Australians at War Film Archive

Good afternoon to you also, to both of you.

Well, my father’s family, they lived in Preston, and we lived in Preston.

And my father’s family, his father was born in Adelaide about 1849, the family were in the first 10 years of the founding of Adelaide. That family, the Bott family, came out, the five sons all moved out to Adelaide and his wife, or my grandmother,

she was born in Adelaide, no she came to Adelaide when she was three, she came in 1851, I think. My father was a printer and only had one job, with a leader publishing company all his life and he was a very good citizen, he was on school committees and things like that.

And my mother’s family, well, they came out very early and her grandmother, she came out from Dundee in Scotland when she was 17, I think

and they came to Geelong and the chap she married was a Scot and he came out working the Goldfields and he died in the Goldfields, then my grandmother or great grandmother, she married again and I’m a

product of that second marriage. They were generally, the Forrester’s were generally bakers, in their bakery, they were making crumpets, an ordinary bakery you know. And so that’s fundamentally the sort of people they were but very honest and loving people. So I was very happy with the family that brought me up.

Well, I was born in Northcote, but we lived in Preston, went to a hospital in Northcote. I lived there till after the war, before I went to the war, I bought a block of land in East Ivanhoe and fortunately the best thing I ever did.

And, but we lived in Preston, my wife and I until after the war.

17.

I think more or less playing cricket in the back yard or against the lamp post in the street, something like that. They’re the big memories I’ve got.

I did all right at the state school.

I don’t know about that but I used to play a lot in the back yard and in the street. As a matter a fact there was a girl that used to play with us against the lamppost and she played in the first Australian Women’s team ever, as their wicket keeper, so we produced

something out of our….. There was a lot of love around and people got to know each other. We were better off than most. We’d be the first to have a telephone and we’d be the first to have a radio and things like that, an old crystal set, kids used to come up and spend the night when the tests were on in England and that sort thing. But I did well at the State School; I didn’t do well at the high school,

I didn’t work, I was too sport orientated, I think. But after I left the school, after a couple of years I went to the university and I finished up getting a Degree in Commerce there. I finished up all right.

Well I used to follow Preston, as a matter a fact,

I used to go instead of my father, I used to go and report the Preston matches, I used to go down with the players, they used to all get a bus outside the newsagents there and I used go down with them and come back with them. But after the war I became a Member of the Melbourne Cricket Club and I became a bit of a barracker of Melbourne, but I don’t go now.

There’s too much money in it for me.

Oh, they nearly won it, didn’t they?

Yes, it’s nice to see Richmond coming on again.

I don’t think, all I remember is coming on into the Depression, and there was a lot of hardship among a lot of people and I know I had a lot of….it took me a while, I went and interviewed for a job in, it must have been 33, end of 33 and there were 200 kids lined up for a job, so things were tough.

But I was very much a church family…

It was a Methodist Church, now the Uniting but and that’s where….I’ve only been thinking in bed recently, that’s where people met their wives and that sort of thing. See I met my wife at around the church.

I think it helps a lot, you know each other and you know a bit of their background and that sort of thing. But my wife at the moment is in a Nursing Home just up the road here. I have to live on memories a bit.

Well, they didn’t have…. they had leaving, that was….you matriculated from leaving, there wasn’t a leaving honours then, though I stopped through to then. And I did well enough to get entry in the university when I felt I wanted to go to university. I went to the university on a part time basis and

I went into 37, 38, 39 and then I moved from the Post Office into munitions as soon as the exams finished and then I couldn’t, I was in munitions, supply and munitions and I couldn’t, no possibility of continuing the university course during that period. And I joined up in 41. And I went back after the war

and finished my degree in 46, 47, 48.

Well, I had enough brain but I didn’t use it as well as I should have by any means, that’s all.

Oh yeah, I went to ….I worked all of 34 at Noise Brothers; I know they’re still in Lonsdale Street, Electrical Wholesalers I suppose they would be. A chap at the church was secretary of Noise and he got me a job there,

I was there in 34 and then in 33, I sat for a Commonwealth Government Entry Examination and I took that up, or they, I was invited to take that up and in the end of 34 I went to Sydney in the Post Office and I was there for a year. And then fortunately I moved back to Melbourne

and I was in the Post Office for about…in Sydney 35, 36 over in the Post Office and I moved over to….oh no I was still in the Post Office up until 39.

Yeah. Yeah, well there was a lot of part timers in those days.

So that was hard work. That’s why my wife you know, even when she was my girlfriend then you know, she didn’t see me that much. So she had a pretty hard time with all my sort of being away in Sydney all in 35, matter a fact her mother died in that year, so I came back for the funeral but

you know I’ve …... I enjoyed the post office, but in supply. Supply and munitions is a fantastic department, really great, great people, and I’m really happy to have the opportunity to go in there and that helped a lot. You’ve no idea the work I put in there. I was a paymaster for Head Office and people were getting put on all the time

to join some directorates to, or starting armoured fighting vehicles or starting aircraft industry and things like that. They’d come on our payroll before these various places were established and I used to, we used to wait before I could. You had to pick up your pay in those days, it’s not delivered to you, so they couldn’t put any more on the sheets, salary sheets or on the salary

until say 6 o’clock and they we got that and we had to convert that into pounds, shillings and pence for each one, so I’d know how to get the money from the bank and it was generally about midnight before I’d go the last train home normally. And then the Friday morning, I’d have to be first at the bank, so I could get it all done the next day, when I had to pay it. And then I went to the

Contract Board as sitting on the….as a Finance Member of the Contract Board, an old ex-Bank Manager sat on for me till got back there. They were opening tenders you know, for equipment for the services and that was normally a last train job, but sometime in the 1940 they started a three

Tech Schools special training for mechanics and that for the factories and I used to go and pay them, after I finished all the pay and the Contract Board, I used to go around to these three schools about 1 or 2 in the morning and pay the fellows their 4 pound a week, as I think they were getting paid, go to the three Tech Colleges and then I’d come home and go to bed.

They were training then, training them, apart from their school hours they must have been started some time, it was a night course for them.

I used to have a mislaid law on the computer, used to work it out for me.

Well, they had computers. But see they’d all help me, everyone trusted me and when I came back from the war I went back to munitions and then I finished the course and they immediately sent me to England for a year to see what they were doing in the Ministry of Supply in England and to have a look at….we weren’t

getting many reparations this time but one big plant we were getting as reparations and I went in to see the reparations and that sort of thing and one of the places it went to, they were waiting for the machine to be taken out, the old machinery, so they could get the brand new machinery under Marshall Aid, so the Germans had all brand new machinery, worked a 56

hour week, so they automatically became the head of Europe. Yeah that’s a long story, sorry about that.

Oh I started, I started to go with

my wife when I was 16 and she was 17.

Around through the church really, she used to come over, I think she was into another church but she use to come to our church for eurythmics or something or other and play tennis and that sort of thing, so I met her that way.

But otherwise, all I was doing mainly were you know was working pretty hard.

So but you know it pays in the end. Pays in the end.

Well I went straight to munitions at the end of the university

year and that’s where it had the impact. When we were getting ready for building up our factories. See I was ready to go when Japan came in the war, I was already in the navy and we sailed from Sydney on the day after the [HMS] Prince of Wales and the [HMS] Repulse was sunk. So I was, I left Australia about a

week after Japan entered the war. But I’d been in the navy then for a couple of months, doing training down at Flinders. I went in as a rating.

No, no, no conscription, yeah we volunteered and we went in on a course of going to work with the Royal Navy and then you do

some initial training over there and then eventually get to sea and do at least 3 months at sea and if that was satisfactory, went and did an officers course, so we got our commissions then. That was the basis of our recruit, we would go to England, go to sea, do the officers course, get a commission and stay over there with the RN [Royal Navy], until well I stayed for the whole time.

Oh, I would have thought it was a natural decision to make.

No, well we were married in 1940. So that’s…it wasn’t easy from my point of view, nor from hers I suppose, but she accepted it. No, I don’t think I would say it was a hard decision. One of my closest mates, he joined up with me. So you know, it wasn’t a hard decision.

I don’t know, I think I had two brothers in the army and I wasn’t that keen on the air force and I like the navy. You know I used to do a bit of sailing before the war and that was one of the conditions on this recruitment, that you had to have…they called it the yachtsmen’s scheme, you had to have some experience in yachting, but we hadn’t had that much, any

of us I don’t think but that’s what it was. No, I just enjoyed it, it worked out well.

No, it was all army.

Oh well, my mother’s brother and her father were both at the First World War,

there wasn’t much on my father’s side but he had volunteered for the First World War, he always wore his volunteer badge on his….and his best mate was killed at Gallipoli, so I suppose if he had any tendencies it was towards the army, but I don’t know. But my two brothers were in the army.

Yes, he didn’t, wasn’t accepted.

I think it was his feet. Thank heaven he wasn’t.

Oh, October 41 I think we went in, it might have been September.

We went down to Flinders and did what the ordinary sailors did on the parade ground, all that sort of thing, learning discipline and learning a bit about guns and things like that. Oh it was good training. That all we had here and we repeated that when we got to England anyway.

Oh generally it would be navigation I think. I was a good….when I was navigator in 1943 I was a, I think extra good as a navigator, but you weren’t looking at the stars or anything it was all watching the wind and watching the tides and knowing the places

where you were, what was a, in the North Sea and just where the sandbanks were and all that sort of thing. But that interested me; I was better at that than anything else. Well, you didn’t get much chance otherwise; I was a first lieutenant on the Gun Boat. My first appointment was a navigator and

then I was on that for about 9 months with a fellow that was a…oh wonderful, wonderful sailor, wonderful man and he used to and we used to get up and when we went out on number 4 buoy outside Great Yarmouth we’d get there and we’d see what the tide was doing to the buoy and the rest of it and we’d talk things over and he and I took it from there.

Yeah, Flinders.

Oh well, it was straight after, as soon as we finished that we went to Sydney and we lived on [HMAS] Kuttabul, which is the old ship ferry alongside the wharf in Sydney and we were there waiting for the ship to take us.

And the Kuttabul, I think was sunk by the Japanese later. And then, so the Japanese entered the war, so we went over to New Zealand and then way down the south of America and came up the South American coast and then through the Panama Canal to go over.

I get a bit confused, I’m not sure. I think it was probably the Largs Bay, they’re all on the

merchant ships. And then we went through the Panama and up the American Coast to Halifax in Nova Scotia and then went from there across to Glasgow and then down to London.

Oh it was quite good, we weren’t overcrowded or anything, it was all right and you weren’t doing anything.

No, no.

An ordinary seaman, an ordinary seaman. But going up after we went through the Panama Canal, see

America wasn’t really prepared for what might happen up the, on the Atlantic side and the Germans knew it was going to happen and they had the coast up there loaded with U-Boats [German submarines] and I believe that about 20 sailed up at the time we sailed up, we didn’t go in convoy, we went individually and

only four got through, there were a heck of a lot of ships there and then after we left Halifax there were two ships and two destroyers and about a day out one of the destroyers wasn’t with us any more, we heard gunfire but we didn’t know until we got to England, that one had been lost. So it was pretty dicey in the Atlantic and particularly on the American coast at that time.

And we used to have to man the 6 inch gun then and it was cold too in the winter, you know you were sitting on the aft deck. We were there to load, but we never used them, not on the ship when I went. But we were up there in the cold.

Yeah, immediately after.

Sunk off Singapore

Oh yeah, in the newspaper and we sailed the next day.

Oh well we wondered what was going to happen, you know. I couldn’t

go into any detail, if I had any deep thoughts about it. I don’t remember, I suppose we were a bit concerned that the Japs had come in and where they’d go next.

Oh it occurred to me, we mightn’t go. Oh certainly but

it was the next day that they. Oh well, we stopped there, as I say a lot of us right through the war, some had come back after a couple of years as officers over there and went on to corvettes or something up here. But

once we got there and got into what we wanted to and that was in Motor Gun Boats, we were quite happy to go to stay in them and go back there in them. I had an appointment back to my old, I came home on leave in December 44, I left England, I came out in a ship with the Duke of Gloucester and his wife

and family and staff and he’s coming to be Governor General, so we left England in December 44, so after D Day I stop with the Flotilla, the ship I was on, 502 until about September 44, I think then I took over command of MGB [Motor Gun Boat] 318 for about a month

or two and then I went running over to France and back, that’s in daylight then, just doing a ferry run you know.

Oh I haven’t got much more to say, we left Bermuda; we didn’t land in Bermuda then, that time we just. We tied up there I don’t know what, we might have taken onboard, I don’t know but

then we went up the coast. And I think at that time Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting on a battleship at Bermuda, I think I’ve a bit of a recollection like that. Otherwise, we didn’t know how chaotic things were around us, cause we sailed alone. We didn’t know, it was just a trip up that, the East Coast of America.

We down at Flinders, in big gunner loading and all the rest of it but they had like DEMS [Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship] ratings, they were the main ones, we were there to move the…..

Ask your question again.

The DEMS

were the main, they were permanent guns, so they were the real gun layer and that sort of thing. We were there to handle the 6 inch shells, to move them in the gun, so they could load them. I suppose there’d be about, I think there’d be about 4 of us hanging around there in addition to the DEMS gunmen.

No, no.

No, you didn’t. I don’t know how many were fired, I don’t know. See even across the Atlantic, some would have done it but generally, generally they were escorted and the destroyers or the navy would do the, any contact rather them firing service vessel, but I don’t

know enough about that. As a matter a fact the fellow who used to live next door here, he was a DEMS gunner and he sighted a submarine I think and warned the ship, he was highly commended for that and then they suggested he take a commission, so he got a naval commission out here he got his, and we were good mates until he passed away last year, yeah.

