Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Westonia on the 11th August 1915.

No, in a tent.

Because there were no hospitals. My father was working

in the main mine at the time and the nearest big town was Southern Cross and you can deviate slightly off the main road into Westonia on the Great Eastern Highway.

In a mining town, yes.

My father really went to school in Fremantle. He went to Mr Brigg’s school as a boarder and he boarded there until he was 21. He was very well educated but he never made much of his life. He married my Mum when she was 32 and I think he was

nearly 40. They were married in Darkan. My grandfather’s name was Rhodes. He was a horticulturist and he grew some of the first fruit, especially grapes, down at Darkan. His name was Rhodes. He called his farm Rhodesdale and it is still called

Rhodesdale. It is a stud farm today. We visited it a couple of years ago and the people that own it made us very, very welcome. I told them that my mother was married there I don’t know if it was in that house, it wouldn’t have been that house, but 1910 Mum was married.

Yes a little bit. My great, great grandmother and great, great grandfather came out here in 1829. He was a brick maker. And you know Queen’s Gardens, you know all the duck ponds and that, they were all his brick pits.

He was the first brick maker in Western Australia. My great grandfather is the only person according to the latest by the name of Eakins that has ever immigrated to Western Australia and he was only 16 and he came out with George Moore. He

apprenticed him to a, you know he makes drays and things?

Yes. He was a blacksmith first of all but then some time in the

1840s, he married Hannah Crane and it was her father – I’m mixing myself up a little bit there - it was her father who was a brick maker, my maternal great, great grandfather. And they drove a bullock dray up to the Greenough [River, flowing out near Geraldton] and settled in the Greenough. And he established a

farm called Pioneer Gardens and it is made out of hue and brick. He employed 20 ticket-of-leave men. There was a ticket of leave place outside Port Treasury and he employed 20 ticket-of-leave men there and I think

just after the turn of the century Dad was left the place. But I think he drank too much whisky and mortgaged it but it is still owned by part of the family, the girls. My Uncle Jim had

twelve children. Dad was an only child and his father owned a station out from Yalgoo and Dad’s mother died when he was only 2 and his dad married again later but he never, ever had any more children.

Oh,

yes. We went to Carnarvon or he took the family to Carnarvon in 1918. Of course the only way you could really got to Carnarvon and there was a bit long jetty there at the time. I went to school in Carnarvon.

Yes.

I never had much school. In the navy, the last year I was in the navy and I was on the Horsham and we were more or less on survey duty out from Darwin and I did a course in English and maths. Afterwards a little bit later in life I was Honorary Treasurer of the Australian Hotels

Association, because I managed to become a publican. And before I retired they made me a life member of the WA [Western Australian] Hotels’ Association.

One of the things I did in life after I got out of the navy was a hotelier. I was at one stage

General Manager of West Australia Hotels and I built the Belmont Hotel on behalf of a company, a small company. And I was one of the directors of the Quindalup Bay Hotel/Motel in Busselton. And I used to go down there to board meetings about once a month, sometimes more often.

Back to front, yes.

Growing up in Carnarvon? My father then was appointed manager of a little farm, which was the dairy farm for Carnarvon. We used to milk I think about

36 cows or more. It’s a long time ago you know.

I was a bit too young. We used to walk to school about 3 miles at first. And then we had a dray a bloke, a contractor, he used to harness his horse up to the dray and he was a farrier at Carnarvon

and we used to catch the dray as we used to call it. Then he finished up before I left school - I left school at 14 – he bought an old T-Model truck and put a top on it with seats and he used to take it off after he’d

taken the kids to school and brought them back home again at different times. And he was a carrier in Carnarvon. It was a marvellous life as a kid in Carnarvon.

Yes, afterwards, we walked to school at first before they got the dray.

3 miles and 3 miles home. But if at any time it got to

110 [degrees] they closed the school and let you go home. I think to walk home 3 miles in 110 was pretty hard really although it didn’t worry us kids.

I had one brother and one sister and one died as a baby with meningitis.

I don’t remember. I might not have even been born when he died. I wasn’t born until 1915. I’m the youngest of the family. There are three of us and there would have been four had he made it

alive.

I think my memories of going to school are of just being taught to read and write and being taught to spell “cat”.

It was a corrugated building with a veranda all around. There were two rooms and toilets attached. There was one side of the school for the infant classes and the other side of the school I think was about from 3rd up to 7th.

And then I’d only been there really a few years and Mum sent me to the convent. My mother was staunch Church of England and it was a Roman Catholic Convent. The nuns were great. They taught me a lot.

General schooling, you know, history,

geography and English if they could. I’m not too bright.

I was quite a good student at school I suppose. I was very independent as a kid, very independent.

I don’t know because my mother I suppose was a real old English, although she was born in Australia, Victorian. She was a perfect lady my mother. She was admired by a lot of people and tried to teach me the same way, which I didn’t like.

I had long curly hair as a baby and a little boy and my mother used to curl it and I used to have ringlets hanging down. I didn’t like them and I got a pair of scissors one day and cut everything off when I was about 3 years old.

Quite different altogether. The state schools were really rough in those days and we were only a few of the kids that wore shoes and socks and boots. Most of the kids went to school bare-footed in those days. Some of the

kids were pretty rough.

One day the Reynolds kids, there were like cups on the telegraphs lines

and they were shanghaiing them and shooting them all out. They were real larrikins but they were pretty good kids.

Yes a lot different. Convent school was much more refined. I went to school with Bill Willis who died recently. I was about twelve

months older than Bill. He was a senator and his brother was a member of the Legislative Council for Carnarvon in the state government. I knew Frank Wise, the Premier, and I knew Jack Wilcox. When I was a kid my father

took me to see Jack. He wanted to get me in the police force and I didn’t want to join the police force. And Sergeant Teddington was in charge of the admissions for the police force and he had a military moustache. I took this letter from Jack Wilcox, the Premier, over to him and he said,

“So you want to join the police force do you, young fellow?” And I said, “No, I’m not keen”. He said, “We’ll fix that”. And to get measured you stood alongside of a board that went up and down like that and where it hit your head was your height. So he got this board and he brought it down pretty hard like that and he said “All right, you don’t have to worry you’re too short”.

That’s how I never joined the police force.

We played a bit of cricket but sadly we never had proper pitches. We used to play tip and run. If you tipped the ball you had to

run and if you were run out that was the finish of you. We played football and rounders was another thing we played. You threw the ball and you had to run from one side to the other. Marbles of course, marbles was a great game and spinning tops.

You threw the top down like that and you wound a piece of string around it and threw it down. This is going back 80 years you know it takes a bit of remembering. I didn’t anticipate you were going to ask me anything like this.

Good. My mother was a great lady, Dad

was pretty rough. His great grandfather was an Irishman. He was a northern Irishman came from Londonderry and he must have been reasonably educated I think. They were quite prominent in Western Australia and

were both members of the Genealogical Society. We learned lots of things about the early settlers of Western Australia. When your ancestors have lived here since 1829…

Yes. Mary has got a greater background than me. Her ancestors came out on the Callista and their name was Keene. And the interesting party about them is that he died about

eleven months after they arrived in the state. She had 3 children and Mary-Anne, that was Mary’s great grandmother, when her husband died they’d been here just over twelve months and her son was only a boy and he was drowned in the Swan River and she was left with these two little baby girls,

and she had to bring them up in Western Australia when it was only a year old. She’s got a marvellous history.

Yes, both of us. My great grandfather went to Greenough sometime in the late

1840s I think and he used to have the Pioneer Gardens there. Then my grandfather took up a little station in Yalgoo but when his wife died and through a drought and whatnot he finished up selling it. I think he sold it to Beatons but I’m not sure.

Yes. I had to milk a cow and cut the wood as a kid for the wood fire in the kitchen and bring in the chips to light the fire in the morning

and help separate the milk to make cream out of the milk. The farm was pretty big and we grew oranges and mandarins and no grapefruit. But we grew pomelos and Dad grew a few grapes. They do very well at

Carnarvon, the grapes. We had five acres of lucern under irrigation, flooded irrigation, you open the water out of the tank and it went along drains past the beds. The end one you’d open the drain up and the water would flood all over a big bed of

lucern. Then when that was flooded you’d close that off and open the next one and so on. You used to cut the lucern with a mallet and feed the cows. And you’d go out on the common in the morning and they’d come home in the afternoon because you’d lock their calves up at home away from them and we used to feed the calves with

separated milk and pullet and grain. I don’t remember I was only a small boy. To feed the calves you’d push their head into a trough and put your fingers through and they’d grab your fingers and suck the milk up through your fingers.

That’s one of things I can remember as a kid.

Out of the trough. The calves would come up to the trough. For a while their mothers would hold their milk up a bit so you’d bring their calves into

suckle and they’d drink their milk down again and then you’d lock the calf up again and then finish up.

Yes.

How did he?

Well see he’d been a

sheep man and he found out one of the camel teamsters wanted a camel man there so he left the family to come up later by boat and went up there to drive a Bidgimarra camel team. He drove the Bidgimarra camel team until he was appointed manager of Leura Farm, which was the first

dairy farm that supplied the town with butter and milk. Before that he was a camel teamster.

Not for long because he was appointed manager of

Leura Farm.

Yes but he never made much out of life my Dad.

Well happy go lucky and he boozed a lot particularly whisky. I know a cousin of mine

said his father at one stage was not going to leave him the farm because he said “It’ll all go”. He finished up mortgaging it and losing our farm. He never looked after us kids very well.

Not very well. I started work at 14

while I was still going for the school. I worked for the grocers at Carnarvon at times on a bike delivering groceries and whatnot. I got a job as a roustabout on a shearing team when I was 14. And a bloke called Roy Young he was a half Chinaman and his father’s name

was Ying and Roy was a shearer and so were all his brothers. Gee he looked after me as a kid in the shearing sheds. He was a great man, a really lovely man. He taught me to play chess.

No but he could play chess and he taught me to play chess

so that I could play with him.

No you never had time during smoko. Smoko in a shearing team is run by a bell and if the shearer didn’t have a sheep on the board when the bell went he couldn’t grab another one.

Smoko was half an hour and any shearer that had a sheep on the board he was able to finish. I used to wash up for the shearers. To understand what I’m saying their combs and cutters got oil yoke on them. When they changed a cutter or a comb they

had a bowl of water and they dropped it in that and they had to be cleaned before they went to the expert to be ground. He had a wheel that he used to run off a motor to grind the combs and cutters. The shearers used to pay me 5 bob [shillings] a week. You only had time to look after

one because you had to have your morning tea or your afternoon tea. That’s how I started off in the shearing sheds.

The smallest was 4 shearers, 4 roustabouts, a presser, a wool classer and an expert.

One of the 4 men was a pinner up and I was a picker up, I was a kid. According to the union rules, they were only allowed one boy in the team and I was always the boy and I didn’t get much wages. Then I woke up to this and the contractor agreed if I put my

age up 4 years, I might have been about 16 or 17 at the time – I’d been out roustabouting for a couple of years – I put my age up to 21 and he agreed to pay me because I was a pretty good hand. And I could run and pick up fleeces and throw them out and whatnot. One

year we were in Port Hedland and we were going out to Marble Bar. I was in the Pier Hotel with the shearers and I was only a kid, I looked young too, I could drink a pot of beer as easy as anything. The mounted policeman came and there were no windows there. He said, “Hey, young fellow, I want to see you. Come out

here”. So I looked at the shearers and I walked out and he said, “Are you 21?” I said, “Yeah”. He said, “How old are you?” I said, “24.” I’d just put my age up to 21 you know. He said, “You’re only a boy”. I said, “There are the shearers there that I work with and I’m paid as 21” and he knew the law at the time. I said, “I get paid

as a man” He shook his head and he walked away. Of course we were only there that night. We only passed through these towns going to another shed. But he was amazed here was this kid telling him he was 21.

Through the years?

As a roustie? That year I think I did 8.

