Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Toowoomba and then we moved down to Paddington when I was about six or seven. The place where my father was working was owned by my grandfather and he dropped a tree on himself and killed himself, so they had to sell up the property, that’s why we moved to Sydney, worse luck.

In Paddington that’s where we lived and it was pretty ordinary. We lived at Lidcombe for a little while. My Dad hit the road and took off looking for work and they repossessed the house; it was a war service home, they could repossess them then but they can't now. We went to school at Paddington on Glenmore Road,

that’s where I started and I went from there up to Paddington Tech. Until I turned fourteen and I got myself my first job at an old Paddison company. I use to get ten and six [10 shillings 6 pence] a week and I gave Mum

the ten bob [shillings] and I kept the six pence. I got a bit fed up with that and got myself a better job and I thought messenger service. They used to give us little penny tram tickets, one to go and one to go back. I used to run everywhere and save my penny tickets and I brought my bike.It was a pretty good life, they didn’t spoil us.

I got a photo out there that I could show you of poor old Mum. I finished up in a flourmill, but I didn’t like that I was coughing up in the morning, so I joined the navy, that was about the only thing that I hadn’t tried. Apart from that it was

a pretty normal life.

Goombungee was where we lived, it's further out, right out on the border but I was born in Toowoomba because it was the nearest hospital, I was about six or seven.

Not that many. I was a little bit young, just six or seven, and that’s going back a bit far now because I’m eighty three.

Yes, it was then, but it's not now. The last place we had in Paddington was owned by Stern the artist, he first bought

houses there together, they were shop fronts. He offered to Mum, there were two together, six hundred pounds for the two of them, and you can imagine what they are worth now, about a million dollars. Of course we couldn’t afford it then, I was the only worker in the family and I was only getting ten and six a week and that doesn’t go far.

Yes he was ex army, he was gassed a couple of times over in France and finished up in hospital over in England. That’s why he brought the house through the War Service Home, but if you didn’t pay your rent in those days you were out - and they sold your house over your head. That’s why we moved to Paddington and got ourselves a little flat in there

and away we went from there.

No, never ever mentioned it, wouldn’t even collect his medals. It wasn’t until later years before he died in Lady Davidson hostel ,that’s when he admitted to being in the army. When I wanted him to sign my papers [to enter the navy] I sent them on

and he tore them up and sent them back and said that he wouldn’t sign them. I went and saw the local sergeant of police and he signed them, he said “If you have any trouble, send him to me”. Mum signed it and the policeman counter signed it, he sort of backed it up.

Pretty rough, being the eldest I was expected to do a lot.

Mum taught piano and I got caught skinny dipping [swimming naked] with the rest of the kids and they pinched my clothes and I had to run all the way through Lidcombe through all the swamps.He was on his bike and I got a flogging all the way and when we came through the door the old lady met him with a chair, so down he went, very exciting of course.

Apart from that we got on alright, there was no trouble.

Never ever went to it, he never recognized it, didn’t have anything to do with it.

Whether he had a pretty rough time over there I don’t know, he never ever told us, and I suppose

I did the same thing. That’s what they are going crook about, “How come you’re spilling your guts to everybody but us?”.

He worked on the PMG [post office] and because he wouldn’t go to church he got the sack,[dismissed] it was a very Catholic minded setup in those days, whether it’s still these days I couldn’t tell you. I was a postman for a little while

and when I started there a bloke said to me, “That’s a fine Catholic name”, and I said “It is a Catholic name but I’m not a Catholic”. Whether it is still hanging in there I don’t know.

She raised the four of us, and her sister’s husband

died and she had a little girl, and she remarried and the new husband wouldn’t have anything to do with the little girl, so Mum raised her too. She was a schoolteacher and barmaid before she got married. Some of the best all sliders [barmaids?] in Goombungee.

Yes, five kids to look after.

No, but she took in washing and ironing, she was stuck to the house, she wouldn’t leave the house, or the flat that we had.

I took the wife and the kids

on a trip down through Paddington, I had a big Ford Twin Spinner [sedan] it was a fair thump of a car, we couldn’t go down some of the streets. I couldn’t get over it, we use to whip down there on our bikes, no problem at all. You can't drive a car down there; yet there were cars parked on the side of the road and if you wanted to get around them, you had to get up on the gutter and go around them like that, and that was the only way to do it. I thought it was unreal

and I couldn’t get used to it myself, the kids thought it was a great trip.

One house in particular that we remember, we knew it very well, it was painted completely black - the windows, the shades across the windows, the storm windows that they had, everything was painted black, just black. I thought "Gee, there are some funny people over

here now". That’s how they wanted it, and I don’t know whether it was painted black inside, but on the outside she was just pure black. They are all terrace houses and they are all joined together, and this one house in the middle that was painted completely black. That was in Windsor Street, Paddington.

The people were different, all the Italians, Maltese and you name it, and they had everything in there, the Turkish, the whole lot. It was still the same Paddington, down Oxford Street out to Centennial Park, and then on to Bondi.

No that was the only difference, the traffic. Red lights and flashing lights everywhere and, God knows what. She wasn’t too bad a place. When you lived in the place and everybody knew you, you were alright, but if you were a stranger in Paddington in the old days it could be pretty rough, and the same with Darlinghurst

with the razor gangs, they were all about then.

We didn’t have much to do with them, we kept away from them because they were bad, they were a really bad mob.

They wore the old style cap and it had razor blades. Off with the cap and they could slash you as quick as wink, no problems. Being known we were no trouble, it was only the foreigners or the different people

would come in, strangers in paradise.

Yes only the local kids, the bad bunch, that’s how the coppers [police] use to nail them - with the caps with the razor blades on the tip of the cap, and they’d swing it or throw it like that, and it could cut you to ribbons in no time if they wanted too.

No. When we lived in Lidcombe, before we moved to Paddington, and Moxley [wanted killer] was captured just across the railway line from us. He was in Rookwood Cemetery, that’s where they caught him and that was just across the railway line from us. We use to rock up, that was after the old man had left

No, they hung [executed] him and that’s the end of the story. We never ever saw him.

They were frightened, the lights would go out at eight or nine o’clock at night, there was no television in those days, so if you wanted entertainment you had the wireless.

I got a second job when I got my bike and I use to go down to Double Bay picture show and sold chocolates, ice cream and all that type of thing, that was six nights a week. After work I’d go down there and that was right up until I joined the navy, I used to do that.

There were two old dears [matrons] who used to own the lolly shop where we used to work from. They were terrific, the two old dears, they looked after us like babies. I have quite good memories of those days, we had our bikes and we were free once we finished at night we’d head for home, or head up to the dance.

The bike club used to have a dance above the bike shop, and we joined the club and went up there. That was our entertainment, dancing.

Ballroom dancing, in those days it was old style, but now its new vogue.

There would be a good thirty or forty people in there, they were only dancing to music off the

jukebox.

Sometimes, but only parts of it because we weren’t allowed to go in there and you couldn’t go in with your ice cream because it used to melt, so you only use to watch bits and pieces of it. There was an usherette and she was a proper villain she was.

She wouldn’t have anything to do with us blokes because we were only kids, she went on the big dipper [fun ride]at Luna Park and when it went around the corner at the bottom and swung around she steered straight out and she wasn’t hanging on and she slid right along the concrete floor on her backside and she wanted to show me the bruises. Me being a sixteen year old boy,

just little things that happened, she said “Look what I did at Luna Park”.

About thirty five.

Like I said she was a bit of a villain, never ever attempted anything on us young fellows. We used to like her, she was a really nice girl, she was a person to talk to. She knew Al and all that mob before they went to Hollywood. She used to really get around. She used to live up at the [Kings] Cross and she had a flat up at the Cross, she had to keep herself

in the job because the coppers were after her. That’s life, life in the raw in those days.

I never use to go up there much. But I did stop in with an aunty one time but I think she had a boyfriend and she use to send me to the movies

every night to get rid of me and I was there for about a week. She wasn’t really our aunty, she was just a friend of the family, that was all.

Pretty wild, you reckon it is wild now, it’s tame now to what it was like, and they have it under control now.

All the razor gangs used to go up there for a bit of excitement, let's put it that way. That was their excitement, going up to the Cross just to start fights, so you just kept away, when you knew what it was like you just kept to your own little corner. We had a picture show just down the bottom of our street and used to go, that’s when I wasn’t on the lollies

and they used to have blues [fights] down at the pub. There were two women Kate Lee and I can't remember the other women’s name, they were in the underworld. During the war they were selling the sly grog,[illegal booze] and if you tried to get in on the sly grog you had the front desk mob, and they were wild and woolly.

We used to play tennis with cricket bats, little bats about so long with a handle on them up against the nearest brick wall, and that was our tennis court. There was a fight that started this day and my mate’s father got tangled up in it. So we mounted the fence and as the blokes came past, if they weren’t on our side, we’d whack them with our tennis bats. There were two of us that arrived that night

selling ice cream with black eyes, but that’s what it was like in Paddington. Tilley Devine, she was the worst of them all, and she was a bugger, she only lived down the street from us. You could've written a book on them.

We were too young to have anything to do with her,

except these blues down the pub. Her and the boys use to stand over men and turn on the blues whenever they felt like it, that’s where my mates old man got tangled up that night, and that’s the only time we were anywhere near them, we just kept away from them. My mate’s old man got stuck into them that night and we had to go in and help the poor old bugger out.

She was very ugly, she was a wino,[wine drinker] and she had a real cruel face, that’s the easiest way to describe her. I don’t know if you have ever seen anyone like that, living in amongst it you can’t help it. She used to go shopping

and a couple of the boys would go with her, making sure that nobody attacked her. Villains they were. Kate Lee was sly grog over in Surry Hills, we were in Paddington and that was over the other side. Strawberry Hills they called it, but Surry Hills is its proper name.

Girls mainly, that’s why she had all the hanger oners,[goons,pimps] they were for protection, they were looking after the girls so they didn’t get mucked about with or didn’t get cheated on their money. Some of them were quite nice women, some were even married women

and they’d come from other suburbs to Paddington, that’s where they’d earn there money and then go home, and nobody knew anything about it, that’s how they’d get a quid [pound] I suppose.

One of them was down at Rushcutters Bay, I forget the street but it runs right down through Paddington, Brown Street,

that runs right down to Rushcutters Bay.There were two of them down there that we knew of, and they had bullet proof windows. We use to throw rocks and they’d just bounce off and that’s when we found out that they had bullet proof windows, we were buggers. There was one chap that I joined up with, Alf Long, and he and I use to go down to White City where they used to play tennis and Denny Pails was down there

and after he finished training with Harry Hopman [Australian tennis legend and Davis Cup tennis coach] We used to play singles and he used to have to play doubles, he used to verse [oppose] the two of us and that’s how we got our tennis in. Then when I joined the navy the tennis went, I’d tried everything else.

Just for something to do, letting off steam. You’d see the blokes come out and of course we’d be gone by the time they did come out, long gone.

Nobody took any notice of it, the coppers were the only ones interested because they were getting

their money behind, off the takings. That’s why they let them go on, don’t tell them I told you though. We knew quite a few of them and they’d give us a kick in the backside every time we walked past, just for kicks. The old sergeant up at the Paddington police station, he was who I got on really well with and he was

a terrific bloke. He was the one who I got to sign my papers for me to go away with. He said “No trouble, come in here boy”.

No clubs only pubs, and they closed at six o’clock or they were supposed to, and that’s when the sly grog took over from there.

You’d just buy

it after hours, you could buy it when the pubs were open but you could also buy it after they were closed. They used to trade out of the back door so you’d knock on the back door and tell them how much you wanted, then pay them and then away you go, that’s sly grog.

No, you took it away with you, to your home

or a park, anywhere to get together and avoid the coppers.

Not much, as I said I was working, so I never took much notice of them, there were three of us from the same street, two brothers and myself and another bloke Tommo,

so the four of use to go down and sell lollies. I don’t remember much, only a dance and you had to be a member of the club to get in there. There was no charge to go in, only as long as you were a member of the club. If you weren’t a member of the club it used to cost you to go in, if there was any fights by God, that’s when she used to start.

I didn’t, because I was working all night and it was about ten o’clock before I got home, and I’d stop off for a dance on my way home. Only one that I ever knew, and I knew her at school, I went to a dance and it was a reunion dance and I met her and that was the first time that I ever got kissed by a girl.

I use to dance with her one hundred mile and hour. When I got home there use to be a shearer come down to our place, a friend of Mum's from way back, Andy, he was part aboriginal, and he used to boarded at our place. He finished up marrying a girl he met there and then he stopped in Sydney and never bothered to come back anymore. He had been at a

bucks [bachelor] party and he was standing up with a foot at each end of the bed and he was wobbling and the bed wouldn’t stop moving, he’s dead now poor old Andy.

We had our church, but I got expelled from church for asked in the wrong question. The big white church was they’re doing the rounds. Myself and my brother we were in the choir and this head of the

church came and, doing his rounds and gathering his flock, and he said, “Are there any questions?”, and of course me being the bright boy - and I used to wear a ribbon with a medal around my neck and I was a soprano. Up went the hand and he said, “Yes sir, and what would you like to know”, I said “If God made the world, then who made God?”, I went out the door just like that, he took the ribbon off my neck.

I’m still trying to find out that one. Then my younger brother, he started making airplanes out of the pray books so he got the big A[thrown out] as well, so we were all ostracized from the church, much to Mum's disgust.

She liked her religion,

being a mixed marriage it was destined like ours, as far as she was concerned. She kept to your own little self, she did have a family Bible. My brother got that, the one living up in Brisbane. We were villains, when you put four boys together you couldn’t control us, Mum couldn’t control us.

Very close, yes we were. I’m up in Lismore, the youngest is down at Ballina, the second youngest is up in Brisbane and the one next to me is in a home down at Cronulla, he’s got dementia and

alzheimers [degeneraive brain disease], but apart from that I’m as fit as a fiddle. That’s from all the sport that I played, I’d do anything to get off the ship. I use to play soccer, rugby, cricket, water polo, that’s all that I can remember,

anything to get off the ship, to get away from the war.

No, only when I was on the bike, I use to have about three bikes, one after the other and wore them all out. I belonged to the Eastern Suburbs bike club, they called it the Eastern Suburbs Wheelmans' Association after we left.

Yes, I was being coached by two brothers out at Bronte, because I wouldn’t give up the bike, I use to ride out there to swim, but he said “No you have to come by tram”, if I came by tram I couldn’t afford it so I came on the bike, they wiped us, that was it. I did play water polo. I did a hell of a lot of swimming especially in the navy, and I swam especially in the Mediterranean and there weren’t any sharks.

You just go over the side and have a swim whenever you felt like it, it was great.

Bondi was where we used to go, and that’s where I lost my first bike out there, it got pinched.[stolen] Later on when I was in school at Parramatta Jail, that was after the war, the bloke who pinched my bike was in jail and had been there for fifteen years,

he was a real bugger of a bloke. He was caught at Bondi where he was running the boys, the rough nuts. We joined the Junior Bondi Splash, I was twelve

or thirteen and we were on the beach the day that the sandbank collapsed, they called it ‘Black Sunday’ I think it was. The tide changed and took the bank away, there was thirteen drowned, that’s how bad it was, it was a shocker.

The tide changed and just washed the sandbank away, all the people that were on the sandbank were all the people who were drowned. We were helping them with the lines, pulling the lifesavers, they were going out and we were pulling them in on the lines and they’d turn around and go back out. I don’t know how many were rescued but

thirteen had died or drowned. There was a hell of a mob out there that day, it was a really hot day and just a sudden change and the bank went away like that.

You don’t go surfing much apparently. When you go into it there is a deep part and it comes out

on the sandbank and then it goes back down into the deep part, that sandbank was washed away. I’m pretty sure it was Sunday, there were so many people killed on it, but we were all on the ropes that day helping them. We had done all the training with them but we hadn’t done the swimming part, that was what we were doing we were running the lines out and pulling them back in again.

When they lifted their hand we’d start pulling them back in again.

They weren’t expecting it and just a sudden change in the water that’s all, she just whooshed and away she went, it just swept like that and she was gone just like that. That’s how it goes.

Yes. I was down there with the kids years after the war and I took my daughter down there, she was only a little baby and she walked down into the water and the lifesaver didn’t see her and a wave hit her and knocked her flying because she was so small, so I raced in

and grabbed her. I said to the bloke “You didn’t see that one did you?”, he said “What happened?”, and I said “Forget it”. That’s how it is down there now, it’s so thick, heavily populated, the water wasn’t that populated in our days, except in the summer time they were all down there swimming at the old Bondi and Bronte.

On the beach there were two promenades that went out from the main promenade around the edges and they had pulled all of those down when the war broke out because it was more of a landing part, and when the water came in there they could land on it. So they blew them all up with dynamite and got rid of them and

that’s when they reckoned Bondi changed, it’s never been the same since. The water has altered the tides and God knows what else.

They had a lot of shops and the pubs of course, the Bondi Hotel, the big one just over the Esplanade. The trams use to come down Bellevue Hill down the side of it

and around up to North Bondi where the depot was.

There were only two, North Bondi and Bondi, there was Bronte and Cronulla and all of those but they were different clubs, but there were only two at Bondi and they were the only places that we used to go because they were so close. It would take

us about twenty minutes from Paddington to Bondi Beach, that was on our bikes.

Not as many as what there is now, there was still a lot of ethnic mob. That’s where they used to form their own little groups, but there was never any trouble with them, we never had any fights with them.

It was the same there, it was the same right through Sydney, different parts of Sydney was different places where they congregated. Like Leichhardt, it has all the Greeks and the Italians and you go further out and get out to Auburn now, I don’t know what they are now, but they are all a mixed crowd.

It’s much of a muchness except there are more of them, I think that is what is going to cause a lot of trouble later on, but we won't see that, so not to worry.

I didn’t take all that much notice, it was just life to us and we accepted it. We used to ride to work on our bikes. I had three apprenticeships as a boy, an apprentice to a butcher Garand’s up at Darlinghurst and then I went to linotype service.

I was an apprentice there but you had to drink two pints of milk a day and I didn’t like that, I didn’t like the sound of it. Then I went to the glass cutting and that was the only job that I really liked. Old "Knockout Smith" closed us down and we went out on strike, so he just shut the factory down. Because I was an apprentice he had to give me a job so he gave me a job down on Burke Street, in a glass company where I was just a store man.

