Australians at War Film Archive

Thanks for coming.

Dad was a Welshman; I’ve been welshing ever since. Mum was Scottish

ancestry, they were born in Australia. The Keam family came out on the ship called the Hope in1849. On that ship was this lady who lost her husband who died over in Cornwell

in the mines, I think it was the lead mines they had then. Soon there was a potato famine in Cornwell, which I never knew about, I always heard about the Irish one, but the Cornwell one was a similar thing. People left there because they just couldn’t live. I forget her actual name now, but she immigrated to Australia. She came with eight kids,

from a baby up to a teenager. When she arrived here she was already committed to a person for a job here who owned a property, Dickson’s Creek or something I think it was. I’ve got a family book out there that I could check up. She went there to live, took the family, she was on a yearly

pay, paid so much for the year. Out of that pay she had to keep the family and everything like that, she was on a contract seemingly for twelve months. After twelve months she must have said “That’s enough” and she left and then the family started to break up from there.

Dad’s father came out of the eight children.

Yes.

The earliest I can remember being myself and with the parents was at Werribee. Looking at papers, I was born in Carlton at a women’s hospital and Mum and Dad did live at Footscray for a while and what they did I just don’t remember. But from what I can remember from Werribee, that’s were I went to state school. Dad was working for the PMG [Postmaster General],

the PMG there, it’s Telstra or whatever now. Mum was always just a housewife.

One brother.

Yes.

Two years younger.

He was in World War I, yes.

He was a soldier. I don’t know a lot about

him, because we never talked, on those subjects it was just one of those things. I’ve got his papers and everything like that.

Werribee is only forty or fifty mile away from Melbourne, I think. In those days it was out in the back lots. We didn’t have a car and we probably went to Melbourne once

in a blue moon. School, you would walk about, say a country mile and home again. Werribee was just a little country town then and I think the main claim to fame was the sewage farm, which is still there. There used to be Carter’s Chicken Farm - that was a big chicken farm

and all the eggs, I think supplied Melbourne from there. As I said, Dad worked for the PMG there and that and the council were the only type of jobs there.

Just the usual kid, go through school, it was all right, it was a good school.

Dad threw his job with the PMG, he was a linesman. I will go back to some of the little stories that he used to do up there. Whether it was promotional or whatever but he got shifted to the city to work, at first he used to travel on the train, we had the steam train that used to come through

from Geelong. After a while Mum and Dad and me and my brother shifted down to Melbourne and we shared a house with one of Mums friends, we used to called them aunty in those days, but they were only friends. We shared this house until Dad got a house at Ivanhoe, then he rented a house at Ivanhoe.

First of all I was at the Westgarth School when we were sharing the house, but then from there I went to the Ivanhoe School. In those days you would do the state school, like that’s up till sixth grade. Then when before you left you had the choice of either doing high school if you wanted to be a white collar worker

or that type of thing or you would go to a technical school if you wanted to do a trade. I decided I’d go to technical school. I didn’t have the brains to be a big CEO [Chief Executive Officer] and get thirty million out and lose it .I went to Collingwood Tech [Technical College], and did three years, that’s what you do three years at the tech. The first two years you do all subjects, history, geography as well as woodwork, engineering, all those things. Then the third year you made a choice on which one you wanted

to follow. Then they concentrated more on that. You still did a bit of history and maths and everything, but you did more on that. I don’t know why, but I just went for electrical engineering. I knew nothing about it but you had to make a choice, so that was as good as any .

So I went for electrical engineering. In those days too, towards the end of the year, people used to come to the schools if they had employment for school leavers. One of the jobs that was put up was a dental mechanic. I knew nothing about that, except that it had to do with teeth, so I applied for it,

but I didn’t get it. You just had to do something, there was just no handouts in those days. I eventually got a job as an office boy, working in an electrical engineering firm, called Electric Motor Guarantee, at Clarendon Street, South Melbourne. The idea was, by working in the office, if ever a job came up on the floor

outside, then I would put in for it and hope to get it. It was while I was an office boy there that I decided, the sea thing came along.

Just a little bit of country life in those days. Dad worked for the PMG and he was a linesman

and the telephone lines always ran parallel with the railway tracks. The workmen, the PMG chaps, used to have these little trolleys to go to work on and at weekends he would get me, my brother and even Mum and we would go up and get this trolley, it’s just a sort of a flat top with the four wheels. On one wheel there would be a square rod sticking out, and you had this big handle and it would fit over it,

and you’d press down and get the wheel going until you got up enough revs to get it going and you’d take it off and roll. We used to go rabbiting. There were a lot of brick fences in those days up around Lara. Dad knew from the timetable like when the train was coming, so you hopped off with plenty of time before and lifted the tray up and put it down and the axels and the wheels and take it off and then when the train came past you’d put it back on again .

These were just some of the things to fill in time, you’d go rabbiting and it was a day out and you got some free tucker.

No, we used little fox terrier dogs and they get in amongst the things and would more or less bail the rabbit up in the thing and then you’d put your hand in and grab him and take him. No, we didn’t have guns then I think. Later on I did shooting,

after the war when I was working of properties and that, but not at that stage.

No, probably never knew where the sea was. It’s just something that just evolved. I never really thought that I was going to be a sailor or go to sea.

When I was young and I used to read books and the sea impressed me a little bit. I didn’t like history at school, but I liked geography. We used to get the National Geographic magazines, you were lucky if you got one because we couldn’t afford to buy one, we could pick them up at libraries or something. In there you would get the stories of other countries .

I can always remember on the front two pages there was blue and had maps of the world and it was advertising some shipping line and all the things you could do and that sort of might have triggered me a little bit. When we lived at Ivanhoe, I joined the sea scouts. But there was no sea at Ivanhoe, our boats were on the Yarra River, but we still did all seamanship stuff and things like that.

We used to go to Williamstown to the Williamstown sea scouts and that was a big deal. They had a big boat and you could go out on the real water, the real waves and that was probably the basis of how it came about. Also, when I was working as this office boy for EMG [Electric Motor Guarantee] the war was on then and I will just go back a bit.

I was at technical school, 1938, 1939, and 1940 and then that’s when I took the job as the office boy. The war was well on by then and some of the jobs that this firm used to do, was what they call degaussing gear around the ships, it’s an electrical, it’s like cables. I will go back and start it properly. The magnetic mines

in the water and when a ship went past the metal on the ship would attract the mine and the mine would hit it and blow it up. But they found out by putting the cable around the ship it would put out an electrical current, which would nullify the magnetism, and protect it from the magnetic mines. This company was going that, putting on that degaussing gear. As an office boy, I would be filling

the time sheets and working out the chaps wages and the names of all these ships, the Taroona and the Orania which were into Melbourne all the time, and other ships. Just talking with the chaps or working on them they would come from overseas and that sort of got me going a little bit more, thinking the sea might be a good place.

Practically nothing, what we would read in the paper, we’d get The Sun everyday The Sun newspaper and what you read in there. When the war first started, before the war was actually declared and Germany bombed Poland, that was the start of it. I remember that they put out extras, like Herald extras ,

and I went up to the paper shop and sold extras. I was walking around “Germany bombs Poland, extra, read all about it”. We got about thruppence a dozen for selling them. I did pretty good with that, maybe I should have finished as a paperboy. When Germany bombed Poland, these extras came out, it was a Saturday and I went up to the picture theatre and got the crowds coming out of the picture theatre, and I had a captive

customers and I sold a lot of papers. Later on, when the war was declared, that was a Sunday. I only remember that because we were listening to the wireless, and the Jack Davy show or something was on and they interrupted it, to say “War was declared”. Mum and Dad were pretty quiet because they understood more about what it was going to mean. I went around to my mate’s place,

Rex Walker and I said “Hey, Rex, we can make another couple of bob here, we should go up to the paper shop and they will have extras”. Sure enough there were extras out. We decided we’d work together, we would both walk up the street, with Rex on one side and me on the other and we would just half our takings at the end of the night. We did this, walking up “Extra, extra, war declared”. I don’t know if it was because it was a Sunday

night, because in those days people didn’t like you making noises on a Sunday, or whether people were just a little bit in shock about the war, but we hardly sold a damn Herald. I think we made about thruppence or six pence between the two of us for the night. We hardly sold any, and I don’t know why that was. Next time if they start a war, make it a Saturday.

No, I didn’t really understand, even when you’d read it in the paper, you knew what you read in the paper, that this was happening and that was happening. Then as the war went on, every day there would be drawings on the front of the paper of the armies advancing here and the armies advancing there.

You knew what war was, and what it was about. Actually, when it got to the time when I started to get more interested in wanting to go. Apart from the fact that I was at the stage where I wanted to go to sea, I wanted to see the world and all of that, it was the adventurous side mainly .At the back of your head it was that little bit of a

feeling that you were doing something for your country, because it was a service, the merchant navy, even though it was a service. I felt a little bit good about that, which made me sort of want to do it.

Yes.

Actually, there is a photo somewhere in the album. The year before I went to sea I was still in the sea scouts. They had a war run rally in Collins Street and they had this model ship there and on there this chap was doing the flag signals to someone up there, just to raise money. It just shows that one year there I was in short pants and a few months later I had gone to sea.

Yes.

Yes, a couple of years, and I rose to the rank of office boy to office boy, I was still office boy then.

I was pretty serious about it,

like it just sort of happened. But I had got myself fairly serious but in those days, you had to have permission from your parents to go to sea. Because the firm I was working for as only an office boy, but they were doing work for the army or navy, it was an industry that you weren’t allowed to leave.

Then that meant that I had to go and get a manpower clearance. There was a little bit involvement and when I did first start to try and get to sea I went to the Australian Seaman’s Union and I couldn’t get a ship. It was a very closed shop, the seaman’s setup in those days, and it still is .The silly part was, you couldn’t get

to sea, if you didn’t have experience. How the hell do you get experience? There was just that thing, I was knocked back and couldn’t go.

I was fifteen when I started to make all the arrangements, and before that the little bit of the

loyalty thing must of started flowing threw me and I joined the air training corps. That was sort of juniors, if you went right through you could get into the air force. I don’t know why? I don’t like flying, not even as a passenger. I did join that and when I got into the merchant navy I got an honourable discharge from the air training corps ,

I was about fifteen. That’s the way that they do it properly. What really triggered it off, in those days you used to work forty-four hours a week, that meant Saturday mornings. This Saturday morning, I was on the train going to work. I met one of my mates that lives further up in Green Street and I said “Gee, I haven’t seen you for a while, where have you been?” ,

he said “America, this and that”, I said “How did you get there?”, he said, “Merchant Navy”, I said “How did you get on a ship?”, he had the same trouble too, he said “Go to the Norwegian Consulate and try there”. I didn’t do much because I hadn’t got my clearance and I hadn’t got my Mum’s permission or everything. It kept bugging me a bit

and eventually I didn’t go to work one Saturday morning and I went to the Norwegian consulate. They said “Yes, you could get on the ships” Then it was sort of putting pressure on Mum and Dad, and I kept asking and asking and eventually they signed the papers to say I could go to sea. The manpower were very strict, they wouldn’t let me go because of the protected industry or what it was .

At South Melbourne they had an office in the South Melbourne Town Hall and at lunchtime from PMG I used to go through the back lanes up to the town hall and I wanted a manpower clearance, got knocked back. It was just a case of water dripping on stone, I kept going and going and I don’t know if they were just glad to get rid of me. I must of struck somebody a little bit more sympathetic and then here I

got the manpower clearance that meant that I could leave and I had Mum and Dad’s authority to go.

It’s not like in the army or navy where you go up to the enrolment place and join up. Once I knew it was all right with the Norwegians, you could get a ship there. I will just go back a little bit again.

You talked about the Australian Merchant Navy. There was an Australian Merchant Navy but it wasn’t, we didn’t have thousands of ships. But in wartime, it was more an ally merchant navy, because all the Allies, their ships were together, and they were controlled by the power to be, I don’t know to this day who did it. All those ships were just merchant navy ,

it wasn’t that you were joining the Australian Merchant Navy or joining the Norwegian. The merchant navy as a whole, it was just whether you were serving on a Norwegian ship or some other ally ship.

I was fifteen when I first started to push my luck but I turned sixteen before I actually got to sea. I kept going

to the Norwegian consulate and I went there one day and they said “Yes, there’s a ship available”, no they didn’t say there was a ship available, I was waiting in this little cubby hole waiting for my turn to go up. There were a lot of Norwegians, they’re naturally, just reapplying for jobs. One Norwegian just came over to me and said “There’s a ship there, the Fingal, but it’s not a very clean ship”,

and I don’t know what he meant, he said “It’s a dirty ship”. He just gave me the impression, don’t sign on it, so I didn’t. Luck, you’ll find luck comes into the whole life here right through. That ship, Fingal sailed and about three or four days later and it was torpedoed, and there was twelve lost on it, including the mess boy ,

not to say that if I had been on it that I would have been in the same place as the mess boy. That was just a little bit of luck that happened along the way. I kept going back to the consulate. This day I went in and they were sort of anxious to have you there, they said “Yes, there’s a ship, they’re the Tai Yin”. That’s the flag up there on the corner, I got that in Sydney and it’s got the name on it, the Tai Yin .That was the first

ship. How it came about a lot of Chinese used to do the mess work on ships in those days. Even back in those days, they realised that Australia was a pretty good country. When they’d get here they’d shoot through, so that left a vacancy on the ship. As it turned out, there were three mess boys all wanted that day, because the Chinese had shot through, and

it was suppose to sail that afternoon. The consulate gave me all the particulars and said “Now, go down to the shipping company, Will Williamson”, the ones that own the Tampa, the one with the recent publicity. I went there and there was a chap standing there in the door way just waiting for me and he said “Are you the one that is assigned here?” I said “Yes”. This is where it is, and I don’t know how it works out.

When I used to go to the Australian Merchant Seamen and try and get a ship, they wouldn’t listen to you. When I went there with this chap for the Tai Yin, he took me straight across the road to the Australian Merchant Seamen, explain what was going on and they signed all the papers and that was it. They said “Go home, get your things and get back, the ship is sailing”, that night or that afternoon.

Mum didn’t know because I was suppose to be at work. I went home and I said to Mum “I’ve got a ship”, Mum didn’t like it much, it was a bit sudden. We didn’t know what to do but Dad was working overtime down at Heidelberg with the PMG,

so Mum said “Oh well, I better get some things together for you”. I hopped on my bike and rode down to Heidelberg to see Dad and tell him. Dad, men I suppose are a bit tougher then women. He didn’t show a lot of emotion, he just, that was it. Sort of the fact that

doing something for your country sort of struck me and I rode down to the boat shed at Ivanhoe and see all the boys there and let them know that I’d joined up and I’m going to do my bit for king and country. I got down to the boat shed and there was nobody there. I couldn’t make a hero of myself then. Then I went back and my brother was at the pictures, at the afternoon matinee. I went in and asked the manager if he could put his name up on the screen to come to the front

because he was only fourteen. I just told him what was happening and I gave him two bob and said “Look after Mum”, it wouldn’t do much but two bob is still two bob in those days. Then I went back and Mum had a suitcase packed for me with nice clean clothes in it, a nice little suitcase. In those days everybody had grey blankets. We didn’t know if there were blankets on the ship or not so

Mum rolled up one and said “Goodbye”. I went up to the station and hopped on the train at Ivanhoe and just sitting there, I was the only one of the train I think because it was Saturday afternoon, and every one was at sports or whatever or doing things at home. I just sat there, and in those days the train used to go from Melbourne to Port Melbourne. I got

on the train to Port Melbourne. I never spoke to anyone, I didn’t see anyone. Then you start to think, what’s going to happen? You’re all excited about going but what is it? Eventually, I get to Port Melbourne and the Tai Yin was tied up where the Tasmanian

ferry pulls in now. I went through the customs gate, and that was another big thing, going onto the wharf, showing a pass and going through a customs gate. Then I saw this ship. I started to grow to about ten foot tall because here I am a part of the crew and I’m going on that and everyone else was just looking .I went up the gangway and there was a wharfy on the gangway watch there, and I just asked him “What do I do next?”

and he got an officer and the officer showed me my cabin and that was the start of it. The thing is that the ship didn’t sail that afternoon. Wharf trouble it just happened to be, it just didn’t get finish loading .I was lucky that I went ashore again that night and it was a big deal then, because I’m a seaman, I’d been on a ship and I was walking to shore off the ship

and I went home to Mum and Dad. I had a proper little. But you had to be back in Melbourne before midnight because all the last trains left about midnight. So I had to be back in Melbourne before midnight to get the last train out to Port Melbourne. That was it, the ship sailed the next day.

No, I never knew what it was. Until you got there and

they said that I was a mess boy but I didn’t know what a mess boy was, but I knew it was catering. You didn’t know until I got there because there were three and they just said, “The other two were on and one had been made the deck mess boy, engine crew mess boy and I was officers’ mess boy”.

Nothing, there was nothing. As I said, eventually after you get through all the hassles that you have to do. If I had of been old enough and everything in the first place you would just walk straight to a shipping company. Or with the Australian you’d go to the union and you were selected, they had numbers and they would call out numbers

and you would get picked that way. But otherwise, no, with the merchant navy they were just so short of men that they just took anybody, they took me.

No, nothing. You were just a person and you were prepared to do the job. It was always a hands on learning. With me, I never knew what mess boy was.

You find out straight away. The three mess boys had the one cabin. There was a single bunk, and two bunks and I had the top bunk. It seemed to be forever, it seemed to be a twenty-four hour a day job, but it was roughly twelve to fourteen hours a day that you worked and it was all the time .