Yes. That year I went to Limestone, ‘Yarrie’, ‘Strellie’ and it may have been Bonny Downs. This was a good many years ago. Then came

Nambour, Gascoyne and I finished up on the Murchison. I think Marlow Downs was one and I don’t know about Dairy Creek; I was at Dairy Creek at other times. That year on the Gascoyne I finished up at Manilya, which is right on the banks of the Manilya River going, up towards the Station.

A marvellous life, a young bloke in a shearing shed.

Well if you were with the Pastoral Labour Bureau, the PLB, they had their own truck but they had a number of teams out. The teams were stationed to cut

out and the next station was ready for them. They’d done their mustering and whatnot. You were transported on the truck, the PLB truck, or Jack Marks had his own truck. There were different shearing contractors and they took their own truck but the PLB had more

teams out than the rest. The shearing contractors only had to find the one run. It was cutthroat you know.

They started and these blokes came in a little bit afterwards and probably cut the price a little bit to the squatters. The squatters were a pretty hard

band. They were all pretty hard businessmen and they had plenty of money.

The last year they had cut them down low and they were earning twenty-five bob a hundred. Most of the shearing teams I was

in they were all young because if you were a good shearer you could shear 200 or a little over 200. The learner, all the teams had a learner, and he’d be down probably as low as 125. I had a go as a learner one year but I died in a hole for 100 one day; it was too hard for

me because I was only a little bloke you know. I remember Lockyer was the manager of Nalboro and Nalboro belonged to the people that owned Errabiddy out from Yuna and it was a stud place and oh gee they were hard sheep.

I got into this run of lambs and I’m blowing them all off and they only wanted the tips to make the wool good for next year. He’s standing there the manager and he’s looking at me blowing this wool up and he said, “Hey, young fellow, what sort of a go are you getting there?”

I said, “Pretty good. It’s all right Mr Lockyer”. He said, “If you don’t take a bit more wool off those lambs you won’t be getting a go at all”. That was my experience of shearing. I went back roustabouting after that; it was too hard for me.

Yes. Some of them were very, very

skilled.

Skirting the fleeces on the table and picking pieces and locks. On the board, picking up wool on the board you had to pick your own bellies and you had to take the pizzles out of them.

If you don’t know understand what a pizzle is, it’s from the leather and where he pees it is all…

And you had to pick this out and put it in the basket and then class the belly fleeces. On some

bigger stations they had 3 degrees. You’d have an A lock and AA locks. And you had bins that you emptied your baskets into. Of course, the wool classers they’d pull all the sweat locks from under the arms and the dags from around the crutch and

whatnot off and throw them into baskets. Then the piece picker picked these baskets up from the wool table and he classed them in piece bins and they were called pieces – 3A pieces, 2A pieces or 1A pieces and then stained pieces. I’m only giving you a

rough idea of what a shearing shed was like.

8 hours.

You slept in the shearers’ quarters and it was pretty rough. They were rough beds and all you had was a hurricane lamp and probably a kerosene box for a table. That was all you had to read by of a

nighttime. Shearers were always pretty tired and they went to bed early and they’d go crook if you made too much noise or something. All the younger blokes, I was always the youngest bloke in that shed, we used to get up to all kinds of mischief in the shearing sheds in those days.

It was great travelling through the northwest towns and the stations.

In the towns, they always knew when you were coming through. We generally stayed the whole night in the town probably at the hotel or if the hotels at one of them or two of them. The townspeople would always put on a

dance when the shearers were going through and it was great.

The food wasn’t bad at all. Don’t misunderstand me, sometimes you got a crook cook but they were not easy to get. I finished up a shearers’ cook

because I woke up when I was really young. What I used to do of a nighttime after dinner I would wash up for the cook and he’d pay me five bob a week for doing all the washing up at night. Then I’d do the combs and cutters for a shearer during the day and I’d get another 5 bob a week

there and sometimes I’d cut the wood for the cook. Eventually, you see the cook was a highly paid man and I’d got a good few tips from the earlier years off the cooks, so I tried cooking then. I learned to make bread and you had to be able to

cook to cook for shearers I tell you.

Yes. There was a shearers’ rep [representative] and they’d have a meeting and he’d be told to check the cook and tell him he wasn’t doing things satisfactorily or he was too dirty or

something like that. Fortunately I never had a check all the time I was cooking for shearers. When I had learned to cook for shearers, in the summer - you see the shearing season went through the winter, it got too hot in the summer - and I’d come down and I’d get a job in the hotel as a

cook. The first job I had was at the Addison Beach Hotel and Freddy Pound was the manager, and he was shacked up with the housekeeper Miss Perry.

Yes. Then the shearing season finished and the beach places cut down

and they’d finish up with only one cook through the winter. The holiday places I cooked at were the Lodge at Rottnest for old Harry Rex and I cooked at the Lagoon Tea Rooms in Cottesloe and the OBH, the Ocean Beach Hotel. And for Old Harry Green I cooked two seasons

running in the Rockingham Hotel. That was the busiest place I was in because girls used to go down there on the bus. The last year I was there, there was one bus a day but you had to cut through Spearwood. Kitson was the Chief Secretary in the Labour Government the year before and he’d put a bitumen road through Spearwood

and it was inland. The coast road was too rough; you couldn’t get along it. That’s where I met Mary just after Christmas in 1937. She’d left school. She’d been in school and her father was a farmer in Morawa. And she’d left school when she was 17 and a girlfriend that was

working at the Rockingham Hotel and it was just after Christmas in 1937 and she got Mary a job as a housemaid and that’s where I met Mary and I’ve been with her ever since. We got married in 1940, the 1st of June 1940.

45 years on the 1st of June.

Actually, I should have said 65 years, what am I saying?

65 years on the 1st of June. I got married on the 1st of June 1940 and I was in the navy and I’d been going with Mary for over

18 months. I came down from up north. I’d left the Esplanade Hotel [in Fremantle] because I was cooking at the Esplanade Hotel and the bloke called Walsh who was the shearing contractor came and saw me and said, “What about coming up north again?” But I wasn’t that keen on account of Mary you see. Anyhow I went up

north and when I came back the first thing I did, and I’ve still got it, was I bought Mary a glory box. Anyhow, Paxton contacted me and asked me if I’d go back because he had a Japanese chef there and he wasn’t that satisfactory. He asked me if I’d go back to the Esplanade Hotel and it was a pretty high-class hotel. The first

time I was there a couple of years ago, I’d been second cook to a very good chef at the Esplanade Hotel and he taught me a lot about gourmet cooking and good cooking. I went back and I wasn’t there for long and I got the idea I’d join the navy.

I got a watch out of Rory Paxton; he was a great bloke. Anyhow, that’s how I joined the navy. That was in November. There was a sergeant commander who was in charge of the recruiting at Leeuwin Depot. Remember the old Cliff Street depot it used to run down to where the fish markets are now [Fremantle]. And I had a lot of

decayed teeth. I had false teeth in my top teeth. And he said, “Look, I’ll sign you up in the navy if you get your teeth pulled out”. I said, “That’s easy.” So I knew a dentist who was a petty good bloke and he pulled all my teeth out and he banged the new mob straight

in. I wasn’t recruited until October. I went down and saw Martel who was the sergeant and he said, “That’s all right”. And I joined the navy. We were in civilian clothes and we used to go out on the Esplanade and do exercises like this. They used to march

us down to the Rex Café in the high street in Fremantle for our meals. And that’s how I joined the navy. But the cooks there, I was really and truly, I never trained in the navy. They sent a lot of the cooks that had joined up they sent them to

Flinders Naval Depot for training but I never trained in the navy at all. And then on the Thursday of 1940, it was a bit before June, – no, it was a

Thursday at the end of April - I got a draft to go to sea on the [HMAS] Westralia. So Mary was working in Perth and I rang her up at work and I got on to her and I said, “I’m going to sea on Monday”. No, I couldn’t ring her up but when she knocked off that afternoon I went on shore leave, what we called shore leave although we were in a depot in the big

drill hall at Fremantle. We’d been kitted up with uniforms at this stage and I said, “I’m going to sea on Monday. Let’s get married”. And she said, “Oh Bernie I’ll be in it but I’m not 21 and I’ve got no mother”. Her mother died when she was 2. And she said, “I wouldn’t be able to

get married on Saturday”. This was Thursday afternoon and I said, “I’ll fix it”. She said, “You can’t” and I said, “Yes I can”. So I rang up the naval padre and he was a Methodist parson, one of the naval padres, in that big church right in the middle of Fremantle. It was the Methodist church on the corner of Cantonment Street. He knew me by name and he said, “I’ll

see if I can fix it for you. Ring me back in an hour’s time”. So I rang him back in an hour’s time. And old Wiggins was the magistrate in Fremantle and he wore pince-nez [glasses with a spring to clip on the nose (French)]. He said, “The magistrate wants to see you but he wants to see your girlfriend Mary as well”. This would have been the 30th of April because we were married on the

1st of June, the next day. So we went before him and he said, “So you want to get married do you, young fellow?” I said, “Yes” And I had a letter from her father who knew we were going to get married but he’d never really given his consent. He’d more or less said it would be all right and I showed this to the magistrate. He said, “You want to get married do you, young fellow?” I said, “Yes.” “I’ll give you

permission to get married, a special permit to get married tomorrow on one condition, a special license”. I said, “What’s that, Your Honour?” He said, “Promise me you won’t come before me in different circumstances in the future”. Now that’s 64 years ago on the 1st of June. I said, “That’s easy, Your Honour” and I had a great big grin on my face. He got out his quill and he wrote me up a special license and I got married the next day. There was no one there;

Mary’s brother happened to be available as best man. So he gave her away and we had a few beers and what not. I was to go to sea on Monday but Italy was coming into the war so that draft was cancelled. The Remo came into Fremantle, the Italian Ship, and the Customs grabbed it and they wouldn’t let it go out.

So to make a long story short, the draft to the Westralia never came in and instead of going to the Westralia, I was drafted as prize crew on the Remo, to take the Remo to Sydney. So that’s how I went to sea. I never trained. Then, when I got to Sydney, I was stationed at the [HMAS] Kuttabul, which was a naval ship at Garden Island.

I was only there for about a fortnight and I commissioned this ship called the Whyalla.

No, only at Fremantle. I was cooking for the officers upstairs. I was just cooking breakfast for the duty officers. There was always an officer on duty at the drill hall. And I used to

cook scrambled eggs or poached eggs or fried egg and bacon. It was pretty good. It was cooked on a gas stove downstairs. The officers’ quarters were upstairs.

No, me, nothing. To make a long story short I was drafted then to the Whyalla, or

commissioned, it was a Merchant Navy ship. It was a freezer ship that traded up and down the North Queensland coast. It had a complement of about 65 I think. So there were 3 cooks on board and there was a paymaster too on this ship, which was unusual for such a small

ship. He brought the cooks together and I was only an ordinary cook and he said, “Eakins is in charge of the galley so you’ve got to take orders from him”. I was in charge of galley almost from the first time I joined the navy. And I was never, ever not in charge of a galley or a watch from then on.

The galley on the

Whyalla was a coal-fired stove. And to get the coal it came down from the upper deck through a chute and into a big box in the galley and it used to be very dirty because it used to make a fair bit of dust. And that was my initial into cooking in the galley and I was very

successful. The officers were very happy. The captain of the Whyalla was Royal Australian Navy, a permanent bloke. He was a Lieutenant Commander and he was a surveyor too. He never stayed there long. The captain of the Bingarra – we were 3 ships –

and we’d come around to Fremantle from Sydney and we’d been doing anti-submarine duty at Sydney but a lot of ships leaving Fremantle for the Middle East. This was more or less the last port of call for the big troop-ships. Our duty when we were stationed there at Fremantle was to go

out further out past Rottnest and do anti-submarine sweeps. We were anti-submarine ships – but I’ve got a bit ahead of my story.

Everything, roasts and sausages for breakfast. Things weren’t that

tough early in the war. Italy had just come into the war. On the Remo in between Fremantle and Melbourne because it was a passenger ship too, the Remo, and the Romolo. But the Romolo was stuck off Sydney. We

broached the grog and everyone used to get full. There was a Merchant Navy captain and his name was Collins, he was a good bloke, he never booked anyone for getting drunk or anything and we had the time of our lives. But the first day we went to sea, I was really seasick too but I got over that all right.