So I left there and went to the flourmill and from there I joined the navy. I spent about thirteen or fourteen months at the flourmill and I got fed up with seeing these lumps of dough on the road as I was going to work on my bike, there was this dust in the lungs, so I got out of it.

I don’t know. At school you had to do a classification to see what you were good at and they reckoned I’d be a good butcher, so I tried working as a butcher. I finished up with that many cuts on my hand, to even pick up a tin of dripping and you’d slip, and then there’d be another bandage on your finger, so it went on, so I thought that it was time that I was out of there,

I was losing too much blood.

Yes it was a shop at Garand at Darlinghurst, there used to be a big fat bloke standing outside on Saturday mornings talking about how good the meat was, that’s how I remember it, Garands.

It used to come in a big truck, it used to come about six o’clock in the morning

and fill up the fridge and away they’d go, and you’d have to chop it or break it down from there. It wasn’t a bad job but I didn’t fancy it. I remember the day I finished up there, there was an old lady that came in and she wanted a piece of veal. I can’t remember how big it was but I only charged her ten and six

pence and she said “Oh, it’s twice that price”, I said “See, there’s the tag off it.” Away she went, happy as Larry, [very cheerful]ten and six pence for a great lump of veal.

They took all my holiday pay, I had been there about three months, and I was expecting the three months

holiday pay but I didn’t get it.They kept that because I had broken my apprenticeship.

Five years I think, I just forget now, it was a long time ago. That was just after I left school.

Glass cutting, crystal glass company out at Waterloo. You could do whatever fancy business you wanted to do on the glass, if it didn’t work out well, bad luck.It was a good job and I really enjoyed it. You go from cutting to polishing then into the acid room, where they polish them up much more better.

We used to polish it with pumice stone on the wheel, a big flat wheel and it would be about that big and there would be about four blokes, one on each corner and they’d be polishing different things. Sometimes you’d get a breakage and you’d get a cut finger. You’d get some bad cuts sometimes. I had a wart

there and I got an abscess underneath it. One night it was painful and I was up all night so I went to work and I started up the old emery wheel and jab it on it, and the blood and everything went everywhere. The boss said “What the hell did you do that for?”, and I said “I only wanted to get rid of that wart”, he said “You mad bugger”, and then he had to go off and get me a hand bandaged. It got rid of the wart and there was no more pain, but I’ve still got the mark.

About two years, I was about fifteen, sixteen and then he closed the place down, and we were all out of work. Most of the people who worked there did but I was an apprentice so he had to find me a job, so he sent me up to another factory that he had in Bourke Street,

one was in Wyndham Street, and the other one was up the road in Bourke Street. I got a job as a storeman and it was dirty, there were rats running everywhere, they were pulling things down off the walls and the rats had been living in there, yuck, it wasn’t for me. So I hunted around and found myself a job at the flourmill, it suited me splendid

for a while.

You cant help it, it was in the air, as you breath you breath it in and out and the bags of flour down on the big hopper, there is a certain number of plain flour, then crème of tartar and all the other stuff that goes into it.

Crème of tartar use to come in pure linen bags and I use to take them home and Mum use to wash them and they were beautiful for pillow slips. They never bothered about it, the bags use to go out the back door. We had that many pillow slips, they were about so big and I forget

how much they use to weigh. The big bags use to weigh one hundred and fifty pounds and I use to stack them thirteen high, image me a little skinny bugger lugging all these bags up and down on my shoulder.

Just bread, they didn’t have masks or anything like that like they have these days, they are now all running around with masks on, but no,

not in those days. There was no such thing as compo,[compensation] if you got sick then you got sick and that was it.

Quite a lot of them. A mate I used to work with, Smales was his name, and he finished up a sergeant of police and got mixed up into that royal commission into the grog after the war, he was mixed up in that.

He got ousted out of the police force over it, Arthur Smales.

There was Alf Long, Tommo, they both went into the army when war broke out.

Malcolm Thurston he was a mate of mine and he had a leaking valve of the heart and of course they couldn’t cure it in those days. He died during the war, but he hadn’t joined up, but his brother joined the army on his birth certificate. His mother bought him a Pommy [English]bike and it was too bloody heavy and I used to have to ride his bike because he couldn’t ride it, and he would ride mine because

it was nice and easy and it was a racer. When I came home I went to see him and he was on the way then.

We just hit it off together, wherever we went we always went together, because I always had to look after his bike for him. He was a real good mate,

we grew up together, they just lived a couple of doors down from us. His mother was a real broad Scots, Scots to the eyebrows she was.

The way that she spoke, if you have heard a Scots person talk you can hardly understand them, she must've come from the Highlands of Scotland I think.

Her husband was a Pommy and they use to fight like hell, they had a big family there were about five girls and two boys. One of them used to work at Coles next door to where I worked in the chemist shop and we’d end up going

and playing tennis, with their club,,it was the Coles club. She was alright but she was a real little fat thing, but she was a good tennis player and she liked it too.

Soul Patterson’s 160 Pitt Street right opposite the Strand Arcade, next door to Coles and then

Prouds was on the corner, the jewelry store, I still remember some of them.

It wasn’t bad but I was only a messenger boy', I use to go out and get the lunches, wash bottles,there was no money in it, it was ten and six a week, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

Then I got seventeen and six a week and then as the messenger boy plus the penny tickets they used to give me,so I bought my bike, they were pretty good. There were a good lot of blokes and they all worked together, anybody who liked the long jobs they’d give two penny tickets.

Yes,you could sell them to the conductors on the trams,

it saved them worrying about the money, they’d take the ticket and put a rubber band around them and throw them in the bottom of the bottle, penny ticket, to account for the pennies that weren’t there.

Yes it was, it paid for my first bike.

Mum started to make me knuckle down because I was swapping my jobs too quick.

I knew the city like the back of my hand.

It was a lot quieter to what it is now, the trams used to be all the traffic that was on the road, there were a few cars but not

like there is now.

There were horses and carts, I used to hire a horse and cart, there was a box factory near us and they had the broken boxes and used to take them home for firewood, two and six for the loan of the horse and cart.

You’d load it up with wood, they’d give it to you to get rid of it, so you’d take it home for firewood for the old chip heater. A chip heater there is a tap that runs into it and you stoke up the fire in it and hot water comes out goes into the bar, that’s Depression. Two and six [2 shillings 6 pence] for the lend of the horse and cart, so that was cheap

firewood, it would last you for two or three months, you would get firewood for your chip heater or the other stove. You’d start it up with pine wood, because it was all pine wood, it’s easier to chop and easier to start fires with. Mum use to do the cooking with the wood that we brought home, the gas was there if we wanted it, but if you used the gas you had to pay for it.

The old shilling in the gas meter and when it ran out it would cut out just like that, then you got your bob's worth.

No everybody was doing it, the bloke up the road had a horse and cart, they were all going to him for it and we were all carting from the broken boxes. We had blokes working in with the boxes and they use to throw out the

broken ones too, they’d put the axe through and split it and we’d get another bit of a load and away we’d go again. You could only go there when they had a load,, you just could go there anytime. If they had a load you could back in with a horse and cart and away we went.

Whatever we could afford. During the Depression

you had to go to the butcher with a voucher for meat, one for the green grocer for the vegetables, sugar and tea there were all different vouchers that they gave you for the Depression. That’s how we use to go, me being the eldest, I used to have to go and get it, Mum was always busy

doing something.

Mum was a good cook, as my wife will tell you. A while back I made a stew, Mum use to call it the shearer's stew, every time she walked past it she’d throw something in it and you would never know what was in it, but it was good tucker.[food]

She used to make bread and butter pudding, that was a great one. Bought the bread up at the bakers and before the old man left I used to go up to the baker because they had the horse and cart that delivered it, so I use to pick up the manure and bring it home, and they used to always give me three or four long bread rolls. Mum would chop them up to make bread and butter

pudding, so she was pretty good.

Yes after he left and they sold the house we had to move to Paddington, you couldn’t rent houses or anything like that out there.

No, only when I told him that I had joined the navy, and the sergeant of police signed the papers and he came home quick, but he couldn’t stop me.

He was going to stop me and I told him to go up and see the sergeant of police, and he said “What’s it to him”, and I said “That’s the bloke that counter signed it, Mum signed it and he counter signed it”, he said, “He can't do that” and I said “Go up and have a yarn with him”,

I said to him “I’m in, don’t worry about that, I’ve passed the medical”. I went down in 1938 when it first looked as though war was going to be, and they told me to go home and grow up, they said I was too young. When I was seventeen and a half, that was when I hopped into her, he was very upset about it. He hung around from then on but I didn’t see him because

I was overseas for the first three and a half years. I saw him once when I came home and I walked past him, we were crossing over a bridge near St Vincent’s Hospital tramway bridge and the trams use to go along one side and the pedestrians use to go along the other side. I just walked straight past him and ignored him. He said ‘That was the worst thing that had ever happened to him’, he told my mother, “My son walked past me and wouldn’t even recognize him”.

When he was dying I went to see him in hospital, but he wasn’t interested, he was fighting with the sister-in-charge, he was a very heavy smoker. She said “Mr Coleman, that cigarette is going to kill you”, he said “The sooner the quicker, luv”, that’s what he was like, an inconsiderate old bugger.

I was ten when he left, it was two years before they repossessed the house, and we moved into Sydney then and I was twelve years old. About seven or eight years since I’d seen him. He was working on

the wall at Bundaberg, he was in charge of building a wall out from there, that was one job that he got while he was up there.

He went out to A D Davidson hospital and that was where he died. I only went once to see him and that was at St Vincent’s and I took the grandson, my eldest boy, I took him to see him, he wasn’t interested, he didn’t want to see him. Went down with the younger brother, myself and the wife to see him,

when she saw him I said “What do you think?” and she said, “He’s a mongrel”. I told her that a long time ago.

I never heard her say a thing about him.

During the

Depression it was, they just took off on bikes, they use to go out shearing, go to shearing sheds looking for work. Did you ever see “The Shiralee? it’s a movie, you should see that because that’s what it is like. He [the star of the movie] had his little girl, he left his wife and just took his little girl with him. “The Shiralee.” -

that’s the one [movie] you should see, where he tries to get his women to fall in love with a little girl because he didn’t want to keep her, no way in the world was she not going with her father, it was a good movie. That’s life, it has changed now.

The young ones want everything laid out for them. Jean’s granddaughter, she has moved into a flat on her own now, seven hundred dollars she paid for a television set, but she can't afford it, she has got to pay it off. Can't convince her to try and balance it out. It’s a shame because she’s a terrific kid, she’s a beautiful girl,

she is twenty seven now.

When I was going to Lidcombe school there was a teacher there called Leopard, we nicknamed him Spots because of Leopard.

He was a mad cricketer and in those days Bill O’Reilly was the top bowler and he was trying to find somebody the same as him. He drove me mad with bowling, bowling that was all that we use to do. Of course when I went to cricket I use to hop down into the big storm water drains and away I’d go. Monday morning, line up for the cane.

Mr Coleman. I shot through [ran away] and I knew I was going to get it on the Monday. Friday afternoon was our sports day and he’d have us out there playing cricket, I was no more interested in playing cricket as I was of flying. I was interested in running, I use to love running, jumping. I held the senior high jump championship when I was only twelve, so I was pretty good,

well I thought anyway.

I don’t know, I was just talking to Mum one day and she said “The only job you haven’t tried is the navy”, and I said “OK, I’ll try it”. I ended up in it for twelve years, and I couldn’t get out of it. I couldn’t change my job even if I wanted too, and that’s just how it has happened.

Nothing, not a thing except I use to see the ships coming into the harbour. The American navy came in and the Rodney[British battleship] turned turtle and drowned all those people, and a mate of mine’s sister was one of the girls that got drowned. A bloke I used to go to school with, he wasn’t actually a mate just a boy that I knew. and his sister was lost on it and she died from drowning.

They were all trapped inside, when they changed sides and the whole mob of them raced to the other side of the boat, it just turned turtle straight away and straight down. If you ever hear the saying ‘think of the Rodney’ that was the name of the boat that turned up. They used to sit down in the car or something like that and they’d say ‘think of the Rodney’, have you ever heard it?

I think it’s only us old people who say it now, but it used to be a popular saying a long time ago.

No, I joined up in February 1939 and war broke out in the September. We knew it was coming so that was the hurriedness of our training. We had just about finished our training

when war broke out. All our mob, there was X2 and Y1. Y1 was my class and they all went to the Sydney, I was in hospital with measles, there were six of us.

We all went to the small ships, the Stuart, Vampire, there were three of them in Sydney harbour at

the time and they split us all up. There was Don, myself, Max Middleton, Barry and I can’t think of the other two, it was too long ago.

We were better off because the [HMAS]Sydney got sunk with all hands, you probably heard about that. They machine gunned them all in the water, the Japs apparently had something to do with it, they weren’t in the war before they came into the war.

The Sydney?

She ran into a German raider

off Fremantle somewhere and they got stuck into it of course and apparently the Sydney went in too close, she went in to have a look at it, she thought it was a merchant ship but when she got in they downed flaps and they had these big guns behind the flaps. They just sank the ship and then they went around and machine gunned them all in the water. There were six hundred and fifty four blokes killed, they lost the lot.

That was later on, that was about 1942, or early 1941, we were over in Russia at the time. When we came back from Russia that was when we heard about the Sydney being sunk.

This was the "Scrap Iron Flotilla”[veteran ships called up for Naval service] and that was the first ship I went on.

Yes, we were supposed to of had nine months of initial training, but we only had about seven and a half months, we only had a little bit to finish off. War broke out and of course they just drafted the whole lot out. Our two classes, X2 and Y1, went to the Sydney

and they were all the blokes that I joined the navy with.

Rifle drills, doing squad drill, marching, they drafted me into the band, it was good because I was having a ball when I was on the little side drums

but then because I was so tall “You are for the big drum”, and I didn’t like that at all. We were coming out of parade one day and I gave them a boom, boom and I shouldn’t of, so I slipped back to being a sailor again. 'Boom, Boom!' means that you have got to come to a halt. “No, no, Coleman, no no”, that was the band leader.

I forget his name now, he had a very funny name, he couldn’t ride a bike and he was learning to ride a bike and every time you go past an officer you have to salute them. When we saw him coming we’d all get out in a bee line and salute him and he’d say “No, no please don’t salute”, because he used to fall off his bike.

They just changed you over, you still do your seamanship, then you have a certain number of hours a day that you have to go with the band master, and learn your drums.

Yes, probably once a week you might go and then they’d have a march and you have got to learn

all the stopping and starting business. I use to enjoy it when I was on the kettle drums, the little side drums, but I didn’t like that big one, boom, boom, boom!

You have got to do a swimming test, I was a smarty in that too.

You have got to swim in a canvas suit, like a sailor suit, so what I did was I stuck the top half in my pants and tied a string around it so that it wouldn’t come out. Around my feet and the legs I tied string so the water wouldn’t get in there, I thought. Right, in we go. There I was floating,

the suit had filled up with air when I dived in. If I had've jumped in it would have been alright, but I dived in and of course the jacket filled up with water, the pants filled up with water and I was there. The blokes came in and got me out and they said “Well that will teach you Coleman, I know you could swim but you didn’t have to do that”. Some of the silly things you do when you are a kid.

They didn’t do what I did, they just went straight in. Because I dived in the air was pushed out towards the water and I had string around the bottom of my legs to stop the water from getting in, there was nothing to stop it.

It just made a big bubble and I couldn’t move.

You learned to pull anybody out, you had to take your turn at drowning so that you could be rescued, that’s about all. That was when I started to play water polo,

they started a water polo game and I thought ‘Well, that looks good’, so I went into it. We were over in the Middle East in the Mediterranean, where there is no sharks and we used to swim from ship to ship and challenge them to a game of water polo, it was terrific. Then the Germans came in and mucked it all up, the Italians didn’t want to fight. We sunk a submarine

and we had three blokes on there, they were farmers from Griffith.When they came on board they said, “They reckon you’d eat all your prisoners because you haven’t got any food”, I said “Rubbish.Who the hell told you that?”. I had a photo that I gave to the museum years ago where they were standing there reading the Pix [magazine], all the Australian papers, it was great because they went over there for a holiday and they must've sucked them into the navy.

We found that the submarine was laying mines outside Alexandria harbour.When they got the word that we were onto them, they let all the mines go and we had to try and float out in amongst them. We were using lumps of wood to push the mines away from the side of the ship, what a caper! They were alright the three of them, they were real

fair dinkum Italians, just farming down at Griffith, that’s where all the grass [marijuana] is growing these days, they are all Italian farmers down there now.

Yes, it would blow a hole in the ship.

They had horns sticking up like that and you can push against the bottom of them, but if you push it against

the top, it only takes eight pound of pressure to set that mine off. If you push that it breaks the glass and something inside with the detonator in it. If you break the glass the detonator goes off and up she goes, and they made a fairly big hole too.

No, push it down at the base like that and just push it,

not hard just very gently push it away from the ship, once the stern started going they just seemed to drift away anyway.

They were setting them off with a rifle, hitting the horns, that’s when they were a fair distance away and that would set them off, then there was no problem.

The enemy, that’s what they were doing it; was an Italian submarine was laying them outside.

They were up until I was about ten when the old man finally hit the road, but they were always fighting.

The only time I used to work at it I use to cop it, but it didn’t worry me, I got used to it after a while.

With his hand or whatever he could get hold of. He chased me on the bike with a tomato stake and every time he caught me I got one across the backside, but I soon put on a sprint to get away from him. I took him through all the swamps and water holes, then he had to get off his bike and swim like mad.

Anything like that that made him cranky[grumpy], that was my way of getting back at him.

No, I wasn’t big enough I was only a little skinny bugger in those days. He was a big man and he used to have a forty three chest, that’s a big chest.

I was having a ball.

I enjoyed the company of the blokes, there was not a woman within miles. We used to go for a walk, a mate that I cobbered up with from Newcastle, we used to go for a walk and we got into trouble and one woman reckoned that we were trying to do a line with her.

Her husband was one of the instructors there, we got into a bit of trouble over that. We told him “we definitely did not, we wouldn’t do a thing like that to a woman”, so he just forgot about it then. We would often see him, him and his missus parted company and he said “She was only a bitch anyway”, so that’s the way it goes.

We use to have to go to the rifle range and we used to do the exercises with the rifle, marching and changing arms on the move, the shooting was quite good and I use to like that too.

There was a bloke killed on a motor bike down at Sale, and we had to go to his funeral, a funeral flying party and we were all coming back and all the poor old ducks [women] were swooning over the sailors with rifles, we were only kids, we had only been to the funeral firing party. “The war is coming”,

“all the kids are getting ready”, and all this sort of jazz, but not to worry.