When you are a mess boy or when you were at sea, everyone has got to eat and everything like that, and in port it was the same thing. Whereas the deck crew, once you got to port, they’d work sort of day hours and go ashore.

No.

It was one of those funny things, everything was a secret. All the time, during the war everything was secret, you were not allowed to say anything. You’d get on the ship and they were loading these big crates and they had Ceylon printed on them, and that’s where we went.

I was too young, and

I don’t know if I thought about it. I think the merchant ship there was more excitement. If there was no war on, it was like what every young man should do, do to sea, it was a man’s job.

Naturally, all the officers could tell me what to do, and there was a chief steward on the ship too. He was the one that I was mainly responsible too. But once you knew your job, and you learnt it, you were always getting better at it. Once you knew it just happened. The only time someone said anything to you was when you did something wrong.

About the same age, sixteen seems to be the favourite age, the growing up age.

I can’t really answer that honestly. I did speak to them. No, sorry, they hadn’t,

later on I can explain why.

We became mates because we were put on the ship at the same time.

I can’t remember. I know that lots of things went through your mind, but mainly I was excited. Like hey, going to sea and doing what there was, and in the back of my mind I was doing something for my country. There was a little bit of that feeling there, and I was just excited to be getting away, not knowing what was going to happen.

No.

We didn’t have a uniform. The catering staff sort of had a catering uniform. Mainly you were in civilian clothes and you looked tidy. When we got to places like India you could get things made up. They would come on in the morning when the ship tied up and measure you and you would have it back that afternoon. I had one made up ,

a bit flash. Those white jackets like you see on the old photos, waiters on the Titanic or something like that, with the inch high white collar and the brass buttons.

Half way down the bay the ship stopped, the sirens go and I had a life boat rehearsal, they blew up one life boat to just let you see what happens, they rowed it around and then put them back up again. It was just a little bit of familiarizing

with getting the crew all organised together. I served the meals for the evening, it was getting dark as we were going out the heads. I thought I want to see this, going out the heads, because once you’re out there you are in the big ocean, you are a bigger man. I got there and as the ship got outside the heads got the real waves, up and roll,

not too good Leo, and I went back to my bunk. The next morning when I was woken up to get the coffees ready for the officers, I was on the top bunk as I said and I jumped out and as soon as I hit the deck I more or less collapsed in a heap and out over the rail. I did say when I went on the ship I was about ten foot tall, this day I was down about two foot

tall, I was sick as a dog. This other mess boy, each morning I’d be out leaning over the rail, down there he was over the rail too. I couldn’t do my duties, I don’t know if you’ve ever been seasick?

You can’t stop.

This went on and on and I couldn’t do my duties, and they put

seamen on to do my duties, and he got my wages for doing it, and I got no pay and that was fair enough, I couldn’t have cared less. It took about three days or something to go across the bight, we were heading to Ceylon, or Sri Lanka as it is called now. Going across the bight took about three days. I was sick as a dog all the way and I said to myself if this ship pulls into Fremantle

that’s the last they’ll see of Leo, I’ll do a Chinaman. I don’t know whether I would or not. But I wanted to just get off. The ship didn’t pull into Fremantle, it just kept going and did a u around Australia and then headed for Ceylon. Once it hit calmer waters, your tummy settles down, that was it, I never got seasick again. You might get a little tummy upset if

you’re in port too long, and then your first night out, but no, never got sick again. But gees I suffered, that’s one way of bringing you down from a big hero.

No, the only think, you couldn’t eat food, and our cabin was here and there was a passage way and right there was the galley, even when you’re in the bunk you can smell all the food getting cooked.

All they told us, the old sea blokes, “Eat oranges and dried biscuits, because you can get them down nice and easy, they also come back nice and easy without busting your stomach”. You had to have something in your stomach to bring it up or otherwise you would damage yourself, and that’s what I did. They were real naval oranges, they were down with the naval one-minute and up past it the next.

The main duties were to serve all the meals to the officers in their officers’ mess. I’ll describe that the best that I can first, before the other. The mid ships

on a cargo ship was where the officer’s quarters were, the crew were down aft. One side is engine crew, the other is deck officers, they were always like that, they’d keep it separate. In between this, the cabins were on the side of the ship and then a passageway down there and in between these two passages and another one went across, and in there was a big mess room.

It would seat about twelve officers all at once, if they were in all at once. Off the mess room was a little, was my casal [?]. When you walked into it, if you took about three paces, you were out of it and on one side was the wash up trough ,

with plates and cups in their racks. Then other pieces of paraphernalia on the other side. I used to set the table, then just go back and stand in your little room. When the officers started to come in, you would go down to the galley and bring the food up hot with the plates. Then when they wanted something

they would just ring a bell, and that would ring in my little room. I would go out and they would be just holding a plate out, more soup, more this, more food, you would just go and do it. Serving the main meals. Of a morning, there was an officer on watch, you would have to make a cup of tea and toast, and I can cook. Made toast, and carried it up to the officer on watch .

Also of a morning the wireless operator he had all his equipment in his cabin, all wireless operators were more or less the same. It was made or extended such so all the wirelesses were on one side, so he is living with his job twenty-four hours a day. I would have to bring up a cup of coffee to them too. By then, the officers going on watch ,

the engine officer and the deck officer, they’d be coming in for their breakfast and the officers that weren’t on duty would come in just whenever they were ready. But within sort of a breakfast time, about an hour or so. You would just keep an eye on them so as when they finished you would just go in and take the plates away. Then just the routine thing, washing the dishes, stacking them up. Then of a morning you would clean the cabins,

they had a cabin each. The decks of the ship were steel and in the cabin area they are concreted, they were painted a reddish colour just for a bit of colour. You would mop the floors, polish the brass doorstep and brass the handle of the big front door. Do the brass work,

and straighten their bunks. You were sort of a housemaid. You did the cabins and by then it would be the same thing happening again. The officers coming on watch, and officers going on watch, then lunch for the ones that weren’t there. In the afternoon, you were probably doing more cabins that you didn’t finish in the morning. Then evening, the same thing again

and tea and coffee and then wash up, then knock off and go to bed and that’s it.

You would be woken at about six o’clock in the morning, and you’d finish maybe seven or eight o’clock at night.

It didn’t worry you, because where were you going to go?

Well I just ate whenever I could fit it in. I didn’t eat with the crew, I just ate more or less in my little cubby or in the officers’ mess if there was nobody there.

Good, I must say.

This is probably what that chap meant about that remark when he said about the Fingal being a dirty ship. The Norwegians are very good seaman, they keep their ships ship shape. The food was good, yes.

Yes, every officer on that ship was Norwegian.

The captain was Norwegian, the chief steward was Norwegian and we even had a stewardess. That was only by accident, I’d say. Some of those ships, the bigger cargo ships, they are little by today’s standards, they were big in those days. The mid ships and the bridge area, they had cabins built for passengers, so there was a little bit ,

maybe about a dozen passengers at the most, and that was a little bit of cash flow for the company, as well as the cargo. And the stewardess was on the ship, those types of people and the captain. Because when the war started she was on the ship and then passenger business sort of wasn’t. She was stuck with the ship, the company was good enough to keep her there, kept her

a job. She was also the companion of the chief steward, so that made everybody happy there.

They all spoke English when they were speaking to the Australian boys. Us three boys were about the only Australians on it. The crew were nearly all

Norwegian but the Norwegians spoke English to us, well they had to or we wouldn’t know what they were saying. But when they spoke between themselves, they spoke Norwegian.

Good. Some ships weren’t the best but this one, my experiences, there was no complaint. You might get some of them trying to take a bit of an advantage

of you. To do things that you didn’t have to do. He was an Australian too the rotten, he came on as an assistant steward or something, but his ranking made him sort of higher than me. He got me to do his washing because I thought he was an officer and he was telling me to do it,

he wasn’t an officer but he was higher than me. Then I was told by some of the others that I didn’t have to do that. I just told him “That was it”, but the rotten, would have kept me going. That was the only one, the officers were real good. You didn’t mix with them, you wouldn’t say that you went ashore with them, you only spoke in the mess room or in passing.

We sailed on the Tai Yin and the Kongsdal by ourselves all the time, except the Kongsdal we got into a convoy. They did that because any ships that were capable of a certain speed they felt that they were better to go on their own. When you got into convoys, you were limited to the speed of the slower ship.

If you had a cargo of guns or ammunition that would want to get somewhere, it was better to let it go on twelve knots or fourteen knots, than be going at four knots. So, no, we were by ourselves most of the time.

There was very little discussion about it. It’s just something that happens. Like, when the alarms would go, and you would go to action stations. Well I’ll go back a bit first if you don’t know what action stations are. Merchant ships at the start of the war they weren’t armed, because a merchant ship

is not like a navy ship, it’s not out looking for someone to shoot or to start a fight. It was just loaded with material, the army might want it in Africa or somewhere, or the air force wants its petrol here and you were to just take that from there to there. They were losing so many merchant ships at the start of the war, it looked as though the war could have been over in a few years because everything was gone.

They started to put guns on the ships and they were just to protect yourself. They were there to chase, they were there just if you were attacked and they would use them. That pendent above my shoulder there - ‘DEMS’, that stands for Defensively Equipment Merchant Ships. When they started putting the guns on, because the seaman knew nothing about guns, or firing. They put on those

and usually naval ratings, two to four on each ship and in England they use the Royal Marine, they were experienced men. Their job was to maintain the guns, keep them in working order, and show you what to do, to just teach the crew the little bit that they had to do.

Yes, we had guns. As I say from the early part

of the war, even late 1939, the war started in September, even late 1939 or 1940, they started to put guns on ships, just protective guns. When I went to sea, yes, it was pretty common nearly all ships had guns. Not that they were very effective because they were experimenting a lot, they’d come out with some idea and we’ll put this on a ship

and let them go and try it out. If it worked, well and good but if it didn’t work, well they would think of something different. One ship, the chap in our group the merchant navy group, he was on this ship and he had this old gun. This old gun was put on the ship and a sign was underneath it do not fire this gun. It was there purely for appearance. That goes

back to the old fashion days, when the sailing ships painted dummy portholes and it looked like it. It was mainly for submarines if they’d see that and see the big gun and there it might make them think twice. They had other lighter types of guns on the ships that they could use. All the ones that we had on were all usable. On the Tai Yin,

we had two Otskers [?] guns on the bridge, the bridge area, and two Oerlikon were down towards the aft. The Otskers guns, they were all anti aircraft guns. The Otskers was a water-cooled gun. This was my

big job on that gun, there was a water pump, like the old fashion, very old fashion, circular say twelve to eighteen inches round and a handle about a foot or so and you’d pump it backwards and forwards and that pumped water through the gun. Seemingly if all guns get too hot they just misfire, buckle up or break all together. That was my job

if we were in action, was to pump water.

No, not in drastic actions, just in the situation. We will come up to that later. I often wondered years ago, the Bible says where the seas parted, I thought that can’t happen. But then I thought if they had a bloke on this thing and someone was shooting at him and he was pumping it dry enough that you could of walked across it anyway.

The Oerlikon guns, they were different. Their barrels, they would sort of thread and you would change in the barrel, they had asbestos, so you had to use gloves there. But you could change the barrel whenever it got to hot.

Yes, you could go everywhere you wanted too. You could go everywhere except onto the bridge.

We used to take coffee and that up to the bridge. No, you weren’t allowed on the bridge or anything like that, or mess boys weren’t.You could go down the engine room if you wanted to, but more or less you had to get permission, just go to the door and look down and if someone’s there just ask, and then you’d go down. I used to go down into the engine rooms quite a lot, I like it. They were very clean engine rooms, engineers are very fussy with their things.

It was very clean and to just see the big pistons going, they were massive things. I didn’t stay there too long, because you have got to realise that you are below water level, you have got about three eighths of steel between water out there and a torpedo coming. I used to always be glad to get back up top. The engine crew, they did it pretty rough. They’d be down below all the time, it’s all right starting on top

but finishing in the water, but if you were down below you didn’t have much hope.

It didn’t sort of rule your life, thinking about it, just now and again. It was mainly when we used to have a lot of the alarms go, so you’d go to the action stations the guns. You went to the gun that you were allotted to. But you never

ever knew if it was a practice or fair dinkum. They never ever told you. The officers, they didn’t tell you much. When you got there, and the waiting. It would have mattered, if something had happened, even pumping water then you’re doing something and your mind is thinking about what you are doing, but just waiting, that’s the only time that you would think about it.

Otherwise it didn’t really worry you.

No, I’m not. It didn’t really pay to be a good swimming when I got on the Kongsdal. It was carrying high-octane gasoline most of the time and if you were hit, your head would go this way and your legs would go that way. So you didn’t really have to swim.

I wasn’t a good swimmer, I might have been able to tread water for about five minutes, but it would have only prolonged the agony.

The first port I would say Ceylon, Colombo.

A sixteen year old in foreign country, not

white people, not wearing clothes like us. It was real interesting, and I like it. We came ashore and we did what we had to do.

Mostly I went ashore by myself. My working hours made it late, the deck crew.

Most of them were old blokes, in their thirties.

You didn’t want to go ashore with an old bloke. The young ones more or less kept to their group. When I think back, not many went to shore as a group anyway. They might of gone ashore in pairs, or twos but mostly I went ashore by myself.

I can’t remember the real feeling. It must have been good, there’s an elephant’s head hanging, and there were elephants crossing bridges outside somewhere. Just souvenirs and looking, it’s just so different. You’d be there amongst it.

They were the things that you only read about the cobra dancers, the bloke with his flute and all that. I bought one of them and bought it home but it’s gone away with all the things now.

You didn’t have too. But you had to be there for work the next morning. So you could fall asleep on shore and get back in time

for the morning.

It varied. With a cargo ship, you were there usually for a few days. In those days it was the old derricks and loadings with the slings and the unloading and it took days to do it. So you would get a few days in Colombo. I’ve got a list out there with all of the days and that that I’ve done.

You’d say a few days in port, especially on the cargo ship. The Tai Yin, most of the trips were Colombo, India, Africa, down around those areas, Portuguese, South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzanian.

I got to Calcutta a few times. To Colombo a few times.

No.

Yes, you’d just go.

When I was shore working as an

office boy, I started with a pound a week, but I was twenty-five shillings a week when I went to sea. When I went to sea the wages were worked out in Norwegian krona, their money, but then translated back into Australian. About fourteen pound a

month, your monthly pay. Fourteen pound a month. Somewhere early in the war it turned out, like the merchant navy was a civilian force really. The powers that be said that the wages they were getting were nowhere near what the civilians were getting in an ammunitions factory at shore. All merchant seamen were granted ten

pound a month, it was called danger money, some call it danger money, some call it a bonus. It was just ten pound that your wages had to get. That was twenty-four pound. I made an allotment to my mother of ten pound a month, so that ten pound a month was always sent to Mum.

I just thought that it was the right thing to do. Mum didn’t spend much of it anyway, she just banked it. It was making me feel good, that I thought that I was helping Mum and at the same time Mum saved it.

Yes, it was all in the bank when I came home.

No, you don’t get paid. You’ve got a pay book. You are at sea for so long and your wages are in, you never saw your pay book until the purse or whoever was doing your book work gave it to you. He would just enter

in each month your wages. But when you got to a port. When you were getting into port, a day or two before you get to port, he’d come around and say “How much do you want to draw?”, it was the sort of round about way that you did it. Say that I wanted to draw five Australian pound, then I’d have to transfer that into Norwegian krona, which would be what’s coming out of the book,

they would transfer that into, if you were in Ceylon you’d be getting rupees. So, if I wanted ten pound, the rupee was worth ten bob then, so you would be getting x amount of rupees. Then when you went to another country you would get their currency and that was done all by them. So you weren’t getting money every week or every month or what ever. Before you get to port, they’d ask if you wanted cigarettes,

and how many you wanted and you’d put your order in and that’s sent ashore and the agent in that port, and when the ship pulled up, the chief steward or whoever was responsible went ashore and would came back with all the money for everybody and then you went up and got paid as much as you thought that you had to go ashore with.

No, you weren’t allowed alcohol on the ship.

Officers might of, but the crew weren’t allowed to bring it on. As you know, females weren’t allowed on the ship, other than the stewardess who was there. A mate of mine was telling me, he said it as a joke, but I think it might be him. He said this chap was taking a girl aboard the ship this night and

the captain saw him and said “Hey mate, you are not allowed to bring women on the ship”. He said “But she’s mine, I own her. I won her, she was second prize in a raffle”, the captain said “Is that right, what was first prize?” He said “Five shillings”, I don’t think he got a Mona Lisa, but I think he might be bragging a bit.

Souvenirs.

I’m trying to think here, and I’m trying to be honest. I think Colombo the first time was just souvenirs.

I just don’t know whether it was Colombo or the next stop Calcutta or whatever. Where you’d find the bed of roses.

I think you would come back to size. You had gone though a bit of a thing within you, you’d been a seaman and that, and then you realise that’s all that you are. Then there’s all these others on the ship and they are exactly the same. The first port, you don’t know too much about anything. The older blokes, those thirty year olds, they’d tell you a bit but then you’d just sort

of learn yourself.

