Australians at War Film Archive

Briefly. Right, okay. Briefly, I was born in Oakleigh in Victoria. I don’t usually tell to many people I’m born in Victoria, and spent all my life in Victoria

as a child, attending school. 13 different schools in my primary life.

Yes, born in Oakleigh, Victoria.

We – my father being in World War I, he had a soldier settlement block and things like that, and he had no particular trade; he was a labourer. And of course he had to go where work was available because the Depression years commenced in 1926. 1932 to 1938 and he couldn’t get any work,

and we all had to do our little bit and so forth. But where he had to go, where he had to go to work we had to go also, and therefore we just went to different schools all over Victoria, mostly around Gippsland and places like that. Eventually I ended up, we ended up going into the city. I can expand a great deal more on that if you so wish, all those other bits and pieces, but we went into the city and

continued with schooling right up until the secondary school and then after I finished school the war had started and I didn’t know what to do with myself but I got a job with a

company called Nonporite. I was always a bit of a science person and my main subjects I loved most was maths physics and chemistry so I got a job in a laboratory in this manufacturing organisation and was going to become an industrial chemist.

Didn’t really, it was a bit – I just couldn’t make up my mind really of what I wanted to do, but when I started to look around, and I thought to myself, well, there’s not too many guys left about my age now. I was going on to fifteen and a half, fifteen, and I was going to the

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Anyway, I thought to myself, “No, I feel that I should try and do something for the – get into the services,” but it was rather difficult to do because my father, during the First World War, he had his seventeenth birthday in France.

And I tried three times and a very good friend of mine, his son, he went to school, with me. Anyway, he kept

putting me out so eventually I was determined to do it so I went to…

Yeah, well, there was three of us at school. There was Doug, Jeff

and myself. My father, he joined up at the beginning of the Second World War, but he was considered not of great health to go into – how old would he be? He would have been about, he would have been in his forties, forty-two, something like that, pretty young really.

Anyway, so he went into the army so he wasn’t home. So my mother and – we didn’t really worry too much about family life, we had – Dad being in the army and myself,

no one to really talk to and things like that, so I used to have to depend on Jeff, Jeff’s father to – Jeff’s father and mother who were like second parents to me. Anyway, I tried three times to go into the army and he was awake up to me, and he used to go up to the army and pull me out. Anyway, eventually one day there, I was in town

in Melbourne and I went up to the Royal Melbourne Regiment which was up at the top end of Swanston Street and I walked in there and said, “I want to join up.” And the bloke said to me; he was a warrant officer, yeah, he was a warrant officer. He said to me, “What for?” And I said, “Well, all my mates have gone,”

and trying to big note myself and so forth, etc., etc. He said, “Okay, so you want to join up. All right, stand over there.” So I stood over there and then he said, “Go and see that bloke down there.” And I went down there and he was the medical officer and he said, “Oh, so you want to join up. You look all right to me, you’ve got two arms, two legs, two eyes, okay, sign on the dotted line,” and next morning I was in camp.

That was, yeah, that was the fourth of July 1942. And the camp at the time was the Caulfield Racecourse, and by the way,

my mate’s father didn’t know about this, which of course I made sure after the last three attempts that he wouldn’t know. So I ended up there and we all lined up there, civilians, a great big line of us. Of course, there was no races at Caulfield Racecourse in those days. So, we all lined up there and there was a sergeant and a warrant officer walking along with a pad,

a note pad, taking our names and so forth, etc. And he only asked two questions and that was, “What do you want to join the army for?” “Well, because everyone else is in the army; I thought it would be a good idea.” “What’s your interest?” And if you said, “No,” he immediately yelled out, “Infantry.” I said, “Well my interests are electronics, maths, physics and chemistry,” so he said,

“Signals.” And so that’s why I ended up in signals. We were all put in tents and so forth and the next day I was on a troop train. I think, it was a troop train for Bonegilla in Victoria which was the Signals Training Camp.

It was the 1st Australian Signal Training Establishment I think it was, something like that. And you did your basic training there and then after you finished that, which didn’t take long – it was only about six weeks, all you had to do was learn how to salute, turn left, turn right, and march up and down.

A little bit of gas training and so forth, etc. And then you were individually put into groups. And those groups were either as a radio operator, a linesman or whatever the case may be and as I had joined the air training corps when I was at school and I had already learned morse code

and I wanted to be a pilot – I’m digressing slightly – does it matter? Anyway, I went back, I went to the air force place and said that I wanted to, when I was in the Air Training Corps, No. 1 Squadron in Melbourne, and so I did all the morse training, I learned morse and da dee da. I excelled in that. And

I went to the air force recruitment centre in Elizabeth Street, Swanston Street or whatever it was and they did all the examinations to become – I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but every kid wanted to be a fighter pilot, and he put me through all the tests and so forth and he said, “I don’t think you would make a good

fighter pilot.” And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because you lack coordination.” And one of the tests was, you know, to hold your hands out and put your fingers together and all this sort of thing and I happened to go a little bit one way or another,” whatever the case, and so I lacked coordination. He said to me, “You’d make a damn good bomber pilot though.” So I said, “Oh, okay, that’ll do.” So that was that, but you had to wait until you were eighteen, so I thought to myself, and that’s why I went into the army.

Anyway, of course when they knew in the army that I already was fully equipped to be a radio operator, they said, “You will be a radio operator.” So that was that, and I became a radio operator in the army and we had different groups there and I joined – they sent me into

a particular group, which was a commando group. And we did commando training all the time and

armed combat. That was quite funny, yeah it was quite funny, and we didn’t muck around, we did everything with bar knives, bayonets and

we were fair dinkum. We used to always use live ammunition We used to march twenty-five miles per day, full pack, eighty pound packs, and they had to make special boots for me because my feet were too small, size two.

Anyway, that was that, and then I just learned all the different equipment that were used and we used to do bivouac training, we used to climb mountains, we used to walk along little edges around these mountains, we used to carry all our radio equipment

between two poles on our shoulders over these mountains, we used to carry all our fuel drums and our battery charges and everything like that over Mount Feathertop, Mount Bogong, and we went on a big bivouac and they reckoned the Japs had landed at

Lakes Entrance, and we were down there and we were going to capture them down there or get into them, whatever. And they wanted this special party to go ahead. So there was three of us, and we all had motorbikes; oh, deary me. Anyway, we used to have to draw the panoramas and sketch the areas down there so we could

take them back to intelligence and that was quite funny really. And we decided to nick off at some stage, so we disappeared for a week, and we went in and stayed at the pub.

I don’t know what the hell we did, really I don’t, but the

publican, he was so pleased to see us he put us up there and didn’t tell anyone about us and we stayed there for a week and we thought, “Oh here we are; we’re in bloody trouble now.” So, when we went back and took all our drawings back, they went mad at us for coming back too early. So, that was that. Anyway, we did all our initial training in the commando group

It was run by a major, a very well-known major, who was involved with Z Force [Services Reconnaissance Department]. He was in the Krait to Singapore and places and Borneo. I wonder where they are now?

Yeah, I had a brother, Rex. He didn’t join up, he was an engineer, he actually

ended up he had his own engineering shop and he used to make machine gun bits and so forth, that was Rex. And he stayed that way right through the war which was very good. That was his war effort, because as you know in those days you had to have protected undertaking, you couldn’t just have any old job. I had a sister and she ended up marrying an air force guy.

And ten years later, I had another brother, Kelvin. Anyway, he was up here last week to see me as a matter of fact. And, actually, once I joined up that was just about the end of my family life. And

the family itself was not conducive to keeping a lot of kids together. It was only, there was only – my mother and father’s relationship wasn’t the best. And Dad being in the army, my mother was never home sort of thing. So, you know,

we basically did our own thing, all the family and the kids

Yeah, well they were very – I used to always call them my parents, his parents, I used to call them my parents because they used to look after me and

I used to have meals over there and I used to sleep there.

We were school mates. What really actually happened was when I joined up, they joined up. Because they thought, “Well, if he can get away with it,” they could too. Anyway, Jeff – they both went into the army.

Jeff and Doug, yeah. And they were mad keen on cars but in those days no one had cars, but they were always mad keen on them but they wanted to drive cars. So when they went into the army they also did the same thing as me but they did it about six months later. And, they, when they went into the recruitment place

they said they wanted to be truck drivers so they thought they’d get into transport or something like that. And, as I said, they lined them all up and they said, “What are you interested in?” And they said, “Truck driving,” and they just said straight away, “Field ambulance.” So, they went to Wangaratta in Victoria to do their training in field ambulance. I don’t know what Jeff ended up

as but Doug, I think they both ended up as stretcher-bearers. And Doug, when he finished his training he joined the 9th Division, he was sent to the 9th Division. You don’t join them, he was sent to the 9th Division. And he was sent up

to – he was sent up to New Guinea and he was at the invasion at Scarlet Beach at Finschhafen and to be a stretcher bearer was not a good job. He – the landing craft – of course, particularly

as the Japs had all that area up there and when they landed, of course, the idea was – oh, the beach wasn’t the best and when the doors went down most of them were killed then.

Doug, as he was going on to the beach, all he could do – he used to have a haversack full of cotton wool and he used to push the cotton wool into the holes of the bullets.

When he got ashore, the Japs come over and dropped daisy cutters. They are bombs, which as soon as they hit the deck, they make an indentation and then they splatter straight across the ground.

And the idea was to get into their legs. Anyway, when the Japs come over, they just all, as soon as they hit the beach, they all dived into a hole. And everyone dived into the same bloody hole and his bum happened to be sticking out of the hole and he got shot up the bum, or shrapnel went right up his

bum. That was six weeks and his war ended. That was Doug, he survived and I don’t know where he is today. Jeff, he ended up, I don’t know where he ended up, in the Torres Strait Islands somewhere. I don’t know really what happened, this

is what happened, you know, we all went to school together; during the war years you were in and out of places and so forth etc. etc. You made friends, you lost friends and then after the war, everybody was so pleased that the bloody war had ended that they never ever kept in contact with each other again.

That’s a sad state of affairs. I got some wonderful mates who I have never seen again and it’s not until later in life that you say to yourself, “Wonder what he’s doing these days and I wonder how I contact’ – a matter of fact, a very good friend of mine in the navy, I’ve been trying to contact him. He’s down in Victoria somewhere.

Anyway, that was that, and Doug and Jeff, well, Doug – no where am I, Jeff. Jeff is now living at a place called Casterton in Victoria. And he’s the president of the RSL [Returned and Services League] down there. Actually, we were going to go down and see him next month but we were

a bit pressured for time so we’re flying down for Beryl’s war brides’ reunion. And, so we decided to fly to Adelaide and then fly down to Melbourne and meet up with a few of my old navy mates and so forth, and relatives, and then we’re flying back home again. So that’s that, so I won’t be seeing Jeff. And I don’t know where Doug is. I was going to ask him where Doug was these days.

Yeah, so that was Jeff, that was the schoolmates.

Yeah, but then again, you know, everyone seems to be the same who was in the war. Very few of them ever, ever stayed, or met again, did things. It’s like when I was in the navy –

the only people I ever knew were the people, and it all depended on the size of the ship you were on. If you just met the local, domestic mob and others, you wouldn’t even know. Like, for example there was a bloke all the time on one ship, he just lived over the road and I’d never have met him. And he was a stoker and of course I was on the upper deck and

therefore we never met. And when I did meet him, I met him on the way home, on Adelaide Railway Station of all places. Anyway, that was the way things go. So we never, ever, never met, things, met each other again.

Oh, well,

the Depression years were pretty rough. Dad was working on the Great Ocean Road. In those days there was no such thing as the dole. The government just sent you

where there was any work, you know, there it might be fruit picking or whatever there might be. But Dad was working as a labourer on the Great Ocean Road and they were living in tents there and what you did, what he used to do, he used to get a piece of paper at the end of the week, and that piece of paper he took to an office and the office then sent money home to my mother. So he never had any money at all. They used to give him, oh I forget, cigarette money and things like that but he never had anything.

Oh yes, he’d be, they used to, just like the army, you know, you’d have mess tents and things like that and they would just feed them, line up sort of thing.

I don’t know how she got it. I suppose that would be the way because there wasn’t too much and we didn’t have anything

to do with banks when we were kids because we didn’t have any money, period. Yeah, that would be probably it, you’d probably go to the post office and get an allowance given to you. But during the Depression we all had different jobs to do when we came home from school. Mine was to go to the grocers and get all the broken biscuits out of

tins. Biscuits used to come in kerosene-type tins, I don’t know whether you know what kerosene tins are. And of course, these tins, they used to have them full of biscuits but the pounding up and down of tins from time to time, you’d always end up with broken biscuits at the bottom of it. And so that was – and, of course, they couldn’t be sold. I used to go round to the grocers and I used to say,

“Have you got any broken biscuits?” And I used to take them home and Mum used to make porridge from them.

Yeah, and those type of biscuits. Not the dry type of biscuits, the sugary type biscuits, which – they were just pulverised at the bottom of a tin and, of course, they couldn’t be sold to customers. No, we used to do that and she used to make porridge and things like that out of it. And

the other thing we used to do, we used to go to the greengrocer shop and ask for specks, we used to call them specks, and they were damaged fruit. Once again, they were half rotten but you’d always cut the rotten piece off and Bob’s your uncle, you were in business. So you had that. Meat, I don’t know what the score was on meat; mostly offal meat I think. But then again the rabbits was another big thing we used to eat in those days.

Big, a lot of rabbits in those days, before they starting using myxomatosis to knock off the rabbits. So we all had our different jobs to do after we came home from school.

Well we all did it. All the kids did it. So, you know, we all had our share of, you know,

that street was my street, and that street was some other kids’ street and so forth, etc., etc. It was a planned, it was a bit of a planned organisation but it worked out quite well and used to get a lot of free stuff given to us. The Salvos were great and we used to grow a lot of our own stuff and things like that.

But I think we in Australia here suffered very much in the Depression years because, firstly, we didn’t have the population. And, of course, America suffered very badly from the Depression years too when the Wall Street slump was on which created the problem of course. But in the UK, they didn’t have too much of a problem there and I don’t know why.

But Beryl doesn’t even remember the Depression years, and yet it’s very indelible in my mind. Yeah, so that was basically what that was about.

Well, we always used to have the old coffee percolator perking away there.

I know Sundays was our big day. We used to have – oh, that’s right, the war hadn’t started. Yeah, Mum used to cook all Sunday morning and we used to have our big lunch on Sunday. Yeah, and yeah, that was, it was, they were

pretty tough old times because they always say that one thing to overcome a depression is to have a war.

And, of course, as you well know, it all finished around about ’38 and ’39 and there was a war. And so – but then again you see, that’s how some of these people like Hitler and so forth, started,

became powerful because they could handle, like, I suppose, you might say that’s the way communism worked too because they used to take over peasant countries and things like that because they could handle the poor people.

Nothing much. I think the big problem was that

Australia was very much tied to the United Kingdom as a part of the Commonwealth, and everything that emanated from the UK we jumped, sort of thing. Like, you know, for example, we had to answer the motherland and all this sort of caper. Yes, okay,

sure I still go along with it, what we did in those days was right as far as we were concerned, but I have totally different thoughts today of course. So, you know, when our troops went to the Middle East and then the alliance with Japan and Hitler and Germany and Italy kicked off,

that alerted a lot of the people around the place to the problems we have here on our own side of the world and as far as Germany was concerned, and Europe, it was something I didn’t know too much about and to be quite honest I wasn’t particularly interested in it either because, let’s face it, it was their war, not our war, sort of thing.

But then our guys went over there and when they came home, that was the beginning of what we considered our war here, and little thought was given to Europe. I don’t know, but as far as I was concerned I didn’t think much of it. Of course, one of the things that really involved Australia

in the Second World War was the air force. Because of the fact that we had a lot of – it was an infant military service for us here and we didn’t have anyone trained in the air force and they developed what they call the Empire Air Training Scheme which was a great thing, done by Canada, and of course all our air force blokes who I have many good friends who today –

I talk to one in Canada every day, and he was instrumental in – he became a director of the Empire Air Training Scheme in Canada and he taught all our air force blokes through his institutions over there, air observer training courses and so forth

and then they shipped them all off to England. And then that meant that when England – when these guys went through Canada over to England they were already well trained personnel. Of course, they immediately went to the, oh, Casel Command was No. 10 Squadron of course, with Sunderland flying boats, and then they went on to Lancasters

and Wellingtons and so forth and they really did well. A very good friend of mine also was one of the dam busters, Sir Jack Leggo, he’s dead. And, oh, this chap I talk to in Canada, he was a very good friend of Jack Leggo’s. They were both in the dam buster crew. Jack Leggo was the navigator and he was

instrumental in knocking out all the Ruhr dams. And this Canadian mate I talk to every day Art, Art’s now eighty-three and he taught – he showed them how to do pinpoint bombing. They called it the Oba, Obo radar system, which is

almost spot on for dropping bombs, particularly in an area within thirty feet from a height which is I suppose about thirty odd thousand feet. So as far as the war in Europe was concerned, I wasn’t particularly interested in that so much. I was more concerned about the fact that, because 1942, all our Middle East boys were coming

home. Because Japan, after they went into Pearl Harbour and then they did the lightening strikes down the Malaysian Peninsula and we had them right on our bloody doorstep, and of course I wasn’t particularly interested in Europe at all. And the idea was to get them here up the top. Anyway, that was that, so

you know…

They did, they used to call them the drains. Up around, in South Gippsland, there was all the area that leads into

Western Port Bay in Victoria is very low-lying area and it was all swampland and they used all the soldiers from the First World War to build these drains and you were up to your knees in mud building these drains. And these drains used to all be endeavouring to drain the land to make it usable for

farming purposes. And they built these houses on them and we all lived in them and when we moved to another drain to be done, we’d move into that house and so it went on. And these houses were built on big high stumps and when the high tide came in from Western Port Bay it flooded the whole area. So we were just like sitting in mud and water all the time.