Two navy blokes living next door to each other.

Well, actually we were a bit, we were, yeah convoy because we left with 2 ships and 2 destroyers and one destroyer was lost, so we kept coming with one destroyer around us.

Glasgow. Just down the river from Glasgow, but Glasgow for us. And then we came down to London and then down to Portsmouth to do our ratings training.

Oh no, just in the train.

Oh well, you’d see it was pretty cold too, it was January. Oh I think, we were glad to get out of it and go down south and get a bit more warmth.

Only, we

had a few hours off it in Panama, that’s all. Oh no, no, we had a few days in Halifax, yeah the people there looked after us pretty well too. But January was cold there. Oh no, we enjoyed our stay in Halifax, it was interesting too. But that

was the only stop. Glasgow straight from the ship onto the train and soon as there was a train to London, we were on that, so there wasn’t any delay up there. London, we had a meal right outside Waterloo Station, I don’t know, at a restaurant there, you know on the railways and then we caught the train down to Portsmouth. And then we started our Ratings Training again down there.

Oh well, it was the bombing I think, the bombing around London and the bombing of Coventry. The bombing was the thing that would be uppermost in my mind I think.

Oh no, not really. We did later, we got it when the… you know when the Japs took over and got down to Singapore and things like that. But we’d get as much information as we could. Whenever we could we got into Australia House to find out what was happening.

And the club there, that was very useful to us and very helpful. But again once you’re on this 8, 10 weeks or whatever it was Rating Course you, we didn’t get any time off then but once you finished that you were ….and you started to do a few other courses. And we

even had to go up to Scotland to do a course on Coastal Force Craft and those that wanted to go on that. We didn’t get much time off then in London but I suppose we might have had a few days around there, but we called there as often as we could get there.

Oh no not…..no, I can’t. I mean I’ve got feelings about it, but I don’t know anything really. I would have heard about it then, but oh I think it was very distressing for everybody, the British and the Australians.

Oh, I’d say so.

I’d say so. I would say so. Cause we were there to support the British people but they were, I mean the Australians were not me. But the British sort of, all their resources were based around the Mediterranean and over there really, they were getting ready for, for

trying to do what they could to hold the, their foot in, their feet in the Mediterranean area. But they lost a lot and we lost a lot, but they reported it of course, yeah. It’s not like now, there wasn’t all the tv at everybody’s back door you know where you get so much, you didn’t get that during the war.

Oh again it was the same as we’d done at Flinders,

you know parade ground work and getting some gunnery training.

No, I don’t know, no. Just told us a bit about the guns, that was about what it was. And we went over to the

submarine base, I suppose that is, at Vernon Base in Portsmouth, next to the main base. We went over there and learned a bit, had lectures about the sub….about torpedoes, that was the sort of training we got to learn something about it but no……..when you got into those areas

you spent time on a proper course.

Well, I’ve got a picture somewhere, yeah we went out on a French, an old French sailing ship and went out sailing on that but I don’t know, we didn’t do much on it or the pictures I’ve got, we were all sitting around there and take pictures of each other.

No, I don’t think, no, I don’t think we did any sailing down there. But we went all the time when we went from there up to Scotland to the Coastal Force Training Base. We spent a lot of time on the water up there.

I think it would be a couple of months about, again 10 weeks I think.

Oh well, we used to go across to Swansea, there was a, no, not Swansea, that’s in Scotland.

No, not as far as Weymouth. In Portsmouth itself really, there

was a place there that we all used to congregate, use to be for colonials and we all used to gather, most of us use to gather there.

Oh no, not among the people or anything like that. No, not at all even when you go back to when we

were down in the Panama Canal. Some Germans, no, some Americans, what did they call us? What did they call the British?

Yeah they called us Limeys. We all had the same sort of uniform. No, no, oh no, we were very welcome, very much so. It’s amazing how welcome we were.

Just to bypass a bit but when I was an officer on this lot that we used to operate across to France, the commander he often came onboard for lunch and I’d welcome him you know, “Good morning commander,” and he’d say,

“Good morning you colonial bastard!” That was a sign of, I made to grade with him really, it wasn’t meant any other way. I think he married a girl, his wife was actually, spent a lot of time in South Africa, whether she was born there or not, I’m not sure. No there wasn’t, we were very welcome.

No, not as far as I know. But you know, no. But again you don’t know. We had a

coxswain, he was a fantastic bloke and he died when 502 was lost but absolutely fantastic bloke. But they tell me that when he went ashore, he was a bit of a devil and he wanted to punch somebody. I can see, he’d grab someone and say, “You can come with me tonight,” and they all shivered at the thought of it. No, I didn’t see any, no.

I think they all had minds on other things generally, happy to go in and have a beer or something like that. I don’t think I drank in those days. I drank sometimes, I started during the war. But then no, they were good; I

didn’t experience or run across any of that sort of trouble.

We went up to Fort William in Scotland, to do our training on Coastal Force Craft. And we did a fair bit of sailing out on a Coastal Force Craft on the Loch up there.

And it was very interesting and very good.

No, no like the MLs [Motor Launches] and that like they had out here. They’d be MLs, we used to go on then. Fairmiles, and they used to run around and most of us went to a Fairmile when finished up there.

Oh well, it’s just a hundred, I think about 110 feet long,

No wood, wood. A crew of about 20, I suppose. And they were all the Coastal Force Craft that were built in any great quantity.

Early, early on you had some small 70 foot boats and that, that were very fast and that. We had some of those but for the mass production and the ones they used on trying to protect the convoys around the coast and things like that were ML’s, were Fairmiles. And they could go, do about, generally about

20 knots maximum I’d say. They were quite comfortable. I went to a Fairmile after I’d finished up there. But one of my mates, went on a Fairmile at a different port from what I went to. I went down to Weymouth he went …I’m not sure what port he went to now. And the other one went onto Steam Gun Boats and it was very

interesting when he came back and qualified, we went on the same course, we got….we went, did our course together, we were commissioned together and he went back to Steam Gun Boats. It was very unusual for a rating to go back to the Flotilla he came from, but he did. So he was pretty good. But the Fairmiles were

…and then after that they started to get faster vessels. And after the Americans came in, they had the faster Gun Boats and they were again Fairmiles, Fairmile D’s, and they had Packard engines in them, so

I think we had on those, 4 Packards. And that’s what the American PT [Patrol Torpedo] Boats had Packards engines. All the ones I know. We had a Flotilla came and work with us for a little while, just before D Day, they had Packards. But and they were faster. We could go on the D Gun Boats,

up to 35 knots I suppose.

Yeah about that.

Oh they were all…their boats of course would do about 50. Some of the smaller boats we’d had would do about 48-50 too. But they didn’t make those; they did make those in quantity during the war at all.

Oh, I get a bit confused because I went back there again as an officer, and did training there. As an officer we use to train in, a lot of training signalling and the Morse code and things like that. As a rating we probably did a bit of signalling too I’d reckon.

They kept you always busy with something. Anyway, when you came back, you were quite, I think they were quite good ratings that went back onto the ML’s. But you always had to get trained on a ship when you went to it. As a matter a fact when I was on the ML’s I had a job as a point 5 gunner alongside the

bridge but I think, I can remember more helping the first lieutenant in the, doing his navigation charts and things like that. I had a pretty good go on navigation on the ML.

No, general.

Oh well, we expected to be in a ML. There weren’t many others in Coastal Forces, they were the growing number.

Oh yes, you don’t go to Fort William, unless you were destined for Coastal Forces, and this was part of the training.

Well, when we joined up this was where we wanted to go, to Coastal Forces.

And that’s where we got. Some of the fellows that joined up, that went to England when we went, one finished up on a battleship and he was the aide-de-camp to the admiral when they signed the surrender at Hong Kong. And a lot went,

I think, oh they went on various things, a lot in fact finished up on landing craft. But we didn’t want to get on landing craft, we wanted to….well that’s later on when they determined that. But yes, we all wanted to go on Coastal Forces. And that was ML’s, that was the big production then, they were the B Class they called them and

they produced about 100 I suppose, it might even have be 200. Then there was C Class in which they produced another about 100 and they they got onto the D Class, and each was getting bigger and faster.

Motor launch, really.

They were the 110 foots. About 110 feet. And then the C’s were about the same length and the D’s weren’t that much bigger, they might have got to 120, I think, but they weren’t much bigger. They were designed by again, the Fairmile were the architects that designed them.

So there were a lot of D Boats in the finish. C’s, there weren’t that many C’s, but I spent some time on C’s for a few months. They were good, they were good but the, not …the D’s were a class above them, they had more speed and I think a bit more room and things like that.

I went down to Weymouth.

Yes, it would be about then cause we went down about October 42 for our Officers Course, I think.

Yes about mid 42. So you spent a lot of time on courses when you joined the services.

Yes, that was a Rescue Motor Launch as a matter a fact. It was a B Class ML but they had a deck on her for, to carry a doctor if necessary or to have patients if you were then a Rescue Motor

Launch and you used to go out when there were, not that there were that many down in that area at that time. But they were used a lot more later on, they were to go out and pick up aviators and that, that had been shot down and bring them back.

Oh, of course, yes it was, oh yeah.

Oh well, it’s

only a matter of at last getting to sea. What you joined up for, you know many months earlier. And I enjoyed the people and I got on well with them and we had a good time.

Oh, I suppose from all around England really.

Oh no, none in the port. I never had, I’m trying to think, I don’t think I had another one in the port when I was on the Sea Boats at Great Yarmouth for a year. And when we were down at on Special Forces that I was on, there was one fellow down there,

he is also a mate of mine, he was down there but he was the only other Australian in the port. Oh there weren’t that many. See, a lot were out and gone out to India or the Med [Mediterranean] or Africa, they were widely spread. So there weren’t enough to kick up any fuss about anything.

Oh with those, look we did very little. We just went out into the [English] Channel and just waited for something to happen then, that’s about all, all completely uneventful. But this mate of mine went to SGBs [Steam Gun Boat] and he went on the Dieppe raid, so he really got

into something. Some others you know, there was another one went over I think, in the lot went after me and he was on a Russian Convoy and sunk, and in the water there and he didn’t go to sea again as a rating, I don’t think he went as an officer, I don’t know.

He was very lucky to be in there for a minute, cause a minute was that sort of limit in Arctic waters. That would be the hardest job in the world I reckon. I count myself lucky to be in Coastal Forces, I tell you. I appreciate what they did in the Atlantic convoys, they did a fantastic job in that, in the navy. And

but the Arctic convoys must have been horrible very tough. I didn’t have to put up with those, nor what happened at times in the Med were very difficult times for them. So I count myself pretty lucky in that respect, I was lucky too.

After I left the RML [Rescue Motor Launch] down there then we started a training course down at Brighton.

That was to become,

to get your commission, you got your commission after a couple of months training down there, maybe three months. And then once you got your commission you, well you then did more detailed, I think Torpedo and Gunnery and went down to the navigation place to do a bit more on navigation down there. And I went to the

Greenwich Naval College and we did the Divisional Officers Course down there and then we went up Fort Bill, up to Fort William, and did a course there and largely on, oh I think my main recollection is on the Signalling and Morse code stuff, having to you know work into the night

with those. It didn’t have to be too much in the night because there was, you’d get up north, its and the days are a bit short. Cause I was up there in, well I started at Great Yarmouth in February, so I’d be up there in Great Yarmouth when it was, up in Fort William

when it was nearly mid winter, so you’d only get a few hours of daylight a day up there, about four I think.

Oh, a bit on the mountains around didn’t get any fall. Of course you’d get, you’d get it down in Sheffield and places like that. Relatives that I have discovered since the war there, you know they get it up over their windowsills and that sort thing. I never…

You have, have you?

Oh yeah, they get a lot around there, it’s amazing. I couldn’t have seen the worse of it at Fort William either; I couldn’t have, because they’re a lot further north. And they wouldn’t get the Gulf Stream or anything to help them.

Well, it depends on your age, if you were under 21 you start then as a… oh I forget what you call them. Anyway, if you’re over 21 you come out as a sub lieutenant. And that’s what I started all my, most of my time at

Great Yarmouth would be as a sub lieutenant. And then I eventually, after a couple of years as an officer and you’re 25 you can get a …..you can expect to be made a lieutenant.

I was on a Motor Gun Boat and the purposes there were to support the convoys, most of them you’d go out every second night at least, off the coast and waiting on anti E [Enemy] Boat Patrol and then we used to go, about once a month I suppose, once every couple of weeks across

over the Dutch coast and sometimes more often than not with MTB [Motor Torpedo Boat] Flotilla with us

That’s Motor Torpedo Boat, they carried the torpedoes, and we would sort of have to attract the attention of people on the convoy over there and we’d get into

the situation where the Torpedo Boat had them in, we’re in a position with the moon or anything that suited them, the Torpedo Boat, not the other.

Yeah, and so over there then, we used to, I suppose get out of the road. Let the Torpedo Boats do it and then we’d come back.

Well to us it’s an Enemy Boat. But all the E Boats, they were very fast MTB really and they were good ships all right.

Or smaller but doing the same sort of job.

No, no, no we were a big base at Great Yarmouth, oh Lowestoft was a fairly big base too I think but Great Yarmouth would be the bigger of two. We had D Boat Flotillas, we had, we would have had two and there would be one Sea Boat Flotilla there

and we also had another D Boat Flotilla of the Canadian navy, oh it was a pretty big port, Great Yarmouth.

Oh well, I went there occasionally, across there.