I think to get to Colombo it was about two weeks, seventeen days, something like that. A few days, maybe a week in port. It’s not a long time, it was really just

breaking the ice. I don’t know. We got to Calcutta about three times on the Tai Yin, and I even went back later on the Kongsdal. That’s where the first, it was probably an easy break into the war situation,

it was like getting into the war sort of slow motion. We were tied up at Kidderpore docks in Calcutta, that’s up the Ganges River or Whoes [?] River. We tied up there and it must have been in the afternoon, because I had a bit of spare time and I was leaning on the rail just looking around and just looking at the workers, and watching the natives work and the way that they go about it.

Then I just heard a bit of a bang, I didn’t really think but then it came on a couple more, quick, bang, bang, bang, like that. Then another little session. Then you start to, you can hear the drone of the planes but you can’t see them, you were looking

but you can’t pick them out. It was a bombing raid. There were groups of bombs. You hid. It seemed to be getting closer and closer. There was no actual alarms sounded, but there were dozens of ships in port. The was also anti aircraft guns on the roofs of the warehouse, but over further there were anti aircraft

guns that were firing. I ran on a little bit to get to my gun station, and I just waited. No one on the ship did fire. I think the main think was that the planes were flying quite high. One of those dare devil attacks where planes come out of the clouds zooming in and it was just a bombing

raid. They were just letting them go from way up there, and hitting whatever they could hit. It just went to the guns, and apart from the anti aircraft guns that were firing, nobody was firing anything, because I think they realised that their guns wouldn’t of hit there anyway. It just sort of went. The next day I brought one of the local newspapers, just for a souvenir, because it had in it the Japanese first daylight raid on Ceylon, what date that was, I can’t remember. The newspapers,

I went down to have it to show you today, but Bill Fisher has got it and I’ve just got other things here. That was just a bombing raid to just let you know that it is there. Not a vicious one.

When you hear them you would think they were pretty close. When I went shore at Calcutta, there was no damage that I saw, in Calcutta, not the areas that I went. About two days later I think it was, we shifted camp. Where we went we had to go up locks, you know where you go and get lifted up and in.

When we were in there, there were bodies in the water, you could tell they were Indian peasants not our people anyway. I thought that that was a bit strange. The chaps, whether they are right or not, the Ganges is a holey river, a sacred one to them. They just left them there because they were in sacred

territory, or whether they were just poor people and they just didn’t have the facilities to get out. Those bodies would have had to stay in that area until a ship came, they had to float into the dock area. It was just something that you thought about but to be quite cruel you didn’t sort of worry about it. They were dead, they just

looked terrible. If they’d had been alive and had been in agony you would do something to help. But once they are dead, your mind, you’d go from being a person to a body. Even to this day, I don’t know about that business of them being in there, was it a sacred river or because

they just? Over there, there is a big stepping-stone, with all the poor people on the bridge.

No. Probably because it was such a mild thing, you could say now, but at the time you didn’t know what

was going to be next. After that, you’re locked in it, you’re on the ship, you were going to go wherever the ship goes. So no, it just let you know that something could happen.

In 1943, with the Tai Yin, being a cargo ship. We carried ammunition, firearms,

tanks on the deck, small type tanks. All army equipment, and a lot of the time we didn’t know what was down there, you weren’t really interested, you were just taking it. It was mainly army supplies, but I have to admit the first trip to Colombo, I think it was a lot to do with the officers because during the early parts of the evening there was a tap on the port hole and

one of the Indian or Celanese wharves was there, said “Want to buy a bottle of wine?” and they wear a sort of a skirt, and he got it from under his skirt. He was selling that for about a couple of bob. What they’d done was they had raided some of the stores, and it was all liquor, so that would have been for officers’ messes. It was mainly ,

equipment for the armed forces and a bit of food between countries.

Yes.

Yes.

Madras is on the same side and down a little bit.

Apparently, marines supplied gunners for the ships, a skilled personal who knew how to maintain the guns, that was it and to teach the seaman what to do and on a lot of convoys that were, would probably meet later one, they needed to know what to do with the guns.

Horrific situations. I was probably one of the lucky ones, it turned out to be just a good learning curve.

Yes, we went to Durban. I don’t know what

we had on there for the load of cargo. I know that the general talk on the ship and as I say, you never get told by anyone anything, it’s always, I heard this. The general talk was we were going to Durban. Earlier on I explained about the degaussing gear around the ship. They came up with some way

to put in something to heat the ship to keep the ship warm, because they heard we were going to go to Russia. Because of the very cold climate and a lot of material needed that temperature. Today it’s a very standard thing with the oil tankers that the ship is actually heated, to keep oil at a certain temperature. Back in those days this would have been very much an experiment, I should think.

We got to Durban and we were there for about two weeks, a long time, not a good time. Nothing came of it. We never got anything put on, I don’t know what, the hearsay must have been wrong.

From what I can remember,

it was just an ordinary voyage, but I can remember one situation in the Indian Ocean that - just the change in the weather. You’d be going across on a beautiful calm sea and within five minutes up comes say cyclone, hurricane or typhoon, or whatever they call them, they call them different things in different parts of the world. In ten minutes it can - just about wrecked the ship. Ten minutes later

it is gone, and it’s back to normal. The trip mainly, from I remember it was just a normal trip. There is one thing that I do remember it was I first had close contact with racial discrimination, black and white. Everywhere you went there the

toilets were black people, white people it just seemed wrong to be so blatant about it. Even on the buses, the double decker buses, it was white people on the top and black people on the bottom. For a little bit of trivia for you, that you are going to probably ask later.

The white people there don’t mix with the black, but we were just seaman, and I had gained a couple of learning curves along the way and we did meet a couple of coloured girls. They were very nice girls, very friendly and they were taking us out to their village.

They explained to us that the whites were upstairs and the blacks were downstairs. What we had to do was get on the bus, there were us three Aussie boys and the two native girls. The girls just said “Wait until you see us get off and you get off at the next stop and walk back”. So, that’s what we did, go out, way out in the, it seemed to be the jungle. They got off and the next stop

I didn’t thing we were going to get off, but the next stop we got off and walked all the way back and we went to their village. It was just like story book stuff, it was one of those villages that you used to see in books the circular buildings, they call them a carawl [?], I think, circular buildings thatch type, a hole for a window, but no windows in it. It was

just unreal. I would have been frightened, you think all these black people, Zulus and all that. I was looking for the pot. They were friendly and they didn’t interfere at all, because of the girls and we met their parents, it wasn’t an awkward situation, it was a very enjoyable situation. That was one situation that we didn’t go back

to our ship that night. But we did get back the next morning.

Yes, it was. The buildings and the atmosphere was so different to what you were used to. It was good. It was a real good experience especially at that time and at that age and everything.

Yes, of the boys, yes.

The mess boys.

We had things in common. Well we could understand the language.

Yes. Afrikaans, which is sort of an English and Dutch sort of a mix, but it’s English.

Yes and no was sort of yes and no.

That was the only real visible signs where you were amongst it and where you were walking down the street and you could see it and feel it and even the shops wouldn’t serve black people, it was just bad. Of all places,

the other place that I saw it was in America and when I say you saw it, there are still buildings there, they say slaves, that’s where they used to sell slaves. The printing is still there and it just hasn’t faded away yet. It’s not that they are still selling slaves there, but the print is still there that you can see. Also the remarks about no blacks is still visible.

Really, quite recently, Sheryl and I went over there to a merchant navy reunion with a lot of the American seaman. We were staying in Las Vegas for a while. We were walking down the street, you could feel it even there then, that’s 1996. The black and white relation

wasn’t really good. Waiting at a bus stop, there were some American Negroes, they seemed of the poorer class. I was talking to them and they were happy as Larry talking back but you could feel the other white people just looking at you because you shouldn’t be doing.

It is a thing that has been around for a long time. It is sort of bad.

Yes. It was later on, after the war it was a Greek ship, you will probably get to it in the series. The Santiago,

I think we had one of near every nationality onboard, but out of the twenty or thirty different nationalities there were coloured chaps on the ship. On the ship, and that’s a funny thing, on all ships where there were mixed breeds, colours or whatever, everyone gets on well together, it’s so easy. Once you get out into the other world,

it’s different. This one particular black chap, he was as black as the ace of spades, he came from the real deep Africa. I went ashore with him that night in Ingram, I think it was. We went into the pub to have a beer and the English people, blokes there came up to him and said “Why don’t you get back to your own country?” They would serve you over there

if you were in your own country. The poor bloke, he was doing nothing, he was as quiet as a lamb. We just didn’t stay there, because it would have got naughty, it would of got real bad. So we left. It always seems to happen somewhere. We did have coloured people on the ship itself, no worries.

Yes.

That hasn’t caused me to particularly think of the Aborigines,

but I do think of it, when I say I think of it I put these others in context with it. I haven’t had any situations where I have had troubles with Aboriginals. I haven’t really, I worked on cattle stations after the war. I never worked with any natives.

But I have thought that, hey, you are putting me on a spot, I have thought about the Aboriginal part of it. I’m sort of sitting on the fence to be quite honest. Because a lot of what is said about what happened in the old days and that to the Aborigines, what was happening to

the white person in those days too. There was really no, which there still is, the blokes with the money, the boss blokes and the poorer blokes. Ordinary Australian white people in those days used to be treated badly by the land owners, the police and everybody and being put in chains it was no novelty for the Aborigines because it was happening to the whites. In some cases,

it’s really been the same. Probably the difference is where children had supposedly been taken, that’s sort of not the right thing to do. Although, there again the pendulum, I can swing it back this way. A lot of those children finished up in, I wasn’t there, so I don’t really know.

Finished up in better conditions than if they had stayed with the Aboriginal community, that’s only my thoughts.

No, we didn’t. We just carried on, I don’t know, it probably was one of this things that someone just wanted to say it.

It is. When you look at it and think of it now, it was a lot. At the time, you just accepted each one as it came along. In Beira, there is a little bit of a difference there too. I think it was Portuguese East Africa, I

think it was called in those days, but it was neutral. Let’s double back a little bit, this is a little bit of a quickie. As we said earlier, you don’t head straight for the whatever’s when you get off the ship, but the red light, was the sign. In Beira you were anchored out, and you had to put up a flag

and they would come out in a rowboat and they would come and take you to shore. You had to walk through miles of railway lines and that around the wharf area and in the distance we could see a red light. There was myself, he wasn’t Norwegian, but anyway the two of us

saw the red light and we thought that was a good spot to head for. So we were just finding our way in the dark, through all buildings and getting out of the wharf area. We get to the red light, all it was, was at a cross roads, lights on the corner, they had one that strung across the road in the middle, a danger light, so there was no sense in hurrying there.

But Dar es [Salaam] as I was saying

was neutral, and it seemed funny. I was walking down the street and here was the German Embassy, no German Consulate sorry. Only an ordinary looking shop. But here we are at war with Germany and I look in there and these people were working in there and I thought they would have to be Germans and you were so close and sort of nothing was happening. You got a little feel when you went into a bar .

I used to smoke then, and I had a box of Australian matches, and I put that on the bar, as I was drinking and that. I didn’t really take a lot of notice but I saw it, it was as quick as lightening, the barman took my box of matches and put another box there from the local things. I didn’t worry about it, but I thought afterwards now that’s

taken that and they can see where the ships come from or everything and that gets onto the spying type of, it was just a little incidence there. But other than that I had no trouble it was just a situation.

There would have had to be. You wouldn’t know. The foreigners, they could have been seaman of another

ship. You never really stuck your bib into any other situation, they would have had to have been there. It didn’t have to be Germans, it could have been Portuguese people themselves who were German sympathizers. You knew that once you left that river and going out that the Germans would have all the information that the ships sailing, but nothing happened.

No, no advice. You weren’t told but there were signs everywhere “Don’t say anything”, “Don’t talk”, “Don’t do this and don’t do that”, it was instilled in you a bit. It’s a little bit hard because when you’re talking you’re just talking naturally.

I think that things just slip out. That would probably have to be the only neutral port that I got to anyway.

On a normal ship in those days, the compliment would have been roughly thirty to forty people. I think that you can speak to nearly any merchant seamen, none of them knew the whole compliment, probably never even met the whole compliment, there were nearly thirty or forty on.

So you can’t really speak for the lot of them. On the Norwegian ships they were all good blokes, I had no trouble with them, but when you did get a bit of spare time it would usually be playing cards and you played for cigarettes because you had no money, but you always had plenty of cigarettes, packets of cigarettes.

As I say the Norwegians were good. On the Gripsholm that was a Swedish ship. That was a much bigger crew, so once again you only sort of mixed with the people that you were working with, you didn’t know too many. Probably the best ship of all for ideas of individuals was the Santiago, a Greek ship, rough as bags, but a good experience.

And as I said there was about one of every nationality on it. They all had their own idea of things, but they never got into fisty cuffs, I never saw any fights anyway. On the Gripsholm there was one chap that was just a little bit arrogant and that very bossy. The funny part is he was a big

man. Apparently he was a Turk, I have nothing against the Turks but he was big, big, I mean big this way, two axe handles across the shoulders and solid. And he did sort of rule the roost over the crew a little bit, not me because I didn’t get involved with him. We were in Liverpool, and I was going ashore this night, and

the ship in front of the Santiago out of the water, either just loading or just unloaded and here’s a bloke yelling out “Help”. It’s this big bloke, he was drunk or I don’t know what, but he’d fallen over and he swam and he was hanging onto the propeller and it’s half out of the water the propeller and he’s hanging on to it around there, not right around it but as much as he could. I just thought to myself, there’s the toughest

man on the ship and the toughest man in the world, and here he is out there yelling for help. We got him ashore, eventually. They all come down to size no matter how big they are.

Yes.

No, it probably did happen on some ships, in different ways. But all my experiences with it, no they never took you under their wing, to teach you anything or that, but by the same token they

didn’t, but they might of done a few things to have a shot at you or something, but never anything nasty, not in my experiences anyway. That was just on four different ships. I think they just realised that they were just seaman and they all do their job. As I say, out of thirty blokes I probably only knew half a dozen by name.

You all had your job to do. Eventually the Tai Yin got back to Sydney, and I paid off. I just might have had a bit of homesickness or something, we were back in Australia. I thought I would go home to see my parents.

Three Australians signed off, and we got the train down to Bombala, that’s in New South Wales and that’s as far as the train would go. Then we hitch hiked from there to Melbourne.

I can remember we crossed the river there, I think it was called the ‘Delegate’. That’s the border. I remember when I got to the Victorian side of it, you felt as though you were home, even though you were miles from home. There was a farm there just not far in from it. We hadn’t had anything to eat, we had been walking for a while, and it was getting on dark.

We went and asked the farm to see if we could stay somewhere for the night. He said “Yes”, and it was a dairy farm. He said “That we could sleep in the hay shed”, that was fair enough for us, we slept in the hay shed. The lady brought us down a billy of tea, and toast and everything to eat. He said “The milk bus comes through in the morning and you can get a lift on that to Orbost.” We thought that was all right.

I don’t know what went wrong but the milk truck didn’t turn up, but we didn’t get it anyway. So we kept on hitch hiking and we eventually got lifts and we were going through the bush. In those days, there was petrol rationing and they had gas, they used to use gas. On the cars they had big balloons on top carrying the gas. We got picked up by a car with a gas unit on it ,

and of course there were three of us and there was this chap and his daughter, a young daughter. I don’t know if he didn’t trust us in the back seat with the daughter or what. He let one in the back and the other two of us were on the car, the body of the car leaning with our feet up against the gas producers. Anyway, we got a lift, it was better than walking .

Then we got to Lansdale and I had relations there, Dad’s sister, I think it was. I went there and we got a meal and I borrowed some money and we got back to Melbourne. I saw my parents, I think it was about two weeks altogether from the Tai Yin to walking out there. Then I went back to the consulate to see if there was a ship there, and I ended up on the Kongsdal.

By fate again, the reason, the Chinese crew had disappeared. So thanks to the Chinese I got the ship easy and I think it sailed the next day, the Kongsdal. Where the Tai Yin was up around Africa in that in mostly short trips, mostly seventeen days I think was the longest. With the Kongsdal,

I had a month trips there at one stage, when I was talking with our mates in our groups and I asked “What’s the longest you’ve been at sea?”, and I used to think about three weeks or something, I’ll check that out one day, that list. I found out about eight or nine trips that were thirty odd days and up to forty-one. When you whack that altogether in one year, you’re at sea for about nine months

solid. But you didn’t realise it.

No, it just happened. You don’t know where you’re going from one port to another and a lot of the time you didn’t know where you were going until you got there. Usually, you got a little hint that would come out from the officers or something,

you’re going so and so. I never knew we were going to get back to Sydney until we got there. Once I knew, I must of known a bit before, once we knew we were getting there I started to feel.

It wasn’t that I’d had enough of it, I never ever thought that the war was going to kill me, or I’m sick of the ships or anything. The fact that I just sort of might never get to Melbourne, and this was one way of doing it. Maybe somewhere in the back of the mind I might of just wanted another ship, I don’t know. I wouldn’t

of had any real good reason.

No. It would have been maybe just something different. It was mainly to get home and have a break. Then when you start off again you just take potluck and I got on the tanker. I got another good ship and I stayed with it till after the war.

Yes. I got to Melbourne and I went to my parents and stayed there. In Australian ports I just acted as an Australian. Get to the girl subject, you can talk the language and then you just take your chances there

in Australian ports, it was just ordinary situations. It was only foreign ports (UNCLEAR).

I think they knew that I was at sea and they never, they asked

me what it was like. I think the fact that they’d seen me and they thought he’s not doing too bad. That’s a mouth less to feed at home. No, they never tried to keep me there and I intended to go back.

Yes.

No.

