Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Bondi Junction New South Wales, Waverley. My parents lived in Waverley for some time, and then when the western suburbs was opened up they moved out to

Croydon Park. And I was at Croyden Park until I was fourteen years of age and my father was then moved to Melbourne with his firm and I have been in Melbourne ever since. I went to Stanmore High School. I went to Croyden and Croyden Park junior schools. When I came to Melbourne I got a job with Myers

and I worked with Myers for fifteen years and I went from Myers to the war. And from the war I went back to Myers and then I went to a finance company and I ended up at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] as a pay clerk. Which I stayed there for twenty years. Anything else?

Right oh then. I joined the cadets in 1936 and my number was 439. When I turned eighteen I signed on for three years with the RANR Royal Australian Navy Reserve, which the war started while I was still in there and therefore I was called up on full service to save my country. On the 4th of November 1939

I left for England. I had Christmas 39 in Cape Town. From there we went to Balikpapan, Tarakan and Borneo. And after being in Borneo I went through the Mediterranean to England, arrived in England January 1940. From 1940 I did twenty-two crossings of the North Atlantic,

and I never fired a shot at the Japanese all of the shooting was with the Germans. I went to Murmansk which I did not go ashore so I can’t say I went to Russia, I didn’t go ashore it was too cold, you have got no idea how cold it is there. I was in the one ship for two years. I was in an oil tanker a Shell Oil Tanker called the Eulima Shell

which in 1942 was sunk by enemy action and lost all hands. I in turn was taken off it, and on my ship I joined the Hazelside as a passenger on the way back to Australia because Curtin called us back. And I got sunk in South Atlantic, two hundred miles south of Saint Helena, four hundred miles due west of Baltic Bay Dune which is Africa. The Dorsetshire got the submarine that got us, that’s the HMS

Dorsetshire an English war ship. Arrived at Cape Town, was sent to the convalescent home at Froggy Ponds. At Froggy Ponds I went for a fortnight holidays with Jerry Munich at the bottom of Table Mountain, people looked after us and eventually I came home on the California Star. One of the Star ships. In

six years of war I was at sea bar four months, I walked the deck of a ship the whole time. Which I have documentation there to prove that. That’s got to the war so what do we do from now on?

My family, I am an

only child. I had very good parents, and a very good life, no problems with that at all. Although we went through the Depression my Dad never lost his job, although he got his salary cut in half and that made it pretty difficult for anybody to pay a mortgage off and live in the way we were accustomed to. But no I had a wonderful life, my parents were very good.

Yes to a certain extent my father was strict, so was my mother. My mother was a very religious woman which rubbed off on me quite a bit. But eventually I dropped a lot of that off because once I joined the Navy I was free.

Baptist.

Went to church Sunday with my mother, went to Sunday school. Went to Christian Endeavour the Ashfield Baptist Church.

No my Dad wasn’t no. Wasn’t at all.

And World War II. My Dad was a sailor in World War I. He was on the Encounter and the Protector. And then when the war came he was in the VDC [Volunteer Defence Corps]. And then he joined the, I was going to use the wrong word. He joined the army and he ended up in records as a sergeant.

I knew in World War I my Dad was on the Encounter and the Protector. A hawser broke and hit him in the eye and he was discharged, they were on their way to Fanning Island I believe at that time. And he was discharged from the navy then.

Not very much of the World War I, I don’t because I was born in 1919 and in 1919 I was a little fellow, a baby.

No my father.

Not very much.

As you know the navy is silent service. And most of it we keep to ourselves, I have told my kids a few things but there is a lot of things I have never told them and they will never know.

It was a dreadful war to start with., Hundreds and hundreds of people were killed. The Anzacs made it at Gallipoli. I don’t know too much about the war, all I know is that there was a lot of blood shed on both sides, not just one side.

It’s a war that should never have been, and neither World War II. War does not do anything to help the world at all, it’s a selfish way of standing over people.

I never missed an Anzac Day march unless I was ill. I can’t go, I still go to the Anzac Day marches

now but I can’t march I go in a car. Still go in, my family comes in with me.

No I never used to go in, my father never took me into Anzac Day at all, he didn’t go into it.

Very vague. Not twelve months, at twelve months I don’t remember very much.

Up until I was ten I went to school and I remember Empire Day we had in Sydney in those days. And we used to go to school and then we would go down to the picture theatre at Croyden Park and then we’d get a

lecture from the mayor. And then we’d get the afternoon off. And that’s all we went to school for to get the afternoon off.

Well it was all Queen in those days. Everything was Queen, as a matter of fact I am not a royalist by any means at all, I think that Australia should be a

republic myself. But in those days royalty, the Queen, the King and everything was what we wanted.

Make shanghais, fly kites. Just like all kids play, get into mischief.

Yes mostly the mates lived in our street. I lived in Beresford Avenue in Croyden Park behind the school. And Colin Butterworth and Gordon Ford and Stanley Polonoski and all of those we used to be all good mates.

Billy carts was all the go, running up and down the street in billy carts. Four wheel drives.

Yes scooters and bikes, I had plenty of toys. My parents were very, not that they had a lot of money but they went without to get me things. And I think my Dad paid my first push bike off, which I got at twelve,e at about two and six a week.

Duncan Grey’s Speedwells.

Oh yeah I used to have to do my little share. I learnt to cook from my mother, I learnt to wash up. And outside I learnt to mow lawns and do gardens. And outside I had a bit of a farm, I had a rabbit, guinea pig

and a dog, so they kept me happy. And bees, I had a hive of bees in the backyard.

No never. When I was eight years old

I started to learn the violin which I played for many years up until the war came but I don’t play any more now. I play piano now but I don’t play violin. I just play the piano to amuse myself.

No not really, I loved my Dad but we weren’t

bosom pals like we were going everywhere together, nothing like that at all. My Dad was Dad. And my Dad allowed me to drive the car up and down the driveway on the house where we live and learn to drive on how to use first gear and reverse and I used to have to run up and down the path, make sure I didn’t run into the garden and that’s how I learnt to drive a car.

No. No he didn’t have. I’ve got, no he didn’t have too much at all. My father was in the band too, he played the drums and he was in the RAN [Royal Australian Navy] band too, one of them. Because there was many.

No when I went to school everything was quite OK I went to school. I wasn’t what you call brilliant, I was just an average kid going to school. I wasn’t that smart and I wasn’t that bad. But I was just an ordinary kid going to school.

I think I wanted to be a pilot in aeroplanes. Never happened.

Not until I was a teenager and I used to build model planes later on, but not in those days, not when I was in Sydney. When I was about seventeen

I used to start to build. But I bike ride, Gardenvale Amateur Bike Club too, bike riding. I used to live on my bike.

Yes I had, my Dad, Daily Messenger boats in Sydney, he built a model of the America’s Cup. The America,

and my grandchild has got that now, still got that model. And I have got a photograph of one over there that I built and sold on Albert Park lake. A model, it’s a three-foot international. I have always been boat minded.

Why is it? It just sort of came naturally.

Well when I was a kid we used to go to a place called Saratoga out at Woy Woy and my Auntie who was Nurse Trander of Hornsby had the private hospital there, she had a little weekender there and she had a boat there, a little rowing boat. I used to row that around.

No, life carried on, got up in the morning went to school. Came home from school did my practice on the violin, went out and played.

Played cricket in the street in those days, there was no cars you didn’t have any problems. No life was just normal.

No I didn’t, they just lived to themselves.

Everybody in our street helped one another. If there was a house being painted, a lot of the blokes would come down and hop in and help out. Most of the houses was brick, they painted the windows and things like that. Everybody was pretty good at our place, used to all help. Sometimes there was a ‘nine gallon’ [nine gallon keg of beer] put on.

Nine gallon put on so after the painting they could have a drink.

For the weekend. Yeah.

Oh many many. As a matter of fact the next door neighbour, Ollie Wilson they used to walk from Croyden Park to the city just to get the off-cuts of the vegetables from Paddy’s market to make soup.

Things were very very tough in the Depression.

Only what I can remember, not very much though because my mother and father always just had enough to get by. But a lot of people never knew when they were getting another meal.

My Dad was an evaluator for a finance company.

No not a great lot, but he did travel. He used to, he might be away two or three times a year. But he did travel, when he went he went away for a week or two at a time. But no great amounts.

The firm’s car.

No we never had a car but my Dad’s car was a Buick six.

Oh normal food that we eat today. We used to have eggs and tomatoes, a little bit of meat and plenty of vegetables.

Oh yeah.

Rabbit was very good. We didn’t eat my little rabbit, my little white one.

Well when I turned fourteen my father was moved to Melbourne by his firm for six months, and he is buried here, he never got back to Sydney again.

So he is buried here and I was with Gardenvale Amateur Cycle Club. And I rode with them for quite some, I built model aeroplanes and I used to go for rides from Glen Huntly right over to Kew to fly them. I had a lot of mates, and I loved ballroom dancing. Did a lot of ballroom dancing, I even had a dancing partner those days.

Couldn’t tell you much about her, all she was was a partner, wasn’t a girlfriend or anything. But she was good to dance with, and we’d got to the Leggett, which is burnt down now.

Prahan. Murrumbeena Bowling Club we used to go there of a Saturday night it was good fun.

Me? Oh I loved girls I always had a girl of some description.

I can’t tell you too much about them, I used to try but I never got very far with them. No I can’t, I had a girl she lived in McKinnon, I had her

even when I went to the war and she married somebody else. Then I came home in 1942 after I met my wife-to-be, and I was married thirty-eight years and she died at fifty-eight. She died very young unfortunately. Excuse me I’ll have to go to the toilet, do you mind?

Well I lived in Glen Huntley at that time, this is when I was a teenager, but my parents were very strict I had to be home at a certain time every time I went out. And I was in trouble if I didn’t get home. Even when I was eighteen I had to get

home at a reasonable hour, not early in the morning like the kids do now. We used to go, with a crowd of us used to go to the Murrumbeena Bowling Club. And we used to have a dance there, and we’d all come home to Glen Huntly, we’d all walk through the park through Carnegie, and no problems whatsoever. I

had a good life time. And we’d have the girls and the girls were taken home. It was just a real happy family. Of course then that was, I went to the Congregational church and to the gymnasium. And we used to go there and have plenty of exercise and things like that. As a matter of fact I have got a little testament

that they gave me as a gift when I went to the war. But I had a sweet life, a sweet teenage life. There was no problems with my teenage life at all. I had good parents I had nothing to worry about, just look after myself.

Yeah I used to smoke. My mother found a packet of cigarettes in my tie box, of course I got in trouble for that. My Dad went crook at me for smoking tailor-made cigarettes, he said if you are going to smoke you roll your own. So I had to roll my own from then on. But I smoked from the time I was sixteen, ended up I was smoking sixty a day eventually. And then

my wife died of lung cancer and I gave the cigarettes away straight away. And I haven’t smoked now for twenty odd years.

Because he reckoned that the other ones were bad for you they had too much nicotine in them. That’s a lot of rubbish.

No everybody smoked in those days. As a matter of fact I never smoked properly until I joined the navy. We used to have the occasional cigarette, but when I joined the navy I used to buy them at the, on the last ship I was on I used to buy them for eighteen shillings

a thousand. That was eighteen shillings Sterling a thousand. We used to buy them straight from Bond by the millions. That was on the Eulima Shell too.

I used to drink beer, yeah. I never really drank until I went to the navy and then everybody drank. So you joined them.

And I drank from the time I was eighteen right up until this year.

No. I left that to the politicians themselves.

Yeah my parents voted Liberal, and I vote Labor. So

there is a conflict of interest there. But politicians they all tell lies.

No, no.

No I couldn’t tell you that I wasn’t interested in it.

Yes. Only what, the knowledge I had was what we read in the papers, what we were told, I never delved any deeper than that. But,

Oh Germany was going, Hitler was starting to get to power. And the German nation was building up for war right from 1936 they were building for war. And they went into the Rhineland, and that’s when they should have stopped them, but they didn’t. Because Britain didn’t have anything to stop them with.

Because in those days, the old guard as I call it, England, we looked to England for leadership as far as military and all of that was concerned. And then the war came and from then on we made our own way in the world. And at the present moment our navy is as good as any navy, it is

small but what's there is very efficient. Its very good I am very pleased with it. As a matter of fact I still go to the American ships now, I got down and board the American ships and still go over them. Boy oh boy, what they’ve got on those ships, wish we had have had it. The

American navy, we have sort of gone from the Pommy navy and we have gradually gone over to the American navy because they helped us out when we were in dire trouble with the Japanese. And I mixed with the American sailors quite a a lot when they handed over the fifty-four four funnel destroyers in Halifax Canada, mixed with the American sailors.