Oh yes, a lot of the navy crew. I think there were a few civilians on board but I’m not sure now. You’ve got to realise when I talk about ships’ operations I was a cook. I wasn’t a seaman or a stoker or a gunner.

All around the ship I was just free. I could walk on and off. Every ship I was on, I was in charge of the galley and I could walk on and off as I liked.

I beg your pardon?

I could because I was in the Petty Officers’ Mess. Petty officers didn’t have

to fall in for leave and be inspected to see if they were tidy and their shoes were polished and whatnot. You just signed for your leave, your shore leave, and you just signed a shore leave book. Ratings put in a card, what they

called a liberty card. I’ll show you some. I’ve got quite a few liberty cards from when I first joined up to get ashore in Leeuwin. That’s all part of the naval history.

Because I liked fishing. I’d always really wanted to join the navy but never had the

opportunity and I never had the education. You see I was not very well educated but I educated myself in the navy. I was pretty good at figures. At one stage just after I was discharged from the navy I worked for a bookmaker clerking. I was pretty good too. I was pretty smart at

figures. That was more or less my civilian history. And then when they licensed SP [Starting Price] bookmakers after the war, I became a licensed SP bookmaker and I had the biggest shop in Perth. I had 23 clerks working for me.

Yes. On busy days there were 7 or

8 ticket writers and two pay out clerks or four for a while until the pressure eased off. I enjoyed every minute of it too.

White trousers, always white trousers. But in the tropics later on when the [HMAS] Quickmatch came from the Scapa Flow [Orkney Islands] off Madagascar, because we had been on convoy duty in Madagascar, we joined the Eastern Fleet in Mombasa. We weren’t long in Mombasa because we came back down to Durban [South Africa]. And most of my service with the

Eastern Fleet was at Durban because we were on convoy duty and anti-submarine duty. Durban was a pretty busy port because the Suez Canal of course was the only way you could get to India and Colombo, before the Japs grabbed Singapore, and also to Australia. You see

Australia was such an important place for food. England was getting a lot of their meat and what from Australia during the war. Durban was a very important town. It had to be kept free of submarines, Japanese submarines. I had twelve months on that station. It was great.

In Australian waters; well first I was in Australian waters I suppose early in the war about nearly two years. But I was at

sea all the time. I was one of the unlucky ones that never copped a depot. I was sent to sea early in the war and kept at sea. In 1944 I returned and I caught the Rani at…

I came home from Trincomalee to Colombo and went on the Nizam from Colombo to Cochin down the bottom of India. And I caught the Rani, which was a baby top carrier that was ferrying planes from Vancouver, via New Zealand, and Melbourne was the Australian port so it never called at Fremantle, to the bottom of

India for the Malayan troops. She was ferrying these planes there. The whole of the crew off the Quickmatch had been relieved in Colombo except me. They couldn’t get a relief for me. And I was put ashore in Trincomalee. The motor launch broke down and they had to row me ashore. They put me on the beach at

Trincomalee and there was an RN, a Royal Navy NAAFI [Navy Army and Air Force Institute] canteen because the eastern fleet was just moving there. And I found my way up to the canteen and I had my kit bag and my hammock with me. And they said, “You’re catching the train at midnight to Colombo”. So I proceeded to get full of course and they

took me down in the car – there’s not much train service in Ceylon - and I caught the train at about 11 o clock or midnight or something like that. I got into Colombo at 7 o clock the next morning and there was not a soul there to meet me, not anyone.

I had no proper leave. Every time the ship…if the ship had to go into dry dock anywhere you had to be put ashore generally in billets somewhere. I usually managed to find somewhere. I remember one naval billet I was in was when we were put in Bombay because the

destroyer had to go into dry dock in Bombay and they established a camp with tents for us just out of Bombay.

I liked India but not many did because they didn’t like the poverty in India and the smell, especially in Bombay. I found it an interesting country. I

had the good fortune because Nick Carter who did the washing up for us in the mess, he knew Edgar Britt who was a jockey. And they were still race meetings in Bombay in the war. And he rode for the Gaekwar of Baroda [maharajah of the state of Baroda] and he lived up at Balabar Hill, which was a posh place. And he went to school in India and

he was a naval seaman. He was a good bloke. I got on well with everyone if you can understand what I mean.

Anyway I rang up Edgar Britt and he invited me to go and see him. He said, “What about you come up with me”. I said, “Yes”. So we went up to Balabar Hill, which is the flash part of Bombay, and Edgar had to go out

with the Gaekwar of Baroda who was a great, really big man with palaces. So his servant, Edgar’s servant; his wife wasn’t home she’d taken the kids for a walk or something. He said, “Come inside I’m expecting you” He called us Mr Eakins and Mr Carter. He said,

“Mr Britt said to give you a beer”. He had nothing but the good beer – Barclays – it was English beer. And he poured us that. Edgar came home and his wife and they invited us to stay for dinner. To make a long story short during the little while we were there, there were races on the Saturday and the Gaekwar of Baroda said, “Would you like to go to the races?” I said, “Nick and I would

love to”. I said, “I can get off, Nick, and I’ll be able to get you off”. So the Gaekwar of Baroda sent a Rolls Royce and a servant for us to take us to the races. And we were in shorts. The cook and the AB [able seaman] were taken to the races. It was good fun. We never stayed there that long and we got him to take us back to the ship.

In those days and I think it still is but it was prohibition in Bombay in those days but we could still get a drink.

It was very, very unsatisfactory because you could write as much as you wanted

to but it was censored by either the doctor or paymaster or someone. And this didn’t suit me. I used to send those air things. They were cables and all you could

put on them was three sentences. They were numbered 1, 2, 3 and up to 100 different kind of sentences. You were allowed three and they were photographed and sent in a capsule to Australia on a plane and then they were deciphered. And that was mostly my way. I’ll show you a letter

from a sugar farmer in Mpofana in South Africa. She said, “Would you like me to write to your wife?” I said “I’d love you to but for heaven’s sake don’t mention the name of the ship. You can mention my name and where I am”. I’ve dug the letter out if you’re interested in looking at it

later on. I was pretty ingenious you know.

At times. I never heard for six months on one occasion but then I got 32 letters at once. I had worded Mary up to number them,

each one. We’d taken the [HMS] Victorious, which was a big aircraft carrier; we had taken her from Glasgow over to the Norfolk Navy Yard over in America because America had come in. There were three destroyers and we ran into a gale,

one of these real gales.

And it was Christmas too so we never cooked anything. If you can understand the cooking on destroyers was canteen cooking. All the messes prepared their own meals and ordered it through the galleys for the cooks to cook. It was a

shocking way of messing. It never suited me.

Oh yes. All our watch deck lockers were stove in and the capstan was a foot out of line. A huge big 4.7 [gun] had to be reset in America again.

It was the worst storm. It was one of these gales they get off the coast of America. But that was an experience I’ve never forgotten.

Any time you go into action you’ve got an action station. I was in charge of the forward supply party and the first thing you do when the alarm bells

go, it doesn’t matter if it is aircraft or a submarine or whatever it is, the first thing the cook does is draw the fires, put the fires out in the galley. You don’t cook anything. You’ve got dried biscuits and bully beef. Cooking on destroyers in the navy especially in the United Kingdom…

Getting food, dried potatoes and dried onions and ersatz sausages with not much meat in them and things like that. It was pretty hard going cooking on destroyers in England.

Oh yes. I was an expert.

I’d soak the dried potatoes and then cook them and then if I was serving bully beef, I’d mince it up with the potatoes and make rissoles, potato and bully beef rissoles. They had never heard of it in the navy if you can understand what I mean.

Navy cooks are well trained but they’re not taught to cook. Although I say it myself I’d probably be the best cook in the navy. I’d been camp cook for a survey party where you live in tents and you cook in camp ovens. I can make bread in a camp oven and I can make sponge cakes in a camp

oven and I could cook properly whereas navy cooks didn’t know how to cook although they reckon they can.

I taught them nothing. I just showed them how to make different things.

Well I taught a lot of them to make bread

and really and truly they didn’t know how to, you know, for a big crowd say for 300 or something like that, how to cook fish and chips. They had been told…

To cook like that takes a big of organising

and I’d been doing it since I was a kid.

I don’t know.

Yes but there’s an officers’ cook. He’s got a separate galley. There are only 7 officers on it. That was another thing that bugged me although I never complained or anything. At my discharge I got six and a half years in the navy and I got superior recommends every year.

I was mentioned in despatches.

I don’t know they thought I was a good cook I reckon. Well, I reckoned I was, I don’t know whether they did. It says “For devotion to duty - I’ll

show you the orders – “For devotion to duty in the face of the enemy in the South West Pacific area”. That’s all bullshit.

Yes.

To get recommends every

year, once at the end of the year, you must have been doing all right although they probably didn’t approve of a lot of the things you did at times. I was coming back one night at about 4 o clock in the morning and there were four of us. There was a bloke called Zibcus and he was a cook and he was nearest the wharf. And he walked over the edge of

the wharf and he grabbed my arm and pulled me over too. There was a pontoon. We were tied up alongside a merchant ship because sometimes in Durban there was that much shipping in and out of there that you couldn’t get a berth and you’d have to tie up alongside a merchant ship. And to get ashore you’d have to walk over the deck of the merchant ship. So I fell down in the drink and

lost my cap because there was a fairly decent tide and also my pay book with my passport and whatnot. I think the only money I had in the world was in my pay book. And someone yelled out, “Are you all right?” I said, “I’m all right. Let a rope down”. So I got up and I got back on board and nothing was said about it and they gave me a new pay book and passport. That was quite an experience.

My mates, yes. They were all good blokes of course that I met in the navy. A mate that I was with, the destroyer had to go into dry dock in Simonstown

right down at the bottom of South Africa. There was a big Royal Navy base there and they used to put the ships in when you had to go into dry dock. When you go into dry dock everyone gets leave and gets billeted ashore somewhere or they put you up somewhere. So my mate and I we were told that Ceres was a great

place and so we said that we’ll book in, they told us the hotels in Ceres and we walked into the Grand Hotel in Ceres which is in the middle of a fruit growing district in what they call the Apple Valley in South Africa. So we had to change trains and we had to catch the

Johannesburg train from Cape Town. And I’ve forgotten the name of it. Those things you don’t kind of remember. But to go to Ceres the train we had to catch meant we had to change at this place and it was midnight before we got into Ceres. This is Levine, it was a Jew that had it, his name was Levine. I said to Bon my mate I said

“Well look what we’ve got to do is, this looks a pretty flash joint. We’d better in the morning we’d better go into the office and pay our board and if we go broke it doesn’t matter. We’re square and we know nothing”. So we went in and saw Mrs Levine and she said, “Look, Mr Levine is in Cape Town and he won’t be back until this afternoon.

You’ll have to fix him up and pay him” So when he came back, we’d been having a few beers through the day, and we went and saw him and he said, “You Australians will be my guests for a fortnight. I’m not going to charge you anything”. So we got to know the chemist he took us, nearly every night they had a dance there and we were treated like kings.

But the big thing about this is that there were only two trains a week and they were too close together. To catch a train back in time for our leave we’d be 24 hours late, which is a

crime in the navy especially in a foreign port. So I said to the chemist I said, “I’ll fix this”. I think I’ve got it somewhere, I don’t know where it is now. I said, “I’ll get permission from the ship”. So I sent a telegram to “Commanding Officer, HMAS Quickmatch, Simonstown Dockyard,

South Africa, “Request 24 hours extra leave, signed Eakins, Grand Hotel, Ceres”. So in no time back came a telegram, “Eakins, Grand Hotel, Ceres, Not granted, signed Commanding Officer”. So I showed it to the chemist and he said, “I’ll fix this”.