There I was with Mike Marshall, he was the CO [Commanding Officer] of 607 that I was on then. And Mike’s wife Stella, she was living on the Broads, so Mike…when we had a night off Mike would go out there and spend the night. I only went out there once or twice. And I haven’t been much to Great Gov, I’ve only been

to Great Gala once since, I’ve been to many trips since the war but we were going to look for relatives largely and visiting old mates. And I had the great pleasure really of, last year my daughter visiting my old mates and the family that we discovered. When she went over to France and met the people there that I’d

known, more know of because they were in the dark largely when I was there. And she went and saw them; she got a tremendous reception, it was awe inspiring, it was just straight out love. I’m a great believer in love. They say you can give…love is the one thing you can have, you can give away all you’ve got

and you finish up with more than you started. That’s what I’ve shown my children and grandchildren anyway. Anyway, she got and had a great time but that’s really by the way. Ahead of myself.

Well, we were on a D Boat and it was largely going out and most nights,

most of them we’d be out, only two boats used to go together, and you’d wait and then you’d go with the tide and then you’d come back to where you were just keeping guard against E Boats attacking our convoy as they came down the coast.

Oh, well not very far, couple miles I suppose. See the number 4 buoy that would be getting close, see you got all of the sands down the centre there..

Yeah, so it was limited how far you could get over there because of the bottom, it gets very shallow

but you had to watch all those sort of things. But it’s not that wide across, well it could have been three or four mile but just so much that we could still protect our boats, the convoys, you don’t want to be too far out.

We never did

but I can tell you just after I left 607, Mike Marshall on 607 encountered a group of E Boats attacking a convoy and he went and sank one, or badly damaged it

and then there was a battle continuing and then he rammed a second one and I think the third might have got away, I’m not sure. But I think he got three in one night though. I think that was probably the record of any number. That happened about a month after I’d left to go to the Senior Officer of a Sea Boat Flotilla. And the fellow who took over

my job as navigator, he lost an eye in the battle that went on. They lost about I think about seven crew in the battle. But, so it’s all fast and you have to ….it depends on what sort of CO you are or you’ve got on, how you fight it.

Yes

I’d say about 25, I’d say.

Oh well, there’s the captain and the first lieutenant and a navigator on the D on the biggest ones. And so but the first lieutenant, generally to me, he had to

look after the discipline of the ship and things like that but when you’re out at sea as the captain or the navigator, they’re the key ones, because the navigator has to, sort of you know, wheeling around and turning and all the rest of it, he’s got to keep, let you know, let the captain know where you are but so that’s why when Mike Marshall eventually after he sank the E Boats, the 607, got back,

in fact we went out, I went out on the ship, I was first lieutenant of this other Sea Boat and we towed them in but after that Mike didn’t have a ship. He got an appointment to this Special Service Flotilla, and then when the Senior Officer of that Flotilla was looking for a first lieutenant, Mike saw, suggested they might

approach me. Well the approach, I got was a draft from Great Yarmouth to Dartmouth.

Well as time went on, you got more and more. But for instance, at the finish when we were going

to France and that, they were equipped to link up with the RAF [Royal Air Force], whatever the RAF homed on, we could home on that, we could navigate largely from that. Otherwise, it’s use of radar and that sort of thing to navigation. Never on the

North Sea for instance, never using the, you know the stars and that.

I did, yeah I did a….but I don’t think I was awfully successful at that. But I did, I did a Navigation Course for a couple months, oh well it might have only been a month.

Yeah, I did a course on navigation. But we never used it, so anything that I learnt doesn’t help me. Well same with most of the navigation on the aircrafts at the finish, they homed on this homing thing. So we homed on, we did radar in the early days and things on the shore that you knew, you’d home on them

but after we used to use the RAF signal and we used that for a lot of our navigation but when we were going off the enemy coast, it would be largely by radar picking out the spots on the land.

When’s this?

Well, there would be, generally there wouldn’t be that much of a daytime. There’d be of nighttime, we used to go out of a night. And that was just riding out there up and down and if nothing came, nothing came.

Oh, we’d be out all night, that’s why we went every second night. I remember on one of the trips we did, I think it must have been when we got into a battle of the Dutch coast, we came back and I ordered from the ammunition store, I ordered 99 rounds of 6 pounder, was it 6 pounder? No

it wasn’t, it was the bigger one and the fellow behind there said, “Yeah, that’s the complement of it, I know its ninety nine but how many of them do you want?” And I said, “I want 99, we had used every single round.” They were 2 inches, I think.

Well this one was at the rear, rear aft

and then there was twin Oerlikons.

No, the point five guns were the ….alongside each side of the bridge we had two point fives and we had 6 pounder up for’ard. The ack-ack were fundamentally the point fives either side of the bridge.

But the Oerlikons were very good gun.

Yeah, we did. Yeah, we never let any off, not seriously.

Oh I remember one morning in daylight we were there and there was all people going to church at Arnhem.

I was very worried about it, I

thought, “We’d better get out of here.” Yeah, we were late that day. So, we were close enough for that.

Oh anything.

Oh that was when we had a convoy, and we were attacking a convoy and having a battle with the… and firing the guns at the convoy.

Sometimes there might be three of us and there could be even three Motor Torpedo Boats, as many as six, I think could be there. But that wouldn’t be, six wouldn’t be common. I think the night when we must have come on, must have been when Gun Boats alone went

and we attacked the enemy convoy with our torpedoes. I think later on they all got, they changed them and they all were able to fire torpedoes. Cause we were, the last vessel that joined us is called MTB, MTB 718, but they…

I left Great Yarmouth and

I went down to Dartmouth to the Special Service Flotilla, that operate the 15th Flotilla that operates from Dartmouth. Doing work for….oh well putting prisoners in and putting agents in and out and putting in agents in for SOE – “Sabotage Operation Europe” and

bringing out airmen shot down, who were evaders.

Well because Mike Marshall who had been my Commanding Officer in Great Yarmouth, when he had sunk the E Boats and

607, the Gun Boat, wasn’t serviceable for several months, he was invited to join the Special Service Flotilla as Commander of MGB 503, one of the Gun Boats. And then the Senior Officer of the Flotilla, a fellow named Peter Williams, he was looking for a new first lieutenant

for his ship, 502, so Mike suggested they might see if I was interested. And the next thing I got was a draft from Great Yarmouth to Dartmouth.

Oh I wouldn’t know too much, because no one knew too much. No, I don’t suppose I did.

I knew Mike was a good fellow and that I’m happy to go down with Mike.

Well, the first briefing is, “I’ve got to keep my mouth shut. And don’t talk to anyone about anything.” See even when we were down there we used ….our Flotilla use to lie alongside an old paddle steamer in the middle of the Dart River, we didn’t join with other

Flotillas that were moored at the wharf. We stopped out there. That was again for secrecy and the operations. And so we were….that was the prime thing that we had to be very careful we don’t talk to anybody about anything.

Well, there was an old Sea Boat MGB 318; they’d been working there for a couple of years

and they’d been working, doing a terrific job really but not very successful because they didn’t have the navigational aids that were available later. And also because the arrangements in France weren’t properly organised and also because the weather was bad for them a lot of the time. So

there was 318 and then there was 2 other MGBs, which were the only high speed, diesel MGBs in the Royal Navy and that was MGB 502 and 503 and they were the two MGBs in the 15th Flotilla and I was on 502. And sometimes, sometimes when there’s a second boat’s officer on 503 and also

I did an operation on 318, so I’ve…I did a bit of work on all of them.

Yeah, they were the three main boats, then 718 came in March/April. But they did their first operation as a second boat for 502, that’s the only time we ever had two boats going over and then they went up, and their main role was in

Norway. And they did a mighty job in Norway. Right up until, till VE [Victory in Europe] Day almost.

Well, the four were.

Yes.

What sort of?

No, I don’t think so. This mate of mine was down at Dartmouth and he said, “You Bs,” he said,

“You never go to sea.” He changed his mind after he saw the book I wrote afterwards. So I don’t think anyone really knew, they knew there was something different, that was about all.

Oh if they were, I would just say, “We just operate out of Dartmouth in

the Channel,” that’s about all I would say.

No, no not down, not in our Flotilla, we only went when it was dark, when it was pitch dark, pitch black, so we only operated for about 10 to 12 days of a month. And we didn’t go for a night, no. In the 6 months I think I’m

supposed to have done 11 operations, I think. That’s 11 and that’s working on one, a couple of operations on another 503 and as an extra officer and one on 318. So you didn’t, there weren’t that many agents that were going in and out. When you brought back airmen shot down,

we brought out say over 30 in a night well then that’s when they’d take…..I went as a Second Officer, as a Boats Officer to take one of the boats in. You see they’d be four boats go in from the Gun Boat, they use to row ashore to bring the airmen back.

And we’d anchor off shore.

Then we’d lower a boat and it was always done with 502 and the work we were doing for SOE [Sabotage Operation Europe], only ever one boat and then the people we had onboard we would

get them into the, down the ….they’d come down the scrambling net, row them ashore where they’d be met on the beach and if there was anyone that was coming back we would bring them back and row back to the boat. And it was oh a very…it was very interesting work.

You know one….we didn’t know who we were carrying, not then. Some we found out afterwards, for instance I found out afterwards, the President of France, Mitterrand, he, we took him in, in February 1944 we were,

I’m responsible for being the Boat’s Officer to row him ashore. So not many have got distinction of rowing a future President ashore, not these days, you’d go back a few hundred years for that.

Someone come down from our London Office or from SOE and they’d go and

stop down at Torquay or somewhere like that until we got the clearance that we could go. And they’d come in the day we were to go, they’d come out and go out onto the Westward Hoe, which was the boat we use to lie alongside, then they’d have a rest in their cabin there until it was ready too, they were ready to come aboard. And after they were properly cleared

that they had nothing that could be difficult onboard, you know just check for anything… I don’t mean carrying guns or anything but they used to make sure that they couldn’t be picked up easily over when they got there. And someone did that. Then we, they’d come onboard and away we would go.

Oh, I couldn’t tell you.

In the book it’s a …..all the information I have is that they were just checked for, to make sure that everything was clear.

Oh well, I don’t know any particular people, I don’t think, that we put in.

I got the story about one fellow we put in and when they’d heard that we landed him, I think SOE were hostile and the Eisenhower crew were hostile that this fellow could get there.

Because he’d been operating in the South of France, he was a Jew and operating in the South of France and he was wanted so bad by the Germans that they were horrified that he should go in there and perhaps be tortured to divulge information and anyway it so happened he went over there and he was

out….he went over to make sure that the people there, they were appointing a new head in one of the divisions over there in France and he was to make sure that there was no general uprising when the Allies landed, they were to wait until they were told what to do,

and that was very important in the whole operation and he told them that and came back through Spain and was back in England in no time. And then he landed again but not with us, I think he was flown in next time and he was sort of the, sat in the chair of the Minister of Interior in Paris until they took over.

So he was really the….De Gaulle sent him, wanted him to go and of course De Gaulle didn’t necessarily hit it too much with Eisenhower and Churchill you know but anyway they were quite happy when it was all over. But they were horrified when they heard,

when they found him back in a few weeks and nothing had gone wrong they sort of relaxed a bit. There was a lady that we brought out and one of our crew….she came out, it must have been April 26th,

that’s when we put that other fellow in with a couple of others and Susan came out and went on that vessel. She came out with a lot of information about the V1 and V2 rockets and we in fact were more concerned to make sure that she was looked after

when she came back. That’s why we took the other, 718 came with us on this trip. They took a couple of other passengers, they took them but Susan came onboard our ship and she was …..she wrote she was so delighted that we

saved her life cause the Gestapo [German Secret Police] were after her and so delighted to come on board and be settled into a cabin and got a little pussycat to play with and the only sad thing was that night we ran into someone coming out and one of our

fellows got killed. And that was the sad thing as far as she was concerned that he died going in there to save her. So Susan, I got to know her. One of our fellows, he must have looked after her down in the, she stopped in the wardroom, he must have looked after her, our signalman because after he

saw her name mentioned in a newspaper, so he got to know her and I got to know her through him, so I used to see her quite often, she and her husband. And but she died recently too. She was, we didn’t really know much about, you just took people in and left them and the people had them on the beach and took them away

through the system over there until they got where they had to go.

I didn’t. I don’t think ……he must have though somehow, as I say he must have been looking after her and she must have mentioned it to him. I certainly didn’t know.

I don’t know, I don’t know. If they had it on the mess deck it’s not with my

knowledge. And my job would have been to see there wasn’t one I suppose. We might have….we had one, at one time when we were having an overhaul in a shipyard somewhere and the crew called it the Lloydy, so they had a cat there named after me at that stage.

Yeah. I think having a few of us there made a big difference. We got on so well with the people. We’re a bit more approachable.

Well, there were a couple of South Africans and an Australian makes it a bit easier.

Anyway, we all got on well together. And it was good. Well, you know the fellows that row ashore are just as important as the officer that goes with them. You know you just have to get in, don’t you? And the others, they’re all good and you get to know you’re a team and it was a team.

Yeah, a fellow named Sandles.

A boat accosted us and fired at us and Sandles was unlucky and he got hit and we sent a signal off and

whether it was right or wrong. We used to get the signals, the German signals used to change say every day and we used to get those before we left but they change at midnight and we never got that. That was the Enigma you know, that they broke the code. And they come out on the code; we didn’t know it at the time,

we know now that was the source of our information, so we would have used it, probably the code before midnight and they were a bit confused, they didn’t fire any more and we came away with……we weren’t there to fire, we didn’t want to fire, the more you fire, the more problems you get into with people that were left ashore.

