarine minesweeper stationed in East London.

And I thought, “Oh gosh I want to get out of this cold country.” So East London. And I was obviously distressed about it and they watched my unhappiness with a great amusement and they finally told me that East London is in South Africa. See I thought “God thank goodness.” So

in a short time I was off to South Africa.

Thank you love.

Well I found myself again in Liverpool on a Norwegian merchant ship with a group of about 8 other officers all of whom were going to the same minesweeping flotilla. So we were really quite a

merry band. We were all going to be working together. And I was thrill about this, all these nice blokes. Anyway, we got to Capetown and then around to Durbin, got to Durbin enquiring about onward passage to,

what the name of that place, East London. And they all went but I didn’t, there was a minesweeper in harbour at Durbin and they were short one officer and they wanted a replacement urgently because they going to take part in the invasion of Madagascar in the next few days.

So they grabbed me and I had to go to this minesweeper and that was the beginning of a very unhappy period in my life.

Romney.

Because this bloke had gone mad. I didn’t know that at the time. In fact I found out afterwards that he’d gone mad and was taken off the ship.

It was a hell of a ship, a hell ship. The captain was an absolute pig, with a capital P. He was a homosexual and for some reason which I was never able to understand, he didn’t seem to find me very attractive. He gave me a hell of a time, he was cruel, harsh.

And I had to get off. After the invasion, after all that was over as far as he was concerned I was there for keeps, as far as I was concerned I was only on that ship temporarily for the invasion. So I took a boat across to the, when we were in harbour, Diego Garcia Harbour

I went to the commanding officer of the flotilla and I spoke to him for a while and said, “I’d like to go back to my original appointment.” He was very friendly, he ticked me off for coming to him direct but after that he was quite friendly and he said, “well you apply for transfer

to your original appointment, through your commander officer, correct channels,” he said, “It will come to me and I’ll recommend it.” I never heard any more about it. So when I got to, one day when we were in Mombasa I went to see the admiral who was in charge of the whole eastern, far eastern fleet. I told him

my story; I was a little bit apprehensive, a junior sublieutenant interviewing an admiral and I’d needn’t have worried, he was very friendly, you know kind, “Yes I’ll see what we can do Mr Thomas.” And “nice to have met you,” and so on. And I was transferred to an aircraft carrier, I didn’t get back to my original appointment

but I did get off the Romney.

It was just this pig of a man was making life miserable for everybody. And I thought, “I’m sorry for them,” but I was only here temporarily, that was the idea. I wanted to get to my original.

Well have you

actually worked for somebody who’s thoroughly obnoxious? Have you?

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Just by being obnoxious. Unpleasant, harsh, unreasonable, you know flying off the handle, he was a pig.

Yeah.

Well for instance I upset him by some minor thing

Well I’d paid a visit to another ship to visit some Australians and I had trouble getting back, so I had to stay on that ship for the night.

It’s not a hanging offence. I think I got back in time the next morning but he confined me to the ship for 4 days for that. That sort of Captain Bligh stuff you know. Anyway, I got transferred.

No idea, it didn’t affect me. I wasn’t aware

of anybody else being affected but I know he was a homosexual.

Everybody else told me. It was just known he was.

Well he was in trouble for interfering with his steward.

And he was under notice for that see.

Oh I don’t know.

No but the authorities just had their eye on him because of that. And there were consequence, which I’ll tell you about later.

No it’s just the next stage.

I went to the admiral and I said, “I want to get off that ship, I want to go back to my original appointment.”

In his office in Mombasa. Because he was ashore, he was in charge of the whole far eastern fleet. And I said, “If I cant go back to my original appointment I would like a

appointment anywhere, anywhere except the Romney.” I said, “Even the Persian Gulf.” And of course you don’t know the Persian Gulf but anybody who does know the Persian Gulf would know that anybody who made that kind of request would have to be really desperate or most likely insane.

Hot, blistering

hot. Anyway, as I said I moved.

No I can’t even remember.

Well my case was quite sound. I was appointed by the admiralty in London

to a minesweeper flotilla in east London, I was temporarily appointed to the Romney for the invasion of Madagascar and I simply wanted to get back to my original appointment. Nothing wrong with that.

No. But as it happened, well anyway a few weeks later after I got off the Romney the

When the fleet was in harbour the navigating officer of the Romney who was a good friend of mine,

contacted me and we had lunch together ashore and he told me that the captain, my batman had been removed, not just from the Romney but from the navy forever, because of his homosexual activities with the steward. And the navigating officer was now the captain and he said, “Well now what about coming back?”

He said, “I’m in charge, there’s a vacancy because I’ve moved up and I said I’d love to but I made such a fuss about getting off.” But I wouldn’t be game to go back to the Admiral and say look I want to go back again. But he told me an interesting thing that when he moved into the captains cabin and to take over,

he was going through the drawers in the captains desk and he found my application for a transfer torn into small pieces in the drawer. It never got passed in. It was then I also because I realised that the commanding officer of the flotilla who I went to see when I was in Madagascar and the admiral would have known all about this bloke. And that’s why they were so

you know sort of sympathetic to my problem. See my problem was I wanted to get back to my original appointment but they probably thought that I wanted to get away from this bloke. That he was harassing me, which he wasn’t. But they probably thought that.

Mmmm. Well they were so you know pleasant and

considerate and sympathetic.

That’s right. Anyway, I never went back to that, never got to that appointment, never.

No in fact I

was shortly removed from the, transferred from the aircraft carrier to a job onshore.

Oh just a few weeks.

No I wasn’t there long enough to, but they wanted somebody in this shore job and

I was really a sort of a spare number on the carrier. So I said, “I’d take it.” So I was there for the best part of a year.

In the Port War Signal Station.

In the Port War Signal Station.

Where? It was on the coast.

At Mombasa.

Well I thought we were talking about Mombasa.

Well you’re not paying attention.

Oh it was quite interesting. You had to watch the ships coming and going into the harbour, satisfied that they were legitimate and they were obeying all the right rules, the signals and so on. In fact you

kept track of all the shipping. And it was a responsible job. There were four of us on, taking in shifts. Anyway, by that time Japan had invaded America, attacked America and they were bombing Australia and Mr Curtin wanted all Australians back,

back home. So I went back home.

Oh very distressed indeed. Very. The first thing, the first time I heard about, it before I left England I was in the wardroom at HMS King Alfred and we heard that the two Battleships the Prince of

Wales and the Repulse had been sunk by the Japanese and that was a devastating blow. That’s two huge ships just blown out of the water by Japanese aircraft. And that was immediately after Pearl Harbour. You’ve heard of Pearl Harbour?

Yes.

Oh you’re better informed than I thought. So I came back to Fremantle and subsequently went up to the Pacific area. And I was up there until the end of the war.

On a merchant ship.

Copper. Copper.

I don’t know, the copper was picked up from I don’t know whether it was Lorenzo Marks or Byra, one of those two places and the ship was loaded with these copper ingots about that long and they’re produced in East Africa.

And I don’t know what the destination was, somewhere in Australia. And this merchant ship tri-colour Norwegian, only 2 passengers onboard, one was me and other one was a Royal Navy lieutenant commander and we were living in the lap of luxury. I had a

cabin almost as big as this room. And

He was coming with me, he happened to be a passenger on the ship, he wasn’t with me.

Because he had to go to Melbourne, because he was an expert in the Japanese language and he was needed as an interpreter in the Pacific.

With him?

Oh yeah.

But of course he wasn’t Japanese you know.

Yeah that’s right. He was also are ardent Roman Catholic who did his very best to convert me. But he was not successful.

I have no religious bias whatsoever, not interested whether you’re a catholic or Episcopalian or what. But I didn’t want to be, have someone try to convert me to something.

No I don’t think so, he never tried anything anyway. And I didn’t either.

Mainly about religion.

Mmmm.