He said, “the DNO in Cape Town, that’s the District Naval Officer, is a friend of mine and I’ll fix it”. He apparently rang up the DNO and he said, “It’s all fixed you’ve got 24 hours permission not to return to the ship”. So when we get back, we had to catch a train from Cape Town to

Simonstown, which I think was nearly an hour’s run but it was a long way around the cape to get back to Cape Town. We get off the train and all our different mates are going, “Gee, you blokes are in trouble. Everyone’s back off leave, you’re the only two and you’re about

14 hours late”. So we were expecting trouble but not a word was said. We walked on board and not a word was said, so that was quite an experience. I’ve got the telegram somewhere. “Not granted” – the shortest telegram in the world.

Drinking, hiking and visiting and people coming to see us and buying us drinks. There was a dance every night and it was great fun.

Well the only

leave really was overnight on land. You’d go ashore, I used to get ashore at 4 o clock in the afternoon. In my case you’d make it to the first pub. All naval ships in foreign

ports they landed their own patrol. The patrol generally speaking would be able seamen or stokers; anyone that was on duty would have to take the patrol, and they put leggings on and side arms, a sword and whatnot and they’d patrol the streets.

What they’d do is they’d find out where most of the blokes were drinking and they’d go into a different part of the town altogether. They were landed to look after their own shipmates. For the day they had an NP

wristband on, which meant Naval Police. It might be an AB or it might be a stoker, it might even be a steward, anyone.

Unless you were right out of hand. If they couldn’t handle you that was the provos [provost, military police], the

regular police and the regular naval police in places like Cape Town and Durban and Simonstown and those places they had vehicles as well. They’d probably get you back to the ship but you’d be in trouble. You’d get a stoppage of leave or something like that but it never, ever happened to me fortunately.

I was never out of hand.

I don’t know. Common sense that’s the only reason. You can do

lots of things and get into different spots and whatnot but if you use your common sense you don’t get into trouble. That’s the point in the navy and the navy is pretty tolerant and pretty understanding but if you don’t use your common sense then it’s your own blooming fault. I mean if you get into

trouble and lots of sailors get into trouble I can assure you there’s stoppage of leave and stoppage of pay and different things.

I think a bloke called Simpkins got into trouble a couple of times. Simpkins he was one of

my cooks. He got a Captain’s Report for coming on board drunk or getting drunk or coming back late. He got a Captain’s Report. A Captain’s Report is you go on the quarterdeck and you take your cap off and you stand with attention and you are charged with whatever you are charged with being drunk or late back on board. And the captain asked him,

“Who did you go ashore with?” He said, “Sometimes I got ashore with Bernie Eakins”. He said, “Well I’ll give you a little bit of advice young fellow, if you continue to go ashore in that company you’ll soon get out of your depth”.

Yes, “You’ll soon get out of your depth”. And then in Durban one night we’d come over from Bombay and didn’t expect to be in port. I think it was New Year and we got into Durban on New Year’s

Day. And there was about 4 of us, my mates of course, it might have even been five. There might have been an extra one but I’ve just forgotten now. We hired a taxi and he’s taking us around all the good pubs and we’re doing a

pub crawl around the suburbs of Durban. And the pubs were closed then and he said, “There’s a big ball on at the Royal Durban Light Infantry Club”. That’s a pretty posh show everyone is in dinner suits and tails.

He said, “You blokes look all right I’ll take you down there and see if they’ll let you in”. He took us down there and they let us in so we said to him, “Come back and pick us up at midnight and take us back to the ship” because we’d had quite a bit to drink. So we were sitting with some girls or something and their husbands were in the

South African Army and they were fighting up north somewhere. All the beer had been drunk. They had no more beer for sale. They were selling alcohol.

So all they had left was Commando brandy and we were drinking this Commando brandy and buying some for the girls

and so anyhow we go outside at about five to midnight and our taxi had come. These girls were claiming the taxi. So one of my mates said, “That taxi is ours”. And she said, “Australians, the scum of the earth”. And she let go with an

open hand and she slapped him across the face like that. He gave her an open-hander back again. They were calling for police and I said, “Listen you blokes, keep your bloody head and settle down until the police come”. I thought it was the naval police but it was the civilian police. So they go and take this bloke down, this woman wants to charge him with

assault, in the paddy wagon. I said to the police, “If you’re taking my mate down to the police station I’m coming too”. I said to my other mates, “What about we all go down to the police station”. So we go down to the police station. And these women are down there and they are charging this bloke with assault and they are telling the sergeant what happened. So he’s got to appear in

court the next day. So I said, “Let’s see the officer. Let’s get the same story and ask the officer if he will let us go to court as witnesses”. So we all agreed on the story we were going to tell him. So we see the captain and he agrees to let us all go and we go as witnesses.

She’s got a black eye where he’d hit her and so I think eventually we got our stories all mixed up a little bit. So the magistrate is summing up and he could see she had a black eye. He said, “I think there’s little doubt that this woman copped a nasty

blow. And I told him that she’d said, “Australians, the scum of the earth”. And he said, “Furthermore I think she thoroughly deserved it. Case dismissed”. That was the only spot of trouble of any kind that I was ever in on shore or on board ship or anything. So we went down to the pub and proceeded to get full. The officer

sent the Second Lieutenant to defend him. That was quite an experience.

We were mostly drinking South African beer.

It wasn’t bad. Sometimes we would drink English beer, Barclays if you could get it, which was an export beer from England.

Sometimes you’d get some awful beers especially in India.

What ports; well I landed in Liverpool and spent a lot of time in Portsmouth and then

after a few months in the Scapa Flow with the Grand Fleet because we were working there we were escort to the battleships [HMS] Anson and [HMS] Howe. At that stage we were stationed at Glasgow and when we’d come into port we’d…you see the convoys used to rendezvous in the Clyde

outside Greenock before you went out into the Irish Sea. And then you might head out into the North Sea and always out into the Atlantic of course. We took a lot of troops as reinforcements for the 8th Army over towards, later in the war, towards Algiers and all around.

And one of the biggest convoys we picked up after we took the Victorious over to America was a huge big oil convoy from Curacao in the Dutch West Indies because the Dutch West Indies - they were never conquered and the

crude oil ships used to come over from Venezuela in South America and the Dutch had a refinery in Curacao up a river. It was a busy port on account of the Dutch refinery there. And we had about a week waiting for ships to congregate but gee it was big. We had to refuel at sea.

We took this convoy right across the equator all the way and believe it or not we weren’t allowed ashore because the Vichy French I believe were in control of Casablanca. And we dropped a ship off on the way at the Canary Islands and we took one in to the French at Casablanca and eventually we

picked up a few little ships and took them back to England. But we were taking it must have been upwards of 60,000 reinforcements into Algiers and Oran. And we were the leading destroyer. There were about 14 destroyers with this convoy.

And we sighted an unidentified ship in the Bay of Biscay. It was a good many miles. So we were detached and the convoy turned. You knew the position of every neutral ship and we knew their position. We could receive messages

but we were not allowed, we could never break WT [wireless transmission] silence because the enemy could pick up your position if you broadcast anything from the sea. Generally speaking this is of course. We could pick up the Admiralty or any ships that were broadcasting.

So we were detached to go and investigate this ship. So we increased our speed to 36 knots, which is pretty fast on a big ship. As soon as we got within signalling distance we signalled them in international code “Who are you?” They signalled back in international code, “We are a

Swedish ship bound for South America”. So we signalled back, “If you are a Swedish ship bound for South America, we know nothing about you and we’re giving you five minutes to abandon ship or we’re going to blow you up”. We had 8 torpedo tubes you know. I’ll show you after this. They couldn’t get the Swedish flag down fast

enough and up went an Italian flag and when that had come up went a great white sheet. So we gave them five minutes to get into the lifeboats and abandon ship. And they couldn’t get away from that ship quick enough. The boys had the time of their lives. The 4.7s [guns] were doing a circle around. The convoy had disappeared if you can understand what I mean.

And we put one round into them and there is always a sea running in the Bay of Biscay. And we picked up the survivors and had a conference and the skipper said…I think there might have been a ship’s company of 32, it was a merchant ship you see. And we got them on board and we never heaved to at any

stage. To get these blokes out of the lifeboat we got a line fore and aft from the lifeboat and every time the lifeboat crashed alongside the destroyer we had scrambling nets. The iron deck of a destroyer is only about 6ft out of the water – they had to grab the scrambling nets and pull themselves up on board.

So we got them all eventually on board. And we had one of them – the officers were locked more or less in the wardroom - but we had an Italian in the mess doing our washing up. We weren’t far out of Gibraltar

and when we got within signalling distance of Gibraltar we signalled them that we had some prisoners of war on board and they sent out a Royal Marine contingent to pick them up. There were these Royal Marines and they’d got side arms and they came to pick them up. Anyhow, they took them ashore in

Gibraltar and we never saw them again at that stage. But the convoy had got all through the Straits of Gibraltar and were heading to Algiers and to Oran because they were reinforcements. We caught the convoy up because all ships, the Dominion and the Monarch were full of troops and the Carnarvon Castle, they were all big

troop ships and there were bout 5,000 troops on each ship. They were very precious cargo. So anyhow we pulled into Algiers, the convoy pulled in ahead of us, and some of the boys got leave. I never worried about leave, I didn’t want to go into Algiers, it was evening in any case.

What I want to tell you is it must have been nearly six months afterwards and we got a letter from the Admiralty. One Italian, I don’t know what his name was, Italiano or something like that, “A prisoner of war on board His Majesty’s Australian Ship Quickmatch lost one

cigarette lighter and it is strongly suspected of having been stolen. Please institute the necessary enquiries and report back to Admiralty”. The skipper put this on the public noticeboard. On the bottom of the Admiralty letter was “This half-starved Italian rat was picked up out of the cold Atlantic” we had

survivor kits in those days; if you picked anyone up out of that you could give them dry clothes because they were wet through, “given a survivor kit and no doubt transported to the fair land of England where he would live in comparative safety until after the war. Such is British justice”.

That was printed in a magazine that event.

He must have complained or something. It might have been taken from him.

I wouldn’t chastise an Aussie

pinching a lighter from him, a cigarette lighter. That was quite an experience. Then we picked up 32 Yanks [Americans] in the Mozambique Channel. We were out on anti-submarine patrol and I’d say about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we got an aircraft, which was

patrolling out in the Mozambique Channel signal us that they had sighted a lifeboat full of survivors about 32 miles off the South African coast. They estimated, they were doing between 3 and 4 knots, and heading for the African Coast. We plotted a course. They

gave us an accurate position of where they were on the ocean. We plotted a course whee we reckoned we’d pick them up about 10 o’clock that night. So we increased to full speed and just before 10 o’clock we were shining, because there were no Japs around at that time, a 44-inch searchlight in the sky around like that.

And just around 10 o’clock we sighted a flare on the ocean. And we were able to pick these Yanks up but they’d been 32 days, they’d been torpedoed in the Indian Ocean and they’d missed Madagascar. Of course they were only on a hand compass.

The only food they’d had was four bowls of milk tablets a day and four rations of water and they couldn’t scramble up the scrambling net. They had to be helped on board. We increased to maximum speed and took them into Durban and they were taken into hospital. But the point about these Yanks is when they got out of hospital and they were discharged and waiting to be taken

home or somewhere by the Americans, they hired the town hall and catered for it and put on a party in the town hall for the ship’s company of the Quickmatch and we could bring who we wanted, girls or anyone at all, and gee it was a great night.

Oh yes. They had

plenty of money the Yanks. Gee they used to spend money ashore.

No not much. We never mixed with them much. We never went into Yankee waters much. There were no Yanks in Durban they were all English and a couple of Australian ships there. But the

Yanks were mostly in Australia and the islands and the Philippines afterwards. There were quite a few in India only on account of their ships and whatnot. In America the Yanks were great. Gee they were great

hosts in America.

When we took the Victorious over to Norfolk Navy Yard.

They swarmed on board and they refitted the ship. Gee they worked. After being in England and on convoy duty in the

Atlantic we’d never seen a light, only inside. Everything was blacked out. At Norfolk Navy Base they were building ships and repairing ships and it was an absolute blaze of light. We went ashore but we had to leave early the next day because we had to pick up a convoy from

outside South America and take them across the Atlantic. You never got much time on shore, only time enough to get drunk.