And we had nothing in the house whatsoever of course. Just bread and butter and all that sort of stuff. And Dad used to supplement his income by being a potato digger and I used to go with him and we used to pick peas and we used to get a shilling a kerosene tin

or something like that for all the peas we picked and things like that, and you know, that’s the way we lived in those days.

Because eventually they were going to be farms. Eventually they would have been farms and I believe they are, well they are today, I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve been there about ten years ago.

I’ve been down that area now and there are some very, very good farms down there now. And this irrigation, or whatever you like to call it, but they were called the drains, the Dalmore drains.

Dad should have got a settlement block. I don’t know what happened, maybe he did, I don’t know. Maybe it fell through. The trouble was

that, as I stated before, my mother and father didn’t – their relationship was very bad and I think simply because of that there was – it was a very unstable marriage and therefore we – anyway, we ended up at a place in Tooradin, I don’t know if you know Victoria at all but Tooradin

is the main area and we went to school there before coming into the city area. We lived at a place called Dalmore which is just up the road from Tooradin and we had a farm there, so-called farm made out of tin. I always thought it was a mansion. We used to sit out there of a night-time with kerosene

tins full of cow dung, burning it, to keep the mosquitoes away. Them’s rough days. Anyway, and then we came into the city. And Dad got a job at the State Electricity Commission in Victoria as a labourer making concrete slabs, and I used to go up there

and help him. And he, of course, when the war started, he joined the army which gave him a little bit more, you know, comfortable living. Mum continued at home, Dad was down at Portsea for a while, then he was in staging camps up to Darwin looking after the staging of troops

going through to the Northern Territory.

Well, I used him as an excuse. When I wanted to join up I told Mum that I was going to join up and I said, “Dad could have his seventeenth birthday in France in the First World War, I could have my sixteenth birthday in the

services. And no one stopped me, not my family anyway, but Jeff’s family tried very hard because they realised I was only a stupid kid. But then again, I grew up very quickly and, of course, nothing will make you grow up more than being in the services. I think so,

I think a career; I would have actually had a career. Actually, I was very good at, as I said before, maths, physics and chemistry at school and I was so good actually, my IQ [Intelligence Quotient] must have been pretty high; they even gave me my certificates without sitting for the exams. And Dad was told that I was quite a bright boy and Dad

suggested I go to Duntroon. Very competitive to go to Duntroon but what Dad wanted to do, he wanted to give me the education which he couldn’t afford. And he thought, well, if I went to Duntroon, well I could. But there was a lot of class distinction in those days and only the rich boys ever went into defence

colleges and things like that. He also wanted me to go to the naval college at Creswell. But unfortunately, once again, you had to be a doctor’s son or whatever the case may be to get into the damn places. Anyway, that was that, so you know, that’s the way things went along.

Yeah, he sure did. He was at Heidelberg Military Hospital quite a lot. He also – there used to be another one up at Caulfield, Caulfield Military Hospital

and I used to go up there and see him and they had rubber tubes through him. And they used to pull these rubber tubes through so that it would jag on the metal that was inside his body,

to pull it out. I was quite young and I used to watch them do this. He was all right

but what really crapped me off was the fact that, how they treated the First World War guys – nothing, and thank God they learned after the First World War and the Second World War. I think we’re treated pretty well here now. He

he was only on a lousy ten per cent pension after being wounded five times, gassed, mustard gas, and I think that, you know, ten per cent was terrible. I mean no one looked after them. When you think of what we gave in the way of life

in the First World War which to me was horrendous, a far worse war than the Second World War. As far as I was concerned it was simply because, you know, the only part of the Second World War to me, which he quoted, to that of the First World War was the Kokoda Trail and Milne Bay.

Possibly I’d say also Singapore of course and Changi, and up in that bloody Malay Peninsula; the Japs weren’t nice people. But, you know, the trauma that those guys in the First World War must have been up against all the time.

My grandmother, she had four sons. There was, Dad, Rupert, there was Reg. Dad was in the army, Reg was in the navy, Albert was in the army and Robert was in the army. They all joined up

from Metung in Gippsland. And you know out of those four sons, fortunately she only lost one, he was blown up in France, Robert. And I was named after Robert, that’s my second name. And, you know, that was absolutely horrendous places that they used to fight, in places like the Somme, I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to Europe

and seen all those millions of bloody graves there. And you say to yourself, “For what?” But then again, isn’t that all wars, for what? Although, I will say this, I will say this, that, you know, all those guys died over there for that

in the First World War and here we are in Australia, here where we have all our own problems here right now and you say to yourself, “Well, would you do it again?” Well, yes I would if they were threatening my country and my family. And that I think was the most important thing. So, you know.

No.

Dad never, ever, ever spoke about the First World War. Never. But I know that he went through hell. He – we’ve got his postcards from the First World War here that he used to send to my grandmother. Some of the places he was;

the Somme, that was not the best. But then again, you know, they all had – I mean, you know darned well the First War it was thirty, forty feet apart the trenches and all this sort of caper, come on. Whereas in the Second World War, unless you were in close contact fighting like the

Kokoda Trail, which was also – I had a lot of mates there. You know they – what it amounts to is as the wars have progressed shall we say, progressed, that you’re fighting a war further apart.

So you don’t see the enemy now, like, in the navy a ship can be sunk and you don’t even see who sunk you. And so it goes on. No, I think that Dad suffered badly. Physically he wasn’t too bad, mentally I think he would have been pretty bad.

Anyway, we used to get on very well, Dad and I.

I don’t know about that. I don’t know, I don’t know. No, I don’t know, they didn’t get married

until when he came home. But it could have been. I don’t know, it might have been. But then again, a lot of – no I don’t know, they said behind each man is a successful, you know, a woman sort of thing to hold the whole fort together. As far as Beryl –

I mean we’ve been married fifty-seven years. We’ve had our ups and downs but, you know, there’s been a lot of traumas from certain things from time to time and, you know, you always need someone to lean on. Yeah. Anyway.

I think he did that more or less to get away from home. I think that the fact that when he did go into the services he wasn’t medically fit for front line stuff. I know myself that he wasn’t medically fit to go into front line stuff but he did a very important job, what he was doing. And

I think he just enjoyed the camaraderie business of being with other men, which, when you think about it Chris [interviewer], it was only twenty-five years from the First World War. I often thought to myself that, you know, “Well, we’ve had little wars between the Second World War but I don’t think you would have

tempted me to join the bloody forces again.” I know that at the end of the war they asked all of those who would be prepared to sign on please step forward, and no one stepped forward. And yet, and yet, I’ve met a couple of guys; I went down to the Antarctic in 1950;

we went down on a landing craft, we were the third expedition to go down there and I happened to bump – I was a scientist then and I was in the ward room of course, totally different story to my old navy days

when I was just an ordinary old sailor. Anyway, I was walking along the deck and I bumped into this bloke and I said, “My God, bloody Frostie.” I said, “What in the name of the hell are you still doing in the navy?” And he’d signed on. Because it was a navy ship that took us down there.

My best mate that I was down there with, his name was Frost too.

Yeah, Frost, yeah.

Well, that was

very short-lived, very short-lived. Inasmuch that I mentioned, you know, once you got your directions to which way you were going, which way you were told you were going and then you ended up at your training establishment. When you finish your boot training as just an ordinary old soldier, you are then

moved into the areas of where you are going to actually do what you are going to do. And, of course, being in signals you could move around anywhere because they had them in the tank corps. And we were all dead scared we’d get stuck into that lot because there’s no way in the world – at the best of times I’ve always, I think I’ve always been a bit claustrophobic and I’m not too impressed

about being stuck in a tank. So we all tried to clear out of that so actually going into commando groups was good in many respects, because we thought we were pretty tough. I know that when I did go into this particular commando group we were all lined up, and I can still see the bloody sergeant looking at me

and he said, “I suggest you get that bloody bum fluff off your face.” I’d never shaved before and I thought, that’s when I started shaving. Deary, deary, me. And, of course, being as young as I was, I felt no one treated me as being young.

I was one of them and that was as simple as that. When it came to – I’ll put it this way; in the commando unit there was more of us under age than there were of age because it was 1942 and there wasn’t too many eligible men around left to go to war. And there, like Hitler was

at the end of the war, his army consisted of fifteen year olds because there was just no one left. And that’s as simple as that. And in Russia it was exactly the same. I don’t know about Britain, wouldn’t have a clue about Britain, but I know that Germany, Russia and Australia they were all kids. So, anyway, the thing was that

we all grew up very quickly. We learned and we had to grow up. We learned that we had to eat, live off the land and all this sort of stuff and how to do it.

Yeah, it got to be,

this commando training we were in for was the beginning of the move north of MacArthur’s. And the Battle of the Coral Sea had just begun in august 1942 and I was in, in July.

And we knew what was happening at the time was that MacArthur had got down from the Philippines by PT [Patrol Torpedo] boat to Darwin, and I was in the army and met him at the Spencer Street Railway Station and I was his guard.

We were his guard, I’ll put it that way. And when I went back to my unit after that little episode they formed us, what they called the 4th Air Support Commando Group. And the idea was that you worked for the air force, the navy all at the same time. For landing, everything was on landings because it had

to be necessary that one could be flexible enough to move from one area to another. And being signals, you can do that quite regularly because all you had to do was operate the signal equipment, whether it be HF [high frequency] radios, semaphore, Lucas lamps or whatever the case may be you’re still just bloody signals irrespective of the service you’re in.

Anyway, there was 400 of us being trained for this, yeah 400 of us, and at that time in Australia here we were losing so many kids who were sent directly from – you see, training in the base camp would only take about six weeks

at the most but they really, they would ship you off quick smart. It all depended how good you were. For example, when we did our morse training, we were doing our morse training, I used to sit next to a guy who was slightly retarded, I mean they took anyone, that’s why he said to me when I went to join up, “Oh, you’ve got two arms, two legs, two eyes,

you’re in business,” because they took anyone. And this guy was the best radio operator we had because morse code is like another language and he just took to it like water and he just learned it so well he used to read a book at the same time as receive morse code. And yet he was the sort of guy that when he went down to the showers he wouldn’t take a towel.

He would go down to the showers and use the inside of his pockets to dry his hands, he didn’t understand that you had to have a towel to go with it, you know, and all this sort of caper. That’s the type of person that we had. Anyway, out of 400 of them they all went up to different locations for the immediate landings that were going to take place.

And when you go away at any time you always come back to your original base. Anyway, out of that great lot of guys only seven came home.

And, I was still there because, what actually happened, they were legally responsible, even in those days, that no one was to go to the front line at the age of eighteen. And I was supposed to be eighteen, but they knew bloody well I wasn’t because I was about the youngest of the commando group

and they knew I was only a baby – a kid of only fifteen or sixteen. No, I was sixteen then damn it all. But they knew, they knew that there would be quite a big stink if they had sent me away so they didn’t send me but they sent every other bugger. Anyway, when they came home, when they came back to the base, there was a – they were changed.

Anyway, in the interim, I didn’t know what to do with myself there and that was the 4th Air Support Group. And I spent a bit of time at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology on electronics. I studied electronics

there and so forth, and also I went to chemical warfare school. They said that we didn’t have any gas in the Second World War. We certainly did, I can tell you that. We had mustard gas, you name it, we had it. Because

I was one of the guinea pigs that they used for gas testing. I did it at the Melbourne University. We were at a camp called Camp Pell in, what’s the name of that park outside Melbourne University? The Americans were all there too, and we used to have just a couple of tents there, but what we did was we

tested anti-gas ointments and things like that. They would put drops of mustard gas on your arm and then they’d put this ointment on it. If it worked, it worked. If it didn’t work you ended up with a hole in your arm. And they did also anti-gas clothing, and they used to put

this clothing on you and they put you in these cubicles and they sprayed you with mustard gas. If the clothing worked, you were fine. If it didn’t work, well, bad luck. And so they’re the sort of things we did, and then I thought to myself, “Well, this is not going to be much chop for me because they are obviously a bit concerned about that I am a little bit too young

to stay with my group.” And, as I say, I often wonder where those boys are now, if they’re still around or if they ever came home or whatever. One of the biggest mistakes we can ever make is not having, like you people are doing now, is having records of the names of the guys, and I’ve got photographs of these guys with no names on the back of them.

I’d love to know where they are. I’ve managed to remember a couple of names but after sixty years it’s a bit difficult you know, to try and think of their names. Anyway, so that’s when I thought to myself, “Well’ – and in those days there used to be a truck coming around. And this truck came around and tried to tell you to join the

navy, because you could transfer from the army to the navy because the navy was the senior service. But you couldn’t go into the air force because it was the junior service. So, I thought to myself, “Well, here comes the truck.” So I decided to say, “Well listen, I’m a fully trained radar man, not radar, radio operator.

Been there, done this, fully fit, da dee da, fully fit, da dee da, so how about the navy?” They just took the name and that was all there was to it. Anyway, I thought, “Fair enough, I’ll get out of the services, out of the army, and to try and tackle whatever I can,” because I knew then, I was sixteen and a half then,

I had then 367 days of active service in the army, finished that. So I said, “I’m going to get out of the army,” and of course in those days you can’t just walk out of the army. So I just said, “I’m going to get out of the army, I’m under age.” And they said, “Hey?” And so they said, “Okay, well fair enough,” and I said, “Well,

there’s my birth certificate.” I can’t produce my birth certificate. I didn’t have it, of course, I didn’t even know what a birth certificate was. Anyway, they said okay, so I was discharged due to giving false information in regards to my age. And then I went and joined the navy.

Oh, yeah, what actually happened; it was all the mothers, the mothers actually complained about their kids being killed in the front line at the age of eighteen, and it became a government issue.

That was in 1942 and they said that no one would henceforth go into the front line until they’d reached the age of nineteen, in the army. And I thought to myself I would have had to wait a long time before they would send me away. We had done a lot of things in the

army and, you know, everything would have gone along quite well providing if I wanted to proceed the way I was going to go not just – I didn’t want to be sitting in a base camp all the time. And they said they’d send me up to Fort Signals up at Newcastle. And, you know,

I didn’t want to be sitting in a bloody radio office in a fort in Australia, I wanted to do something for my country. So that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So I decided I’d opt out.

I’m not too sure, Chris. I don’t how they really did it but they obviously went to their politicians or something like that. It became a federal

issue and the big problem was that we didn’t have the population. You see, if you didn’t send the young ones, who the hell are you going to send? All the others have been killed. And so they said, you know, “That’s not the name of the game, you might just as well send babies.” But then again, Hitler did that and the Russians did that and so forth but when you run out of people

that’s it. But they just said, “No, you had to be nineteen years of age now, to go into front line activities.” But our front line was almost on our doorstep and that was the big problem. It was then at Port Moresby.

In 1941. In 1941 I was still at school.

Yes, 1941, I would have been still at school. But, you know, that didn’t – nothing seemed to register too much early in the piece. You know, a war was a war, but when you saw the streets becoming very empty of young people around,

you know, you’d go to a dance and there wouldn’t be any guys. There’d be all girls and so forth and the girls would be dancing with each other and all this sort of caper. But no, and that I think is what started things off with young people joining up under age. I felt extremely confident with myself no matter what I did at that age.

To be very honest, Chris, I could not relate my situation to the young boys of fifteen today. Maybe if they were pushed into it they might, but when I see a fifteen year old kid, the way he carries, I think to myself, “There’s a lot to be said that they need a little bit more discipline.” Yes,

I think that that was the case. And I don’t think that discipline ever hurts anyone. It didn’t hurt me one scrap.

Yeah, yeah. I don’t think we – I mean you had nothing to do. We didn’t know what to do. So I mean, it was just the streets were empty and the

young people around were just mainly interested in joining the forces. It’s as simple as that, right. Because, you see, when I went into the Air Training Corps I was still at school and that was the first one of Air Training Corps that were developed in Australia. No. 1 Air Training Corps, and we were given air force uniforms

and let’s face it, when you’re still at school and you got an air force uniform to wear you were very proud. And we used to get half fare to go on everything because we were wearing the uniform. And we learned all our military discipline and rules and regs [regulations], and as I said, morse code and how to do everything, and

aircraft recognition. It was great. And we all thought, “This military stuff is pretty good.” Well, I guess it is until someone decides to shoot at you or something.

Well, actually, the longest period of time I spent, of course, was in the navy. And I happened to love the sea, and I happened to love everything associated with the sea. So, the navy to me would be the ultimate and I would recommend the navy to anyone. The army is now very sophisticated but it’s still –

when I went into the navy, I had my ex-army badge on and one of the guys he said to me, he said, “Were you in the army?” And I said, “Yeah.” I said, “One of the most important things in the army is that you must learn to live accordingly and that means live off the land and stuff.” I said, “But I do believe

that the navy has three good meals a day.” And when I used to – when I was in the navy and the guys used to moan and groan about the quality of the food, I used to say, “Well, have you ever tried the army?” But you know the people in the navy live very, very well compared to the army. The air force I cannot say but I would say they live pretty

good.

Yes, that’s exactly right. Exactly right, because in no time when I was in the navy I was on active service. I think if you –

I might digress a little bit here. Say, for example, had I stayed in the army I would have ended up possibly in Fort Signals. And when you go into a place like that, as I was a pretty well qualified person in signals, they have a tendency to leave you. You die there. They will never move you out

because when I was in the army I was also associated with the special wireless group. We used to decode all the languages, Japanese and everything like that. And then they brought in the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service] to release men for active service because this is the same, this is the big problem they’ve got. It’s like the police force today. There’s a lot of police sitting in desks in headquarters and things like that.