Once I get onto the Kongsdal, I got tangled up with a couple of Aussies, but they were different Aussies, they were on the ship. Sydney I think they came from, oh one from Adelaide.

Panama Canal.

You don’t know where they are going. It was just a ship, if it had been the Titanic, I’d have signed on it, you were not to know that it was going to hit an iceberg when you signed on. No, the ship was there and it was the first thing that came up and I just got on it and away it went.

Once again, I got

on as an officers’ mess boy. But I wanted to steer a ship, be a seaman. I didn’t know how to go about it, but Roy, a chap, a seaman on that ship, he said to me “Come up son, in your spare time and just come up to the bridge and have a go”. He had it organised with the officer on watch that it was all right

for me to go up on the bridge. The steering wheel on this ship, and they do vary on each ship, was two foot six across, spokes on it. I always thought that it would be just like steering a car. He let me have a go at the wheel, I got told what to steer, what course to steer via the compass, and I was looking at it and the ship started to go off course, so I just

turned it like that, thinking I’d go around the corner, nothing happened and I turned a bit more and she’s still going off course. Next minute I was way outside, I just didn’t know what to do. So I had to leave the wheel and walk out of the bridge and call for help. When I went out there the officer and him were laughing their heads off. If you looked at stern, it was a beautiful flat sea, blue as blue like an ad for perusal, and here the wake going around

at about one hundred and eighty degrees circle, and was nearly heading back to Melbourne. As I say, everything is a learning curve, you learnt hands on and that was the first time that I’d steered a ship, and from then on I used to keep going up and learning to steer. I think it would have been about five or six months, then a vacancy became available for an ordinary seaman and I swapped over. That was as far as I wanted to go, I didn’t want to become a captain or anything, I just wanted

to steer a ship, and it’s a good feeling.

I never really knew and I haven’t been able to find any books on her. I was always under the impression that she was about a ten thousand ton tanker, which in those days was a fair size. Today it would only be a lifeboat on these five hundred thousand ton monsters. It was a reasonably big tanker because in some of the ports

when we went to, the people, the wharfy type of blokes, and they said that had been the biggest ship that had been in there. It was reasonably big in those days.

Oil, or high Octane Gas, that’s airplane fuel. That’s all that we carried.

There again, funny you asked these questions because I never ever thought of it. No, you were never ever taught anything. Common sense, and you were just told not to smoke here and that and if you did smoke it was always aft, the wind was taking the things that way. The most dangerous time for a tanker is after they are unloaded. The gases, when the covers open and they’re degassing and all that, that’s when she’s

more likely to blow up than anything. It was just common sense and the fact that you weren’t allowed to smoke there.

Yes.

It was a great experience. At that time, the first trip I was still mess boy, so it was only a case of looking. But then it was about being somewhere that you’d read about in the National Geographic or geography books, it was different to the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal was flat, straight and sandy. Panama is like a scenic cruise, you’re going around curves and there are mountains.

It feels like you can just reach out and touch it, you can’t but it’s very closed and it’s interesting. The Canal itself, there is a lake in the middle, I forget the name of it, I don’t think I forgot it, I think I never knew it. There is a lake in the middle and the ships coming this way, or the other way, but one lot of ships anchor to let the others come through the lochs,

in massive lochs there. When those ships have gone through the other lot go through. If they let one ship go this way, one ship go that way in convoy, if they let them go through the war would be over by the time they got everything through. It was a one-way flow with the shipping. Panama then was under American control, but it’s been handed back to Panama now, I think.

It was very strict, the Yanks they do a lot of friendly fire action, I can understand it. As soon as the ship got within range of the locks, Americans came on, naval personal. The gob hat [?] the forty-five strapped to the hip and everything like that. Maybe four or five or something like that.

One would stand behind the helmsmen and the other one stood alongside the telegraph operation, which gives the messages to the engine room, there was another one down in the engine room and there were two on either side. They were armed to the teeth and everything was cocked and loaded. You weren’t allowed to say anything or do anything while they were there. You had the pilot telling you what to do ,

this was later on and not while I was mess boy, and I was steering through there. You had the pilot telling you what to do, there were markers on the mountain ahead of you there, he would come along and say “So many points to starboard”, and then you would pickup another marker and wind your way around. You had these Americans there armed to the teeth all the time. If there was a false move, or if the chap did the telegraph wrong, they would probably shoot

him, no worries.

Yes, they were worried about somebody blowing the ship up, or doing something wrong or purposely going off course and wrecking the whole Panama Canal, because the whole wall system would have fallen down through the Canal. Once you got into this lake area in the centre, and you had to anchor and fill in for a few hours while the ships were coming the other way.

As soon as you anchored, because all of the guns were defused, all the guns had the firing pins taken out of them and none of them could be used. As soon as we anchored, and waiting there, the Yanks would put their rifle down, come over and sit down and talk, just like you and me, it was like having a card game. Then when it was time to sail again, back to business,

until you got through that loch, until you go out so far or whatever they classed as a safe area and they went ashore. As for the Canal itself it’s a, or was, I don’t know but I still think it is the same and it was nice. It was just something different, different from the open sea, all the waters were just flat.

Coming home on the Rangitata.

Yes.

Quasar [?], or Quako [?], but I always said Quasar, I’m not sure what it is. We went there a few times, Quasar. Not on that ship but on another ship the Santiago. We went to Caracas,

which is Colombia, the top of South America. We did a few trips through the Canal and Quasar [?], what was the other place?

No, Cristobal was another one of those things, I never knew where, because in the Panama Canal you couldn’t get ashore, or we weren’t allowed ashore anyway. Then when you were there at night time and you see all the lights and you hear the music,

you’re thinking that you were missing out on something there. We never got ashore, and I never knew the names of those places, until I got home well after the war and read that. Cristobal was one side and Balboa was the other. I can’t tell you what they are like but only just a port.

No. Unless you were actually going

to Panama or the Port of Panama, if you were just passing through that’s what you were doing, just passing though, so no, we never got ashore.

Yes.

Yes, we got off there. Los Angeles, at San Pedro,

that was the port there. Yes, at Los Angeles, we went ashore there.

It was another one of those towns, it’s not a town, it’s a city. I had never been there, it was a magic place. I went out to Hollywood, oh, marvellous you know, where all the film stars live and that

seeing all these big houses. They don’t own any of them, they only rent the damn things, they live there for so long and they get sick of it and they rent another one somewhere else. Near the Chinese theatre where they have their fingerprints in the cement. All those things were just seeing something that you’d only heard about. The Brown Derby or the Brown Darby ,

the big restaurant, you don’t even know it. It was a very famous one, that’s where all the film stars go there to be seen and that. I went past it on a Sunday, and there wasn’t a damn soul in sight. It was the deadest, drabbest looking place that you would have ever seen, and yet it was where all the millionaires went, at night time it would come to life. The same, just jumping ahead a bit. When I was in New York,

I went for a walk around and I got up to Wall Street. I thought gees, that’s an important place, I read about that, the stock exchange and all that. I went up and it was a Sunday, there must be about seven Sundays in a week over there. No one, not a soul in sight, it didn’t look like Wall Street to me, no activity. You do get a mental picture of things and sometimes they don’t turn out the way they seem, they very rarely turn out the way you picture

them. That one didn’t picture the way I thought, not that it would have made any difference if there’d been people there. Another little thing there, when we were in New York, we were tied up at Hoboken, New Jersey, which is just on the other side of the Hudson River. I think Hookahs is famous for the singer bloke, Frank Sinatra I think, I can’t remember, not

that that matters. When we were there in New York, talk of the twin towers now with the big planes and wrecking it and all that. When we were there, there was a little, I think it was just a twin engine plane that crashed into the side of one of the skyscrapers there, up on the hundredth floor, or eightieth floor or something like that. It was

a big deal, when you went ashore you couldn’t see it, from the ground or from where we were. When you went ashore that night they were there with their telescopes, five cents or ten cents to have a look at where the plane had landed in the skyscraper. They has always been a risk of planes, even then. That was an accident, I don’t know, either he didn’t see it or something.

That’s it.

Yes. I was going to say it earlier on but that’s something that when you

go to a place for the first time, everything is so new and when you get back, you might have been there only a few days, but when you get back a second time you feel as though you know it, or you know where to go. To put you out of your misery. Yes, the first or second time, I went ashore, because you

don’t have to look for girls in those foreign ports. As soon as you go ashore there’s, well “giggy giggy” seems to be a universal word, or you have got young boys or even young girls there. “Girl mister” or “My sister”. Because you would never know if it was their sister or not anyway. They used to offer their sister or brother or whatever.

This first one, there was Roy and myself, he’d been there before. He was an old timer, he said “Chinatown”, Chinatown in any city is a China town, it’s much the same anywhere you went. He said “We would get a ritual”, so we got a ritual in Chinatown. We went to this place and we got to

know the girls pretty well, one in particular, she was another old one, she was in her twenties.

Yes, very old, in her late twenties or something. She was a very nice girl and we became friends. Those girls, they are not all real bad girls, in fact they are nice, I could talk about them for hours.

It was a brothel as we call it in Australia. This one was old fashion Indian style, the rooms were just separated with hessian. There was the room there where all the girls would just be sitting, gathering or playing. You were just there talking, once again just like a conversation, and most of them were young girls I suppose over

in those countries, it’s the only way of getting a quid, they didn’t get a quid it was so damn cheap. All young girls laughing and giggling and talking away and the madam would just come in and signal and away one would go. Then within x amount of time and back again and would just carry on with the conversation as though nothing had happened. They were nice girls. There was one nice Chinese girl there, as I say the older Chinese,

one, twenty year old. We got friendly, friendly enough we even went to the pictures. You had to pay the going rate. I will take it that you don’t know. It was either

It was either short time or it was all night.

The first time I went there, a new cab off the rank, or a new kid on the block. What’s a short time? The poor madam she was sort of wanting to explain what a short time was. That’s it, one and that’s it. An all night is all night. When I went to the pictures, I had to pay an all night fee. That was her, the madam had to get her cut and the girl.

Each time when I went back there and when you were in port for a week or two. You got friendly enough that they didn’t have much fresh food or anything there. Apples, tins of condensed milk and things like that, you could get it from the stewards, you were knocking it off. They all served the same purpose as a block of chocolates.

You’d go ashore with your tins of condensed milk and some fresh fruit or something like that, and that was enough.

I would be today. Young bloke and in those days you didn’t have the freedom they have today. I think there was a movie made some time back, The Virgin Soldiers, you

could fit me into that bracket except a seaman. It was all hands on learning, the first time. Like you say, especially when you were going to a place like in the Rickshaw and Chinatown, as I say is Chinatown and the streets and the Rickshaw just fits in and there’s all this dark and they have a little bit

of a smell about them which is typical of those areas for some reason. I was more frightened of myself, whether I’m going to get there in the first place.

The first time, it was before Calcutta.

Yes, you don’t really know anything, you know that, you just pay and you go in. I remember poor old Mum, she would collapse if she knew. I bought a lot of cushion covers that had Ceylon on it or tigers made in beads on velvet, just souvenirs, and these present were for Mum.

I’d bring them in a brown paper bag, there on the table along side and I said “Mum, when I go”, if she’d known, that was, as you say you can’t picture yourself going into one. Once you are in there, the girls take you under their wing, more than any blokes. This Roy, when he took me to Chinatown, it was just a case that he knew Chinatown, and he knew that was,

must of known there were nicer girls, he thought.

Yes. The thing is that you have got to realise,

from the year dot, the waterfront, seaman, girls and crime to a certain extent, they were just hand in glove. You always had that, that was there whether you wanted it or not. You’d get involved in those type of situations. I will give you another little example, which probably covers

me and a lot of other people too. I was on the Santiago, that’s this Greek ship, she’s real rough, no refrigeration, she used to carry livestock and sheep and folks would just kill them when they wanted them and that. As I say they were all nationalities, they could talk English, but they used to, in every port they would go ashore, and these are

the older men that probably had a lifetime at sea. In different ports, the girl even though she’s a prostitute, becomes their girlfriend, for want of a better word, they just develop a relationship. These men used to get letters written too them from the girls but they couldn’t read English, so Leo

used to get the job, and I’d read the letters to the chaps. Then they’d say “Leo, write back”. They’d just use the same word but in a lot of different ways. They’d say “Put in a lot of love”. There was a deep affection between those two. Even though he would be away for

months before he gets back that port, that girl carries on her business all the time while he’s away until he gets back, and he’ll have a present for her. I used to write these letters and put in as much love as I possible could think of. I’ve said to some people that I think I’ve written to more prostitutes in the world than some people, than written letters to my mother. It did, it was a service, and they enjoyed it.

As you say, that companionship is probably more important than the sex part of it in a lot of cases. The sexually part of it happens just because you are male, and a part of the male makeup is that you get to a stage and that’s it, you’re the hunter.

By the same token, because when you get to port you do sort of make a beeline for that, because when you are on a tanker sometimes you are only in port for one or two days, it’s not time to be fussy. You do, but even though

it’s important. See there, those eight or nine trips over a month at sea, I know that it’s probably going through your mind, through everyone’s mind.

In those days, poofs or whatever or perversion, or like that. There probably was some of that but I never saw it or was involved in it.

The fact that you were away for thirty or forty days, and even though you are a young bloke and fighting you can still turn off. While you are at sea it doesn’t seem to have any great importance, even though you might have the wall of your bunk with all the pinup girls that you can think of it. It didn’t really, and I’ve spoken with other chaps on this same theme,

and they say the same, that it wasn’t that important but when you get to port, the stimulations there of visual things and away you go and Bobs your uncle.

Yes.

I think I can read your lips.

No, and I can honestly say that I never was, and yet by the same token there was a chap on the ship, at the times when we were friends and in fact

there is a photo with me ashore and a couple of other people in an amusement park, San Pedro, he just seemed a normal person. After the war, I struck him again somewhere and he explained to me that he was that way inclined. He named a situation with another chap where they nearly got caught.

Well, I never knew it and I never would have even thought it of him. It was there, but no, I was never put under any pressure whatsoever. Maybe a lot depends on the type of person too, maybe Norwegians are that way, and the ships were Norwegian, but even the other ships where there were all this sort of rough

blokes, they sort of saved themselves for going ashore.

Yes.

I used to think it was sort of a stupid thing to be saying, because to me at that age, just breaking into the game, it was just a case of boy and girl and boy and girl and that’s it. I used to think that it was just a stupid remark. Since the war, I’ve read in the paper and seen on the TV,

and there are people that would have slotted into those type of situations, who would of preferred let’s say, a little boy or my sister, and all that business. Like I said, if it was with their sister or not you don’t know. Because it’s out in the open now you can talk about it, in those days it probably was there but it wasn’t so

noticed, because if anyone was that way inclined, they wouldn’t be game enough to say.

What I mean is today you can talk about gay and lesbian but then that’s just part of conversation.

In those days, we are going back to like at sea, there were probably, I will bring you back onto this, just another little point while I think of it. When I was in New York, that’s how this comes up. I met a girl and it was just straight talking and that and we just walked around New York and we headed towards Central Park

and we were sitting on the bench, in broad daylight and I put my arm around her neck, which is a bit natural to do. Out of the blue, she said “I’m a lesbian”, oh, shock, shock, and shock. I’d heard the word but to say it out loud. To be quite honest

I didn’t know what a lesbian was then. I did know that a lesbian was a girl that liked girl company but as for in-depth lesbianism I didn’t know. And for this girl to say that I was flabbergasted you know. Anyway, it didn’t really matter, naturally it might have been said to put the brakes on, and I did

apply the brakes and I didn’t try to take them off. We did, we went to the pictures and everything, and we kissed and cuddled. To have someone say that just surprised me. We still met time and time again after that. That’s what I was saying, just getting back to what I was saying before. There must have been all that about, but that girl came straight out and said it.

On the male side there must have been, they were called poofs or poofters in those days, and in American they are called fruits, “Yeah, are you a fruit?”, that’s right. Anyway, whatever they were called that was the male gay side. You would not have been game enough to let on because you would have been belted to the buggery. In those days, a man

was a man. That was the feeling between men, and to say that, they would of all just bashed you. It was suppressed because of the attitudes of the people at that time.

Well, you’ll get a silly answer.

Differences in cultures, you mean, say in the performance of the act?

I can honestly say this, in Australia you speak the same language and you eat the same food, you took the same chances just talking

with the girls. You wouldn’t worry about going to a brothel. Overseas, of course, it was a different situation. There probably is a bit of a difference in the culture. That was acceptable there, because that was the family house. The parents were aware of the situation.

That might be about a one outer, because most of the others it was a very similar, it’s a business. It’s the oldest business in the world, seemingly. It’s all just a case of there is a building, there’s the girls there and the customers just come in

and there’s an exchange of pleasantries and it’s just sort of a business deal. As I say, it can be sort of just as good as a happy experience meeting the people, as I said before with the other thing, because everyone is different. The one in India where they

mixed freely and all that, that was nice. In other ones, it seems a bit degrading to the girls somehow to me. You knock on the door, the madam takes you in, and you usually get a cup of tea or coffee, or whatever is their national little drink and something to eat. Then they’d bring the girls in and they’d

sit around. I sort of likened it to a cattle sale more because you just pick, and the other girls go away and that’s it. I didn’t think that that was very nice, but they accepted it. To me, it was unfair because I think most blokes were the same, they would pick on

appearance. Some of the poor girls, they’d probably been at the job for so long, the wear and tears were starting to show or they might have started at an old age. The older one, or the rougher looking one would never get picked. Her chances of getting a job there would be if there were six girls and seven blokes come in, always the pretty girl would get picked.