He was more interested in that. I don’t think he was very interested in the war he was just an interpreter you know that’s his speciality. And every night about 5 o’clock we’d meet in his cabin and have a glass of sherry and talk about religion but during the day we’d often walk up and down, up and down, up and down just talking. We very rarely talked about

anything very serious. Nice bloke though. And I’ve got a book out there on my shelf written by Japanese but translated by this chap. His name was Col Ray, Lieutenant Commander Col Ray.

Say again.

I don’t quite understand that comment.

Well we had a lot of personal and private conversations.

No not about the war.

He was a nice bloke and I was very grateful for his company because there were only two of us, it was a cargo ship, it would have been very lonely if I’d been the only one. So I didn’t care what he was talking about as long as he was talking. Anyway, we got to Melbourne and I took a train to Perth.

And finished up here and after a few months here I was sent to the Pacific area, you know Milne Bay, Padang and so on.

Oh just doing just depot duties.

Fremantle. HMAS Leeuwin it was then.

Train.

What was it like?

Oh it wasn’t too bad I quite like train travel actually. Nothing like the luxury of the, have you been across by train lately?

Well the transcontinental train is very luxurious now. It was just a reasonably comfortable in those days.

Of course when the train was used as a troop train the accommodation was very basic indeed, they even used cattle trucks to transfer troops.

Interesting stories, I haven’t got any. My mind is a blank.

Well, let me see.

No I was wondering if I could make up something. I remember now the

I got says, everything has to be true.

I got giving me instructions about this interview.

Yeah

I think the form I signed, something similar isn’t it?

That I’ve got to tell, everything I say has to be true and of course that inhibits things a bit, doesn’t it?

No I’ve been across a few times by train but most often during the war by aeroplane. And when I was actually sent to Padang, Milne Bay I went by plane right up the west coast,

right across the top to Brisbane. And then I caught another plane to Cairns and then caught a flying boats from Cairns to New Guinea. So I did a lot of flying.

Yeah. Good.

Not before that time, I’d been on a Catalina

in Mombasa but these flying boats, they’re enormous things.

Yes that’s right.

Yeah

I reckon they’d be three times the size. They’re huge things. And the body of the aircraft would be almost as big as that wall you know, they’re enormous. And they had 4 big engines.

Oh yeah.

In England, yeah Coastal Command, yeah. They did a good job. As a matter a fact there was a Sunderland Flying Boat from the Coastal Command that spotted the Bismarck

when everybody else had lost it. The Bismarck’s slipped, you know gave them the slip and the plane spotted it and of course told everybody where it was.

Hmmm?

Oh yes absolutely. Oh they were all terribly worried because they knew the Bismarck was getting very close to the

coast of France and it got close enough they’d have tremendous air cover coming out from France to protect it, it would be a different story altogether.

I don’t think there were any special events, demonstrations, presentations. I just arrived and was told where my accommodation was and took over my duties.

Looking after all the small naval craft in Milne Bay. All the MLs and the barges

and D-Boats [type of small craft], all the small boats. I was in charge of those.

What were they doing there? They were based there, that’s all. And while they were in harbour I had to look after them. And later on I was transferred to Madang further up the coast and I did exactly the same job.

Oh 6, 8 months I suppose.

All right. It, I built myself a hut on the water’s edge so as I’d be near the boats, so I had a private accommodation and I built myself a shower but

you know I was self-contained there. I just walked up to the naval mess for meals.

I didn’t have to, not at all. I just wanted to and I asked permission to do so and they said, “Yeah.” And they had accommodation for me in the base that I didn’t use. I wanted to be near the boats.

How far away?

Oh a quarter of a mile.

Which site?

Nothing just me.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes I’ve got pictures of that too.

Yeah, right on it. I hadn’t heard about tidal waves at that stage. If they’d have been one I would have been swept away I’m afraid.

It was very heavy, built on heavy piles, like

sleepers almost, but the sides were palm leaves and the roof too. And that was done by natives for me, by New Guinea natives. It was a lovely room and I was sorry to leave it.

Well the more conventional accommodation was of course conventional. Just the sort of thing they rush up in a hurry, timber and fibro and stuff. It was very different.

Oh about a week. The commanding officer was very

impressed with my house, he name was Kennedy, Commander Kennedy. Many years later I became friendly with his son who’s an admiral, who live here. I’ve got a picture of him out there, you’ll see that going out to look at those photos you’ll see him.

And that was good. But then afterwards, after that I was on a store ship for a while.

The climate was pretty trying, constant rain, it never seem to stop raining.

It was not oppressive in the sense of the heat, it was certainly warm but it was the rain that really gets people down. Madang was a different situation altogether, lovely climate.

How independent? Oh completely.

I was my own boss, I was in charge of the boats and responsible only to the captain of the organization.

Supplies?

Well I didn’t want any; I use to go up to the mess to eat, for all meals.

So I didn’t need any food down there. I might have had a few tins of peanuts or something but for basic requirements were not necessary.

Yeah. That’s right. Of course a few of the fellows who were friends of mine would come down to visit me and we’d

sit and talk in my little house. But generally I was pretty busy, it was a big job.

Well I’d have to, I would be responsible to see that they were all in running order, all properly maintained

any repairs that need to be done are done promptly and efficiently and there must have been about 50 boats, not an easy job. And I can’t describe the responsibilities; I’ll just have to ask you to imagine what it would be like looking after a boat.

Have you got a boat?

Hmmm?

Boat in where?

In the past, well you know what’s entailed

Just imagine there’s fifty of them, particularly if they’ve got engines in them, petrol, diesel so on.

I had two petty officers and two ratings.

But the petty officers were both mechanics. They were boatmen. And

No. No. We didn’t.

Yes and of course there were a few anchored but we had quite a few on

buoys and of course we had the big ships in too. Destroyers and the like.

Mmmm.

They had a jetty yeah. We had a lot of trouble with worms, what do they call them Toledo? Torito. They eat the boats.

And you’ve just got to watch that.

Yes they did. Yeah. And

You’re right it was hard. You see they, everything was so temporary, they didn’t worry too much because

if something happened to the boat they’d just get rid of it and get another one you know.

Just destroyers, nothing bigger.

No. Not frequent, well not unusual but not frequent.

Oh no they were reasonably frequent but not frequently frequent.

Yeah.

I can’t answer that because I had nothing to do with, I was not involved, I wasn’t interested. They just came and went. They’d report to the commanding officer

you know whatever requirements they needed, they’d get from some source or another but nothing to do with me.

Oh well they’re always needed for carrying stores and equipment up to various places on the coast. We had bases all the way up the coast of

New Guinea.

Oh yes, not too numerous to name. We had Lae and Nadzab, two of them and of course Madang, Milne Bay.

I didn’t have anything to do with them, even when they

came to do the sheaving, I didn’t organise, I just spoke to a naval officer who was in charge of them. Told him what I wanted and discussed what was needed and he’d say, “Oh I’ll get that fixed.” They’d come and do it. I wouldn’t even watch what they were doing. So I had nothing to do with them, but I believe that the relationship with the natives was very good.

That’s according to people who did deal with them. Exceptionally good.

Mmmm.

Well I think why I was relocated to Madang was that most of the activity moved up to Madang and there were the, you know getting closer to Japan. And there was a Naval Base up in Madang, which was becoming bigger than Milne Bay. And of course

and there was one incident when I was on Milne Bay. I went out, did a trip on a destroyer for, it doesn’t matter why, but while we were out some hundred mile off the coast, we got a message that an American flyer had been shot down

and they were hoping that he might have got into his inflatable rubber little boat and he might be floating around somewhere, keep a look out for him, so we did. And we spotted him and there’s him in this little inflatable little boat, you know laying back and more dead than alive. And they sent a small

boat out to get hold of him and tow him in and they lifted him onboard the destroyer and the captain, a chap named Joel, he was a really hard case. As soon as he could see this fellow coming aboard he rushed into the wardroom and got a generous

glass of brandy and he came rushing out and put his hand under this fellows head to give him a glass of brandy you know and this chap said, no thanks, I don’t drink. And Joel said, “Well if you don’t, I do.” And down it went. But here’s a bloke near death

and he won’t have a glass of life.