Yeah.

And we flashed it to them when they fired the gun, and they must have stopped the gun and what’s the signal and it wasn’t the ……it might have…we would have sent the signal, which was the code up until midnight.

Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Yeah, we could use it that way. But we had to be very

careful what we used, when we used it because we didn’t want them to know an Enigma had been broken. That we’d broken into their code, and that was getting close to D Day at that stage.

About half a mile, half a mile to a mile.

No. On some of the beaches where we went there was a big rock on which we could home on or find our way there on and then we’d just anchor somewhere near there. But at others…….and we were really in a … in a pretty, a bit of …fairly well sheltered beach

but other beaches were so dangerous from the weather, that the change came and there’s one beach that 318 went on late in ‘43 and they went in about 5 times to get out the people because each time they ….storms caught them and

once the….once they went, but there was a mess up between the British and the French as to the French weren’t there waiting at the beach and they, we came back again. That was in 318 not me, but it’s ….it was very hard, it was very hard in that respect. I remember rowing in one night and I think it was when I was with

318 and boy there were thousands of birds took off and they screeched, that’s possibly the most frightening experience I had, you know go up there, up to the coast, you can see it, you can see the torches of the guards up there flashing around the place and now these birds take off. You could often see when you were coming in, see people up top not flashing at you

but just using a torch in the ….around the place. So we were, well you had to, you to get into the beach. But the people there they use to be there. There were a couple of young girls with me on the SOE beach, and they, two sisters I suppose, 17 and 19 something like that, they were always at the beach

and they’d take the people, they take them off the beach, take them to places where they could….till they got to a safe place.

Well we did…..what then? No, no idea who they were or what they were going to do,

no. We found out a lot of this afterwards, same as we found out about Mitterrand. When he landed I was talking to a lady who used to be in the area and I thought at the time she was in charge of the beaches but she wasn’t, I don’t think, but she was very much involved and that.

But they took Mitterrand to there, to her place and she said that he left with her his ration card and it was in the name of Mooreland Mourn, so no one knew it was Mitterrand till after the war, till later on.

Yeah, I actually tried to send a message to him on the fiftieth anniversary of the day we put him back in, well the message did go but all I got was a message from the …..not the Embassy down in Melbourne, the French have a

Consulate, yes and they told me that they’d sent the message off to him and he was pleased to get it, but they didn’t send any acknowledgment. It’s interesting

after the war and the French started to get together and again they were writing to me about what things that might happen and I told them that the fellow who knows more about these operations was a David

Birken in London and he’s the one that could help. So David and his wife Judy went over and there was a terrific gathering and at that stage I got a ring from the Consul in Melbourne and

I spoke with her and she said her sister, Madam Laduke, had written to her and she’s so excited that this great gathering had happened and David Birken had gone over and he said to them, told them that all this happened because of Lord Bott in Melbourne.

So apart from…..I have been a communicator and everything I do, I’ve sent to all the troops that I know who are alive and that sort of thing, or the widows and it’s been a big thing. But the days are going because there’s not many left.

Well there were four boats, I had a feeling, I’m not sure now but I think two of us had to go back a second time. Because the boats, really it’s only a little 14 footer row boat and you’ve got the two oarsmen and you’ve got the officer sitting at the stern

and to get 6, to have got more than six would have been very hard, you could get 7. So they would be fully loaded and then we had to go back again, I think. But it was just one of those things. In that case, I was just the

first attendant of 503, it was their beach, they looked after escaping airmen, generally. And then they must have had two of their own, four crews, someone skippered the other two boats and I was number four, I took up the tail

and oh it was just a matter, they organised it well on the shore and we just picked them up and they loaded and we came back. What’s the exercise, it was an exercise, it was pretty simple in a way but it was a very difficult for the people onshore anyway. And when you, the more you talk to people,

the more you realise that just how much these French people did, they were fantastic. Ralph Pattern of the American Airforce Escape Society, Ralph said you know up to seventy people would have helped him out and

you know the wives and the families and the kids were all put at risk, so everyone had to be so careful. But its a …..so they had gone through all that, gathering them all together and there’s a place called La Mademoiselle de France, that was on top of the cliff

at this beach Bonaparte, and they gathered there and the fellows used to lead them down and they’d…..where there was a mine they’d lay a handkerchief or something, something like that so they could lead all these airmen down the slope and onto the beach. And then after that they’d wait for,

to see us come in and if …there was what they call an S Phone, is a phone where a message could be sent, but if they…..if S Phones weren’t in operation at that time, I don’t know if they were or not. They would have flashed a blue light or something to us, but they always got over a BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] message before an operation to let them know we were coming.

Oh, we used to set a time but they couldn’t be too precise, if a ….if there was a convoy happen to be coming past that you hadn’t had prior knowledge of you’d have to wait till it got out of the road. But apart from that we’d be pretty much on time.

Well that depends on the weather, if the weather’s good. If the weather’s, rough weather, you just don’t know how long really. But we tried not to go in bad weather and you know a couple of operations just had to be withdrawn before they even tried to go in, once they got there, and this…a big gale would be coming across from the Atlantic, there was no

point in going in.

At the end of the news they’d just say, “Nancy’s got a fish or Nancy done something…” There’s some message they used to send. Just by some sort of phrase they would use, not every time. They’d have a different one each time but they’d arranged.

No,

I didn’t, no. No, they’d be on the BBC sending into France.

Well, we’d know that day. Yeah, we’d know the day. They didn’t tell us any more

than we had to know. I mean I didn’t know everything that was going on you know, just certain times the briefing was with maybe the navigator, I mean generally on that we had a… we had 3 navigators who used to do all these operations and they were not, they didn’t live in Dartmouth or anything like that, they lived in London or somewhere.

They were kept out of the road, I mean they didn’t have anyone around that might have, not meaning these particular people but generally the thing was you told as little as you could to anybody.

Well because you know, you don’t let anything whisper at all. I mean …I’ve read that some people

were certain there were spies in Dartmouth, I don’t know if there were or not but wherever you were you had to be very careful they weren’t. So there was no talk. It was interesting, when I started to write these books, I talked to Commander Davis’s, he was our Commander to his wife. Ted had died and I said, “Have you got anything there

that Ted had that might help me?” And she sent out a paper, the only paper she knew of and that was headed ‘Secret’. She didn’t want to send it, she didn’t like sending it but she told me to be very careful with it. Now when I got it, I find that, what’s the secret, I’ve seen it published in English

and you can get it here because it…in England and the French had said all this, so there was no secret in it. But she, just after she sent me the paper, someone came down from the Secret Service of some sort and said, “Now, if your husband left any paper anything like that, remember they’re still all top secret,” and she was frightened to death, so the

Secret Services are pretty strong.

Not from our point of view. I’ve written about them all and the French people have written about them all. I wrote after the French people had written,

you know some of their books. And so I thought well, “I wouldn’t write anything that’s secret,” that’s why I suppose I was so late in writing anything, I don’t know. But you have to be, I wouldn’t, I just wouldn’t do it. But it was quite clear that it was published. Public information if you look for it. And I think all Ted had was a copy of a

recommendation for decoration for some people. And you can get that anywhere. Just go to the Public Records Office or something like that and this…some of these they had …I could get a copy of it in the Public Records Office in London. But I know a fellow was after it for 718, their recommendations,

and cause theirs was later, cause they were in the Norway operations and I think they were, the records, they would have go and look for up in Richmond or something like that, I don’t know. But no, even when we were there, we all knew the whole philosophy was

they know these landing had taken place and what is the…what has to be is the, selecting the right place to go to and having the right people there to sort of organise it and for us to be on the ball I suppose.

Well I got a DSC [Distinguished Service Cross], during the war and then after the war, later in my Peacetime work I got a CBE [Commander of the Order of the British Empire]. See I was, well I was head of Departments in Canberra for about 10 years. I was head of National Development, I was head

of Tourism and Recreation and I was head of Immigration and through that sort of service particularly though and also while I was with Suppliers, I was Deputy Secretary but I headed up all the American space activities in Australia that was you know

a big job and I’d been there, I was on the team with Air Marshal Schreiber that recommended the Mirage aeroplane, so I went over on that and then I went and did the negotiations of the Mirage contracts and I was in so many things and everything worked out well. It’s amazing, when we landed in France on the Mirage

then, I think they must have sent an aeroplane over for all the team and they said, “We landed the fellow from DASO, [Department of the Army Special Orders], the Manager, General Manager, Managing Director.” He said something like, “I don’t suppose any of you have been

in France before, or have any.” And I said, “I’ve been but you won’t find my name in the records.” And he’d been in the Resistance. “Oh,” he said, “you were working on Special Service, were you?” And you’ve no idea what difference that made. The trust that they had

in the work we did over there. And they knew they could believe it you know and they were having other negotiations with other people from other countries etc, it wasn’t the same, both ways.

Right, sorry.

Well it was tremendously, I don’t know if it was excitement, tremendously rewarding.

You knew you weren’t there to fire guns you knew you were there to play a most important role in getting information out and getting airmen out and putting agents in and that. And you knew you couldn’t measure the value of those things, terribly

rewarding. It’s more a deeper feeling than excitement.

Funny I really, I don’t think I ever was nervous, more nervous now I suppose. But no, I wasn’t nervous I don’t believe. Well you

get trained and you do something and you got all those around you that are working with you, it’s the feeling you get is not one of excitement or nervousness. But I say in my experience the most time I was …..nerves were affected was when the birds took off,

that wasn’t very nice but the birds couldn’t help it.

Oh well, once that’s happening, these things are sort of a, I suppose a bit of excitement you know, more than nervousness sort of thing. There’s not much you can do, you don’t want to fire back. I think we did quite the right thing, send off a message, a signal to them.

That was enough misleading to them. I forget now, there was one, one of the boats I, not sure if it was ours or not, I think it was 502 before I joined it in December 43, they were fired on and I’m not sure if it was us but anyway and the

signal light started to flash on their boat and they had to cut the wires and this sort of thing, so there was no more light. Those things do happen, it’s like David Birken, he was a navigator and he said he wrote some words and he said

about one of his trips and it was about the weather and he said, “The weather is so bad the water was coming down the voice pipe from the bridge.” There was blood on charts from where his head had been hit with

a ruler or something and there was sick, he was sick all over them and he said, “You had to hold up to stop, to keep on your feet to hold onto the thing.” He said, “It makes you realise that being a navigator can at times be a very rough thing.” Oh dear, he was a funny man, David.

I think in the, that book The Secret Flotilla, he had access to everything and he’s got me, he said, “I went in 11 times I think,” I think he says 11,

and I wasn’t sure, you know that I was in charge of the boats when Mitterrand went in but he quotes particularly specifically that Lloyd Bott was in charge of the boats on that operation, so look we, 11 was enough, we’d go there a couple of time in one period, about

and you think that’s not a lot, but you only had to get in black nights and a couple in five, a couple a month for five months is ten, so you need a few other to get it up to eleven or thirteen. But we used to go then down to

Elford River, which was the SOE Headquarters, or not Headquarters but they had a base down there where the fishing vessels used to be looked after, that went over to France. And we used to go down there and practice beach landings and that sort of thing on the beaches, a fair number of good waves coming

in down there, down Cornwall.

Oh just rowing in, the same as you do in France. Rowing in the same way and just learning just how to, what you have to do to go with the wave and to come out the same thing to get away from the beach, that’s really what it’s about,

how you deal with the waves.

Well, that would make it easier, doesn’t it? There’s always a bit of a wave down in France on those beaches but if there wasn’t, so much the better. You didn’t depend on them, they were your problem really.

Well certainly the night in December 43 before I joined 502, they were in an area where those ashore, they could hear the boat and the oars from the shore.

Two of the people they were to bring back weren’t there, but the two that were organising stopped and waited because the 502 had been delayed by a convoy and anyway they waited and also the illumination of the oars on the water could be seen

and just up top, there was a German base you know. That’s why we never went back to that area again. They’re the things that were ironed out before I got there, before I, that what I ….. When I got there, I got there quite the right time, everything was much more organised on both sides, you know our side had the better navigation

and you had these new boats and it would take a long time to get them to work properly cause these nice big diesels, they were the first the navy had, the only ones they had and they couldn’t get the….they had a lot of trouble with them but when I was there they went all right, everything went all right. And you know you’ve gotta, I was lucky and the weather wasn’t too

bad, most nights that I went.

Oh none of our side, oh there was one fellow we…they used to borrow MGB’s or ML’s from other flotillas and I think one night when they were landing in

Holland I think, yeah I think that’s where it was, a boat was lost, the crew were lost and the officer went to a prisoner of war camp for the duration. But the crew, I am told they killed them but I

don’t know.

Well, I never moved away from it, I came back on leave, then I went back there, with a posting back to that Flotilla to bring one of our boats out to the Pacific.

But the war was happening too quick with the atom bomb and that and we just never came to the Pacific. That’s all, that’s what we were….no, I was still very much a part of it, but I ….the war fortunately finished. I wouldn’t have been as happy out in the Pacific as I was in

….over there in France. When you had everyone trained and that it would be much more difficult out in the Pacific to do some of these things, they did them, some did them. So we didn’t. So I was, I was still……my posting when I came, when I left there to come home for a month’s leave,

my posting was back to the Flotilla again.