I didn’t think that was nice. I think that everybody would pick the pretty girl, like you said before maybe somebody would like the aged whisky.

I think she would know that the odds were in her favour and that’s her livelihood.

They seemed younger in India and Ceylon. The other countries, as I say in the twenties that would have been it. They’d probably had been there for a while, I don’t know. I don’t know when they started.

There was usually a bit of an age difference I suppose. It gives you a bit of a choice.

I’m exhausted.

Abadan, that used to be called Persia. I remember this, when you were a kid and you would go to the pictures or the afternoon matinee and you saw these pictures about shooting the Arabs, and Persia was always with the temples and the harems and the dancing girls. Oh we’re going to

Persia. This will be a bit of a novelty too. That is the only port that I went too where the captain gave orders or told us not to go into the native waters, because it was just too dangerous. As for the harems and the veils, it was nothing, it was

really dirty. Of course, that’s now called Iraq or Iran. Abadan is pretty close to Basra, pretty close to where the fighting was just a little while ago. That other port Bahrain that’s a little island in the Persian Gulf, it was a British controlled thing. When we went ashore there, you weren’t allowed to take money,

and of course there’s no alcoholic drink there or anything. The only place that you could go to was the seaman’s mission. I have got some out there, you didn’t have money, you had like a raffle book. The tickets in it and one was a penny, one was a thruppence, sixpence and when you wanted to buy something, well you bought the whole book to start with, they gave the book to you on the ship. You just bought with these things, there was no money that changed hands.

I have got some money from there, just because some of the native chappies working on the ship, wanted to buy your jeans, you know the American army jeans, the dungarees, as they were called then. I sold a part of mine, they were old ones, I don’t know whether I got the right price or not, I can’t read the figures, but that’s the only way that I got some money from there.

No experiences there. Bahrain, Abadan was a bad miss.

That was all oil, that area would have been one hundred percent oil, petrol or petroleum products. Unless you were taking in wheat and food supplies for the country, but as for picking up stuff that was all oil.

Yes, that’s getting towards the end of the war, more or less, or practically at the end of the war. We’d picked up a load of oil in Caracas I think it was, we were heading up the Caribbean Sea, to New York, but

along the way we got pulled into Charleston, South Carolina. Once again, we were just by ourselves, we thought that was not supposed to be going there. Charleston, South Carolina, that’s a name that brought up good visions. We went in there, but we didn’t get tied up at the wharf, we just anchored. What was happening there, they were forming a convoy, for

what, I don’t know because we only had a few days to go to New York, if we had gone by ourselves. Then we were there and they formed a convoy. We sailed the next afternoon, anyway the next day sometime. All the ships take up formation and it would stretch for miles in convoys. Just before, we were still moving, but just before we took up our proper position

an American naval ship came out and pulled up alongside of us and somebody comes aboard and nobody knows what’s going on. It turns out they bring out orders and our ship was made what they call a commodore ship. I still don’t really know the in-depth of what that really is, it was the lead ship, the boss ship or whatever. All the captains would have had a briefing the day before about the convoy.

The commodore ship was in control of everything. We’d set sail, properly then and taken up our position. That evening I was on the twelve to four watch. I don’t know if I’ve explained it before. When you are steering you did four hours on duty,

eight hours off, four on eight off, all the time you are at sea, that went on forever. I was on the twelve to four watch. On each watch there are two seaman and a officer. The officer takes a look out on one side of the bridge, and does a bit of chart work as well. The other two seamen do an hour of steering, and the other one is on lookout. At the end of the hour you do a swap over and then back again. So for your four hours

you get two hours steering, two hours on lookout. Then you’re off duty for eight hours and then back on again. We were on the twelve to four, midnight to four in the morning watch and I’d done the look out steering the look out and was back on steering and there was just nothing sort of going on that you could hear. The officer on the bridge seemed to be a bit toey, this was all looking back

afterwards. He was a bit toey, and then he cut across and got the seaman from the other side of the bridge. As the seaman cut back to his side of the bridge he said when he went past, “We’ve lost one”. That was it. What it was, was a tanker on the other side of the convoy, they put when you did get into convoys they put the tankers on the flanks and to the rear

because if they blow up and the oil spreads and it’s a bit more dangerous if it spreads. Not that the ship in the middle that’s loaded with ammunition isn’t real dangerous either. They always put them in the rear. This tanker was right over on the starboard flank, had been torpedoed, nobody stops, you just keep going. I was still on the wheel, in the wheel house you can’t see anything, it’s blacked out, you see through

the window ahead and looked at the stars and if there was a ship in front of you. Close gun fire and it went (gun fire noise), right along side of you and I thought gees, what’s this, and it was our own Oerlikon gun just outside the bridge, it was up high, what it was the gunner was on their standby duty because of what was going on. He was getting all tensed up in the

position, getting the things over the shoulder and he was getting comfy in the seat and just squeezed too much on the trigger, and that was that, thank goodness. I went off watch that night. Then you go on to your gun for duty. Nothing more happened, that was just one out, I think it was a tanker, because they said that there was a flame and that.

There were naval ships moving around right on the far side. I didn’t know that we even had naval escorts, because we’d just been more or less just sailing. That was just that, and that was just so close to the end of the war, those poor blokes, they were gone. We went from there and we broke convoy about a day or two after, it seemed funny putting us in a convoy for that little time. These other ships, I don’t know

if they were going onto New York or if you keep on going you go to Halifax and Canada. Halifax was a big gathering point for convoys, to take off across to wherever. Some of the ships broke off, and we broke off to Philadelphia, we didn’t go to New York. We just unloaded there. Then we went to New York, that’s when we were tied up, we were there

quite a few days anyway. The Hudson River at Hoboken, jetties come off it all the way along the wharf areas. You’d get up there and there could be four ships all lined up at each wharf. We were tied up there, and we were the only ship in this bay. It was late in the evening and

we’d been in New York for a fair while, so I wasn’t going ashore this night because it is a bit expensive there. I was just watching, then all of a sudden this ship went past the end of the bay, the wharf area and I said to myself that was a bloody big thing, I’d never seen anything so big, because later on it turns out to be the Queen Elizabeth. It was massive, and all these lights on, and that was it but I just knew

that it was the Queen Elizabeth. Then it was a few days after that when the war finished. The Queen Elizabeth let go with her sirens, and she’s as loud as billyo. Then of course every other ship let go and it was pandemonium, and the war was over. There was a funny feeling, not so much then because there was a lot of excitement. A day or too after that you’d think

well, what do I do now, the war’s over. It was a little bit of a let down. That was after we saw the Queen Elizabeth and after that she finished up being sold and went to Hong Kong, caught fire, capsized and as far as I know it’s still there.

That’s right, yes.

There was that simple fact that I wanted to work on deck, that’s where you were really a seaman, being a mess boy was a good way of getting to sea because you could get there at sixteen, because you couldn’t get a deck job at sixteen. I just wanted to get on deck and as I say I just asked one of the seamen if he could teach me to steer. He worked it out with the officer that

I could just learn to steer, I just learnt there and then on the spot. I was still working as a mess boy, and just going up in my spare time and I did this until eventually, I think it was five or six months I was on as a mess boy. It suddenly paid off and I got the job as an ordinary seaman.

You probably do in normal circumstances.

In England they did have training schools, for merchant seamen, training ships. In this situation, whether it was just wartime or what, I just went up. I was just able to prove to the officer that eventually that I could steer. It’s not like driving a car, you are correcting all the time, you are steering this way, turning this way and steadying that way,

and it’s movement all the time. There is really a little art in it. You had a mark on the compass and you had to keep it line up with the dot on the other side.

I was always steering off the compass. I tried to be a Christopher Columbus one night. I looked out the window and I thought that I would steer by this star, the mast and I lined it up with the star and the ship had rolled and the star was out here

and the mast was over there. I don’t know how those blokes got anywhere with that, but they were pretty good. All I did was do it straight off the compass. A little thing there, when I was in the sea scouts, you learnt all the nautical things, and you learnt to box the compass and that would go from right to left and name all the points, north east, east north and all the things right around. When I got to be an ordinary seaman I thought

that would come in handy that knowledge. By the time I got to be an ordinary seaman they simplified the thing and it was beaut. It was just numbered naught to three hundred and sixty, so we are steering two twenty today and all you did was line up two twenty with the point and away you’d go, or two forty. That made sense all this northeast or east north, two points.

I was, and I would have ended up back in Melbourne.

I’m not an expert but I’ll try and explain it. The ship is on the way or driven by the propeller, it’s at the mercy of the wind and sea and whatever and it will just veer off course. I suppose for lots of other reasons

too, technical reasons I don’t know. It veers off course and you haven’t got a direct steering, you’re not tied straight to the rudder, not like a car where the steering rod goes straight down and it’s connected straight to the axle. With the ship you turn the wheel and there are certain things that happen and even when the rudder turns, it won’t turn the ship straight away. You over adjust in the first case,

you put the rudder around far enough that the ship has to answer to it. Then as it comes around you have to rectify that it doesn’t go too far. The balancing of the ship going this way and bring it back there. Very rarely would you be on course one hundred percent all the time. You’d be going across like this.

Yes,

you have spokes on the wheel like that barometer up there, you spin it, you hit one and it will spin around, but you don’t have to keep turning it, not like the big ones on the Santiago, that was a very old ship like I mentioned. It had the big steering wheel like on the sailing ships, and you would stand at the side and pull it around like that. It was so old it had the chains running down the scuppers of the ship more or less directly connected to the rudder.

It was a little bit harder on the Kongsdal, than that did have a bit more modern. I don’t know how they do it, but they take a lot of, like power steering in the car, you don’t feel anything, it’s very easy.

Yes, you feel it. If it’s rough sea and it’s moving off quite a bit, you will feel the shutter that comes back, but mainly you see the movement, but you’re mainly watching the compass anyway. But you don’t hang on to the steering wheel like that. You might only have one hand on it. When it’s easy going you would probably have the one hand, there’s a stud on in the top of the main spoke, you know when you have the centre one, when you level and that you know which is centre.

You spin the wheel this way and you spin the wheel that way with one hand but you never hang on to it like that. You can’t, because there’s spokes, you wouldn’t hang on to it like that.

The officers, that’s about the only communication you have. They talk, and they work out the course, they chart the course. When you go on watch, there’s a little board on the

wall in front of the wheel house there, and you just have a look at it and it might have one hundred and sixty on it, well then you know that’s the course that you are steering, but the chap that you are relieving will tell you just to verify it. That’s all you do, you just stay on that course until the officer comes in and he might change it to another thing, and then you do it. Not too often they change it, you would be going for a long time, on the one watch anyway. The time when it was changed a lot

was when you were zigzagging, that’s when you got into an area where they knew there was activity, like submarines and that. One of the preventive measures was zigzagging. You go this way for say five minutes then that way for ten minutes, come back two minutes, the law of averages is the way that the officers work it out, in between somewhere is your straight line that you are heading for.

The zigzagging in the first place, well they are naturally dogging the thing and they torpedo into the sea. Zigzagging was so that the submarine couldn’t pick you up on a certain bearing. Once he sights you, they are pretty cluey blokes, those sub blokes, by the same token,

they have to work out the speed that you are travelling at and then the speed they are travelling at and then you have to get into a position, and they know how far the torpedoes will travel. They have to get into a position where they aim at this point, hoping to hit that point. So by zigzagging, you were upsetting the submarine commander from being able to pick out a steady course for you.

You only get one chance. If you saw a torpedo coming, and you could turn quick enough, and you missed it, then the torpedo just goes on and quite often it would hit the other ship anyway. You don’t help that bloke.

No. As I say, many alerts but we never really know whether.

I think they were more fair dinkum with practice, you didn’t seem to do anything practice, you didn’t know what to do until it happened, and you did the best that you can.

Just until you were told the all clear.

It could be hours, yes, it could be hours. If it was your turn

to be on watch, well naturally you’d do the watch rather than go there, because somebody has got to be steering and down in the engine room. You had to keep the watches just the same. The crew that were off duty would stay there until they were told that it was all clear.

That’s right, yes. You had the two seamen and an officer on deck, every four hours, four hours on and eight hours off and down in the engine room it was the same with the engine crew, four hours on eight hours off. I don’t know what they had down there, whether it was an engineering and a greaser and all that, they would have had men every four hours and eight off.

More than a couple of times. You don’t just sail through it by the way, kiddo. You’d go in and out, when you get to Abadan, it’s land.

We did on one occasion to Brisbane. Not every time. The ministry of shipping, I think it was that controlled all this, and all the orders came from. It was just the same as the naval admiral telling the navy ships where to go. There was somebody in control of every merchant ship. All the convoys were numbered,

they were sent off as numbers, I know the convoys to Russia, with PQ so and so, number one, two, three and four. Then coming back from Russia it would be QP so and so. In the Pacific, different routes would have different prefixes. But all convoys were numbered and they were supposed to know where they were.

I left the Kongsdal in New York. I left that. The main reason, when we went there, we were there for a little while before the war had finished. We were there for quite a few weeks after, I was on it for a few weeks after. America is a very expensive place, even in those days.

A seaman’s wages weren’t all that crash hot, unless you were an American seaman, they were paid according to their standard of living. I was running out of money to be quite honest, I was paying out more than what I was earning. I just wanted to do something different, and the Gripsholm was tied up, in another wharf further up and one of the Australian chaps found that there was

some jobs going on it. It was better to go to sea and start earning again. The war was over so I went up there and joined the Gripsholm.

Yes, I was getting paid, but you can’t keep up with your spending. You let it go a bit too quick earlier on. You never had a heck of a lot in the bank.

That was it, the war was over and the good times ended.

No, that was a Swedish ship.

I signed up as an ordinary seaman, I had my stripes, yes, I could sign up as an ordinary seamen, then I didn’t have to go back at being a mess boy.

Different shipping companies did it I suppose. In Australia, they did it a lot, and I have things out there to show you. They signed up for each voyage, they signed up for there and back. They may not get off the ship, they would have to sign again for the next trip. But with the Norwegian ships, the one I was on, you would sign on and you were there till you wanted to get off or until the captain put you off.

No, I never saw it and it would have had to have been drastic in war times, they were just flat out just keeping crews. No, I never saw that.

She was in peace times, a passenger ship. In those days, a big ship, two funnels, that was a big deal getting up a bit with two funnels. She was about eighteen thousand

ton and as I say in peace times she was a passenger. What she was doing on the trip that I went with her. All these big blokes in these foreign countries, they had big bosses and while things were going good, they stay there, and they would play merry hell. When war came they all left their countries and went to America, you know to a safe haven. As soon as the war was

over they wanted to go home and reclaim their castles and their fortunes before the common people got in and pinched them. We took back politicians and people from these countries, Greece. There was probably a mixture of other too but a lot of people were returning home. Then on the return trip we sort of brought back immigrants I think, I forget which way

we were going, immigrants back to America to live, coming out while Greece and those countries France and whatever.

Marseilles in France, Piraeus in Greece, Alexandra in Egypt, Naples in Italy,

I can picture those ones and there were probably others, I have pay books out there.

I was aware of it from only what I’d read in the papers, about the Australian troops that were involved in the Greek situation, yes.

Naples in Italy, it had suffered a bit, I didn’t really see enough to be able to say whether it was devastated or not. Marseilles in France, one again that had naturally been

through a lot through the war with the invasion. Then again we didn’t really go miles inland to see what damage was done, you’d only seen the waterfront from x distance away.

The Middle East, I got to Haifa there, it was one of the places that I got to and that’s in Israel, but there again I didn’t see much of it. In America, they didn’t suffer any damage, so there was nothing to see there. I never got to the places that there was a lot of damage done, I just can’t give

you an opinion on that one.

There again, we were allowed to mix, the crew were allowed to mix with them, so you weren’t allowed to talk, with a close up view, or you never got a chance to speak to them.

From what you could see of them, they just seemed to be ordinary people, they didn’t seem to be suffering or malnutrition or anything like that. They were just people wanting to go to America. Probably displaced persons more or less.

With great difficulty. No, it was quite easy. You just couldn’t do it.

Me and my mate we tried once, we just put on our best clothes and went up onto the deck and went into the big dinner area where they could sit down and have drinks and all that. We went in there and sat down to have a drink and we weren’t there for five minutes and there was a tap on the shoulder “Out”. They know you, you just couldn’t. The only time you only got near them was mainly at night time

and then you would be hosing down all the decks and that up in there area. You had to clean it all, for them to come out the next morning. No, you weren’t anywhere near the passengers. Not to be able to get a story off them or anything like that.

I don’t really know, because there the only sort of

passengers, because it was a passenger ship, whether they paid their own way or was it a government-sponsored thing, I don’t know.

From what I could see, it was just a seaman. On the Gripsholm, I got on as an ordinary seaman, the Gripsholm in particular, anyway, the ordinary seamen didn’t do any steering. They had

special men for that. A big ship, a responsible ship, they have more experienced. The ordinary seaman worked the decks and did lookout, and the lookout on the Gripsholm was up in the crow’s nest, it was the only ship that I was on that had a crow’s nest. The other ships didn’t have them, the ordinary ships.