The Suffolk Inn in Portsmouth and different pubs in Glasgow and

there was one pub in Liverpool. And then taking a convoy around the south of England we never travelled at night. It was only a little convoy and we were taking them around to Liverpool. We went into Dartmouth where the naval base is and it’s a pretty place but I never went ashore there.

We were only there for the night and early the next morning. To keep a station - it was early winter and it was pea soup you couldn’t see a yard in front of you – to keep a station you had to put a flare down and it was attached to the stern of the ship to keep

the ship in station. You had to keep that flare on all the time because the leading ship would have naturally been a destroyer and every ship had to keep on that float to keep station. It was eerie.

Well you couldn’t see anything. You couldn’t see a yard in front of you. And the leading ship of course was travelling by compass. In the English Channel at that stage there were lots of torpedo launches. They were big, say 45 or 50, 60 foot

launches with a couple of torpedo tubes on them. They would come out in the English Channel and try and pick our ships and torpedo them.

Yes, very, very fast. But England was getting on top in the navy. We were a very, very modern

destroyer with echo sounders. A destroyer could never touch the side of the, you could pick up anything with sonar I think they called it, sonar. Gee it was good. To get a torpedo away they had to nearly

surface and you could pick up, the torpedoes were run by propellers really and they had to get fairly close to a ship to be effective. The German submarine in the finish was not a match for us at all because we had reinforced bows.

And if they got near the surface at all you could pick them up with the sonar or if they were on the surface with the radar. They had that much modern equipment on them. And if they were on the surface we didn’t worry to fire at them. I never saw any action, don’t misunderstand me but I knew all about it because we were trained we were either just ahead of it or just

behind it and we picked up lots of survivors at different times. If a submarine was near the surface we could increase speed to 36 knots and we had reinforced bows and we wouldn’t worry about guns or anything we’d just cut it in half.

No I never saw a submarine. A

couple of times we reckoned we were either just ahead of it or just behind it. It was luck. We picked up survivors. Another big lot of survivors we picked up was down off Cape Town. They’d been torpedoed down in the Southern Ocean.

I’ve forgotten the name of it. It was a merchant

ship. It was only a tramp. All merchant ships that carried cargo, it might be frozen cargo or it might be wheat, it might be anything, we always referred to them as tramps. Anything that wasn’t a passenger ship or

carrying reinforcements or something like that we’d call them tramps.

I’d say the roughest sea I served in was the North Sea. The Bay of Biscay was always pretty rough. The Mediterranean was pretty

calm. We ran into rough weather in the Indian Ocean at times specially down around Cape Town in South Africa. We brought a big convoy down right through the Atlantic and right down the African coast. It was a big convoy and we had to refuel and reprovision

off the West African coast, Freetown. It was a big port Freetown. In the old days in the early history of the world

Freetown was the centre of the slave trade to America. You’ve probably heard of it. That’s how it got its name, Freetown.

Negroes taken and sold to American planters and lots sold in England.

Yes.

It was pretty routine. You were in station. I think there were about 14 destroyers escorting that convoy because they were troops. And apart from an oil convoy we brought over from the Dutch West Indies they were

taking the reinforcements to Burma. And reinforcements we took all the way down the West African coast and they were taken over from Durban and Cape Town and they were going over to the Bay of Bengal. We took other convoys from Durban over to Bombay. But that was a very big convoy we took English troops,

reinforcements for the army that was pushing in through Burma against the Japanese. Afterwards the eastern fleet had been changed from Mombasa to Trincomalee and all the crew from the Quickmatch had been relieved in

Colombo except me. And the skipper was still on board.

Because they couldn’t get a relief for me.

Now how I finished up on the

Horsham was when I came home I was granted 42 days foreign service leave. So what I did, there was a mate waiting for me to come home, and there was a taxi strike on. Between us we went down to the brewery to try and get a 5-gallon keg.

They said, “You’d be joking. If any one of our blokes came home we couldn’t sell them a 5-gallon keg. I said to Burt, “I know the Premier or my father does,” I said, “I’ve met him before the war because my father tried to get me into the police force,” I said, “We’ll go and see him”.

So we went down to the Premier’s office, it was down at Sherwood Court down near the Esplanade Hotel, upstairs in Sherwood Court. So we were in uniform; I used to try and get into civilian clothes as much as I could. We went and knocked on his door and went in and

saw the girl in his office. I said, “My name is Bernie Eakins, would it be possible to see the Premier?’ She said, “Well, he’d probably see you but what’s your business?” I said, “It’s very private and very important”. And she rang him up and Mr Wilcox was the Premier and she said,

“He’s a bit busy with his secretary at the moment but he’ll only be about 5 minutes and he’ll see you in about 5 minutes time”. So in we go and sit down. And I think I was in civilian clothes, I don’t know now it’s a long time. And I got up and shook his hand and I said, “I met you, my father introduced me”. And he said, “Yes. I don’t remember you but I remember your father

well; I knew him in Geraldton”. I said, “I suppose, Mr Wilcox, you wonder what we’ve come to see you for. It’s like this. My friend is getting married this afternoon and we can’t get any beer. We’ve been down the brewery”. He said, “What can I do?” I said, “What can you do? You’re the Premier, you can do anything”. So with a twinkle in

his eye he rang up the brewery and he asked for the chief brewer. He said, “I’ve got two sailors in my office and one is getting married this afternoon and they’re willing to pay for it so I want you to supply a 5-gallon keg for his wedding”. He got the OK from the chief brewer and he said,

“Go down to the brewery and pick up your 5-gallon keg”. My mate was a bit wiser than me and he said, “Look, Mr Wilcox, what about a bit of writing because we might get down there and he might knock us back”. So he got out his quill and wrote, “Please supply one 5-gallon keg to these sailors”. So we went down and

we got a 5-gallon keg. We couldn’t get a taxi. The wedding reception was in South Perth so we hitchhiked a car and I think we had to get two cars before we got there. And we got some ice from the Hurlingham Hotel and we got an ice box and a coil and cracked some ice on it and we had a 5-gallon keg for the

wedding. And we went down to the livery stables in James Street and hired two sulkies with horses in and put ribbons on them. And I had an old car and a couple of my mates drove the sulkies with the bride and the bridegroom in and the best man and whatnot. I’d booked in

to the Rockingham Hotel because I’d just come home from India. And I’m driving this old car and I’d booked them in for their honeymoon into the Rockingham because I’m staying there and I’m a guest in the Rockingham Hotel. To make a long story short, Mary and

I had a room with her aunty in 19 Gold Street in South Fremantle. So I had to call there and pick up my case and whatnot and I got a puncture in the old car. So they stayed canoodling in the back seat and I had to get out and fix this and change the wheel. Anyhow we got down to Rockingham and they were not happy being woken up

during the war to give us our rooms. He didn’t get much leave but I had 42 days foreign service leave so I had a great time.

I got married on the 1st of June 1940

and my first son was born 9 months and 9 days later on the 9th March 1941. That little kid was a beautiful child and he died when he was 13 ½ of cancer. He was going to Perth Boys’ School and he had

just won a scholarship to Bond School. He would have been just taking the exams. He was a lovely kid.

Peter had been President, he took over the industry more or less from me. He made an enormous amount of money and

he was I think about…I’ve just forgotten when it was now but he died of cancer too. He had been a journalist and he was a very good footballer. He played for Collingwood in Melbourne but he was

police sergeant at the Russell Street Police Station in Melbourne. At his funeral there was 800 people. We had a big wake. He owned the Cottesloe Hotel and his wife still runs it. She is in the

process of selling it to Multiplex. It is only now waiting on the approval from the Cottesloe Council I think to get the building that Multiplex wants to put up on it. And she’s got a partner, a silent partner in Cottesloe and she’s still

running it. She’ll clear after tax and her share of it and long service leave and what not, she will clear about $8 million from the sale of it.

Nothing. I was meeting friends and old

mates and people that I’d known before the war. You see Perth was pretty quiet. It was still 1944 and things were still pretty tough although they were right on top of the Japanese then and things were going really good in the war. When I came back off

leave, the petty officer cooking in Leeuwin was due for leave. So I had to relieve him in the Leeuwin Depot while he went on leave. And with the Master at Arms in the Leeuwin Depot, I got to know him very well and I was the only one in the service that had a back gate pass. I had a

flat, you know Sunderland’s old house in East Fremantle it’s on the bus route, but I had a bike and I used to ride backwards and forwards. We used to get big things of milk about that round with a top on like

that, like the loads of milk to the shops and whatnot these days. I used to leave it in the fridge for a couple of days and all the cream used to rise up. I used to skim the cream off and put it in jars and put these jars in a great big baking tray and put it on top of the stove and make clotted

cream out of it. One of my customers was the Master of Arms. He used to get a pot of cream for nothing. I finished up with a back gate pass and an occasional jug of beer from the canteen.

You get a bit wise.

It was the same as a kid I’d been around the bush. At one stage my father had a fencing contract, he was back in Perth then, at Mount Phillip Station. And you had to cut your own posts and bore your own holes if you were fencing. And he injured his foot with an

adze and he was in Carnarvon Hospital. So I came off a shearing run and went and saw Dad and he said he was battling a bit with the fencing contract. I was only a kid and he said, “What about coming up and helping me?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll come out and help you Dad”. So we were picked up in Carnarvon and the out camp that he was building

this fence from was about 33 miles from Dalgety Downs. So we went out there and about the second day we were there, he sent me out to get the camels. He said, “They’re not far from the camp”. I got out and I got twisted around. In this part of the country, the sand hills run in all direction and I don’t suppose I was that good a bushman

although I’d been on stations and mustering sheep. I thought to myself, “The sun is a bit high and I’ll wait until I can get my directions”. I didn’t have anything to eat or anything or water. So I waited until the sun was going down in the west and picked out a way to get back to the camp. So I got back to the camp and

the camels had gone home on their own. My old man he called me all the useless buggers in the world. So I said, “Well look Dad as far as I’m concerned, you stick your fencing job. I’m not staying. I’m going into the out camp now”. So I packed up my swag

and a little case of gear with my toothbrush in it. I walked about 3 miles into the out camp and Billy Giblin ran the out camp and he was shacked up with a native woman. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m going into Mount Phillip in the morning”. He said, “Bernie you can’t walk into Mount Phillip; it’s about 30 miles, it might be 32”.

It was only a bush track. A motor could thread its way along it. I said, “I’m going Bill.” So I got up about 4 o’clock and he gave me some damper and some salt meat and a water bottle and I set off for Mount Philip. And I thought I’d never get there. I crossed over a little hill

about 7 o’clock that night and I’d walked all day. And I was buggered honestly I was. I was that pleased because I could see the lights of Mount Phillip Station. And when I got in there gee they looked after me until the Mail came. And I got on the Mail and booked my fare up to my father and I never saw him again for quite a few years until he got down to

Perth. We squared up. He was a pretty good bloke really. He was not a bad moral man.

I had a hard life but a good life and a happy life.

Well the Depression you see so many people were out of work but I was never out of work. The smallest I worked for was as a kid on Bellara Station. I worked as a houseboy on Bellara Station and I had to kill the sheep.

I was only a kid you know and press the bales or help the cook. I learned to kill a sheep. And then my father had been working in Carnarvon and they got a job for me in Carnarvon as a temporary messenger. And I thought, “Oh well the shearing will be starting

soon” so I went back to Carnarvon. Then I went out again on the shearing sheds. I hadn’t started cooking then; I was still picking up wool. I went back on the truck PLB to Perth when that finished and then I started cooking for shearers.

Well you could always, I could always get

work. And then I got a job cooking for a government survey party, which was fairly good, work. It was a government job. I’ve got a reference from the surveyor there. When I joined the navy he gave me a reference because I thought it might be handy because it proves you can make bread in a camp oven and

you can do…you’re a pretty good cook if you can camp cook for a government survey and you’re living in a tent.

Anything.

Well a camp oven is about that round and that’s a fairly big one with a lid that lifts off and it is made of cast iron.

You light a fire and you dig a hole and you put coals under it and around it and you put coals on the top of it and then you cook. You lift the lid off and put anything you want to cook or roast in it and put the lid back on. And you keep it banked with coals and it cooks beautifully. You can make sponge cake or scones.