Well, I left there in December 44 and I came out with the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and their family and we arrived in Australia on Australia Day and by design, so that the Duke

could land on that day. And then we left, we must have left about February at home, some time in March I left to go back and I went back, via New Zealand, and while I was in New Zealand, President Roosevelt died and then we went on from New Zealand across the Pacific

through the Panama and then onto Bermuda and we anchored there and we went ashore there, that was VE Day. And I spent VE Day in the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club. So when I got back to England

I find that four days after VE Day, MGB 502 had hit a mine going to Sweden and all crew were lost except two and Mike Marshall was lost in that, so it was a very sad day. See 502, they’d been renumbered for the Pacific and that was 2002 and they had 2009 and 2003 I think, but anyway I was destined to take one of those to the Pacific, but I didn’t.

As Governor General. Coming out as Governor General. That’s why we landed at Malta on the way out, we came through the Med, the war was still on but we came through the Mediterranean and we landed at Malta, I suppose the Governor

General wanted to see the ….to pay his respects to the Maltese etc and then we pushed on out, out of the Med and around south of Tasmania somewhere and landed in Sydney on Australia Day. That was a very interesting trip too.

Oh just interesting. The Duchess of Gloucester was a fantastically nice person, she really was and I got to know her, got to know them a bit. And I met a few blokes, one I’d known before and known well and a couple of others, largely Naval Officers came out

just in case there was any problems. I think we were the only ones, I don’t think there were any Yeomans on that.

That’s what I worry about, see I said the Largs Bay we went over on but I’m not sure if it’s the Largs Bay we went back on with the Duke, I’m not sure,

I’m not too sure. But it was an interesting ship, we had a good time.

Oh he was all right, we didn’t get to know him as well as we got to know Lady Gloucester, I don’t think, I didn’t anyway. Oh no, they were …..they

met with us all and that sort of thing, they were very happy about it.

Oh well, no we were just there in case anything happened but I know when they were coming down towards the Mediterranean and that I spent a fair bit of time around the…around the bridge and

in case I could help with any signalling, of any signal coming you know, light signal coming through but I don’t think, I don’t remember that being a prescribed duty, whether I just did it.

Yeah

Oh well, there wasn’t much I could tell her. I couldn’t tell her we were landing in France or any of that business. Even then of course it wouldn’t have mattered, but I had to wait

for all that for a long time.

I didn’t try to until I got down to writing the story.

Oh a long time, I think the first was written about 1981 I think and it was…I sent that around to all of them and then a lot of information came back and it was rewritten in, I think 86 and added to in 87.

I had a lot of prints before it got to the final. But it’s been well worthwhile and I’ve enjoyed doing it.

You don’t quite realise the significance until after it’s finished either.

Now I realise you know what the difference it’s made to so many people. I know one of the wives of one of those that died when 502 went down four days after VE Day and his wife had heard about the book and she was so thrilled to get it.

She’d wondered all these years as to what her husband had been doing all the time. And another interesting thing, the RML I was on that was converted after the war and used in the Torbay as a boat taking visitors around and even as far as the Dart.

And when we went over there to unveil the plaque that was there in the Dart waiting for us to take us for a ride up the Dart and out to sea a bit and I get aboard and I see the sum mentioned 497 and I spoke to them and they said, “You’re the first ex

person from 497 that’s been on the ship,” it was a Western Lady Three it was called and so I had to go up on the bridge, and I was waving to everyone from the bridge and then a week or two or it may have been a month or so later a lady wrote to me and she hadn’t been on Western Lady Three that day

but she works on the Western Lady Three and she heard about it and she thought how wonderful it was, so it pays, it pays. Oh well everything, see the French and that they come together and at Dartmouth there’s been a lot of

getting the children of Kingsware, a sister school in France and things like that and they come over to the service we have on Armistice Day every year and I suppose their numbers are declining too, there’s not many of our people that go down there now. But it’s all because these things were written,

no one else would have done it, and that’s the fundamental significance of it and there’s no doubt that it’s been worthwhile doing it. See the first book, the big book I …..it’s in the Australian War Museum

and in the Imperial War Museum in London, so it’s there for history, that’s all. That’s why I’m interested, you take the trouble to come today I told about, talked about, a lot about all sorts of things but fundamentally it’s I’m so happy that some

recognition if you like, not even that word, some understanding of what a lot of people in Britain and Australia did and France did in this very important time in the war. And that’s as simple as that as far as I’m concerned.

Well, they were mainly Americans.

Mainly, mainly. No, no although they were just there and they were brought off and that’s it. But there was a fellow Henry Thompson, did write to one of the crew, one of our crew, and

he wrote about the night where some of the ….two of the boats that went ashore were lost but all the passengers and the crew were saved and that sort of thing, were picked up later and he writes about the Australian, Tassie, how great he was to get the boat back that he was on and that

sort of thing. So that’s the only letter I had that way. The other I get from through Ralph Pattern and the Escape Society booklets and that.

Oh I think you knew in that period before D Day, the American were doing a lot of operations close to the coast there and they were in a position where they could

if they came down, had a chance of getting away in some boat. Whereas Britain did a lot of theirs over Germany, a lot harder job, a lot harder job and no friends to help them there.

I think that’s why, because near the coast where they could get away by sea, I would say it was flooded with Americans

really. End of tape

Oh well, I couldn’t tell you exactly, I don’t know. It’s just something that we had and we had to make them available to the French, so that you a

had, so we could both talk on them, I couldn’t tell you any more. And the later operations at the place where we often came, they had S Phones that we could talk to them and they could tell us not to come in or it was all right to come, that sort of thing.

Yes, yes solely.

I would say so.

And anyway we weren’t to go out there to talk to anybody while we were out at sea. That was the only time we were interested in talking to people.

Yeah, well the period before D Day came down firstly, the, before December

a lot of the agents had landed by aeroplane and they would parachute in or they’d land in a field and drop the agents off but that was found by SOE that it wasn’t secure, that link. Because the fellow

who was operating it from the French side had been talking to the Germans, so that was cut out. So we were the only source of information to and from France for people to send out or to come out with in that period. So it was very important. We used to go,

I suppose the Flotilla altogether, well we certainly would do say two in the dark, every dark period and 503 who were working for M19 [British Intelligence] and largely on POWs [Prisoner of War] or airmen shot down and not taken up who were evaders, they used to operate

once or twice a month, they’d go a couple of times. They did about the same number of operations we did though we weren’t overworked in that respect but it was the agents themselves, they got all the service they needed. I don’t know if you’re interested in we ….I remember one night too, we took in a

man and his wife and one son, but it’s written in another book, it was a Belgium General who was in charge of the sort of what was to be the operation when they came back, went back. It was he and his wife and two children we brought out, I don’t know, it was unusual the one’s we brought out. But we

really did not get a chance, well, we weren’t supposed to do it anyway and they didn’t give us the chance to talk to them, they just, they were put in or brought out and we were just the ferry service. That’s one of the fellows, the signalman on our boat he said, “We’re just like a ferry service across to France,”

he said but I can’t imagine the skipper standing at the top of the step and collecting the money or the tickets.

Well that was the culmination of a

number of failures because of the ….largely because of the weather, once because…..well the first time we went to a beach and they had gone to a different one, the second they hadn’t, in their mind they hadn’t planned for us to go and the third night must have been weather I think,

and the fourth……in one of those early nights three boats went in and two were lost and one got back and the rest were left there and they were finally picked up on Christmas 1943. We left Christmas night, left Christmas Day and picked them up, the weather was perfect whereas the night before it had been a gale,

they’d gone and turned back. So it was ….this was a culmination of so many failures that for all sorts of reasons, bad communications, awful weather and this night it was….they all had their rum and that of a Christmas Day for lunch and they thought, “Here settle down for a good old sleep,”

when the message came through it was going to be good that night and they had to go out and go over to Brittany and pick them up and they did without any trouble and then they were very happy.

Well there were a lot of airmen. The first time there was, there were all airmen

and they brought 7 out, I think they were practically, I’d say all airmen, they’d been accumulating down there.

Oh generally in houses, where board and lodging was provided for free. Around some in Brest and some in places

near Brest and then when it looked like it was going to develop into a time when they thought we would be coming, they moved into a ….lived inside haystacks, which had been turned out, it was all right, it was quite comfortable in there and so that’s where. That was their general movements.

The big thing was all those people when they came down the, they, the people at the railway stations just made sure that they were picked up by the right people, and that there was no trouble that way.

Oh a couple of hours. We couldn’t get there; you see we

weren’t to get there, not supposed to get there until 2 hours after dark, so we left late enough just to get there. We were 2, 2 and a half but sometimes if the weather was bad if was not as ….that’s the optimum

a couple of hours. I think on the day Christmas time they were, I’m trying to think how big the distance is for that, but they were there and back in about, I thought 6 hours, it might have been 8, it could be 3 hours to go over and then you had to sort of anchor and then get the boat in the water

and row ashore and that would take a while.

Yeah and then come back. Yeah that was the operation at any rate.

Yeah

Well one hit, was smashed on the rocks, it was an awful storm and the other turned over I think but they had to sink it, they were all…there was no one lost, none of the crew and none of the airmen were lost. It was a satisfactory really in the ultimate but that was how bad it was

because in that….that particular beach was right facing directly to the Atlantic storms, it was really in my book an unsatisfactory beach to be landed at. That’s where the other Australian, Tassie Henry, that’s where Tassie, he did all those operations as a leading boat’s officer and he did a mighty job old Tassie.

And none of them were a failure as far as he was concerned, he completed them perfectly you know, he did all the right things but the weather was, just didn’t help him.

Worked with,

do you mean in France?

Oh no, I couldn’t say in particular, you see we, I really couldn’t tell you any of any particular characters, they were

all sizeable and natural sailors and all natural good, wonderful people and we all got on well together no matter which boat you were on. The officers got on well together and as I said yesterday the main character was our coxswain, who apparently was a character when he got ashore but

he was a tremendous coxswain for us.

Well, Peter Williams is the senior officer, he and I of course became great friends and have been ever since. He’d been to Oxford and he was a lawyer, and was a lawyer again after the war

and he was a very secure man you know, he was very clear in his mind and wonderful to work with, no problems with Peter at all, really good. I think I told you his father, I did, had

got the award for the New South Wales something or other for saving the French crew, they were in trouble off the New South Wales Coast. But he was very nice, very nice person, good person with a very nice with too.

Buckmaster.

No, I didn’t, I didn’t personally, no. But in the finish he lived near Peter, my CO and that’s how he got to look at a copy of my book, Peter showed it to him and that’s when he wrote the letter back about the book.

So, oh I think he was a pretty tough guy, I mean he knew what he was about and he just stuck to it and did it.

Yeah, that’s right.

I’m trying to think did we bring her out or put her in? But she was a very notable agent and she’d been in there, and she was the one where they all used to …all the agents at some time or other found their way in her kitchen having a cup of tea and having a talking but then I think she became

too, too obvious and they thought, “Well, she shouldn’t stop there any longer, the Americans would be, the Germans would be on to her,” so she was brought out and they would send her back in that same capacity but she studied then to be a telegraphist

and we were taking her back as a telegraphist, we, she’s an invisible person really, she doesn’t meet people as such. So that was Virginia Hall, she’s a, they called her that American bitch, but I think in fact she’s a Canadian woman.

The Germans. They would do anything to get

their hands on that American Bitch, they said, that’s the translation that I know from the Germans.

Oh well, she would be working with SOE in a similar, in a role where …sending the messages and getting the messages they had the telegraphist did all these places,

very important. Oh yeah they, the one at oh, at one of the beaches I think where they had the storms, that was very satisfactory that December Operation, that Christmas operation but the Germans

immediately clamped down on the French people, they’d found out somehow or other and the telegraphist, he was deported and he died while he was deported the other two were sort of operating, they were both caught and sent to, into Germany to one of the

camps and the two came back and they were all right. And one of the fellows from that same beach he was one of the houses, that used to house some of the Americans and that, he was a Doctor and he was caught

and I think now that, I think he was released, I don’t think they kept him in prison for long, I just remember a bit vague now but he was Doctor Monier, so it was a mixture of everyone that looked after the people.

Oh well, it was quite clear that they could be deported and sent to Dachau or something like that, that’s where they were, a lot of them went and one that was caught he was tortured in front of the people and then he was put into Dachau

and he died, so it was pretty tough if they were caught. I don’t know what would have happened to the families, there’s now doubt that the whole lot were in danger, so that’s why the children, it was very hard for them they had to ‘mouths closed’ when they had someone in the house. They wouldn’t have got the full story but they,

you know in children when somebody comes to your house and stops there, they’re inquisitive enough to want to find out who it is, aren’t they? And certainly talk to other kids that they had someone stopping with them. Whether it’s their aunt or whether it was an agent. But she was regarded, I’ve read in one of the books,

regarded as the top agent in France before she came out, Virginia Hall. She came, I think she came out probably through Spain, but we put her back in.

Oh no, I think probably

no, I think we always had to wear some sort of ….part of the uniform, so they couldn’t say we were spies. Your wore a tracksuit or tracksuit top with your rank on it, but you didn’t, you didn’t wear a cap, I never

wore a cap, some did I suppose you’re supposed to but I didn’t as far as I know.

No, no, no, no we were there to go in and get them out and that was it. We weren’t to,

we weren’t rear guard or fighting at all as far as we could. We never used the guns.

Well I’ve only…don’t know much more than what’s in the book really but

the were really savage missions, the weather was so bad and they were very fortunate you know that they were able to get in and out as they did and to carry, for a start to carry a few hundred gallons of fuel on their decks, it was a pretty dangerous thing to do, but they were lucky that they didn’t hit a

mine. They did see one once, they might have seen two floating mines, that’s what makes me wonder about 502, they would have been warned about floating mines and they could have had their radar on or something. I’m surprise that they did hit one. I’m sure there was nothing they could have done because Mike Marshall was an outstanding man.