A bloody long way I will tell you. It’s alright while you’re going straight,

but when you were leaning over in the sea and I used to look down and only see water, I used to say gees they make these ships good, I hope. They would get over and then they would shutter for a little while then they would come back. It was amazing how they made a ship or work it out. It was fifty to sixty foot or something above deck. You

used to go down, they had ladders on the outside, you weren’t suppose to use them - only in an emergency. You’d go down and then there’s a manhole in the mast and you would get in there and you’d climb up inside the mast. Then when you get up the crow’s nest there was another little man hole and you’d hop out and then you’re in the crow’s nest.

Yes, up to, you could lean over it.

No, nothing over it. It was just a casing around you, and you had that and a telephone so if you’d seen anything you could ring through to the bridge.

No. I used to think, in the Titanic even, they didn’t have binoculars in the crow’s nest, that’s one of the controversies about in the story. But no, we didn’t have them up there.

I read a fair bit on ships and I was reading about the Titanic, and I think it makes sense not to have binoculars.

Because, the natural eye, when you look out you can see everything, but with binoculars you put eye in and you look and you can’t see anything, you have to keep moving around until you can find it. To be looking all the time through binoculars, it brings everything up close but you don’t have the big picture.

Twenty-four hours it was. As I say, you were doing your watch and then you’re working on deck and then changing over all the time.

You’d do an hour up there and back down on deck then another hour up there and then the next down there, then after eight hours you did the same thing again.

Yes, but there’s times when even being cold was nice, a little fresh air on you,

it was good.

Anything. Any other ships, for a start, so that you don’t have a collision. If it was wartime you would be looking for anything, like planes, submarines, mines or whatever, just anything at all.

Especially in foggy conditions, that’s when you really have got to be looking. When you get into the port, and it had happened to me. You get into port and then the fog came down. You know that there are ships in there, you can hear them, they have got to sound their foghorn every two minutes. You know they are there and you just can’t see a thing. The fog might just drift and you might get a break, and then you see a ship or something,

you’d get on the phone and ring up and by the time you got the bloke on the bridge the fog would be closed again and you couldn’t really tell what you could see. It was just a safety thing. In the old days, I suppose they were looking for rocks and the sailing ships. It was just looking for anything at all.

Back in New York. I got paid off there with three Aussie blokes, we got paid off there and we over stayed our stay in America. You are only allowed a week or two weeks or something, then you have got to get a

ship or something. Well we over stayed it and we weren’t game enough too, we were just living in a hotel type of thing. We weren’t game enough to go to the authorities because we were frightened that we were going to get put into jail. We were talking with a seaman in the bar there one night, and he said “I’ll give you an address to go there”, we went to it and it was one of those dingy little places, up the back alleys and up

a staircase. It was a bit of a shifty type of a place. They said “Yes, I can get you a ship”. He got us one - that was the Santiago. He gave us the tickets, we had to travel by train from New York down to Norfolk Virginia. The ship was down there. It was a pretty rough ship and they had trouble getting crew, and that’s why you can get it through these places. We were just glad to get out, so

we got on that and that was it.

We just played around like idiots I suppose. We were just being stupid.

To get there for the first time, it was you know America. But like everything else,

after a while it was just another place. To get to New York and see the big skyscrapers, we went on top of the Empire State Building and had a look out and that and after you have done it, you’ve done it, and you walk past it and don’t even notice it. It’s a good place, but I don’t think that I would like to live there.

I don’t know. A lot of the times it was the same three, we were going from ship to ship. It wasn’t organised, it just sort of happened. I think what happened one would sort of want to change ship, and would tell the other and we just stuck together, we were mates.

No.

The Santiago, now as I was saying she was a pretty rough ship and old but it was a great experience and I’m glad that I did get on it, because it would have been one of the old ships, before you got on the ships like the Tai Yin and it was an experience and you didn’t have to be real fussy about anything. She got back to England, and

we did a few trips, Casablanca, Manila, the Spanish Morocco and a couple of nice little trips. We got back to England and it was Middlesbrough I think it was, the end of the journey was Havenmouth in Bristol, after a few trips. The ship was boarded by

the English equivalent to our union, they go on and make sure that the ship is sea worthy. Well, it wasn’t sea worthy. It was condemned. It was obvious that they had to bring it up to scratch but it was so old it would have to be wrecked, so it was obvious to just get off. I will just

describe some of the things to you. On that ship we didn’t have cabins, we slept in the foc’sle, deck crew on starboard and engine crew on the port, that’s up the pointy end. They just had bunks all around the wall there and there were two high and you all slept in there together. You had a little iron stove in the middle with a chimney going through the deck. That used to burn coal and coke

because it was a steam, and we could get the coal out of the engine room. You would put it in there to keep you warm when the weather was rough. The trouble was, when the weather was rough and you wanted the fire going, the sea was breaking over the foc’sle and it would put the fire out anyway, so it didn’t work. Apart from that, I would have loved to of had a camera. You weren’t suppose to have cameras in those days

on the ships. But luckily some did, so I got a couple of photos from them. I would have loved to of had a photo, the toilet. You have got to have an imagination.

Yes, for want of a better things to do.

That was about all, the toilet.

The who?

Yes, they do. We have got some pommy blokes that say that, they go to the head, yes, just because that’s

where the heads hang out, that’s the meaning of that. Oh, we’re going to the loo whether we want to or not. It was a beauty, it was like the old fashion bathtub, only it was metal, more like stainless steel iron, it would have been about six foot long and that wide,

wide enough so that you could straddle, and that’s what you had to do. For want of a better word, mount it. One foot on either side and you’ve got this big bathtub underneath you and that was it. The only way of cleaning that was there was a hole in the side of the ship and when the waves used to swish in that made it

liquefied and would swish out again, and that was the toilet. It was obviously one of the reasons, it was a health hazard. Especially if your foot slipped.

Yes it did. It was

unreal, but true.

No. I don’t know of anyone that did either. You’d soon find out if they did, because they all sleep in the same. As I said, with that ship too, there was no refrigeration, they carried livestock to Canada, and it always smelt up at the foc’sle, because

there was sort of a manger type of thing under the foc’sle head. It was a little bit rough, but an experience, it was part of the name of the game at that time.

It went to

Casablanca, Manila, which is in Spanish Morocco, I know as I say we went back to Middlesbrough on one trip, we finished up at Avon mouth, which is the seaport for Bristol.

It was when we were coming back from Manila to Middlesbrough and we loaded all these rocks, well I thought they were rocks. It was iron ore, just a dead weight. We were going up to Middlesbrough, which was a big industrial English city, I would suppose. We were coming past Gibraltar,

you had to come out there past Gibraltar, the way we were going and we struck a bit of a storm, and for about two days or more, two to three days, each morning when you got up you could still see Gibraltar out there, we were making no head way. Some of the ships were going past, what they called a banana boat, they were refrigerated ships, they fitted with much better engines and more modern than the thing we were on and they were just zooming along

like nothing. The way some people think, it was so rough and the plates on the deck were moving like that, and they were riveted in those days, and just moving. The engineer, sort of one of the brainier blokes and he was just going around hitting the rivets on the top, thinking that he’s tightening it up. Everybody knows that you have got to have something underneath a rivet to hold it there,

it must of thought that it was holding the ship together, it didn’t break up. I just thought gee whiz, what brains. On that same ship, it was a Greek ship, and I’m not being racist or having a shot at the Greeks. They are very excitable, I will put it that way. I was up on watch this night on the steering wheel

on the bridge, just steering away in the dark and all of a sudden all the lights go out, pitch darkness, and the officer standing on the side he was suppose to be looking after you, pitch darkness. Then you’d see whoosh, he’s off like on a brides nightie and you’d never see him and he left me standing there on the ship, what to do, but this is how excitable they are. He just nicked off and left you for dead. It turned out that

down in the engine room, it’s a steam ship, it’s got the oven to throw the coal in and that. The electrical wires there and some of the coals had fallen out on the wire and started to smoulder or burnt through the covering and the brains down there decided to throw a bucket of water on it to put the fire out, and straight away it shorted all the wires and the ship blacked out. As far as the ship, the officer wasn’t worried, he was out there.

There was no good going to the lifeboats because they were so rusted, you wouldn’t lower them anyway. He may as well have stayed with the bridge and gone down with me if it went. They were just the little things that happened, to make life interesting.

No, I didn’t, I was sort of enjoying the experience of a rugged type of a ship. Another little incident to show how rough the whole situation was. When you signed on, and I forget the wages and I didn’t even get a pay book on that ship, it all sort of worked out. You signed on for so much a month and the ship leaves port, we’d get two or three

days out to sea and the officer would come down “Oh, bad news, we don’t have another cargo to pick up, so we drop your wages”, you can’t do much, you’re on the ship you are at sea. They’d drop your wages and you’d travel on and you’d get about two days off getting into port, “Oh, good news, we’ve got cargo back to the other port to pickup”, so they’d put back up your wages, while you were in port, and as soon as you left port

down it would go again, on two trips it did that. You put up with it, just because it was an experience. Anyway, the ship being condemned was a good thing, I have had the experience and that was it. The problem with that was that it sort of brought my sea career to an end. It left me stranded in England with no ship. The war was over, so they weren’t

wanting any ships, a lot of ships were getting put into mothballs, they didn’t have to take guns to the armies, petrol to the air force, so it was hard to get a ship, so I was stuck there with nothing, I was just staying in the seaman’s mission down in Dock Street, in East Allgate. In the finish I went to Australia House, and explained my position and they repatriated me home later on.

So my career finished sort of suddenly, quicker than I would have liked it too.

I would of stayed at sea for sure. I got home after the Tai Yin but after that it was two years and I hadn’t been home, so I was getting used to being myself. When we were in Port Perry,

Adelaide, I forget the year but it was on the Kongsdal. I was going ashore this night and walking down the wharf and here alongside this thumping big four-mast barge, a rigger. I thought that seems like a nice ship, you beauty, I loved it. Standing there and a chap said “Do you want to go aboard and have a look?”

And I said “Yes”. You get on board and the smell of tar and all that it was just real seamanship. They said “Do you want a job?” It was one of the hardest decisions, here’s this big square rigger, the Pamir, and I had the chance of going on this and it would have been a childhood dream type of thing to do it.

I thought it only sailed up the coast and I thought no, I can sail up the coast anytime I like after the war, and having a taste of America and Africa and that I thought no, I’ll stay with the overseas ship. Your life just went on the way it happened. Afterwards I found out that that ship went from there to Canada

and back, so it would have been a beaut trip. But then again if I’d taken that ship my whole life would have taken another turn and god knows where I’d be now, probably not have to talk to you.

No. I know what you mean.

No, no favourite, none that I would like to keep going back all the time. As I say, Calcutta and Ceylon, probably Ceylon had a little feeling, and this was all genuine feeling. The first time I’d seen it overseas, you’d get this on the horizon, this little landscape before that you’d see a few little sailing boats out there.

Then when you get to it, I’ve mentioned this to a few other people and they’ve agreed with me, so I’m not a complete idiot, I’m working on it, but I’m not a complete idiot. There was a feeling in the air when you got close to Colombo or India. I don’t know what it was but it felt nice, maybe it was a tropical feel or something. That always stuck in my mind, but apart from that

no port, if I’d won tattslotto I’d want to go back to now. Everyone was a new challenge, if it was a new one, you’d picture up in your mind what it was going to be like, but when you got there it was nothing like it was going to be anyway. It was just good to get to port.

No, Suez there, I didn’t go ashore anyway, that was said to have been pretty tough, so I wouldn’t have liked it anyway, it wasn’t a port to look forward to. Even Abadan, where we were told not to go near the

native quarters. Off the street and then all the houses and shops you go through gates and in there is a bazaar, but once you’re in those buildings, goodness knows what would happen. We were warned about that so we never went in. Apart from that you could look at other things around, not a lot to look at, but

it had very little to be quite honest. No, there was none that I really hated.

I was stuck in the seaman’s mission, I had a good bed, it was cheap living and I was buying my own food and everything like that. It was obvious that there were no ships that were was going to be a long time before you’d get a ship to get out. A couple of times I thought I had a ship for

a while to get a bit of money and to fill in time. Ships that used to come in to London, they’d pay their crew off and then they’d go up river to get serviced or repairs and I used to, or a couple of us used to go down and when the crews were paid off and ready to shift and go up the river and stay on it for a day or two while it was

worked on and it shifted back down again. Then they’d sign on a crew there. Once there, the officer said “Would you like to sail with us, because I think we are going back to Australia?” That was the nearest that I got to maybe taking a ship. I don’t know what made me say no there. I just said it and

then I found myself running out of time. I thought well go to Australia House and put that to them, you just explain your situation and let them sort it out and I thought they might get me a ship, but they didn’t, they just said “Come back tomorrow”, “Come back tomorrow”. Eventually I got a letter in the mail you have been certified for repatriation,

I suppose they were looking through my records to see if I was fair dinkum, when they found out that I was eligible for repatriation, it’s out there, the letter, after war service and that’s what they did and I came back with the Rangitata, with a ship load of war brides and fiancés.

No, I was a

passenger down below decks, the others were up on top. There was myself and maybe three or four other merchant seamen in the same situation as myself, they were from New Zealand and there was about half a dozen to a dozen soldiers, New Zealand soldiers being repatriated home too.

The Rangitata went to New Zealand after it came to Melbourne. So there were about a dozen soldiers and about four or five merchant seamen, we were all passengers being repatriated. We were down in E deck which was right down the bottom, and all the other were up top, and there again you weren’t suppose to fraternize, but we did because we weren’t crew and you could get away with it.

In fact, they came down and talked to us when we went up on deck, for our exercises and walk around and I’ve got a few photos of them.

Yes, I was still nineteen when I came home after three and a half years. When I say nineteen, I just snuck in about a month and then turned twenty.

Some were fiancés to be married, and others were married, I sincerely hope so because I’ve got photos of them carrying babies, yes they were. Mostly Australian and New Zealand servicemen or wives or whatever.

I think they were all English, I don’t know, they could have been some Canadians who went to England and transferred ship to wherever, I think it was nearly all English girls.

We were very restricted. They were just ordinary people, we were just ordinary people to talk too.

That came out through the Suez. I don’t know how long it took actually that trip. I know when I got home I hadn’t even told my parents I was coming home. When the ship pulled into Port Melbourne down on the wharf,

there was Mum and Dad and a couple of aunties there to greet me. The Australian consulate through their things and they got in touch here and they got in touch with the parents to let them know. You just came home, you walked off the ship and said goodbye to the girls that you knew on the ship

and the ladies and that. Mum and Dad, in those days there used to be a bus service out to Port Melbourne, an old green bus, a tramway bus. You’d get the tramway bus into Melbourne, back home to Ivanhoe and the war had finished.

It was a bit of a let down. Mainly that you were so used to sort of being organised,

the ship was there, you could go ashore and have your fun, come back and the ship was there for you to sleep on and you then sailed and went somewhere else and it was all there for you. When you get home, there’s nothing.

I found it a bit awkward, yes. I didn’t really handle it, I didn’t cope with it. I went and saw a doctor and I explained a few things and

he said “You’re a little bit chesty and all that and it might be best for you to go up to the country for a bit of a spell”, to get a bit fitter or whatever. I finished up doing that. In the back of my mind I was still going to come back to sea. While I was up in the country, my aunty who lived at Yarraville and there used to be a lot of ships coming into Yarraville in those days when the sugar wharf and all that was there. She

used to help at the missions or something down there and she used to get to know some of the captains and she was going to look out for a ship for me. In the meantime, I met Shirley, and that stopped me going back to sea.

At Kongwak, at South Gippsland.

When this doctor bloke says “Go to the country”. What am I going to do up there? Where is the country, sort of thing? With that I started reading the paper and in The Sun one day there was an ad to work on a dairy farm, this was at Kongwak. I thought oh well, that’s the country, and that’s a job so

that’s were I’ll go, so I applied for it and I’d never milked cows in my life and in fact I still thought at that time that you still milked by hand. This chap, Oscar Neilson, his name was, he came up to Ivanhoe to Mum’s place to pick me up and he had a car, which was pretty flash in those days, and he took me back to Kongwak and I said to him “That I’d never milked a cow by hand” and he said “We don’t, we use machine now”.

I thought that was marvellous, how the hell can you put a machine on a cow and make it work? Anyway they do. That was the start of it. I worked for Oscar for a few years. I met Shirley at the country-dance in Kongwak that was of a Saturday night, I couldn’t dance

and I still can’t, but Shirley was a beaut dancer. In those days the non-dancers used to go in the supper room and play card games and I used to just play cards. I met Shirley there and she taught me to dance a little bit, enough to get around a few times and things carried on from there. We used to go down to the dance,

George Chapman, the mailman he lived further up on a farm, he was the caretaker of the hall and he used to go down early to open the hall up and Shirley and I, we used to meet up in the cream stand on the road or sit in the cream stand, and wait for him to come down and we’d get in the back of the ute and he’d give us a lift and we’d go down and help him throw the sawdust on the floor to make it slippery for dancing. Then Shirley used to dance all night

and I used to play cards and you had your supper, you know cake and a cup of tea and all that jazz. Then when it was all over we’d help George pack up all the seats and we’d hop in the back of the ute and home again. By that time I was working on a cattle property and I was living in a hut down the paddock.

Yes.

It did really because once

again you became independent, you were yourself. In those days it was all horse work, you were working on a station and you’d go down and fix a fence, you didn’t hop on a tracker, you got the old horse and he was stabled for the night and you get him and put him in the spring cart and take the saws down there and you were working. You were yourself and you had something to do and you were not amongst a lot of people.