They fire three shots, that’s all, but they fire it over the top of the grave and the bugler there plays the last post.

No, we only fire three with a rifle,

a twenty one gun salute is usually only for the Queen, King some big wheel like that that comes on the scene.

Three blank shots that you fire.

For anyone that has been killed, they play the last post.

He had only just joined the navy, he hadn’t been in it long, but they still gave him the proper burial, a naval burial.

When they sounded the first alarm in 1938, but I had only just turned seventeen so I wasn’t old enough I had to be seventeen and a half so they told me to go back and grow up for a couple of months and come back and I’ll

be alright. That’s when it looked like being another one, so in February I went and joined up and passed the doctor. There is a hell of a lot to it. We had to go to Flinders by train, a hell of a lot joined up, they came from everywhere, Muswellbrook, I cobbered up [got friendly with] when I joined the navy.

The blokes used to like running and I used to run for ages and there was an apple orchard not far from where we were doing our training. He used to grow these Christmas apples, you don’t see them on the market these days, they were as sweet as a nut and we used to go out and raid the orchard and come back and sell the apples to get money to go to the movies.

In the end we got to know him and we use to leave an empty bag and he’d fill it up with apples and he said “I’d sooner pick them for you, then have you pick them and wreck my bloody trees”, we’d leave a couple of bags there and he’d fill them and we’d sell them to the boys in the depot, just to raise money to go to the movies.

No, we just told him what we did. He said “What do you do with them?”

and we said “to get money to go to the movies.” He said, “Fair enough I won’t miss a couple of bags”, he had thousands and thousands of trees there. I don’t know if you have seen a ditty bag, they are blue and they are about that long and about that round and he would fill two of those up and that would be about three dozen apples in each bag. That use to give us weight for running,

that was the only reason we started pinching these apples. He came from Kurri Kurri, he was a skinny bugger and God he would get drunk, he would run all day and all night no trouble.

For exercises.

I don’t know, it was just that my mother said to me “The only thing you haven’t tried is the navy” so I joined the navy just to try it, I didn’t know it was going to be for twelve years, that’s what I signed up for but I only did nine because I got kicked out because of bad eyes, the eyes blew up on me.

I wasn’t really fussed, it was whatever was on, but general adventure I used to prefer.

I liked Errol Flynn and he went to Hollywood and started making them. Reading, I use to read a lot, the Wilber Smith books I’ve read everyone of those, and I had them all here but I gave them away to a hospital in case somebody else wanted to read them. They were a good yarn and I use to like them,

they were adventure stories.

You’re going back a bit now. In 1945 we went to see ‘The Sensations of 1945’, we were looking at it from one side

and the Japs were watching it from the other side, there was no war on then, they had declared peace while we watched the movies. They use to have snipers up on the hills, during the day you got into trouble, if you went into the wrong place you got yourself shot. I can’t remember any that I really went to see when I first joined the navy,

it was only once a week that we were allowed to go.

No, they were too careful with them, they just gave you a certain amount of shots and then they’d tell you when to fire them and when you finished firing them you gave them back the empties, so they made sure that there weren’t any accidents.

Sometimes with bayonet practice you could have an accident, and I got one in the back of my hand. It’s only when you go to put them away, and wave them like that . A fellow near me waved it a bit too quick and I was dragging the chain, and I got it in this hand and I was sticking it in there. He was left handed but he had his bayonet on the wrong side,

it whipped around and stuck me, just drew blood.

Just the rules of the sea that’s all, the ‘rules of the road’

is what they called it mostly. There was a poem they use to have:

‘If to your starboard red appears, it is your duty to keep clear’,

That’s all that I remember of it. If you saw a red light on your starboard side you have got to keep away from it because he’s got the right of way with the red light. He’s coming down this side, the red light would be on the left side, red was port and green was starboard,

that’s how you learnt it with this bloody poem. When learning the ropes we use to have to point and graph our hammocks. On the rope itself point and graph, it was about that long and the point on the end of the rope so that you can thread it through steel rings, that’s about all they taught you.

Of course it doesn’t have anything to do with civilian life, now I’m buggered without a bit of rope, I have bits of rope hanging everywhere in the garage. I used to pull up the wheelie bin [rubbish tin] with a rope, I couldn’t go down and pull it up so I use to go down and tie a rope on it and sit up the top and just pull it up so I got out of it that way. The chap who lives next door won't let me touch it,

as soon as the [garbage collector] empties the wheelie bins he pulls them up, and I wash them out and put them in place around the back.

Yes, all the different knots about the place.

The reef knot, the bowline on the bight,

you can use it as a seat, you put it over your head and slip it down and open it and you sit in that and it’s a seat, so they can pull you up and down on a rope, the bowline was just ordinary . Then there is a trailer hitch

that’s about all I can tell you.

If you wanted to pull a piece of wood through the water, you put the reef knot on it and you can tow it and it won’t slip off.

Yes you used them all the time when you were onboard. Especially when

you were painting the ship, you had ropes to lower blokes over the side and do a bit of painting down the bottom and then you’d pull them back up again. They had stages that went over, there was a platform and it had a piece of wood on either end. You’d make a bowline, which was the best one, and it goes over both sides and then up here and you can pull the stage up and down on either side.

It’s pretty good, I used them and I even use them now. My first job I did when we got married was I put up a clothes line in the garage a put a pulley up this end and a pulley over the other side, and I put a double pulley down the other end. So when the wife puts the clothes on the line she can just pull them up and up, and we can drive the car in

or back it out. I’ve got another pulley on the side to pull the rope out so that it can spread out and you can hang all your washing there and it dries over night. The wife still says “That is the best thing that you ever did for me”.

They just crash draft us. They’d say “You’re going to the Sydney”, “You’re going to the Vendetta”.

Yes.

It was built by the women in Scotland during the First World War, that’s why they called ‘old whore whore’ [after a German propaganda man, [“Lord Haw Haw” broadcaster, later executed as traitor]

they made them from the Scrap Iron Flotilla,[old WW1 ships] they were made from scrap. They reckon she was held together with wire, which was rubbish. She use to leak like a bloody shoe but we got used to it.

There were about one hundred and eighty men

onboard and we had four ditches to shower, shave and bath in, so she was pretty crowded. We lived about a dozen blokes to a mess, I lived in mess 6 which was right up the front end of the ship, the part of the ship which use to rise when she went up and down. Ever tried to walk up and down a ladder with a bucket of water

when she’s going up and down?. It nearly pulls your arm out of your socket, and when she’s going down the water wants to go too and you’re hanging on for grim death, and when she comes up you are chasing it, and the water wants to go up. I told a lot of blokes about that, but they can’t image it, it’s quite a job. We use to wash up in dixies, it is a dish about that big,

that square and about that deep. You get that full of sloppy old greasy soapy water and you will fight like hell to hang onto it. You get half way up the ladder because you have to take it out to throw it over the side, they have what they call ‘shit chutes’ for getting rid of all your rubbish by going down the chute. It hits the water down below and you don’t get any splash back from it.

You then have to go up the ladder with a bucket of water and tip it down and bring the bucket back again, clean it out and bring it back.. My action station was on the torpedo tubes. I was the bloke with the phone on my chest and if they had a break down in electricity you’ve got the phone to

the bridge and they would pass down any orders to the torpedo tube to you and you’d pass them onto them. I spent two years getting a wet bottom. When they fired a practice run, fired a torpedo in practice they have got to chase it and catch it and bring it back onboard. Every time they turned, I use to climb up the ladder otherwise I’d get wet and you’d get a short on the phone,in your ears, because it

used to come over your head, it was only six volts but by God it had some kick. They used to finish up pulling my phone back in because it would have washed over the side. They used to shoot up the ladder but after a while we got used to it, it was the best way of getting away from the water. There was a light above the torpedo tube, a search light, later on they put a

three inch gun up there for anti aircraft work, it was quite good. When I left the ship I left it to go over to England and went into the battle at Matapan, and I never got a chance to fire them in anger.

Yes, in the middle of the ship. There were two sets of three, there were six torpedoes altogether. There was A, B, and C, and X, Y, and Z, so there was no mix up in which one you had to fire.

Yes,

they’d train them fore or aft, which every side they wanted to go.

Six, we only had the six,never had refills, there was no room to put them. On the big ships they have torpedo racks but not on the destroyers, so when you fired the six that was it, you had it.

They’d ride up and down in the water like that and on the end of it you have got a steel ring and you used to have it hooked onto a davit, it was called a torpedo davit, out over the water, and have a hook that was hooked from the torpedo davit to the ring and then you’d lift

it up and bring it back onboard, and you’d put it back in the tube. You’d cover it with bull grease, big thick black grease, yuk!.

It would help it slip out of the torpedo tube when they fire it, it was fired on compressed air and if it had grease along the side of it it would help put her out.

Yes.

It just helps it on its way.

It’s just a big whoosh.

No. I use to wonder how the hell it used to clear the side of the ship because it was a far way over to the side. It has to go right out and over the side of the ship and then into the water.

I used to think that one of these days it’s going to hit the side of the ship, but it cleared it every time, so it must have been worked out at the last minute by the compressed air behind it that pushed it out, but I never got into that part of it, I changed over to radar when we went over to Pommy land.[England]

You’d change the head. There is a cylinder about that round that goes into the middle and on the end of it is a propeller and it’s got to do a certain number of turns in the water before it loaded, it brings it back on. As soon as it hits anything it sets off this big thing that is in the middle, which sets off the torpedo.

It’s armed by the propeller, the propeller screws down onto the explosive, the detonators, and when the propeller hits it pushes it back this much further, that is the trigger to set the torpedo off. Amatol was the explosive they had in there, it was a liquid

and when she goes off she goes off.

The pressure of the water, she is traveling at twenty two knots through the water, it’s got a little diesel motor in the back that drives it. When it’s going through the water

and the propeller is being turned by the pressure of the water coming at it, it’s only got to do a certain number of turns and then it starts free wheeling and it’s waiting until it gets that jerk, bang it sets it off and transfers it and away she goes.

I was only on the telephone so I wouldn’t of known much of what was going on there. I know it had a thing that used to stick up out from the torpedo and when it was fired that used to knock it down and that used to send it away, and get the diesel motor going. I don’t know if it was electric or diesel but I

do believe it was diesel. Once it knocked this lever down then away she goes and she’s on the way and that’s the explosion that pushes it out, puff of air.

The orders would come down from the bridge to phone if they wanted them to be fired electrically or a hydraulic one, I’d tell them what to shoot. If they were going to fire it from the bridge and I’d let them know or if I had to tell them to fire them independently, and that used to come down from the bridge on the phone ‘fire A, fire B, fire C’, or whatever or ‘fire X, fire Y or fire Z’.

They were the practice ones and we use to only fire one and chase it all around the ocean.

Only getting a wet bum. From the deck of the torpedo

chutes to the water, that’s all that it has got to drop, so when the ship turns to chase the torpedo, in she comes and then that’s when you get wet. They all had all their lifelines to hang on to, and I was the only poor bugger that didn’t.

No nothing like that, it was all open.

I don’t know whether they still do it that way or not, I imagine that would be the only way that they could do it, on the deck of a destroyer anyway. On the deck of a cruiser they have a hell of a long way to go down before they hit the water, that’s what starts the porpoise business, going up and down and they fire it from any height like that. They go down into the water again and it’s got to come back up again,

a gyroscopic business that steers it takes over and she levels out and goes along just under the water, whatever is set on the torpedo. She travels at about twenty two knots, it’s pretty technical when you get into it, we didn’t get anything like that all I got was a phone drill.

If there was anything that I wanted to know I would go ask the torpedo gunner, and he’d always be glad to tell you, so it was pretty good.

She was flat out at thirty knots, I don’t think she could do much more because the steam pipes couldn’t hang in there and that’s where she came to grief at the Matapan I believe.

The steam pipes they were always breaking those damn things, that’s how we came to get the submarine that I was telling you about. We were traveling with the fleet and we broke a steam pipe so they sent us back to Alexandria and we had to cruise back at whatever speed that we could manage and that’s when we picked up the submarine laying the bloody mine, all things happen.

No, they opened fire with the pom poms,[rapid fire guns] but no they didn’t open fire with the bigger guns. The skipper of the sub comes down and he pulls the plug to the bottom and start sinking, and it floods the tanks and they all go to the bottom. They had to come up to charge their batteries, because we had been sitting over them all night and they hadn’t had a chance to come up and

charge their batteries.

No, they couldn’t because we were right behind them, just cruising along the top because they can only do five or six knots in the water, the subs they are a lot faster than that now, they can travel at fast speed whereas they couldn’t in the old days. It might have been about ten knots

and that’s was about it flat out.

Yes. we got a ping with our ASDIC [Anti-submarine detection] gear we checked it out so we started dropping depth charges. We were following him all the way along but we didn’t know he was dropping mines all the way along.

He was getting rid of the mines without hitting the ship. There was only one bloke that drowned, but that was because he couldn’t swim, so they left him for dead, but two of our blokes went over to try and get him but he was dead when they got him.

ASDIC.

They run along the side of the ship with ASDIC and it tells them the length of the ping so they know it’s a submarine. If it’s a fish they might only get one ping, if they see a whale and they get a ping off a whale, anything underwater they will ping on, the ping will bounce back at it.

If they hit a big fish you would only get the one ping and you go past it and you don’t worry about it, if they keep bouncing back at you then you know it’s a sub.

They had what you would call IFF[ Identification Friend or Foe] as soon as they hear

a ping hit the ship they sent up their IFF which is a bleeper that comes up onto the surface, and they know its a friendly one, but if its not a friendly one then it’s curtains.

Yes, they send him on the ASDIC to surface so that they can check him out and see what he’s about. That he shouldn’t be there or that he’s just

returning from a trip might be keeping it underwater so that he won't get into trouble coming up over him, all that sort of thing, or start bombing the shit out of him.

It was in the afternoon, we started following him along and he knew that we were there because he could hear us on the hydrophones. It was the next morning that he had to surface because he hadn’t been about to come up and charge his batteries. They have to surface

every night to recharge their batteries so that they can stop under the water the next day. If they can’t get up to recharge there batteries then they are history, they are going to die of carbon monoxide gas.

No, he just kept going, trying to get away from us, ducking and diving but we followed him on the ASDIC alright.

When he surfaced they opened fire with the pom pom but they [the Italians]were all just pouring out of the conning tower of the sub trying to get away from her. The last bloke out,the skipper, pulled the plug and she was on the way down, so it was a waste of time shooting at it any more, he’s gone.

On the side, I have a little photo of it,

I was looking over the pom pom when it was shooting. The box camera, the old brownie boxes, I don’t know if you ever saw them or not, they are only about so big and that was what I use to take all of my photos with. There are quite a few but not as many I use to have I’ve gotten rid of some. They will probably finish up in the bin when I finally fall off the perch[die].

You had to clean it up.

Yes very strict, it had to be on the destroyers more so on the corvettes.

Because it’s got more movement, the old destroyer goes up and down or either it

will roll like that, but with a corvette she’s ducking and diving. On one of the corvettes we had a bloke that came from the Australia and he was a real stroppy little cow he was, so I thought,"Right, the first job for you mister is up in the crow’s nest".[mast top lookout][ I sent him up the crow’s nest that is where you really get the ride, he was only up there ten minutes and he had to have a bucket,

but it took the stroppiness [aggression] out of him.

It’s the worst place in the world. We had a bloke on the Stuart who was up in the crow’s nest, we had a bit of a tangle with the Italians. The battle of Calabria and the

Italians fired these shells at us, they were big shells and this bloke was up the crow's nest and he said “I could've leaned out and touched them as they went past”, I said “Come on!”, he said, “you could, I’m fair dinkum, I’m not kidding”, but that’s what it is like in the crow's nest you were wide open.

To spot anything.

They might see a submarine periscope going through the water, they could pick them up, they have got to report the lot, anything at all you have got to report it. Even if it is only a bit of debris floating in the water, you have got to report it.

With the wind, but it’s alright in the tropics, it’s a good spot to be you get a drop of breeze. It’s only a little cubby house around you,

most times it’s only a canvas bucket and it comes up to your chest, and its just gives you enough room to look out. There is nothing in the road and there’s a voice pipe just below you so you can speak into it and tell them down in the bridge what you can see.

You can’t drop the soap.

No, you get use to it, it’s no problem.

We had one onboard and they got rid of him and he was a warrant officer writer,

I think we had a name for him but I forget what it is now. That was the only time that I ever struck it.

Doing the wrong thing at the right time, they knew he was doing it but they couldn’t catch him at it.

They sent him back to Australia, he was only there to do all the writing for the skipper so he had to do the writing himself after he was kicked off the ship.

Balaclava was his name because he use to wear a balaclava when he was on the veranda around ‘the Balaclava kid’,

that’s what it was. He was only a young fellow. I had never even heard of it before, these days it’s quite prevalent I believe.

Yes he was, he was trying to too, so they rubbished him off.

No.

In those days it was frowned upon, these today it’s more prevalent. They have got it in the army. I had a niece who was in the army and she was a lesbian

and she had a mate. She had been married and they had brought a house together, but they were both sergeants in the army. In those days it was definitely taboo, there were no two ways about that. But that was the only case that I ever heard of, in our ship

and I’ve never heard of it on any other ship either.

A ship is split into different parts, fore[front], mid ship and the stern[reart ship, who ever has the middle part of the ship they were the ones that had to clean it up.

If there was any painting that had to be done up in the fore part its done up there, if there’s any painting down in the middle part, any painting needing to be done in the stern they had to do the painting. When the whole ship is being painted it’s everybody, they start and work their way down either side.

In the fore part of the ship up near our mess there was an engine that was to pull up the anchor, it was a capstone and that use to smell that is the only smell that I remember.

It was only now and again when they used it that you got the smell, otherwise they wouldn’t have the steam connected up to it but if they wanted they would hook up the steam and as soon as the steam went into it that was when the smell use to come out. There were personal ones, they were always

a bit weary of that. Our lockers, they were our seats and we use to have to sit on them, and everything that you owned was in that locker, and the lid came down. They had something like these things along the lockers for the seat, there was a stool on the other side of the table,

the table was there and the lockers were right along there. It was a bit of a pain when you wanted to get into them, but you got use to it and it just went with the job.