Oh it wasn’t secret at all. It had only recently been vacated by the Japanese. In fact there was still wrecked Japanese barges up on the beach there. So not long before it was a Japanese possession, so they knew it was there.

Oh very much so, well they even got down as far as Sydney as you know.

Yeah.

No I never thought about that part of it. I don’t

think I was too worried about that. But there was certainly Japanese around but not really on the mainland. But we thought they might be in submarines. As you know several submarines attacked Sydney Harbour. Do you remember anything about that? No. Well they did.

They did a bit of damage but the submarines themselves, they were destroyed. They were midget submarines, just two man submarines.

Oh yes plenty.

Good service. You see there were planes

coming and going all day long from the mainland to Milne Bay and Madang. They all brought mail. And because all mail for army, navy or air force had to be address to their appropriate mail office in Melbourne. So I was writing to a friend of mine

who happen to be in Madang and my letter went to the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] office in Melbourne and from there they sent it back to him. But it was very quick; they had aircraft flying all day, both ways.

Yeah,

my word, they were very good.

Well mainly chocolates, cigarettes, mainly. But other and tins of peanuts things like that. But if I’d been a smoker they would have been much more valuable to me than otherwise, I would have given the

cigarettes away to somebody, I couldn’t smoke them myself.

Mmmm. No I never did, I didn’t believe in that.

The same sort of thing. In fact most of our parcels did come from ACF, Australian Comfort Fund they also supplied quite a nice line of writing paper and envelopes to enable, make it easier for people to write home. And they were much more prolific than the Red Cross in fact.

It must have been of people working very hard down there packing these things up to send them to people like us. But I didn’t want the cigarettes.

Yes, chocolates and tin peanuts, I ate a lot of those.

Yes, always in New Guinea, Milne Bay, Madang, everywhere. So we had to rub a repellent in the arms, everything that was exposed after dark, mosquito repellent, awful

greasy stinking stuff and you use to have to take Atebrin tablets, yellow tables everyday so then our skins got quite yellow. You had to cover up at night. Leggings, boots, completely covered. The only part that wasn’t completely covered was your face and neck and that to be covered with mosquito repellent. And of course some people

didn’t worry about that and they got bitten and they had to go home. Which was maybe what they wanted.

Yes there were a few. But there would have been a lot more if they didn’t have all these precautions to prevent a big scale out

breaks. We were lucky.

I don’t really know. They had a, all I can say was that

they had the basic medical kit type of thing; I don’t know what else they had because it out of my province, you know.

No.

I think as I said earlier, I think it was because the activities, the war activities were themselves shifting up to Madang. Everything was moving towards Japan. And for instance the use to be Port Moresby in

Papua and then came around to Milne Bay then up to Madang and where it went after I left I don’t know because while I was there the war was finished and I don’t think they were worried so much about proceeding to Japan. But all the bases were on their way up so that’s why I moved. And that my be my

I might be wrong, but that’s what it sounds logical.

Well it differed because the climate was much better, much better, better climate.

That’s right. Apart from that it was a

just a better climate. Quite pleasant but we still had to worry about mosquitos. And I had a hut on the seashore there which was built for me.

My next-door neighbour was the senior Anglican padre who was an absolute pain in the backside.

He use to keep me awake at night with his raucous parties with the women from the air force base, he was the head of the Anglican Church in the navy.

Yeah.

We had the air force. Penang was an island.

And there’s a big bay there, Penang there and the air force there. Air force had a lot of women, we didn’t have any. And he’d organise them to come over, he’d send a boat over to them, bring them over and have a party. Grog and dirty jokes and raucous and riotous sort of an evening and I’m trying to go to sleep.

I thought he was a hypercritical pig and my best friend on the island was the Roman Catholic padre and we use to often go for long walks into the hinterland together, you know just for the pleasure of each other’s company. Religion was never discussed. He was just a good bloke.

Yeah.

Oh very heavy bush, you wouldn’t want to go too far. They got so much rain in New Guinea that everything grows, it grows so marvellously well.

I’ve no idea, never struck any of it, didn’t go looking for it.

I’ll have to go and get a drink of water I think.

The Roman Catholic padre. I was, if I’m anything I’m a Protestant, but I’m not anti-catholic, I’m not anti-anything. But

it was interesting that the Protestant father, the Church of England father was to me a pain in the arse. But that’s not on record is it, that profanity.

But the padre, the Roman Catholic padre was a gentleman and I admired him, I was very fond of him, we were great friends.

So what does it prove?

Exactly the same.

Just different environment, different conditions but the job was exactly the same. And there was a very big base in Madang at this time and as I said this is why I think everything started to move up there. The boats that I was handling at Milne Bay were the same ones that I was handling in Penang. I don’t know how they got there.

But there they were.

American Base? No, no, Royal Navy, Royal Australian Navy.

They’re around. They’re around particularly in Milne Bay; I don’t remember seeing them at all in Penang. So

no Milne Bays the place, they had a base there. You have to understand also although I’m a reasonably intelligent person, I’m also not very curious. I didn’t like, I didn’t bother about digging into finding out the whys and wherefores and who’s doing what and why the emergency and why aren’t they somewhere else. I just did my job and focused on that.

I’m not really a very adventurous sort of person when it comes to you know finding out about things.

Yes I did.

It was a good job. You’re good mates with all the boat coxswains and you know you like dealing with, there’s some nice lads and

some of them were pretty rough but they were good blokes, good at what they did and it was pleasant dealing with them and I think they found me quite pleasant to deal with, I wasn’t often hard to get along with and I enjoyed it. And of course I wasn’t there that long when I was

sent to a store ship.

Well this particular ship was a small ship I suppose about 600 tonnes, it use to be use before the war to carry coal between Newcastle and Sydney. Now it was used for carrying stores to and from naval establishments

they had big quantities, heavy stores and so on. And we did a couple trips down to Port Moresby and Cairns, mainly Cairns. We even went south to Byron Bay, you know all on duty. But it was a very

dangerous ship, it was shallow draft and it had armour plating which consisted of 6 inch thick concrete, it was enormously heavy, shallow draft. And on one particular occasion we left Port Moresby for Cairns, you might find this hard to believe, we were battling against huge seas

for about 24 hours and eventually the captain said, “I’m going to turn round and go back to Port Moresby.” But he was scared, that when he went to turn round he caught the, when we were side on the ship would turn over so he said, “everybody, everybody up on deck” and when the signal came, around she went and it didn’t turn over. But we were back in Port Moresby in

an hour and a half.

Well so that if the ship did roll over there weren’t people below decks trapped. And that was the Birchgrove Park.

Well he was getting nowhere.

Making almost no headway.

And the fact is it took, in 24 hours to get to that point from Port Moresby and only an hour and a half to get back, you see. On the way back it was coasting, you know planing on the, it was a wonderful trip. The ship had never moved so fast. And I got out there a newspaper cutting, which I cut out during years after the war,

about the Birchgrove Park which had gone back to its job carrying coal. And this newspaper article was about the Birchgrove Park which rolled over and sank. That’s what it was like.

They were quite good.

Yep. It was comfortable. A steam driven engine, it was quite a comfortable boat when it wasn’t rolling. And the crew was, you know the captain was quite a nice bloke and the

others officers, we got on pretty well. It was a happy ship. But it worried me that there was so much top, it was so top heavy and shallow draft.

I was officer of the watch. I had my duty on the bridge, took turns to,

for duty on the bridge. In other words I was in charge of the ship for 4 hours, make sure that its keeping on its right course and not running into danger and so on, it’s responsible.