Yes, for a while I did. When I was living in this little hut, all I had was a fireplace down the end, an old bunk or bed on one side and a table on the other and a window over the table. I started to

do sketching, for something to do, to fill in time and that. Other than that you were still independent but there wasn’t that big adrenalin rush of a new country, a new port and all that. After a while it grew on you and I liked it. You were still ploughing with horses and cutting hay with horses and all that business.

Cutting down trees with cross cut saws and all that. Once again I experience some of the old stuff.

It was a combination of not being able to really handle the people or the city.

Just not being happy, and also Mum saying “You should be looking for a job, Leo, you’ve got to have a job” and everybody in those days had to have a job. So I thought that I just had to do something.

No, I have always been sort of chesty

from then on. It was not long a go, it was sort of playing up again and I went and saw the doctor and they tested me for asbestosis, which they thought that it might be, but I hoped that they were wrong, and he was.

Yes, you used to, I don’t know, you went and had injections,

it was a public thing, TB then, you could go and get treatment for it. The polio epidemic that happened before the war, they got to the stage there that if you didn’t want to go to school you didn’t have to. I used to always go, because you had the whole big school to yourself more or less, with about a dozen kids there and you had the whole playground

to muck around in. The TB, I don’t think I got it.

I’ve heard of some, yes.

No, there weren’t those facilities available, not like now, especially the Vietnam Vets, there is counselling and all that that you can go to, but there was none of that about. Another thing too, we never touched on this before. The merchant navy probably goes back to a lot of those situations, where I couldn’t get a ship

when I first wanted to go. They were very, very communists, they were real communists. Now there was no secret about it. That brought a political issue, which still sticks with the merchant navy today, you will probably hear about it if you interview more people. It’s one of the main reasons why the merchant navy never got any

satisfaction to start with and still today not getting too much anyway. It wasn’t until 1980, or somewhere around that, before they were classified as eligible for

things available to other servicemen, like myself now, I’m on the gold card for health, which is good because that’s my health covered. You don’t get any pension for it, but health is the only thing to worry about. There was nowhere for merchant navy to go too. If a soldier when he left the army, when he got his final pay, where you could go and

what you could do and if you did have a job before the war you could go back and pickup your old job. You could also get priority over any civilian if there was a job available and if a civilian went and a serviceman went at the same time then the serviceman had authority that was not available to a merchant seaman. So there was nowhere to get advice to, even the RSL [Returned and Services League] wouldn’t have you in

the first instance. It’s all changed over the years.

We are in an RSL sub branch at the moment. Originally there was a merchant navy league and it didn’t seemed to be getting run properly, and a lot of us sort of dropped out and gave it away.

Then somebody came up with the idea of forming a RSL sub branch, which where all merchant navy veterans, no social members, all veterans and that’s what happened and I think that was in the late 1980s. That’s what we are today, the merchant navy sub branch of the RSL. You do have a little bit more input and that from the RSL but like all

bodies they’re all tied down to government decisions, they agree to something but then you have to have another meeting, year after year and it seems to just go on and on and on. Most of the seaman now, well I’m seventy seven coming up and I’m a young one compared to most of them. They are all at the age now where they’ve just lost interest in trying to get any benefits.

They just keep what they got and just keep rolling along. Still, that’s life.

I think 1948.

1951.

No, we got married at Norsket, the church of Epiphany on top of on Ruskas Hill [?], if you know that.

At that time, I’d thought that I could do a better job than just manual, so I tried to get a job with the railways and didn’t do any good, don’t know what I was going to be, a train driver or something. Then I tried the PMG, because Dad had been in that. It took a while to get in but I did

get in and was only a temporary, you couldn’t get on permanent, it was a temporary personal, whatever you call it. I was working at the Norsket Post Office over there, that’s on top of Ruskas Hill too, more or less opposite the church. That was working in the exchange, doing the wiring and different things. Then from there

an opening come up in what they call Country Installation, and that appealed to me because what it turned out to be they had an office in Latrobe Street. You went in there, you might be too young to remember, the old phones where you pulled up the cords and plugged and the telephonist had the gear on and like that. What we used to do, a post office somewhere would have an order in for a ten line, twenty line or a thirty line and we’d make up these switchboards

and then they would be taken up to that country town and then installed and that was a good thing, because I was then back in the country and moving around a bit, and I liked that. At the same time, once we got married, we didn’t have a house of our own, we cleaned out a front room, which was the lounge room and that became our bedroom, so we were sharing the house

at Ivanhoe with my parents, to start life. Shirley, to help make ends meet, she got a job at McRobinson Chocolate Factory and if you ever ask her she will tell you, it’s the worst thing she’s ever done, been a country girl working outside and then being in a building, but the money that helped at the time.

Yes. Before I got married I was up at Kongwak, I went back there for something to do. I used to trap rabbits, cut brack and fern and do all those things.

Nothing.

You just had to kill it.

It’s a thing that just keeps growing, it was all done manually in those days. I wasn’t married then but I was up in the Kongwak area.

Yes, we did all that. While I was working there,

Shirley’s dad was share farming, a dairy farm up at Kongwak. Apart from the dance, meeting Shirley, Mr Scott who owned the cattle property that I worked on, also owned the farm down below the hill, that Shirley’s dad share farmed on, a dairy farm.

When Shirley left, that left him, but Betty the other sister was still on the farm then. After Betty left, that left Tom by himself to do the milking. He came up with the idea, he offered me a half share of his share to go into partnership with him on the dairy farm. I thought that might be an idea to get out of Mum’s house. So Shirley and I

took it up and I think it made Shirley a lot happier too because she got out of this fenced in business back with her parents and milking cows which she was used to. The only thing was, when we went back there to live, we were sharing a house with Shirley’s parents, but they are the things that just happen. It wasn’t a very big house I must tell you, it was a share farmer’s house, which the owners don’t make much. So I went back there and

we went dairying for a while. I think it was the living again close together, it was alright while we were there, but we had the feeling of being so close together all of the time. I went out, actually we were still living there at the time but I stopped working with the cows and I went out and

did some painting and decorating. I didn’t know decorating but I advertised as that. I didn’t know anything about painting either, to be quite honest. I went out and it was just something to do. I used to get contracts from the government chap that was in the building there, sort of commission houses and that, and in those days they didn’t paint, it was all calcimine. You used to just carry around

forty four gallon drum of water and then if you wanted a pink wall you would put in a bit of pink calcimine and paint it, blue a bit of blue, it was just easy stuff. They had a contract price, you’d get say ten pound a room and all this business. It was money coming in, and that was all that mattered. We then, while we were still doing that, we shifted from Shirley’s house, Shirley’s parents housed to one on another farm

at a place called ‘Atrium’. It was a farmer who used to live in there when he first bought the property then he made x amount of money, so he built himself a big flash house up on the hill and he had this other one. So we lived in there, and we had a house of our own. That was when we first started living by ourselves there.

Yes.

Yes, you’re dead right. There used to be a coalmine not far from where we were.

That’s in Korumburra itself.

I forget his name. Where the cutting used to be, where the railway line used to be, there was a bridge over it and his farm was here.

Just can’t remember. Somewhere along the way I

don’t know where this idea came from either, it’s just one of those things to happen. We would get a job on a farm, a big property somewhere. The method behind the madness was that a house is supplied on these big properties - that was the main thing. That’s where we started off. We went up to a property

probably through Stratham up through Mortlake are you up there with me.

Anyway Stratham, it’s the western district. At a property called “Mount Hamilton”. Mr Noel Calvert owned the place, there were Calverts up there everywhere, and they have tons of money. Noel’s gone now and so is his wife. While we were up there at Mount Hamilton,

there were a few thousand acres, I never ever saw the back of the property. I went there because there was a house supplied and you’d go up as what they called a station hand. I thought that was all right, I’ll be a station hand. When I got up there for the job, you are employed as a station hand, but I was sort of maintenance man, gardener, and handyman and do all the odd jobs.

The only time I worked out in the paddocks was at lamb marking time or something when they wanted extra hands to do it, and branding calves and that. It was a job, you had the house supplied and he also had a small dairy on the property. Somebody was running that as a share for him. We were allowed to go up with a billy and get a billy of milk everyday, and you’d

get half a sheep a week supplied free. We were living with a roof over our head and food coming in and a few bob in our pockets, it was the lowest paid wage in Australia, but still it was a few bob and you were miles from anywhere and you couldn’t spend it. We did that for a while. You could always tell what day of the week it was because the

half a sheep was delivered on a Saturday, the owner of the other property “Canong”, still the same family, where the sheep were killed and he would come around on the Saturday with all the half sheep laying on the back of the old American army jeep and with the sheep dog in the back with him too. The houses were along the driveway, and he would just drive down this driveway into the thing and toot. You’d go out

and just grab half a sheep and he’d give it to you and then you’d take it inside and then cut it up. You could tell the day of the week, Shirley would have the leg, the next day on a Sunday. Then she’d work through the cuttings and the chops and all this and when it got down to the flap, you knew it was Saturday because that was the last bit to eat and then you’d expect a new half bit of sheep. We did that. The way that you improved yourself in those days with that

type of living. The wages were the same on nearly every property, very few property owners ever gave you more money than what they had to. They used to give you little extras. Some would give you a house cow, you’d keep the cow and milk it and make butter. Others would offer to pay your phone bill, if you had the phone on, and that’s the way that you just improved yourself, just getting a little bit

better conditions. Also, you might strike a better house than the one that you just had. We had at Stratham was made of galvanized iron. It had been the old school house in the very, very early days. The wooden floors, no lino, no nothing. As I say, it was a job.

Yes, just a few, not a terrible lot.

It didn’t rain much, you had a water tank for fresh water for drinking. To have a bath or anything like that you had to use bore water, it’s pretty course water. The bathroom on this house was out on the veranda, it was built there and it was just walled off. We had this four-gallon tin of

teapol, it’s like a thick soap and you put that in the water, it was a water softener, you put that in the bath water when you had a bath, but when you got out, there was this big dirt mark around where the water level was. That was the only thing wrong with that the water wasn’t too good. There were a lot worse things that could happen I suppose.

I have got to get all these dates in order. Married in 1951 on the 7th July. Leonie came along on the 30th June 1952, Allen came along November 1953 and then that

was enough, that was it, we could handle two, so that was enough. I don’t know whether it was conscious sensation or not, that was it, two and that’s all that we have got now. They are still alive. No grandchildren, thank you. That’s all right. We had

you could say more or less our own grandkids, there are a couple of pencil drawings up there. We finished up going back to a property at Inverloch down on the coast through Wonthaggi. That was with the family called the Murray’s, old Tom Murray was the owner but Kevin, his son

had the farm and they were his daughters. Old Tom, he was a good bloke but he was a scrooge, he didn’t treat the family too good, you know. He had more money than he could poke a stick at but he kept it. Kevin’s wife Carol, she decided to go back to school as a schoolteacher, a teacher at the Catholic School at Wonthaggi.

She asked Shirley if she could look after the two little girls, while she went to school. They lived further up the road. Carol would go to school in the morning and drop the girls off and go to school and teach, come home, pick the kids up and then go home like that. Shirley looked after them, and the little one Rebecca, she was eleven months old when we got her. I somehow sort of found

somebody that liked me, we clicked, as she got older, I was in my forties. She was a beaut and I used to look after her and that. Today Rebecca is thirty years old with two kids of her own and she still comes up and visits us and we have got more photos of her kids and we don’t need any grandkids. It was just something that lasted, she was just one of those kids. In those days there was a lot more trust

than there is today. Carol and Kevin were quite happy to leave her with me. Every time there is one of those complaint sessions that comes in on the paper ‘dob in on anyone’ and I listen and my name hasn’t been mentioned yet. She was a beaut kid. I used to take her to the zoo, I’d take her anywhere.

Yes.

There wasn’t a lot of pressure put on you really. There was a limited amount of things that you could do in those days, but what you did you were independent. Like go to the scouts, you’d get on your bike and ride places and do all that. You were still doing what you wanted to with the rules of the game at that time.

Going to sea was just something that just happened. It was just an initial feeling for wanting to go somewhere to look at the other countries, I guess being in the sea scouts helped a little bit, you would get a little bit of flavour for the sea and with people. Maybe if the war hadn’t of come along

I may not have gone to sea. I think that helped a bit, that little bit of feeling that I was doing something, it just turned the tables that way. Once I started to do it, it just kept rolling. I never put pressure on everything, I didn’t go up to the consulate everyday or every Saturday. I used to just think that I’ll just go up and try and

I’d go until I got to the stage when the man power was the only thing left, and then I did pressure them a little bit. It just all happened. Probably living out the boyhood dream that I never really knew that I had and probably another boyhood dream that you were doing something good. Not so much of a hero, hero that’s a four-letter word but you just didn’t

feel guilty about doing nothing. You didn’t have to feel guilty I suppose at sixteen, it was just a better feeling to be able to. It’s a nice feeling now to be able to talk to you or talk to anybody with the knowledge that you are a returnee and you threw your cap in the ring and that was it.

I used to read the pirate books and all of those. No, if anything as a kid I would have been more of a cowboy, and I finished up sort of being one. When you talk of heroes, you know blokes like Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson and

they were always sort of folk law to me. That time when we went over to America, for the union with all the American merchant marines. We went to a place called Tous in New Mexico and low and behold it was Kit Carson territory and his house that he lived in was there, and it’s turned into a museum now,

run by some Masonic type of group, a lodge of some sort. It’s there and here’s this big saddle in a glass case that Kit Carson road and everything. Here I was a seventy year old and still my childhood dreams coming alive. When I had a bit of spare time I went up to the

park there which is called Kit Carson Park. His grave is there. So after years, fifty, sixty years ago reading about him or whatever, there you are standing right alongside of him more or less. The little bit of history that goes with it, the stars and stripes on the flag pole there, and the one down in the town where he and his men fought off the Mexicans or something

in that war that he was involved in. He said that he would never lower the flag, or let anyone else do it. The only place in America where the flag is never lowered. It stays up forty-eight hours a day in both places the grave and that. That was just a little bit of history or trivia, whichever way you look at it.

Yes, it could of ended very smartly, my career there.

In those days, things were pretty quite. You’d go to Sunday school of a morning, you’d go to church after Sunday school.

You were brought up in that type of tradition. So that and the sea didn’t sort of go together. It was just one of those things, I just can’t really explain. I can only tell you and talk and go over it and over it again and each time probably alter it a bit but each time I alter it, it will still be what happened.

Sixteen, I must admit I didn’t

know anything, really as far as life. To be quite honest coming back even in my twenties I still felt that I knew nothing, it’s a long while before you know anything. Being a churchgoer, not that I wanted to but more or less that you had too. You accepted it and that was it.

Going from church boy to school and to the Calcutta scenery and all that. It was a bit of a long jump. It just happens, you get on the ship and I think if you don’t cause any trouble yourself or don’t upset the apple cart yourself, nobody else, there might be the odd one that would annoy you over certain things but not continually,

you just learn to live with it. The fact that I was a mess boy, I was more or less by myself most of the day, because most of the time I was in that little cubby hole, feeding or washing up or something, or cleaning cabins. I was still doing my own thinking and then I got to be an ordinary seaman. You were doing something that you liked. You didn’t think you were sixteen,

now I probably did that many damn stupid things when you’re a lot older. I know I did, but that was it. Maybe it helped thinking you were older too, because it gave you the feeling that no one else is sort of that much better than you, they might be bigger but not necessarily better. You do grow up fast but I think you do also

probably grow too fast and do a lot of stupid things that you shouldn’t have done. If you could really go back and have one of these of everything that you did, you’d edit a lot out.

A lot of people have asked me. As I say, when there was a situation it was doing nothing or just

waiting or not knowing anything was the thing, that’s when your mind starts thinking things that you don’t know anything about. But as soon as something happens it doesn’t matter what it is, a ship going off course, it’s there and it’s something to do and your mind has something to occupy itself, you just accepted it. I’ve said to most people that I was never frightened, but there again if I could go back again

and analyse myself properly I probably was at certain times. In a way I was frightened of being in the water, with your legs dangling down there and sharks, that would frighten me but overall no, you had so much to do, that you didn’t really worry. I was very fortunate I didn’t

go through half of the bad things that the others did. The thing is they probably approached that situation as the same as any other when it happened you deal with it because it’s happening, and the fact that they survived, whether one way or the other. They weren’t really frightened. They might have been at the time but once you

got it, but the name of the game really is survival, once you come back well you’re back.

I don’t remember being lonely. As a mess boy when you were in the cabin, there were other mess boys, so you weren’t

involved with them but you weren’t in a solitary situation. When you were an ordinary seaman you had a cabin. No, I don’t think so. There might have been days if you started thinking of home, or write a letter home you might sort of make yourself a little bit miserable because

of things, but if you don’t think about them then you’re not miserable. There was just too much to do to be quite honest. You might say, you’re at sea twenty-four hours a day, what do you do? Just looking at the sea all the time, but I don’t know. I didn’t spend much time looking at it but I looked at it when I had too, as I say when it was rough.

You would get a bit of a feeling out of it being rough, same as when you got a little feeling when it was that flat, it was just as though it was a sheet of glass. It was just unbelievable.

I’d have to say - yes. If you weren’t happy it would stand out and even

struggling to remember, to remember anything that made you unhappy.

The Atlantic was always a sort of notorious stretch of water. By the same token

Bass Strait down here is around about the third or forth most dangerous piece of water in the world. I never got around Cape Horn, that is one of the roughest down at latitude forty and all that. Any part of the ocean, it changes. The sea must be a woman, it can change from one mood to another so quickly.