Sailors have got funny tricks, funny little tricks. You couldn’t drink tea with milk in it,

if you did somebody’s false teeth would be in the bottom, little tricks like that. I told the wife about it but she didn’t believe me because she thought that I was kidding. It is fair dinkum and that is one of the capers that they use to get up too, it’s funny at the time. If anybody

broke wind they’d say “stand clear of the vent in rear”, that is when you were working on the gun and you fire it with fixed ammunition and the shell comes back out ‘stand clear of the vent in rear’ so when somebody breaks wind they always say ‘stand clear of the vent in rear’.

Yes.

The first time that you cross it you have go before King Neptune, they have threaded rope hanging down over their head, and King Neptune is there with his big three pronged fork, even the skipper has to go through it all. You can’t get out of it, no way in the world can you get out of it. They have a

pill that they give you, which is generally soft soap, and you try swallowing that, oh boy, they call it number nine that the doctor ordered. Just silly capers that they get up too. Some of them do get carried away with it.

I had a shave

but I hadn’t even started shaving then, I had turned eighteen, I was nearly twenty six before I started shaving. They have this big wooden razor and they lathered you up with this bloody soft soap all over your dial, generally with a paint brush to do the lathering and then they gave you a scrap with this big wooden razor, it’s rough on the old dial.

That was the first present that my wife brought me when I got married, a razor for my twenty sixth. She said “I think its time you started shaving”, it was only bum fluff but it came off.

They could of if they wanted to. You couldn’t grow a moustache, it had to be a full beard, you couldn’t grow just a beard

that would be there and then the moustache, you couldn’t have a mustache or beard on it’s own it had to be the full beard.

I don’t know just rules and regulations of the navy. You had to have permission to shave off. If you wanted to take your beard off you just couldn’t go and have a scrap to take it off you had to get permission from the skipper, and you had to get permission from the skipper to grow one, and you had to get his permission as well to take it off.

No. When we were on the corvette and we were going up north and we were in Fremantle and we had a big farewell party and we all decided that we would shave our heads and grow beards. Well, you should have seen my beard.

A CCC [civil construction corps] used to be in Darwin, Civil Construction mob, instead of going in the army they put them into construction and this bloke had a dirty big white beard right down to here. I had a dirty face when I went in to pick up the mail, I was a post man on board, I walked in to get the mail, “Good day, scars!”, silly old bugger. The things that stick in your mind.

Yes, I was only there for about a fortnight.

The first trip was to Eroal Bay, down past Jervis Bay,

I was going to swim home from Bondi, that’s what I thought of the navy because I was that sick. The old Stewart did everything but go upside down, she rocked and she rolled and she jumped, oh God. They finished up tying me in my hammock, I wanted to go home, right, left or center. But when we came back it was like the top of that table, it was beautiful.

My oath I was sick, but I never got sick again.

Tie me in my hammock. They pushed me in my hammock and tied the ropes around it so I couldn’t get out, I was going to swim home no risk, for Bondi, I was off.

That’s right, I threw up but we cleaned it up the next morning just the same, and everybody was the same, everybody and I mean everybody. Except the skipper he was still smoking his pipe.

When we went

back to Sydney we got the word that we had to go to Singapore for six weeks training with submarines, that was the whole five destroyers. Three of us over this side, it was the 10th October that we left and we had six weeks in Singapore. As we went up the coast

where everything is all settled now all the island, they were naked and there was nobody living there. We called in and cleaned our boats, clean the whalers and motor boats and all that sort of thing and everything on board was spotless by the time we got to Singapore. We went across to Darwin going to Singapore and we had six weeks there. Then they decided to send us all into the Mediterranean. Four of them went

straight to the Mediterranean . Did you hear of the ‘Graf Spee’, the German pocket battle ship that was operating in the Indian Ocean and they sunk quite a few ships too?. They sent us as a decoy we had to travel along making a little bit of black smoke traveling slowly because that was what the Graf Spee was looking for. We picked up two lifeboats on the way to Madagascar

and they were sunk by the Graf Spee but we didn’t see her, she was over in South America by then. We lost a bloke on the way he had died of meningitis, he was suppose too of had meningitis but he lived on the ship so how the hell it didn’t go through the ship I don’t know, it should of done. We dropped him off at Diego-Suarez in the north of Madagascar

and we shot off back up to the Red Sea into the Mediterranean with all of the other ships.

Yes it was quite exciting to start with and when they were using us for a decoy it was a different matter then, nobody was interested. We got a few photos of the lifeboats we were picking up. They use to riddle them

with machine gun fire hoping that they would sink, but the lifeboats from the Pommy merchant navy there is a tank in the front and another one in the back, because they are shaped like that and go around like that, and if they don’t puncture the tanks they won't sink. We found two of them who had been machine gunned, full of water but they weren’t sinking, because the tanks hadn’t been ruptured.

Then we went on up to the Red Sea and caught sharks on the way through the Red Sea. We used a kerosene tin as a float and a piece of rope with a hook on it, a big hook. We caught three sharks and I’ve got a photo of it somewhere of the one that we caught. Then we were in Malta

and they decided to bring the British troops out from France out the back door.We got many troops out and that was Christmas and I’ve got a photo in my album in there of the King and Queen with a little tin of bully beef for Christmas, that was the

gift from the King and Queen. We went to Marseilles, and we were on our way back from Marseilles when we got our tin of bully beef from the King and Queen. That was where we struck the first Australian navy blokes in France during the Second World War but we never got there again. The skipper wouldn’t let us because we all played up. We only had about six hours leave to

go ashore and didn’t they make whoopee, while the sun shined. Then coming across was the first snow we saw, it bucketed down with damn snow all the way back from Malta. Then we went to Haifa, we took the troops through to Haifa that’s when the Jews and the Arabs were fighting and then the Pommies come there and they were fighting amongst themselves, the three of them.

The only place they could take us was in the armoured car up to the police station in Haifa, that was the only way because all the buggers would kill you, the Arabs, and they are still fighting so how the hell are they going to settle it, tell me that because I can't?. That was in 1939 and now it’s the year 2004 and they are still at it.

They were spotted sharks but I don’t know what kind, we never bothered looking, we just pulled them in and then threw them back over the side again, unless they wanted something to eat if anybody was mad enough to eat fish. We had our own mess and we had to supply our own food, we had to do it through the canteen.

It was heading for the Suez Canal.

Yes we just towed it behind over the stern, then the old shark would hit and then you’d see the kerosene tin bobbing up and down and you knew that you had a shark onboard. You didn’t know it was a shark until we pulled them in but we

lost interest after we caught three and the skipper had to come down and shoot it.

Yes in the Red Sea and it’s crowded with sharks in there. We lost a bloke over the side off of Norman, we were going through and he barely hit the water and they had him.

Yes, they had washed over the side when it was a bit rough and he went down on the upper deck

back and away he went. They saw him bob up once and then that was the finish, he was gone.

Yes, that’s why we caught three in no time, and they lost interest after that.

No sharks, there was too much phosphorus in the water, that was our main trouble at night.

When we were going through the water our propellers use to stir the phosphorus up and the bombers could see us from up top but there was nothing you could do about it, it was in the water.

Yes.

In the south of France, I never thought I’d forget the name of that place, I can't think, I’ve got a block.

No they weren’t,

they were still fighting up in the Maginot Line, [heavily fortified border defence line]the Germans bypassed the Maginot Line and came through France itself, they came down through Belgium.

That was before the dagos [Italians] came into the war. The first few convoys we did through there the Italians were in the war. Their

ships that go out on tours, the P&O liners, it was the same in the Mediterranean, all the lights were burning and we were in darkness because we had to protect the ship that we were looking after. The Italians weren’t in the war so they weren’t interested, they were more hanging over the guard rails with their girlfriends.

They didn’t even know that we were there because it was so dark, no lights no nothing. All you had to do was dodge them and you couldn’t miss them, because every light on the ship was on.

No the Germans hadn’t gotten down that far then,

it was only when the Italians came into the war, that’s when we started to get attacked. They came in in June 1940 I think it was, it was 1939 when we left here. They used to get up that high you used to get plenty of warning,

because you could see the bombs leaving the planes, and that’s when you turned. By the time the bomb got there you were over there, that’s how the skipper used to work it. He wouldn’t take his eyes off the bombs. They used to always let them go in one stick, I’ve got a photo out there of the stick of bombs going through, between us and the Sydney when she was going over to the Mediterranean.

The first time we got bombed my mate and I were getting ready to paint ship and we were chipping all the rust off the side of the ship. We got stuck there until dawn because we didn’t know they were coming down and the next minute boom, a great row of bombs about three or four hundred yards away, they didn’t hit us. We were traveling alongside the Sydney, that’s us there and the bombs came from ahead of us

because the last one was just dying away when I got the photo of it with my little box camera.

It was continuous, one convoy we went with we took eleven ships from Alexandria and we were supposed to go to Malta,

we never got to Malta, we went back to Alexandria with one merchant ship. God knows how many of the escort were sunk, that was when we lost the Mesta, one of the Australian destroyers. That was later on, I wasn’t on the Stuart then I was on the Norman, that was just once and it was just continuous night and day. One night time we had U-boats, at daytime we had

the bombers, the Stukas.[German fighter bombers] The Stukas were the worst, there used to be three of them and they used to circle over the top and they used to take it in turns to come down. They were playing fair dinkum the Germans, but the old dagos, they never bothered you, they used to bomb at about thirty five thousand feet, you had plenty of time because as soon as you saw the bomb leave you’d just flip and away you’d go.

They played up with the girls.

I don’t know if I can. It was my first time, that’s enough said. We really had a good time. First of all the skipper wasn’t going to let us go

ashore he said “It’s only six hours leave it’s not enough”, so they went out on strike. That was the first time that there was ever a strike in the Australian navy. He said “You have six hours leave so be back by midnight and if there is anybody after that, they have to really front up”,[face discipline] we were all back. A girl got me back, “I’m going to work very hard for you”.

About three months later she was probably shacked up with a German.

The worst ones were in Alexandria, they used to be four deep queued up, and

there was about five or six girls in that one brothel, it really turns you off it. That would be army, navy and air force - they were all queued up waiting to go in for four or five girls. They would have been working overtime.

In France, there was a girl and she was a dancer

at the place that we went to, but she was working on the side, but when she found out about me, she said, "No money, no money I work hard for you now", she was going to work for me and nobody else.

I don’t know where they finished up but there was only two of us in the night spot, it was a cabaret. The one that I was with

she was one of the dancers, I got talking to her and she was very friendly. She paid for a cab to bring me back to the ship to make sure that I was back at twelve o’clock.

There were always movie nights onboard. I was sitting at one

and the bloke sitting next to me when the stuff dribbled out [in the film] he fainted on the floor, so he must have been through it, but I never had that trouble.

No, it was all above board, pretty clean.

We were there for about two years.

I was on the Stuart for the whole time. One thing that did happen and I don’t know if this has come off the Secrets Act or not, I have never heard a thing mentioned about it. The admiral of the fleet in Alexandria

asked for two volunteers from each ship. One carried ammunition, one carried food and the other one carried the men and they were going up there to blow up all the oil supplies. One of my mates Barry who died here a while back, he had a heart attack

he was one of them, there were two off the Stuart. They took them up and one bloke got drunk and cobbered up[made friends with] with a bloke who he thought was a nice bloke and it turned out to be a Gestapo bloke, they were all arrested the next day, and they checked the barges they were with. There was only one that had a motor in it, so they loaded them all into the one boat, gave them the boat and sent them home.

Where they went the Germans weren’t in the war, they had to do what the Germans told them because they were frightened they’d be invaded by the Germans. They told them that they weren’t going to put them into prison, they were going to load them into a boat and sent them back. We had to go back up to the Dardanelles where the troops landing in the First World War in the army, that’s where we had to pick them up.

No I wasn’t one of the volunteers. I volunteered and wanted to go with my mate but they only wanted one cook, one seaman, stoker, one seaman and one stoker and that’s how it went on. That’s why I didn’t get into it and that’s why I didn’t go with him, I didn’t know where they were going at the time.

To blow up the oil supply

from the Germans. The place had been invaded by Germany later on, the Baku goes right through there. It was the Baku that they were picked up in the Dardanelles and they went right up and went into this place there the oil was and they were going to blow it all up, but they got sprung.

Another one was a Shell oiler, it was about a five thousand tonner, and it had a single screw, one propeller and it broke the propeller shaft and it was floating onto the rocks from

Italy and they sent us out to pick it up and tow it back. All the dagos were sitting up on the rocks watching us mucking about, we were hooking it up and getting out and they never did a damn thing about it. We thought in any minute there would be a plane, but we never saw a bloody plane.

Yes they were in the war,

they just weren’t interested.

It was a hot spot and I got a medal from the Maltese government when they had their celebrations, their fifty year anniversary. They asked for anybody from the different ships that would like to apply could have themselves a medal who were in Russia.

My brother had a delivery service and he goes around different places dropping supplies off, but he had to go to the Russian embassy and he got talking to one of the guards. He said “we have a big turnout here and they are presenting medals” and he said “What’s it for?”, he said “Fifty years of salvation of the war”, he said “My brother was over in Russia” and he said “give us his name and address”.

In my wallet I’ve got the invitation to go to the embassy to pick up a medal, I’ve got them but I can't wear them, so it was a waste of time getting them. I used to wear them underneath but they told me it's not real, only the medals to wear for the King and Queen so we don’t wear them, but I’ve got them in there..

The Stewart went into dry dock

just to keep us out of mischief they put us on guard duty. We were guarding the wireless station on Malta, they were coming over and bombing but they never hit it thank God. Later on the Stuart was in dry dock just down below and we were up top and we had to guard the wall so that nobody could throw bombs over onto the Stuart in dry dock.

There was nobody there, we never had any trouble. Before we left, the last night we were on guard duty and before we went back to the ship we had to call at every house and have a cup of tea, but in the cups of tea there was whiskey, by the time we got to the bottom of the street we could hardly walk. We couldn’t even carry our rifles, we had young fellows carrying out rifles for us.

That was about all in the Med, but after that it was just straight out convoy work, convoying the troops backwards and forwards or running supplies into Malta, up to Gibraltar.We were suppose to be heading for England and we got recalled,

we came out from Gibraltar and heading for England and they turned us around. There were three or four pommy instructors on board and they were spitting chips.[angry] God they were upset, “Going home.Beauty…”, it was the Stuart coming back into Gibraltar. Then we were drafted, they were new blokes coming

to take over from us, and we were to go over and pick up the N class destroyers. When we came to the N Class and the drafts came out, we all drafted and they sent us onto the Liverpool which was a ship that had its bows blown off and we had to clean up the muck. They didn’t jack up,[rebel] but they weren’t fussed about it, ‘the Australians they’ll do it’, so they sent the lot of us.

Blood and guts, the Poms that got killed. Half of the crew got killed that were in the bows and they blew the bows off completely and she had to come in backwards or it would've sunk. They sealed all the water tight doors on the front and put her into reverse and drove her in backwards.

This was in the Mediterranean. The Liverpool got hit by a bomb right on the bow, it took the propellers and anchors off and they went into the water, it was like she had gone under a guillotine, just cut her straight like that. All the mess decks are under there where all the blokes live,

that was an accident too they reckon.

Yes.

No. We were off somewhere else, probably running supplies through to Tobruk and Bardia and all through there,

that’s where the Aussie soldiers were, we were feeding them. I don’t know what happened, we just heard about it when we got back into the harbour. There she was sitting there with her bows chopped off. Must have been a bombing apparently on the convoy and she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There were bodies everywhere, they had cleaned up most of the bodies, but we had to clean up the blood and all that sort of thing, clean it right out so they could go back and live in there. It was trouble for them to go back and live in there, that’s why they got the strangers to clean and mop it up. While we were on there one of our blokes played up, he was late back

on board. In the Aussie navy, if you turned eighteen, you were allowed to go ashore full time, no restrictions, but under eighteen you must be back by midnight. In the Pommy navy even if you had turned eighteen you still must be back at midnight. This bloke didn’t know the difference and he turned up late, they had us all lined up, all the Australians and

the bloke who was in trouble, just as a ship went past with Aussie soldiers heading for Tobruk and they were singing out all the abuse to the Aussie bloke, “Give the bloke life, lock him up, hang him from a yard arm”. Then one bloke let out a 'cooee', Well, it was on for young and old, the language.

It was quite good and he still got locked up. He got out doing the work down below with us. It wasn’t a very nice job, it wasn’t all that wild, it was mostly steam cleaning

using the steam pipes and hosing it away off the side, down the scuppers.

Yes there was quite a bit of a smell, they had been there for a while. They didn’t start cleaning it up until they got into the harbour, they got out of the road of whatever was going on. I don’t know what was going

on there must have been some big show on somewhere. We were on the meat and spud [food] run to Tobruk with supplies, taking in supplies and picking up the wounded. We used to drop the supplies and the re-enforcements off and pick up the wounded and bring them out.

I have a photo of one in Tobruk and one in Bardia, they were pretty rough. The Waterhen got sunk coming out of Tobruk she was with the Ladybird, which is a ship that just had two big guns on the front, they were for bombarding places and they were escorting her and she got

sunk just outside of Tobruk. It could be pretty hairy [dangerous] in there especially taking off ammunition and all that sort of jazz, the soldiers were going fast to try and get it all off, getting the potatoes and what have you, all the vegetables and supplies. We were loaded to the eye balls and it was all on deck, there was nowhere to stow it down below, so it was there just covered over with tarpaulins,

and hoped to God that the weather held.

Mostly at night, we’d sneak in at night and we’d be out the next morning before dawn, get the hell out of it, she was a real little hot house.

That’s between Malta and the next place, I’ve forgotten the name now. A little neck of water and they used to camp in amongst the rocks, that’s when they used to come out and that used to be hairy too. They used high octane gas,

petrol for their motors, you’d only need a spark to set them off and up they’d go. It was only small arms, we never used in the big guns just the Oerlikens[rapid fire guns]. We had a lot of Italian guns onboard that they got from Tobruk when Tobruk fell, there were millions of these little guns and ammunition

everywhere. They were beautiful guns, they could really pump out the bullets. We had them all along the bridge and down along the side and when you came fairly close to stuff you could use it as well, we’d quickly lay it on. It wasn’t costing us anything, all you had to do was go back into Tobruk and load up again.

I think that’s what saved them a lot in Tobruk too, because we were using Italian ammunition and it's different. I don’t know if you have heard anything about tracers?, Behind the bullet it is a different colour. The colour of the Italian flag is red, white and green and they’d see the red, white and green and they’d think it was one of theirs, don’t worry about it,

that’s what the Stuart was using, she was on the wrong side, they came in handy with the U-boats, they were real beauties.