You’ve got to learn how to do it right.

That’s easy.

There are a lot of ashes and you get used to it that it is second nature to you.

Anything. We might be a couple of miles out of town and they’d go off and I’d

generally give them a crib or if I’m fairly close to the camp I might go out and boil the billy for them at smoko or lunchtime. They generally took their lunch out with them. We surveyed the ground in Kalgoorlie and

radio station 6KY we used to have that in Kalgoorlie. And then I did jobs out at Menzies and Sunday Soak. I did a railway deviation at Goomalling and we did the main road up at Bindoon Hill up to Moora and did a job in Moora. That was a good job because we were camped nearly in the

town. And the sergeant at Moora I knew because he was in Carnarvon when I was a kid. And he was a member of the club. During the day they were away out on the line always and I used to go and meet the sergeant of police and we’d spend a couple of hours in the club every day.

I knew my way

around.

There was only two and myself, three in total.

I think I was making about five pounds two and six a week.

It was big money in those days. But of course

the most I used to get when I was with the shearers contract cooking. I’d earn up to fourteen pounds a week doing that.

It was hard work. You had to cut up your own sheep. It was killed for you and brought into the meat safe. It was a walk-in meat safe because

blowflies were a terrible problem in those days.

A walk-in meat safe is quite a big shed. It’s about from say that wall to that wall say cut in half maybe to that wall. Now that’s the meat house. Now it is covered in

flywire, metal fly wire and blowflies can’t get into it. You’ve got to be very careful opening the door. It’s all right of a nighttime because blowflies are not active of a nighttime. I’d always, when I was cooking for shearers, around about a quarter past three. If it was a new sheep you’d

cut your sheep up and you’d set your bread the night before. It was very cold out and I used to get a hurricane lamp on a kerosene box. Have you seen them? They were open. I’d light the lamp and turn the wick down very low and put it in the box and then put the

tub of bread on top of it and then put blankets all over it to keep it warm. So after you’d got up then you’d knock your bread back and put it in the tins. And you’d have that cooked after breakfast. You’d get up and make breakfast and your bread would have proved. It was a lot slower than modern yeast. To make your own yeast you boil

potatoes and hops and sugar and flour. And you always keep a little bit of the yeast as a start, the yeast you’ve made before. You have to make it in an enamel billy because it was iron – the yeast did

far better in it. So that’s how I started as a cook.

No. You’d kill the yeast if you boiled it. You had to put it to one side. You’d mash the potato and keep the water, the water was important. And then when it got cool or cold you could

boil the sugar or mostly put the sugar in afterwards and then beat a few tablespoonfuls of flour into it. Then that would start after it had set, it would work and it would start to bubble. And that’s what you made your bread out of. It was homemade yeast.

This is the bread-making machine.

I got a name for breadmaking in the navy. The cooks that were trained in the navy they were given a baking

course but you can’t learn to bake bread in five minutes.

The palms of your hands moulding a loaf; I can mould two one in each hand and you mould them like that and then you lift them together and put them in the tin like that.

I used to make bread here all the time. Everyone used to get bread off me. I used to make bread for the fetes and they’d sell it and make jam for it and give it to them and they’d sell it. And when there was no fruit available I’d get dried apricots and make dried apricot jam for them. They used to love it.

Yes. Sometimes. Now in Darwin we always operated three ships together. We were a destroyer flotilla.

When you came into port you’d always be tied up at the same jetty. I’d make a batch of bread and give some to my mates on other ships and whatnot.

No. All your victuals were supplied to you from the Victualling Office if it was available. You could get nearly everything from the Victualling Office. But in England and foreign ports and

whatnot during the war, groceries and victuals were not readily available. You got what you were given to you.

Yes. And then the victuals were supplied to the messes. And they made up their own dishes and brought it to you in the galley to cook for them. You

more or less had to ask them what they had got for victuals. If everyone wanted the same thing you just couldn’t cook it in time. The victualling and the stores for the navy was not good. I hated it because I was too conscientious.

I’m being quite honest. What you had to cook with in my mind was unsatisfactory. That’s what I mean. It’s not that you were really conscientious but you knew what was needed to cook with and if you couldn’t get it, you could call it conscientious or you could call it dissatisfied.

When I got sent to the Horsham they had beautiful galleys. To get food in Australia was not that hard. The civilians were rationed and that but in the forces we were not rationed. We could get nearly

everything.

It was modern.

It had a huge big electric baking oven that you could stack bread into evenly. And then it had an electric

oil-fired oven, a drip try oven which was very good. They were good galleys. They had a proper big bread bin. And there were plenty of benches. There were good scales and plenty of boiling water.

No. At Stanshaw, when I was in Stanshaw about 3 miles out of Portsmouth it was a transit camp and there were about 5,000 ratings there. And the permanent crew of the

depot they grew vegetables but mostly only lettuce and not much. Right alongside of…Portsmouth was a gun-defended port and you lived in air raid shelters. Over about 5 acres alongside the

depot at Stanshaw was a rocket gun position. This was over five acres. There were these rocket guns in barrels of four facing straight up. Any planes that came over, bombers or fighter planes…

there were also all these huge big balloons. It looked as though Portsmouth was being held up with balloons. We hardly got any raids in Portsmouth. They were more in London and different places even Liverpool.

What happened these rocket guns they were I suppose as tall as this room and they used to fire a chain. They were all propellers. And if you put a chain barrage up amongst these planes if they were coming

over they were all propellers. They didn’t have to explode but if a propeller got caught down she came straight away.

The British got to be pretty good inventors in the finish.

London was in a shocking way. The best place in a raid in London was down in the underground because sometimes

you couldn’t get in the air raid shelters.

I’ve got the greatest admiration for the British people, the ordinary English people.

Their attitude to the war. Things were grim in England I can tell you

truly.

Oh yes. We had a ship.

We were at sea most of the time. I was over at Cowes in the Isle of Wight standing by on the Quickmatch for quite a while. That was good.

We used to be able to hear the raids but not much. There was a Polish fighter squadron stationed there. Gee they were great people, the Poles and they were good pilots. As soon as an air raid siren sounded say in Portsmouth the loudspeakers were all over the town.

They’d say, “There are ships and enemy planes crossing the shore at Land’s End - I’m just pulling out any town - and they are headed towards so-and-so and so-and-so”. When they were within

100 miles of Portsmouth you would be told to take shelter in an air raid shelter. Now I was fortunate enough, when I say fortunate or unfortunate enough to be in Portsmouth the night the Dieppe raiders went over. Now this was a Churchill thing. The Germans knew they were

coming. And they landed at Dieppe and they were mowed down. It was a Canadian division, it wasn’t the British, it was Canadians. And they were murdered and when they brought them back they pulled in alongside the wharf and the Germans came over and it was just like complete daylight. They dropped flares

and Portsmouth was gee it was…we’d not seen a light other than on the inside. The air raid shelters were full, of course. We’d been in the Suffolk Inn and we were walking down the street and an old bloke is standing in his doorway and he said, “Guys would you like to come inside for a while until things quiet down a bit”.

I said, “Bloody oath we would”.

When the Sydney sank I was looking for submarines off Fremantle. It was in charge of the squadron and we were the first ship to look for the Sydney. We took a guard of young, ordinary seamen and we

put them on the Yandra at Carnarvon. We did drills up and down where the fight took place. I’ve never heard it stated in the papers or anything but we picked up a dead German in the raft. He hadn’t been dead

very long because the boys when they pulled him up out of the carly raft and dropped him on the deck blood came out of his nose. Of course they kept up the carly raft and kept it. We picked up a great deal of flotsam and jetsam like grates out of bathrooms or something like that. And we picked up a pair of water wings

that were broken off. The knot was still in them but they were broken at the nape of the neck. It’s not for me to say but to me they were fully inflated and they looked like ours. To me it looked as though they had come off someone that had been in the water off the Sydney. That’s not

official they could have come off someone from the German ship I don’t know. That’s fact. We were the first boat looking for survivors off the Sydney.

I think she

blew up. They probably were fortunate to get a torpedo into her magazine and she blew up. That’s only my opinion. That’s not official. It is common sense to think that, because the Germans

say they just saw her disappearing over the horizon and she was completely covered in flames.

Yes, that’s what I mean. I had a couple of mates on the Sydney. One was a

stoker who had come off the Whyalla. He’d only been on the Sydney – he joined the Sydney in Fremantle. She was looking for the Kormoran [German raider]. They knew this armed merchant ship was in the vicinity somewhere. I reckon if Captain Collins [later Vice-Admiral Sir John Collins, senior Australian naval commander during World War II] had still been on the Sydney she wouldn’t have got sunk because I think

she must have come around a couple of miles and hove to, signalling and what not. I don’t know.

Captain Collins was a merchant [navy captain of the Romolo] – who was captain of the Sydney? Another Captain Collins was captain of the Sydney when she was commissioned I think.

But he was RAN [Royal Australian Navy] and he was a full-ranking captain. He was captain of the Sydney when she was in the Mediterranean when she sank the Bartolomeo [Bartolomeo Colleone], which was an Italian battleship. It was sunk by the Sydney.

Yes.

Dusty Rhodes, he was a great bloke. I left the ship at Trincomalee and we were the only two Australians on the Kormoran, not the Kormoran,

I’m getting my names mixed up but that doesn’t matter. When I left the ship at Trincomalee he sent his steward down to get me in the galley and bring me down to his permanent cabin. He said, “Eakins what would you like to drink?”

He said, “We’ve been together for over two years on this ship and we are parting now”. From the skipper to the cook I thought which was rather good I thought. And I said, “I’ll have a can of beer” and that’s when we parted.

Oh he was a good bloke. He had a

ginger beard. It was a beautiful beard too.

Yes.

I don’t think I had a nickname. Mostly they used to call me “Chef”. They used to just say “Chef”.

Good. I used to go and make things for them in their messes.

Well the food was entirely up to the crew because we didn’t prepare it or make it or anything. The only thing I did really for the crew except visit their

messes and cook puddings for them and things that you could get a bit of gear for. At times I made bread but the bread-making facilities on board a destroyer, the type that we had, were not very good.

No. I never ever had a

complaint.

I’d want to know why there was complaining. There’s got to be a reason for a complaint hasn’t there? If there had have been any, you’d have asked them and tried to fix them up.

Most important. That would be the most important thing anywhere of cooking to produce the food to the best of your ability. If as a cook and you don’t try your

best, you might just as well give it away.

It’s important. On the Horsham we always had good food, top food. I wouldn’t say the food we cooked on the Quickmatch was good food but it wasn’t our

fault, we never had it to cook it if you understand what I mean. But the food I cooked on the Whyalla was really top food. Off Madagascar we might put the pit down or the anchor off a place called Tulear and the natives would come out in their canoes and

they’d have suckling pigs and chickens and roosters and they would sell them to the boys on the boat. They’d chop the heads off or slaughter the suckling pigs and scrape them and I’d cook them for them. One day we got an

enormous big ‘ping’ [sonar response]. They thought it was a submarine or a couple of submarine pings. The skipper immediately ordered a depth charge. You have never in your life seen the surface of the water covered with as many big fish. We had fish for days

after that submarine was bombed.

Anything. Everyone preferred fried fish. You could make a dish. To make gourmet fish dishes you need

plenty of butter and milk.

Not plenty. We had a bit of butter. You were rationed with butter on board and milk was all dried milk you had to mix it up. There was no fresh milk.

The best meal – I went there the other day – was Christmas dinner in Darwin. We’d come in off a survey trip and we were able to get something good. Gee it was a good meal and it’s still talked about by the boys. That would be in

1944, Christmas 1944.

I don’t really remember but it might have been a roast turkey or chickens and good veggies. We were able to get some good vegetables and plum pudding made by me.

We had brandy sauce.

No I might have been able to get some suet. I don’t remember it’s too long ago. There would have been breadcrumbs in it and spices and all

fruit you know, sultanas, raisins, currants, peel, everything.

Yes.

The best was the Horsham.