But they did a mighty job and right up as I said before right up to VE Day they were still… well it was within a month of VE Day, anyway it might have been closer to it, they were still operating and taking things into Norway, cause the Germans were still there till the end, till the war was over and they came back.

But very rough weather and very cold. It was the roughness of the weather that was their biggest obstacle. They used to go from Aberdeen. No, I don’t know, there’s not much more except that they were regarded as the norm.

I guess they did half a dozen to eight operations across putting in people and bringing them out, but largely putting them in into Norway, I think. But they had to be very careful of the beach they chose because of the

conditions of the wave breaking. You know, but they, they’re very proud of what they did up there 718, I’m proud of what they did too.

Well, they were going over,

they were taking some merchant officers, merchant services officers to Sweden. During the war there were these officers, the Merchant Service they operated between Sweden and England bringing back ball bearings and they had a

ship which they regarded as a store ship over there in Sweden and as soon as the war finished they wanted to go over and everyone wanted to thank the Swedes for what they’d done and to bring this store ship back. So that was the purpose of going just after VE Day, they waited till VE Day before they could do it.

And as soon as they got organised they went. And that’s why they were going and unfortunately didn’t make it; hit a floating mine when they were off Norway in the Skagerrak very sad. Of course 502 had a crew that was

a mixture of the various Gun Boats of the Flotilla, of those that…. people that wanted to go, prepared to go to the Pacific and so they were all up there preparing to go to the Pacific and so it was a mixture of, from all of our Flotilla, the old Flotilla

is a mixture of 502, it’s a great shame. Unbelievable that was, probably the last tragedy at sea of the war, I think that one. In the European war.

Well there were two survivors, three at the start but one, threw himself off the raft after drinking salt water and things like that and the other two just…… I think they just, I’m not sure if they got information from those people or

…. I think it must have been after they were picked up. They were picked up after 4 days I think, yeah on this raft and one lost legs, they all lost their toes and one lost a part of his leg, the two that were saved.

From

Well, it’s equivalent to a sort of frostbite, I forget what you call it. Yes, from being in the water and being cold, very cold water and couldn’t get out of it, yeah. The one that I knew very well he

was a remarkable man afterwards, really great. He’s loved by everybody and he could.

Hey?

They couldn’t do anything about him; they were too weak to help him.

Yeah, he just couldn’t take it, and after about 3 days he’d had it and then he just slipped off the raft and they were too weak to try and stop him. A very sad experience that. Pleased that

a Norwegian ship picked them up and they went to hospital there, you see at that time I wasn’t in France, I was on my way back and I wasn’t in Europe, I was on my way back from Australia and I’m not sure when they found out that they hit a floating mine,

But I assume that’s all it could have been, but they might have known….they got the story afterwards from these two fellows that where they’d hit something and it had blown up all the forward part of the ship and the bridge and one of these were certainly in the engine room and he came up after that sound after the noise. I think they’re the ones

that probably told them that it was a floating mine.

Oh, offhand I can’t tell you.

Oh no.

No David, David died after the war, he died after

the war.

Not for that, no.

No, no David was the one who was always seasick, so I don’t think he would have journeyed up to Norway. No, David he died, I don’t know, 15

years after the war finished I suppose. His wife Judy Birken, last year even, she was still acting on the stage and his daughter, Jane Birken was a leading actress in Paris, so David’s been tied up with the stage for a long time.

He was a navigator,

yeah. He was one of the three navigators that we had and he lived in London and I suppose the other lived somewhere but not down in Dartmouth.

Well the operations were only once a month, well they did two or three a month, over that period, they’d lived down there on Westward Hoe in those times but

oh well, I think again it’s a matter of convenience for them to be up where they were you know where they live, like for David in London and well, it was free from all people around asking questions in Dartmouth.

Oh comfortable,

they had cabins on there and it was pretty big, they did all right the people there, there was a crew for the Westward Hoe and they were quite comfortable. Oh if we were having a…..anyone having a big party for instance

they would have it onboard Westward Hoe. A bit different when I was with Mick Marshall at Great Yarmouth. After he had an operation, the skippers would get together, always in our 607 wardroom and it’s a wonder I didn’t die

from smoke, cancer - the air was full of it. They used to count the number of drops left in a bottle, I think they got 60 once. But Mike was very popular, you see he was in English Ruggers International and he’d been as a

…he’d played for Oxford and he said, “They gave him his degree just to get rid of him,” but he was a very smart fellow really. Mike went to Giggleswich School, I don’t know if you know it but it’s up, oh in Yorkshire I think he’d say and his family

lived in near Newcastle.

We’ve got the one, there’s some in France. And the one they had erected in Dartmouth, which

I was responsible for having erected. I didn’t pay for it but it was my idea, we should have one and that what eventually happened. Just to honour the Flotilla and the to the, honour the French who used to…who were so important to us and

to remember the airmen and that and our passengers. No, it was a good Flotilla, good, good monument.

Oh it’s over there, it’s I don’t know, “To honour the men of the 15th Motor Gun Boat Flotilla who

with the assistance of French Resistance carried out operations to France to carry agents

or bring out airmen, who were the brave agents and airmen, who were evading from France,” something like that.

I wrote the words, oh yes, I was the one that said we should have……we were

going over to a memorial that the American Airforces had…..it was there, they were organising this fiftieth, it was 1994, 50th Anniversary of D Day and they were going over and we went over to it and then on

the way there or back I said to Sir Brooke Richards and Peter Williams, our Senior Officer, who I was travelling with that we should have a memorial at Dartmouth, but they weren’t very enthusiastic, and a couple of months after,

I’d got back home and I had a call or a letter, saying yes, they would like to proceed with that idea and would I tell them what should be on the plaque and where it should be. So that’s how it came about.

Well, we definitely knew of course that the things that SOE were doing, see they were doing bombing, getting people to bomb the stations to

stop the railway service and that sort of thing and that didn’t suit the SIS at all. They wanted things to be going peacefully, so they could do what they wanted to do but this, we knew that was necessary and no great love between them.

I know, I know.

Well, each had different

beaches; they never came out from our beach.

They were separate beaches. They may have gone from Bonaparte beach with the airmen coming out but SOE beach, which was the one we generally operate, 502,

there was no SIS from that beach. So they went from one of the other beaches I guess.

Oh yes, there was no one else doing it, yeah.

Yeah. Well, all of these had their own sort of organisations over there

to attract people and to look after people and yeah for organisation over there as well as they operated from, so a bit of politics entered over there as well.

No, I don’t think so at all, not in my time. Whether that was a

part of why things were a bit upsetting earlier on I don’t know but no, it wasn’t, it didn’t, it didn’t upset us when we were doing all these operations. But we know it must have…we knew of the impact of what SOE, what the job was, we knew that and we knew that that would be contrary to SIS

and it was, by down what you read afterwards it sort of it was.

Oh yeah, yes

I think we’d been to Treegey River and

we were waiting for an agent in there and there’s a story about that later, but he didn’t turn up and this battle was raging outside between these destroyers and some German equivalents and we

could see that we were in the middle of it. We were there and someone on the shore would see us because the flashing lights that were coming from this battle, it was pretty close into shore, that we would be seen, so we thought we’d have to go, so we did go and then eventually we went in between the ships that were fighting. We just

came out through there and came back. And they just, I don’t know what they took us for, they had one shot us, by one of Canadian craft or whatever they were, I think they were Canadian and anyway we got through and came home. But that was….they’re the difficult

things that do happen. Though normally we would have been warned that the destroyers would have been in that area, because we didn’t go until the SIS in that area in England, till he said we could go and that took account of operations that were to

proceed in the area, but this battle could have been coming up the coast for quite a long way. And they were battling on. There was one of the German ships was going down. One of our fellows wrote about it, Alf Harris and

I think we wrote or I wrote or he wrote to the fellow that had written something about it, about how there was a gun on as it was going down. There was one German gunner, a lone gunner firing a gun from the German ship and he said, “Yes there was,” he couldn’t get over

the ….how good our fellow was in spotting what he did. He had more information than they had from the destroyer, that was very interesting. But it was a big night.

It so happens we think, or Brooke Richards thinks, the night before that he thinks, the one we expected was picked up with his sister in Paris and killed, I think.

That’s why he wasn’t there at the station to come down, that’s what Brooke had written in his book. But yes it was….they’re not the sort of things you look forward to those battles going on all around you and that was up a river, the Treegey River.

I don’t think, I don’t …..I think you take everything as it comes you know. I don’t think…it was something one talked about between yourselves but there was nothing,

it was just something that you wouldn’t want to happen again, that’s all, and nothing more than that either. We didn’t go into any drinking parties and that sort thing.

No, generally used to go down, spend a lot of, did many visits down to

the Helford River and do practice surf landing in the surf down there in Cornwall. That would be, I don’t know almost, not every month, but quite frequently. I went down about 3 times in the 5 months and another interesting thing about going down to the

Helford River, there were two brother down there, Warrington-Smythes they were, they were SOE fellows down there and to the fellow Dakus Smythe here in Melbourne and he told me they are, they were cousins. So it’s a small world, isn’t it? See Dakus is a Commodore, a retired Commodore

in our navy. But oh well, I don’t know what really, you know what we did, it was pretty comfortable, we used to go ashore a lot of nights, a lot of nights.

And I know there was a couple of us, a South African I think, Dusty Miller it was and I used to go and a couple of RANs [Royal Australian Navy], that had been boats officers and that, we used to go to the Ranry Hill Pasture and we’d pick them up and we’d walk around through the Devon coast and go out and get a

I don’t know if it’s a Devon drink or not, a cider. We’d go out and have a cider and then walk back. We did that frequently. And also down on the coast there, when I’ve been back I can’t quite see where the pools were, but there was a pool there and we used to go down there and have a bit of a swim. And I used to play, I didn’t get around to playing a match, I don’t think cause when the war came

or when D Day, when that area the last few weeks, I used to play cricket down at the Dartmouth Cricket Club, you know I used to practise with them. So there were things to do. You know I didn’t find too much trouble filling them in actually with a bit of exercise and that sort of thing.

Oh it is in coastal waters, yes.

Well all the time, you’d see there are tidal charts to show what the normal tide would be with certain phases of the moon and that sort of thing. So you would certainly study those before you went out, the tides always and you’d seeing the weather forecasts to see what the wind might do and that. So they were the things that were that, affected your navigation from being a straight thing

it was, what would happen to the tides and what was happening to the wind. Like we used to go out there and sit and then we’d float with the tide down or up and then we’d start up and come back to our original position. So that’s why in waters close around England, that was the

main thing in the navigation and knowledge and knowledge of the area, particularly where the sand banks were and that sort of thing out in the North Sea.

I nearly made one big one but it was a time, there was a terrific fog everywhere and everyone stopped in their position

and I wasn’t with 607, then I’d moved to be with the Senior Officer of this other Flotilla and we were out and I said we could get back, so he trusted me and as we come around 4 buoy and we were coming in and the first thing we saw was the

jetty there and the little beach there and we were heading for the beach, so we at least didn’t do any damage, so we got in, so we had the few days at home, whereas the rest of them were left out at sea for a few days. So whether it was a mistake or not, my judgment was pretty close but it was …..it could have been a few yards that were dangerous. I suppose it’s a lesson you learn but I never had time, I never had another experience

to test it out, what I’d do. And there were. …with radar you could pick up things on the shore and we had radar there to pick up, we knew there were a few things you could home on and that all helped. That was very important. It was things like that that you, where you could radar in on and know the tides and the wind that

was the sort of thing that was the strength of it. And of course when you’re over off the Dutch coast or something like that and going around, it’s a matter of just keeping your eye on the, on what the directions you were turning on and going on, so you could try and write it down and work out where you were. But generally it was the tide and the

winds and the radar on the spots ashore in England. But determine you know the normal features that you had to be well aware of.

Well, we didn’t get any.

We didn’t get any from the continent.

No. no oh, no no, that was well, see largely at that time we could get the

signals that were coming out for the air force and we could …we used those, our navigators used those, they were frightfully important, just listen to them, like a radar, they were good, helped a lot. They’re the

things that were available in this 6 months that weren’t so available in the earlier years when they were struggling over there.

Had radar, yeah. We used to use the radar on certain things on the coast, high spots. Can’t tell you exactly what they were but there were some there and that’s what we definitely used.

No, No, it could have been just a chimney or anything, but I don’t remember any chimneys round there particularly but there was something there we used to be able to home on or use as a guide.

VE Day itself? For VE Day our Flotilla was sitting in the harbour at Dartmouth, very difficult. There was a role for us, I think around the Channel Isles, I think it was to be. If the,

the landings had been a failure we had to go in to a certain place to try to pick out the airmen that had flown in..

D Day, yeah. See our job was done by then as far as bringing anyone in or out but we, the crew were pretty unhappy about sitting there in Harwell while all this was happening

and see all the ships leaving Dartmouth harbour to go in. But our job, I understand was to….we were on standby in case we were needed, if it was a failure landing and I think largely to bring the airmen out from the Channel Isles or something like that. How they can get to the Channel Isles, I’m not sure.

Something like that is my understanding but I don’t know. They didn’t tell you everything, only when it was going to happen. Yes, that was D Day. And after that we did a few operations into Bonaparte Beach near Poitou, where we used to bring out the airmen.

Brought out a couple people from there. It was still in the German controlled area in the few weeks after D Day, this part of Brittany was still controlled, all of Brittany probably. And we went in there a few times then but on D Day itself, we sat in Dartmouth harbour.