Not as much as what you’d think really. At night time when you were on the bridge or when you were in the crows nest looking down you saw more, you didn’t know what half of them were, but the phosphorus and the movement of things just gave it sort of a pretty look for want of better words. No, you didn’t see many fish and I never saw one whale. You’d see a lot of bird life when you get near shore,

marine life and out at sea, the Albatross, they are a graceful bird, you always feel that you were getting near land when you saw them, they can fly about two thousand miles from anywhere. The sea life, I’ve got a photo out there of flying fish you can hardly see them in the photo. They’re called flying fish because they have fins that look like wings, they don’t really fly but

when you’ve got a wave coming up here and a wave coming up there they sort of swim through, they swim through the waves between that wave and there you’ve caught them flying and they are really swimming all the time but the gap in between the waves gives the impression that they are flying. They don’t actually fly like a bird, they don’t go up. No, the sea life there could have been empty for more or less of what we saw.

If the misses started going crook. No, once I sort of got established and realised that’s it.

I’ve thought about it and I often thought where would I be? And everybody thinks this at some time or another, if I’d gone back to sea, where would I be if I went this way instead of that way. No, I’ve never had a hankering to go back. I’m just getting too old now. We nearly all say the same down there at our meetings. I wouldn’t really like to go back to sea today. You will probably hear this type of remark

when you interview a lot of other seamen. The sea life today is not the type of life that we lived. We lived a good type of seaman’s life. The ships are different, we say that they don’t even look like ships, these container ships and that. The way that they run a ship. We had our set routine, four hours on, eight off, always a man on watch, always a

man on lookout and always a man at the wheel. These days they have, in our days we used to have about thirty-five maybe more on some ship. Today they take bigger ships out with about half a dozen men. They call them integrated ratings, I think. They have got to be capable, if they wander down the engine room to do something you did that, if they wander into the cookhouse you have got to do that. That’s cost saving which

shipping companies have always been on about. But the lifestyle is not as good as what we had I don’t think, and you’re not in port very long either, these days. With container loading, with containers rocking, bang then gone. We like to think it anyway, but we think we saw the best

of the sea years, war aside, war situations aside, for the ones that had it bad. In the old days, the sailing ships, they were a pretty rugged sort of a life. You might have different stories to tell there, what we were talking about before. When they were at sea for three and four months at a time, that might create problems. We missed all that. I was lucky enough to have got

the Santiago, which gave me, the taste of the rough type of ship and go to ports that not many people see. Then we got the better type of ships and we’ve missed all this big modernized type of thing, which is just business, business, money, money all the time, it always has been, because that’s what they’re there for, to make money. No, I just look back and

I’m quite happy with what I’ve done. I had the years on the land and did the sheering, did the cowboy stuff and worked with horses and all those type of things. I’ll just fade away gracefully now.

I’m talking as though I’ve just been on a cruise ship, from place to place. If you put it in that perspective I suppose that’s what it would amount too. Everyday, or just about everyday there would be a situation that would let you know that there was a war.

It may not be the actual action. Sometimes you’d be on watch and the officer would just be a little bit more careful. We know that he’s had information from somewhere, and they did this with everyone, you know things in the area. It just puts you on your toes a little bit more.

Then when you went on watch and saw the zigzag course, you knew that there was something about. It was just enough there to let you know that you were in a war. When you talk like I have been you leave all those bits out. It is, it’s just a cruise but there was more to it.

Yes, you’d see shipping in the distance and you’d see the aircraft. Whenever you got close to most of the bigger ports, aircraft would come out anyway. Because when they’re coming out you don’t know who they are to start with. You’d just hear a plane and they were all propeller planes in those days, so you would hear it coming closer and closer. Not like a jet,

one boom and it’s gone. You’d hear it getting closer and closer and you’d look and waiting to see whether it’s one of theirs or one of ours. The officer, you had a number and you had to identify yourself. Yes, you did hear a lot of planes come out, only when you got close to port.

Not at that stage, no. The only time if the

officer was a pretty cluey sort of a bloke and could tell by the outline of the plane that it was an enemy plane. He would sound it. The only other time would be if the plane had started shooting or bombing, before anybody on the ship would wake up and go.

No.

Got a little bit. Very little on the ship, but now and again the sparks, the wireless operator, he would be the only one who could pick it up, he must pick up messages and then he’d let somebody know and they’d let somebody else know. We did hear things, I suppose you’d call them the important things.

Like the Jewish situation in Germany in the concentration camps and the burning of the bodies, we heard that. We just sort of couldn’t fathom it, it was outside and we were sort of locked into a sea sort of situation, it was outside it. We did hear things like that. If there was a major sort

of event in the war, you might hear about it. Otherwise, when you got to port and you bought a newspaper.

No. When that came through, I was on either the Tai Yin or the Kongsdal, I’m just trying to think.

It probably was. No, there were no Jews. Because you don’t have to be a Jewish national to be Jewish either I suppose. Like Sammy Davis Jnr, he was a Jew, he took up the religion, not to say that none of the Norwegians couldn’t have a Jewish religion, there was no national Jews there.

The war finished on

the 15th August.

Yes. I don’t remember where we were.

No, that would have been the Japanese, the VJ Day [victory over Japan] or whatever they

called it. But as for Germany I was probably at sea and it was just accepted. There was no hooray about it, I know that.

There wasn’t a lot of talking, I’m glad that you raised that point. Earlier on, and I just forgot which ship it was, we got talking about the war and it eventually works out that several of the Norwegians were sympathisers for the German

side of it. That made it an awkward situation for them. Fighting against them, well it’s only natural because Germany and Norway are close together, so in peacetime it’s only natural that they would get to know each other.

They never ever seemed to make an issue of it. I do remember some of them saying that they were sympathetic.

No. I never crewed with any. But after the war, strangely enough when I was up at Inverloch, one of my good mates, he turned out to be

German and he turned out to be not a captain but a lieutenant or something in a U-boat and he was one of my best mates, Günter Zimmerling. You couldn’t get much more German than that. He showed me photos of himself, done up in the jodhpurs and the big swastika, it was after the war, so there was no malice or anything there. That was it, after the war you just got on

as though there wasn’t anything that happened. During the war, I don’t know. You always heard the stories of what the enemy did. Now, Günter was telling me of an incident, his submarine and there was a lot off, they must of torpedoed a few ships, they had a lot of survivors, they picked up

the survivors not too often they did. They had them on the deck of the submarine and they were prepared to take them to a prisoner of war camp, it would have been, they wouldn’t have given them back to the British. They were prepared to take them to land or to a mother ship, I think they used to have mother ships that would pick them up. In the course of going to where they were a British warship saw them

and they were heading for them, they signalled with Morse and everything that they had prisoners on deck and everything and what they were doing. The British kept coming, they were going to ram it, right through, there was no sympathy for anyone. They had to do it. The submarine dived, and left the poor devils up there. By the same token the other side of the story was they would have been

cut in half for the sake of getting rid of the submarine. It’s hard to balance, what’s correct in those situations.

No. There wouldn’t have been anything, not those types of situations. I think all that I saw would be classed as normal for a war situation.

No, because a lot of people didn’t know that you’d been away,

so they don’t ask so you don’t talk much. Mum and Dad, they were just a little bit interested with what had happened, but apart from that, no. You got more talk when you go to a meeting just amongst the boys. Just after we have our meeting we have a lunch and a couple of beers and then an hour or two talk, that’s about the only time that you get any talk. It’s more on the

social side of it than anything else.

The merchant seamen were unlike the other service personal, they lived in a town

and they joined the local RSL club and they all know each other. Merchant seamen, we, that’s why we started this one up and we meet in Melbourne, because I’m down here, some are over at Frankston or that, the others are down at Lilydale and they are just spread all over the place. The only time that you see any merchant seamen is on Anzac Day, then you see the same ones, all the time.

I didn’t early on, because a: I was up the country; it was hard to get there and I just didn’t feel it, and at that time the RSL wasn’t particularly keen on merchant seamen and there was no merchant navy sort of organisation. You were just in limbo.

After when it was possible to go in and march, the sub-branch we march every year. We are getting less and less of course, some are passing on and others are just getting too lame and are running out of breath to do the march. We will keep going while there is one or two there.

There was no sort of, sorry I always tell fibs. There was one chap, a Norwegian chap and I always

thought that I would have liked to have met again. In general, not that you don’t like the people, but it just never enters your head to think I’d like to see him again. This Norwegian chap, Pete, that’s the English version of it. He was in the engine crew. If anyone was a bit of a

fatherly hand to me, like guiding or helping he was if anyone and that was him. When we were in New York and the war had finished, and we and the Aussie boys we decided to get paid and get off the Gripsholm. Unknown to me, Pete, because the war being over, they’d got in touch with the Norwegian consult that got in contact with his country

and that. They got back all the information about their families. Peter, this night he wanted to go over to the bar, it’s a pub, just outside the gates to the wharf. He went over there and had a beer, he’d

just had word, this is the other side of the Norwegian and German sort of being friendly. All the news that came back for the crew, amongst his news was the fact that his parents had been murdered in one of the German things. His grandparents and nearly all his family, had been wiped out in one of the German,

what do they call it, a repercussion if someone did something wrong, they’d shoot the whole town [reprisal], but his whole family had been destroyed. The story was that once the war was over that ship was going back to Norway, because they were all wanting to get back home. He wanted me to stay on the ship with him, and I’d already signed on the Gripsholm. That

was a very hard decision. He broke down and I think it was that I’d already signed on, and I think the Gripsholm sailed the next day or something. That is one chap if possible that I’d like to see. He was an older

person than me. The chances of seeing him are just minimal, if I could, it would be nice. Apart from that, the crew, the officers and that, they were just part of the life at that time. Now that that part of life is finished. I don’t remember it until

people like you come around.

I think I might have always been a bit of a loner anyway. On the ship, you were amongst people but you still had your fair share of space, to be alone. Just being amongst people, it just seemed crowded and you were amongst people all the time. On the ship, you were all part of the ship, you felt as though everyone

knew each other even though you didn’t know their name. In the city, I just felt out, that’s all. I can’t explain it properly but that’s what the feeling was. It might have been me who was at fault, there was nothing wrong with them, but I just felt that I couldn’t communicate. Maybe I didn’t want to be part of it.

I wanted to go back to my own cocoon, and that’s it. As time goes on, you naturally get older and a bit wiser and you just accept things a little bit better.

Shirley probably wouldn’t know any, she would have known some of the places but not too many, we didn’t worry about it. She loves going here to the ‘ladies day’ where the members take their wives and girlfriends, and she loves going to that day and talking to the ladies, and listening to the men talking and that in general.

No, we don’t carry on a conversation about the war. No and again something might be on television, I’d say “I was there, I saw that”, but that’s it, there’s no great big story about it.

No, they’ve never. Once again we’ve never talked about it, so it’s a case of if one doesn’t make the move then the other doesn’t seem to

do it. I’m not blaming the others, it’s probably my fault all along.

No, it just doesn’t happen. It’s only now that Dad’s gone, I should have asked him this about different things crop up and I don’t know nothing about Dad really, it’s just that if you don’t ask questios, you won’t find out. I suppose that’s your answer to this.

Mum died on her eighth birthday in 1980, because she went with the years. Dad passed away before Mum, I just forget the dates now. It was I think 1976 or 1978, those two numbers come into it.

No, I didn’t buy Dad any presents actually. No, I didn’t, he probably would have listened. To be quite honest I

wasn’t sort of really game enough, in those days, it’s not today, it wouldn’t have been the right thing to have said then.

About the war, do you mean?

Yes, I can go through all of it, as long as I can remember it. No, there’s nothing, even seeing death

you accepted it and now when you think of it, and it’s probably a cruel thing to say, you didn’t even think of it, it was just something that happened and that was it.

I don’t know about the most significant. They would have had to have been significant just because they took place at such a young age, more or less a developing age. That’s the age where you go one-way or the other. They were just significant, they probably set a pattern for me, I don’t know. I haven’t worked to any pattern,

they kept on changing. No, they did make me change my way of life. Life’s just come along and I’d taken it as it has come. I hadn’t planned anything.

It must of changed me a bit, because I was a pretty quiet sort of a bloke now, but that’s only because you’re old. It changed me from I think what I would have been. I’ve never really thought about it, probably if I hadn’t of gone to sea I’d of finished up probably office type work, I don’t know why.

The war gave me an opportunity to be me. It was something that I would have never been without. I don’t think I would have gone to sea without the war. The war was the little push that got me going.

I did, yes. That was the American Merchant, they call themselves Merchant Marine.

They invited Australians and their wives over to the reunion. That was good, because Shirley could come over there and see things and mix with people and they really gave us a good time.

I haven’t been back to many of the ports, the only one that I have been back to is London. Shirley got breast cancer a few years back and she had the operation and every thing went good and then she went onto the treatment. When she had it, we said then “We’ll

go over to the places that you’re never seen before”, just in case. We went away and we went to the Baltic Sea in Russia, we went on a cruise, I thought that it would be good. Shirley loved the cruise and the food and everything. She said “I can’t see why you like being at sea, because that’s all there is to look at”,

people think like that. When we got back to England, we had already arranged that we’d stay there, and we did a bus tour of England. And London is the only place, the port that I’d been back too from before. I went back, not purposely but I was going to look at the sailors home where I was staying, but

because the waterfronts everywhere around the world and in Melbourne you can see it, the waterfront over there is valuable property in London. With shipping changing the way with containers, all that wharf area is being knocked down and turned into units/flats or whatever. So the nursing home is not there, not the nursing home, the sailors’ home. It was on the cruise ship up the Thames, and I asked the captain on it where

the seaman’s mission was, and I said “East Allgate”. He lives there in London and he didn’t know where East Allgate was, it’s a suburb of London. I found out later it was no good going over there because there was nothing to look at. I could of shown Shirley, I slept there. No, that wasn’t to be. Colombo and those places, no, I’ve never been back there,

or Africa.

Now and again, yes. Not necessarily purposely, it’s something that just happens, your mind ticks over, or something triggers it off. From there you go to something else. At times I can see myself back in those places.

There again, the way that I picture myself now, thinking I looked like that back there, I’m probably wrong. I can still see the ports, I can see coming into some ports, the Tai Ying up, the actual actions, throwing the rope over to tie up, I can see that. Probably in the back of your mind you’re thinking that was good, that was

good, it was good to be there.

Not as fully as to you, just an odd thing you might say down at the pub, if someone says something. Just a little thing over there on that issue. I was saying that women

are just part of the waterside front. The merchant seamen when they get to port, more or less the first thing they head for. The barmaid down here, or one of the barmaids, she’s got both her son and daughter in the navy. I was talking to her the other night, you know stupid talk. I said

“Now your daughter’s in the navy, when she gets into port, do girls think the same way, do they head off to wherever girls go?” All she said was “I hope not”. Are the females that way inclined or is it only the males that put that as a priority?

I will believe you, it was just interesting. Somebody said to me once “What do the prostitutes do for fun on their day off?” Normally, if you’ve got your own day off that’s what you’d be going for. I don’t know, I’ve never asked her.

No.

Just a couple little bits of trivia. We were in Philadelphia, this is on the Kongsdal,

the wharf in Philadelphia, the ship’s here and the wharf’s there, the wharf would have been about fifteen foot wide at this stage, and then there was a big ring lock type of a fence there, and then the footpath were all the local people walked along.

We were painting the side of the ship, the actual side of the ship, naturally you can’t paint down below with the wharf, because it would squash your legs, but just where the ship curves away from the wharf. There were three of us sitting there painting, but of course all the girls walking along the wire mesh only x amount of feet away. We weren’t doing much painting, we were just sitting here just staring.

It went on for a while and then the next minute I hear a voice “Keam” and I look up, here’s the bosom, he’s a bit Norwegian, a big beard, “Yes, sir”, he said “Go and get a bucket of water”, I said “Yes, sir”. You get up and sheepishly walk along up the gangway and onto the ship. Look for a bucket of water or near enough to a bucket of water and walk around looking

for the bosom. I eventually find him “Hey boat, what do you want me to do with this?” He said “Dip your bloody paintbrush in it, it must be getting hot”, if he hadn’t of been so big I would of whacked him with it. That was just a little bit of trivia. An aside from that, not with me, but just incidents that happened. With my group I’m the welfare

officer and most of my jobs now is to go around hospitals visiting sick members. I just rang one up the other day, Ron O’Donald, and just talking away about things. He explained an interesting little situation. We were in a port on west coast of Africa, and it’s similar to Colombo. Colombo has only has a limited amount of wharf area. If that’s full up then you anchor out

and they have the big barges and you unload into the barges and then the barges are taken over and then unloaded. In this port where Ron was, it was the same thing they had to be unloaded onto barges. He went down with an attack of appendicitis and had to be taken to hospital. What they did, they had to load that barge first, they wouldn’t take him ashore. They load with coffee beans it was, he said, “They put him on top of the coffee beans”,

it was a big barge, it’s nearly as big as a house. Then went ashore with him and took him to hospital and he got over it. There was no sympathy for the poor devil. He was one of those that had a bad trot. He was torpedoed twice, and another ship hit a mine, on the Normandy beachheads. He’s a very sick man.

There was probably quite a lot of things happened, they just don’t come to the mind.

No, because if we’re to go back and try and do it again,

it’s not the fun, it’s not the experience. Doing it when it happened the first time and that’s the whole experience of the thing. You learnt from that. No, I wouldn’t do anything different, no. What was done was all right at the time, you got through it, so why change it? I’ll live with it.

Thanks very much mate.