Yes, you had to feather your way through, it was unreal. Mostly Italian stuff was in there and they couldn’t get out so we use to bombard them

and drive along. We had most of our guns up on the cliffs, were set in the rocks and all they had to do was blow away the rock underneath it and the whole bloody lot would come down into the water. Anything that tried to get out of the harbour was history, just bombard them and that’s where they were choking the bloody entrance to the place.

Not really, we were very lucky we got in and out. We had a good skipper and he knew what was going on, he knew which way was up. He got killed on the Perth, he was the skipper of the Perth when she went down.

No there wasn’t much, it was mostly Italian subs in the Med and we never struck any, they were probably there, there’s no two worries about that. There was nothing stopping them getting through to Gibraltar, it was wide open, it was a narrow neck and

it was being patrolled pretty good, but you could still get through.

Torpedoes.

No I went to double Lewis gun, you put the big shell in and it was a double. I was number

two and I was the loader and the other bloke was a gunnery bloke, he did all the shooting and I was doing all the loading. When we ran out of ammunition I would whip the can off and stick another one on.

Which ever one it is he takes his left hand off the trigger, you’d lift the can straight off and stick another one on and back to firing, then he’d lift his right hand so it goes on, you’d be running around.

They came in the flat drums and they’d just sit on the top and you screw them in, and as soon as they click in they are loaded and away she goes.

No, but generally all the firing we did was at the mines, to let the mines off,

it was to save mucking about with the rifles, you’d use the guns, you have got to hit them first pop. That’s mainly what we did because when Stukas started their dive bombing stunt and she was handy then. Just before I left the ship was the first time we had to use them against aircraft.

It would go straight threw them and wouldn’t hurt them, it would go straight through the motor and it wasn’t until they got back to land that they had been shot at or not, we never shot one down, we never saw one go down that we hit. They could've done after they had gone over the horizon.

We were never credited with any that I know of.

On the guns just in case, because they’d have snipers in there, they’d sneak in behind the Australian lines and caused quite a bit of havoc, we never had any trouble or I don’t remember any anyway.

How do you mean?

When we were discharged off the Stuart we went over onto the Liverpool and from there they sent us

to pick up a Dutch ship by the name of Christian Nugan, she was loaded with Pommy soldiers going back on leave, navy, army or air force going back on leave plus us.We were going over to pick up the N Class destroyers. We got to Durban in South Africa and the ship broke down and we had to go into dock so they put us in tents.

While we were living in tents it was quite a good turn out, they really looked after us, the South Africans. They weren’t real happy when we first got there because when the first Australian soldiers went through they had the policeman directing traffic stripped naked. They closed the pubs on them and they had to go to the breweries, because they got a bad name for kicking up a fuss.

As soon as we said that we were Australians they’d take off like rockets, once we were there for a couple of days and they got to know us it was alright. They turned out to be quite friendly. That’s when we started sewing the Australian strips [country tag] on our shoulders, we never had them before that, they thought that we were Poms.

Travelling, that’s all.

That’s when they got tangled up in the Matapan, the battle of Matapan, you’ve heard about that?

The whole crew, they put a fresh crew to take over.

They had to come on board and we had to show them what they had to do, so we did a trip with them, as you could image one hundred and eighty blokes twice living in four bowls, it was bedlam it was unreal.

They were sleeping, eating you’ve got no idea, but

thank God it only lasted for a few days because we walked off and left them to it.

Back to the Liverpool.

Just a trip for a bit of a run around to show them which way was up, so they would know what they were handling and how to handle it. Firing torpedoes, we had to teach them the whole run of the ship.

Still in the Med just outside Alex. We left the ship and they were left with it. It was only a couple of months after that they went to the battle of Matapan.

I brought a book recently, ‘Perth’, the bloke who wrote it was a bugler and he had to play the bugle

when these blokes were buried, there were twenty two of them. He said “No way” he said, “I couldn’t even blow a note”. It must be right but it was the first that I’d ever heard of it, they must have been killed with the bursting pipe. With the steam you can't see it so if you run into it it just melts your skin off your body.

They were only stokers but twenty two stokers that’s a lot of stokers. I’ve been trying to find out, but nobody seems to know anything about it. We have a big reunion on for the Corvette Association down in Canberra in March, so I will go to the museum and find out about it.

No not that I know of. Blokes that I haven’t seen since might have been among them I don’t know, that’s how I will find out when I’m there. That was the first I’d heard anything about it in this book, it was suppose to be about all the boats and the ships in the Mediterranean. He lives up near Tweed Heads

and I rang him up and told him that I was on the Stuart. I said “Do you know anything about the blokes being killed?” he said “Yes, there were twenty two killed”, I said “Rubbish!” and he said “No, fair dinkum [true] I was there at their funeral and I was the bugler and I said I couldn’t blow a damn note on my bugle, because I was so upset about it”. I brought his book and you should see it ‘Perth in the Mediterranean’

what a waste of money. It was supposed to be in the museum down in Canberra, the book. I’ll sit down and write a book one day and they won't know what the hell hit them.

I could enlarge on a lot of the stories, definitely. There’s no way that you could print them, you couldn’t put them on a video.

It’s a bit rough.

That’s right.

I told you the stories about the brothels in Alexandria, that’s what it was like all over the world, you don’t know where they were but that’s where the troops were. We were tied up along side a German

ship, when we were coming back from Russia and we had done a convoy over to Canada, it’s a big island off Canada where they do all the big fishing, that’s where we unloaded and dropped off the ships and picked up the loaded ones and brought them back. Then we headed for the

South Indian Ocean and we were going to Cape Town, we called in for oil at the Canary Islands, and we were tired up along side a German ship, one of the tankers. Got their oil off them and talking to them and then the Gestapo bloke came and broke it up and they all drifted away and they were all waving their hands. We said to the Gestapo blokes before we left,

“See you outside mate”, their hair nearly stood on end, it did. That’s just something that happened, you’d talk about it but you’d forget about it as soon as we were gone, we weren’t hanging around waiting for him, we were heading for the warm country to get out of the cold, that was the Canary Islands.

We got it from the tanker, they were pumping it onto the shore, instead of pumping the oil from the shore onto us they pumped it from their ship onto ours, it was no problem. They had twenty four hours to get out of there, the same as we did. We didn’t wait the twenty four hours; as soon as we got our oil we blew.

No, we didn’t wait around, they might have been there longer because they were pumping oil out of the tanks on the shore, they might have been a bit longer. We only had twenty four hours to get out of the place, we didn’t want to stop there.

That was in Alexandria that’s where the brothels were where they were queued up outside and waiting to get in, nobody

talks about that. You go and get on the grog and pick a blue [fight]with the bloody Poms.

No,

She got hit, as I told you about the stokers up above them. They put her in dry dock and she missed out on the battle of Matapan, she would have been there, but she got hurt before. I don’t know how these blokes were killed on the Perth, a thousand pound bomb makes a fair sized hole and they had to have it fixed up.

All we’d talk about would be the convoy work, going to Haifa and going up to the police barracks because you couldn’t go ashore because they’d kill you. The Arabs are into the Jews, the Jews were into the Poms and they were all into one another.

The Arabs and the Jews were fighting one another and then the Poms came in, so they joined in with them.

No that’s fair dinkum.

Yes. That was where they sent armoured vehicles down to the ship to pick us up and take us up to their barracks and that’s where we could play billiards, darks, half penny, a very

exciting life considering you’d been out at sea for ages. You could have a few beers, but you couldn’t have too much because you had to be willing to come back down to the ship again.

They were out of bounds, no way could you go to them there. One would be an Arab and one would be a Jew and then they’d be fighting and you were caught in the middle of it,

there was no fun and games there. You could go ashore on your own if you wanted to but at your own risk, I never bothered, I always stayed with the police barracks.

No, but at Alexandria we knew about them there because they were wide open

and doing a roaring trade. There were only four or five girls there and they couldn’t work all the time naturally, but most of the time they could. I didn’t like it I never went near it, I couldn’t be bothered.

No, they were run by the government and the government would inspect them every week

and check the girls out to make sure they were clean and alright for us.

Yes we use to get on with no trouble at all, I’ve got photos taken with a French man before the big blow up. I don’t know whether you heard about that or not, but there were a lot of the French fleet tied

up in Alexandria and when the French went with the Germans the Vichy French and the Free French, the two Frenchmen, but these ones were meant to be Vichy French, who were with the Germans. It looked like there was going to be a blue on, in Alexandria harbour. French ships there with guns that big around the mouth,

that was just about the break when the Italians came over and started bombing them, they all turned all their guns on them and forgot about the fight. It was touch and go there for a while. Then I finished up going ashore with a Frenchman and they were all coming ashore with us and we were going ashore with them, they were all a pretty good mob.

It wasn’t their idea to go over with the Germans, they didn’t like the war either, they wanted to stop in the harbour.

They were pretty easy going, they had to be, there were too many of them.

The Aussie, French provos the whole lot were all working together, but there was always a mixed crowd that went out because if they couldn’t speak French so there was a Frenchman there who could talk to them. The same with the English

and the Australian, so they were altogether.

Yes waiting for the ship to get fixed up in dry dock. It was only there for about three weeks, might have been a fortnight.

They had put up big army tents to accommodate us, it was pretty good, they looked after us pretty well.

We went onto the Liverpool in England. When we called into

Freetown on the west coast of Africa and the bum boats [traders] use to come in trading and they had Australian beer and all they wanted was blankets. Where we were we were right along side of the blanket store for the Dutch ship, those big beautiful white blankets, there were some drunken sailors that night,

all on Australian beer, bought with blankets from Holland.

One blanket for three bottles of beer, that’s how we started off, but when the beer started to get a bit short you were anything, every man for himself. We were right down in the bottom of the ship and we were only

that far above the water line, they wondered where the hell the blankets were going to. When we got to England that’s where the dirt had hit the fan, there were hardly any blankets left. I had two latched up in my hammock, I left my army blankets there to replace them.

No he stopped on the ship, Hec Waller, ‘Harmless Hec’ we had several names for him. Every time we turned the ship and she’d go around like that and everybody with their plates of food trying to balancing it. ‘Harmless Hec’ he used to get the lot [criticism] but I think he loved it.

That means that the ship is going over, she’s leaning over, ‘hard over Hec’ you put it on starboard thirty, you are always on the wheel and that makes it lean.

No he went onto the Perth and that’s where he got killed.

The Perth got sunk in Sunda Straits and he just disappeared and I think he stopped on the ship until it went down. When we got to Moa, a school teacher was on there, Tubby Lions, and we said to him “What do you remember of Hec?”, he said “He was leaning on the wheel of the bridge, like that” and he said “just looking”,

I said “ I’ve got a good idea of what he’d be thinking, what a bloody mess” and that’s what it was, and she went down. A lot of them finished up in prisoner of war camps, and a lot of them died, the sharks were busy there in Sunda Strait. I reckon that’s where most of them went.

It used to be, Hec I think might have been wounded, he wasn’t going anywhere, he was stopping with the ship. Whether he went down with it or he was determined to go down with it, I don’t know, it was another ship. I only found out about this after the war, doing radar courses up there.

I don’t eat fish at all and I’ve always said that I had made an agreement with the fish, if they don’t eat me I wont eat them, and I still don’t eat it, so it’s got to be the fish, the sharks.

There was a Italian prisoner of war ship sunk just outside of Durban while we were there and we had to go out and rake out the bodies.As they were coming up, which was probably about a fortnight later, coming up from the ship and they were all bloated. We had to break them up before they got onto the beach, that was a nice old smell I can tell you,

never ever got rid of that.

From the propellers on the ship, just drove straight through them, plowed them in. It is the way of the war, but they were all dead anyway, there was nothing more you could do about it. Probably those three blokes from Griffith could have been amongst them too, the blokes from Griffith who I knew

that we caught on the submarine, they were all Italians.

I was on radar but that wasn’t until I went over to Pommy land, I was just only starting off then, what they called radar allocation.

It was a big array of aerial sitting on top of the mast, which you couldn’t train[direct]. If you had a ship or submarine over there you’d turn the ship to look at it to see how far away it was, to get the actual description of it. Later on they got another one a 286P which had a handle that turned the aerial around,

which we controlled with our foot.

This was in Madagascar, the invasion of Tamatay. There were three places, we missed the first one because we were up in the Mediterranean

with another convoy and I was on the Norman then. We were sent in and there were guns along the beach, we were sent in to check them out and they were cardboard and they were blowing around in the breeze and the soldiers standing on the side and they were flopping around in the breeze. We were just cruising along the beach and they got the 'ping', we knew it was a big fish but we dropped the charge

which was a half charge that brought the fish up and it was swimming around up side down and we forgot about the bloody war. There were four Australian destroyers chasing it, he was swimming up side down because he had lost his equilibrium, but we caught it. What they do is they drop the row boats into the water and away you went chasing the damn fish.

We cut the head off it and took it into the Durban museum, just the jaws and they reckoned it would have weighed three hundred and six eight pounds, and she was a fair sized groper.

Bloody oath that’s what they were after, fresh tucker, but I went hungry.

Off the Dutch ship and we were headed for Portugal, when we got ashore at Liverpool they had a bloody big air raid, so they put us on

a train and sent us to London, and when we got to London they were having another bloody blitz there so they stuck us on another train and sent us to Ponte to get rid of us. When we got to Ponte they were having a land mine blitz, they are big and they could take a whole row of houses down in one blast, that’s how big they are. That’s where I got lost and disappeared for

three days because all the blokes were drafted to different ships. The ships that were ready for them. “Collie got it”,[has been killed] I walked onto the ship at Glasgow, “What are you doing here Coleman you are supposed to be dead”. There was a land mine that landed on a place where the working women went

during the war, this was where the land mine landed on this place and flattened the damn thing, that’s where I was for three days, but I was still alive, that’s the main thing. Mum back home got word that we were missing, but no,

as soon as I heard about it, I sent a cable to her.

The people of Malta stood up to it pretty well, and that’s why they were presented with the George Medal

because of that, they really stuck to it. With all the bombing that went on there it didn’t do all that much damage because it’s built out of solid rock, even their catacombs down below where nuns make all the beautiful lace, they are all blind they have never seen daylight. They just live down in the catacombs and that’s what they do all their life, and it never effected any of them.

Yes, I sent some lace home for mother because I didn’t want to carry it with me all the time because we went to England and places all up there after that.

It was dark in colour but it’s the finest lace you have ever seen. I don’t know

what happened to it after that, I just sent it home to Mum and she was raving about it and showing it to everybody. I can’t even tell you who finished up with it.

Just something for them to do I think, they are nuns and they are blind, but how the hell they do it I don’t know but they do it.

If they took them up into the daylight they couldn’t see anything, they were down in the dark and they could see what they were doing all the time. They were daylight blind and they had never been up there.

We use to go to church there and I got to know the choir master, he use to teach the

kids to sing in the choirs and he took me through quite a bit of it. He’d take anybody through who was interested to go and have a look. There was nothing else to do but get on the grog in the town itself, that’s where we got our monkey drunk.

We had a pet monkey on the Stuart and he use to tell us when the planes were coming, his hearing was that

acute compared to ours and he could hear it from miles away, he use to go berserk up and around the mast and all over the place, and we knew they were coming, so we’d get ready for them. We used to take him out and get him drunk. He’d only have one beer and he’d be drunk. He had his bed and when we got home we’d make him get into bed on his own, he was that drunk he couldn’t climb up the leg of the bed to get into his cot so we had to lift him up into it. I’ve got photos of

him out there ‘Chico’.

One of the boys bought him off a bloke in Singapore, he was with us the whole time and he even got a mention in dispatches.

It was better than radar before radar came in. We always knew when the planes were coming but we didn’t know from which direction they were coming but we were always ready for them.

He was a little spider monkey, little fellow, he was only about that big when he was fully grown, he’d sit up on his backside with his tail down. We had a kerosene tin and we’d cut one side of it out and that was his bath. We used to put him in there and he used to put his tail up and run around and around the bottom of the kerosene tin and that was him having his bath.

Yes he was beautiful,, we never had any trouble with him. There was another ship there, the Defender and they had a female one, so we use to give him what we called ‘a run ashore’ we’d lock him away with his girlfriend until we were ready to go again. The ships use to tie up together, it might only be for a few hours but

he was right, full of beans again.

He was clean, clean as any cat or dog and you could train him. When we use to go swimming, playing water polo he use to jump from head to head out on the water.

No he never went into the water. In this pond he’d put his tail up and go around like a snorkel, then put his head up for some air again. They go into water, they are not frightened of the water.

He only drank out of a bottle. They’d sell over there what they called

blues beer, only about that big, the same as our stubbies, [medium sized bottles],the same size and he used to drain his, after half a dozen he would be off.

Played merry hell with the girls, he used to pull their hair, he wasn’t used to long hair, he was a villain.

It was down in the catacombs,

it never ever got blasted because it was too deep, it was all solid rock above it. Back in the old days when the ship used to come in there and the ships had to pay a certain amount to stop in a harbour, in the old days they used to charge them for dirt, soil so many tons of soil for so many days of stopping in there, and that’s how they got all their top soil, they never had any before that.

The farms had top soil from all over the world. It’s a wonderful little place, it has good swimming, good fishing.

Where ever we wanted to go he’d take us, there was no restriction. Apart from where the nuns

lived we couldn’t go in there which is normal.

He was from England. With the Roman Catholic church they’d come out every so often and stop and then they’d send another one out and he’d go home, just relieving them. During the war I don’t know how long he stopped there, he was still there when I left, that was in early 1942.

All the Catholics would, I wasn’t a Catholic but I used to go to the church with them.

No I used to never take part in the mass, I was high Church of England, I could've done but I didn’t bother.

Yes quite a lot, I had a bloke trying to convert me.

I don’t know what happened to him but he was still on the Stuart when I left, Jerry Jarred was his name, and he heard I had been playing up the first time and he wanted to purify me or something like that, I said “It’s too late mate I’m gone”.

He was alright, he never used to go there but neither did I, I was tied up too much with my sport, there was always plenty of sport to go to, I use to love it, anything to get off the ship.

A few of them, when we were on guard duty we got to know a lot of them, especially in the one street.

As I told you before the last night when we were going back on the ship the next day we were finishing our patrolling up and down and we had to call into every house. If we missed a house we’d hear about it, they used to have a cup of tea that had a dash of whisky. By the time we got back to the ship we couldn’t walk.