They’re replacing them with civilians now. They realised that those police should be out doing the job they’ve been trained to do. And that’s exactly why they brought in the AWAS, they trained them to do the jobs we were doing so we could be sent elsewhere. Well, some of the army places you went to, you still went into them simply because you were once again, you can be too qualified.

And you will stay in those places because they’ve got no one to replace you. Now, Fort Sigs [Signals], if I had have gone there I probably would have seen the end of the war out there and you would have had a disgruntled person from the point of view that I went into the services to do a job. They would probably say, “Righto, fair enough, you are doing the job.” But that is not the type of job that I wanted, I wanted to actually be involved

in the conflict. For example, when I was in the navy, one of my very good friends who – which is a terrible thing to happen to me if I had have joined the navy and never, ever went to sea and he didn’t ever go to sea. He was sent to Darwin.

Okay, well, I guess all port facilities must have sailors because they need them from the point of view of, once again, it all depends what their specialty was. He did not have any particular speciality. He was a sailor and all he did was tied knots. And he was up there in Darwin Harbour, he spent the war there, sitting on a pontoon and a deck chair.

Well, you know, and directing ships as they came into the harbour as to where they should tie up and that sort of thing, da dee da dee da. And he said it was a terrible existence. Now, if I had have gone into the navy and never ever gone to sea I would be looking for another service. So that’s the main reason why, and that was the main reason that I went into the navy because I knew

that you would be at sea in no time, hopefully, hopefully.

Well no, there’s none is there? At that time there wouldn’t have been any either. No, I tried the Merchant Navy. As a matter of fact I did try the Merchant Navy but that was very restricted because in Australia here we didn’t have much in the way of Merchant Navy. I was

with an outfit, once again in communications, and it was AWA [Amalgamated Wireless Australasia] beam wireless they called it, and all the Merchant Navy blokes used to come in there for a break to get away from being at sea. And that’s what stimulated me to want to join the Merchant Navy.

But once again, I was even younger than when I was in the army, and of course you could go in, in the Merchant Navy at thirteen I think it was, and be a cabin boy.

Doing all the odd jobs around the place like probably cleaning the toilets or whatever the case may be, da dee da da. So anyway, they didn’t want any. Oh, I remember now what it was, what the problem was.

I’ll never forget. I went along to the Merchant Navy’s office in Melbourne and they said to me, “Have you ever been to sea before?” And I said, “No.” And he said to me, “You can’t join the Merchant Navy unless you’ve been to sea.” And I said, “Well how can I bloody well go to sea?” Anyway, they wouldn’t accept me so that was that. That was the end of my Merchant Navy life.

Well, the Merchant Navy of course, they were the lifeline of the goods and chattels that went from A to B all the way along the track. Whereas the navy itself is a war machine, and the machine itself is built as a fighting machine and not to carry goods and chattels and things

like that, and so all the necessary things in life are not really required in the navy. That’s why you don’t – well nowadays they live aboard a ship in comfort, air conditioning and bunks and things like that. Whereas we used to have to sleep

wherever we could. And, you know, hammocks were the thing and that was that.

Initially very difficult, but once you learned to swing yourself into a hammock they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. But then again, when you’re at sea, if you can get away from sleeping in a hammock

it’s the best way to go. Because, number one, big problems you’ve got always, always with a hammock, I’m talking about wartime, inasmuch that if action stations should be made at any time, you’ve got to really, you’re in trouble. So, most of us didn’t bother slinging our hammock; we would sleep where we were. On a deck, round a gun

or on top of a locker – I even used to sleep on top of a piano. We had a piano in the canteen; this is on a large ship, on a cruiser. But that’s the sort of thing – but anyway, sleeping in hammocks…

No, it’s just that firstly, it all

depends, if you were in a total red centre area where you were likely to hit action stations any old tick of the clock, no one would ever have a hammock because you don’t unlash a hammock and expect to lash it up and stow it away. You don’t have time. An actual battle at sea only lasts between five and twenty minutes. It would take you that long, just about, to lash a hammock so on, you don’t do that.

We just slept anywhere, particularly out in the tropics. It was all right, no problems, because you use your Mae West as a pillow.

A life saving jacket.

Ever heard of Mae West? Well that’s why. Yeah, and

most people did use them as their pillows. But then again, we even didn’t use those, we used to roll up anything to put our head on.

Yeah, you had decoders to do that.

No, we would receive the morse code as sent

and then it would go to the decoders who would decode it because we couldn’t do that because they’re very specialised people and they’ve got to know the codes. Whereas that was a very highly secure area.

Actually, in the army I was a decoder but a very basic one they call them, very basic.

You just sent five letter words but they were all jumbled up. You’d have a password.

Well, I’ve got to think. Let me think, how did you work it now. You had a particular word and each one was – oh, that’s right, yeah. That’s right, we used to do it –

you used to have a square and we used to have to get the letters. Look, I’d have to think about how we used to do it. But what we used to do, we used to send any message you so wish, but you could not understand what it was but the person at the other end, providing they had your code word, they could decode it. Now that’s very simple,

very basic coding and decoding. But I’m trying to think of my mathematics now. Mathematical progression, anyway, what the intelligence people would be able to easily decode what we used to use as our basic stuff because by using a mathematical formula of progression,

logical progression I think we used to call it. You could easily find out how many times this word was twisted around and so forth and they’d got the answer.

Oh yeah, but my maths only came in handy when I was at university. That was pretty basic in those days, I was only a

school kid. I just happened to like maths at school.

I was of age to join the navy.

Well, that was my excuse, yes, yes, that was the reason I wanted to. I thought to myself, “Well, you know, I wasn’t going to get anywhere.” Like as I say,

to get involved in the conflict, and we all did really want to get involved, well most of friends of my friends, at any time, even in the navy, the most important thing was to get involved in conflict.

No, no, I felt sorry for them in many respects because

the 9 Divvy boys, most of them ended up in the Kokoda Trail and things like that and the army, the army life, you know, particularly up where the army, after they came back, after the army, our 9th Divvy boys came back from the Middle East, they were sent direct to New Guinea

and they were involved in the Kokoda business and Milne Bay and up at Finschhafen and right up on the north coast and then into Borneo. You know, they’re all being very much, being right on the equator, very much jungle areas and the type of fighting there they had never, ever experienced before. Because, when you’re out in the desert fighting, it’s a totally different story. You can see

who you’re shooting, or getting close to or whatever the case may be. But that Kokoda Trail, no, you would be within four feet of an enemy and you wouldn’t even know he was there. And they used to tie themselves up into the palm trees, the snipers, and they would just stay there all the time and they’d just wipe out everyone around the place and no one could ever see them. That’s the type of war

that the 9 Divvy had to face up to when they came back, and so when Jeff and Doug went into that, I don’t know whether Jeff went into the 9th Divvy but Doug certainly did because when he got shot, well actually he didn’t get shot he got shrapnel, he ended up on, they brought him back to the hospital at Atherton, in the Atherton Tablelands,

and he came down to Melbourne at the time and he showed me his bum. Anyway, so that was the end of Doug’s war.

Yeah, well, it was, where the shrapnel had gone into the side of his buttocks,

it had gone right through and opened up the whole side of the buttock. It was a bit of a mess. So I wonder what he’s doing today, old Doug, and I wonder if he’s getting sort of some pension. He ended up as a carpenter. He did rehabilitation after the war. They offered us all rehabilitation of some form.

I didn’t, I didn’t apply for rehabilitation. I really think one of the reasons I didn’t apply was because no one really advised me how to do rehabilitation. Because you’ve got to remember that when I went into the services, or went to war, I had no real education, I only had really

primary education. I had nothing to prepare me for after the war. And when I came home, that’s the basic education I had. I had nowhere, I had no job, nothing to help me and on top of all that I was married. So he did

rehabilitation as a carpenter, Doug did. Jeff, his mother and father had a business. I don’t know what transpired there. I think, myself, that unfortunately his mother died very early in the piece and then his father, he became an alcoholic

because she died, because they were a very close family and he eventually died. And I think the business then got sold up and he ended up on a sheep property. I think he owned a sheep property out in Western Victoria.

No, I did it solo; oh, I don’t know quite why, I think they were happy with what they were doing. As I said, I don’t even know what happened to them.

He just said to me, “So,” he said,

‘So you want to join the army son?” and I said, “Yeah.” “Well,” he said, “You look pretty good to me.” So he said, “Go over there.” And there was this bloke who was over there who was an officer, and he was the Medical Officer and he said, “Two arms, two legs, two eyes,” and so he said, “Get in that line over here.” So I went over and got in the line and we were all sworn in then and there, and I was in camp next morning.

And then, as I say, we ended up at Caulfield Racecourse and that’s when they decided who was who and where you were going to go.

Yeah, I had to be there at half past seven in the morning or something like that and so forth, etc. etc. I don’t know how I actually got there

or what the situation was but it wasn’t very far from where I lived.

I cannot recall on that whether I was excited or not. I guess I was. But I know that it was a pretty rush job. You know, here one minute and gone the next sort of thing. So, you know, they were putting people through as fast as they possibly could

for training. Because as I said, 1942 was a very dangerous time for Australia and they really had to do something about it because the Japs were almost on Port Moresby. The Battle of the Coral Sea had been just fought which had stopped the Japs from getting into Port Moresby.

MacArthur was on his way back and he was working on the idea that the Guadalcanal was the big battle of the time up in New Caledonia there, and it was a horrific bloody business that was.

Oh, no that was only

a day or so. Oh yeah, that was nothing. That was only a transition camp.

Navy training?

Navy training consisted of – it was basically like the army, you know, you had to learn to –

the navy is very precision, the discipline is extremely high. There was no such thing as what you would see in the army. They had rules and regulations which, you must remember, that the Australian navy was not the Australian navy as such, we were run by the

British Admiralty. Everything that happened in the navy in Australia came from the British navy. We actually did not have our own navy at all until after the war. That’s when we came under our own jurisdiction and if you think about it,

we were colonials and we used to be called the Australian station of the British navy. Our training used to be the same as you would get in the army with a great deal more discipline on it. For example, you would never walk, you ran, you doubled

all the time. You did not look at any person who was of any rank above you with any look in your face at all. If you looked, for example, at an officer with as much as a drop dead look, you went up for what they call silent contempt. You would be then

made to climb a rope in the gymnasium eighty feet high and hang by one arm.

Yes, it did.

I’ve basically told you.

Well, you know, there was nothing that you could do. You

knew what you could do and what you couldn’t do. You were told that very, very clearly right from the beginning of your navy career. And if you – when you were all lined up and you were standing like ramrods, all straight, and you would be, for example, if you just happened to look at, you saw the officer there, and you just happened to look across at him like that, bang, you’re gone.

So, in other words, you just kept your eyes directly ahead of you.

Oh, you’re just up there and you hang by one arm and you’re told to come down. Or, you’re made to stay there a little bit longer. It all depends how the particular person that put you up there felt about you. The gunnery officers were the worst I think, they were the toughest,

the gunnery officers. Lieutenant Commander Shaw, I’ll never forget him. These were the sort of things, but then again don’t forget the navy was voluntary. Everything in the navy was volunteers, there was no conscription at all to go into the navy. If you didn’t, if you went into the navy with the idea that you were going to be

the smartest thing since sliced bread, you were seriously underestimating the navy because you would soon find it otherwise. Today, I have not much time for the navy today because I do not believe that you should be calling at all officers by their first name and things like that. There were some of our officers that I think were absolutely marvellous and others I think were bloody terrible but, you know,

that’s beside the point. You always, when you were in the navy, when you got an order you did it and you asked questions after, even if you died in the meantime. That’s exactly what it’s like, it’s just a place of discipline. It was, but I don’t think it is today as much as it was then.

Is Beryl around? Yes, I did, I used to get into a lot of trouble. But then again, when you’re not on active service and you got into trouble you didn’t get into too much trouble. But when you were on active service and you did something wrong you sure did get into trouble.

You cannot argue against an officer at any stage. What the officer’s word is God’s principle; he tells you exactly if you’ve made a mistake, even though you may not have made that mistake and you think you’re totally innocent of it, what the officer says goes. It’s as simple as that.

Well, I forget where I was now, let me think, I’ve got to be – that’s right, we were crossing the Bight and I was on look out, yeah, on the bridge. It was a very, very rough

sea. Without going into navy terms I’ll tell you that the distance between the water and the guard rail on a cruiser is about thirty feet. That’s what they call the free board. They were going under the water, the ship was rolling that much and we had lifelines out and so forth, and to get from A to B you had to hook yourself onto a lifeline to move to any part of the ship and you were

virtually, if you could, you were not allowed to go on upper deck. But she was very, very, very rough indeed. But I was on the bridge on look out and it was night-time and the navigator used to be on the bridge but he was never in his cabin like during war service; you do it on the bridge. Anyway, he’s got a desk, this arrangement, and a

hood, and he used to stick his head in this hood. And he’d be doing his work in there. And we would be sitting, there’d be two lookouts on the compass platform, yeah. And you would be given a sector and you would be with your night binoculars and you’d be searching the sea for whatever.

And they were usually swivel seats and when the ship gave a sudden lurch or something, particularly if the props come out of the water, when the props come out of the water on a big ship the whole ship jumps and shakes and goes on. Anyway, actually, I fell off the seat. And I landed on the navigator’s toe.

I know I wasn’t asleep on watch but I landed on the navigator’s toe. And when I went up before the captain, the navigator said I was asleep on watch. And I ended up in the brig.

Jail, on the ship. And they give you oakum to pick.

That’s coir rope Around about two and a

half, two and half or two and a half inches in diameter. You know coir rope?

Coir rope, ever heard of a coir mat?

Well, there’s one outside the door here, made from coir. They make rope hawsers out of it. Well they did. I don’t know if they do today. And on the decks of our ship,

well, on the decks of ships on those days, except on the gun platform, we would have wooden decks over the top of steel. And the space between the planks on the deck would be filled with oakum to allow holly stoning or

whitening the deck and so forth and you got down and just scrubbed them or so forth. And sometimes the oakum which was in there would pop out. And oakum was made of tar and coir. And when you were in jail you picked oakum to make up this big box of this coir, which when mixed with tar was used in the cracks between the decks.

And that was your punishment while you were serving time in the brig.

Would you like me to jump on your toe from about four feet up?

Yeah, but it was my word against his, you see what I’m saying.

Oh yes, absolutely, oh yes. He would be nothing less than a

lieutenant commander or commander on a cruiser.

Quite a while on that occasion. I had to get permission from the captain to get out of the brig to marry Beryl. And we’d just arrived in England and he gave me permission. He said,

“When you come back you will serve the rest of your time.” But that is one of the worst things you can do in the navy, sleep on watch.

Well, you tell them.

Yeah, well, I think, that was Showers. He was a good bloke, yeah, Showers. There was

a few of them, most of our officers, there was only one out of them all. Most of the Australian officers were great. The Royal Navy officers, not so great.

Oh, yes, oh yes.

Oh yes, yeah. Well

that was the general opinion. I’m not saying, no, I won’t say that, I can’t say that really. Well, maybe most people might have accepted it but there was a majority didn’t really. Don’t forget most of our officers of any standing amongst the heavy cruisers, big ships that I was on, they were all

Royal Navy except towards the end of the war and that’s when we started to produce – see, the movement through the navy’s pretty slow at any time. One must start very young in life to start to grow through the navy. It takes a long time. And it wasn’t

until towards the latter part of the war that we had Australians that had gone through the naval college. You must remember they go in at the age of thirteen. Well, that means that they would have probably had to be, really, in the First World War, to become a top officer in the Australian navy in the Second World War.

Yes I did, yes I did. One particularly, his name was Harrington. Actually, it was a bit of a shock to the system because I’d just joined the navy. I was at Middle Head in Sydney,

at HMAS Penguin. And I was so excited about being there. We had a picture show in the canteen I think it was, yeah, we used to have to take the long stools into the gymnasium. I think it was where we had the picture show. And I was so happy that I started to whistle.

I’ve never ever forgotten this. And he was standing there with his big long sideburns on; he was a pretty well-decorated man and on his walking stick. And he called out he said, “Hey you.” And pointing at me, and I look around I thought to myself, “Oh well, anyone else around here? No, it’s me.”

And I said, “Yes, sir.” And, of course, you know standing straight as a die and not blinking an eye. And he said, “Have you ever been to sea before?” And I said, “No sir.” And then he really went into me. He said, “When you get to sea you will learn never, ever whistle.” And, of course, in hindsight, in retrospect now, I look back and I think to myself, that is

a terrible thing to do in the navy, to whistle

Because all the orders and things are given by whistles which could be interpreted as anything at all so you do not whistle in the navy.

No, no, no, no. But it was a

good lesson. It was a good lesson.

Oh, no, no. No, right from there I can assure you, right from there. It was a pity that somebody hadn’t told me beforehand but I was over-exuberant and a little happy, I guess. Maybe it just came out voluntarily I guess.

No, I wouldn’t have a clue. It was probably

Marilyn Monroe.