Yeah, no walking, no tennis, no cricket, no nothing for you know, just standing by.

On my way back to England, VE Day?

Yeah VE day, I was on my way back and we were in Bermuda and I spent VE Day actually in the Royal Hampton Yacht Club, I spent the day there. So I was in a good situation and then we proceeded onto England.

Oh well, you were glad it was over, but you were sorry you weren’t over in England to enjoy it, I suppose, oh yeah. I think things, we deserved it, we deserved something good.

No, no, even before I came out in September I’d left 502, I think they might have even as earlier as that gone up and started to get ready for the Pacific. But I’d taken over

command of 318 because the skipper of 318 have taken over 502 from Peter Williams who said, “Well, he’d finished with the seagoing, he’d be in the London office after that,” so I was in command of 318 and I used to do a regular run across to

France anyway just to sort of, still might have been a few agents around but even carrying special mail and things like that. Unfortunately, I had one trip up to deliver something in Paris, so I saw Paris not long after the deliberation of Paris, you know I was happy with that.

Oh well, we got a calm and we went up,

it’s interesting another fellow from 318, he didn’t much remember that I was on 318 at all really, I was there for such a short time, I suppose but I went up there and took one rating, I don’t know if we hired the car and he drove or he came up with me

and afterwards, when we were talking about my being onboard on 318. “Oh,” he said I can remember it well and he recalled the day and he recalled the things he’d got from various theatres and the pamphlets and that sort of thing and he said, “I’ve got copies of them all.”

So we went up there just for a day trip and back. And it was a very interesting run. It was nice to be in Paris when it was a, so close to the deliberation too. That would be about, I suppose October because I left England in December 44

to come back here on leave, 6 weeks’ leave and that’s when the Duke of Gloucester and the Lady Gloucester, Duchess of Gloucester were on the ship and we were on the ship with them really. And we came into Australia on Australia Day 45 and then I had my leave and

went back to England again and on the way back VE Day happened at Bermuda, that’s how it happened.

Oh well, I just went to see what was happening to the Flotilla and what they wanted me to do and I’m trying to think when,

I think it was still when I was at Dartmouth, they sent me up, sent me down to out of Dartmouth, they sent me down to look at the trials of the new explosives being that was down at, on the Thames,

I always forget, but eventually it comes back. A place right on the Thames where they, something on Thames where they had a gunnery range, anyway it’s down there and we went tram car to take us out to where we’d watch it, it was full, I was a lieutenant and there were admirals galore and

captains in the, in it and a gun went off and all the windows of the tramcar, all the glass spattered. I don’t know what went wrong; I think I was still at Dartmouth then, that was to test a new explosive and then RDX [Royal Demolition Explosive], I think, and then we eventually, it just so happened that

we opened a new factory up when I was in Department of Munitions, we opened a new factory up at Mulwala to make this explosive. So I’d seen the start of it, or experienced it, not see, experienced it, I did see a lot yeah. Oh, that’s changed the subject a bit.

I have a feeling I read it in a newspaper, but they would of told me when I got back and made contact that he’d died. That Mike and the crew had gone and the ship had gone and how it went. But I think I saw something in the newspaper when I got back to England.

Oh awful, I still haven’t recovered

from that.

Yes I was, I’m still pretty, very close to his wife too.

Oh well, see we were together at Great Yarmouth and you know a lot of trust developed between us but in Great Yarmouth so many boats,

Flotillas there that the CO’s went and they did their….went off together and the first lieutenants and navigators used to go somewhere else or do what they wanted together, so it was just the trust and that we developed on 607, not social contact except I did meet Stella and her daughter once

or twice or a few times when she came down. But then he suggested that I should be come join the 15th Flotilla and they just drafted me down there and when you’re down there, there were only a few officers, so Mike and I used to go out

together quite a bit. Particularly when the American, they had an American Flotilla at PT about three I think they were, they’d come over and they used to tie up with us. They were to do similar work and one of those, skipper of one of those and Mike and I used to go out in Dartmouth over to Torquay

and that sort of thing, for once or twice a week, once a week I suppose and go ashore together occasionally into the pub in Dartmouth. So it developed over that period. And then of course my daughter’s seen Stella a few times and Stella just loves Susan. Oh Stella and I are very close friends.

In fact she’s in a nursing home at the moment and my daughter went to see her last year. And Stella, we knew Stella would like to go out and where she could get a whiskey, cause she can’t get one in the nursing home. So Susan organised all that and then she went there, and they went out and she’d organised it in a pub down there.

So she went out with Stella and they had a good day out and then she left there and went down to see Commander Davis’s wife and family and stopped with one of her daughters when she was down there near Portland somewhere or Hamilton somewhere, near the New Forest somewhere. But that was….oh yeah very close

with the family.

No, no, I haven’t. I had a, you know few good

neighbours that have been friendly. Quite very friendly with and it was good. But Mike is the only really long-standing friend, there’s a mate of mine who did our university course together and things like that, we used to play golf together and he rang me from Canberra the other day to see how things were. We’re still in contact, so I’m pretty close with

him and his wife. But no, there’s something special with Mike and Stella and their children.

Not a particular way. I’d say it’s been, something’s been with me ever since. You know

I think being so friendly with Stella and her need of us that has been very, all related to Mike, no that’s about it I think. But Peter Williams who was the CO, SO [Senior Officer] of the Flotilla and my CO of 502 we were very close with he and his family.

His wife has just died recently but my daughter called last year to see Peter down there and his daughter. We’re pretty close relationships in that Flotilla.

Some of the ratings and some of their widows still write to me and my trouble is I don’t get time to write now and I’ve got to write, put off things. Last Christmas you see, I got a lot of cards and I didn’t reply to them. I was in ….I broke my collarbone in October and then that stopped me writing with my right hand and that’s when I

normally get my mail to England out done. And then I had another thing in hospital with the skins grafts on my leg and arm and I was on my back for a fortnight in December. So you know I haven’t had …it’s really…I haven’t really recovered from that fortnight in bed, I don’t think. Anyway, I’m pretty good.

But I don’t go out now; I’m not doing enough gardening. We’ll have to see.

We were there until November, we left I think. After a while, I’m trying to think

if I did anything for the Intelligence Group, I probably didn’t. I spend most of my time, we were at a place up in the ‘Crossry Hall’ up near Penrith and we stopped up there for quite a few months,

that was wonderful. Playing croquet on the lawn and playing tennis in the district all around, yeah. I’d met some people during the war as well in Penrith and I went and renewed association with them too. I still keep that association

up with the two of them. So that was largely spent on….I spent a lot of time at the Lincoln Arms in Broadway, which was where I used to spend a lot of time, a lot of time at the Lincoln. Don Russel’s a fantastic guy.

And then I went to the Palace to get my decoration on June, June the 20th, I think it might have been and VJ [Victory over Japan] Day was

August, wasn’t it?

Yeah, I think we must have gone in June when we got back, I went to the Palace and Don came as my guest and in that book there I’ve got a copy of a letter he wrote to my wife about this day at the Palace about who was there and

how wonderful it was to be there and they were in the front row and I think he knew Lord Clarington, he used to help organise what happens at these occasions and he said he got there early, so that’s why they got the good seats, but I’m not sure that would be everything, but he writes a letter about the Indian chap, he was first across and he got a VC [Victoria Cross],

and he talks about the admirals getting knighted and tapped on the shoulder and that sort of thing and they you know the great occasion when I go up and the King talks to me and then where we went after the occasion and so it’s all recorded in that, in one of my story books there. So that was a part of what happened after I got back

to England. But the first part was getting organised to go to the Palace.

Yes

No, no, he just sort of said, “Congratulations,” or something like that I think.

When I was back here in Australia on leave they sent a telegram out to say

“The award of DSC to me had been published.”

I suppose so, family, yeah. Oh we’re still very happy about it I think, yeah.

Yeah well, see at that time I was still due to go back to take a ship to the Pacific, that was….I was posted back and that’s what I was suppose to do. A mate of mine, he’d come back a week, a year, a month before me

and he went back and he did a mine sweeping course and he was mine sweeping around England around France, so there were those sort of things going for even as late as that for someone to go back. But when I went back there was the plans

for me, I was….when I left I had…it was quite clear I had an appointment back here, back in England to go out with the…what was originally the 15th Flotilla to go out in that Flotilla to the Pacific. And of course the atom bomb and that changed that.

But that’s why I wondering what I was doing before August but I think they must have appreciated that something like this was on because I never went up to Scotland where they were getting ready to go.

Oh well we just …your name was on the list with thousands of airmen and to come back and we came back in the Aquitania and we got back about November, November sometime I think. Around that time, we might have left England then.

Anyway, we were demobbed in February 46, so I don’t know how long. The end of the ‘45, anyway we were on the Aquitania coming back. Oh we were lucky then, there was actually seven of us in the cabin for two but that was all right, they managed that and one was on a bed in the centre of the floor.

But you’d go down where the airmen were down in the hold, there were hundreds of them, so we were fortunate. You’ve always got to count your blessing, don’t you, yeah? Oh no, we were, we managed all right and then we came out to Cape Town and the officer,

OC [Officer Commanding] troops on the ship, he didn’t want us to go ashore, he said, “Oh no, the weather’s too bad,” and then everything, the wind dropped and everything. So when the water boat came on, a lot of people got onboard the Water Boat and landed in Cape Town and then came back with a Water Boat or something later. Well there were a few naval fellows like me who also joined in that operation, but we were back safely

and had a few hours in Cape Town. Then we must have come into Perth and my wife had a baby in October, so I got ashore to give her a ring, a lot of them had to stop on the ship, they were frightened they’d get off and they’d

never get them back on in time to carry on, on schedule I suppose. Anyway, we went around to Sydney and came home from there. I suppose we…I’m not sure when we got home, I don’t remember….we wouldn’t have had Christmas on the Aquatania, so we must have been home before that, I’d say November.

I went straight back to the Department of Munitions in February and then in March I resumed my university studies for the next three years, part time, so that’s 46,

47, 48. Then in December 48, I went back to England for a year with my wife and son to see what they were doing in the Ministry of Supply about the what factories that were keeping, what they were doing about closing down and liquidation of plants and this sort of thing. And I went over into Germany to see any reparations that were….there wasn’t much, we

didn’t go for many reparations this time. But I think I mentioned yesterday that the one place I remember well was going to a place where they were just waiting for someone to come and take out their old plant because they had waiting at the other end, a brand new American plant under Marshall Aid to install so. In Germany and that when I, I think

that was possibly the first time I’d saw Hamburg and that was shattered and that was really shattered, that was dreadful. And then back, I would have gone to Paris and then you sort of ….even there for a day or two, I had the name of one fellow who used to be down at in

Brittany who lived in Paris and through him eventually I got the names of the people down at Paris when I went back there later we…I could renew the contacts. So that’s what happened after the war and then from then I stopped in Munitions and Supply as it was

and they joined. I was with them for, until 69 I’d worked up and I was then Deputy Secretary of the Department and by that time I’d be over to France and negotiated the contract with DASO for the Mirage aeroplanes that we’d bought or were buying.

Well, I went first over with Air Marshall Schrader. Schrader had a team of six – one on airframes, one on aircrafts, himself, two pilots and me. I was to do the contracting side of it, what price and that we should pay, the others were to seeing what sort, which sort of aircrafts were the best

one to buy and either one was determining the terms on which we would buy. And so anyway, when we first went over there that should be when, 56, I think, anyway when we went to France the head of

DASO said, “I suppose any of you have been here before to France,” and I just mentioned you know, “Yeah, I had been but it wouldn’t be shown on the records.” So he was interested, how it had happened, what was I doing for that to happened, was I in the force that had landed after D Day or was I working before D Day

etc. So I told him the story and after that you’ve no idea the trust that existed between the French people at DASO and the Australian people that were negotiating the contracts, when I had to go over and negotiate, it was terrific. It’s one of those things, one of the offshoots of the wartime operations.

Oh the Mirages, they’ve been….it was a very successful buy too. Very successful.

Oh no, no. Well, I was back with the wife and a new child and I suppose I was not much different from other people that just had a child I guess. No, I don’t think there was anything like that, I think I was happy to be back and was then busy trying

to set up where we were going to live. Fortunately I had bought this block of land at East Ivanhoe and I think for about £360 I think, which would now be worth a couple of hundred thousand for that block but eventually we built on it. But that was after we lived with my parents until

till after we’d been to England in……no, we didn’t, no we lived there when we came back from England I think or we had lived in the house, which that Gwen and her father were living in, I’d lived there when we first got married.

And they lived there for I suppose for the rest of the war. Yes, they were because we, I came back, that’s where we lived. And then eventually we went and lived in East Ivanhoe and I kept moving up the scale and had a successful career in supply,

most enjoyable, they were wonderful people, quite terrific. The thing was there, they knew, right from the start, that I was one they selected to go to England because they knew I was the quality to become a permanent head really and

that apparently proved the case in the long term, I didn’t get Permanent Head of Supply, although I wont comment on that. But I then got the job in National Development, which was a tremendous job to get.

Of National Development? I went

there about 3 weeks after the men landed on the moon. That’s what I check it by. So I went there July 69 and I stopped there 69, 70, 71 till the election 72 and that’s when Gough Whitlam got power and National Development split several ways. But it was interesting when I saw

how they intended to split the Department, I saw Gough one night, I went and saw him in his office in Parliament House about 11 o’clock and I talked to him and I said, “Look, I think what you’re doing is a big mistake, to split it the way you are,” and he listened to what I said, etcetera and he said, “Yeah … in any case,” he said, “I’m sure we’ll proceed the way

we had intended,” and then a year later in fact they turn, they followed what I said, it came into force then. That hadn’t been a sensible thing to do. But old Goughy, they appointed me to Tourism and Recreation, which was looking after sport and tourism.