The Remo was a

good galley but we were only in that for a fortnight. It was a passenger ship and beautifully set up to cater for passengers. It had good stoves and an electric bread

oven. You could make beautiful bread on the Remo. Of course that was a civilian merchant ship.

Well I was sent to the Horsham because

they’d chopped out this canteen messing I’ve been telling you about on the destroyer. The Horsham had been put onto general messing. The cook they had on the Horsham, old Bob Gurr, he’d been a cook in the Indian Army and he was an

English Army cook and they’re not very good. So the captain of the Horsham had complained about his cooking. He was a leading cook on the Horsham. They wanted someone to go up there reorganise the galley that could cook. And I was sent up there in charge of the

galley to reorganise the galley. I’d only been there ea couple of days and the organisation of a galley was that everyone ate the same food. It was general messing. And the officers at this stage, the stewards used to buy different food and they’d

come into Darwin and they’d go ashore and they’d bring this to the cooks the other mob or the other cooks to cook special food for them. So the one duty you had under general messing was with the First Lieutenant, who was the divisional officer, to make a week’s menu out with breakfast, luncheon and dinner at

night. And that was the week’s menu. If there was anything wrong with it, the captain was supposed to do the rounds on a Saturday morning to see if the crew was satisfied with the catering and the food, which he never ever did. So I was there and the charge of the galley and had just taken it over and on this

particular morning it was spaghetti on toast. It was still fairly much rationed in Australia but the navy was pretty good, you could get most things. So the steward came down and got the officers’ meals and whatnot and he brought the captain’s back. He said, “The captain can’t eat this he wants something else”. I said,

“Well you take it back to the captain and tell him that’s all he’s going to get”. The captain put on a real show. So with the coxswain he had a copy and I got a copy of KR & AI, which is King’s Rules and Admiralty Instructions, and he was going to play merry hell. So through the divisional officer, I found out that you could

do it and I put in a request to see the DNO, which is the District Naval Officer, to state a complaint against the captain. So the next thing I know the coxswain came down to the galley and said, “The captain wants to see you in his sea cabin over the food”. I said, “I won’t go and see the

captain in his sea cabin without my divisional officer, who was the First Lieutenant, and the coxswain”. So he agreed and up we marched to the captain” and I said, “Sir, you are not liking this...” like in a fairly loud voice too. He said, “Eakins, don’t you shout at me”.

I said, “Sir I’m not shouting at you, I’m just telling you the truth”. He said, “Well what are you going to do?” I said, “Unless you apologise to me for what you’ve done to the galley and the cooks and leave us alone, I’m going to see the DNO and tell him how you are running the victualler on this ship”. So he thought for a while and he said,

“OK, Eakins, I’ll apologise to you and I’ll admit I’m wrong”. And the cooks were left alone completely after that. I could walk on and off the bloody ship, as I wanted to. That’s a true story.

He was quite a good bloke. He was all right. He was a merchant seaman. He

was harbourmaster in Port Adelaide, South Australia, and that’s when he joined the navy. He was a merchant seaman. He was a lieutenant or he might have been a lieutenant commander. I think he was only a lieutenant but he was quite a good bloke.

When I was on the Horsham it was working out of Darwin.

Darwin had been bombed. There were no females there. It was all army and navy. It wasn’t a bad

station but we were mostly at sea doing survey work. The day Japan surrendered we were halfway between Thursday Island and Darwin. I’ve got the signals there. One was from the Commander in Chief, the Yank Commander in Chief from

Leyte, I’ve just forgotten at the moment. I’ll have a look in a minute because I’ve got the signals there. I tore a couple out of that book the Horsham. The skipper, this is the old Newby that we’ve been talking about the skipper of the Horsham told anyone that wanted a copy of the signals of the surrender

of Japan at sea he’d give them certified copies of the naval signals. “Japan has agreed with Sweden to surrender. They make one condition that they be allowed to keep

their Emperor”. There were three signals at different times. They were great signals I can tell you. Excuse me a minute.

I was only going off to get the signals, that’s all.

All right.

I haven’t interfered with that have I?

Being?

It was good. Fremantle was all right. When we came in from sea we had the

last berth at Victoria Quay down near the bridge where the bridge comes over the railway line. There was a hotel there at the foot of the bridge on the Fremantle side.

No it has gone. There was only a small bit of land there.

The Swan Hotel and then there is the Fremantle a bit further going down over the railway line.

They’d be fairly popular with sailors because they were the first coming off the wharf. And

if you couldn’t get a ferry over you had to walk around to Fremantle, walk around and then walk over the bridge into Fremantle. But you had to walk past the Swan Hotel to get into Fremantle.

Not hard but you didn’t want to. You didn’t want it to be

hard.

To explain it to you, I was a young married man. I never worried about girls. My hobby was booze.

You see in say Gibraltar and Alexandria and all those places, there were dozens and dozens of harlots and the same in Bombay. In Colombo and places like Savo Island

were full of prostitutes. In Curacao the sailors could hire a taxi and the girls used to come over from Venezuela on the fishing boats.

They’d pick up the girls at the pub. They weren’t in there that long and they’d pay the taxi driver a few gilders and then he’d pay the girls. I’ve never seen anything as funny in my life. A mate and I hired a taxi to take us along the beach and in the moonlight there are

little trees that they had scrubbed patches underneath the trees. And the taxi driver would hand them a mat and they’d roll this mat out under the tree and all you could see along the beach was white bums going up and down and little black girls. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, dinkum!

Gee I laughed. You wouldn’t touch them. The ordinary sailors they didn’t care. Gonorrhoea was nothing in the navy for the young sailors and what not, they’d just give them the needle. They weren’t even excused duty.

If a cook got venereal disease he was generally got rid of off the ship.

Because you were handling food. You were not expected to be that loose a character. No one was really. Sailors that

mixed with fast women in foreign ports they were tolerated. It’s just like a snotty nose.

On a destroyer, on a big ship it’s not

too bad, but destroyers are very, very rough ships. The Quickmatch was remodelled before the war finished. They built new galleys on there. It was an

austerity ship. Everything that was good…a fleet destroyer that was built during the war was built mainly to fight. They didn’t care much afterwards; you didn’t have to live in a hammock. Your only bed was a hammock and you swung yourself

off in the hammock of a nighttime. The lights were off all night too. All you could see was the hammocks hanging from the deckhead swaying like that. You got I think it was two and six a day, hard-laying money on a destroyer.

You got extra pay for serving on a destroyer. And of course on submarines they got extra pay again. But all submarine crews were volunteers. If you didn’t want to serve on a submarine you didn’t have to. The destroyer crews generally speaking were picked men.

You didn’t have to be picked anyone could serve on a destroyer but generally they picked men that were capable of hardship. Destroyer crews were great blokes.

I beg your pardon?

Sorry?

Destroyers?

It was just natural. It was never considered important if you can understand what I mean but it was important. If you were

unsuitable on a destroyer, the captain might ask for you to be replaced. Might; I’m not saying he did. You’d find that most crews on destroyers were easy people to get on with.

Frightening experiences? You never thought…see when you are getting set for a convoy you know you are going out under danger immediately but you don’t think about it. Now the destroyer captains would go

ashore if a convoy was assembling there and they would go and discuss the convoy because once you got to sea the only way you could signal was by flags or Lucas lamps, they were

signalling lamps. When you got out of land and out to sea, the captain would tell you where you were going and what your duty was. Every day at sea the position of the convoy would be put up on the map.

The position of the ships was on little flag, the position of the convoy and what direction they were going in. You were never in a straight line. You were zigzagging because it didn’t give a submarine time to get a proper bearing. At this

stage of the war the submarines would never be around of a daytime. They always operated during the night because you could pick them up too easily of a daytime.

You would say you never had any fear. What was the good

if you had fear? The only time I suppose you had time to be frightened was if you were being attacked by aircraft or something like that. We were fortunate enough to come through the war and being attacked and the bombing of England but we

were never actually attacked at sea. We only sunk a merchant navy Italian ship, which we sank in the Bay of Biscay. But they never fired a shot at us and as far as we were concerned that was sport, fun, sinking that ship. The boys had great gunnery practice and fired a torpedo

and seeing the ship explode and sink gave everyone I suppose…

We would all be at action stations watching probably – I might have been able to leave my action station I’ve just forgotten. We

made it a holiday event. Sinking an enemy ship that would be my only experience of that and you got great satisfaction you know.

A great amount of pleasure. We were told immediately and we were at sea.

Half way between Thursday Island and Darwin.

There was just a great lot of joy. There’s nothing you can

do on a ship; everyone was that pleased. When you think you’ve been floating around on the sea for five years, or nearly five years, you don’t think a bout danger because you are more or less in danger all the time. You know there are no

enemy submarines about where you are but you don’t know what you’re going to run into. When you were out with a convoy, there were these flags for the ships and the convoy ships were different the position of them and then expected submarines were the same type but they were a

little red flag. The positions were not known but expected unknown enemy submarine, presumed enemy submarines because the allied knowledge had become pretty good.

They got the better of the submarines and the submarines were starting to think twice bout attacking a convoy. They were getting good support. I served on a very good destroyer, a modern one, that had all of the modern…

we had all the guns and bombs and Bofors [anti-aircraft guns] and 4.7s. We were bristling with armaments and depth charges. If an enemy submarine got caught it was curtains

because it opened all the seams up.

Australian sailors practically all over the world were received very well particularly by bar staff. In Portsmouth a couple of us got to know a Scotch barmaid down there in

Portsmouth and she used to look after us like gold. So when the pocket was a bit light on, which often happened, you would go in and say, “Money is a bit tough, Betty”. And you’d put two bob a couple of you or it might be three or four of you and a shilling each it was a shilling a pint I think.

She’d say, “That’s OK”. She’d take your four shillings and ring up “No sale” and give you your four shillings back. Now I’ve been a publican for years and years and if that happened to me, gee wouldn’t I go crook. You’d say they were thieves but we weren’t thieves we were just poor sailors. And then probably on payday when we had a bit of

money we wouldn’t go near the Suffolk Inn. We’d go down the Spotted Cow or the Crown & Anchor and do a pub-crawl. Then we’d always end up sometime or another while we had a bit of money to go and pay for our beer but if we were a bit short, we’d have the money to pay for it, you know, but we’d complain that we were a bit short and

Betty would look after us.

Durban was a right station to be on. The Eastern Fleet was mostly the bigger ships, the cruisers and whatnot, but we were the workhorse of the navy. A battleship could not go out on the ocean without

destroyers looking after it. We were what they called a fleet destroyer but we were mostly on convoy duty. The fleet, except when the Bismarck came out, was anchored in the Scapa Flow for most of the war

but of course the Australian fleet out here was occupied with the Japanese Navy a lot but the Germans had no navy in the finish. They had those pocket battleships but they were holed up in the Norwegian fjords. And the frogmen got in and

attached limpet mines to them in the Norwegian fjords and they blew a lot of them up.

I would have been on the Whyalla. Most of our news

at sea came from the BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation. You could hear them all over the world. We were able to receive but we were never, ever allowed to broadcast from the ship because it discloses your presence. You could pick up anything and it never disclosed where you were, incoming signals.

Yes always. On one trip in the Bay of Biscay I lectured to the crew about the Russian defence of Leningrad, the whole ship’s company. I had all my notes here at one time, I don’t know, Mary’s

disposed of them I think. But that was quite an account and I got great praise for the speech I made. It was in praise of the way the Russians fought the Germans outside Leningrad and coming down when they pushed the Germans back towards the end of the war there. This

was I suppose it would be 1942 or 1943 or something like that. The war was a great experience. Being frightened; you were never, ever frightened. If action stations were in well what you did was you went to your

action station and that was it. But nothing happened so what was the worry.

The war being over? No, I’ll show you the signals. We got official signals. We got official signals. “Japan has agreed to

surrender to Sweden” and it gives the time and whatnot and “they only make one request that they be permitted to keep their Emperor”.

Sorry?

I think in general news.

Anything that happened in general news. When we were in Darwin, the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Commission] used to give a very good news service. Everywhere all over the world in the Atlantic and whatnot and even in South Africa the BBC was marvellous for their news. We never worried about other programs.