Yeah, well, why I never, ever went in as a radio telegraphist I do not know. I really, I’ve often thought about it as to why I didn’t end up

a navy telegraphist. Maybe they didn’t want them. Maybe I didn’t volunteer, because everything you had to volunteer for in the navy. You weren’t told you were going to be this or going to be that. You were just going to be a sailor and that’s as simple as that. Unless you had matriculation. If you had matriculation, which

was the basic educational qualification required, you could become what we used to call a ninety-day wonder, and that was become an officer, because they considered that the basic qualification for a ninety-day wonder was matriculation, which was entry to a university, in Victoria I’m speaking of, because everything was based in Victoria because that’s where the navy base was;

HMAS Cerberus. And if you were accepted and you were of a standing, and you didn’t have to be from a very rich family or anything like that, you could be just an ordinary recruit, and you became an officer. You did exactly the same training as a Sub Lieutenant and then you would become a Lieutenant and so on. And

as for me, I didn’t have that so I couldn’t go into that at all but I would have, had I had the opportunity. So I thought to myself, “Now what am I going to do now I’m in the navy?” And I was very much, after I’d finished my basic, you know, seamanship which everyone has to do of course,

I thought that maybe I could become an electrician, maybe. Now, the electricians in the navy weren’t called electricians – well they call them totally different names today, but they were called torpedo men. Now, when you did the torpedo men’s course, you ended up looking after all the electrics on a ship, basically, and they’re a totally different system. It’s a totally different ball game

to what you would ever think of because you’ve got to remember that there’s so many things can happen on a ship. Around the whole ship is what they call the ring mains; it’s a huge cable which goes right around the whole ship. And it’s broken up into sections so if any part of the ship gets hit, it doesn’t

wipe the whole ship out. Because if you’re, say, three or four decks below and you’re in pitch blackness, pitch dark, or if the transmitting station which is the automatic station for firing all guns, go down, all these things are very, very important. So the electrician on board is a very, very important man because he had to be there to fix anything immediately because

even though there’s always secondary positions on ships which are man-handled, such as rotating gun turrets or guns generally, they are normally run – they are normally operated electrically. So, I thought to myself, “Torpedo man might be the way to go.” And of course, torpedoes, we used to – to be a torpedo man,

you know, you looked after the torpedoes and okay, they were all run by gyros and things like that, so once again, you had to know all about electrics to run a torpedo so they called them torpedo men. And they did all the electrical work, they looked after the fans, you know, the ventilation; none of them ever worked but anyway, that was that, torpedo men. And I thought to myself, “That’s the way to go,” so I thought I’d do the torpedo course. In doing so

I got very good marks for that, I passed out at eighty-five per cent, which is very high in that job. But at the same time we had a major problem here in Australia, inasmuch that we never had radar. And radar was just being developed in Australia but not implemented and

we used to get all the British leftovers. They used to give us their radar equipment. I’ve got a very good book called, It’s got nothing to do with me, I’m radar. That’s the name of the book, because it was so secretive and so involved that even the officers didn’t know anything about it. It was all hush-hush

stuff. And I thought to myself, “Now, that is what I’d like to get into,” so I thought I would have a go and they accepted me and I became a radar man. Now, in doing that, there was – if you ever get the opportunity read that book, it’s not very big but it’s a

book that tells you all the whys and wherefores of how radar was established in the Australian navy and you became either a radar operator or a radar operator plotter or a radar technician. To be a radar technician you had to be officer material, so that wiped that out. So I thought to myself, “Well, well,

I’ll do the next best thing and become everything about radar,” so I became a radio operator plotter which was a very interesting job and a very precise job but unfortunately most of the equipment we got was so bloody old-fashioned by the time we got it, and the Yanks were here and they thought it was the last thing since sliced bread, or the worst thing since, well, anyway, it was crook. But we managed very well, we managed very well.

Well, it was a console job. When I say console, you were sitting in front of the console and it’s just a big screen, like round screen, like that, and the radar antenna was sitting up there on the foremast or wherever.

They use radar in all sorts of places now, gun directors, the whole box and dice for firing of shells and all sorts of things. And, it keeps on rotating all the time and she’s sweeping the whole area right across to the horizon. Nowadays they have over the horizon radar which is very much in operation.

And it then comes down on the screen as just a sweep arm going around like a clock all the time and you have what they call grass on it. And if you hit an object, if the radar beam hits an object, it will go ‘ping’, and you’ll see a little blip pop up. And it’s only by being a very good radar operator that you know what that is, whether it’s a ship, a rock,

an island or even a wave top. You know exactly what it is if you’re a good radar man.

By the type of blip and the way it is spread out, split, whatever the case may be. It’s only by experience that you would know. That’s what it was like in those days, I wouldn’t have a clue what it’s like today.

No, not really, I can’t remember, I can’t remember now. But we used to always know whether it was an aircraft or whatever the case maybe by the different shape of the blip, and now you’ve got to differentiate by what we call the grass. The grass is going up and down all the time and you can – sometimes

a blip would be inside the grass and you’ve got to make sure you pick it correctly because you then sweep your cursor round on to it and the give an exact direction of the object that you’re looking at and the angle. And of course that immediately then goes to the bridge, the skipper, and the skipper will then say, you know, “Investigate da dee da dee da.” It was a very important job, very good, and a lot of

satisfaction. All guns would train around on it or whatever the case may be. That’s the way it operated in a very basic form.

A radar operator plotter did both jobs. He not only operated, he was versatile. He would move into the operating situation or into a plotting

situation whereby you stood in front of a great big perspex screen and you had your headphones on and you’d be listening to the radar operator. He’d be giving you the plotting positions and you would mark them and then you’d be sending them up to the bridge. And the bridge would be coming back to you, and so forth, how fast is he closing in, da dee da dee da, whatever the case may be. That’s the difference between an operator plotter, but what it

is today I wouldn’t have a clue.

Yeah, that was the job. It all depended on what operating position – if you were a radar operator, it all depended where you were as to how comfortable you were with doing what you were doing. Sometimes you were in very enclosed places and others you were –

modern-day ships are very well set up. I don’t think there’s anyone of them in obscure places like we used to get into but, you know, they’re all, it’s just progression of time that’s made it more comfortable.

Well we were based at a radio station 284

which is now South Head in Sydney. Even today, it is now called HMAS Watson. Even today, I think, oh no, I wouldn’t vouch for that – I only went there recently as a matter of fact, when I say recently, in the last five years or so and it’s a lot different today. But the army used to have

radio station 284 and we used to sit up there and you’ll always find them on coastal places, Port Stephens, we’ve got them here everywhere too, all along the coastal range. Because after the war, when I went into meteorology, we used to use the same equipment would you believe for thunderstorm prediction. And, I was involved with radar there. That’s one of he jobs I had

in peacetime because of my experience back in those days. It was all very interesting, and some of the places that you did your training – we used to have a ship HMAS, there she is, the one in the middle, that’s

HMAS Yandra, and she was an 800-ton cattle boat. She was seconded during the war by the RAN [Royal Australian Navy] as an anti-submarine vessel. That was my first ship. She used to run from Milne Bay in New Guinea down to Burnie in Tasmania, running

along the east cost of Australia as an anti-submarine vessel and she was used – we used to use her for all sorts of purposes but she was a great ship inasmuch she was a small ship,

and of course there was a lot of people that had preferences in the navy, things that they loved more than anything else, one of them was being – one of the things that I ended up doing which is nowhere near as good and that is, once you go on – once you’re sent to a – you don’t have any say with what happens to you in the navy. If you’re sent to a cruiser

you become a cruiser man. And because you’re a cruiser man you will never get off that ship. But if you’re in a small ship like the Yandra, on small ships it was absolutely wonderful, a wonderful navy life.

Well, firstly, your skipper was only usually a lieutenant, and he’s usually a great guy.

And he’s usually what we used to call the Wavy Navy. Remember that picture – what was his name, there was two of them in it, in the navy, the American navy and they used to get into more strife than Ned Kelly. But anyway, he was usually Wavy Navy; in other words he was Merchant Navy, and

volunteers for naval RAN work, and he has – instead of having the two bands on his arm, he has a wavy mark in between it. We used to call them the Wavy Navy boys and they were, of course, naturally a lot more humane than the ‘brought up through the college’ boys. And also, you never, ever

got dressed. You’d wear anything you liked just about. You did your job. They weren’t the most comfortable ships. The old Yandra used to roll like a bucket, and she had one gun up forward, a four inch gun up on the forecastle, full of rust.

We used to have to pull the ammunition up in canvas bags from down below and hand them up one by one. And when we fired the gun more sparks came out of it than anything else. But it had a big well deck forward and a well deck aft and we used to play cricket on the well deck. The boys used to be so seasick because

she used to roll, and the galley was in the superstructure in the centre and they would get their food and they’d take it outside, and if the wind didn’t blow it off their plates or whatever, they went down below into the mess deck and ate it but she used to roll that much they couldn’t eat it. They were so seasick they used to roll backwards and forwards

in their food and everything else, in the well deck. Water and them rolling backwards and forwards. It was great in calm weather. But the small ships had something about them. For example, we used to play music. The skipper used to put music on up on the bridge and we’d bask in the sun on the forward well deck, great stuff.

Not many; oh, I suppose, twenty or thirty of us at the most, at the most. She was a great old ship, she had reciprocal engines. She was given back after the war to the Adelaide Steamship Company if I remember rightly. She used to travel from Whyalla to Sydney with cattle. And after the war,

we lived in Adelaide. I was with the Adelaide Weather Bureau at the time, and we had push bikes and I used to always. I still love the sea; in those days we wouldn’t go for bike rides along streets, we’d go for bike rides along the wharf so I could look at ships. And

as we went along this particular wharf I said to Beryl, I said, “God, that looks like the old Yandra.” It was dirty, filthy, nothing like when I was in the navy – all polished, spit, everything shiny, spick and span. Sure enough it was, it was the Yandra. Anyway, she foundered

in 1969. She went up on the rocks on Fortune Island, Neptune Island. Neptune Island in the Spencer Gulf, yeah. And she was involved in the sinking of the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour in 1942. She dropped the depth charges which killed the – which knocked out all – which knocked out two

of the submarines. And for that she was given commendation, and she had a plaque on her foremast saying that it was due to her great skill and captain and so forth for knocking out the midget submarine in Sydney Harbour in ’42. And when

I knew she had hit the rocks over in Neptune Island, I often thought to myself, “Now where did that bit of history go that was on the plaque on the foremast?” And, would you believe it, it’s on Port Pirie railway station in Spencer Gulf. What it’s doing there? It should be in the bloody

War Museum instead of sitting there but it’s there, that’s where it is.

That’s the navy version. I do have a photograph of it in the civilian version.

A vastly different story. They just built the superstructure up higher. We had two Vickers guns, yeah two Vickers guns on either side of the bridge. Down aft on the poop deck we had depth charges and a Bofors, we had a Bofors gun down there, a 40 mm Bofors gun..

Everything was very, very basic on there. For example the showers and so forth were, virtually, put a bucket of water over your head and that was it. But it was a great ship. And that’s why I say small ships – you consider the patrol boats that do the wandering around the coastline here; they’ve have a wonderful life. Well they did, well, I don’t know, as I say, I don’t know what they do today.

But everyone knows everyone. They know exactly what they’re doing and all this sort of caper. They’ve got a specific job to do, you know, there’s none of this – I think one of the worst ships you could get on would be an aircraft carrier. I saw one the other night, the Enterprise, and you know they use golf buggies

to get around from one deck to the other and all this sort of stuff. There’s no – you might just as well be in a supermarket. Too big. Far too big. So the smaller the ship the better.

I can’t remember how many there were now.

I know, we had one radar station amidships on the upper deck, we had one down in the bilge, we had one up on the compass platform, so that’s three.

Well, they all operated for different purposes. They were all different types of radar, you do have different types of radar.

And they were all specific to meet the needs of any ship. Every ship would have that type of situation. We also had what we call IFF [Identification Friend or Foe] radar, IFF yeah, Indication Friend or Foe, yeah, that’s it, IFF. And when you hit someone

with one of those, if it comes back with an incorrect, if the signal comes back incorrect, that plane or whatever is immediately shot down. Even if they’re a little bit late in getting the password changed, they still get shot down because no one can afford to take the risk,

so it’s their problem not ours. There was another one too, we had – what was that one? We had all sorts of different radar systems, the 277, 272. That book that I’ve got explains it all to you. He was a radar technician, old Lofty. Anyway, that’s basically it.

It’s a very, very interesting – I’ll tell you, there was another form of radio which was asdic, I don’t know if you know of that one?

That’s anti-submarine indication. It’s mainly used in destroyers when they’re chasing subs and things like that. They were at Rushcutters Bay at Air Training Base. I don’t know why I never ever went into that. I don’t know, wouldn’t have a clue, asdic.

Anything, you name it. We’d be stream paravanes, paravanes are meant for

cutting mines. We had a huge loss of shipping on the east coast of Australia.

Oh yeah, yeah but people often ask me and say to me, you know, “Were you ever concerned about submarines and things like that?” and the answer was, “No.” I don’t know why;

I mean, the poor old Yandra, the seas that run up the east coast of Australia. The prevailing seas are south-easters, and when you’ve got a ship like the Yandra, which top speed is eight knots and you’ve got a sea running eight knots. You go to bed that night and there’s a light running off the Hawkesbury River and when you wake up in the morning it’s still there. And you’ve been travelling flat out all night.

Well, because of that situation you’re a sitting duck for enemy activity because you’re not moving. But then again, when you’ve got a ship as slow as the old Yandra, you’re still a sitting duck and the only way you’ll ever get away from a submarine is speed, and a good skipper who knows what to do. They’re the sort of things you do.

But you never, ever thought about it.

She was anti-submarine vessel from the point of view that if you did get an Aztec ping or something like that you could drop depth charges. And, let’s face it, the poor old sub-mariner, that’s the one thing he’s dead scared of,

that is then discovered. There’s a very good German film been produced called Das Butz. Do you know of it? Did you see it?

That makes you feel terrible because I volunteered for submarines and, thank God, they didn’t accept me.

Yeah, well,

when you think about it now, in retrospect, I think to myself, thank God I didn’t get into one because I know that one the Yandra we used to have an operating position down in the bilge and I used to take some of the guys down there and there was two things we used to enforce. First of all they must get to the toilet before they get down there. Second thing, do they worry about seasickness because

when you’re down there doing a full watch, all you’ve got is a bucket, nothing more. And you’re in darkness, you’ve got a red light, which is the security light, and you’re in darkness simply because you’ve got to see the screen all the time and no ventilation. And you’re in the bilge with the smell of fumes all the time. Now, the

first thing that I – and one of the guys down there once, as soon as he got down there he said to me, “I’m going to throw up,” which he did, and you’ve got to stay the rest of the watch down there with that smell. No, I think that submarines to me – I’ve only ever been on two submarines, one was in England and the other one was down in Sydney Harbour when I looked at the Russian

submarine down there, when it was there. Some private organisation purchased it from the Russian navy and brought it out for, oh, to make some money I guess.

No, not really, I can’t think of anything more than what I’ve just mentioned –

the fact that you’d do your watch and that’s all. Don’t forget, we were specialists, we didn’t do anything apart from radar work, unless, of course, you were detailed off for a particular purpose, but basically you were radar and that’s it. And that’s what the name of this book is all about; It’s got nothing to do with me, I’m radar. And if you said that to anyone at all

they’d leave you alone.

Not a sub, not on radar, no. Service ship or air.

Service ship or air. Or any – if you were entering harbour or any unknown area, something

like that.

What transpired from there on I wouldn’t have a clue, because it was all done by whoever was responsible for that. It would be the case though, without a doubt. The only time that I can – no, no I don’t know

what they would have done but you can bet your boots – the communication centre on big ships particularly is very, very complicated and they would have, everyone would have known about it. But basically, as far as the Yandra was concerned, she was just a little flea in the ocean for doing a very minor, very minor

job and nothing, nothing at all really.

It was a wonderful ship. As a matter of fact I had a – someone was asking me about it. Would you believe, I believe they have an HMAS Yandra Association still. God knows who they’d be. I saw it the other day advertised in the Veteran Affairs

paper.

The army is much closer, much closer.

Everyone was on the same level; they all did the same thing. You worked together. You had some very good close friends, very close. Navy were, you know, you were just a part of the ship.

You were just a part of the ship and you didn’t meet anyone else except as I say, on small ships. And when you’re on small ships you all knew each other. But, you know, for example, our mess deck on the Australia was on the upper deck. And that upper

deck position we had, we used to have a catapult on the top for our aircraft which was, initially was a Walrus, and then they lost the Walrus and all this crew got killed on that thing. And then they put on a Seagull, and that was very similar, or a later model than the Walrus. Then they found the bloody thing was hopeless,

because those ships, as the war progressed – it’s just like modern technology today, it was progressing at such a rate that those aircraft became obsolete. They were ideal for going out and as an observation aircraft but that was about all. So they wiped them out, they kicked them out. So the catapult was removed and the underneath which was

where the pilots and everything lived on the upper deck. They gave us that, and we thought that was great being on the upper deck. It was a little bit more conducive to reasonable sort of living except there was one – a few problems, for example you used to have to have block curtains so that no light would come out onto the upper deck when you walked in and out. And you had to make sure you closed all the doors, ex fire doors

and hatches and so forth. That was the only problem, whereas if you were already down below you don’t have to worry about those sorts of things. But apart from that it was a good spot. Good living. Yeah, so there we’d be.

Well, basically, the problem was we had to do things under the close conditions that we would have been involved in or exhibit in an actual situation and some of the

things that we did went astray a little bit, but basically they were very simple things, due to individual problems more than anything else, not due to the training. And the thing is that, for example, if we were in a bivouac area where we posted sentries and things like that, if the sentry

was in a place, and we used to have opposing commando groups who used to raid us and we used to do likewise. But if, for example, you never had your back to anything at all, your back has got to be out to the open. Because the methods we used were very deadly.