What part of the 30s though? The latter or the?

Not really. In those days it was very very hard to get a job. And I applied to Myers and I ended up a wheeler boy at Myers. That’s

going to pick up parcels with a wheeler. And I carried on in that job for a year or two and then I was a department boy in the manchester department and then I went to the war and that’s exactly all I did.

Yeah 36.

Yeah well I wanted to join the permanent navy but I was too young of course. But my father said well you join the cadets and see if you like it. So I joined the cadets and I liked it, but then I wanted to join the permanent navy and my parents would sign for me. They said well you go into the naval reserve for a while, and of course in the naval reserve and the war came and that was the

end of it I was in the permanent navy. (UNCLEAR) I put six years in. I never got out until 19, when was it? I can’t remember exactly what day I got out.

No I got out in 1946. January 1946. I ended up

in charge of the care and maintenance party on the Corvettes as they were being paid off down South Wharf. We used to have to watch the lines, you know from the tides going up and down. Just have to watch, keep the water on board. Anyway that didn’t last too long and then I got my discharge, I have got it all over there. Not discharge, demobilisation.

Oh because I liked it. I think it was the flair of the uniform.

None where I lived no.

Oh yeah. Matter of fact it is sixty-five years now since I first joined up anything.

And I have still got my mates that I met, we have been meeting for years and years. Jimmy Mason out there, we still go out and we go to the Corangi do down Queenscliff and we mix around together. We still know each other. Peter O’Donahue who was the, he was captain at one stage and coach of the Hawthorn Football team,

the league team, he was in my guns crew. And Jimmy Brophey, he fought for the Queensland title, he was in the guns crew too on the last ship I was on, which I’ve got, the Triona that was a British phosphate ship. I was DEMS, Defenively Equipped Merchant Ships. We had the guns on board merchant ships. That’s why we travelled the world, we saw more than the navy did.

Oh it was just that you thought you’d catch more girls. I used to like the uniform. Used to get dressed up, we used to go to drill every fortnight.

Same as what they’ve got today, similar. We haven’t got them piss-pot hats that they’re wearing now. Gee they’re terrible. We had a different hat altogether. We used to have to clean ours with sand shoe black o. Now they’re a vinyl so they don’t have to clean them.

Oh just the ordinary

sailors hat, just the one without the peak. .They were just a soft cap where the new ones are hard.

Oh training in seamanship. Yeah well battle and buckle we used to call him, he used to train us. We used to do drill,

drill with a rifle the same as anything else. And we used to go out to the tattoos out at the showground and we’d go against the air force and the army. We learnt to sail boats ,we learnt to do all sorts of things. Learnt to get into trouble. The discipline

was good you learnt discipline.

Oh not doing what you were told, in other words it was very strict. You had to do what you were told in the navy. And I think that’s what everybody was to make them think.

I enjoyed my whole naval career mate.

I can’t elaborate on that because I am still with them. I enjoyed the navy. A lot of people don’t like it, they go in and if they are not suitable they should get out.

Yeah I was good at tying knots. Still am.

Good at tying knots, I splice all right. I sail a boat all right because I used to sail from Port Melbourne to Williamstown to pick our mail up when I was called up full-time when the war first started. Sail a whaler across, used to get blown off course end up at one of the piers there near the pub. Go and have a pint or two, come back and then we’d bring the mail in.

Weather would be always rough and the boat wouldn’t go where we wanted to, it was a twenty-seven foot whaler we used to sail.

The ship like a big canoe, double ender. That means she pointed both ends. And she had no boom, loose sail on the bottom, very good.

But in other words it’s a sea boat, a navy sea boat and they can launch them at five knots. As the boats go along they just drop them into the water. Twenty-seven foot carbon built, very good whaler and very good sea boat. Five oars, now that sounds funny doesn’t it, three on one side and two on the other.

Well that’s how they are,

I don’t know why.

No you had a rudder to steer it by.

Are we? He’s not here.

Well one night you’d do knots, another night you’d do drill. Another night you’d have a talk, a talk all about the navy, talk about boats, parts of a boat. In other words just giving you an idea of what you’ve got to put up with. I suppose that’s what it was for,

there is no good getting in a boat if you don’t know what the parts are. The instructors were old ex-sailors. PO’s [Petty Officer], Chief PO’s. Knew their game backwards and they wanted to pass their knowledge onto you. The cadets wasn’t that serious, the naval reserve

was absolutely top notch, in my opinion we were well trained. And when we arrived in England I reckoned we were nearly as good as the Pom navy. My gunnery, the gunnery course I had Brigham Young down there, off to Sussex and I was only a little fellow like I am now and

the six inch layer was there, and I was blood blistered all up my arms when I was throwing the shells onto the loader. And, pushing them home, you’ve got no idea how hard it is, because I was too short. Anyhow the cadets was very very good, I enjoyed it because it was just like a boys’ camp, it was something different. But then when you went into the

reserve you got things more seriously.

Well I was in the I was, shot at Williamstown Rifle range with a rifle, with the RANR rifle club, we’d shoot against the army and navy. Well I used to go every Saturday afternoon, well most Saturday afternoons down to Williamstown and shoot. Then when we were in the naval reserve we had to do three weeks

a year aboard a vessel. So I went on the Yarra, I went on the Canberra, other ships. And we just mixed with the sailors and just did everything. Washing the decks with bare feet, and same as everything was going on then.

The big ship, the Canberra it was. When I went on the Canberra I was lost, it was so big you could get lost on it. The ship was the fo’c’s’le, main top, stern, and we had to learn their terms, the man would pipe something, we’d have to listen to what he’d say and then we ‘d have to find out where it was.

It was shambles for the first day or so but you got used to it and we came good at the end. Then of course when I went away on the Yarra, another three weeks on the Yarra she sunk by the way. My best mate went down on her. The Yarra I was all right on her. But then when I finished my training as a [gun] layer in

the naval depot I did my shoot on the Yarra on the B turrets, was our practice shot which was a bad one. That’s only nervousness. Anything else?

Seasickness?

I’ve never been seasick in my life. No it’s mind over matter. If a bloke is seasick you put him down in the galley with all of the sick and food and everything and make him spew his guts up, I’m hard on that, shouldn’t get seasick.

Huge. It was big, and yet it’s only a medium ship. But I was amazed the one thing that the Canberra had, it had a civvies person running the canteen who had the rank of a PO but he wasn’t; a PO at all he was a civilian and

he used to run the canteen and sell cigarettes and lollies and food and everything like that. As well as our onboard ship. I was amazed that that was run by a civilian and not the navy ran it. That’s one thing that stuck in my mind. The eight inch guns I believe they were the best guns that were ever made for any war ship, was the eight inch guns

on that particular County class Cruiser. There is quite a few of them, Graf Spee, the Exeter was one of them. Knocked the Graf Spee off down on the Border [Battle of the River Plate]. We were scared stiff we were nearly taken by the Graf Speein the Indian Ocean. We blew a liner in our motor, I am reminiscing now, we blew a liner in our motor

and it’s either cripple the engine and go to Cape Town or stop and fix it, we had a liner on board. So they decided to stop and fix it. In the meantime the Graf Spee by-passed us and went into the South Atlantic but it got the Africa Shell, the Africa Shell tanker she was caught by it. And she had the prisoner ship the Altmark with her too, taking the prisoners.

That’s just reminiscing.

No, no. We never did that because I was only about twelve months in the naval reserve when the war started and it was fair dinkum then. It was no mucking around and just having target practice it was fair dinkum. One particular night on the North Atlantic convoys I saw nine ships go.

Because we covered forty square miles of ocean with a convoy, now that sounds ridiculous but you’ve got twelve hundred feet apart every ship and you might have sixty ships in a convoy but that takes up a lot of room. They were marvellous the convoys but still the Germans, I admire the German navy too, don’t get me wrong.

The Germans sailors were very good sailors as well as we were and they respected us too.

Right I’ll clear that up for you. When you joined the naval

reserve you signed on for three full years to defend your country in time of war. But before the three years was up war was declared and I went to war then, I was full-time navy. Although I was still a reservist I was still full-time navy then. Does that clear it up?

No, no. Travelled to England after I done a gunnery course at Flinders Naval Depot. I most likely led you wrong there.

Well what happened, war was declared. We were called up on the Wednesday war was declared on the Sunday. We were kitted up with all of our paraphernalia, and then you were sent home to phone

in every day until we were called. Well then we were called, when war was declared we were called. And we had to go back to Lonsdale depot, which was the old depot in Bay Street Port Melbourne. We went there and we had the phone in every day and then when war was declared, we were allowed to go home and we had to phone in every day and then when we were wanted we had to go there because they never had any sleeping accommodation. So away we went,

we ate our meals at the Pier Hotel, the one next door to the depot, there is three hotels there we used them. I was sent down to Flinders, I did a five week gunnery course, came back and I was sent to Sydney. And on the 4th of November 1939 I left for England on the Eulima Shell from Pulpit Point. Now Pulpit Point

is near Cockatoo Island in Sydney.

Near Woolloomooloo.

Yes. The gunnery course it lasted five weeks of continual training of stripping, stripping machine guns. You just didn’t do one gun you did everything. Hydraulics, pneumatics, there was quite

a lot of schooling in it. They were very very thorough with what you did. The drill was the most important thing, I remember the instructor saying you don’t run around the gun you bloody well fly. I can remember that, we used to have to do it, we knocked twenty rounds a minute out. Pretty good going, as good as anybody can do.

But it’s hard to explain what you do, you are just in practice, practice, practice all of the time. Pull the gun down, pull the machine gun down. They’d tell you the traps of the Lewis gun, you get the pulls in back to front you won’t fire. On the Vickers if you put the clip in the wrong way it won’t fire. They teach you all of those little tricks.

No. No.

I was an able seaman that was it. I was doing the seaman gunners course there for seaman gunner. And then you went seaman gunner to gun layer. Well now they were short of gun layers so I went away as gun layer and after

a period of time I was made gun layer.

No after I left. Well I was in England January 1940, I was two years in the Eulima Shell, even when I was torpedoed I was home, and we got a letter from the navy saying I was missing at sea. I was talking to my mother at the time we got the letter she was notified.

No, I went away, what we had to do, as I said before we were DEMS, defencly equipped merchant ships. In other words we ran from the enemy, we were there to protect our ship from

the stern, that’s why we always ran. We had to train, three of us went on board, Noel MacGroder and Fred and myself we went on board and the three of us took the main positions on the four inch guns. Such as the gun layer in charge of the gun, the trainer that did that with the gun. And the breech worker that looked at the loading of the gun. The three main

positions. And then I had to train merchant seamen or merchant officers, or whatever it was to make up the eight, the number of eight positions, there was a number of eight positions on the guns, six and then two extras ones. I trained them and we had a very very good gun crew then because I had engineering officers in my, engineer officers,

had them in my guns crew and they were very very good because they wanted to learn quick. And we used to knock the target over and everything. I can’t explain any more than that. They were very good, when we had gunnery practice they were there. I have got a photograph

of it. And that is something you’ll most likely find hard, photographs. We weren’t allowed to take photographs on board ship during the war. So therefore it is hard to get photographs.

Never bothered me I just carried on with what I was told to do. I was a navy personnel

therefore you have learnt to do what you are told, I was trained that way prior.

Never thought of that, all I was going to do I was going to kill Nazis, that’s what went through your mind. Of course sailors might be a little different. Our main objective is to save the ship, not to save ourselves but to save that

ship. And you’ve got to get that in your mind, you do everything in your power to save that ship.

I hated them.

Because they were German, because they started the war. And they were preparing for it for many years, I could see that as a teenager. And now I have go no animosity for them at all. They were only doing what they thought was right in their own lingo, their own daily habits.

I have got a lot of friends, I had one particular friend here he is dead now but he was a German and he was in U boats.

Yeah we knew it was coming. Everyone knew it was coming but the query was when. As a matter of fact between you and me if Hitler had have listened to his generals he would have won the war, but he thought he knew more than his generals did and he lost it. That’s my observation.

I was sent to Sydney by train to wait on a ship, an the ship came and one night I was taken by work boat right up Sydney harbour, right up under the bridge by work boat and put on the Eulima Shell. About nine o’clock at night.

And then my crew arrived the next morning, Freddy and Jim, Freddy and Noel and we were together in that ship for nearly two years.

Yes we were good friends all of the time because they did what they were told. I was leading hand on board and they had to do what they were told and they did what they were told. We used to keep watches. There was nothing much to do but keep watches

and man the gun and have gunnery practice when we needed it. Rifle practice. Rifles are for mines, if a mine came to the surface we’d shoot and put holes in it and send it to the bottom.