Just a dash of whisky, no milk or sugar just a dash of whisky,

hot tea with a dash of whisky in it.

They had to all do it because they would have been very upset if we hadn’t of. Over there they have a funny setup, each street has a senior bloke, and he was the one

that put us straight.He said “What ever you do don’t miss a house, go to every house, because you will never hear the last of it if you don’t”, and we could go back any time and see them and we were always welcome, we got drunk and we got into trouble. We had to explain it to the Skipper[captain] what had happened he said “fair enough, good thinking”, and that was the end of it.

Some of them did but they are very strict Catholics over there, they were going to be married later on so they were all promised to somebody, all the girls. They were quite a good mob the people, I enjoyed it anyway.

No, nothing like that over there.

Yes.

All very wet, very slow, because a lot of the ships were very very slow, we being a fast ship we had to slow down to their speed

because we were escorting them. What we use to do was go around them in circles like that. It’s a boring life because there’s nothing to do except do your four hours on duty four hours off, four hours on four hours off. You had four hours to sleep while you were off then you’d go back and do another four hours duty where you can’t sleep.

My nickname on the ship was ‘Sleepy’, I could sleep anywhere. I finished up doing five days in jail because I went to sleep on duty.

I have a history sheet in there and when anybody reads it they say ‘What’s this five days extra in the navy for?’, I’d say “five days in boob, you’ve got to make it up”, they’d say

“what did you go to boob for?” I said “Sleeping on duty”. We spent fourteen days following the silly muffies(?) around the Aegean Sea and we came back into the harbour and the first night in I was on duty on the forecastle. You had to keep forecastle watch and I was on the forecastle and another chap was on the stern and that’s how you watch for boats sneaking bombs onboard or anything like that. I sat down on one of the bollards and went to sleep and so did the bloke down the back and we both got caught

and we both had five days each in jail. The skipper told them “I will take full responsibility for anybody killed in the guard boat” which meant we got open slather,[to do anything we liked] that was the first thing. I had a pop when I came out, the guard boat came buzzing around [so I] just fired a couple of shots into the water, he never came near us no more. We use to sleep on deck in the warm weather with our hammocks,

you used to sling your hammocks on the upper deck and I was standing at the bottom and he yelled out “What the hell happened, Coleman?’, I said “I just shot the guard boat” and he said “Oh not again” and nothing happened about it.

It came from the ship where I ended up in jail, it used to come out every night cruising around the ship to see if nobody challenged

them. They’d go onboard and plant bits of wood that had bomb written on it, so that’s how we got caught.

No they were on guard duty the same as we were, if they catch people well and good, it makes their job good.

Yes and especially in war time, I could not keep awake. That’s how I started smoking, I used to light a cigarette and put it between my fingers so if I dozed off to sleep it would burn my fingers and wake me up, I always had sores there on both fingers. That was when I started sucking on them and that finished it, thirty years later I had to give it up because they reckon

that’s why I lost my leg, but it wasn’t, it was the mad doctors fault not mine.

Nineteen, that’s when I came out of jail and that’s when I started smoking.

Pretty hard at first. The Poms give you oakum, which is little lumps of rope,

about that long and you have got to pick all the tar out of them. When you finish they weigh it and you have got to do two pound a day. I don’t know what they used it for, probably nothing, they probably just throw it over the side, that’s what you had to do. I use to flick mine on the bars of my cell and knock all the tar out of it and catch it all down below, you’d get up to all the capers about the place.

During an air raid they used to have to unlock all our cells. There was another bloke in there from a submarine, he didn’t want to go to sea on the submarine so he stopped ashore and got into trouble and he finished up in there with us, there were three of us. They’d come around and unlock our cells when the air raid started and we used to go out and raid the fridges around the different mess decks and get something to eat. We were only eating dried biscuits for five days

so it was getting a bit monotonous, but we use to live alright.

About the width of that short wall, about that long, and it had a wooden seat where you had to sleep just on a wooden platform.

Yes. That was just one cell, you all had your own independent cells.

Yes, it did have a window, one port hole to look out to see what the weather was like.

No it was on a big English ship,

I can't remember the name now but it was a depot ship for the submarines, all the submarines used to tie up alongside of it to get all their supplies, that’s an English submarine on our side. He had a couple of goes getting away.Never saw him again, he went out and he made sure he went out the next time and the submarine never came back, he knew it was coming, he knew his time was up

He didn’t want to go so that was what he was doing.

Yes plenty of shut eye, you could have as much sleep as you liked, you were only doing nothing.

I was tired, as soon as I hit the cot it was ‘boom’, that was it.

You got used to it after a while, because we did it for the best part of three or three and a half years, I was away most of the time.When we changed over to the radar we were lucky, we did four hours on and eight hours off, so you could do your washing, cleaning or sleeping or whatever you wanted to do, it was quite good.

That’s right. They had two different degrees of readiness, first and second degree of readiness. First degree you’re not allowed to sleep, second degree you can sleep on the steel deck if you can. Apart from that it was four on and four off, which is just normal cruising time.

It never hurt me, I could just lay down on the floor and just go to sleep and that was it. As soon as they said ‘second degree of readiness’ boom!, out we went, wake up the next morning on the steel floor.

No. When we went over to the Norman we commissioned the Norman and we had to go to a place called Scapa Floe, we had to do working trials to get everything working. We were dutied to destroyer this time and up in Iceland the Dydo which is a six inch anti aircraft ship had broken down

and they had five men on who had to go to Russia from the British Trade Delegation.We were the duty destroyer and they sent us to Iceland. We picked them up and took off and had to go right up to Bear Island because they were fighting the Fokker Wolfes [German fighters] and picked us up coming down into Russia. The Germans just patrolled it with their planes Fokker Wolfes, long distance spy planes.

We ducked them and we never saw them again but, boy it was cold, we were all ready for the tropics too, fancy that, no warm clothes. You’d go up on deck and the spray, they tell you that salt water won't freeze, that’s rubbish, because the spray used to come off the waves with the wind blowing and by the time the little lumps of water got to you

they were bullets, they’d mark you and draw blood. You had to wear balaclavas over your face and special glasses on your eyes so that they wouldn’t penetrate your eyes, so that’s how cold it was. As soon as the wind hit the little sprays of water, boom, they were like bullets and if you got in the road you got hit by them. Lucky we were on the radar by then because blokes would always come down bleeding from the face,

with little tiny pip marks on their face, not fun.

We were going on leave to Scotland, there were

six of us, three of us were known as the ‘three musketeers’ we always went together everywhere. We only had to send a telegram to the lady at the YMCA in London and sign it the ‘three musketeers’ and she’d have our room waiting when we got up there, she was a beauty. We were going on leave and somebody said, “Anybody want to do a course in Glasgow?”, up went the six hands, the six of us and away we went.

Three were from Western Australia, one from Victoria and two from New South Wales, so that was the six of us.

I’ve got some photos out there, the three of us were in London and we always went to London together. One of them came from Devon, he didn’t but his parents did and that was Don, he’s just had four

strokes in Melbourne and he’s completely paralyzed, he can’t do a thing for himself now. The other one's Barry, he had a heart attack and died and there’s me, I’m the only one left standing. Wherever we went we used to naturally go together, the three of us, not one of us got hurt and we went right through the war together on the Stuart, the Norman

then we came home on the Nepal. We never thought that we were going to get home on the Nepal because we hit a hurricane. I’ve never seen waves so big. I’d look up and they’d be a least one hundred feet waves to the top of the wave. From right down in the gully looking up I thought "This is it, we are not going to make it home.".

We had to ride them,

that’s how you went all the time up and over you have to go into them. If they get behind you they’d tip you over when they crash down and break. That was the roughest trip I’ve ever had.

Never ever got seasick again just the once.

No sometimes you’d get what they call ‘your sea legs’ other times you don’t. Remember that chap, Jerry Jarred, he use to sit there with his bucket reading his Bible and vomiting into the bucket at the same time. As soon as we started to go out into the harbour and the propellers were turning, Jerry got crook. I used to keep my eyes on Bonox, [broth]

just mix Bonox and bread and make a stew that was it, kept him alive that’s the main thing.

I never did anything, I just went along with the mob, they were getting sick around me but I never got crook. God knows what it is, I think you just get used to it, you either get used to it or you don’t get used to it, it’s as simple as that.

I had another mate and he was the same and I used to feed him on Bonox that was on the Norman ,but Jerry was on the Stuart.

Yes.

We went to a place in Scotland.It was supposed to be a secret and Sherbrook House was the name of the hotel

that was back in the olden days before the war, it was a very flash pub and they turned it into a radar school. We had never heard of radar because there wasn’t radar in those days, it was Radio Allocation they called it, or RDF Radar Direction Finding. We went there and did part of our course there, all the bits and pieces, reading all about electricity and what electricity does and doesn’t do. Then we went out on a boat,

one of the mine sweepers out into the river, the Clyde River up in Scotland. It’s a hell of a wide river, it's more like Sydney Harbour, it was that big. There was also another ship with us, we were wondering what the hell it was there for. When we finished our course we asked the

fellow who was teaching us and he said, “If we were attacked by a German ship”, he said “the first thing they have got to do is shoot us”, and I said “Why?”, and he said “because you have all the secret stuff here and it's just what the Germans want it and if it looks like they are going to get it, we have got to sink it, send it to the bottom so they can't get it”. That answered that question, end of story.

We were radar operators then, or RDF [Radio Direction Finding] operators.

You went out in a little fishing boat but it had all the equipment on it. They had a big aerial, some like that except it was a bit wider and you had to train the ship. If there was something over there that you could pick it up in the side,

all it was was a straight line down the cantharides tube, with green stuff on the side. If you got an echo and it was on the left hand side, then you’d get a big jab go out like that amongst the graph. So you’ve got to train the ship around till it’s in the middle like that, that’s the line there and that’s how it goes. When you are looking like that you were looking straight at it.

That was how it was shown to us and how we practiced. We’d get a little pip on this side and you’d divide that into that and divided it three times then that means it’s thirty degrees to the left or on the side thirty degrees to the right, port and starboard side. It was quite interesting at first, but then it got quite monotonous after a while. Then they got the good one, come on board with the winding of the handle, and we didn’t have to worry about turning the ship,

that was good.

There was us six and a chap from South Africa, a bloke by the name of Jeff Smart. He was in Australian when the war broke out so he joined the Australian Navy.He went to do a radar course and that’s when we struck Jeff. He had nothing to do with us, he was on a different ship altogether from us, we were all on the one ship. All the other Australian ships had English operators on their radar sets.

Our ship had the first Australians to go through the course, the six of us, the three musketeers plus the other three.

Anything above water you could pick up, it didn’t matter what it was. Even if it was a little bit of something floating on the water you’d pick it up. Planes,

anything up to four and five hundred miles away you could pick up, if you put it on the long range. We had long range but you never used it because you only used short range, because that’s all they wanted, anything nice and handy. If you wanted to on the big sets, five and six hundred miles away, you could pick up a plane no trouble. We had another set that they introduced, shooting for gunnery

and boy was that accurate, they used to hit the target every time, it was a waste of time shooting at it. So they used to try and throw over it, because it was so accurate, it was exactly spot, on it was terrific. If the Germans had got hold of that there would have been some fun and games, they were good enough as it was.

Yes it was, it was discovered by a Western Australian bloke by the name of Bill Watt.

He was mucking about with [developing early]TV and a plane flew over and there used to be a shadow go across the back of the TV, so he started enquiring,"What the hell is that plane coming on our TV?", and that was what it was, it was the start of radar. The Yanks gave it the name radar, it was still radio allocation to us, you had a choice of which ever one you liked.

When the Yanks got hold of it and they told the Yanks all about it they called it radar, something about Radar and Radio Direction Finding so that brought it down to radar.

It’s an off shoot of TV.

Yes they had TVs over in England and America as well, but they had never had any trouble with the planes flying through their picture.It was Bill Watt who started enquiring about it and he discovered radar, he got knighted for it.

There were two German battle cruisers and I’ve forgotten their names and they picked them up on the radar sneaking out of the [Norwegian] fiords and they took off after them and got them. There were two German battle cruisers and if

anybody knows German, could probably tell you what the name of them were, they were pretty well known.

They picked them up coming out of the harbour, they were coming out to attack the convoys, they sent the fleet after them and fixed them up with a gallop.

Not really I don’t think. The Japs had radar after the Germans, they got it first, the Germans. When they sent a mob of bombers over German they used to send them with

little shot pieces of silver paper, if you throw that out it kills the radar, 'snow' they called it. They used to use that a lot, there was silver paper all over the place the next morning and that would kill the radar. They got it from somewhere, I don’t know where, but they got it. Whether they discovered it themselves or not I don’t know, but they got it the buggers.

England. When they sent the bombers over there was always a lead plane.What he did was he’d drop the silver paper out and that just fluttered down and spread out and smothered the radar so they can't see anything through it, and that’s why they called it snow.

The plane coming behind

would be covered, just coming into the snow, the aluminum strips. They had some smarties, there were some capers about the place.

I don’t know I couldn’t tell you that, the Germans might have done the same thing themselves. We never came in contact with it because we were at sea

so it never used to worry us. It was only bombing the cities in London all over the place, England and Scotland.

With the round circle and the line down the middle, this was the old one not the new ones, RDF.

There use to be a split one, little one on one side and a big one on one side and that meant there was one, a big one the left hand side, and if there was a little one, that meant it was on the right hand side. Then you would divide the little one into the big one by so much, thirty degree or twenty degrees or whatever it is on the port side the left hand side, that’s how it worked in those days. But then later on

you had the big one that you looked down at and wound the handle you looked down into it and in the middle of it was a ship, and all around there you’d see, goes around like that, and if it goes over anything it shows up. After a while you can tell whether it’s a boat, ship, plane or whatever, and it was the best of the lot. Until they brought in the PPI which was a later model still. In the middle was the ship and she used to go around with a hell of a bat,[fast] lit up anything that went over the top, submarine, ship or boat, fishing boat or just something floating on the water, it would pick up anything above water.

You’d go chasing and see what it is, if it disappeared then you knew it was a submarine, so you started with the ASDIC and he picks it up and then they could attack it. If it goes out of sight you knew it wasn’t one of yours, if it was one of yours you’ve got the IFF which is off this 'blip, blip, blip' on your radar, it's a friendly one so there’s no problem.

On this screen you get this 'swish, swish, swish', echo jumping that means it’s a friendly one and that means the IFF is working. If there is no bleep or jumping of it then you know it’s an enemy one and you know that you can attack it. That’s why there was no risk of being attacked if you were a lone ship, because if your IFF was working

properly you had no problems. That use to be my job after I came back from the other side, go around checking the IFF. I had a little box like that and I use to carry it on my shoulders and put it down and point the aerial at the ship, and my mate who I’d be working with would be able to tell if it was working or not. I would always have a mob of blokes behind me following me to see what the hell I was up to.

After we came down

from Bear Island, there were two ports there one was Banks and the other one was Archangel that’s the furthest one over ,Archangel, and that’s the one that we went to. To see the women going to work in the morning, have you seen double sided axes with two blades they had those over their shoulders, off to cut timber down. You should have seen the muscles on them, my God and that was

damn cold. Once the women guards came on you could not go through that gate, if you went anywhere near the fence they would poke the bayonet through the fence. They were pretty rough, it was fair dinkum and no mucking about with them.

They tried to but they wouldn’t get near the gates, they’d just sing out to them

otherwise they’d stick the bayonet through the fence and no way would they go near it then. During the day, you could go ashore to the pubs and all those sorts of things. I was talking to a woman one day and she had a little boy with her and she was teaching him English, which was against the law over there, old Joe Stalin [Soviet leader]wouldn’t let that happen in his schools, no way was he going to teach English.

Just walking along the road and the fellow was about this big and he said “Good evening” and I said “Hello mate how are you?”, and we sat down in the gutter and we were teaching him English and the women thought it was bloody lovely, it’s just little things that happen when you are in those places. It was a cold horrible place, God it was cold. When we were playing football and of course our football was frozen, but you use to get a kick and the snow was going off it. The Russians thought that we were mad

playing in the snow, but it was something to do, either that or go mad doing nothing.

No. The one we were against was the exchange of money, if we had cashed our money before we had left England, and if we had of known we were going to Russia we would of cashed it, it was worth three hundred and sixty five dollars to the pound. When we got to Russia

and cashed it we got seventeen rubles per pound, so that was a hell of a difference. Nobody was cashing their money, I used to take chocolate and cigarettes ashore and swap them because they couldn’t get chocolates and cigarettes. One bloke brought a full Russian sable coat for his wife for fifteen hundred cigarettes, you could image what it would have been worth out here.

But he had to keep it in the fridge, it was the only way you could look after it, because we had to go right back through the tropics, it wouldn’t have lasted all that time.

Anything, fruit and nut, milk chocolate, dark chocolate anything as long as it was sweet, that was all that they wanted, sweets.

We had them in the canteen, the canteen use to open up every day and we could buy whatever

we wanted, luckily he stacked up on chocolates. The sailors are great chocolate eaters too, still am if I’m allowed too, but not with this though.

Oh boy it’s like methylated spirits, God it’s rough. But the beer is made from onions and it’s shocking. You’d buy a jug of beer for practically nothing and

it would take you all day to drink it, it was shocking stuff, but they’d drink it, they’d drink it by the gallon. You would buy it by the jug.

Yes you could taste the onions in it. The same as their sugar; it’s made from beetroot, the sugar is the same colour as beetroot, that’s where they get the name from I suppose. It’s derived from

beetroot itself, that’s the sugar.

You need a lot of it to get a sweet taste, a hell of a lot of it. You’d use two spoons of our sugar in your cup of tea but you’d need four or five of theirs to get the taste, just to get a taste into your tea. We stuck to our own sugar, so we didn’t worry about it.

It used to go the beetroot colour. The same with the cabbage, if you boiled a cabbage the water was red, why I don’t know, but it’s something to do with growing it up in the cold country, what it is I don’t know. Boiled potatoes are the same, you have red water.

Yes.

The propellers use to stir it up and leave a bright trail behind us, that’s how the planes use to bombers us at night.

A real bright one. You could see one another standing on the end of the ship. If you stood on the back of the ship where the propellers were you could see one another as plain as day, just like standing out there

in the foyer.

That’s right. It’s in the water and whatever it is I don’t know, but that’s how it used to show up.

Bright green.