Well, the idea that you must kill and make no noise. So what you did was that you used a very small commando knife, only about two inches the blade, and you knew the parts of the body where you just did that to them and they’d just, they don’t even gurgle, they’re out, gone.

They’re the sort of things, and how you just kicked a rifle away and the rifle – made sure – and you had to catch that rifle before it hit the deck and then you’d just slit their throats accordingly and all this sort of thing. They’re the sort of things we learned to do. Some of them went astray a couple of times. Negligence on the part of the individual more than anything else. But, you know, when we –

in the First World War as you well know, they used to do a lot of hand-to-hand fighting and things like that with bayonets, of course, if you recall. Well, in the First World War and the Second World War we had the same bayonets. They were the long lengthy things. If you notice today, you’ll never see a bayonet like that now, they’re only very small because they found out that, well, of course,

it’s only the first two inches of the bayonet that does the damage. So why have the big long ones? So they have the little fellows now. Well, one of the problems we had with the long bayonets, which was the reason they tossed them away in the end, was the fact that they do come loose. And if they do come loose they fly through the air and of course when they land, they sometimes land in the wrong place. So we had a few people skewered with them.

No, with a bayonet flying through the air when it came loose when they were doing an actual – using bayonets generally as part of the rifle.

Yes.

Oh, it’s just that they weren’t connected to the rifle correctly and they weren’t in place and once they get – you’ve got to remember, a lot of people you know, well, as you know

with any sport there’s a hell of an adrenaline rush and they just go ahead and do things, and they should have ensured that the bayonet was really connected correctly in the first place. And other times, as I’ve said, we used live ammunition which was supposed to be passed in on our immediate return to base, but sometimes people didn’t unload

their magazine completely and things like that. And one of the things, the most important things, we used to ensure that, because we used to have to wade in water up to our neck or whatever the case may be, keep your rifle above the water and so forth and sometimes your rifle got a little bit dirty and dusty and at the end of the day you’d come back and clean your rifle up and so forth but unfortunately some people would leave one up the spout in the breach.

And, you know, many a one was fired and dislodged somewhere in the vicinity and some people got in the way and they got hit and things like that. There was one occasion in my little hut that we were in. One of the methods of cleaning your rifle was to put it down in front of you with the muzzle up on your shoulder

and you’d just get a toothbrush and you’d clean your rifle and make sure it’s all thoroughly clean and so forth, etcetera, and he noticed the thing was cocked. And he couldn’t, he said, “It’s cocked,” and so he hit the trigger and blew his arm off. They’re the sort of things that went on and they happened routinely, those sort of things. So they were the dangers of those, in training.

No, not to my knowledge, no, I didn’t. They’re about enough anyway, those sort of things. But other types of training of course, we – oh, no, there was nothing really, nothing more exciting than that. You know, usual old – because you always get the smart Alec and things like that do ridiculous things. But there, that’s that.

Well, actually, the training was the same as, you know, just the ordinary, like boot camp, boring sort of stuff where you just did all your – same as we did virtually in he navy and so forth. But the actual, the camp itself was – you had a –

it was a very big camp. The Yanks had one half and we had the other half.

Oh yeah, we used to.

I thought they were pretty good, pretty good. There was a lot of problems associated between the Yanks and the Australians of course, because they were very much

more paid, better paid. Very much better clothed. Far more amenities in the canteens. Our girls seemed to like them better than Australians. That was one problem, that was a big problem really. Beryl will probably tell you about that.

It was

in may respects, because I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Battle of Brisbane?

Yeah, well, that was one. But all those, that sort of thing went on everywhere right throughout the world. But no, I got along quite well with the Yanks. I had never any problems with the Yanks..

Well we didn’t have much problem, as I say, with the Americans but with the British Marines, we used to get into a few blues with them. They felt the same about us as we felt about the Americans when it came to the girls and so forth. Because we used to pinch the English girls and all this sort of stuff and we were better paid; don’t know about the uniforms but then again, I was in the

navy over there so it didn’t matter because our navy uniforms were much better than theirs. And what do they say? “Clothes maketh the man,” shall we say. So, you know, we didn’t – we used to get into a lot of fights and all that sort of stuff. No matter where we went we had fights, we had trouble, we used to have fights. It just seemed to be a make-up of the Australian.

He doesn’t go looking for it but no one would dare do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing otherwise he’d be in trouble. Australians really did do a lot of things which – oh, we had a big brawl in Gibraltar, just about everywhere we went we had a brawl.

Well we don’t know too much about that actually. I’ll put it this way, the fleet was there, and where the hell was I, coming home – no, I was coming home on one trip I think. And, yeah, we were going through the Med [Mediterranean], and we stopped at Gibraltar

and there was a – that’s right, it was – there were some of the Australian soldiers in a café there and, this is what I – I wasn’t involved in this brawl by the way. As a matter of fact this mate and I we decided we would – we did two things there. One was go for a swim in the raw at the end of the runway,

and some girls come along and pinched our clothes and we had to chase them to get our clothes back, that was that swimming part of it but that wasn’t the brawl. The brawl was, the brawl occurred when we walked up to the top of the Rock [of Gibraltar], we walked up to the top of the Rock and we heard this tremendous noise. It had occurred while we were up there and while we were on the top of the rock

we could hear this and it sounded absolutely terrible. So, when we came down, there was Military Police everywhere and so forth, and apparently there were some Australian soldiers in a café and someone went into the café or someone said something or other and, of course a brawl broke out. Of course there was a lot of Royal Navy ships and army, us, of course but there was a lot of Australian soldiers there too.

I think we might have been bringing them home, I don’t know. We brought home a lot of prisoners of war, air force, army and they might have been just letting their hair down. I can’t remember that but I know that my mates tell me about it all now and it rings a bell. Bu, there was ambulances everywhere. It was a hell of a mess. It was a big mess. It was almost like a third world war had broken out.

But anyway, I didn’t get into any trouble there that’s for sure but I know that a hell of a lot of others did. But that was that.

Well, I’d say grog probably has something to do with absolutely every brawl, but they probably get a little bit more brave than usual.

No, I didn’t drink. Not to any great extent, I don’t think I did. Don’t forget the Australian navy was a dry navy. We didn’t have alcohol at all. The British navy had rum.

But that still didn’t stop us from drinking ashore if we wished. I remember when we were in the Middle East we were told to steer clear of certain – we always got lectures before we went ashore, and there was one type of brandy, C to C, yeah Cape to Cairo, yeah, C to C, C to C brandy,

we were told to steer clear of that; yeah, it was almost like moonshine stuff, you know. And a lot of things went out of control on that one but I – when we were in India we – in Sri Lanka, as it is known today, Colombo, was it there? No it wasn’t, it was in Aden

I think. Anyway, we used to drink some stuff there, I forget what that was. But basically alcohol in the Australian navy wasn’t a real problem because we didn’t, as I said, it was only really when we went ashore and if we really wanted to get into drink, but we were too young to get involved too much in the way of drinking.

I cannot recall, I know when we were in England we used to drink scrumps, which is commonly known as cider because it was the cheapest. We’d go ashore with one and sixpence and you could, if you wanted to, get as full as a skunk on one and sixpence which is equivalent to fifteen cents today.

And the only trouble was that, being cider, you know, it has a very deleterious affect on one’s guts. But anyway, no, I don’t think that anyone – and I know that when we did leave England when the war ended, we were given

two bottles of beer each I think. We left England on New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, that’s right. When we left, that’s right, Christmas Eve and we were given two bottles of beer each because, I don’t know, for being good boys at Christmas or whatever we were. We used to have this –

on a cruiser, you’ve always got the young guys and the older guys. Well, we always considered anyone of say, twenty-five years of age, we used to call them – there was a very good guy we used to look after. We used to call him Pop, and he was twenty-five years old, because he’s old. Anyway, but Pop was a different story. Oh yeah, we looked after him.

We had to keep the girls away from him.

Well, they were going to take advantage of him I think. That was in Malta, in one place we went to in Malta the Valetta, Malta. Anyway, what we did, what we did when we were given the two bottles of beer, the older sailors would buy them off us,

those guys that didn’t drink, which I didn’t at the time. So they would buy it off us and that’s how they accumulated their grog. Because they used to get into trouble; they’d be getting pie-eyed of course with the amount of grog they bought from the guys who didn’t drink. So much for drinking in the navy. But no, alcohol was never a problem, not to my knowledge.

Oh, that’s a different story, that’s a different story. Getting drunk and then coming back on board. Oh yes, that used to happen repeatedly I can assure you.

Well, we used to call it the brow but you call it the gangplank. Oh no, no, I don’t think there was anyone that bad, but I must admit that’s how my brother died,

by falling off the brow getting back onto his own yacht. He built a magnificent yacht, a beautiful yacht, and sailed it up from Melbourne to Sydney, and he was at the Sydney Marina and he’d been up the yacht club and he fell off the damn thing getting back on board the yacht. Hit his head, of course and that was the end of that. But, no, it was never a

problem. I don’t think there’s anyone that I know of. I guess there’s always the odd guy that would have got a little bit pie-eyed and had problems but I never really drank to any great extent at all in my younger days, very little.

Yes, well it would have to be. Although, I must admit that at school we used to have a lot of discipline there but basically that would be a disciplined life there but the army was nowhere near, as I said, as disciplined compared to the navy. It was a matter of, “Yes sir, no sir,

do as you’re told,” and that’s all there was to it. And you could, you could actually negotiate with a person if you did the wrong thing in the army but in the navy you haven’t got that right. As I said, you do as you’re told and ask questions after, if you were game enough to.

Sheets and blankets in the army.

There was no such thing in my army called sheets.

Just blankets and a palliasse, that’s all you got. No beds, just laying on the deck, on the floor, a wooden floor in a straw

palliasse and you had your two army blankets and that was it. And them, you got them from the Q Store [Quartermaster’s Store] and when you left that particular base you handed them back in again and when you went to the next place you got another pair of blankets, set of blankets. But there was no such thing as sheets at all, ever, not to my knowledge.

No, no, I didn’t. I don’t ever recall seeing a sheet. There’s lots of things, lots of things we did, for example, I remember in the army I used to wear pyjamas. Never in the navy. One of the major reasons, once again, was because of the fact of restricted space.

Washing facilities, also, because you must remember when you’re at sea you have desalinators on a big ship which you get your fresh water from, but you weren’t allowed to wash your clothes in fresh water because that was for drinking purposes only and for, if you’re

lucky, showers, but they were even cut out after a while. If you’re at sea for any lengthy period, length of time, you would, if you were at sea it’s for six weeks, you would be on very restricted water and also, it depends on your desalinators, if they didn’t work, which ours didn’t at least seventy-five per cent of the time.

And let’s face it, the worst thing in the world is salt water, for you had to make sure that salt water, there was no brackish water or anything like that amongst any navy personnel because you would go round the twist drinking that stuff.

Yeah, you have salt water soap.

Salt water soap – honestly, I don’t know what it’s made of but all I can say it was, it was like fat but it didn’t worry us because we had rules amongst ourselves when it came; every sailor was supposed to shower every day, that was most important, and if we found that any sailor wasn’t bathing every day, irrespective of whether it was

salt or freshwater, he was taken down by another member of the crew and scrubbed with a scrubbing brush and he soon learned to shower every day.

Yeah, you can’t have a smelly old sailor, no way. Very important.

Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah. But not

generally. I could go into who they were but they live 12,000 miles from here, and when we were in England getting our refit they used to, like ourselves, we used to have to go down there on working parties and do work on – particularly if you were a specialist like myself.

You went there to do a particular type of job because no one else could do it type of thing, and you’d go down there and then you would come back to where we were at our barracks, and then we would shower and get dressed in our number ones and go out and paint the town red or whatever. But some of these, some people, would go down there in their number ones with their combination overalls on and when they go out at night-time just take their overalls off. Well, that wasn’t the nicest thing, so

cleanliness in the navy was extremely important, extremely.

Oh well, there are women and there are women you know.

No, I don’t think that – Australians were, Australians were pretty good. I never bumped into too many of them – they were, no, they were pretty good.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think I could every recall any of my mates to be anything but absolutely clean.

Well, it all depends how long you’ve been at sea. We used to have,

when I was on the Yandra, we used to go to sea for a week and then come in for a week and then go out for a week and then come in. But I had a girlfriend in Sydney so I didn’t – no problems in that and she was, what we call, used to call them ‘at-homers.” And she used to take me home and I used to stay there and they used to – the family

used to look after me and they would, she would take me down to the tram each day, yeah, tram each day and she’d give me a little packet of cigarettes and away I’d go, just like going to work, backwards home, backwards and forwards, you know.

At a dance, where you met all girls in those days.

Oh, they had the – oh, the Red Cross and all these sort of things, they put on dances. And there used to be, I met her in a ballroom opposite Sydney Railway Station. David Jones, something like that. You’re a Sydneyite?

There was a big department store.

David Jones, right up, close to the central railway station.

A very big ballroom they had there. I don’t know whether it would be, well, let’s face it, it would be a long while after your time. Anyway, that’s where I met her and she – it’s great to have – the beauty of at-homers was the fact that you weren’t left to your own devices,

and the family used to look after you, particularly when you had a good-looking sort, you know, to help matters along a little bit. She used to work in a factory, she used to wind transformers, yeah, doing their war effort.

She, no, she actually got very friendly with my mother and the mother really wanted me to stay with her sort of thing, but it didn’t turn out that way. A lovely girl, but…

Well, she was a good friend as far as I was concerned and she was good fun to be with and we used to do everything together and she used to come with me down to the ship. And we used to have an open day on a Sunday afternoon I think it was and she used to come down there. And she used to – she was a pretty top flight looking

girl, and all the sailors on board used to like her. We had great fun.

No, no, no, no that was when I was on the cruiser. But no, when I was on the Yandra it was the same thing too.

No, she was the same girl.

Yeah, well we weren’t in Sydney that long

all up, but so you know things last, didn’t go on very much and I don’t think there’s anyone else I knew in Sydney at the time. We used to go to a lot of the – oh, American canteens?

Stage Door Canteen.

Oh, it’s an American terminology

they used in America when they have the stage door where they allow people to come into the studios and things like that to met all the actresses and things like that, and they just called it the Stage Door Canteen. I went to one in New York, yeah, that’s right, they were quite good and of course they were all over the place.

The Yanks had them everywhere. Same as in Britain they had the NAAFI [Navy, Army, Air Force Institute] Club and in Australia what the hell did we have here? We had nothing I don’t think; we had the Snake Pit.

Sydney.

The Snake Pit. Well, you had to be very brave

to go there. It was, you know when you come off Sydney, I’ve got to try and think of the name of the damned street now, not George Street, as soon as you come off the southern end of the bridge, in between George and

Yeah, up there, there was the Royal Navy House. I don’t know whether you know it or not

or whether it’s still called that but I do think – I don’t know what – I have seen it and I think it’s still something associated with the navy but it was about a four-storey place and all Allied navy personnel were allowed to go there and particularly if you had nowhere to go. When our ship came in you either stayed on board or you went ashore. Now, not too many would stay

on board unless you were a total introvert. So you would go ashore and do your own thing whatever that may be. And if you didn’t want to, if you had overnight leave you could go to the Snake Pit, which is the Royal Navy House, and it was like a tiered building with cobblestones at the bottom with a bar, and the general idea was to go there and get completely

sloshed, and as you walked in the door you paid a shilling, I think, and you got a blanket, and that’s it. And you slept anywhere you possibly could and of course it used to be absolutely chock-a-block full of sailors from all walks of life. And what went on in there, well, you had all sorts of people

there – weirdos and absolutely incredible stuff and if you want to see the lowest form of life, that’s the place to go. But mostly people went there because they had nowhere else to sleep so they would just doss down on the – in a hallway on the floor, there was never any beds or anything like that. But that was the snake pit.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, well, where else can you go and particularly in Sydney in winter? A bit chilly.

No, they didn’t sleep in the bar, they slept anywhere in that, up there, right to the top, you could go anywhere.

Yeah, sailors everywhere.

Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. They’d be urinating over the top balcony down into the centre. All types of things. You name it, they did it. Throwing up over the top balcony, oh yes, that happened, everything happened there, the old Snake Pit. You’ve got to get, the tape’s running out.

No, no. No, any of the navies apart from the Americans. The Americans wouldn’t stay there anyway.

Too much, definitely too much for them. No, they had their own canteen place. Actually their accommodation was pretty good compared to ours. Well, you wouldn’t have to go very far ahead to be better

than ours. But that’s what the conditions were like.

Lousy. Ask Beryl. But I think one of the main things that

we ever did those sort of things was to meet girls, that’s all. Because in those days you only met girls by going to dances, you didn’t meet them any other way.

By treading on their feet. No, I was all right, but I think to myself today when I think back about it,

I was pretty good as far as, yeah, I was pretty good as far as some of the dances were concerned. Some of the dances we did here were vastly different to what they did overseas. I used to like the waltz, and there’s the old fox-trot of course and we had the barn dance.

I think they only did the

basic thing like waltzes and foxtrots and things like that. But they didn’t do anything like – we had a tendency to move towards the American way of dancing with barn dances and things.

No, I didn’t meet anyone there that I can recall; I think we steered clear of there.

We did go there but it was just an ordinary place so people met, and I remember, oh, we went to a place, now, you were in America. Now the whole thing is – did you go to New York? Did you go to Yonkers? That’s just out of New York, one of the suburbs outside New York.