We did a lot of time then in bringing coaches out and getting coaches in and paying for coaches of all the sports and building basketball courts in school grounds and things like that where the people could use it and the kids could use it.

So, it was a very successful period in Tourism and Recreation, I wasn’t ….it was a bit of a knock down for me after a Department, which is possibly the most important in the country at that time, cause all the Mineral and Energy and Water Resources, we were responsible for doing something about them.

To come down to Tourism and Recreation, that was a bit of a blow but eventually it turned out to be quite interesting with the things we did.

At, when National Development?

Oh yeah.

Oh, it was very good, yeah, it was interesting. We did a lot for sport

No. I wasn’t Labor orientated at all, but Gough and I got on extremely well. I got to know the Prime Minister better than any other Prime Minister.

I think Gough if he’d been with the other party might have been a much further longstanding, I think he was a man of great ability really, old Gough, but I don’t think he could handle the forces within the Labor Party too well, that’s what I thought with Gough. I don’t know. I don’t know. I shouldn’t say that on the records.

Be he, I don’t know, I liked old Gough.

I’m not sure if it was the Fraser government or not. I’m not sure when Fraser took over. Yeah I went and was given Immigration. Immigration and Ethnic Affairs and see that…I had to re-establish that, that had been down in

Labour and National Service, that’s where Immigration was put, so it was very….Immigration related entirely to labour requirements. Well they put this new Department and we had to …it became Immigration and I got population included into it and it was a very hard job but we did quite a bit on

population. We produced a book on it, I can’t find my copy of it.

69 to 72, 72 to …did Gough go through to 75, he must have. This would be 76 and 77, I was Immigration,

I left, I retired in 77. It was hard work though, it never stops. I remember getting a Christmas card from some chap and he said, “I wish you a happy Christmas, I wish I could wish to my family in

Saudi Arabia,” or somewhere. And then at one time we had a policeman stationed in the garage, so they were…they haven’t been easy times for a long time.

I don’t remember, it must have been someone

sent something, provocative letter or something, I don’t know. I don’t know. They were there for long; I don’t know four days to a week, I don’t know.

That was in Munitions and Supply. Well that was a tremendous thing too of course.

See in supply I was on the Board of Research or for Munitions on the Board of Factories for Research and Development and I don’t know if that involved the Woomera Rocket Range or not but there might be some other boards for that. I think there’d be the same board and so I had a lot to do

…..I knew a lot about Woomera and their first part in Australia was to get help from Woomera to trace to track one of their first aircraft etc, base craft. And then they came out here,

it was after the John Glenn flight and they came out to thank us for what happened on that trip. They asked John, and he was the secretary of my department and I was deputy secretary, “If I could be made available to head all their activities, space activities in Australia, man in space?” Which I did and after that

the new stations that we built up at Carnarvon and in Canberra, three stations around Canberra for various things, one up in Brisbane or out near Toowoomba and then the manning of the tracking and communications facilities. So it was a big thing and I used to be always over in America. And they were often here

and I met some of the astronauts, out here, when they were out here. And I got to know some of them quite well, the early ones. And spent a lot of time over there and had the invitation from the Vice President to be there for the firing to the moon, which I did and I went with the Minister and

then we came back and when we came back I was out at Honeysuckle Creek, our manned Space Station at Canberra to see the….when they were around the moon and when they landed on the moon, I was out there. And after that,

three days after that, that’s when I became head of Department for National Development. It was a wonderful experience in the space business. Oh yeah, they all appreciated what the Australians had done for them, someone they could rely on implicitly and they were very happy with us. Well, we had to build houses for them at Carnarvon and

at the same time there’s a condition of how building some there, we had to build for the Aborigines on the other side of Carnarvon and it was and in Canberra we had to get some roads built to lead out to the new stations, it was a big job. You know but

bearable of course, it was bearable. I had a few people help me to do, one in particular who took over a lot of those general activities of a foreman, but I had a thoroughly wonderful time and it was good. Whereas you can see from the pictures on the wall next door that

I got some fabulous photographs of the astronauts.

Well in Canberra, no. I was in the RSL here before I went to Canberra and I’m still a member of that Ivanhoe RSL. I had been all those years and still am and when I

was at, in Templestowe I was also a member of the Doncaster, second member of the Doncaster RSL. I used to love their early morning on Anzac Day, it was fantastic I used to love going to that. So that was my….I never got close…I never …I haven’t got into helping them out in anything

just being a member.

Oh well, it was just around the Doncaster RSL they had their memorial stone etc and they had anyone who could, who wished had put all their little crosses with names of people on it

around it. And it was just all done very nicely. And they used to have someone to play the Last Post, like that and breakfast afterwards, they did breakfast afterwards. But it was all very nice and then I don’t know if I stop for breakfast, I might have, because coming home along Doncaster Road I could see

behind in the rear vision mirror etc, I could see the sun rising over the mountains, it was all very happy day. In that situation it was very nicely done, impressive, yeah.

No. I’m trying to think, I had more to do than here early on, I’m trying to think why, I don’t know. I might have been trying to

talk about somebody but I think I was pretty regular down there. The fellow was a doctor down there then. No. I don’t know. No, I didn’t have a lot to do with them.

I was proud to be in the Australian navy but under the way, what we, the conditions that, on the one we,

what suited us was the one to go and be on Coastal Force craft and be attached to the Royal Navy and then if we got a commission, well then if we had 3 months at sea we did an Officers Training Course, that was an established routine, you know that was so, that’s why we really took that.

Oh, I was happy we did too.

No. No. Not the life I would want. I enjoyed what I had in the navy; no, I didn’t contemplate to stay on,

quite the contrary. I had an established, something established before me waiting for me, again if I was good enough. It’s no doubt the hours I worked in munitions in 39, 40 when I was there, like I said yesterday were fantastic. And I think they all knew that

there was someone that trustworthy and pretty, worked pretty damn hard, so you know, well known by them all, those that make the decisions in the department, so I think it was quite clear that I was destined to be as I said before to be a Permanent Head.

Yes it did I think, yes it did. It was just another addition to what I’d already started to establish with the confidence they had in me, yes undoubtedly it did, but I can’t be sure it did. I really do believe it did.

No, only of course a lot of the things we did in Supply and Munitions, we had a security officer in the department but you know, I knew all about top secret and secret and the rest of it, which I had to observe in certain things.

But that’s all; no I had no interest to further my knowledge of, in that area, no.

No. no. Well it wasn’t such a big deal then, was it?

Yeah but more in latter times than earlier times.

It was my two daughters in law that sort of said that I should write things down, so I must have said something. But that started me to write so, no, but later on these things are becoming…people are saying more and people are, want to know more.

I think that some of the grandchildren and that, I think they, now I think people want to know a lot more than they did. I get surprised but I think they are.

Well, it wasn’t a matter of taking a decision I suppose,

it just flowed that way. You always have enough to do with your children, you don’t have to tell them too much of that.

Oh some years after I came back, yeah.

Yes, I would have. But it would be when I could start to see that they were writing books about it in France and that sort of thing.

No, I don’t think so. The main thing’s I’m not sure that I said, that fellows like Buckmaster were, that he wrote down a letter to Peter Williams after reading my book,

“How pleased he was with it and how the work done by the Flotilla was so important and how Eisenhower reckons that the work done by the underground people, saves the war at least six months, shortened the war by at least six months,” that’s about all. That’s very important because they went in and they had to blow up the railway

lines to make sure the tank regiments couldn’t get through by …other than by their own steam. And they had to lay about 8 to 10 days and you know they couldn’t operate right at the beachhead and that’s what they had to avoid and that’s what did help the war considerately. Apart from other operations they might have done afterwards.

No, that’s about it as far as I can see.

Oh, there was no question that E Boats were very efficient operators, there’s no doubt about that. But and they had probably

better vessels than we had I reckon. But I’ve got a great respect for the German navy, I have, yeah. The, oh I’m changing the subject a bit, the important thing really was that our navy against U Boats really

was the big battle which I didn’t partake in. But when the U Boats in the middle of 1943, that was the time, in that month they sank their record amount of shipping they sank. But in that month they lost

43 U Boats and there’s no question it was radar first by the ships and then by the RAF, the radar that’s what beat them and that’s what Admiral Doenitz wrote, he said after that they knew they couldn’t do what they were doing before. So

I think a big thing in it was they didn’t continue with radar. They built certain radar possibly, maybe ahead of us but they stopped at that, whereas there’s a lot more to be done with radar and that’s I think…I’m a great believer that radar is an important element.

Oh well, we didn’t read the newspapers that much I suppose but whenever we could, we would look for it and get it and see it. And I used to always read up what I could when I got to London in Australia House and see what, they’d get the newspapers over there and that sort of thing and see what was being said out here. Oh we were

very interested in what had happened and what was happening and I still had two brothers in it up there. We were all very interested in what was happening out there.

No, no I lost my best mates from school days and

he was up here at, in Malaysia and he died on that, that famous march where they lost so many people.

No, only a four-letter word, anyway they were just allowed to

fall out and die that’s all. One of the most tragic events of the war, I think. No, I didn’t, fortunately didn’t lose any.

I would think so. I would think so. I think there’s no questioning in Germany, the outcome …there was no use going through what went before and taking all their machinery and that out, but so there weren’t much

reparations. Whether Marshall Aid, whether they were a bit liberal with that, that’s another story but in Japan I think, I think they’ve been treated pretty well in the circumstances. It’s unfortunate that bombs were dropped there. I mean I still think that they had to come, otherwise the war would have gone on a lot longer. But yes, I think

that it was handled correct apart from, I don’t like the bomb but I think the whole thing with Japan was handled very well. I think our troops that went up there they did well too.

I was the Commissioner of Atomic Energy Commission when I was in National Development.

Oh well, see we had the plant, down there south of Sydney, Jervis Bay and we use to go down there and see what was happening and

they, I think they ….there was a lot of feeling that we should have an Atomic Energy Plant and certainly the Chairman thought that but I was of the opinion in fact

we have enough energy without using Atomic Energy. Because there was a waste disposal problem, anyway I didn’t think it was necessary and in fact I won the day, the government, the Minister mightn’t have endorsed it in the finish. But he would support me I’d say.

I had a bit to do with it, like I say that was National Development, I was on the Commission for three years I suppose. But there’s not much, you’ve just, you got reports, what was happening and I think they were doing a fair job there, to get knowledge about things and I don’t disapprove of having that but

I think knowledge is important but I don’t believe an Energy Plant is necessary.

Did I visit Japan? Oh regularly, regularly and I was here and they visited here.

One of the big things, the first or the biggest, the biggest commercial group to ever visit Australia from Japan, when they got here, oh well, I was the one that chaired all the meeting with them I can assure you people like the Department of Trade were

not very happy with that situation. I was a great believer generally that we have a Bureau of Mineral and Resources and that we are doing what we can to discover, find new minerals and in my view they’re irreplaceable, so you have to be very careful how they’re used and I, my view was it’s no use saying, “All right let trade, let them

look after the selling.” I believe you’ve got to look after the sales, the selling side as well as the producing side. So I was never very well received in the Department of Trade. Sorry about that.

Oh look I think, I really think there’s not a thing that comes out at the end. I think that’s the way I was trained and then they way I was bred, I think it was the

way I went about management. It was very important that anyone that worked in the Department in which I was the Permanent Head, very important. I know when I went to National Development I called in, into the telephone room and the girls had never seen a Permanent Head before, things like that. I, and all

the letters that were written to me were about just… I seem to manage well with people and do the right thing. Oh look I’ve got letters to, from BHP and when I’ve moved from somewhere I had one from CHERG [?] and one from the Rear Admiral

Victor Smith who has become the head of the Defence Force as well just saying how much that I’d earned this appointment I’d got and this sort of thing. It’s just I happen to make friends everywhere and get things done, but I wasn’t on my own. The big thing when I went to National Development

was that I think when Reg Schwartz took over from David Fairban as Minister, it was a lot easier. He used to stop there in his office and anything you needed from the Minister, we’d sit up even till 11 o’clock at night and I’d get things from the staff

say at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and 9 o’clock in the morning they’ve got a decision back on their plate. That all adds a lot, it adds a lot. And that enable me to sort of get a lot of support and love from the people when I…probably Reggie earned it for me, Reg Schwartz.

Oh that’s the CBE. Yeah that was for Public Service, yeah. Not any particular thing.

Oh well, as far as I’m concerned. It was made by…first of all I received a letter to say

would I be happy to accept it? And I write back and say yes, I would and then well the CBE, see the Queen has to sign it, she sent that certificate up there signed by the Queen and Prince Phillip because he is President or Patron of the Board of the British Empire

Group. So I then…it’s comes back and made public and…

Over at Government House, yeah. It was a good day too, my wife and daughter were there and a band played, and a lovely day and lovely grounds at Government House in Canberra. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

Just added to it. Whatever I did, the experience

kept adding, I was so lucky. I can’t tell you, the people in Supply, they were just fantastic, they really were great, great people and then in the navy, whether no matter who it was, the general experience added all the time to what I am and I without taking anything away from my family or my wife, fundamentally my wife made me.

But that’s all a part of you know, you build up as you go I think. Even when I got up to the Nursing Home they all, the girls love to see me and that sort of thing. They know that I try to help Gwen and any others that I can help up there. It’s all a part of living

the good life if you like.