Very reflective, you could see it for miles

that’s why the planes up above could see you. They used to bomb and drop the bombs along where you left the trail from the ship. Most ships that got hit got hit on the backside near the propeller, right on the back of the boat, because that’s where the last bomb would drop and it would hit her. Especially when you can’t see the cows, it’s alright when you can see them.

Our old skipper on the Stuart he was terrific. As soon as we told him where they were he’d look straight at it with his binoculars and as soon as a bomb was let go he’d say to change direction that way or that way, and never ever got hit. If we turned that way we would see the bombs over there, and if we turned that way they’d still be over there, because that’s where they had bombed. They used to let the whole lot go together the Italians

when they were bombing, they’d just pull the lever and away would go the lot. They used to drop in sticks, I’ve got a photo in there of the Sydney and us and we were travelling like that and the planes were coming towards us and they were dropping bombs and they went straight in between us, just a row of bombs. I’ve got quite a few photos in there, you’re not interested in that are you?

Some of them are a bit small because I only had the box camera, remember the little brown one only about so big.

We only had one contact, and that was with the Italians that were on that submarine that I told you about, the three of them were Australians,

three cousins they were, all farmers down Leeton way.

The army blokes were good because they used to carry their rifle and there were thousands of them[captured Italians], the army were looking after them, taking the [captured Italians]back to the

internment camp, and the Italians use to carry their [the guards’] rifles for them, they got tired from marching them all the way back. The dagos weren’t interested in fighting, the Italians weren’t interested in fighting, no way.

All we had were the planes,

they used to be up thirty five thousand feet, that’s where they used to drop their bombs from and you had plenty of time to see them coming down and in which direction they were coming and you knew where to turn to get out of the road. The Italian army had thousands and thousands of them and there might be half a dozen Aussies marching along with them keeping them in line taking them back to the internment camps, they didn’t want to fight they had had enough.

Yet there were Chariots [midget submarines] and they came into Alexandria harbour and fastened on the bottom of the big ships, and then they went onboard and told them that they had put a bomb underneath and she was going up. They got as many blokes out as they could, but it was all over. They settled down on the

mud in the harbour, that’s where they were terrific. They did a good job, they had Chariots and they drove these little bombs in and rode them into the harbour and through where they had the mines to stop people coming in. They got through the nets and fastened them onto the ships, three of them. Somebody goosed [miscalculated] somewhere.

Yes they were Italians.

What do you want to know?

When I was working on the Perth as a radar officer and I went around testing the ship,

I used to see these dirty little ships tied up alongside and they were corvettes, ‘fancy going on one of them’. Then I got fed up every time the ships came in and these ships came in and they’d say, “You still here Coleman?”, I thought it was time that I was gone so I went and that’s where I went to one of these corvettes. I didn’t want to leave it, it was a beauty. On the Cootamundra I had to leave her to go into hospital

from Moratai, I left the ship in Balakpapan and went over to Moratai to pick up the Cootamundra home and we only got as far as Thursday Island and they stuck me in hospital. I was there for three weeks, they

took me over by motor boat to Jacky Jacky which is right on the tip of Carpentaria, right on the top it was. I was there for three weeks and they sent me to Townsville into Brisbane, Sydney and five months later I came out of hospital. They were still waiting for me to go to England to do another radar course.

She was a funny old war it was. When I was going to the Inverell I left Sydney and the Inverell was in Townsville and I got to Townsville and it was in Darwin, I got to Darwin and they put me on the back of a semi trailer and sent me across the desert to Darwin. I got to Darwin and it was in Fremantle so they stuck me on a plane and I caught it in Fremantle.

They were told not to speak to us. One bloke came up and asked us for a cigarette paper, and I told him “I haven’t got cigarette papers but I’ve got a cigarette” he said “No, I want a paper”,

and a policeman came and arrested him because they were told to put up with us but not to have anything to do with us. So he was whipped off to jail just because he didn’t want a cigarette, he wanted a cigarette paper to roll his tobacco.

That was their war effort, all the men were away at war so they were doing their thing in the forest, like cutting down the trees and all that sort of thing. They never had any machinery up there, it was very rural. There were no tractors or cars about because

you couldn’t drive because there was ice everywhere.

That I couldn’t tell you because that was all that I saw going to work. They were doing the washing on the side of the river pushing the ice out and doing their washing in the ice water, they were unreal. Yet there were twenty six million of them killed, the Germans use to slaughter them all and they used to dig big long trenches

and get them all in there and then machine gun the lot of them and cover them over and put another lot on top. There were twenty six million got killed during the war, it’s unreal. It’s a big country of course but that was the way that the Germans treated them.

Not much because they weren’t about. In the pubs there were a few there with their husbands and boyfriends,

but that was the only time. They were told to keep away from us so they kept away from us. They thought we were English and they hate the bloody Poms over there, until we explained that we were Australian, then it was a different matter altogether.

Back to Iceland, we had to go back around Bear Island again down into Iceland and that’s where we left the five British Trade Delegation,

they flew them from Iceland back to London. We had to go back to a place called Scapa Floe where we did all the training and all the English fleets there. On the way back we got a message to intercept a fishing boat and on that fishing boat was a Crown Prince Olaf of Norway, him and all his freedom fighters were there, and the Gestapo were after the lot of them.

He said good bye to all his friends and stayed with us and we were heading back to Scapa Floe with him and we had only just got over the horizon and we saw the fire where the Germans had caught them and killed the lot of them, burnt the boat and the whole lot. I don’t know where he went from there because we didn’t hear any more

about him. I had a photo of him but damned if I can find it, I wasn’t supposed to take it but I took a peek over the top of the rail upstairs and looking down onto it, as he was stepping ashore and saying good bye to all of his mates. There were five of them altogether and they were all in charge of the freedom fighting over in Norway. The Gestapo wanted them and they got them, but they didn’t get Crown Prince Olaf of Norway, he went to London

so he was alright.

We stopped in Scapa Floe until we finished doing all our trials and then we went back to Scotland back to the Clyde River, and that’s where they handed over

the whole ship and the ship was ours and we could do what we liked. From there we picked up a convoy, all emptied ships and we were taken them back over to Nova Scotia a big island off Canada, the names are coming back now, that’s where they do all the fishing, that’s where they catch all the herring. We dropped them off and picked up the full ones, and on the way back, boy, did we get a caning. We lost three of

our ships, sunk by the U-boats, we were attacked by seven U-boats and I don’t know how many of them we got, but we must've made a mess of them, because they got the hell out of there in a hurry. From there we finished up in Wales.

Several ships were sunk by the U-boats.

It was back in the Mediterranean.

On the Norman, we had picked up the Norman.

Yes, we were good as gold. We finished up going back to Wales, then we said goodbye to England

and we were off to the Canary Island. Do you know the name of the island where Napoleon died?

Yes that’s it. There was supposed to be an oil tanker there for us to get more oil off, we got there and a submarine had been there and had sunk it, so we had to go over to the coast of South Africa, that’s where they are doing all the fighting there now.

We lost three but we got away with the rest of them and they went up into Liverpool and around into Wales.

Then we went from there to the Canary Islands, and down St Helena. I forget the name of the place, but one mob gets in and they take over the place, that’s the government mob. Then the rebels come along and cut their heads off

and they take over so the rebels come along the next time and cut their heads off, it’s a funny place. Then we went around the Durban and said hello to all the people we knew there and went up into the Mediterranean to do a convoy, the four of us went up, they only sent four of us because one of them got sunk up there. We had to take eleven ships from Alexandria to Malta,

there was ammunition, food, oil and petrol you name it we had the lot. Of course one after another they were blown up, the German planes, three of them fly around and dropped the bombs down the funnel of the ship, because that blows the bottom out of the ship and that’s it, she’s gone.

I don’t know how many of the escort were sunk but we finished up getting back with one, one merchant ship and all the rest were sunk.

It was a shocker and I was glad to see the back of the place, it was nothing like the Italians, the Italians were having fun and games there and once they had lost interest it was a different war altogether. Then we went back to the Indian Ocean and

then we got the message of what was let of the British fleet was up near Burma and we had to go right up into Burma and collect them and go like stinking hell and get out of it because the Japs had sunk the rest, the two big battle cruisers they had sunk them. The other aircraft carrier the Vampire, the Perth, Houston

and we headed for South Africa flat strap, nothing was to stop us. We passed quite a lot of people who were survivors, their ship had been sunk and they were floating in the water and we weren’t allowed to stop,we had to keep going. We got to South Africa

and dropped them off and then the invasion of Madagascar, the Germans were using it as a holiday resort for their U-boat crews. We knocked off the Ogosharz and went around to Trincomalee and that business with the fish. Majunga the next place down that’s where the guns were on the beach, but they were flapping in the breeze because they were cardboard. They sent us in to have a look

and while we were in there we were using American ammunition at the time for our oerlikan guns, it used to go off when it felt like it, it was shocking. We would be cruising along and having a look and the guns started roaring and waving.The big battle ships there laying out over the horizon thought that the Norman is in trouble so, boom. It just about blew the guts out of the whole town

with just one shell that was all they let go. Then they found out that nothing was wrong, our ammunition had blown up again, it was bloody awful stuff, you never knew when she was going to go off. From there we went back to Durban I think it was, all the N Class destroyers were there, there were only four were left and

they decided to send one home. The Nepal was chosen, all the blokes had been away so long pushed them off and off we went three and a half years later I got home just in time for my twenty first birthday.

Going up the Red Sea to Malta to Alexandria. A mate of mine brought back a bottle of whiskey for my twenty first birthday so I had to drink it on my own, I was gone for about two days,

so that was my twenty first. I forget where I was for my twenty second probably up around Burma and my twenty third was at home, got home in the April and my birthday is in 27th May, so it was quite good.

We were talking to the German crew and they were quite good, we were laughing and talking and

then a Gestapo [Nazi police] bloke turned up and of course they all drifted away and he was standing there with his arms folded just staring at us and several remarks were passed about him. As we were leaving we said “We will see you outside sport”, and his hair went up and I thought he was going to tear his hair our the way he was carrying on, jumping up and down and all the other blokes were laughing their heads off.

The Gestapo were ruling the roost, they kept them in line all the way along otherwise I don’t think they would have wanted to fight neither. They were friendly, they were pumping our oil and they could've put anything in the damn oil but they didn’t, we never had any trouble with it.

No not a thing,

just laughing and carrying on and those who could speak English were translating for them, it was terrific.

We didn’t know about anything of what was going on, not over in Germany, we just had to take it for word where they were cooking them in the gas ovens

and all that type of thing, we didn’t know anything about that. The Germans didn’t even know anything about neither I don’t think, until after the war had finished and they went through and had a look at the ovens where they use to cook them. There was only one bloke in charge, and he was as mad and as a silly as a two bob watch.

Hitler.

He was definitely a mad man, he wasn’t happy unless he had them all into it

they were all fighting and carrying on.

They were into it, they were in Burma. We were supposed to pick up the government of Burma and bring them with the ships, but they were on the beach the lot of them, men, women and children, just laying there all dead, the Japs had got them.

Yes.

Yes, they had been bayoneted and they had cut the blokes' heads off with a sword, God knows what they hadn’t done. We didn’t go right in, we just went looked along with the binoculars there, was no good going in because there was nobody there, so we left.

There must have been a good part of fifty or sixty, we didn’t count them but there was no movement

at all on the beach.

The Burmese government, the government of the day.

Yes.

Just the bodies lying on the beach where they had left them, they just killed them and left them lying there. They did the same with our nurses, caught them in the water and made them walk back into the water and machine gunned the lot in the water. One girl survived [Sister Bullwinkel] it because she pretended to be dead

but she finished up in a prisoner of war camp and she was the one that told them all about it. They were off a hospital ship that had got sunk, it came onto the beach and the Japs were there and they made them walk back into the water and just machine gunned them, that’s all they did, all they believed in.

No, they had only just been killed, we had been there practically on time, we had a set time to pick them up. Whether the Japs found out about it or not I don’t know, they were waiting for us and are still waiting.

We were taking them to the big ships, and the battleships would look after them while we took them to South Africa.

They liked to rescue the government people. It was the same even before Hitler was first kicking off England finished up with all the royal family in the different countries, being murdered and thrown into gas chambers and all that sort of thing. It’s just their way of life, the way that they looked at war anyway.

The same way that they treated our prisoners when they had them on the Burma Railway, they were building the railway through to Burma.

We didn’t know very much at all, only what we were reading in the papers, different people that we picked up being prisoners of war or had been living with them

they’d tell you what they were like.

They’d tell you about, if you didn’t behave yourself you’d have your heads cut off, and that was it. Nothing more to tell about them except what they did to them, they were raping the women and carrying on. It’s a shocking way of life but that was the way that it was.

They reckon a lot of the prisoner of war camps were looked after by North Koreans, whether that’s right or not we don’t know, it’s only what we have been told by different people. I never saw that side of it thank goodness, I got off very light I think.

We just collected the ships and headed out, there was no good waiting anymore because the planes might have found us and the rest of the fleet might have gone as well, so we just headed for home or to Durban anyway.

That’s right.

They were very down in the dumps, they had traveled so far to try and help these people but we couldn’t do it because they were already dead. For no reason at all they just cut their heads off, killed the lot of them. It’s a shocking way of life but that’s the way that they did it.

That’s alright.

There were bits and pieces all over the beach, we were practically right in on the beach because we were going in to get them and we saw them all laying there, with bits and pieces all over the beach, little kids that had been chopped down we just left the lot of them,

not one got out. What part of the government they were we never knew, we only knew they were government people and they wanted to be picked up, they had to picked up but you can't pick them up if they are dead.

Yes working for the government.

Don, Barry and myself we were all on the one ship, they don’t talk about it, one of the things is you don’t talk about it. You go into pick somebody up you don’t expect them to be laying there in bits and pieces. There was nothing else to talk about, so we just left it at that.

They were no relation of ours, they might have been friends later on I don’t know.

The language that use to float behind us, but we just weren’t allowed to stop because there might have been submarines around, we wouldn’t know, we were flat strap getting out of our road. We didn’t know whether they had been sunk by a submarine

or whether they were just setup for a trap; and the subs were waiting for a ship to come and pull them out of the water and down goes the ship.

I could tell that one bloke was an Australian because of the language that he was using.

We weren’t allowed to.

No, couldn’t even sent out a radio message because we had to keep radio silence, because you could warn any other ships that were in the neighbourhood, you have just got to sit tight. It was easy to pick a fight onboard I can tell you that, because they knew there were Australians there they could hear them as plain as what I was hearing them. I was up on the bridge right up above all the noise and they were just floating around in the water.

At night time you couldn’t see them but you knew what they were doing, she’s a rough old life out there on the sea.

Yes.

“Please come back you bastards” and all that sort of thing, knew damn well that they were Australians but there was nothing that you could do because they wouldn’t let you stop,

just keep going.

You have got to do as you are told, if the Skipper says to do this, then you do it, whether you like it or not.

God knows how long.It might have been a week or they might have been there a couple of days, you wouldn’t know, but you weren’t allowed to stop and find out. If we could of stopped we could of picked them up, but it was not allowed.

No, never ever found out and as far as I know they are still there the poor buggers. It’s not a very nice way of life.

When we left Malta we had eleven merchant ships and I don’t know how many

escorts but there were little ones following behind to pick up the bodies off the ones that got sunk. They knew it was going to be pretty rough, then they started losing ship after ship. The Dydo was hit, they dropped one down the funnel and blew the ass out of it, they only got two blokes off it out of the water. We were on the side where the

U-boats and the planes were coming in. Consequently, after about five days we were just about out of ammunition and of course when you are out at sea you can't go down and go get some more. We swapped sides with the Mester, that’s what happened to the Mester; they decided that we had been causing that much trouble it was time we got rid of her, so they got rid of her. There was only two blokes killed onboard from the steam down in the boiler room. They dropped a thousand pounder [bomb]

and it hit the radar aerial on top of the mast and ricocheted over the side and that’s where it exploded and broke her back, but she didn’t sink, not for about eight or nine hours after that. Finally we had to go in and drop a depth charge along side of her and finish her off. There were one or two blokes that I heard that were killed on it, so they didn’t do too bad. There was another convoy coming through from Gibraltar,

there were two convoys and they were hoping that one would get through, the one from Gibraltar got through because we were getting a thumping but they didn’t up there and they weren’t too bad. When we turned around to go back to Alexandra they attacked them in the Maltese harbour but they were in there and got rid of everything, all the ammunition and everything was off by the time they got around but they were still chasing us,

and we finished up with one merchant ship. I don’t know how many escort ships were sunk in the meantime, there were that many ships tied up to the damn thing, it was a massive float. All escorts and these eleven merchant ships and we finished up with one.

I couldn’t tell you which one

went down first or second as far as that goes. I remember the one because I happened to be looking at it, I could see what was going on. I was just having a drop of fresh air out of the radar hut, and I just happened to be looking and the Dydo just disintegrated. It was loaded with ammunition and that sort of thing, as well as that it was a high altitude anti aircraft ship

and it had all the good stuff onboard.

When I was in the hut I was on duty on the radar, about every half an hour you had to come out for a drop of fresh air, because it was that damn stuffy in there and I could go to sleep like a rocket no problem. I just happened to go out for fresh air when the old Dydo went up,

and she made a hell of a splash.

Yes it was, the planes and U-boats you had coming in, submarines we couldn’t pick up the submarines but the ASDIC could pick them up. We could get the U-boats and the bombers and

she was pretty busy.

Yes we had the voice pipe directly onto him, telling him “Another flight coming in on the starboard side or on the port side”, or wherever it was coming in.

The convoy, the main part was the convoy, but if you got in the road you got it .

I’ve got a photo out there of a mate of mine and I, I had a hammer and he had a big marlin spike with the big steel spike working on wire, and we were out of ammunition, but we still had our hammers. It was the way that you were effected, there was no good worrying about it. It’s very frightening at the time but after a while,

we were seven days at it, and it was starting to get a bit monotonous.

About four to five days depending on the speed of the convoy. If you got the big fast ships you could probably do it in three and a half days.

This one was a slow one, eight knots and that’s

awful slow, that’s why we got such a caning.[battering]

No, we never lost a soul.

We never lost one, not even a scratch.

Yes we were strafed,

every time they did the run in over the fleet they’d get something in their sights, they’d just let go of them with a burst of machine guns. There was never anybody shot, there were no wounded people, we never had a soul wounded.

They did go there because you had enough problems looking for the enemy aircraft without looking out for the safe ones. When the

raid had finished they’d come in and do a barrel roll and let you know that they are still there with us. Outside our range they’d attack them going back home, that’s the only way they can get them. When you know they are doing the barrel roll we had victory, and they knocked a few down for us. Sometimes you just don’t have any, if they are stretched too far from land.