Yeah, possibly, I don’t know, I can’t remember now but I know that these girls picked us up

and we had ‘Australia’ on our shoulder, and we had the key to the city and they were really giving us a good time. They took us up to this big party at Yonkers and there was a lot of people there and I remember we, I was leaning on the juke box and this, I saw this Yank looking at me and he

couldn’t quite figure me out and he came over and he looked at the ‘Australia’ on my shoulders and he was staring at me and he came across and he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, “Do you speak English?” and I said, “Yeah.” I let him have a few English words mixed with a bit of Australian and he understood me. It was quite incredible and we enjoyed ourselves there, but the Stage Door Canteen was

just a name for a canteen where people went to at that time but whether I met anyone or not – we had a big ball; they gave us a big ball at the Roosevelt Hotel. And we went to see Harry James, Harry James at the Waldorf Astoria.

Yes. Well no one was allowed not to wear their uniform during the war, it was always uniform.

Yes, well, that’s a most unusual situation that one, like I was – firstly, after the battle of the Coral

Sea, when MacArthur decided to do his island jumping up to Tokyo, of course, when he left the Philippines in ’42, his famous saying was, “I shall return.” Okay, well he did, and the way he did it of course was to take up the Seventh Fleet, the American Seventh Fleet

which was at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and he decided to do a chain of island jumps and the Australia at the time was the flagship of Australia. We had some wonderful skippers on the Australia, and actually

I was on the Yandra at the time, and they knew more than I did of course, naturally, well that wouldn’t be hard, but still, they did it simply because I was particularly well trained in radar, and once again I didn’t know where I was going, I knew I wasn’t going to stay on the Yandra,

that’s for sure because the ship was too small and there was a lot of trainees coming through and I sort of said, “Well,” and I was looking after them. So the Australia went in to – actually, it was the beginning of – no, it was the end of October ’44,

I think it was the end of October ’44 and the lines were drawn up that the Australia would go into the Battle of Tilati Gulf, or Tilati Gulf up at Manus Island. The big problem, anyone in Australia, to replace troops or people who were killed in action was very, very difficult,

difficult because the means of getting them to the ship was a big problem. Particularly when you’re working directly in the front line and I knew, I had a feeling that I was going to go to the Australia because she was – she went in – she went to Tilati.

She was extremely badly damaged there. Two radar people were killed and myself and another mate of mine, we knew we were going to go there to replace these two guys. They put the dates forward of the Battle of Lady Gulf and we had not got any means of getting there at all to replace them because we just weren’t ready.

So, that was that, and we did not get there, and then they went back to Manus Island to get repairs. They got their repairs after – that was a horrific battle, and they’ll be celebrating that next month, yeah, October the 14th, that’s it, yeah. So that was that, and anyway they then

got the repairs without coming back to Australia, so we never got there. Now, the only way we could have got there was to go up to Milne Bay and up from there because you couldn’t have any aircraft going up there. You can’t go from – you can’t go island hopping on an aircraft in the front line, it’s just not feasible. So anyway,

she went up to Lingayen, the Battle of Lingayen, the invasion forces; this is MacArthur’s crowd, for the invasion there without us. And after the invasion of Lingayen, we lost our skipper, we lost, oh, a huge amount of bodies. Matter of fact, I reckon, if I had have

got on that I would be lucky to be here today. Anyway, that was that and anyway, of course she came back to Sydney and she was ordered back to Sydney because she had been hit with six kamikazes; she was the most hit ship in the Pacific and they said, “You’ve got to get out and get home, otherwise you’re gone.” But we lost all our guns, the ex turret was gone,

the four inch guns were gone, there was a great hole in the side of her. So they patched her up and brought her back down to Sydney and that’s when I was there waiting for her.

The forward stack, we

were still picking bits of Japs out of the bloody forward stack. One of the first jobs I ever had when I went on board it was to carry off, with other blokes, all the mattresses soaked in blood. And we piled them up on the bloody wharf and burned them all. And then we just

cleaned up the ship as much as possible and half the engine was gone. It was a hell of a mess. And, yeah, she was a hell of a mess. And that was that.

Well, they were embedded in all the tangled metal. You know suicide bombers, they just disintegrate and so does the Jap of course. And there were those sort of things, and there was lots of little things around the

place but anyway, as far as I was concerned all I thought about was how close was I not to have been on that ship. Particularly being radar, because that’s where they hit. So that was that but I don’t know whether you’re going to see a bloke by the name of Roy Taylor?

You don’t know yet.

He’ll tell you the story. He was on it.

Well, they were, they were pretty good, what was left of them. They had lost a wonderful skipper.

They were all in a state of flux, you know. They gave them a reasonable sort of leave when they got back. But the problem was that we couldn’t get into any dry docks for a complete refit and the whole ship needed a complete refit. We had no guns to speak of. The forward stack which was hit, and the radar

on the director was all – when this particular kamikaze hit up there, his fuel tank went into the radar, where all the electronic equipment was, and it just blew up and went over the bridge onto the forecastle and all that was a total mess and it had to be all

re-done and all our radar equipment and the bridge, everything, it was just one bloody great big mess. So anyway, we just cleaned it up as best as possible and we didn’t know what to do and we found that the British Admiralty had ordered us to the United Kingdom for a refit. The Americans wanted us to go there, that’s why we went to New York,

but the British Admiralty said, “No, you will come to the UK.” So we went to the UK for a refit because the problem was it was a bit dicey going to the Pacific at that time, because we knew the war was coming to an end in Europe, but we still had three months of war here in the Pacific. And if we had have,

well, we had to be very much alert on the way across the Panama.

Oh yes, no, we had no guns. Well, we had the eight inch guns,

we had three, no we had four eight inch guns, no we didn’t, we had three eight inch guns, gun turrets that is. Did we put on some old four inch guns? I think we did, yeah, I think we did. Yes we did, of course we did. Yeah, we had our pom-poms;

they were a bit raggedy but they were still workable. Ask the skipper who took us over there – we nearly blew him off the bridge with them.

Well, the captain of the gun is supposed to put chocks in it to stop it swinging too far, and the chocks dislodged and they were firing away and the skipper was on the end of the bridge, and he soon decided

he’d run to the other side of the bridge because the shells were getting awful close to the side of the bridge. Yeah, there were a lot of mishaps that happened from time to time with the British, Australians and the Americans, like, sinking their own ships sort of thing. No, but that, we managed, the biggest problem we had was the fact that we were

dead meat if – because we only had half our engines operating and we couldn’t rattle up any decent sort of speed. So we were on alert all the way across the Pacific until Panama. And once we got through Panama of course we had a pretty good reasonable sort of go there because the war ended on May fifteenth in Europe.

Well, we didn’t – see the whole thing is most of the radar equipment as it was pretty bloody ancient right from the kick off. And the idea for a refit was to get the state of the art, which we did get. We got some,

they took all our four inch guns off when we got there. But anyway, the four inch guns, they – when we got the new four inch guns, they had joy stick control, radar joy stick controlled four inch guns. We got also very top-flight – I think the Australians were the first to have proximity fuses on eight inch shells too, as in

barrages for aircraft, and that was good because the aircraft engines used to set them off as the shells got close to them. So that was that, but apart from that she was in, you know, reasonably good shape and once of course she got there we were in business but we, of course, had to be very quick. We didn’t know how long the war was going to be ending,

and they were trying to get us back in the Pacific as soon as possible, but it took us six months to refit over in the UK, and of course that’s when they dropped the atom bomb that closed it all off.

Yeah, no. No, I didn’t notice to any great extent but it happened though, it well and truly happened, it well and truly happened. They felt that they were being discriminated against and kicked off the ship simply because of the fact that there were too many bright sparks coming up to take over their job, and they’d been there and done their job and

someone else should come in and do it, take over further. Well that was, whether it was a good move or bad move I do not know. As far as I was concerned I only ever did what I was bloody well told, and you know everyone, and if there was any antagonism towards us, there probably would have been and I know, I do know of a couple of guys in the Australian mob,

particularly one, I know he’s very bitter about the whole business. But Roy Taylor, he went over, he came back over to England with us and he didn’t feel any animosity at all whatsoever. It was just some people thought that they should have had the trip to England for the refit and not anyone else. Anyway, when you’re in the navy you do as the navy tells you and not what the crew tells you.

Well, personally, I mean as I say, who had a crystal ball to know when the war was going to end? No one knew, and the point is that the Australia was a real target for the Japs. The Japs wanted that ship so, you know, it’s what you might even call the luck of the draw.

But I know that there was so many times when I was in the services I could have been killed and it’s, you know, well and truly – and you know, once again, it’s the luck of the game.

Well, some of them, some of them weren’t related to the – weren’t related to actual action but it was related to military manoeuvres and things like that. Such as – a very simple thing,

when I was in the army we were all going to Bonegilla, going into Albury from Bonegilla and I know the bus was waiting at the gate to take us there. So we all trundled down to the gate and the idea was to get on this bus and, of course the bus is not like it is today. They were the old

rickety buses. It was absolutely chock-a-block and I tried to get in on the steps of the bus and these, a couple of these big soldiers and me, little guy as I was, they pushed me off. And so I was just sitting there, standing there waiting for the next bus to come along. Now when that bus went down to Wodonga, a train backed out of the Wodonga Bandiana

workshops there and killed everyone on the bus. And if you go there today you’ll see a big memorial for everyone who was killed on the bus. I wasn’t on the bus. That was just one occasion. So these sort of things do happen and as I say it’s the luck of the draw. The driver of that bus was called Mr Lord.

Lord. If you ever go up there to Bandiana Wodonga have a look at it, it’s on the side of the road, a big memorial there. That was the worst and it still is, the worst bus accident ever in Australia.

Well, I have asbestosis and I’ve got pleural plaques as big as plates in my chest, and I exercise and swim every day to keep my chest working, and I retired at the age of sixty-one, and they gave me two years to live and I’m still living. So, I’m beating something

somewhere along the line.

Yeah, yeah.

I’ve never, ever heard of anyone being superstitious or anything of that nature. The only ever superstition I know of with a ship in general is, you should never ever change the name of a ship. That’s all I know about superstition when it comes to the sea. I don’t know of any other.

Blowed if I know. But that’s an old sailors – never change the name of a ship.

Well, we arrived there

when – oh, the Sunderland was – because we went to Plymouth, and No. 10 Squadron, Australian Coastal Command was there and they came out to meet us because we were the first Australians there for a long while and they flew over us and welcomed us in.

And, of course, from then on we were involved with the 10th Squadron there and they were pretty good. We had a lot of fun with them and I and a lot of great mates in 10th Squadron, still have, we go to their lunches.

Drink beer. I think that was the main objective but we didn’t do too much of that either.

We used to, we used to, you know Ray Wilkie?

He used to be the number 10 weather presenter, that’s where I met Ray, Ray Wilkie. He was in No. 10 Squadron. And I had a few other mates in 10th Squadron, they’re all dead now. There’s another bloke,

one of Beryl’s war bride friends, he was with the 10th Squadron. And then, as far as the UK was concerned, they were, when we saw Plymouth of course, Plymouth was absolutely flattened, with nothing left there. There was just the outer houses around the main city area. They put us in

barracks there, Raglan Barracks.

Oh, they were ancient, very ancient, and we were with the Yanks and the British Marines and ourselves. And, we used to do, we used to go down to the ship and do any work on working parties.

The officers had a – there was one hotel left in town called the Continental; all the officers used to go there. We gatecrashed it one day, tried to take over their women, that was funny. They eventually kicked us out, we had a bit of a dingle but nothing much.

We just went in there because we wanted to dance with their women, and so

we just – I think we climbed through the back window or the back door or something like that. We got in there and, of course, when the women saw these sailors in there they thought it was great to get away from these officers. And so we had a good time, and of course we were collared and thrown out. But that was the Continental Hotel. But there was the Union, in Union Street. There was the long bar there that was the main attraction.

And, amongst the rubble of Plymouth, there was a church, St. Andrew’s church, where I took my first communion there.

Oh, maybe I was thankful for being there or whatever. And the thing is that the –

oh, also, we didn’t really have too much to do when we were in the barracks apart from going down as a working party and doing what they asked us to do. So, that’s right, yeah, doing what we were asked to do,

and so we used to get into all sorts of little problems. And there was a pro that used to come up to the gates and she was pretty good, too, and everybody used to volunteer for sentry duty so that could have a go at this pro. She was all right, too. And that was that and what else was there? Oh yeah, that’s right, there was the guy who was the padre’s

yeoman, old Bob Mawson. Now Bob Mawson was on the Australia through all the actions and he was a great guy, he really was. And his yeoman that he had at the time went mad. I think

it was probably due to the actions that they’d been through, and they had to get rid of him. I don’t know what they did with him, probably sent him back home or whatever, I don’t know.

He just went mentally mad – threw all the ink all over the walls of this little office that Bob had

and so forth, So, there was two jobs going, one was to be a motor bike despatcher which I applied for, and the other one was for being, taking over the padre’s yeoman’s job. So they gave me the job of despatch driver. He got killed, that’s right, yeah, he got killed. Yeah,

and they find out then that I couldn’t ride a bloody motor bike. Oh, well, I thought it was – well, I had a try but it didn’t work too good. This motor bike was – I could ride a motor bike but this motor bike was just too big for me. And, you know, it was a long time since I’d ridden a motor bike, which was when I was in the army, and then I didn’t ride a motor bike much,

I was more on the pillion that I was sitting up riding the thing because we only had the two motor bikes. Anyway, the thing was that I ended up getting the job as the padre’s yeoman, which was a good job because I used to look after him. That was my job then. It was like being his little slave, and I used to polish his candlesticks and what not and, oh, there was a good lurk in it too.

He used to send me down to get some prayer books or whatever the case may be and that was quite good, it was a chance to get out. But we developed a relationship, a very good relationship, a very good one indeed. And we used to go around together. Now, okay, he was an officer, but that didn’t worry me one scrap, it didn’t worry me. And he was somewhat of a

historian and he used to love to go to these particular places. And it was great, we used to go around and have a look at the old history of Devon and Cornwall and things like that, and after the war we became very friendly, the whole family, and then he unfortunately

lost his wife. He used to have the church over at Woolloongabba there. Over the top of the hill there, the big white church. And then he went mad and he died. So we lost Bob, he was a great guy, and Bob Mawson is the nephew of Sir Douglas Mawson who went down to the Antarctic, an explorer, in 1911.

Oh yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Oh, they just lose their marbles and away they go. And, I must admit, that even though I wasn’t much involved during the war it had its problems with me after the war too. And I was at Rosemount

Psychiatric Hospital down here for a while. It has a tendency to get at you after a while.

I don’t know. It’s funny how it affects you but I just couldn’t see eye to eye with things; I couldn’t relate. But everything worked out all right with me as far as I was concerned, I didn’t think I’d gone that far.

But it wasn’t good for a while I know that.

I don’t know, no I don’t think so, I didn’t have any problems with

anything, I don’t know why they sent me there, they must have had a reason. I was very nervous and I did suffer a hell of a lot from what is known as nervous dyspepsia and things like that.

Well, you just can’t keep anything down, you throw up all the time, funny little

things. Anyway, but apart from that old Bob and I – of course we came home eventually. I met Beryl of course.

Oh we would just go down and did whatever we were told to do as far as the electronics were concerned, that’s all. Nothing much at all. There was a mail ship used – it was

a mine sweeper on the other side of the wharf to us and it was run by WRENS [Women’s Royal Navy Service]. I used to go over there and help them sort the mail for the minesweepers and the minesweepers used to come in and pick up their mail and out they’d go again, sort of thing. That was a good job and so were the girls too, and I got friendly with one of them and she lived up at Fishponds, outside Bristol, and her father

was the manager of WD & HO Wills, the cigarette people, tobacco people. She was my drinking oppo [partner] in those days, yeah, she was my drinking oppo and we used to go out and have a few beers together, a group of us, it was quite good. Anyway, what were we starting to talk about – we were talking about something else?

Oh working parties.

Oh, well, of course, the other thing

too was that when you used to go down there, they used to bring a lot – that’s right, they used to bring WRENs on board to have a look at the ship and, of course, we used to all walk around in the raw. And my locker was on the boiler room flap because we used to go down to the bathroom and we’d be in the raw and we used to come up again and stand outside our lockers and get dressed accordingly. And of course all the WRENs would come down and they’d see you there and they gave me the name of Pinky.

They reckoned that I looked pink. Well, yeah, Pinky, anyway. I remember someone bumping into me at some stage and she called me Pinky and then I realised who she was. Yeah, Pinky, yeah. So that was about all we used to do working on the working parties down at the ship, nothing exciting at all.

Well, being a navy establishment, you know, there were plenty of them there. There were mainly WRENs there, we had about five AVS [?] girls up on the foot, on the Hoe. Everyone knew them and of course we used to meet them all down at the NAAFI club for dancing.

And that’s where I met Beryl of courses, at the NAAFI club.

Girl, yeah.

There was no deal with the navy, it was the dealing with the Sergeant at Arms

actually. A lot of the guys, some of the guys, I won’t say a lot of the guys but some of the guys used to volunteer for sentry duty so they could get involved with the young lady. And of course it got even further than that at one stage there – I met her one day on the bus as a matter of fact. I never, ever volunteered for sentry duty by the way.

Maybe I wasn’t invited, but I don’t know but anyway – I don’t know why but anyway. And, we used to live in these barracks in a dormitory, right. It was the first line of barracks, this dormitory was the first line in these barracks, that’s right, yeah and we were,

whether it’s upstairs or downstairs is irrelevant but there was two tiers of bunks that we had on either side, yes, on either side, that’s correct. Anyway, I was always down, right down the far end and there was always,

that’s right, she was right near the door, yes, she was right near he door. They had brought her into the dormitory and they had put her up in this bunk and we knew, the guys who were down there, knew there was something going on up there and we didn’t quite work out what it was, I think it was until the next

morning. Anyway, we didn’t put much import on it at all and so we walked out down there to outside and as we walked down there this girl was laying in the top bunk – see I didn’t – and no one knew she was a girl and suddenly she threw her blanket off and said, “Ever seen a girl in the nude? Ha ha ha,” sort of thing. And of course our eyes popped and we thought to ourselves, “Oh, very interesting.” So that’s how that got involved,

and she ended up, well, I don’t know where she ended up but I know that she used to only come around where the Australians were, and I saw her on the bus one day and that’s about all that I know of her but she was, she was quite a character and everyone knew her coming around.