I was a marksman, I was a marksman. I shot for Hawthorn for twenty years.

Yeah I was.

No I shot with the RANR rifle club, but I never got my cross rifles, I never went for it, it was seventy-five percent and I used to get eighty percent all of the time.

I never went for it so there is nothing there. Caulfield I got the Tyrose Championship I have got that up there. I shot in many competitions. I used to shoot at prize meetings at Bendigo and all of those sort of things, pay to go in them and I always got my money back. I was trained by Percy Pavey, he was one of the

best shots we ever had. And Billy Gray, of course its all gone now. They pulled all of the huts down from Williamstown. There is a lot of things been done that I don’t agree with.

The Eulima, E U L I M A. Eulima Shell. The oil tanker.

We were bound to go to sea, we never knew where we were bound until we got out to sea and then the skipper opened his orders and that’s, he was told where to go. So we went to Soram, that’s a little island west of New Guinea. And from Soram, we went to Sura Bay of Batavia. See we were an oil ship

don’t forget we picked up oil. And then we arrived in Cape Town for Christmas 1939.

No not then but on the way back we did. On the way back we went to Sambo, Port Aplago [sp?], Tarakan,

Balikpapan, we went to all of those places there. And being in the Shell we were allowed to use the Shell clubs, their swimming pools, their bar everything, it was beautiful. And we trickled our way through and arrived in England on the 4th of January 1940.

Well it’s the first time I had ever seen flying fish. The lit up the water, at the stern of the ship, just like daylight. And we copped that in the Indian Ocean just on the entrance to the Suez. And when we went into the Mediterranean there was 8th Battalion submarines on their way into the Indian Ocean but Italy wasn’t in the war then so

we never touched them. So they went through, and the aeroplanes were flying over from Italy.

Old bi-planes, they looked as though they had come out of the ark to the modern plane that we had. We used to laugh. Then arrived in January 1940 at Avonmouth, then

from then on we run to Curacao Aruba, that’s the Dutch West Indies. We run to Corpus Christi, Texas up to Bedford Basin at Halifax and formed convoy into England. Then we were a month at sea three days at port all of the time.

Get drunk.

We never had time to even find a sheila.

Oh yes, the three of us, oh yeah we used to drink. Used to get full come back on board ship. Not only us, of course the old houses of ill fame were used to.

Never had time to find a girl because you’re only three days. We had a good time

Well I’m not going to tell you too much about them.

Oh well. You come into port, you never had time to go to a dance and pick a girl up and

court her, or whatever you like. So you went and paid your five pound and had one waiting for you. Men are men can’t help yourself.

Any. And I was in the Horta de Faial in the Azores Islands and the brothels are in a street called Jesus Street. You wouldn’t credit it would you?

That’s Horta de Faial, one of the islands.

Oh Singapore was the best.

Well they were very good, Chinese.

Well I don’t know it just appeared that way. I never copped any diseases, he was telling me a bloke had all of these diseases, I never copped any of them.

Yeah we used to get two tubes of stuff. One before one after. And they supplied you with sheaths if you wanted them.

Oh yes. You didn’t ask that’s the wrong word you requested.

Oh, only twice in six years

and they were given by the doctor. One of the doctors would get you, I’ll have to go for another wee. But the doctors would group together and give you, only told you what you already knew.

Yes we arrived at Avonmouth, a place called Avonmouth. And we went and found some digs, you know a place to sleep and we had a few days there. Like the ship was going to be in for a few days and of course I had to find out from the captain when it went and we had to be on board when it went. Anyway, we Park Street Avonmouth has got the hotel

that’s got the Mauritania Bar off the Mauritania ship. The big liner, the old one. And of course we went and had a drink there and across the road there is a skating rink and a dance floor. And that’s where I met a girl there, a girl, Phil. Was very nice place her father was in the Board of Works. Was very good,

dance, I used to love dancing. Most of the time whenever we were ashore I’d get to a dance somewhere, of a night time. But of a day time we didn’t we used to drink of a day time. Go to a dance at night.

No, no.

No I wasn’t interested in getting hitched or anything.

No women were women, had to find them and that’s it. I had my girl at home.

I had a girl that I left when I went away to the war and while I was away she married another bloke so that was it.

Yeah, yeah.

Tried to be straight.

No, it’s in the Bristol Channel, its on the west coast of England, south. Above Cornwall.

Very small and very old.

Very friendly, the people there were very friendly. Never stopped bloody raining. Oh just, it used to drive you nuts, it was just that drizzle, drizzle, drizzle, very fine drizzle all of the time. Your feet never sort of got dry. But I liked Bristol very much it was a good place,

of course we weren’t there very long, two or three days and we were on our way again.

No there was no effect then at all. Because they hadn’t started bombing London or anything then. You’d never know a war was on.

Never noticed.

Most likely they were but you didn’t se it.

Only in the pub, and I played the piano, that used to be a great asset to me because when you played the piano everybody used to sing and they’d pour the drinks up to the top of the piano.

Oh I bought a few but

they used to give you a few too. People in England use the pubs different to the way we use the pubs here. Pubs are their home, they only go home to sleep. They used to go down there and have their couple of pints and they’d stay all day. One pint, that’d last him all night. Whereas we’d be guzzling into them you know.

Well form England we’d form convoy and away we’d go across the Atlantic. Now I can’t tell you where we went because we used to go, Curacao, Aruba, Corpus Christi and we’d go to many places.

Now, Willemstad in Curacao, it had no water. So we used to take water on the tanker there, put it on their domestic supply, and they had two waters. One to drink and one to do their domestic supply, to do their washing and everything, they used to purify it. So we were carrying oil one way and water the other. When we went there.

Deep watch. There was only three of us on board and we had three watches, we used to do our four hours each. And twenty-four hours a day we were looking out the stern for anything

coming up behind us. And boy it got cold. You have got no idea what that North Atlantic is like. Sleet, raining ice. Forty foot waves. Yep. Serve your time doing that.

Ate and slept.

Oh I did that, the maintenance work we’d do that automatically, we never had a set maintenance, it used to be done all of the time. If you saw a little speck of dust on the gun you got it off because your life depended on them.

I used to walk, just up and down the deck, no exercises, skipping rope sometimes.

Excellent. We were going to win the war mate.

Yeah very. As a matter of fact the sparker, that’s the radio operator, he left the Eulima Shell and he boarded a ship that came to Melbourne and he went out and saw my parents which I appreciated very much. To let them know that I was still OK. And then I met a chap in Halifax Canada, Bedford Basin is where all of the convoys

were all made up. Bedford Basin at Halifax. And I met Brian, Brian Shute, and he took me home to my [his] mum’s place and from 27 Henry Street Halifax his mum used to, when I used to call in there his mum used to write to my Mum and tell her I was OK. Very good so she knew that I was alive. I call her my Canadian mum, she was very good to me.

Only by letter, Mum used to write to me and you wouldn’t get a letter and then when you are at sea you’d get twelve letters at a time. They saved up and give them to you, you got sick of reading them in the end.

Oh she was writing to me and then all of a sudden she stopped and I knew there was something wrong there so,

that was the end of that.

Oh I was a bit upset yeah, naturally you would be because you didn’t expect it. Never made me that I was going to commit suicide or anything like that.

When I came home I found out. She was married.

No, I haven’t spoke to her, I don’t know whether she is alive or dead now, she could be dead now for all I know. No. Severed relations properly.

At the time yeah. Just a normal bloke I was.

Never worried me at all. I was away, I came home in 1943, I was married so twenty-eight days leave then

and then I went away for ten months, that’s when I met Rita Hayworth. No that’s a lie. I was married in 43 and went away for ten months and came back. Then I was on the coast, I was on the Iron King for a while running up and down the coast. And we never used to come into Melbourne very often but I used to talk to my wife,

my wife worked for Caltex Oil and I used to ring her up on the phone, phones were very hard in those days you couldn’t get through. They, priority, that’s the tape finishing again is it?

Oh that’s good I forgot about that, away you go.

As long as you’ve got good feet you can stand up. No rough weather on a ship is very very dangerous because it’ll throw you against a bulkhead

it’ll throw you against anything. You can fall over and you can slip, there is a lot of things can happen so it is very dangerous. So in most ships, if you’ve got to go anywhere that is open they put a lifeline out. It’s just a piece of rope that you can hang on, and it gives you confidence. Just hanging on to a piece of rope gives you confidence, you’ve got no idea what confidence it gives you.

But when a ship is rolling where you’ve got no control of it, because you don’t know what it’s going to do. If the nose goes up, you don’t know whether it’s going to go that way or it’s going to go that way, it all depends wherever the wave hits you.

Well I was in one ship, I’ll tell you one ship I was in that she rolled sideways that much that the cross tree, which is the little

thing across the mast, touched the water and bent and we lost a lifeboat. That’s how rough it was, but that doesn’t happen very often. Usually when the rough weather comes, unless you are in convoy you turn into the wind, put the bow onto it And she is just bang, bang, bang into it all the time, what they call pile driving.

I can’t explain any more than that it is just an experience you can’t explain it, because the ship does what it wants to do and the water tells the ship what it’s to do. It’s up to the ship itself.

A convoy when bad weather comes, they don’t turn into the weather, all they do is slow the ship down they just hold their position, might be doing four knots but they’ll be not moving. The engine will be doing four knots but the ship will be standing still. And that’s the only way they can do it there. I have got an illustration,

I’ve got an illustration over there where the Eulima Shell was sunk, and she was on her way from Liverpool to New York and bad weather reduced the whole convoy to four knots. Its there written down, so that’s how they do that.

Ninety percent of the time.

No, well it was in favour of them,

But they had a very hard time too because they were only little ships. Submarines are not that big and boy oh boy they got knocked around. They were underwater more than they were on top, but when they were on the surface they were underwater too. Because the water used to, a submarine is only about eight foot above the water, a big submarine that is, and the water just hits it and blows everywhere, they are more wet than any of the other ships.

Anything else?

The weather was bad. The Germans with aeroplanes were bad,

there wasn’t too many submarines, but I believe there were some there. We never saw one, we only. I went to Murmansk but I never went ashore there so I haven’t been to Murmansk, I never went ashore. It was too cold. We went through the White Sea. Very, very, very cold.

Oh yeah, the whole, the salt water is frozen in parts. And you used to have to use a hammer or a shovel to break the ice away from all of your rigging and everything like that, yeah. It’s cold mate I tell you freezing.

No, it was just cold and the seas weren’t bad, they were reasonable, no worry about that.

No Iceland is in a different direction. Britain is there Iceland is here.

Murmansk is there, so that’s, nowhere near Iceland., But the temperature is similar, but Iceland, you’d have to go north of Iceland to get to the same cold. It’s freezing.

Oh I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t tell you the temperatures but all I know is that it was twenty thirty degrees below, something like that.

Very freezing. As a matter of fact I have got a tape there on the Murmansk convoys and the people there had to dig a hole in the ground to get drinking water. They can’t hold it in tanks or anything, it just breaks the tanks. The ice.

Yeah, water has got a great power.

Yes.

And starving under those conditions because they burnt their food too, they burnt their food, they burnt their houses they burnt everything.

No the Russians did it themselves to stop the Germans getting it and this is what saved Russia.

They never left anything for the German that he could use. And of course the thing that beat the German was the cold weather, Hitler sent them in there with summer uniforms on, they never survived. I feel sorry for them.

Hmmhmm..

Well because they were sent in ill-equipped. They were all right while it was summer time. They advanced really

well, they were on their way almost to Stalingrad. As soon as the weather changed they were gone. Hundreds froze, feel sorry for them

I hated them before the war, but after the war was over I have got no hate for them at all. I have got no hate

within me period, never have.

Oh well that was when I was growing up, grown up kid. Or a kid growing up would sound better.

Nothing.

Yeah well that’s nothing to do with the Eastern Front, the Eastern Front is army

and that’s when they were advancing, the second front on Russia.

Yeah well I don’t know about that we were up top.

Only what come over the air. All the information we got on board ship came over the radio. That was not, the war radio just the general radio that we listen to.

No I never went ashore.

Not on the radio. No I didn’t use the radio, the radio man did that, the sparker.

We were carrying oil yes.

The Eulima Shell was the name of the ship.

The ship could pump it out in twenty-four hours. Ten thousand tonnes only ten thousand tonne ship, could pump it out in twenty-four hours. Store establishment can make it much shorter than that.

Oh put it alongside yes. And hoses connected up you just, they used their pumps and we used ours between them they’d get rid of it in no time. That’s why we were only a month at sea and three

days in port. They turn them around quick.

No.

Because I was too far away, it was just like a waste. Snowy waste. A few building there.