Oh yes they were required, yeah. But on the Birchgrove

Park we were coasting most of the time. Talking about officer of the watch, I’ll go back to the minesweeper, the Romney, it’s quite a story actually. I hated being on that ship, the captain as I said a horror, the first lieutenant was

also a horror, the navigating officer was a nice man, we were good mates. If I’d have stayed on the ship I would have been right. One night going down the coast of Africa, we were in convoy, we were escorting a convoy and we’re here

and there’s the last ship of the convoy and we had to keep our ship just like that and the Quartermaster on the Helm was having a lot of trouble keeping the right course and I knew all about steering a ship, I’d done it on the Fiji, so I said, “look give me the wheel, I’ll show you what to do.”

And that was a disaster, the, there’s a fault, a trick, which I cant explain adequately it’s called following the compass. You’ve got the compass there and you sort of tend to follow it around. It’s an old trick, no one should ever fall for it but I did

and one moment we’re pounding into the sea and the next minute we’re going in the completely opposite direction, surfing with the seas behind us. And I thought oh my god what have I done? I was seasick, I was sweating, I was drenched in water which was coming over the bridge, I was thoroughly miserable and I thought I’ve really buggered this up, you know

and so a bit of a flaw in hope, I said the Quartermaster, “You can have the wheel back if you like?” “No,” he said, “no sir not till we’re back on course.” And I thought yeah right. And the thing is the captain is sleeping below the bridge, how he didn’t notice the change in movement I’ll never know. If he had it would have been hell to pay.

And somehow or another I managed to get the ship turned around and there’s another change in movement, instead of surfing we were pounding again and then we were miles behind so we had to put on revolutions so we speed up, he didn’t notice that either. And this time, some heavenly body came to my aid and all of a sudden there we are,

we’re here and that ships there, exactly where we had to be. And I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.

Well that’s something I can’t quite explain, you’d have to sort of, you’d have to have it explained to you with a compass. But the compass

is in a bowl like this and there’s a circular thing with all the points of the compass and it’s floating around you see and it, and there’s a line mark which shows you where the ships head is and you’ve got to keep the ships head on a certain point on the compass and you sort of tend to move it, something I cant explain

except that it does happen and in this case it did happen.

No, it’s nothing to do with a phenomenon; it’s just sheer stupidity on the part of the helmsman, see. I just mucked it up and

and I knew about this thing you’ve got to watch for but it’s nothing wrong with the compass, it was just the way I was doing it. I was bitterly cold and I was perspiring like a pig. And I was frightened and seasick. Somehow or another I got back to where I should be and I thought well maybe there is a god

after all. But that’s got nothing to do with the Birchgrove Park.

And this is the middle of the night and I’m up here on the bridge with a couple of other blokes, the rest of the ships company are downstairs asleep and if they only knew what was going on, they wouldn’t

sleep to well. They were sleeping quite comfortable confident that the ship’s in good hand, and in fact I careering all over the place. So I was only a brand new sub lieutenant, I wasn’t very experienced at the time. And I was sick.

In the six years in the navy, travelling thousands and thousands of miles I was seasick twice, how’s that?

And this is the days before Atebrin and other seasick remedies, we didn’t have them. I just had nothing; I was just fortunate that I didn’t suffer from seasickness except on these

occasions, twice, that’s not bad in six years.

No, no, it was on the Strathnaver on the very first venture from Fremantle at the very beginning of my Naval career. And I was a landlubber, I stepped on the

Strathnaver and just the going right down south to get to Durbin and the ship was going all over the place, very rough, it was going up and down, up and down, up and that’s the worst movement, a roll you can take, it’s the pitching that does the damage. And the pitching was so pronounced

that when the ship, when the stern, the bows went down like that, the stern came up like that and the propellers were out of the water, you could hear ‘brrrrrrrrrrr’ you know oh god. No good. Anyway, I was so sick and one of the Afghan members

of the crew who was swabbing the decks pointed to a big tap, and drink, saltwater that they use for washing the decks, so I drank, and it fixed me. Yeah.

Well I’d never heard of it, it worked with me,

but I’ve never tried it since because I’ve never been except on that one occasion, I’ve never had to worry about it since.

Well that’s a good question, I’ve never thought about that. Mostly sailors don’t get seasick. You know they might start off that way but they get use to the motion and you know they’re pretty good.

Quite often seasickness is a little bit of fear in it you know, if you step onto a ship for the first time and it starts jumping all over the place you begin to wonder you know if it’s entirely safe. And might be a bit of that. Anyway, after the first bout you don’t usually have any trouble well I didn’t. But nowadays they just give you a tablet and you don’t have any trouble.

Oh about 6 months. It must have been more than that, travelling from Madang to Port Moresby to Cairns, Byron Bay and back again, yes about 6 months. In fact the Birchgrove Park, I went right down to Sydney with it, that’s when I left it. Got on

a train and went to or plane, went to Perth to be discharged.

Oh just naval stores, it’s hard to explain what they might be.

Some,

they’d have a cool room for that. Bags of cereals and, this is going up of course, not going back. Most of the stores were carried to New Guinea rather than back. No I really can’t answer that question satisfactorily it’s fifty years ago you know.

Well, by that time you know the war was over and I was due for discharge and it’s just automatic, I just get off the ship and go

back to my homeport. I cant tell you exactly how that was communicated to me, it must have somehow or another. And I still had, I still wasn’t discharged straight away. And the Provo [Provosts – Military Police] Marshal was a fellow named Neil Baird. Have you ever heard of the Emporium, Bairds?

BAIRDS.

Gee, how old are you? About 18 are you?

It’s amazing when I talk to younger people about certain things, they’ve never heard of them.

They loomed so large in my life, so well, you’ve properly never heard of Bones either?

Well in my days the big stores in Perth were Bones, Bairds and Foyes, Foye and Gibson. And Neil Bairds was the son of the founder of Bairds and he was an officer in the navy and he was the Provo marshal and he was due for

discharge, so they discharge him, they were looking around for a replacement, so it was me. And for the last few months of my life in the navy I was a provo marshal, responsible for law and order in the streets of Perth. A good job.

Hmmm?

There was a lot of sailors around and sailors get drunk

and disorderly and they cause trouble. And that’s what the provo marshal is there to prevent if he can. There are other aspects of the job of course, he’s just not spends all his time rounding up drunks but that’s one of the big parts.

No, no, just my naval uniform.

I might have had an armband, I think but I forget. But I was a good provo marshal, very popular. I never ran anybody in, but of course we just dragged the drunks off the streets and lay them out to cool and when they were sober just tell them to go home.

Behind our guard shack or office which is in the police headquarters

in Barrack Street, Bradford Street. I don’t think I punished anybody or caused anybody to get punished.

No. Not really. But we were in their police yard, that’s all, but we didn’t have had anything to do with, there might have been some

instances where a sailors, what’s the word, indiscretions might have been a police matter, you know if he’d stabbed somebody or murdered somebody or raped somebody but we didn’t get any of those. But there were quite a lot of ships around, big ships at that time and a lot of sailors. And we

got, there was a big battleship in Albany, the Anson I think it was, and a couple of sailors skipped, deserted and we were told about it, Albany as you know is a few hundred miles away and I was very clever about that actually, I thought well they’re not going to hang around in Albany because Albany

is a small place and they’d stick out like you know just stick out, stand out. So I thought they’ll have to come to Perth. So I rang up the railway department and I said, “What’s the next train from Albany?” they said, “such and such,” and I said, “All right we’ll meet that train.” And we met the train and these poor cows they stepped off the train into my arms and they said, “Cripes.”

They never got away; we had to send them back of course, I couldn’t hide that, cover it up. Two English sailors. They were all set for a life of leisure and comfort in Western Australia and they got as far as Perth Railway Station.

Oh yes, I was

capable of thinking sensibly now and again.