Yeah, in Plymouth.

That sort of thing happens all the time, it’s

nothing unusual.

It was the most hit city in England. It was flattened, absolutely flattened. There was absolutely nothing left of it except a few houses left up near the Hoe. See, being a naval dockyard

and being one of the closest cities to France it was just vulnerable and it was flattened, really flattened. The civilian losses there must have been absolutely horrendous. So, when you think about those places, what the civilians had to put up with there

we were so very lucky to be in Australia, the way we are so isolated away from those sort of things.

Yeah, nothing but rubble. You know, the church only had the four walls left, St. Andrew’s church, well there was basically, in the city centre there was just nothing there, nothing.

Just completely fields of broken bricks and so forth, etcetera, etcetera, around the place. So, you know, all the way, all the way around that coastal area, the Plymouth sound was, and yet there were some terraced houses up near the Hoe, on the Hoe, that were still pretty good. How they missed them, once again,

you know, it all depends on how good a bomber the Jerries were, you know, it’s as simple as that. They must have been reasonably good because they – you know, if they had have mislaid a bomb somewhere up there in the Hoe they would have bombed all those terrace houses but, no, they went for the naval dockyards and let’s face it, the central business district is just as important to be knocked out. But then again, you find one hotel left.

That’s where Drake played bowls. ‘Drakie was a Devon man and ruled the Devon seas, Captain (UNCLEAR) sleeping there below.’

‘When the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port of heaven and drum them up the channel as we drummed them long ago.’

Yeah, Plymouth Hoe where Drake played bowls when the armada was coming up the sound.

On the top of a hill and it’s flat. It’s a – how shall I explain it? It’s a mound that comes up and then it’s flat on the top and Plymouth comes down from there and up the top there is where they all played bowls and there’s still a bowling green. It’s still exactly

the same as it was in Drake’s time.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. You ask Beryl.

Well, actually, yeah, she got four days leave from

VE [Victory in Europe] Day, and they’re cunning little devils these women. She and a girlfriend, who was in the air force, she was in the air force and Beryl was in the army; they came down to Plymouth, for what reasons I just do not know, but I’m darned sure I think I do know in that there was a lot of sailors there.

Anyway, we had been going to the NAAFI, Navy, Army, Air Force Institute Club, for dances and we knew every girl that walked into that place. This mate of mine, we used to always go dancing together, and this particular time,

as I said, there was about five army girls up in the fort. We knew them well, but this particular time two girls walked in; one was air force, one was army, and this army girl I hadn’t seen before. And I thought to myself, and I just nudged myself and I said to my mate, “Here’s a couple of newies.” So we thought,”Ah ha!” So we decided we would toss to see which one would take which one amongst all the

others. We had a very positive mental attitude, of course, might I add. I lost the toss so, “Oh what was my mate’s name – I‘m trying to think of it – oh I don’t know. He came from Tasmania I think, yeah, I think he did. Anyway, that’s beside the point too.

He won the toss and he decided he’d pick on Beryl but I wanted Beryl. Now, being nice of course, I decided okay well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles and you’ve won the toss, fair enough. Then I said to him, “Well, I’ll put it this way, you’d better not have Beryl because otherwise you’ll be in trouble.” So we didn’t want to have a fight then and there.

Beryl will tell you different I bet you. So, anyway, he did take Beryl and have a dance with her and I had Joyce and we danced together and so forth, but eventually as the night wore on I wheedled my way around and pinched Beryl.

Well, I just took her over, and I don’t know but

what really transpired but we then all walked up to the Hoe, which, as you said, you know, a lover’s walk or a lover’s lane or whatever the case may be and we all sat up at the Hoe there together and that was that. These girls were staying at the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]. There was a YMCA building there of some nature, that’s where they were staying, YMCA, no YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association],

that’s better. So, you know, that was that and I was due to go up to London on leave for something or other and so when I went up to go, I said to Beryl that I would, and she would meet me up there. And so I did, I met her up there and so

the flirtation started.

Yeah, she was in the army but where she was, she was at Kensington Palace. Now what they did with Kensington Palace, they made it an army administration place. I don’t know what went on

there but it was full of army.

Yeah.

No, it was a bit of a mess, no it was very – a bit of a mess. Beryl did show me over the place actually and, you know, it was a real bit of a mess because, let’s face it, after six years of war. Had the war finished then? No, the war was still going on in the

Pacific, that’s right, yep. Yes, of course it was, yeah, it didn’t finish until August because the European war only ended a week before we got there or something, something like that. Anyway, yes, she was at Kensington Place and she – that’s actually how I met her. How I

went to see her when I first went up to London. I had to go round to Kensington Palace, that was an actual railway station there so it was easy to do that. And, of course, I saw the sentry at the gate and I told him that I wanted to go and see a young lady in here. So he marched me in there and Beryl wouldn’t even

look at me. She was a typist and she had her back to me but she knew I was there. Anyway, the sergeant who was looking after the whole caboose there told Beryl to get off her backside and come out, go outside there and talk to me. So she came out and talked to me. And that was where we just renewed our friendship. I think I’m right but Beryl will probably tell you otherwise Anyway,

that was that.

Oh, not long, not long. She was down there for four days. Yeah, four days.

I don’t know. I suppose I did. No, I couldn’t have done that anyway if I wanted to because I only had that one day off or whatever the case may be. That was the trouble in the services; you can’t just see people when you want to see them and all that sort of thing. It’s only when you’ve got time off and they’ve got time off, if they happen to coincide well good, lucky for you but otherwise I think that, no, I think that she – oh, that’s right. Yeah, now I remember,

yeah, ah yes, that’s right. After we met her at the dance, that’s right, we were all sitting around the fire in the NAAFI club; this is in the middle of their summer might I add. We were sitting around the fire in the NAAFI club with our Burberries on and so forth and rugged up, with our feet on the mantle shelf actually, trying to warm everything up, and she tapped me on the shoulder when she walked into the NAAFI club the next day I think it was. And she said, “How about coming for a

swim?” And I looked at her and I said, “You’ve got to be bloody joking.” I mean, here we are sitting around the fire trying to keep warm. And she said, “Well, the Americans are down there at so and so beach,” and I said, “Well, good luck to you.” So she chortled off down there to where they were and whether she went swimming or not, I still don’t know, probably did, I don’t know. In that weather over there you’d be

silly. So that’s what actually transpired there and so that was another day, and I probably did see her other days in the NAAFI Club there before she went up to London. From thereon I used to get up there as frequently as possible and see her and, of course, we had the big problem then with her mother.

Oh yeah, yes, yes, yes, she certainly did.

Oh, I don’t know, a couple of weeks I suppose. Oh, I don’t know, no, I don’t know, it all depends how often I got up to London, I can’t remember how often I got up there but no, she was – her mother used to be – she used to work

for Wembley Town Hall, in Wembley Town Hall as a dietician or something.

A dietician.

I know she used to fiddle around in the kitchen there. A caterer maybe, it might have been a caterer. Anyway, I eventually got home and the father,

her mother and her father didn’t get on too well. He was a squadron leader in the air force, and he was a nice guy too. So was her mother too, so I liked her, always liked her. Anyway I went home to her place, anyway, after – gee we’re going back now, moving on to the time that I was just about to leave England and I said

that I’d like to marry. I said to Thelma, “I can still see her in the kitchen tossing over a bit of fish.” I said I’d like to marry Beryl and well, talk about atom bombs dropping. So anyway, that was that.

Oh, no, she wasn’t there. So that was that and

I think that I got the idea that it was ‘over my dead body’ sort of thing because here was I, a total stranger to her, well almost, and the fact that I was an Australian and the fact that I lived 12,000 miles away. She wasn’t going to let that happen because she was already wrapped up with a Major in the Scottish army or something.

Beryl.

I don’t know whether you’d want to call it that or not but I know that she knew one, and I think that her mother was more interested in that relationship than me. Simply because of the fact that he lived on the same island but anyway, that was it basically.

I don’t know whether I ever asked her;

I just assumed she would.

Oh yes, yes.

Well, when we got back to Australia I worked on the idea

that in those days any world war, during the war, if you were inclined to bring a girl in from another country, you could either marry her and she then automatically become an Australian citizen or she could come out to Australia as your fiancée and you had to marry her within six months.

And if you didn’t you lost all your deferred pay which you accumulated during the war. Anyway, that’s a total other story.

Well, when I got home they wanted to get me out of the services. I’d been in the services long enough. I’d had nigh on three years of so-called active service in

active service areas and my demobilisation points were up. We had a points system. So they said that I could, I went back to – you always go back to where you started off from, like I said with the army, I went back to radio station 284 and they said that, “Yeah, well you’re going to be demobilised,” and

I got friendly with the skipper there, too. And he said to me, “Why don’t you go back and marry her?” And I said, “How come?” sort of thing, you know; ‘Here I am ready to get out,” and I wanted to get out. And, he said, “Go back on the Shropshire. She’s leaving with the Victory contingent and there she is going out the heads now.” And sure enough she was going out the heads.

He said, “Well, your part of the ship is radar. One of the radar chaps had fallen off the mast and broken his back; you can replace him if you want to.” And I said, “Oh.” So anyway, he said, “You’ve got five minutes to make up your mind.” He said, “I’ll fly you down to Melbourne and you can pick up the ship in Melbourne.” And I said, “Okay.” So, he flew me down to Melbourne,

I picked up the ship in Melbourne; I went back to England with a great lot of trauma and so forth.

No.

It ended in August. We got home. I got home on – when did I get home? I don’t know, when did I get home? It was ’46 I got home, so that was –

it must have taken six weeks or so to come home so it would have been about February in ’46. That’s right, yes, because we had to be back in England with the Shropshire for the victory contingent in June of 1946, yeah.

Not really, no.

I wanted to

get out of the services.

Yes, yeah, I was a, they used to call me Mister on board because I was already mobbed more or less but anyway, it was a

quick trip sort of thing when I went over there, but a lot of things happened when I got there. She didn’t want to marry me and all this sort of thing went on.

Yeah, I sent her a telegram that said I was coming over to marry her, make wedding plans. Well she sent her brother down to the ship when the ship landed,

when the ship arrived at Portsmouth, and he was lucky to leave the ship alive. Anyway.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, anyway, so it went on and anyway, eventually it ended up, anyway it was a mess.

Yeah, and then of course we had a lot of talking to do and she – that was the time that I, yeah, I had to get out of jail there on that one and that was when he said to me, he said,

‘Oh, all right, you can finish your time when you come back from marrying Beryl,” and of course, I think I should leave all this to Beryl to tell you about because, honestly, she knows the details finer than I do and we got married in a Registry Office. My best man, he got lost and it was a complete shambles. A complete shambles.

Well, they said it wouldn’t work but it has. Beats me how, but still it did work and it has worked. It was, it was a whole new ball game, it was a new – in that respect, once again, you look back on these things and you say, “How in the hell did it work?” But it did.

She knew that. Yeah, anyway, after we got married and we went up to Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire for a so-called wedding breakfast, which didn’t work out because they thought we were

never coming and so they ate it all. And we got the leftovers because they were still on very strict rationing. And then, of course, then I had to go back down to Portsmouth to come back home again. Portsmouth, yeah, to come back home again.

Well, I wouldn’t have been out of uniform and I’m pretty sure – no, I think Beryl was in civvies. She was allowed to go in civvies. She was allowed to be in civvies, yeah.

No, she borrowed one up at Chalfont just to have a photograph taken

and we both stood in the rain on newspaper while the photographer took the photograph.

Yes, it sure was, goodness me. Anyway, so much for that one.

It was at a Registry Office so we had to get a council worker as a witness. He was cleaning the gutters out I think, and that’s all there was to it. And the licence cost seven and six, same as a dog’s licence. That’s what she always said, “He paid the same amount of money as he would for a dog’s licence.”

Oh, I don’t think so.

We had, just that one taken. We had a bit of a honeymoon I think, yeah, with one of Beryl’s girlfriends and her husband. He was just back from the – he was in the British Army at the Rhine when the capitulation – he came back and we went up and we did a

boatman’s holiday and we went rowing up the Thames and that was about it. But nothing else exciting happened there and I had to get back to the ship. So she just came down to Portsmouth to see me off and away, and we came back. We only stayed a very short period in London for that business.

Oh, I just arranged a meeting somewhere. I know that she – I don’t know, she must have changed her mind, that’s all. Well, she did.

And she ended up marrying me and then she came out here in the end of ’46.

The Shropshire.

Oh, it was all right. When I got back home again of course I got, as soon as we hit Melbourne, yes Melbourne that’s right. As soon as we hit Melbourne, which was my home port, not my training establishment, my home port because my number was PM, Port Melbourne, and therefore you get demobilised

if you’re normally in your home port. So as soon as I hit Melbourne I went off the ship and I was out, finished. And then unfortunately I ended up in hospital, in Heidelberg Military Hospital. I was there for quite a while.

I think my nerves went again, and think that was a big – something – oh, that’s right, they reckoned I had an ulcer and I was getting skinnier and skinnier and I was there, and when I heard that Beryl was coming out

from England I discharged myself from the hospital and met her. That was it; that was the end.

Six months.

Well, it was pretty good. Jeff, my old schoolmate,

he came down. Jeff and Dave, they cleaned up, we had a little room we used to pay twenty-five shillings a week rent for a room in this godforsaken hole where we had to live. And those two boys, Jeff and Dave, while I was in hospital they did it all up for me,

painted it etcetera, etcetera, and they came down. Jeff came down, Doug, I don’t know where Doug was, Jeff came down and met Beryl and my dad was there, my mum was there and when Beryl arrived on the Asterius, it was a passenger ship. Actually it was a troop carrier during the war.

Yeah, that’s when all the problems started from there on because, once again, no job and nowhere to live.

And went home and stayed with my parents but that wasn’t very good. That wasn’t very good. My mother didn’t appreciate Beryl very much and so we had to get out of there and we went knocking on doors looking for a garage to live in or something like that. And, by the way, she was pregnant which created

a massive problem.

Mmm., who’s now fifty-seven.

Well, that’s what

I always thought too. That’s why, naturally, I had to stick up for Beryl. But it was just not one of those things, it was a good thing that we did move out as we did and Jeff’s parents once again were great people. They helped us along considerably.

No, they couldn’t. But they certainly helped us out considerably, and eventually I got a job and then the new world started, getting re-educated.

The first thing I did, well, I couldn’t get a job. No one could get a job after the Second World War,

no one. No matter what you had you could not get a job. There was no work, period, everything stopped, bang. My brother, as I said to you earlier, he didn’t go away to the war and he had an engineering shop, and he was an electroplater and he had this business out near the airport at Essendon, and he said that I could go out and work for him if I wished. Well,

that lasted one morning. Just one morning. He gave me a great big tea chest of tea pot handles to file and I was standing at the vice there for all morning, filing away these bloody tea pot handles. I wasn’t impressed and I told him where to put his tea pot handles. Well, the thing was – that it just wasn’t –

you know, I did not expect to become chief executive officer or anything like that but I certainly needed something a little bit more to do than that because I was – I had been trained all my life to be a little bit more exacting in my work. Anyway, the thing was that when I left there I had to look for another job and of course I came home to Beryl and I said, “I just left; quit the job with Rex,” so, oh deary me.

So there was another electroplating firm not very far from where we lived, so I went round there and said, “Any jobs available here?” And he said, “Do you know anything about this?” And I said, “Oh yeah, I used to work for Rex Boyd.” “Oh, did you really?” he said. “You must be good.” And I said, “Oh yeah, I’m good.” And he gave me a sample from Hecla Electrics that had to be spot on, highly polished and everything else.

And I had to – my job was to polish it on the polishing buffs, on this machine, and the soldering lugs on the bottom of the kettle, the electric kettle it was, got caught in the polishing mop and it got smashed against the wall. So that job lasted half an hour.

Never, ever touched anything like that, never.

Anyway, after that I realised that I really had to do something and go out and get the job that I wanted to do. So I went into the Postmaster General’s Department as it was known in those days, or Telstra today, and I applied for a position as a telephone technician. So, was given a huge name

and I became a telephone technician, but only on a temporary basis because nothing was permanent in those days once again. There was no real jobs available but they gave me the job there and so I worked in exchanges, telephone exchanges, doing maintenance work and installations on rural exchanges and things like that and telephone exchanges I worked in there.

And I had to become – I thought to myself, “Now that’s right; Dad said to me, he said, ‘See if you can get permanent in the public service, because there was the big Depression after the First World War,’” meaning the one we’d been through, and I said, “My God, I don’t want to have to go through that again, not with a young family.” So I checked out the Gazette as much as possible and there was a job there in

meteorology. And so I thought to myself, “I don’t know whether I’ve got the qualifications but I’ll give it a go,” so I did it and I got it.

What transpired?