We had loud hailers around the mast for fleet manoeuvres which they could give orders from. It carried across the ocean but they couldn’t be heard anywhere else within say one mile or half a mile or something like that. So when we left Scapa Flow we knew that

we wouldn’t be going back to the RAN fleet again. We knew we were going down for a refit to Glasgow. We had to get some new gear on so as we broke the lines in Scapa Flow, Dusty Rhodes a real character of a man, he put through the loudspeakers around the mast which spread all over Scapa Flow

“Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye” Gracie Fields singing, “Here we go, on our way, give us a smile”. And all of a sudden the Admiral’s flashlight is going and different big heads and what not, “Who’s that ship and what’s it doing?” We got a great reprimand about

sailing through the RAN fleet and putting on a song like that. And then when we sailed up…I’m not sure but just part of Newport on Rhode Island into Portsmouth, this is the Portsmouth in America which is a huge big naval

base. There were houses all up the side of the river and some shipbuilding and whatnot but he put on “We give our thanks to America for the right to live and the right to live”. Well do you reckon this got the Yanks in? An Australian ship had never, ever

been to a dockyard in America and gee did they make a fuss of us. We were only there the one night. We had to sail the next day. They swarmed on board the ship and said, “Do you want any electric light globes?” Or “Do you want anything fixed?”

No halfway between Thursday Island and Darwin. We were at

sea halfway between Thursday Island and Darwin but we were stationed in Darwin. That was our port for refuelling and refitting and getting stores. We were in and out of Darwin but we were doing survey work. We were more or less

surveying on this. We had to go over and take a ship over to Thursday Island or something but it may have been a survey in the Timor Sea.

Surveying channels and islands and whatnot.

No this was during the war.

With the Moresby and a couple of others we took the surrender of Timor from the Japanese. We took the occupation force over from Darwin; they were soldiers. Then a Japanese barge came out and tied up alongside of us and they picked up all the

soldiers that were going ashore, the occupation force, and all their stores and whatnot. I’ve got photos of it there somewhere. Then in England you were never able to get many photos. You were never allowed a camera on board. The troops were not allowed a camera. But when we were in Darwin getting towards the end of the war

most of the blokes had cameras.

We were surveying all around the Timor Sea and out from Derby and out from Darwin and going into Broome because there was no enemy activity around Darwin at that

time. If a submarine had turned up, we’d have had a ping at it. We were doing really peacetime work but the war was still on. The Horsham never paid off until December 1945. We came down from

Darwin into Fremantle and the Horsham paid off in Fremantle and everybody went by train to the eastern states so everyone was discharged bar me.

I signed up for the duration of the war and six months after. Everyone did but if there was no longer any

reason for you to be in the navy they let you out. But I was considered important personnel or something like that I forget what they call it, but they wouldn’t discharge me. And then they wrote to me and asked me if I would volunteer for another 3 years.

I said, “I want to get out of the navy as quick as I can”.

The first time I saw my son Tony I got a photo of him just after I came back off leave and he was 3 years old.

He was born on the 9th of March 1940 and that was taken in 1944 after I came back off leave. Mary used to send me photos of him. She was marvellous with the mail. I wasn’t very good because I didn’t like these bastards reading my mail

with a bit of a smirk on their face reading what you’d say and you weren’t allowed to tell anyone where you were in the war or what you were doing. You could say if you were enjoying getting drunk or something like that but it was hard to write letters in the navy when it was being censored. Even then Mary said there were quite a few things being blacked out

and as far as I was concerned, I was certain I never said anything that should have been censored but that’s how it was.

I was on the Rani this aircraft carrier and it never called at Fremantle. It dropped me off in Melbourne.

Me and the skipper of the Quickmatch we were the only two Aussies. There were about 32 New Zealanders on board it too and they were going to Auckland. So I rang Mary up from Melbourne and I said, “I’ll be home in four days”. She said, “Where are you ringing from?” I said, “Melbourne”. This was a big surprise. I got home on a

troop train and they always used to unload the troop trains at Claremont. Someone said, “There’s a lady and a little boy looking for you”. And I think they’d gone over to the Naval RTO [Rail Transport Office], which is over in Forest Place. So the train was staying at Perth station for half an hour

so I set off and I met Mary right in the middle of Wellington Street. There was no traffic, very little traffic at this stage during the war. And here was this little boy looking up saying, “Hello Daddy”. And he was a baby in arms when I went away.

That’s one of the loveliest reunions I think. Then I was discharged. I think I was the only naval person. There was a car there to meet me and I was taken down to Leeuwin and given 42 days leave and then I left

Leeuwin. I think I got a taxi. We had a flat in Preston Point Road just behind the depot. No, I’m getting a long way ahead of myself.

We got that flat there.

We were still with Mary’s aunty.

Before I was discharged I had a job. I got a job as a steward at the Metropole Hotel. I was going to take on anything. We didn’t know anything about civil

life after six and a half years in the navy. It was all right. I stayed there for over 12 months and I made good money too because all the Yanks were going home and it was a very, very busy hotel. I was more or less a boss there. Anyhow, then I found a bookmaker and he wanted a

clerk, a full time clerk because he was a phone credit bookmaker. And he wanted a good clerk. So he said, “I’ll try you”. So I left Gordon Johnson. He didn’t want me to leave either. I was getting good money.

No I was a steward.

Just carrying

drinks.

Yes but I worked in the office as well when it wasn’t busy. I did all the banking. The office girl made up the bank and I only just carried it down to the bank and deposited it. I was the messenger boy. The boss owned a lot of

racehorses and he used to do a lot of…Monday mornings I used to go down only when he lost. When he won, he always went down there and collected his winnings. When he lost he’d make it up into a parcel and give it to me and I’d go down the Tattersalls Club and pay his losings. I had a great time.

That’s when we lived…before I got out of the navy we’d shifted into that flat in Preston Point Road. I used to catch the bus into work. Then I used to work for this bookmaker. For two years I worked for him.

Apart from that job?

Answering the phone and writing bets, credit bets from my phone, and making out statements and computing, bookmaker’s clerical work. And then I was able

to get a stand. I became…really you’d be classed as an illegal bookmaker, but it wasn’t illegal to take bets. Your clerk would have fairly big business when you finished. The police would come around and pick up the clerk who was writing the bets and he’d be

charged with standing in such a way on the footpath to illegally obstruct pedestrian traffic. Of a Monday you could go into the court and flick through the fines and you’d find your clerk’s fine and he’d be fined twenty pounds and two and six costs.

He hadn’t been before the magistrate or anything. It was only a lurk [shady scheme]. I’d go and pick up Frank and take him to the court. And then his name would be called out, “Frank Henry Passborough you are charged with standing in situ at Haling Terrace in South Perth in such a manner as to obstruct the free passage of

pedestrian traffic. How do you plead?” “Guilty, Your Honour.” “You will be fined twenty pounds and two and six costs. Next case please”. The case would take about five minutes. It was just a way of making money for the government. Then we’d go down the pub and have a few drinks and then he’d go back to work. He was working for a foundry in Wellington Street.

That was the start of my bookmaking career.

Oh yes you could make a fair bit of money. On Saturdays, race days, and all race days, I’d have an armoured escort come and pick up my money and put it in a safe deposit in the bank

because you needed it. Walking down of a nighttime, there might be thirty thousand pounds or something like that.

It was good fun.

They took over the bookmaking. Mine was the first TAB. It was

the biggest betting shop in Perth. I had 23 clerks working for me in there and a payout clerk, and it used to be crowded. It was a lot of fun. I used to get payments from the eastern states airmailed over and I put up all the eastern states papers. It was big business.

Yes.

I had lots at different times. My betting shop…I was able to subdivide the premises but then it wasn’t big enough

and then I got the other half of my landlords, I rented it and put a huge island counter in it and there were clerks standing behind the counter writing out the tickets. And as soon as the horses would jump you’d write off the tickets. You had to give them a different book of

tickets altogether and they were the returns to the Treasury. You had to buy your tickets off the Treasury and the government too, so much a ticket, and you had to pay turnover tax. You had to collate all your bets and whatnot.

No it wasn’t. You had a

machine and you had a clerk who typed on like a typewriter for each ticket.

There was

only one bloke off the Quickmatch in Perth and I always kept in contact with him. There were a lot of blokes off the Horsham and for a good few years I never contacted any of them because I was later on the Horsham. I never joined the Horsham until 1944 but I’d been in the navy since 1939.

But then I joined the Horsham Association and I still go to that about once every two or three months. We have luncheon down at the Quays. We used to have lunch in the Cottesloe at the restaurant there which my

son owned. He owned the Cottesloe Hotel at that stage and his wife still runs it. But now we go down to the Quays every time if it is a suitable and it mostly always is a suitable time. We have a great day. Mary comes too.

I don’t think it’s

important but it’s nice. You remember the days when you were at sea. We never talk about those days or very seldom. We talk more about the football today or something like that.

No.

I might on odd occasions and maybe some of the funny experiences but no real wartime experiences. That has gone. That has finished but some of the larrikinism we got up to I often talk about

that and some of the funny experiences.

No I was. I gave it away. The RSL is about finished.

Yeah. Some of the ex-servicemen’s associations

are good. The RSL was formed by the First World War veterans and it was run different to the modern other returned men. It was all right but I didn’t get much out of the RSL.

It is still in existence but it is not a strong association. I always go to the N & Q Class Destroyers Association. They are fairly strong. They’ve still got about…there are only a couple of us from the Q Class but the N Class are a fairly strong association. We’re all getting too old now. I suppose I’d be about the

oldest man in the association. There are so many dying. All my good mates here…I’ve been here nearly 9 years just about since it opened. It wasn’t one of the early ones. I think there were about 20 in here before me. I know everyone in the

association or all the older ones.

Well put it this way, I have never been to an Anzac service. There is nothing wrong with it. It is good. But I don’t

believe in the glorification of war and that’s what it is. They get together and they get drunk and they reckon it’s a glorious occasion. Mind you, I’m not knocking it. It is a great occasion with no doubt but it doesn’t suit me. I don’t like the glorification of war. I think it is shocking.

I saw so much sorrow during the war especially in England and when I saw the Canadians come back after the Dieppe raids, they were lost and they still had black over their face wandering around Portsmouth. They had the ambulances to pick up the dead and wounded. They were bringing them back on the

destroyers and the ships. They had the ambulances on the main wharf all blacked out. Rather they had red crosses all lit up so the Germans, the Germans never worried about the red crosses, but they went down onto the wharf all the blacked out ambulances so the raiders

couldn’t see them. War is a horrible thing honestly it is.

I suppose I’ve learned to be a human being. You

learn to love your family and your children. You see my children the two boys, the youngest who was 13 ½ when he died, he was a lovely kid, but that’s in the past. And Peter was a big man.

They were both journalists and Bevan was for nearly five years Sporting Editor of the West Australian [newspaper] and my daughter is a top school teacher. All she does now is teach. But they’ve all been great kids and they’ve had a very good education. Lynne is a Bachelor of Education and she’s got three

degrees in computers. There’s only the two of them left. There’s Bevan and Lynne. And he lives down at Hamilton Hill and he brings his two boys up to see us and Lynne comes up and takes Mary and me if I want to go shopping every week unless she’s got something on on the weekend.

I have had a terrific family right through, beautiful people.

I reckon anyone that doesn’t want a family… My granddaughter in Sydney she’s got a university degree and she’s on one hundred and

twenty-five pounds a week and she owns her own flat and whatnot. She flies over if anything is happening here; she flies over. A couple of years ago, St. Mary’s invited her over to lecture to the leaving girls. During the Olympic Games, she came over and lectured to the leaving

girls. She is well thought of. Her grandson is in his final year at university. He had an Honours Degree in Law and is studying commercial law. He is doing his articles now. I think he is

22 or 23 I’m not too sure. They all got good jobs and the kids all got their own home and they’ve got motorcars.

People say to me, “Where did your kids get their intelligence from?” I say, “Their mother”.

Honestly I didn’t think I’d be very interesting.

I’ve enjoyed it. You’ve been so easy.