No, I had nothing to do with the Americans.

Oh they had their own naval patrols that looked after them.

And not just the English sailors there was

also Australian sailors but British Sailors. But the Americans they had their own men and they were pretty tough actually. They didn’t much around. But I was pretty soft really.

No, no, no. I didn’t,

I don’t think I ever did carry a weapon except on one ceremonial occasion when I carried a sword. And that was when I was doing a Guard of Honour job.

I’ll show you a photograph of that when you finished with all this; I’ve got a few photos out there. But one of our Australian cruisers, the Perth

was sunk in up in the Timor Sea somewhere and it was decided that there’d be a plaque erected and fixed to somewhere in the Town Hall, a wall commemorating this ship, so there was going to be a ceremony and

they sent up a Guard of Honour from Leeuwin, Fremantle and I was in charge of it. And we were lined up in Hay Street outside the Town Hall and the Governor, Sir James Mitchell and I inspected the guard, you know like this and then when that was done, we marched into the Town Hall where the ceremony took place. And that was the only time I ever did

anything like that. But I had some quite exciting jobs as Officer of the Guard, but that was when I first came back from overseas. One of the really exciting jobs was when we had a funeral and there was a gun carriage and we towed a gun carriage up from Fremantle at a certain

point we would then meet the hearse and transfer the coffin to the gun carriage and carry on the funeral.

Well it’s a platform on wheels that normally you would put a gun on but this time you put a coffin on it. So we pick up this gun carriage and we go

to Karrakatta Cemetery and at a certain point near the cemetery we’d pull up and wait for the hearse, when the hearse arrive, they’d transfer the coffin to the gun carriage and then you’d carry on with the normal military funeral you see. The only trouble was around about Mossman Park one of the wheels of the gun carriage fell off and we had a dreadful time putting it on again, somehow or other

we got that but it took us a long, long time, in the meantime the hearse had arrived at Karrakatta and its going around and around the block just waiting for us, you see it didn’t know what the hell was going to happen but he couldn’t do anything, he just kept driving. And what the local residents thought I can’t imagine to see this hearse going past every few minutes and anyway, we connected eventually and the funeral was about an hour late.

That’s some of the exciting things that happened to us in the navy. There’s a military, there’s a war cemetery at Karrakatta and that’s where we were headed for. And there’s all sort of things, like you’d have a rifle team shooting in to the air and the Union Jack.

Yeah that’s right. So

Very basic, very simple town. I have to thank Alan Bond, as much as I dislike that man, we have to thank him for a completely transforming Fremantle into one of the most interesting places

in the metropolitan area. Una loves it she’s always down there fooling around and she knows Fremantle much better than I do. It’s a very interesting town now, but in those days it was just a port, it was clean but just a port.

I don’t know about that because me area as provo marshal was Perth, I never went to Fremantle. They had somebody else down there doing it, I don’t know who it was, never found out.

Hmmm?

Oh they were pretty rowdy at that time, they were full of sailors and they were looking for mischief and I got into trouble with the chief of staff of the navy, a chap named Commander Price, another pig, he was well known as being a nasty man, he was a horrible obnoxious.

As a matter a fact there was a joke going around that a psychiatrist died and went to heaven, at the Pearly Gates he met Saint Peter, he said what are you, he said I was a Psychiatrist, he said oh just the man he said we’ve got a problem here, it’s God. He said, “what’s wrong with him? It’s god he thinks he’s Commander

Price, so and that’s what, but Commander Price, a sailor passed him in the street without saluting and quite thoughtless because usually they weren’t bad like this but he just didn’t salute. So Commander Price told him to report to the officer in charge for punishment

so I happened to be at that moment, the officer of the day in Fremantle and this boy came up before me and the master at arms told me what was wrong and I said, “well we need a witness, where’s Commander Price?” See an absolutely mad thing to say you know, it would be safer to cut my own throat than

make a stupid remark like that. And the master at arms said, “well he’s not available he’s.” So I said, “oh well dismissed, no evidence.” And I thought that was the end of it. This bloke Price checked up to see what happened to this boy and when he’d heard that I’d dismissed it, he was gunning for me after that and he was really on my tail and

you know looking out for me. And fortunately I was discharged before he could do any damage. But he was certainly looking for me, very dangerous man. But you cant do things, you cant say to a boy go and get yourself punished. You know you have to do things properly, you have to have someone there to lodge

a complaint, you can’t have the boy saying I’m here because I didn’t do this or that. anyway.

Hmmm?

Marshal?

Oh well yes, it was called Northbridge in those days. Northbridge is something new. Yes but that’s where the police station was. On the corner of Rose

Street and Beauford Street, the building is still there. But behind that building was a police yard where they put car wrecks and things like that and that’s where our office was. So we were, that was our area yeah. But Northbridge was peaceful. Now of course it’s a hotbed of muggings and druggies and all those dreadful things.

As a matter a fact I’m don’t mind admitting that, I don’t think I’m a coward, I think I proved that but I’m frighten to go into Northbridge at night really. At least I’m not exactly frightened but I don’t go there if I can possibly avoid it.

Do you go there? Do you go to those clubs and things?

Not now?

I couldn’t do it.

Hmmm?

Oh Fremantle is getting a bit dangerous too now.

Yeah

You can avoid trouble by not going there, is that what you mean?

So if someone tries

to mug you just negotiate, you say “look I’d sooner you didn’t do that.”

Next question.

Well Rose street was the brothel area, did you know that?

Oh yes, well from Rose Street,

from about a few hundred yards west of Williams Street was just one brothel after another. And the, that was very popular, particularly with American sailors; there was always crowds of blokes there seeking sexual

satisfactions and diseases of all sorts. But it was a pretty heavily populated area. And we use to call them, when we were kids; we use to call them mole shops. Even when I was a boy living in West Perth I knew all about it.

Hmmm.

A school?

I don’t think so.

I don’t think so.

If you extended Rose Street several miles,

that’s when it stops being Rose Street and it becomes Railway Parade, you’d end up at Perth Modern School but that was four or five miles away.

Mmmm. Anyway, Rose Street in recent years they just demolished all those places and the ladies have moved to all over the place now.

Oh very safe because they didn’t have all those nightclubs and no the place is riddled now with restaurants and cafes, nightclubs and so on, so on, they’re all over the place. In the time I’m

talking about there wasn’t anything like that at all, nothing. And it wasn’t called Northbridge, it was just Perth, north of the railway line. Northbridge is a fancy name dreamt up years after the war to sort of try and promote the place.

Yes but well Northbridge was not especially dangerous, you keep calling it Northbridge, it wasn’t Northbridge but the area was certainly not particularly dangerous. Rose Street, that part of Rose Street was not brothel laden

and the next street, James Street just had shops and warehouses and things and getting away to Francis Street and Newcastle Street, nothing at all. It was tame. So but it’s just the latest additions of all these nightclubs and of course all the Asians and Vietnamese and so on flocking to that area that have made it

the way it is. In those days there wasn’t a Vietnamese in sight, nothing. So cheer up.

Well I wont go there at night.

Every now and again a film I’d very much like to see and if it’s on at the Paridiso, oh no I cant see that film.

Yeah because it’s in Northbridge.

It’s got nothing to do with

Australians at war, really?

March 1946. And I said earlier there were no fanfares, no bands, no councillors, I just went straight back to the Commonwealth Bank.

Well at that point, the Perth office.

They did have a school; the bank was conducting a bit of a school for returned servicemen to get them back into the swing of things. And I went to that and then I went to the Perth office and then I was transferred to Town Hall Branch and then I was transferred to Sydney.

I was transferred to Sydney

in 1948, so two years after I was discharged.

When we were married, before we were married I lived in at place called the Cloisters.

I’ll tell you how I met her, you know the instantaneous decision that she was my wife to be?

In Perth, in the home of her father, her parents in Mount Street, Perth. I was visiting there.