Well, what actually happened was, he was in the British

navy but he didn’t join the navy until after the war. Yeah, that’s right, and he was allowed to come on board the ship and when he did they told me that he was – I had a visitor and we were –

I was sitting around the mess table actually with a lot of my other mates. And one thing about, you know, when you’ve got mates in the navy, and particularly as they knew what the reason I was there for, we stick together very close and he, he came down to the ship,

and when he came down off the bow down onto the mess deck and he stood at the doorway and he was very, very lonely, being a Pommy navy bloke amongst all these Australian sailors. And anyway, he stood in the doorway and I looked at him and I said, “Yes, Tony.” I used to call him Tony. He couldn’t stand that; he wanted to be called Anthony. But I wouldn’t let him have Anthony; I said

‘Tony’. I said, “Yes Tony, what can I do for you?” He said, “Beryl’s just told me to tell you that she’s not going to marry you.” Well, I tell you what, you could have heard a pin drop on that mess deck. As I said, he was lucky to get out of there alive because all the other guys were now standing up and I was standing up and I said to him, “Well, I want to hear that from Beryl, not

from you.” We never did get on. He was too pukka sahib for my liking. Though, I must admit that we Australians were pretty rough when it comes to things, but at least we do speak our mind. So anyway, he went to – he disappeared. But I knew then that there was problems. That was the beginning of the problems but then of course, when I got onto

Beryl, I told her that I’d like to come up to London to meet her just to find out what the real problem was. That’s when you speak to Beryl tomorrow and she’ll tell you the answer to that one. But as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t just, not that I’d come 12,000 miles and given up my demobilisation to just do the trip and then go back home, shall we say, empty handed.

No way. I wasn’t going to let her go that quickly so I wanted to see her and I went up to London. And I know what she said, she said when she saw me she couldn’t say no. I thought, “Ha, got you!” So, anyway, I must admit

that it was a bit of a whirlwind romance but it worked, so there were we. That’s how Tony came down to the ship. He went away empty handed.

Yeah, he sure did, yeah.

Well, she, she wouldn’t give – we were both under age. Now, in those days you had to be twenty-one. We were both under age. I was twenty, I was twenty and Beryl was twenty, that’s right, both under age. Now, she could not get married unless she had her parents’ consent. So she went to her father

and her father gave his consent; her mother said no. And I said, “Well, there’s one answer to this.” And I said, “We’ll just nick off and go to a Registry Office.” But the answer was there again, “No, you can’t do it, because I had to get permission from the skipper of the ship to get married.” Because he was my, what’s the word,

he was, he was like my parent.

Guardian, yeah. And he had to ensure that the ship’s company was such that it was not going to be involved in any sort of problems. And so I was up in London, I think, at the time so I rang the ship and I rang the skipper of the ship

and he gave me permission. So I went to Australia House and teed it all up and so forth, and they rang the skipper on the ship and it was all okayed and we went away and got married. So, that’s how it worked out how. The mother eventually came up with her consent because she knew that she was beaten on all fronts then. It was two against her. That was the skipper of the

ship and the husband, or Beryl’s father. So she said, “All right,” and that was that. So we got married. I don’t think – Beryl might say different I don’t know, but I don’t think her mother really said it was a bad thing but

it was just the fact that, as I said, she really didn’t want to lose her to someone she really didn’t know and for such a big distance away and also, Australians did not have a good name. They were considered pretty much rough characters generally. They always have been considered as such in the UK.

Sorry?

Yeah, but we also, oh yeah, we were always considered pretty rough characters and also, we also knew we had a way about us that was not accepted by the British, and that was the fact that, you know, if we wanted to do something, we did it, whether we were liked or disliked and, you know, there was no getting, no arbiter at all as to which way you should go.

I remember in the First World War, even in the Second World War when we were in Durban, we picked up a little mini car and took it up all these steps and put it in the foyer of the post office and nobody could get it out apart from pulling it to pieces, and we did all things like that. We were a bit wild.

But, you know, nothing malicious or anything like that. And we also did some funny things in the Middle East. Oh there were a few other things we did, funny things around the place. We just did crazy things. I don’t think kids today probably do the same thing but in a different way. Australians are noted for it but I think they might have quietened down

a bit, but then again we’ve got a little bit more of a multicultural way of things of doing things today which has changed Australians a lot, but I hope we never lose our real Australian attitude towards life in general.

Yes, well there used to be three of us. We were called the three bad lads. And we just wanted to let some steam off. I’m just trying to think of what we did.

I don’t know whether it was when we came – oh, Aden was one place. Yeah, we, that’s right, Aden, and we decided we would create an interest so we decided we would go and check out all the brothels we could, but not to partake. That was most important that we all

agreed totally that none of us would partake. But we would check them out thoroughly and see how the other half lived in that respect. Well, it was an education, it was indeed an education, particularly in the Aden area. Oh anyway, they were, they were Aborigines, oh boy, they were dark

and nomad type people and they lived for miles out in the desert, and I mean desert. We got onto an old taxi driver and we got into the cab with him and away we went. And you could see the dust and the flies and the oasis miles away. And we get there and there was all these native huts, and they’re all made out of mud, and these were the brothels and so forth that they used to have for

investing nomads and chiefs and whatever. And all indentations, how you put your head down and your legs up and all this sort of stuff. And this mate of mine, he used to take photographs of all these sort of things which were totally illegal. We weren’t allowed to have cameras. And that was at Aden. In Durban we did the same thing.

That’s when we were told to steer clear of the Cape to Cairo, oh, C to C brandy.

Oh, it’s just dynamite, you know, moonshine stuff. And so we went to this place and we were all sitting around this table, yeah we were all sitting round this table and

the girls would come and plonk themselves beside you ready to wheel you off into their little cubicles. And I said to the guys before we went in – I always seem to be in charge of everything, I don’t know why. And I said, “Listen,” I said, “now make sure you don’t get into the brandy, that’s number one, because your mind will turn on you and you’ll go against what we said; don’t partake.” Anyway, we’re all sitting around there giggling and laughing and going on sort of

thing, and then I noticed one of the guys is missing. And we thought, “Oh oh, Jesus,” so we then ransacked the place looking for him. And it was absolutely incredible the amount of blokes we found off the ship in these cubicles. We eventually found him. We eventually found him and he was just about to get into it all

and we dragged him out by the skin of his neck. Oh yeah, that was a very close go. Cape Town wasn’t too bad.

Because it was just something to do. Something exciting, we just hadn’t done these sorts of things before and we thought, “Hey, this is something.” We just thought would be interesting. And it was it was very interesting. What else would you do, go to

a pub or go somewhere where mundane things happen? No, no, you want an element of risk. Anyway, we ended up in one, where was that? No, that must have been in Durban, that’s right it was in Durban, yeah, and we didn’t believe and that’s right, he had popped into the C to C and we were a bit concerned whether

he did dabble with her. So we ended up having to take him to Hollywood Hospital. That was the name of the hospital there, the Hollywood Hospital, yeah, into the VD [Venereal Disease] clinic. And that was the biggest problem in those days and that’s why, no dabbling. Anyway, we got in there and they – we got into this place and it was all locked up and we managed to break in.

And in the old days there, they had the method of whereby toilet cisterns sitting up all along the walls and down from the toilet system there was this rubber tube with a catheter on the end, all the way along. And we couldn’t find a doctor and we didn’t know quite what we were doing, we didn’t know how to work it all properly

and so we decided we were going to flush this bloke out anyway, irrespective of whether he liked it or not. So my other mate and I, we tied him down and we got this catheter and we used it the way you’re supposed to use it but no one told us the pressure of that liquid up there in that cistern was too great for his bladder. Anyway, a doctor came

in and he just looked at us and he said, “I see you know how to do it.” And he just walked out. And he wouldn’t stay no matter how much we pleaded. Anyway, of course, when we pulled the catheter out, the pressure was so great that he sprayed everything with Condies crystals which was the fluid. Anyway, he ended up with a clean bill of health. We straightened him up. Whether he dabbled or not he didn’t know, he didn’t know anyway.

But we decided we’d make sure that he was going to go home nice and clean.

Well, it all depends on how you want to look at it. But there was other places we went to but they were very minor. But that was just another episode.

Oh, the things you do.

Oh, no one helped my father, no one. Not the government.

No way. Here he was on a ten per cent pension. It was only that he used to really fold up completely that we used to be able to get him up. We used to have to even have to take him up to the hospital himself and do the things and it was so, so

archaic the methods that they used in those days. But as far as I was concerned, after the Second World War, Dad said to me straight away, he said – oh, this was after I came out of the hospital – “They put me on a ten per cent pension,” and he said, “You want to be very careful that if anything happens to you in the future is to make sure you’ve got a good local medical officer to look after you.”

Well, all I can say as far as I was concerned, the Department of Veterans Affairs looked after me very well. Very well indeed. I had that problem right from the beginning, the asbestosis, that was due to inhaling, we had a – you know

the amount of sailors that would have died from asbestosis and not known it would be absolutely incredible. Because we all slept amongst the asbestos. Where I used to sleep on top of the lockers, my nose used to be in the legging on the steam pipes which was covered with asbestos

and, you know, the only thing that started the investigation of asbestosis up, whether you know it or not is the Wittenoom. Over in Western Australia, there was a mine, an asbestos mine; it was called the Wittenoom and they couldn’t understand as to why all the residents of the town were dying. And when they did a

thorough examination they found that they had mesothelioma, which is a very dangerous form of asbestosis from blue asbestos fibres. But now you will never see any asbestos cement around now. You will never see any asbestos anywhere now. And yet there are houses still around, and you must get special permission to pull them down now because you’ve only got to have a few fibres of asbestos

and you’ve got it. Anyway, of course, when I got all this, when that came out and I was, I was bleeding internally all the time and of a night-time my pillow used to be just, you know, you’d get up in the morning and the pillow would be covered with blood and it was just pouring out of me and they, the specialist on the ward, he just said to me, “He’ll end up drowning in his own blood.”

Well, I spent two years over at Greenslopes hospital here, in and out, in and out, in and out. But they couldn’t find where the pocket was, where it was coming from. So that’s why I retired when I did because I knew I had problems. And would you believe, it’s only on very small occasions now I get this problem

and here I am now just pushing seventy-seven, so as far as I’m concerned I’m all right, no problems.

When I was about fifty-eight, sixty, going on sixty. I couldn’t figure out where this blood was coming from all the time. Anyway, [Department of] Veterans’ Affairs looked after me beautifully,

they really did. They had to remove my bottom lip because of cancer. That was because of those ridiculous bloody navy hats which didn’t give you any protection from the sun but no one told us about sun cancer in those, skin cancer in those days. I’ve got, I haven’t got melanoma yet but

I’m checking it all the time. But as I say, I’m nearly seven-seven so, you know. I don’t wish to kick the bucket or anything like that but all the same, Veterans Affairs have really looked after me. So as far as I’m concerned they’re great, they’ve done me well. And most of my friends who were in the same position as myself; they think the same thing so as far as we’re concerned – but the First World War,

I think they learned a lot from the First World War, and they should look after any person who goes to war. It’s as simple as that.

Well, there was quite a few of them actually that went away, and only seven came back. They just weren’t

normal. They almost didn’t recognise you, they – rehabilitation they sure needed. I think most of them, they did something with them, I don’t know. But they were in a very bad way. Matter of fact they disbanded the group,

the 4th Air Support Group, they disbanded that. Then they built up the Z Force which went up to Singapore.

Who’s that?

With my group, yes they were, they were at Milne Bay. Yeah, at Milne Bay and all along the coast

there. They formed this special group that went up there to do all the invasions. They were the people who – they were the commando groups who actually went onto the beach first and established communications which they had to have. And they were behind – most of them were behind enemy lines all the time. And they were communications with the ships and the air force and so forth, and they used to have to

direct the landing craft to the safe beaches and things. It was a bit of a hairy job.

No, they just, they couldn’t smile

or anything like that, you know, they just walked around like zombies. And don’t forget, they weren’t away very long. They weren’t away very long and things happened very rapidly, very rapidly indeed. But they were, I don’t know, they would have been assimilated somewhere along the track into another group of people or whatever.

I often, I really would like to know where they all ended up. As I say, I’ve got a photograph of them, a photograph of some of them and I often to think to myself where they all ended up. This, you might like to ask Beryl tomorrow what the name of Wylie’s old man was, that’s a girl we used to know. I can’t think of his name but he

he was the chief in charge, he was the Major. And I don’t know where they ended up. But when, if you go into those, if you go into those specialised groups like that you can bet your bottom dollar that there’s not too many of them left. I know the ones that went to Borneo and so forth, they’d be all gone, well and truly.

Well, the Krait situation is typical. They were all executed by the Japs when they caught them all so, you know, but then again that was the name of the game if you volunteered to go into those sort of things.

Oh no, good, yeah. Oh no, I think that Beryl and Dad got on quite well together. Dad was an easy person to get on with. He didn’t create any problems. From what I can gather he was a very hard worker all his life. Very genuine character.

He used to work at the gas works in Melbourne and he was a stoker at the gas works. And he used to have to stand on top of this grating around the top of these big burners and he used to have a big steel pole and stir the old coke up and so forth for the manufacturer of

gas. And he used to get as black as the ace of spades. And when he went to work of a morning he used to have a white shirt on, tie, hat, highly polished shoes. He looked as tough he was the chief executive officer of the gas company, and when he came home he looked exactly the same. Incredible. And he was just a

stoker at the gas company. So much for that.

No, no, I didn’t notice any changes. To my knowledge I didn’t notice any change. I don’t think so anyway, it might of. It just didn’t ring a bell.

Well, she was a bit of an oddity inasmuch that, as I said to you earlier in the piece, you know, where we lived. Naturally we didn’t live anywhere near Tooradin then of course but my grandfather was still alive and my grandmother.

Now my grandfather and my grandmother used to live down near the drains which I was telling you about this morning. They’re the ones that lived in this tin farmhouse that I thought was a mansion when I was a kid. We used to – our wall paper in that place was newspaper over hessian on the walls. Concrete

floor in most parts but dirt in others. That was our farm. Now, that was the type of – now, we go back in generations almost, I think the second generation of Australians. My grandmother’s mother was a convict,

and they were a pretty rough and tumble lot. Very rough and tumble. Grandpa – we never had any electricity or anything like that in those days. Grandpa, we were great mates he and I when I was a little kid, and he used to sit

in this shack and he used to always use a cut throat razor. He’d shave with a cut throat razor and if he nicked himself he’d put his hand in a bowl of salt and rub it into the cut. And this was the type of person he was; he was really hard. And of course, Ma, she was an absolutely wonderful woman.

And we used to catch snakes and eat them; we used to catch eels and eat them; we used to do all sorts of things. Anyway, when they – I don’t know what happened to Dalmore, Dalmore where we lived in that mansion. I don’t know what happened there but they moved to a place in the Dandenong mountains, a place called Monbulk,

and this house that they moved into was not much better than the mansion because after the war, when Beryl came home or came out, I took her up there. Now, here she is, a Pom, not accustomed at all to this environment. She was pregnant and anyway, the train stopped at a place called Belgrave

and there was a dirt road up there. And I was impatient to get up there to see my grandmother and my grandfather and Beryl was walking about fifty yards behind me because she could hardly walk because she was pregnant on this dirt road. And I want to ask you about that too. Anyway

when we got up there, well, you know, the house itself… I don’t know what Ma had on the table cloth but it was so stained with all the stains that you could possibly think of, and she cooked us a roast dinner. Well, this roast dinner so help me God, you didn’t know what you were eating but that’s the way they lived in those days. It was so rough. Anyway, of course, taking Beryl there, she just couldn’t

believe that human beings lived this way but we did, and we all survived none the worst for it.

Well, I certainly wouldn’t like to think I’d ever take her round to a place, an environment like that again, but then again she had to find out sooner or later. She’s never forgotten it, she never will but then again we’ve gone from nothing

but strength to strength all the way through.

Firstly my ancestry is Scottish and Irish and we’re probably a bit of a fiery lot. Most of the Boyds are red heads or fair-headed James

people, which we can go back even further than that. And, the Boyds ancestry was very much involved in the Jacobite rising in the days of King James and we were always rebels against the British. Whether that’s part and parcel of it I do not know. But you know, I myself – I do for example,

the flag that we have today, I think that’s a great flag and it should be maintained at all times because up in the top in the left hand corner is our heritage because you’ve got the United Kingdom there, and whether it be British or Scottish and the rest of the flag, of course, being Australian. So I still think that what we did in the First World War, follow up the

motherland, okay, as we were colonials we didn’t know better. Second World War we did the same thing, but at the end of the Second World War we do know different now. I can see this country becoming a republic well and truly but I wouldn’t like to think that we end up with some presidents that I know of. I would hate to think that this country ever had a president

or past or present presidents of some countries in this world today. I’d like to think that we could get someone to rule our country. No actress or actresses or no Arnold Shwarzneggers but real politicians or statesmen, real statesmen, but they’re few and far between. It will develop, it will develop one day. It will happen.

I don’t believe in war unless it was immediately – the world is getting smaller and smaller and terrorism is – terrorism has been around ever since Adam was a pup. But it’s showing itself by right and leftwing, you know, call themselves what they like

but they’ve gone a little bit overboard. So there’s nothing safe from terrorism at all anywhere, so sure we’ve got to be on the look out for that at all times because they’re fanatics. I mean, you take the Japs, they’re fanatics, always have been, it’s their culture. It doesn’t mean to say we can’t be their friends as long as they don’t go sticking their nose into certain things around the place. Indonesians, big concern.

I don’t know but I’d like to think –you see there’s a huge population there. They’d walk all over this place. Anyway, so much on my philosophy. We’re a very much isolated place, Australia, and Australasia generally. And if you look at the war

in Iraq now, and you see those fanatical nuts over there who fire guns in the air because they’re elated about something or other. No matter what, to fire guns in the air, you know, but the biggest problem we’ve got its religion.

Exactly.