A few. But see

oil terminals are well away from civilisation in case they blow up. Always are. You notice where our oil terminals are, they are always away from the actual cities.

You are always alert all of the time. There is always everybody, not just the lookout but everybody looked out. All of the time, whenever you were on deck you kept your eyes feeling around, water, sky. Sky was the one that we used to watch mostly because you couldn’t see them under water because they were submarines. Sometimes, I have never picked a periscope up with my naked eye yet. And I don’t think I ever will because

they used to put them up and then put them down. Used to have a little peep.

Yeah.

No, no regulation in the merchant service as far as that goes. They have a smoke room and if you were inside you smoked in the smoke room. But when you’re outside where there is fresh air there is no regulation

on smoking.

Ah now, we’re, you’re not allowed to smoke at night, unless, I used to have a pipe and I used to smoke at night time but I’d go down below and light it and then I had a cover over the top of it so you couldn’t see it from above. The only thing you’re are not allowed to smoke on deck for is the aeroplanes seeing it. And a little light, it doesn’t matter how small it is it’s a big light when you get up in the air.

I used to smoke. Smoke on watch every night. Eight o’clock watch every night, you had to watch yourself.

No, no. Well we had our air raids yeah.

Well they just come and go, just like aeroplanes

flying at you dropping bombs and then they are on their way. They missed us.

No I never ,the whole war I never had a plane strafe. We had the Stukas [German Junkers dive bombers], in England in the North Sea come down within five hundred feet of you and then turn and that’s when we used to shoot them, when they turned. They’d come down like that, as soon as they turn,

that’s when you used to shoot them when they were vulnerable.

And their bombs had gone. It was very frightening I can tell you.

Fighting against Stukas yes.

Because they had screamers on them, the planes used to scream and then the bombs had screamers attached to them they made a hell of a noise. Weeeee. Scream at the top of their voice as they were coming down.

Oh very loud yes. Huge.

Noise.

That’s very difficult, it’s a screaming noise. You know how when a car hits another one you hear that screaming noise? It’s like that only accentuated. It’s a shocking sound.

I can’t explain it.

That’s what it was done for, to unnerve them. Its an unnerving situation. Where it was first used was in Poland, in Blitzkrieg. That’s where it was used in Poland, and boy oh boy it frightened the hell out of everybody. Not, I wasn’t there so

I don’t know.

Twenty-two crossings.

Got caught at the end and we weren’t in convoy.

Yeah right oh.

They weren’t medium they weren’t big, They were medium because I think they did that for the simple reason they want to get some through. Some not through, they didn’t want a lot of ships sunk at once, I think that was their reasoning. They were medium convoys, they weren’t very big.

Oh I couldn’t tell you mate.

Oh smaller. Smaller. I was only in one.

I only went there once.

Put plenty of warm clothes on. Plenty of warm clothes on and a gargle of whiskey now and again. Mostly just keep yourself warm with, we had pretty good clothing. We had jaffles coats and things to keep us warm. And my Mum used to knit me socks and all that sort of thing. So I had all hand knitted socks and all that sort of thing to keep me warm.

Chinese.

Oh there was only about fifty-four, fifty-four crew. And three gunners.

Three Australian gunners.

Well I don’t know that’s crew. We made up our crew of engineer officers they were out of the engine room, our guns crew. I mentioned that before.

Oh Christ yeah, it was a Shell, Shell Oil Company owned it. Now the Shell Oil Company, forty-nine percent British and fifty-one percent Dutch Shell. Fifty-one percent Dutch, but the ship

I was on the Eulima Shell was built in (UNCLEAR) Holland.

They spoke English.

Yeah the ones we had to communicate with spoke English, and Cassab, Serang, they are the bosses on, you most likely know that. The Lascars.

But

Cassab, Serang, I use that term because I don’t know what the Chinese name for them are but that’s the bos’n and the other thing like that and then they speak English and then they tell the rest of their crew what they said, what they’ve got to do. It’s a very funny thing a Chinese crew.

No problem whatsoever. On board

the ship the catering staff came from Canton. The engine room staff came from Shanghai, and the deck department came from another big town too, and they all speak a different dialect so they can’t communicate.

Shanghai, Canton.

What was the other big town in China?

No there’s another like Shanghai. Oh I don’t remember, it doesn’t mater anyhow. But they came from three different towns and they couldn’t communicate because their dialect was different. I don’t know whether it was done purposefully I don’t know. But the Cantonese they all spoke English, all the stewards and everything, the

that looked on the tables and the cooks and everything all spoke English. But yet the crew outside couldn’t. It’d go through their leading hand.

Well point, you can do a lot of things with your hands.

Sing language is the word yes. I had

not much to do with them because I had my own little part to look after, I looked after the armament, my crew looked after the armament and we had to keep our guns spotlessly clean and everything like that. Because it doesn’t matter what weather you are in they are getting dirty all of the time you have got to keep them clean. Always running around with a rag wiping them down you know, because they used to get wet with a spray.

I’ll tell you what I was in Liverpool and when they bombed Liverpool they took the streets out where the houses were all boxed in, and the Chinese were all dressed with umbrellas and everything ready to go ashore, and that’s how they were going to leave the ship. They would never get in the lifeboat

with an umbrella would they? I could tell some funny stories like that.

Yeah well when the alarm went off they were all lined up below deck with umbrellas and everything ready to go aboard, some funny things took place.

Not many.

They are just odd ones. Oh I can tell you a story the same, Liverpool, we were laying in the Rhodes, we had been up the Manchester Canal and we had come back down and we were laying there at night and a German Dornier came over and was flying off the water only twelve foot above the water, a Dornier aeroplane. And we couldn’t shoot at it because we would have hit our own ships. See they were very clever

the Germans too. We couldn’t fire at him because we’d hit our own ship. That’s just a little hearsay you know. Way away from the Murmansk convoys and everything, I think we have just about had enough of Murmansk have we?

Atlantic convoys right.

We used to leave England go to Curacao, Aruba, Corpus Christi Texas, and then go back up to Halifax to Bedford Basin in Halifax, join convoy. And they formed a convoy up there and then we would go to England. And we would go up north of the Hebrides and come down into Oban in Scotland and that’s where we would disband. Well then some of the ships

would go up through the Pentland Firth into the North Sea and the others went the Bristol Channel, the other way. Now that went on ninety-nine percent until the Wolf Pack submarines came out. That’s when they were hunting in packs. And what they did then they kept us close into Canada, took us nearly to Iceland and then we came down into the,

we saved a lot of ships that way. Came down into those Hebrides into Oban. The reason being we cracked the, they tell me now I didn’t know this at the time. They cracked the, the American or the British or both cracked the German code and they knew where the submarines were, so our convoys used to go to miss them. The Germans never woke

up they we cracked the code, I heard that, I read that later. I didn’t know that during the war, but that’s what it was. There was a lot of funny things. We went to Horta de Faial for orders. You didn’t know what was going on, because the captain would get a note on board what he had to do, he didn’t know where we were going, he’d just get a note on board, oh Curacao.

Corpus Christi, Bahamas, that’s where he’d go and that’s how they kept track of the ships where they were going. See I didn’t know the Eulima Shell was sunk. And I wrote to the Shell Oil Company to find out about it, and they sent me a dossier, she was sunk in 1943 with loss of all

hands and all nine gunners on board were lost. She was just lost off New York.

I don’t know I only had three. More guns? They most likely put rockets on board you never know. They had nine gunners. I joined the Hazelside, came home a passenger

and we went to Freetown. Sierra Leone. And a week,

Yeah twice. This was Sierra Leone and white man’s grave it is, it used to be called that. There used to be a penal place where all of the prisoners went, and you died of the, shocking place, you died of the, you can’t breathe

through the sweat and the air, it’s terrible. Anyway Sierra Leone, weak steam to Sierra Leone and we’re two hundred miles south of Lena and bang, five past two in the morning. And I had just come off watch I was giving them a hand on the watch. Just got my head down and I had to get up, boom, boom, boom.

Put two torpedoes into us right away, then waited seven minutes and put the third one in the boiler room. The ships was gone in twelve minutes, but we got away.

Oh it’s not bad, not bad. About normal, twelve minutes to half an hour. All depends on what the ship was built on, we were heavy stuff.

Railway engine tanks and all sorts of things on board.

Yeah the ship was on its way to the Middle East I was coming home passenger. I was only getting a trip to Cape Town and then I had to wait there for another ship to bring me home. Which eventually I come home on the California Star.

No I don’t know the number of it but the Dorsetshire got it the HMS Dorsetshire sunk it. It was a submarine that was getting oil off the lifeboats with oil on board them. It was out in the paper years later it came out. It was the HMS Dorsetshire that got it, makes you feel better. Once the submarine is hit there is not much chance of saving anybody, depth charge

put some water into them. They sink pretty quick.

No only smoke oats, no depth charges no. The destroyers they used to do all of the depth charging.

Christ you put them in the hands of some of these people they’d kill you.

Oh yeah well one convoy we were in we were about half way across the Atlantic and all of a sudden four or five warships appeared on the horizon and we thought it was the Germans.

It was Churchill on his way to meet Roosevelt. President Roosevelt was on the USS Augustine and Winston Churchill was on the Prince of Wales. And when he passed us he flew the pennant ‘Good luck, Winny’. And when we, our convoy was going one way we were going the other.

Because

he signed ‘Winny’, Winston Churchill. But I was frightened when all of these warships appeared because he had all of his warships there to look after him. Because they were looking after the big battle ship too. The Prince of Wales was huge, she helped sink the Bismarck.

It’s hard for me to remember some of this you know.

Forty square miles.

Yeah nautical miles.

Well in gunnery its two thousand yards. Where its one thousand eight hundred and sixty yards in a mile but two thousand and sixty four yards in a nautical mile.

Yeah it’s bigger. But for gunnery purposes you work on two thousand yards round figures. And of course a lot of the gunnery is spotting

fall a bit short up three hundred, you know what I mean, you’re right on.

No I had a four inch gun, which I have got a photo of over there, I had a twelve pounder. I had eight Oerlikons which were point eights.

Machine guns.

Twenty millimetre, they are three quarters of an inch bullets.

Yeah they explode when they hit.

Yeah but they’ve got a gross fuse in them. And even when you are firing them the rain will set them off, that’s how tight they are, very dangerous but very good. One of them goes up in your magazine you’re dead.

Sometimes they used to malfunction. What's the subject we’re on now?

And then that was the Eulima Shell.

Yeah.

No I used the merchant seaman.

No engineer officers.

Yeah British officers.

No it was never even mentioned. The ones we had that could speak English were waiters and cooks and things like that. No.

No but on one ship I was on I had Indians, they served on the Khyber Pass.

On artillery. I can’t tell you, don’t remember, can’t remember. And one ship I was on, these fellows were a very very good guns crew. I had the Indians on the guns.

Yeah most likely, the Khyber pass wherever that was they served the British, they were in the British artillery.

so they were easy trained.

Oh yeah pretty fluent.

Never.

No worry no. No politics ever entered our ship or me. I got more politics in me now then ever.

I saw nine go in one night. Nine ships were sunk in one night. They’d fire a torpedo if it missed one it would hit the other.

Shocking sight mate, see the sailors running up and down the deck. Trying to get off, not nice.

Oh I couldn’t tell you I was going backwards and forwards all of the time.

Now we’d go from England to our port where we were going to pick up oil, then we’d go to say Curacao, Willemstad, we’d go to Bedford Basin Halifax and then back to England.

Then keep doing that all of the time.

No Canada.

Halifax is a city. In Canada.

No Newfoundland is north of it.

And Bedford Basin is the name of that. Now in the First World War they used that same Bedford Basin is a beautiful anchorage, and an ammunition dump blew up there, whether it was sabotaged or not I don’t know.

No, no you’d get the odd one prior to that.

But I can’t tell you about that because I was on the deck of the ship and all you’d hear was boom, and always at night time, I never saw a ship sunk of a day time at all they were always sunk at night. And all you hear is boom and see the place light up with fire.

Pretty loud, just like a gun going off. Of course it’s muffled under water. Usually they are about six foot under water, eight foot under water. They hit and of course the torpedo hits and the water muffles the sound a lot.

You can just see the squirt of water and the flame when it explodes.

Oh half a mile or so.

I saw a torpedo go right past the stern there.

Yeah missed it.

I didn’t say that. It could have been but I don’t know. They used to just fire and that was it.

I don’t know.

Always at night time, they always attacked at night time. They always got themselves into the routine of veering the convoy to the right or the left, and then the Germans used to put themselves in a position where they could attack and they were very good at it.

Hmm.

I do.