Hmmm?

Well I use to be in the Commonwealth Bank and when I

came home from overseas I went into the bank to see if any of my mates, my mates, friends were still there, there weren’t any, very many but the chief clerk was a friend of mine and he said, “Would you like to meet the new superintendent, Mr McKelpie, he’s just arrived recently.” And I said, “oh yes I’d like to do that.” So

he took me upstairs to meet this very nice gentleman and we got on very well and he said, “I’d like you to come home and have dinner with us one night and meet the family.” So that’s how I happen to be there. A few weeks later and that’s how I met my wife.

Oh yes. There’s no doubt about it just straight away. And the, but then I was

sent up to New Guinea and I didn’t see her for quite a while but when I came back we picked up again and we got married in 1947.

First date? I just opened my mouth and spoke.

I don’t know how it happens to say how it goes. I think I invited

her to come out and have dinner with me one night. And from then on we often went out together, went dancing together and went to the pictures together, we got on pretty well.

There was only one that I ever went to, that’s the Embassy Ballroom, which you’ve probably never heard of?

Have you?

Ah, well that’s extraordinary.

you’ve heard of something. Well the Embassy Ballroom was a lovely place and we had a lot of fun there. I’m not a marvellous dancer but then nor was she but we liked dancing together. And the Embassy Ballroom was the place to go.

Oh every few weeks, some excuse could be

found to go there.

In the Cloisters. Do you know the Cloisters?

They’re still there.

If you go up Mill Street, from the esplanade go up Mill Street to the terrace, straight opposite there is this old fashion church like building,

it use to be a Church Cloisters but at that time it was a residential, you’d have a room and you’d get meals and so on. And that’s where I lived.

Yeah. And it was very handy to where my wife lived because she lived at the bottom of Mount Street, which was just around the corner. So anyway we finally became

engaged to be married. And it’s quite funny really because we were engaged to be married and we had to find somewhere to live and in those days it’s hard to believe now, but in those days it was almost impossible to find somewhere to live. To buy or rent or quite, many married couples

went straight home and lived with his or her parents. Anyway, I managed to get a place out at Canning Bridge and I had to take it straight away so I was paying rent for three months and this is March and we were to be married in July. And here we are two responsible people about to be married and we’ve had this house which I

use to go out weekends to do a bit of work, weeding or repair work, painting and so on and Una use to come with me to help. And Una’s mother insisted that she had to be home before dark, now try and move that 50 years ahead to these times and there’s young people about to be

married, and the mother saying you’ve got to be home before dark. So, incredible.

Mrs McKelpie knew that as long as the sun was shining her daughter was safe. The fact that we were engaged to be married and were going to be married, the date set and everything didn’t mean a thing, she had to be home before dark. And I wouldn’t want to tell her

that it was just as good in broad daylight as it was in night time, I couldn’t tell her that I’d, that would have been a dreadful shock. But that’s how they thought. And on the wedding night Una’s father as we were leaving to go to our hotel he took me aside by the arm

and said, “Be gentle with her Ted.” I was dying to tell him that we had past the gentle stage some, quite some time ago. Again I couldn’t do it, because, but he knew, he just knew. That if until we’re married nothing was going to happen, he just knew that. Funny isn’t it.

Yeah.

And there we go, times have changed.

Yes. That’s a point too, that at one stage we’re all four were reported missing, that’s interesting isn’t it?

No, a bit of both. My

eldest brother was taken prisoner by the Japanese, another brother was taken prisoner by the Germans in Crete and that’s another thing, when I was sunk off Crete, I didn’t realise I had two brothers on the island in the army. Funny isn’t it. They didn’t know I was afloat, I didn’t know they were on the island.

That’s right. Anyway, we all came home. Fortunately, well anyway my parents weren’t alive, so they wouldn’t have had that worry if they’d have been alive they’d have been very worried. But the whole four of us were at one time reported missing. Quite exciting, but we turned up. But my eldest brother

he was on the Burma railway, his health was permanently damaged and his last years were spent more or less as an invalid. So he died thirty years ago.

Oh I think it happened in dribs

and drabs. One came home and then another and then another, and sort of there was no particular occasion, celebration or anything. Just I think when, when my eldest brother came home I was in New Guinea at the time or Sydney, so I wasn’t there for the homecoming.

No we didn’t have a big uniting ceremony it just happened gradually. But all my brother are dead now.

No we were never very close. We were just members of a large family, that’s all

we’re not terribly close, there’s not a lot of brotherly love except with one of my brothers who was a doctor. And he was great brother but even so he was ten years older than I was and we were not exactly mates.

Well we just happen to be members of a big family. And we were scattered all over the place, my sisters, one was in Kalgoorlie the rest were in either Canberra or Sydney so I hardly saw them.

and another brother up north, my doctor brother went back to England to do study, as I think I mentioned my eldest brother who lived in Cottesloe might have been living in Guatemala for all the interest he took in me. He was thirteen years older than I was and he just regarded me as just some young brother, no interest.

But I was sorry for him, because he went, in his last years he had, what’s that disease, not Alzheimer’s

Parkinson’s. Yeah. Nasty. And what’s she want me to do, shut up.

We were married in Saint Georges Cathedral in Saint Georges Terrace.

Yeah, well it wasn’t huge. There were a lot of people in the Cathedral, probably about a hundred at the reception.

I don’t know the name of the place

but it was reception hall in Sherwood, Sherwood Court in Perth, upstairs. Do you know where that is?

Well.

Well you should really but that’s, you imagine your at Saint Georges Terrace, there’s Barrack Street

and you’re going west towards Williams Street, well the first little side street is Sherwood Court. And there’s a huge building on the corner, I can’t think of the name of it. And this particular place was a

sort of a designated reception area, it’s probably not there any more but that’s where we went.

Yes, they were all there. My eldest brother was the MC [Master of Ceremonies], a very good one too. This is the one that’s not interested in me, that one. But he agreed to be MC and did a good job.

And he was the sailor, sailing on the Swan River, I use to sail with him before the war. He was the MC and my other two brothers were also present, one of them was a groomsman, oh yes we didn’t hate each other, we just, there wasn’t you know an awful lot of love.

Oh absolutely,

yeah.

Well one of my brothers went into business with me. I resigned from the Commonwealth Bank in 1954, nearly 50 years ago. I remember that you weren’t born at the time.

And we were in business together.

Well I started off as a manufacturers agent and then we went into the furniture fabric, this stuff,

that’s ours. And we did very, very well.

From all over the world.

Have you ever been to the

concert hall?

That’s our fabric.

His Majesty’s Theatre, our fabric.

Yeah, my word. And also the entertainment centre, no fabric there but lots of vinyl which we supplied and we supplied to upholsteries and furniture manufactures all over

the metropolitan area. We became very big. So and I retired from that 18 years ago and I’m not interested any more in what they’re doing.

Hmmm?

Oh no, oh no it was never a family business.

Yes he was, he was in business with me. He was another director

of the company but the main people were in Melbourne. They were the people that got us going and sent us fabric to see and so on. And they’re both dead too.

I’ve no idea.

I know that it’s, it started off as a one-man show and I think that’s what it is now. It

went up here and then down there.

Bad management.

It was just bad management. Even when the father in Melbourne died, the sons took over and they were absolute twerps. I’m sorry to say.

No,

no, I was out, I’d gone. I’d got, I’d done very well and I got a handsome superannuation out of it and I’ve been very comfortable.

Yeah.

I was still with the bank then.

Six.

Horrible.

Sydney’s a lovely place but it’s a cow of a place to work in, for someone like me I had no money and no car, everything was public transport. At one stage, long trips by foot, by bus, by train, by tram. At one stage I was travelling two and a half hours

each way, each day, five hours out of the day travelling. The best I ever managed, the very best was one and a quarter hours. You think about here, I can get from here to the bottom of Barrack Street in fifteen minutes but go anyway in Sydney it’s a hassle. And apart from that, Sydney branches,

some of them are absolutely dreadful, you know it’s a horrible place.