Altogether exciting I suppose because we were young in those days and you don’t worry about it, it might be a bit different now to try and front up now.

We went on three weeks leave but I went to try and get back on the ship to try and get back to

South Africa, it was quite good over there and I really enjoyed it. There was Madagascar, and there was a big naval base up further because that was all we had left because everything else belonged to the Japs, at Mombassa that’s the name of it. Zanzibar,

all down through there we use to patrol all through there. It was quite good and I enjoyed it but I had the three weeks leave, because there was nobody home because all my mates were away in the army, navy or air force or wherever. There was only one brother at home, the youngest fellow and he was fourteen and he joined the merchant navy and he said “The bloody war is going to be over”, so he joined up and went away as a deck boy in the merchant navy.

That’s the bloke that lives down at Ballina at present, and he’s not real good, the poor old bugger. He’s eight years younger than me and he’s had a pretty rough time. When he came back from the islands he had to buy his own atabrin,[anti-malarials] I used to get a bit that I could help him with but he was really bad with malaria. He used to have to buy his own atabrin if he wanted it,

quinine or whatever he wanted. It was a big rough on him, and now he’s a gold card, but he’s too crook and he can’t use it, and they can't find out what’s wrong with him, but I think its only nerves myself. He can’t hold a cup of tea, he has to hold it with both hands, if he tries and passes one over to you he’s history because he loses it.

It’s only nerves I think, the specialists up here aren’t worth two bob, I wouldn’t take my dog to him if I had a dog.

Mum yes, I met up with Dad, I saw him in the street and that was about it, I never ever hob- knobbed [socialized]

with him or had anything to do with him, but Mum and I were like that and always were, I was the eldest in the family.

Yes, that upset him more than anything, and it really hurt him. The other brother took to him and gave him a flogging, he thought he was trying to strangle Mum with an iron cord, so he took to him and gave him a bloody hiding and put him in hospital.

It was his son giving him a hiding. I just walked passed him and completely ignored him, and he was dead as far as I was concerned, that hurt worse than anything.

No I was married over in England in Sussex.

No nobody was there, my brother was in the merchant navy up in Japan and he tried to transfer onto a merchant ship so he could be over there to be my best man.No luck - they wouldn’t let him transfer over. My wife never had much to do with the old man either because the only time she saw him was when he was in the hospital dying.

I thought I was doing him a favour and he said, “What are you doing in here, I didn’t want to see you?” and I said “Fair enough”, so we turned around and walked out and he had his grandson and everything with us, he wasn’t interested. He wasn’t interested in us.

I was working at Garden Island at what they call the port radar office. You had to go around and check with the merchant navy,

they had a little set only about so big and they called it the IFF, Identification Friend or Foe.When that’s switched on we can get it on the radar, it goes 'blink' like that. If it’s not switched on or it’s not working we don’t get anything, and we don’t know who the hell they are and you take them out.[attack them] I used to have to go around and check the IFF

and make sure it was working properly.

Yes a maintenance job. What they wanted me for was to drive a car but I couldn’t drive, I never had a driver's licence or anything like that, my two brothers were alright they were interstate drivers, that was after the war, they were all drivers the whole bloody three of them.

It was different altogether to ours, Morse code that they sent out, whether they had it or not I wouldn’t have a clue. The Germans were pretty well up in the radar so I reckon they would have had it, they’d see it on their screens and think ‘what the hell is this?’, and we knew what it was.

About seven months,

then I applied to come back to sea and they sent to me out to the Inverell.

That was a nice trip. I left Sydney when she was in Townsville and when I got to Townsville just on the train, they sent me to Darwin overland on the back of a semi trailer, there were five of us.

When we got to Darwin they were in Fremantle and then they sent me to Fremantle and I picked it up and I was on it for six weeks and they sent me home on leave, right around Australia overland, not a bad effort. We had to go back over the desert in the cattle trucks, they loaded you into cattle trucks so that’s how the transport was.

Yes.

Radar. When I landed onboard the skipper said that the radar blokes must have good eyes so they’d be good up the mast at the lookout and I stopped that straight away because in the Kings rules and instructions, ‘No lookout work to be done by radar operators.’ We fixed that up and he was quite happy

about that, no problems. I used to keep the radar going all day and all night I was still working it.

They are the rules that the navy goes by.

He hadn’t studied the rules, he was a merchant seaman and he didn’t know anything about the navy and it was a different setup, he changed over from the merchant navy

to the navy.

I did radar all the time, which I didn’t mind, just a bloody lot better than sitting up in the mast at lookout in all sorts of weather, raining, it’s rough as guts.

After we left Durban in early 1945 to go to Onslow they sent a flying doctor down to pick me up and take me up to Broome, that’s where I was in hospital. The ship had to go

out and pick up a floating dock that came down through Colombo down that way, because the boat that was towing them kept floating out their turret. So they sent the corvettes out to tow them in, and that’s where I picked them up, towing. They thought I had a broken leg but I didn’t, it was only a lump on my shin but I had six weeks in the hospital in Broome.

It was quite good fishing and I use to run wire out into the water at low tide. When the tide went out and there were crocodiles and the boss use to come out and shoot the crocodiles, but there were miles of fish, and I was feeding all the hospital and everything in Broome, and they were sorry to see me go.

I fell through a hole in the wharf, we were catching sharks there in the morning.

I was the postman and I went off for the mail and the Germans had tossed their hand in, the Germans had finished with the war and all the blokes were there in the pub saying “Come in and we will buy you a beer”, so I went in and had one and I had a great old time in there. I went back full as a goog [drunk] and fell through the hole in the wharf. They had to take me up by the Flying Doctor and when they got me up there the x-ray machine had broken down so I had to wait until they fixed it up. They fixed it up

and took the blood to an aboriginal women that was going to have a baby. But they couldn’t get any blood, it was alright I still don’t know what my blood group is, but they took enough to fix that up and she was right, had the baby no problems.

Yes. Then we went up into the islands from there,

they picked me up and they flew me into Darwin and I picked it up in Darwin and we were supplying the snake boats, the little commando ones that use to go around and they’d send a boat out and we’d unload off them, they must have been right out of the jail, they were bad looking buggers. They loaded them with machine guns and pistols, machete knives,

they had everything. Then we went onto Moratai and Balakpapan and a little place just around the corner from Balakpapan and I forget the name of it now. We went ashore there and there was a big café and the bloke said to us “What’s the name of a favorite café

of yours down in Sydney?”, and he said “I’m going to put up a big sign”. So we told him ‘the Who Put Inn’, that what it was, the Who Put Inn up above his door. I’ve got a photo of that too, I don’t know who the hell told him and nobody has admitted who told him, but it was there. He said “I will put it up, I will fix”.

The Who Put Inn,

you know what it means? You don’t? I will show you a photo after and it’s a beauty, the sign right up above his door. That’s navy talk, you can’t blame that on the army, that came from the navy.

No. I had a couple of photos of it for years, of one of the Japanese soldiers and they must've made a little shrine in the gun pits, where all their guns were. It was a photo of two boys, I don’t know if it was his brothers

or his sons or who they were, I had it for years, took it out of the shrine, he was probably dead anyway. Then I went back to Moratai and my rank had been I increased from Sailor to Leading Sailor and of course when they do that you have got to leave the ship, so I left the ship and they sent me to Cootamundra.

We set sail for Sydney with a little motor boat hanging on the back on a string, the skipper must've wanted the motor boat for down in Sydney. We got as far as Thursday Island and I ended up in hospital there with dermatitis, all the hair on my body fell out, the whole bloody lot. I thought that I would be an egg shell bomb for the rest of my life. I had about three weeks in Thursday Island hospital

and they took me over to Jacky Jacky in a little boat and from there I went to Townsville and they had me in salt baths there and I was glad to see the last of it. Then they packed me off to Brisbane, Brisbane didn’t want me so they sent me to Sydney, when I got to Sydney they sent me out to the naval depot at Balmoral. When I got to Balmoral they said “He’s no good here, take him out to Randwick”, so I finally got to Randwick

that was were I finally stopped for five months. I got up at two o’clock one morning and we weren’t allow to have a shower, I hadn’t had a shower for five months so I went and laid in a big hot bath with a cake of soap and I gave myself a good old rubba dub dub and a couple of days later I was as clean as a whistle no sign of dermatitis.

Just cold salt water and you go into it, when you get your underwear

all nice and wet and sloppy, they take you out and put you in your bed and every now and again they come and shake salt water all over you, just to keep you wet and that’s supposed to cure the dermatitis, but it doesn’t, I can assure you. Then I headed for England and did a radar course, they sent me over to do a radar course, but I wasn’t ready for it. They had different radar sets, different plotting tables,

you didn’t get them on corvettes and that’s what I had learnt on so, I came home still the same thing that I went over, a Leading Seaman Radar Operator.

That was when I met the wife over there, she was out here actually and I met her at a dance and she was a real snobby nosed bitch as far as I was concerned. But I ran into her over there and she was all about like a blue bottomed fly.

We went up to Scotland where she lived to her mother's place, and he mother fell in love with me.She thought I was a dead ringer [copy] for her son that got killed over in France, she reckoned I must have been his ghost, but I wasn’t. They sorted me out over at the Island of Man, and finished up back in 'civvy' [civilian]street.

They sorted me out at the Island of Man, they found out that I wasn’t ready for what they were trying to do to me. I could operate the radar sets no problem at all, but the plot table, I had never seen a plotting table before in my life. The MADP, the Main Air Display Post, and it is a big one where you have to write backwards, it was unreal.

Then you get into the big stuff but that was over in England where they had all the new stuff, we hadn’t seen it out here. The other three musketeers finished up instructing down in Flinders [Naval Depot], one was in the gunnery section and one was in the plotting section.

No, I took my discharge

because my eyes were playing up and I was getting stinking headaches, and you weren’t allowed to wear glasses in the navy, then but you can now.

We went over on the big cruisers, eight inch cruiser and

I had just come back from getting my [toe] corns pruned, I was getting ready to do some dancing because there were some good dancing over in England, they were terrific dances. I was walking past the Master at Arms Office, he’s the head policeman on a ship and he said, “Mr Coleman, just the man I want to see”, I said, “What’s up?” and he said “Where have you been?” and I said, “I’ve just been to get my corns cut out”, and he said “That’s good. I want a bloke to take seventeen blokes up to London

to join the victory march”. I said “you have got to be kidding me, I’ve got a seat booked to go and see that”, and he said, “You are taking a good sort [pretty lady]as well”, he said “Well you will be in it this time so get yourself back”, so away we went. I’ve still got the victory camp pass in the album out there.

I married her.

I took the seventeen fellows and they had thirty two blokes abreast,

there were three rows of thirty two right across the road and that’s how we marched right up the Mall, down Queen, it’s about seventeen miles the march. I had a pair of old dancing pumps to march in because I was on the uppers by the time I had finished, I had to go get a new pair of shoes. It was quite good and considering there was a mob [crowd]there.

No the seventeen men made up the three rows across the road, there was one row of thirty two, another row of thirty two, the seventeen made up the three thirty twos. I was in charge of them and as soon as the march was over they kicked us out of the tents and we went back to the ship.

Just ordinary green army tents.

About five days we were there before they had to march, and when the march had finished they didn’t want us anymore, so they hurled us. We went back to Waterloo station and caught the train home back to the ship. It was quite good and I really enjoyed it, it was good to see the way the Poms

thought of the Aussies. ‘Good on you Aussie’, as you went past.

No not in the band, we were in the march that was all.

That’s where we did the examinations over there, the studying on the Island of Man it was.

Just a depot on land, we lived in houses along the front,

the sea wall was there, and the houses were here across the street, you lived two blokes to a room, there were eight of us I think it was that went over there. We had about five Dutchmen join us and one Pommy bloke, so

that made up the class that we were in. The Dutchman they really had brains, two of them worked at the university as a student of the university, they were way above what we were.

Yes we studied there but Joe Loss[musician] and his band were in the next house over the back from us, and there was no way

in the world that I was going to be doing any study in there, I was over the fence and gone. That was the top band in England at the time, wherever there was a dance that’s where Arnold was.

I started off on the buses, I got a job on the double decker buses at Burwood, I lived at Leichhardt

at the time where my mother lived. I was there for about twelve months and then I brought a house up at Richmond, traveling by train from Richmond to Burwood everyday to go to work. I couldn’t see any future in that, so I got a job with a builder. I bought one of the houses that he was building and I just popped it on him for a job and just asked “What’s the chance of a job?”, he said “Yes, start tomorrow”,

so I finished with the buses. I was with him and then the coal strike came on, we couldn’t get any material. I was thinking of going on the dole, that was about all there was because there weren’t any jobs, no electricity no job. I went around and saw one bloke who was on the old night cart, the little bucket that you get out of the toilet

and they use to collect them at the fourteen door saloon. I asked him for a job and he said “yes, start in the morning mate, two o’clock”. On my way home I ran into a bricklayer he said, “Are you still looking for a job?” and I said “I’ve got a job, I’ve got to go with the dunny man tomorrow”, he said “You can start with me tomorrow if you like”, so back in the building trade again, he had the bricks all about the place, no labour, so away I went.

I was with a bricky, a plaster, plumber I had a go at everything, that went on for years and then I finished up on the concrete gang. We put the roundabout’s where the planes go out and turn around down at Mascot we put all those in, near the new terminal,

that’s where the planes go right out and turn around and take off, we put all those in. I use to have to drive one of the buses, there were two buses that used to go down and I drove one of them, I was a taxi driver so they gave me a bus. When we finished that we were having a competition one day by lifting lumps of concrete onto the shovel and putting

it on the back of a truck and I did my back in. I went and saw the chiropractor and he said to get an easy job, so I got a job as a doorman in the club, and that’s where I retired twelve years later. I was seventeen years as a foreman in a plastics factory too I forgot about that.

She died about two years before I retired,

I retired in 1982 so about 1988 I think she would have died, she was 86 years old. She had a little flat at Liverpool in a Church of England home out there, she was pretty good out there but then she fell and broke her hip and that was the finish of her.

She never ever got over it. And here I am, I thought it was time I moved out, Mum was living a different life altogether, a different life span to what I was thinking of doing, so I pulled out and moved up to Ballina. Bought a caravan and moved into a caravan park and was there for five years and sold the home

down in Richmond and I brought a motor home and put that on the caravan park and that’s where I ran into Jean at a dance one night. Her husband was a bricky [bricklayer] and I knew him in Richmond, so that’s just about it.

I enjoyed every one of them.

No, I can sleep like a baby, Jean wishes she could sleep as good as me.

I lost some good mates, one in particular

on the Sydney. One part of Western Australia they built a big plastic dome and on it is seagulls, there are six hundred and fifty four seagulls - that was the number of blokes that were killed on the Sydney, when they machine gunned them. They weren’t killed, they were murdered, they machine gunned them in the water,

there wasn’t one survivor, not one. I hope to get over there one day, but Jean, she’s not a travelling lady, she doesn’t like it, she has had a big bowel operation and it slows her down, I won't be able too, and that’s all there is to it.

This is a German chair and his name is on the back, Otto or something over in German, a German made the chair, it doesn’t matter, no effect whatsoever.

Yes, they are a different race of people, they meant the war the Germans. The

Italians only went along for the ride, they thought that they might come out in front but they finished up getting the big A. [beaten] The Japanese - I can't understand why they went berserk because they were on our side in the First World War. They hated America and that’s the main part of it, if anybody got in the road they got exactly the same treatment as the Americans got there.

The Germans did it for a reason and the Japs did it just for the hell of it, because they were white people. The Germans did it because they were trying to hide their tracks, they were getting rid of the people as well as the boats. As soon as they machine gunned the boats

they jumped out of the boats and couldn’t get back in because they were still there with the machine guns. That was all they were doing, just trying to hide their tracks.

No, they just killed for the hell or fun of it. I don’t know whether it’s right or not, and we can't prove that there were two Jap submarines operating with the

Kormoran, the [German raider] ship that sunk the Sydney. It was Sydney’s fault because she went in so close and they just dropped the flaps around the ship and there were six inch guns all lined up and blew the hell out of the Sydney. It blew them over the side and they killed everybody on the bridge, they were at their mercy after that. The Jap submarine came in and torpedoed them and sunk her, and the people

that were in the water they machine gunned, for no reason at all just for the hell or the fun of it, which is their way of life.

Yes.

That’s right, that was before they hit

Hawaii with the planes, that’s what started the war with Japanese.

I can show you strips out of the paper, I’ve got them all the whole lot of them there, all saved up, because I would love to get to the bottom of it. There is a session on Channel Six [TV]now

of all the mystery ships that have been sunk in the Western Australian coast.That’s where that Dutch, I forget the name of it now,[Abrolhos Islands,off Geraldton] but they [mutineers]killed most of the passengers onboard, [in late 17th century]some of them got away and they sent the[Dutch] army down [from Java]and they hung the lot of them because they wanted to kill the rest of the passengers.

There was no submarines there, it must have been the Germans but he was frightened of being court martialled for war atrocities, the captain of the ship that sunk them, they couldn’t prove that he had done anything wrong. He said there were

submarines there with him, it could have been submarines that did it, but whether they did it or not we will never know, and now most of them are dead.

I think it was more localized because the Japanese were closer and they did all that to their soldiers, they took prisoners of war

and killed most of them that were up there, thousands of them. The Burmese railway line they put through, most of those if they weren’t dead, they were next door neighbours to being dead.

I don’t think its changed me in any way. I’ve got no time for the Japanese

certainly, but that’s only my own personal view. They did the wrong thing and they should have paid for it too but they didn’t, because they denied it, and said they didn’t have anything to do with it.

Wars are a waste of time

as far as I’m concerned. We’ve had wars since the year dot, and since the year dot just got to have it, I suppose. Like now. going into space, why the hell do you want to go into space for because we have enough troubles down here without going up there?.

It never gained much, it got rid of a lot of young people who could've lived a lot longer and probably done a lot better now compared to some of the ones that we have got here now, without naming names.

I don’t think so.

I enjoyed the war, we had good time during the war, there were a few rough edges but you soon forget them. You remember the funny bits, not the rough bits, well I don’t anyway. Whether it’s just my way of life or thinking I don’t know.

Don Cop he’s the bloke that had the stroke and now he’s paralyzed, I don’t know if it will help any. He was a really good mate, he was even my best man when I got married over in England.