No I can’t tell you any more because it’s night time, there is a fire, fire, fire, you can see people on the closer ship running up and down but then you couldn’t see anything else. And then all of a sudden it’s gone, pitch black again, no moon. When there is no moon it is pitch black, when there is moon you can see.

But you can’t see people very well in the water with the moon.

That was in one convoy I was in nine ships were sunk. I can’t tell you which year it was, was either 40 or 41.

No, no idea.

A very large one.

All convoys that I was in were large.

Well in the end we used to get a few but in the beginning no. Very little. We never had the ships. You might get a convoy, you might get one with a corvette on the front and a corvette behind and nothing on the sides. And then you’ll get one with four in it. No.

In the beginning there was very little escorts.

No, but towards the end of 41 the escorts were coming very good.

Well they had more ships. See you can only spread your ships out for as many as you’ve got. Its better to put a few in places

than to put them in one. One place at the one time. They used to use them around. Is that worded all right? So anyway that’s how they worked. As they built more ships, so towards the end it was very good. 1945 it was excellent but I wasn’t there then, I finished in 42.

You’d see people running up and down the deck trying to get the lifeboats away.

I couldn’t, we were on our own, we weren’t a big ship. No that was the escort’s job.

No that was the naval escorts was the one that helped them. They went in, no we weren’t allowed to go in.

We had to save our ship. As I said in the beginning there, all sailors have to save the ship at all costs, that’s what you were there for.

It could be me, you don’t know, anything could happen.

No I can’t mate, I’m not the terrified type.

The only thing I was scared of was if I’d have a hang-fire in my gun and I’d go blind that was the only thing that frightened me the whole war.

No.

I don’t know.

Just my nature I suppose. I never got scared because I knew what was going to happen, what's the good of worrying about it?

No scared of sharks.

Yeah. Because sharks killed a lot of sailors, blue sharks

particularly.

Well that’s a type of shark that gets out into the deep water. They killed a lot of sailors that were in the water you know swimming.

Oh I couldn’t say. They used to just turn up. I’ll give you an illustration. The HMAS Yarra was sunk, there was thirty-seven people got off it,

only thirteen survived. The rest were taken by sharks. That’s the HMAS Yarra, there is a monument in Newport to it.

I don’t know, I went to the service but I couldn’t tell you where it was sunk.

It was in a convoy somewhere in the Dutch East Indies.

How long did it take?

Sometimes three weeks.

Well every time I presume. Towards the end every convoy was attacked, very lucky to get through

without a convoy being attacked. There is a lot of these questions that I can’t answer truthfully because I don’t know. After all I am only a sailor amongst hundreds and hundreds of sailors. What was my gravy was someone’s poison.

Oh God, excellent. I am not a hard person to get on with mate.

They were good.

Noel MacGroder was one, and Fred, and I can’t think of his surname. But I was twenty year old in charge of Fred he was forty-three and Noel MacGroder was thirty-four. And I grew up overnight. I have got photographs over there,

and I’ll tell you I grew up overnight because I was in charge. In charge of all armaments. Even the skipper to go into the magazine had to get my permission, the skipper of the ship. Because he wasn’t a gunnery man. That might sound difficult to comprehend but it’s true.

Because I was so young. Older people tend to play up on young people and you had to nip that right in the bud which I did. By having a talk to them right at the beginning.

Not doing

what they are told, so you have got to be firm and strong and tell them. And I am still strong, because I gave up drink. You get what I mean?

Well it’s one way of relaxing yeah.

I never mixed with the officers much, they were only over on business.

Yes. Captain Legge was the best captain I ever had, he went down on the Eulima. He died. He was from Dundee. Scotland. I have got a photograph of him

there.

No, no. No emotion.

No that’s the wrong attitude there, I didn’t grow up watching people die. I grew up because I had led, was brought up in a semi-sheltered life and I had gone into a big wide world that was rough as guts. And to live in that world as rough as guts I had to handle it. Can you understand what I am talking about?

Well when you have got to handle it you either make the grade or you don’t. I made it.

By forming an alliance with the people that were as rough as guts.

Well the world. Anybody. Didn’t matter who they were.

No.

I was sheltered to an extent. I never had to want for anything, I’d get it eventually if I couldn’t get it right away I’d get in eventually. But that’s not the way the world is, everybody in this world has to fight for something.

And that’s where I used to, I grew up overnight fighting for that, to be on equal terms with everybody.

Oh no that’s just talking. That’s just my saying, my lingo. No that’s just a way of, only terminology. No I wasn’t one to rush out and start fighting everybody.

Oh I had a couple.

No I won’t tell you about them.

That’s one thing I won’t tell you about.

Yeah. I won’t tell you about the fights. I’ll tell you what all right. I had a sailor on board, that was a newcomer. He was put on just for the one ship. And he goes and tells the captain that the machine gun won’t go, instead of coming to me

he goes to the captain. Now you don’t worry a captain with little worries and things like that. So, I said to him what happened? And he said oh it just won’t go. And I said why didn’t you bring it to me? And he didn’t say anything. So anyway I found out that he had taken a part off the gun down to the engine room to have it straightened, and it has got to be bent that’s the way it was.

So in the end words, led to words, led to words and I went whack.

Then I said go up and see the captain and tell him I belted you. He wouldn’t go. No that’s where I, you use your authority. Now I was in trouble for hitting him.

I could have got in trouble for hitting him,

but he has got to report me hasn’t he? He would have got another belting then.

Yeah. That’s one thing my Dad got me taught, I was taught boxing when I was a kid.

No not necessarily, no.

It breaks my heart to see how the press are tearing the Royal Australian Navy down now, such as drunken parties on board. That’s just, they should just leave that alone. If they have their drunken parties on board let the skippers of the Australian Navy handle it. Because these skippers, these captains don’t want their ship badly named. And the press sometimes elaborate where they shouldn’t as you know.

How we doing all right?

No well I can’t tell you that.

I have never been in one of the submarines so I don’t know. All I know is that when the Wolf packs first come I was in them. They put one submarine out here, and it would make a heel of a lot of noise music and everything out of it. Over here there’d be five submarines, so what would happen, the convoy would turn into the five wouldn’t it?

To miss that one. And that’s when they’d torpedo. We woke up about that eventually, because like everything else you learn.

Well I couldn’t tell you that but all I know is that is was instead of the skippers turning to the right they were turning to the left.

Yeah, yeah. They do all sorts of things, or the escort would go and we’d follow the escort. So I don’t know.

The whole of the war was a game of cat and mouse as far as the navy was concerned. You sought the enemy out and you sunk it. If you could if you couldn’t find it well you couldn’t sink it could you. It was all cat and mouse the whole thing. You are going to run out of questions eventually.

Never thought about it.

Oh yeah well. You just hoped that it never happened to you. Never worried me.

I always had a life jacket around my body that you could blow up, it wasn’t issue but I had one. I got it from the Yanks, a good idea

and I used to keep it there. And I could always, I could swim like a fish, I am a Torquay boy. And I could swim pretty well. So I never worried about the ship going down.

All sailors are superstitious mate. Don’t walk under ladders. I don’t.

Because tradition

you don’t walk under a ladder it is bad luck.

No I haven’t got any others.

Just that one.

No I have been in the Pacific which is a bigger ocean. But the north Atlantic is the biggest waves I have ever been in.

Now we’ve got the same, just as bigger waves down in the Southern Ocean down the south here where Bullamore lost the keel off his boat. We’ve got waves down here just as big, but with a forty knot wind blowing behind it too. That’s where the clippers used to go along that route there to get speed.

Just reduce speed.

Sometimes it was funny to hear the cook swearing. You’d hear his pots and pans go off the stove and you’d hear bloody language, you have never heard anything like it, it was funny.

Swearing yeah. You’ve got a mess dinner on board and the next thing it

is on the deck and you have got to go and do it all again. There is some funny stories.

Oh I have got no problems mate. To sleep in a ships bunk when the weather goes like that that leg goes there and that leg goes like that. So you don’t roll and you put your elbow like that and you don’t roll.

No we had bunks.

Well the navy did use hammocks but we three sailors were in the hospital on this ship, we had bunks. Everybody on merchant ship has bunks. On war ships they had hammocks, now they have hammocks.

No I had my hammock up on deck I like a hammock. They’re beaut,

you don’t feel anything with them. You don’t have to try and stay in bed. The hammock just sway with the ship. Except that way.

Your head and tail, your head and your feet. When the ships doing that, you have got to be some way but you don’t get the side swell.

No, no.

Right. You do a four hour watch each, there’d be always one person on watch looking aft. The other people could do whatever they liked, read, sleep, watch the, there was no TV, watch the radio. Or, change watches every four hours, that’s all you did. While you were up there you did a bit of cleaning up

on the gun or anything that wanted doing, Strip it down. But you didn’t strip it too much, you only stripped little bits. The main section you used to leave until you got into port.

Yes.

Yes. The Prince of Wales was there. Australia, HMAS Australia was there, two or three Indian Corvettes was there, and they all went out, that’s was just, they were in Cape Town. I never seen a ship as big as the Prince of Wales.

So that was one thing. What else do you want to know?

Oh shore leave was automatic, whenever the ship was in port I went ashore.

Oh just at the pub yeah. Knew nobody.

It’s a lonely life you know, you have got to make friends as you go around.

Yeah well, go and have a drink, a bloke would be next to you and you’d buy him a drink and start talking. You find mates. We used to go ashore and have a drink amongst ourselves and come back on board ship. Of course our money was pretty poor, although I was on

fifteen dollars a day when I finished, in the beginning I went away on eight shillings a week. But it was better to go back on board and eat the food that was on board the ship because it was excellent, very good tucker on board our ship. We used to eat with the engineer officers, it was very good. Get dressed up.

They were very good, the only thing that I was disgusted with, and I will say that, the law is over there then, that if a black fellow is walking along a footpath and a white girl coming opposite him he had to go off the footpath onto the road and let her pass. And if he looked at her he was raping her. That’s how bad it was in 1939.

Yes.

Well he was supposed to put his head down and look at the deck.

Well I don’t know I suppose the police could arrest him.

No, no I never saw them arrested, I’m just saying that was the law.

Disgusted with it. Still am.

Well I wouldn’t bring it up to you if I didn’t think it was wrong.

Oh well we never had many, there was the aboriginals I suppose we were bad to them. But we never had too many people like yourself out here, we were never had too many. So we were what would you say? Eighty percent white Australia.

No, no. The aborigines were over Hurstville Botany way, over near Mascot aerodrome.

No, no.

None really, the only place was when Mum and Dad took me to La Peruse one day to the aborigine settlement. And that’s the first time I ever saw a black fellow.

Hmm?

No, no. They were too lazy to walk let alone get on the road.

Oh, they were very very pro-black, they hated them, didn’t like the blacks at all.

The white people.

Yeah particularly the Bores, the Dutch.

No I never worried about it. I don’t talk politics.

No because when you went to a pub in South Africa it was always white there or the blacks had to go to a special place,

if they were allowed in any I don’t know.

All sorts of white people.

Yeah Afrikaans and the Dutch and the British. But the Afrikaans, after I was torpedoed I was taken by an Afrikaner, he owned a

coal mine. And Dougie Boon and I were taken out to his place for a fortnights holiday. We were given a wonderful time. Jerry Munich was his name and he owned a coal mine, he was only twenty-four, very wealthy man. He had it handed down to him.

And I’ll tell you what I loved Cape Town I loved South Africa.

South Africa climate is the same as here, you understand what I mean? Very similar to as Australia. And where I went for that holiday it was at Somerset West, at the foot of Table Mountain and it was beautiful, the big Table Mountain looking over there and it was glorious. And Jerry Munich had an old 39 Chev, it had to last him the war out, a 39 wasn’t a bad car either.

We used to go, and I got (UNCLEAR) on peppermint brandy. Crème de Mond.

No, no there wouldn’t have been any of them, we were the only ones. And yet the Aussie was there and I don’t’ know where they got to. The HMAS Australia was there and I never saw them.

I never went to one.

No, no. Never went to brothels there.

Oh the sailors like d it. The sailors liked, sailors like any town. There is no town they don’t like, it all depends on how they are treated.

Oh I never went ashore. We were only in Freetown twice. When I first went over there in 1939, Freetown, bananas were a great big stalk for a shilling. When I came back in 1942 they were a shilling a dozen. The Yanks had been through.

That’s how the price went up.

No, no.

No, no. I was four hundred miles off Walvis Bay that’s all.

Nothing.

Who?

No I don’t know what you are talking about.

No don’t know it. Have you been reading?

No.

No I gave it away. I was brought up religious and I gradually let it slip all away I am not religious at all now. I am being buried at sea by the Royal Australia Navy too. When I die I am being buried at sea by the Royal Australia Navy.