Oh she liked it because she was born in Sydney, she had her parents with her, sisters and brothers in Sydney, but I was very unhappy. And one day I was sitting at my desk I said, “here has to be something better than this, I’m not going

to spend the rest of my life,” you know this endless travel and dealing with people I don’t like very much so my brother who I mentioned early came to Sydney to see us and “look he said if you come to Perth they’ve struck oil over there at Rough Range, things are going ahead, start a business, he said I’ll help you, put some money in, give you accommodation,” so we went.

And the wonderful about it was, although Una had all these ties in Sydney she came quite willingly and didn’t argue, she said, “You’ve got to be where you want to be.” And so, but we went to Sydney in the first place because her father who was the superintendent in the Bank in Perth got transferred to Sydney and he persuaded

his various sons-in-law to get themselves transferred over there as well. So that’s why we went. A big mistake.

It was. Costly?

Costly?

Well put it this way I was about to, I had a block of land in Doubleview and I was about to build a house,

with an easy bus distance from Perth, it was going to cost fifteen hundred pounds. When we went to Sydney we eventually got a house, which was out in the wilds, three thousand three hundred pounds. More than twice and everything else was correspondently expensive. Travelling particularly, you know it ruined us;

I had no money at all. In fact Una went out to work, so that we could have some sort of a live. Oh terrible place.

Hmmm?

Recouped?

Well, when I started the business I put some money in, my brother put money but for the first year we really lost a lot of money.

In fact I had to lend money to the company out of my personal purse, lend it to the company so that the company would have some funds to pay my salary. That’s how silly it was, but after about a year we found that we were making a profit. And from then on we kept making profits and finally we were making big profits, we were doing very well indeed.

So that when I retired it was a magnificent affair. (UNCLEAR) it was marvellous.

But after I left things started to happen.

Hmmm?

Yes, oh yeah.

We’ve got

2 sons and a daughter.

Well Geoffrey was born in 1951 in Sydney, Leslie was born in 1953 in Sydney and Russell was born in 1956 in Sydney although by that time we were back in Perth. And Geoffrey is an Aviation Travel writer

for the West Australian newspaper, if you get that paper you might have read a few articles of his. And Russell is a real estate agent and Leslie works for an insurance company in Melbourne, so and they’ve all been divorced, they’ve all well Russell’s been divorced and he’s remarried. Leslie’s

been divorced and hasn’t remarried and Russell’s been divorced twice and hasn’t remarried but he’s got a partner, a girlfriend, lovely girl, she’s, we’re hoping that they will get married. But when I was a young chap, when I was your age when I got married if you lived with someone to whom you’re not married, it was scandalous. You simply didn’t talk

about that, I mean it. And if you’re divorced that was something to be ashamed of. So if you had one of those in the family you kept quiet about that too. Now as I say my three children have all been divorced, have all lived with people they weren’t married to at different times. As a matter of fact my eldest son at one stage was living with a girl at that

particular time, they were each still married to somebody else, I couldn’t imagine anything more sinful that. Yet it turned out all right.

Oh by that time I was getting use to the idea of you know sin on every hand, but I just thought, too bad. But they’re happy these boys that have remarried, they’re very

happy. And my son whose got a girlfriend they’re very happy, a nice girl, she’s a really nice girl. So it doesn’t seem to make any difference these days but in those days it was not good.

Mmmm.

All right.

It’s quarter to six?

Yeah, all right.

Madang.

Well with great relief, shock also because it meant the dropping of what they called the Atom bomb. Which completely devastated the town of

Hiroshima. And then later Nagasaki. After the war in 1972 I think it might have been, we visited Nagasaki, or Hiroshima, we went to the war museum, it’s absolutely frightful

what happened. The photographs they’ve got of people, particularly young people with skin peeling off their bodies but it just wiped the town out. Flattened everything and killed thousands of people and fatally injured a lot of others so when I heard about the end of the war I was relieved but I was

really worried about that bomb. What the dreadful damage, the wholesale destruction and death, it affected the pilot who dropped the bomb too. He had a mental breakdown.

Yes, my word. Well the war was going to drag on

and don’t forget we didn’t start that war. The Germans started it and then the Japanese started it and but we finished it. And the Japanese were really, they were fanatics, they were going to fight until they’d, til the last man. Death

was a great sacrifice they were prepared to make. And the Atom bomb although it caused frightful death and destruction in those two towns, it saved thousands of lives, cause if the war had gone on, the Americans were on their way up, they were going to invade, there would have been a lot of people killed.

No it was good.

Oh that, I wasn’t worried about my naval career, I was thrilled that the war was over from that point of view and that meant that I was then free to return to civil life and to marry the girl with whom I’d fallen

in love. That was terribly important to me, the mistake I made was going back to the bank, it took me a few years to work out that I had made that mistake but when I made it I then took, I resigned. But also when the war was over, the navy invited me to stay in, I was very flattered

they invited me to stay in, they offered me you know a position. If I’d have stayed in I wouldn’t have been able to have a satisfactory married life with my wife. I said, “No, I want to get back to the bank,” I’d been happy in the bank. I thought I’d continue to be so, not true.

Repatriation?

Oh yes, no I didn’t even think about them. I could have done all sorts of things. As a matter a fact a friend of mine ex-Commonwealth bank, who joined the air force when he was discharged he took up one of these offers and he became a medical practitioner with their assistance. He also became an alcoholic, not that that’s got anything to do with.

He finally drank himself to death. So what’s that prove.

Que sera sera, “what will be will be.’ No I don’t regret going back to the bank although it was some years of unhappiness but it led to some many years of very great happiness. And so I’m not unhappy about that.

Oh very important.

Yes it was. Well there wasn’t anything else was there? You know if you didn’t have mates, you’d have an awful time and when you didn’t have mates

it was awful, like on that minesweeper, when I was on the hell ship. The only mate I had was the navigating officer, he couldn’t help me against this homosexual pervert, who didn’t find me attractive, I couldn’t understand that. It’s never happen before.

The, so oh no mateship’s very important. And particularly if you’re on a ship, long serving on a ship, which I in fact never was. But I can see that if you’re on a certain ship as a member of the crew and for some years you would form very deep

associations and you would actually, I know this doesn’t sound quite right but you’d begin to love your fellow sailors, your fellow men. Without sort of doing anything about that, I don’t mean that way but it’s terribly important because there’s nobody else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll show you their photos in a minute.

Oh it was wonderful. Years after the war I thought I’d like to see what happened to these two men, whom I admired so much. And through a navy friend who

had connections, he found out where they were and they were by this time both admirals, both knights and I got their address and I wrote to them. I got lovely letters back and we corresponded for some time, very friendly. And then unfortunately one of them died so that was the end of that.

But the other one didn’t die but he lost his memory but when we were in England at one time, Una and I went to his home by arrangement and met him and his wife and family and we had a lovely time with them for a few hours and I said, “Well sir I don’t suppose you remember me?” He said, “Son, I remember you very well.”

Now did he or did he not?

I liked to think that he did. There might be many things he didn’t remember but he would remember me. Because I was a bit unusual there and in his whole ship there were two people, two Australians who were candidates for commission and I was one of them, he’d probably, he have every reason to remember us.

Who knows when a person loses their memory, how much they actually lose. You know it is quite possible he said, “Mr Thomas I remember you very well” so that’s good enough for me.

Not terribly important, although I do go, I

go I’m on a jeep that is trailed around at the end of the, because I cant walk the distance any more. But I regard it as an important anniversary but I don’t regard it as terribly important to me. Anzac Day as I recollect, Anzac was 70

years ago wasn’t it? Horrible business, did you ever watch that film Gallipoli? Well it gives you an idea and I’ve read books about, the senseless slaughter that went on. All these young chaps going over the top towards the Turks, they knew they were going to be killed, they just do it.

Because all their mates had been, they just did it because they were told too. And some smartarse sitting back in a safe trench somewhere directing operations said, “You know this has got to be done, you do that.”

Well I just, I suppose I go along because there’s a couple of friends of mine, a naval commodore and a naval captain ex who are on the same jeep and they say “Come with us” and I say “All right” so there. No other reason

just for the company of these estimable gentlemen. They’re good friends of mine, we’re good mates and you know I’m quite happy to do it but I’m so deeply stirred by the ceremony.

Oh I think it certainly has. And what worries me is that I find that

in some schools they wont celebrate it. Because they think it will offend the ethnic population. I was horrified when I heard that. And they’re talking about cutting out Christmas because Muslims don’t like it and I also heard the other day as you may or may not know in the all-prominent hotels throughout the world you’ll find a Gideon Bible,

did you know about that? In every room in the side next to the bed, there’s a Bible put there by the Gideon’s. And the Muslim hotel staff want them removed. That’s terrible. It reminds of a story about a journalist, I’ve forgotten his name, he came to Perth,

he gave us a talk, he wrote a book which I’ve got out there. He told us he said, “I’m staying at this hotel the Parmelia and he said I have noticed a Gideon Bible in the bedside table,” he said, “I just before retiring I thought I would need something solace so I picked up the Bible,”

and he said, “I opened it up and there on the fly leaf someone has written if you are tired of sin read Matthew chapter 4 verse three.” He said, “Underneath somebody has written if not ring Samantha on her telephone number.” Well that brought the house down and from then on he was,

he had everybody agog.

Well I think it has, well I’m sure it has. I mean back in the days when, after when it was first celebrated there was tremendous patriotic fervour, it was very fresh in the minds of everybody. It was a calamity,

a lot of marvellous lovely young blokes who were just blotted out through senseless direction from higher ups, even the Turks were astonished, they couldn’t believe that these fellow would you know come wave after wave you know into their machine guns and so it was terribly important. And of course that’s faded away, lots of people

I wasn’t born in 1915 but I was born soon after and those (UNCLEAR) very large but lots of younger people, you know it’s just a remote event that doesn’t mean very much to them.

Yes well it’s probably not entirely due to Anzac Day, probably not entirely to the Anzac business, you know the Gallipoli. It’s probably all mixed up with the thrill of celebrating, just sacrifice, you know not just Anzac, not World War I or World War II as well.

Like Armistice Day, we use to have a holiday for that, we even use to have a holiday on my birthday, Empire Day, they cut that out. I was annoyed about that. And but Armistice Day, probably now days, kids or young people don’t know what Armistice Day is all about.

What is it do you know?

Well that’s an old trick. Well the war was declared finally on the 11th of November 19, 18, 19 I’m not sure which, and that was the Armistice. And from then on

that event was celebrated as Armistice Day. See now of course it’s called Remembrance Day, see it’s got nothing to do with war, World War I at all, it’s still celebrated on the 11th of November at 11 am, signing in the railway carriage in the forest and it’s just Remembrance Day and there’s no holiday any more.

It really relates more to World War II than anything else. I think World War I was a dreadful, dreadful tragedy. If you ever get up into Kings Park and walk down the road, don’t drive, walk pass those magnificent trees and at the bottom of each tree there’s a plaque

with a soldiers name on it, where he died, why he died and so on. And you looked at the ages 18,19,20 you know one after the other all the way down, these boys, that’s all they were, just wiped out because some idiot back at headquarters said, “we’ve got to do this.”

And so

No I don’t think that. I don’t think that but because as more and more veterans are phased out, people around about my age, there’s not many left when there’s no one left they’ve still got someone left from the old, from World

War I, just a few, but it wont be long before there won’t be anybody left from World War II. What they’re going to do then I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re going to celebrate.

Well I don’t know what to think about that, I think they got a pretty rough deal these boys. I know they did what they were told to do,

went away and fought, when they came back they were ostracized because it was an unpopular war. I think that particular part of it has faded away a bit but I think it was awful the way these boys were treated when they came back. And that was an awful war too. I’ve read a few books about that, particularly how our prisoners of war were treated

by the Vietnamese. Shocking. You know brutal, sadistic.

I use to be for many years I was a member of the Highgate sub-branch of the RSL and I was treasurer for five years, so I was pretty active

but I resigned a few years ago on a matter of principle which I won’t tell you about. I’m going back there as a guest on the 15th. They still love me. But Highgate RSL, have you ever heard of it?

It’s nothing to do with Highgate at all.

Well though, it really started off as a kind of a businessman’s ex-servicemen’s club and it was a sort of a upper class RSL club and they were looking for a name, any name, so someone said Highgate, so Highgate it was. And they use to meet in

the restaurant at Bowen’s for years and then they went to various other places, now they meet monthly at Anzac House. But it’s still called Highgate. But we do actually have a member that use to live in Highgate, but he doesn’t live there any more. I know Highgate; I went to Highgate State School.

Years ago.

What, what?

Well I went because they use to have a luncheon and they use to have a guest speaker and that’s the sort of function I rather like. Have a nice meal and listen to an interesting talk, and that’s why I went. I really wasn’t interested in the

inner workings of the club, I never went for high office, they wanted me to go for president a few times but never, I was happy to be treasurer for a few years. It was just a businessman’s club as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t terribly wrapped up in it.

Sense of humour. Yeah.

Hmmm?

I think it’s terribly important. As my friend Lindsay Goaty use to say, “If you don’t laugh you go crazy.” And he said, “You can actually do both at once if you set your mind to it.”

You’ve got to see the funny side and there always is a funny side. And I mean the funny side of my encounter with this young boy for instance who wanted to do anything for me, the funny side of that moment on he avoided me like the plague and I thought that was quite funny.

Never saw him again. He probably saw me many times but I never saw him.

I’m dead against it, that’s all. I can’t see that it achieves anything. Look at Hitler

it laid waste to huge areas of Europe for what? And again look at the World War I, the Battles of the Somme where it’s not unusual for twenty thousand young men to be killed in one day, for no gain whatsoever.

They didn’t advance a yard, they just popped up, got shot. It doesn’t make any sense. And these big shots, these colonels and generals an so on, sitting in comfort in some distant headquarters directing operations, they ought to be shot. No I absolutely, I’m a pacifist, not a ‘pisafast’.

I’m dead against it. Talking about ‘pisafasts’ it reminds of my, when Una and I were in Japan visiting Hiroshima, we were on a Ferry visiting the Islands of the inland sea, very interesting, and our guide was a very pleasant Japanese man by the name of Shigamitzu,

he spoke English very well indeed and he had a great sense of humour and we were talking together on the ship, on the boat and I happen to notice down the, towards the bow there was a doorway and a sign which said in English, and in Japan a lot of the signs are in English and Japanese and this sign said in English “Notice,

Passengers are forbidden, no, it is forbidden to go past this point, by order.” or something like that. And then the lower part of the sign, there is two of these funny Japanese characters you see. And I said to this chap, Mr Shigamitzu, I said, “ Tell me, does those two Japanese characters mean the

same things as the English message above?” and he said, “Yes they do.” And I said, “Do you mean to tell me all that warning ‘Unauthorised persons not permitted beyond this point by order’, all that is contained in those two Japanese characters?” He said, “Yes, that’s right,” and I said, “Well I am surprised.” And he said, “Well Mr Thomas you have to understand our language is much more basic than yours. Those two Japanese characters mean ‘piss off’.”

Now don’t tell me the Japanese have no sense of humour, he was a funny man. If he said right off the cuff, “I don’t know what those characters really meant, surely they didn’t mean that.”

Mmmm.

That’s all right. It’s a pleasure.

Now just take a few minutes and we’ll go and have a look at those photographs that you said you wanted to see.