I applied for it, they gave me permission to do that I have got the letter there. Everything I am telling you I

can back it up there.

I believed in myself.

Well when you

see people dying like the way they died and things like that you wonder if there is a God at all. Even toady little kids are being murdered in the world. Why is it allowed? Why has the world gone berserk? It has gone stupid at the moment, I wouldn’t leave Australia, if you gave me a free trip to the United Kingdom I wouldn’t take it. I would sooner

stay here. You don’t know where you are going to be safe, you don’t know what you are going to, it’s pretty bad. And the whole lot of it is through religion. Look at Ireland, religion, Protestant and Catholic. Middle East. The Koran versus the Bible.

You don’t know where you are with it.

People are using religion for their own ends instead of treating it the way it should be.

I believe in nature.

Well the trees grow. Leave them alone and they will grow. Set a bushfire there are gone. Someone lights a fire they are gone.

The fish, used to see the dolphins playing with the water, the dolphins playing with the bow of the ship and that, it’s lovely. As I said in the early part of with Colin [interviewer], when I first went through the Red Sea was when I first saw a flying fish. Have you ever seen a flying fish?

They fly through the water, fifty feet at a time. Fish fly. And then at night time they light up the water

as if there is a lamp under the water. Hello Jule.

Well I was in Makatir, that’s,

Makatir Tahiti. I am changing right away I am going towards the end of the war now.

In Makatir and in Makatir where we used to lay, I will show you a photograph of that later on, it was that deep that when we got an onshore wind we had to nick off to sea because we would drag anchor. And while we were out there we had nothing to do. Ship was just floating that was all it was doing, the motor wasn’t even going, it was just off shore.

no anchor or anything on it. So anyway we looked down and there was a hell of a lot of sharks there, they were shocking. So I went down and got the 303 and we got a lump of meat out of the chief steward and we got a shark up and as he put his head out I shot him. And do you know what happened? All the other sharks got in and they tore him to bits. You have got no idea what vultures they are.

Tigers.

Hmm.

Oh ten foot long. They are a very big shark yeah. And one of them we brought on deck and his mouth is wide open, and one of the kids went to put his hand on the thing and I said don’t do that mate and I threw a shovel in and boom it went shut. So If he had have touched it he could have lost a hand. You have got no idea, that’s mother nature.

Yeah.

Well I am in the two fishing clubs and conservation wise on fish, they have got this blooming Uruguayan ship, I hope they put them away for life. They have taken out two tooth fish there that are

running out of time, they have got tonnes of them on board. She’s under charge now, the navy is in charge of it or customs are in charge of it, that’s it now.

Customs are in charge of it, they’ve got him.

I think there was whales.

Oh a whale is a whale to me mate I don’t know the names of them. But a hunchback, whatever you want to call them, they are the most common I think. And albatross, I have seen birds with eight foot wingspans from tip to tip. Albatross, they are beautiful looking things.

They eat them?

Do they?

Well I’ll tell you what every time they ate one of those they were eating a sailor. That’s a superstition.

Every time they were eating an albatross they were eating a sailor. They reckon they’re all sailors. Well that’s our superstition. That’s what we reckon they are.

I can’t remember now, but that’s one, albatrosses. We look after them, we reckon they are a lovely

bird. As a matter of fact one of them landed on the deck of the ship, it was sick. It landed on the deck of the ship so we fed it. Mince meat and whatever else we had, anyway we have got to get him off the deck, now he can’t walk. Because he has been on the wing too long, as soon as he put a foot down he flops. So we used to have to lift him up, we carried him over to the side of the ship and we threw him overboard, and he flew.

About two days, never moved and we fed it with just water and mince meat.

In those days we never ate it mate. That’s was only the Japanese ate squid.

No I never saw them but now I am a fisherman I have seen hundreds of them. Catch them down Queenscliff of the pier if you want them. The, when you are on a ship you don’t see many fish. Although I did catch some cod down near New Zealand, down in the Bluff. Put a line out the side and caught a few fish.

No not really.

No.

Ni I haven’t seen any mermaids. We would have brought it on board if we had have seen it.

Nothing like that. A lot of things go on that sailors do but a lot of it is not true.

I don’t know. Sailors get blamed for a lot f things that they don’t do. But they are a larrikin some of them, some of them are not.

I’m not one of them.

No I am not a larrikin no.

Pubs.

Oh you go and have a few beers to fill in time, that’s what you do at port, they fill in time.

Oh I don’t know I have never heard them.

No not me.

I have been in the roughest in the world mate.

Well one of them is Sydney, Fortunes of War a pub on George Street north. I have been in the pubs in South Shields in Wales. South Shields I am sorry,

Newcastle. I have been in the pubs in Cardiff. Some of these pubs are in the rough as guts areas you have ever seen in your life. As long as you keep to yourself you are OK. Open your mouth and someone will shut it for you.

Oh no,

Oh that’s very interesting, yeah. Very interesting. My Dad and her dad were friends, and they were in the VDC. which was, the what do you call it?

like in England very very low army did in their spare time. Anyhow I came home and my wife had been to first aid school, she was doing first aid and she came in and I met her then. So I said to her father I will give you a cigarette for a phone number. I can remember

saying that to him and he was a very stern man and he nearly died. Anyway I got the phone number and I rang her up and I took her out and that was the start of it. And I spent that leave with her and we had a ball, and in 1942 I became engaged to her, and in 1943 we were married. And we were married thirty- eight and a half years and she died of lung cancer. So that’s the story of

Betty and I had thirty-eight and a half years of lovely married life. And four kids.

Just her manner. Free and easy. She was an athlete, she was a runner. And we just clicked. But she was the secretary to the

installation manger of the Caltex Oil Company. And she had a very very good job there. As a matter of fact the accountant there, when I used to come back on leave we used to go out and have a few beers, down the, in Swanson Street down in the pub. She was well thought of. Her name was Betty Hazel.

No, no he was a station master at Auburn Railway station when I met her, and he ended up before he died he was

station master at Flinders Street. He was a station master of Flinders Street. No when I said stern, that’s stern is not what I am most likely to mean. He was a man that everything was positive, nothing was out of the way at all, you know what I mean by that? He was straight down the line, he didn’t like. He liked a joke but he just, I’ll show you a photograph

of him and that might tell you the story. He was a nice man, lovely man, and so was his wife Elsie. Mum Graham she was a lovely lady too, got on very well together.

Well she married me mate she must have loved me, she wouldn’t have married me otherwise.

She was a very down to earth person. When her scuff came off her foot the kids took off to the hills, they took off, they knew she meant business.

Well if the kids were naughty she would take her scuff off and the kids would go. We had a milk bar down in Glenn Huntley Road South Caulfield too, she ran that.

I went to work. She was very good.

Yeah.

43. November 43.

That’s right, my wife arranged all of the wedding, everything. I didn’t do a thing, and I stepped off the ship on the Friday night and I was married on the Saturday. And then I had twenty-eight days, and in that twenty-eight days I was married and I went on a honeymoon to Woomerton. And that’s when we, we were told to go there ,you couldn’t just go where you wanted to go you had to go where you were allowed to go. And went to Woomerton for a couple of weeks and then I went off

to sea for ten months.

That’s the government. The government had travel restrictions on.

On everybody. The trains we say was halved and things like that, so there was no transport.

I stayed at the guest house there.

Alpine Retreat Pub, we used to go there every night.

Oh she didn’t drink much but she have a drink yes.

I presume it was but she never complained about it. I don’t think, she was working, therefore she would just get up and go to work and she had a very good ring of friends and relations that she used to mix around with. No I don’t think she was that lonely. That’s a good word to use, I don’t think she was very lonely, she always had somewhere to go and she was

mixing with soldiers, sailors and airmen, she was with the war correspondent girls when they used to be partners for dancers up at the Odd Fellows hall in La Trobe Street. They used to put dances on for the soldiers, sailor and airmen. So it was very good.

I worried wether she was all right of course. We were living in St Kilda at the time, right behind the Ritz Hotel which has changed its name again now. No, no, I was worried, naturally, I wanted to see her.

As a matter of fact to tell you the truth I have got an axe to grind, a real axe with the doctor, the port doctor. We were away for ten months and we steamed up to the bay with the old ship rattling its guts out to get there before seven o’clock and we got there at one minute past seven and the doctor wouldn’t come out to clear us there, and here I was living at St Kilda and I couldn’t go ashore, couldn’t’ go and see my wife. I had to stay there all night on board ship.

Port doctor wouldn’t come out because it was after seven.

During the war ,this is when the war finished. During the war he’d come out at ten o’clock, eleven o’clock twelve o’clock at night. To clear a ship.

Oh seeing you didn’t have scurvy or anything wrong with you. That’s all he did, they only looked at your hands, no short army inspection or anything like that.

Yeah never missed her now.

Losing my wife? No. No I made sure of that before I married her.

Well I knew the girl.

I was at sea. Oh we used to go swimming and do a fair bit of swimming. And my Dad was very good, he had a car, and we used to go for picnics up Emerald Lake and

things like that. In those days we didn’t have the activity that the kids have got today. We were restricted really because not everybody had a vehicle. Now everyone has just about got two vehicles. My Dad used to take us pout and when the babies were born, well Greg the eldest, we used to take him in

a suitcase with a mattress in it. And put in the boot of the car, not in the boot in the backseat of the car. Take him with us that way. But my Mum and Dad and Betty and everyone else got on very well together. I come from a nice family mate. There was never any, well very little bitchiness or anything like that, if there was any I don’t remember it.

Used to teach Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church in Murrumbeena. At Auburn. But she wasn’t fanatical. She was an average girl that went to church. Used to go to Sunday school, teach Sunday school and that. That was the growing up days, because she was married

at twenty, only young., I was twenty-four.

The girls in those days used to get married before they were twenty-four if not they were going to be left on the shelf. It seemed to be a right time for a girl to get

married about twenty-, twenty-two. And blokes were twenty-four or a bit older but most of the blokes would be a couple of years older than the girls.

Right, the Pacific, being, I have got a letter there, a letter being from the chief officer of the lifeboat I was in and everything like that. And when I was put on running New Zealand Tahiti, south Pacific and it was south south Pacific. I never ever saw the Japanese I never fired a shot at the Japanese, I was looking for them but I never saw them.

And we were running Tahiti, New Zealand, New Zealand Tahiti and that all of the time. And I went to America, met Rita Hayworth, that was in 1942. Went on the old wire tap, three of the ships I was on there I have got, I was on dozens of ships, dozens. Not one or two ships, I was on dozens of ships. I have got lists of them there, I was on all this,

I went to America, but the most important thing there I was on runs backwards and forwards.

Merchant ships, I finished the war on a ship called the Triona, a British Phosphates Commissioner. While we were running to Tahiti and Makatir really we were going, and while we were going there, why we were going there was because the Japanese had Naroo. They captured Naroo and we used to go there to get phosphate

from Tahiti. Yeah, met a couple of nice girls there. The old man owned the Cold Blue nightclub and it was very good too. And their brother was the heavy weight champion of the island so we were looked after. That was, with Pete O’Donahue in those days, he was captain coach of Hawthorn.

Oh yeah. La Fayette. We went, they had there was a place pout at La Fayette, the beach and everything like that and then the dance floor was in the middle of a park. Open air no walls no anything, just a dance floor it was good, oh we had a good time there. As a matter of fact when I came back from America I brought a lot of records with me, Harry James

all those records and I left them at the old Cold Blue because they couldn’t get any music. They couldn’t get records, it’s a French Island by the way a French possession.

The old Cold Blue, it’s a nightclub. On the corner of the point, right on the point as you are coming in. Tahiti is a lagoon, it’s a lagoon and you have got to go through the opening, which is a coral reef

and you have got to go through that. And they use the Protestant Church lined up on something else to navigate through it. Very strange, very, very strange mate, but it’s still the same as what it was. And when I was going there there was no other way to get there but by schooner. No passenger ships were allowed in. Of course we were a freighter we were allowed in because we had supplies on board, but no passenger ships, no liners were allowed in at all.

But now of course the aeroplanes have opened it up and it’s a bugger of a place now, Tahiti, or Pahiati some people call it, but Tahiti is the name of it.

We were going there to get phosphate. We used to get the phosphate from Makatir, another island

and the water was that deep that whenever there was an onshore wind we had to go adrift, go out to sea because we would have pulled the buoy off its anchor. There is some bloody deep water around you know, my ship sunk in three miles deep, where I am not, can’t go and get my clothes. All my souvenirs and everything went down with the ship when she went.

I had German helmets and bayonets and God Knows what I had. It’s all gone.

Oh accumulated them, rabbited them as we called it, pinched them in other words. But we keep that to ourselves.

Other sources yeah, barter system.

Oh usually grog or something like that. Because I used to buy whiskey for half and six a bottle, the little bottle, half bottles. Beautiful Hagan Hague.

None whatsoever.

There was no regulations but you behaved yourself.

You did not, well that was my job to see that my crew didn’t drink too much. We’d have a nip every now and then, but mostly you didn’t drink at tea, we’re too busy. We might have a couple of scotches at the end of the day or something like that. Or the engineer officer would come into your cabin, would you like a drink? Oh yeah, but it was nonchalant.

We had it there, we had it there all the time. We could have sozzled on all of the time, there was no regulations, because the skippers and that they all drank, every sailor I know drinks. I couldn’t name one in my lifetime that didn’t have a taste. We used to all like to have a drink.

No. never on watch. Never on. We weren’t on, once the ship was tied up we never had watches. We used to keep our eye on our equipment but no watches. As soon as the ship bell went boom and the motor stopped we stopped.

Oh I’d have a drink, I’d have a drink. But you don’t have too many, as a matter of fact drinking whiskey in the cold doesn’t do too much for you at all. Rums better.

Because I liked the taste of it.

Yeah.

Yeah well the Pommy navy always had rum issue which is cut out now. But we never it in our navy. We never had a rum issue we had a beer issue instead, two bottles of beer a day.

this is what they’re, the trouble on board one of the ships there, they were all drunk or something and they knocked one of the female sailors off and she was as full as a family Poe, they were drinking beer. And some silly politician wanted to cut drinking in the navy out. Well you don’t do those sort of things ,you don’t cut the fingers off a bloke because he steals do you?

No, no.

Well no I was at sea I didn’t have anything to do with the, once I passed out of the Flinders Naval Depot in the gunnery school I never saw the young kids again. I was with senior sailors all of the time.

No not during the war no. I don’t say it didn’t take place but I don’t know

a thing about it and that’s the truth, I would tell you if I knew.

That’s was, he was a soldier actually. He was a soldier, what they call maritime AA.

When you went down the North Sea they used to come on board with machine guns, stripped, Lewis Gun stripped and they used to tie a landing around the guard rail and just help us in case the aeroplanes came over. With a 303, which was useless, a 303 had only got a range of five hundred yards on an aeroplane that’s, can’t understand it,

half inch was better.

That’s what I am still trying to find out. Why did he go to a captain and worry the captain over a trivial matter like that. The captain has got more to worry about than, I went up and apologised to the captain after. I said why didn’t he come to me?

He couldn’t answer the question either. See I had been in the ship quite a long time then. All he had done was put the pulls in back to front in the gun. Stupid thing ,the first thing you learn is what makes them stop? And that’s one of the things.

When you strip them down you put them back the right way, not the wrong way around. And it is such an easy thing in a Lewis gun to do that, put the pull in back to front. Its only that stops it, when it throws the bullet it it stops it, keep going. The little pulls, spring loaded. I have got all of my books in there do you want to have a look?

I have got it all in here.

Shot one of our own down too. I don’t know if I short any of the enemy down but I did

maim one of our own planes coming back from Germany in the North Sea. It was his own fault but he couldn’t help himself because he couldn’t gin altitude, but it was just on, it was just breaking dawn, it was a Wellington. And he had been over Germany all night and he was shot to bits, plane was belted around something shocking. And the law was they weren’t allowed to fly over a convoy and we had our

ammunition all set at fifteen hundred feet, and they weren’t to come under fifteen hundred feet. And he came under fifteen hundred feet, but he couldn’t gain altitude, of course we let go at him. Of course we put a twelve pounder shell under his under car, which was shrapnel, it was the last straw. And that’s was that. Fixed the plane for keeps, he landed, he did land it in England and nobody was injured. But I was praised up for shooting him down and it was one of our own.

Yeah they, for shooting it down. Could have been a German mate, of course you can’t tell at that time of the morning. You can’t tell a, I know all of the planes, I watch all of the things on TV and that’s a Heinkel 111-0, or that’s a Borneo. I know them just to look at. Heinkel 111-0 was our main bomber.

Beautiful plane, they were nearly all Perspex on the front.

You don’t wait to see the German mark on the side of it, he shouldn’t have been coming over me. That’s it. The rules said, the rules, you go by the rules, if you don’t go by the rules you might as well throw

everything away so he copped it.

No. it was too early, too dark. Another time a Heinkel 111-0 came down the Hebrides and he was a cheeky cow flying over the

top of us and just flying slowly like anything else. Anyway we let him go for a while and nothing happened, and I let one go at him too, put him on his way. He didn’t turn around and come back.

Yeah. An aeroplane can fly through that much junk, you can have a whole battle ship through stuff at him and you’ve got to hit him in a vital spot.

Yeah it is difficult to shoot them down.

Well the book told you what the planes would do, and we had a Y, a very very simple thing but we had a

V like that on the little handle and it had two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred miles an hour. Well what you did you put it up like that and it worked on the wing tips, the tips of the wing. You put it up like that and you look straight down and it says two hundred miles and hour, you’d find out what he was doing. Quite good.

The wings fitted into the V it gave you a measurement, and that’s what you worked on.

Well the ones that fitted, anything bigger than that well you couldn’t do it, or smaller.

Well the wings, it didn’t matter where the wings were, ti was the tips of the wings you worked on, not the size. It was the tips of the wings in the V, that’s what it was. So I can remember. I think I can show you the book in there. Question number nine hundred and fifty seven.

After I had come ashore or?

Right well I have got the written down, would you like me to get that?

Right. We were torpedoed at five past two in the morning. I came off watch at twelve o’clock. I was a passenger by the way, just assisting the guns crew taking a turn to give them a bit of relief. And I just got off to sleep when five past two in the morning we got hit by two torpedoes. One nearly blew the bow off, and the second one number two hole. Just forward of the bridge

number two hole is. And of course the ship rocks and makes a hell of a thump. Out of bed, and my life boat was forward forward, aft of forward or forward forward. I can’t remember whether it was forward or after one I can’t remember. It was a forward, that’s where the block and tackle was that let the lifeboat down. And I undid, I was

first there so I undid loosely for the other ones who got it ready. And I’m ready to lower, as soon as he come I said to him right oh lets lower away, hand over hand don’t panic, now that was taught to me when I was in the cadets. Hand over hand don’t panic or the boat will get away from you and end up with one in the air and one in the water.

So anyhow we got the boat in the water, and the both of us jumped, with the lifelines. Both of us had lifelines, you didn’t have ladders then to go down the side of the ship, you had to go down the rope., We went down the lifelines and we waited, and then all of the others came down the lifeline, and there was twenty-six of us came down the lifeline and got in the boat. The we rowed away from the ship, and then I think it was so many minutes,

third torpedo went straight in the engine room and she went boom. She blew up then, boiler went everything, and of course stern went up, bow went up and she just folded into herself. That was the end of the ship, twelve minutes. Right oh, well we, we picked up the other boat. Two boats got away, we picked up the other boat and tied two boats together. Just by the hawser at the front, the bow rope.

Well then we had a meeting to see what we were going to do, we had four hundred miles to go one way and two hundred the other way, so we chose to go the four hundred, because we couldn’t miss Africa, we could miss Saint Helena. That’s where Napoleon was remember on Saint Helena? So anyway we had the meeting and everything like that. In the meantime our water, we lost ten gallons of water. Oh five gallons of water not ten, five gallons of water we lost

because the life boats hadn’t been in the water and they were taken water in, so the bung came out and we lost that water. So we’ve got five gallons of water between twenty-six of us and that’s all of the water we had. So anyhow this is where the problem came in. We were rationed to two ounces of water, night and morning first. And we just got a little drink every morning and night,

to make it go around, which didn’t go too long because we were out of water in the end. What we sued to do was get over the ships side, over the live boats side and hang onto it naked, and our pores would soak the water in, by putting yourself in the water it used to take water into your body. Through the pores. Two or three ships we let flares off to but they never saw us, and

the Malayan Prince she was coming down and our very last flare, we let her go and the gunner on board saw it. Now the Malayan Prince wasn’t supposed to stop, that was against the law no merchant ship was to stop. It was supposed to ring an escort to come and get us, that would have been too late. He decided to stop and bring us on board. We were too weak to row the

boat to him, so he had to bring a fifteen thousand tonne freighter, or freighter passenger, carried passengers as well. Bring that along side the life boat and it took us four hours to get us on board. But we all got on board. I fortunately was light in weight and I was able to go up the Jacobs ladder. Climb the Jacobs ladder and collapse on the gunner. Just bang, that was my last effort, I couldn’t do any more.

We were carried into the ward room and giver whiskey and pepper and dried biscuits and raspberry jam. That was to give us something to eat, and in the meantime we were in the water thirteen days, thirteen days adrift from the time we were torpedoed. Everybody was paired off. Captain to captain,

first officer to first officer. Gun layer to gun layer. And they gave us clothes because we had very little clothes on us. Anyhow I don’t know what I did with the slippers, I had the slippers for years a bloke gave me his very good slippers and I wore them all the time. I gave him my wrist watch too, I gave him my wrist watch for his slippers. Anyhow

we went into Cape Town and they took me to Froggy Ponds, which is a convalescent hospital. And we were put on egg diets and light custard and foods like that. And then Jerry Munich who owned a coal mine, he said to the officer in charge of us I would like to take a couple of sailors who were shipwrecked out to my home. So Dougie Boon and I went out there.

And we had a fortnight out at the foot of the Table Mountain at a place called Somerset West. A beautiful spot. And in this old Dutch Home and great big doors that looked like telegraph poles, you know holding them up. Beautiful old Dutch home. Anyway I got better on peppermint brandy, which is Crème de Mond. Drinking a bottle of that a day. And then we

came back and I awaited passage, and in the meantime I got kitted up by the South African navy. All Pommy equipment, oh shocking. Rough Serge suits. And I waited and all of a sudden I got a draft to come home on the California Star so I came home on the comfort of the California Star doing nothing. She could fly, she could do eighteen knots, it was a good big passenger liner.

So I came home on her. That was it. Then I am with my mother in the kitchen, I will never forget. The post came with the navy telling her I was missing at sea they were talking to her.

Because they’ll get hit too. The submarine sunk one it could sink too, could still be in the vicinity. That’s why they weren’t allowed to stop, but they used to break the rules and the skipper, I don’t know whether he got into trouble or not, I don’t think he would. Because he, nothing happened, but if he had have lost his ship there would have been trouble, why did you stop your ship?

They were a clinker boat.

Oh that’s right. Look a clinker boat the planks are like that. And then they have got cotton fibre put between them and hammered down. Well what happens, you have got to keep them in the water or

they expand. Now we have steel boats it’s a different story. But those days it was wooden, because they used to put canvas covers over them. Gone again.

The bung came out. The bung came out of the barraco, we used to call them barracoes, that’s a barrel. And it had a bung in it, and the bung came out, and of course it went under the salt water

the boat had plenty of water in it, it went under the salt water and the salt water went in and contaminated it. Now do you understand?

Oh it was shocking, shocking. We were all right the first week, the first week we were ok, we were fit we were fresh, plenty of food we had in us, and we were good as gold. But after the first week we started to deteriorate because we weren’t having water, we weren’t using our bowels or our bladder. That stopped, and we’re starting to die,

that’s exactly what it is, because we’re malnourished. So anyhow we used to get over the side of the boat and take the water in, and that helped a little bit. We sharpened up a bay hook, you know what a bay hook, what they’re like. Sharpened it up, we found an old file on board and sharpened it up and we used to get over the side and that was to stab sharks if they came along. The night time was the worse because it was freezing cold at night, we were on the Tropic of Capricorn

stinking hot during the day and freezing cold at night. And of course we had inadequate clothing, a few sails we could wrap around us there at night but cold cotton sails is not much good in the Atlantic. So anyhow we used to cuddle into one another, like if we were lovers. Hang on to one another and away we go and keep ourselves as warm as possible that way.

The time lagged, it was slow, very slow. We used to wait, we used to, as soon as the nightfall went we were waiting for dawn to come.

No I didn’t, I was as black as a nigger, and it didn’t worry me, I used to be in the sun all day long and it didn’t worry me at all.

Oh well we were wanting water. No they were pretty good, we only lost two out of twenty-six. Out of twenty-six we only lost two, we lost the chief engineer, he was seventy years of age, he died of exposure. And a fireman, one of the fireman there a steam pipe burst and hit him in the chest, and he died of pneumonia. He died

two days after we were torpedoed. And the old chief engineer died the day we were picked up. Just too much for him, was going to retire it was his last trip poor bugger. So we just tied him to the life boat and we sunk the life boat. So he is still floating in the south Atlantic somewhere, about thirty or forty feet below the surface,

that’s all she’ll go down.

I don’t know. We had the copper tanks in it, broke them, put tomahawk into them.

Oh yeah the skipper did, or in our case it was the chief officer, I was in the chief officers boat. But everything changed in the boats,

said a few words. Just a little few or something like that, not very much.

There was only those two, that’s the only two I ever saw. And I am going myself there, the navy is burying me, I have got the bonefied over there that they are going to take me on a warship and take me out and send me on my way.

Well my wife got buried, my wife is at sea too. She got buried off Torquay, Point Danger off Torquay. We surfed for twenty-nine years, I was on the one side of Torquay for twenty-nine years. Body surfed all of the time, that’s why I reckon I am so fit because in my young day I lived in the water surfing, body surfing. I used to go down and put me tent up and five weeks I’d go from Christmas to Easter at Torquay

every year for twenty-nine years.

No I will be buried from where the navy put me in the drink, put me in the bay somewhere. Would you like to see the letter?

Ok. Very, very difficult again to get buried, for the navy to go to the expense of burying you.

Well you’ve got to apply to Canberra, and then they go through your papers and see if you have been a good boy or a bad boy, what your service record is. If you have lost any demerit points and all this they go right through you, and if they decide that you are eligible they will bury at sea.

In other words your ashes, they don’t bury the body.

I’ll go out on a, most likely it will only be a patrol boat. Like the Adelaide or one of those small ships that pick up these fisherman, they do about eighteen knots or something.

Yeah be family on board. They

will make arrangements with the warship. The ship will be at Sorrento say, and it is up to us to get to Sorrento and go on board. And the ship is limited, only so many people can come on board, of course is most likely to be eighteen or twenty people. There is no room on them, you have got to watch where you walk now because everything is don’t touch.

Yeah the Malayan Prince.

British. That was the one that Claudette Colbert went from America to England on. And the skipper was sleeping in her bed. Where she slept, and he was tickled pink. We teased him about it.

Oh she was an American film star. In, earlier than Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth was 1940’s, she’d be 1930’s.

No.

Lost in the water?

Nobody was lost in the water, we all got off the ship into the life boats. Twenty-six in each life boat, fifty-two people all told, but we lost two. The two were in my boat.

Twenty-eight days leave.

No I was right. They wouldn’t let you go from the Froggy Ponds until you were pretty right. It’s a funny thing about that but it doesn’t take very long for you to recover because we were young and fit, we were fit as Mallee Bulls [very fit]. And of course we went down hill quick but we come up quick.

Dehydration, not enough to eat. We had nothing to eat. We had plenty of food on board. But what saved my life was Nestles Condensed Milk, we all had a can of condensed milk and we kept sipping away at that all of the time, it was just in your mouth it was like chewing gum because you had no water. But, marvellous what you can do

when you are starving.

Yeah only once. Went down the embankment to the pay office to see how my pay was going and everything like that. We passed a theatre and it was

playing Gone with the Wind. The next day I came back and it had gone with the wind. Disappeared. All that was there was a placard flapping around. Gone with the Wind, I thought that was funny.

I didn’t see it was only the embankment I went to, not the heart of London or anything like that. But I didn’t want to go

to London, I have never ever wanted to go to London because I don’t like big cities. I would sooner get out in the little suburbs or something like that.

No. I had a job to do, get down and get my pay fixed up and get back as soon as I could.

No.

Yeah true.

In Halifax Canada, they handed over fifty-four, four, what they called four pipe Destroyers, that’s four funnels. First World War Destroyers that they had in moth balls in the United States,

they handed those over to Britain for escort duty on the convoys. And I was in Halifax Canada when the first lot was handed over. I went on board them, I got on well with the Americans in Halifax, they were very efficient. I can tell you a story if it goes on record it

doesn’t matter but it’s true. They put an Oerlikon gun on one of our ships and sent us down, sent me down by Greyhound Bus to San Diego from San Pedro. And I get down there and we decide to have practice, and I thought, the Poms always let you have twelve rounds boom, fire twelve rounds for practice. We fired all day, I had a stack of brass cylinders stacked this high beside the gun, we were firing all day long.

We fired at this aeroplane with a drag behind it. Different all together, they do things in a big way. Of course they had the money, that’s most likely what it was. The Pom’s never had enough money. Do you know that twelve months ago that never had enough money to send the main fleet to sea because oil was too costly?

Twelve months ago the British home fleet couldn’t go to sea because they couldn’t afford the oil.

Not very good, and then some silly bugger says you can’t use nuclear.

Sailors?

Excellent. They are very very generous and very very good. I got on well with them yes.

A lot of blokes reckon they are no good and all of that but I reckon, you have got to only speak as you find.

They manned a ship well, so did the Germans. You can only do so much on a ship, we all navigate the same way, except the Japanese because their compasses are

east instead of west. So we’re north, south, east, west. And Japanese compass is north, south, west, east. That tricks you.

Yeah bit tricky.

No, no. They used to keep more or less to themselves, drinking.

Fact was we couldn’t keep up with them money wise anyhow. I think an ordinary seaman was getting about sixty a month, and we were on, well our blokes were on something like six shillings a day, wasn’t nothing like it. I had an allotment to my Mum, I bought my first home with it. So I was saving money, and I can’t save money and spend it too, so we just had to

budget correctly and make our money last. The month at sea was good because you had a month to save up two fortnights pay.

A little, not a lot. Not socialised with them, spoke to them talked to them. Had them on board ship.

As a matter of fact, that’s how I came to meet Rita Hayworth over there. Victor Mature was engaged to Rita Hayworth at the time and he was on the American Coast Guard. And we were tied up at the wharf, this is how I come to meet her, we were tied up at the wharf, and the American Coast Guard ship was tied up beside us and they had to walk over our ship to get ashore. And that’s how I came

to meet Victor Mature, and Victor Mature introduced me to meet Rita Hayworth. And then he arranged me to go through all of Fox Studios and everything. The doors were just opened right up mate and the whole of Hollywood was at my disposal. Wonderful.

Oh it was wonderful, beautiful.

I saw Jack Benny making a new, The Meanest Man in the World. Rita Hayworth was making You were Never Lovelier. The doors were opened up mate, you have got no idea. It was all done, you did it through their, oh what was their name? Oh you rang one bloke up and let him know

and he knew who you were, and you’d have the doors opened before you got there it was wonderful.

Oh she was a lovely lady. Very down to earth, when she came down to the wharf to see Victor Mature, that’s when I first met her, I, we had been unloading ammunition, renewing it, and I was in a pair of dirty old overalls and covered in shit. Anyhow she come down and

didn’t take any notice. So we all went down, overalls and all, all went down to the speak easy at the end of the wharf and we all had a beer. I had a wonderful life.

Well he kept walking across our ship. And the gun layer on their ship, one of the gun layers said oh Victor Mature will be coming along now, I was talking to him while we were unloading. And he

came along and he introduced me to Victor, he said oh you’re from Australia are you? All right well I’m going up to meet Rita Hayworth, coming up? So away I went. Grabbed a few bob out of my pocket and away I go. The speak easy there they seel grog, it is just a little milk bar at the end of the wharf, but they sell beer and all sorts of things.

Oh no it’s all right. Went to Cab Calais on Figorara. Few, Earl Carols, saw Greer Garson putting her hands in the Chinese Theatre.

Yeah, he had an Australian playing the trumpet in his band too. Yeah, Cab Calais, Cassa Manyana he played at. Cassa Manyana on Figorara.

No, was some silly

American sailors. And that’s where I learnt to drink whiskey sour. I have never had one before, I have got the recipe there but I have never had one since I have been back in Australia either, but it was very nice. Of course they kill you with drink in the states, you only buy one and you have to have ten more to get over it, over the shock of the price.

No the war had no impact on the drinking. After I was married I drank but I didn’t drink as much as when I was, well when the war was on of course. It did have an

impact most likely because we were lonely. We didn’t have ,we only had our sailor mates on board ships. But we were travelling the world mate, we were on our own. Whereas when you are home you are never lonely, you have always got someone in the corner reading a book or something, at least something happening. I would say it did have an impact on us, but I don’t think it would be much. And then of course I

had a de facto for three years too, and found her dead in bed, and then I just got stuck into the bottles.

I used to drink a bit heavier then too.

I ended up drinking a bottle a day, too much, and I have been to the doctor and the doctor said you had better cut it out and I haven’t had a drink for,

forty-three days today. Pretty good.

There were three, we were three of us all told,

There is no such thing as mateship here as getting on together, that’s the most important thing, being, tolerating each other. And not fighting no bad words, it’s not necessary, just carry on, just do your job, and carry

on. If you want to do something that’s out of the ordinary tell someone you’re going to do it or ask someone can you do it. And that’s the way that we worked all of the time and we had no trouble. I never had any trouble with my sailors at all.

That’s right.

Yeah it wasn’t a strong bond no, because when the war finished I don’t even know where the two of them are. Because Noel MacGroder I did know, he was in, working on building Warragamba damn or something New South Wales, and that’s the last I heard of him, he married a Pom. Fred I don’t know what happened to Fred, of course Fred would be dead oh years ago. I’ll never forget him sitting there, he said, ‘Oh bugger this’ he said ‘it’s bloody cold’. We were getting down

towards Cape Town. He said, ‘Bugger it’. So he got a blanket and he cut it up to make a hood to keep his ears warm. I can see him to this day sewing it by hand, sewing it with the needle. It was good, but he wouldn’t make one for anybody else, he said it’s too hard.

No, no. We all went our separate ways.

On the ship there was officers. I was a lower deck rating, not an officer. So the officers kept to themselves, even the engineers we ate with were officers. So we treated them with

respect and they treated us with respect too because we were just ordinary seamen.

That’s right.

No the ship’s crew would all say to each other, you look after yourself to the best of your ability and if you saw a mate in trouble you’d assist him if you can. I think that answers the question because everybody gets into trouble if the ship goes down

everybody has got to help each other if they possibly can. But you don’t risk your own life helping if you can get out of it.

It’s a topic you can talk on forever, there is no mateship in that. It is just loyalty to your fellow sailor, no mateship.

No not as far as, the Anzacs are the soldiers that went on Gallipoli, I don’t go to the dawn service, because I leave that to the soldiers, they were there. There was some navy people there but it is a soldier’s day so I don’t go to the dawn service no.

Anzac Day I look after, I think of my mates who died and I think of the sailors on board. As a matter of fact the Arandina, the tanker, Ian Davis the organist from the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne was on her and we were getting dragged in from the magnetic mines up the Thames, we were pulled up by a tug because we were diesel,

and a mine hit him. But his ship completed the whole war I have got the record of that, got through. Every ship I went, the two ships I was on the Atlantic with, both gone.

The whole of the ship is your marker, the whole of the ship is your tombstone. No, there is no graves for sailors. One big sea.

I quite agree with that. After all when you’re dead you’re dead and there is nothing you can do about it mate.

No I just think we’ve got enough monuments now, and for that government to be putting that ridiculous thing in London now, after the First World War sailors, I think that’s stupid. Waste of money.

Give it to the sailors’retirement fund or something, let the sailors who are sick enjoy something. Because monuments do nothing to anybody, although I like them. We have got a beautiful one down on the Yarra at Newport, do you know Newport at all? Right well you know where you come around under the Westgate Bridge and then you come onto the foreshore? I can’t think, the Strand it’s called that’s right. Well at the end of the Strand

you go to the, keep going right around, and it’s right on the water, that’s where the Yarra memorial is. Beautiful memorial. I was at that myself, Bill Munday one of my mates went down on the Yarra. Thirty-seven of those sailors got off that ship and only thirteen survived, the sharks got the rest of them. Makes you think.

He lived in Ormond, I put him in his uniform when he joined up. I had been two years at sea then, but his mum and my Mum were very good friends. Because they’re all passed on now, my Mum was dead in ‘72.

Oh yes. But not big elaborate, we have done a lot of work down at Queenscliff. Now if you are ever down at Queenscliff I implore you to go and see it. We have got a mine that was guarded our heads along the boom,

from opening up and shutting the heads. It all started with the mine sweepers, and because the first ship sunk, the first casualty, the first naval casualty of the war was the Goorangi. It was cut in half by the Duntroon troop carrier on its way in the heads and it was lost all hands. And Captain Boyle [Cole?] who was the skipper of it, he was the man who took

me to the rifle club down in Williamstown every Saturday afternoon. So I go down, on the 20th of November 1942 it was sunk. The Goorangi, we have got a beautiful monument, down to everybody down there so if you ever go down, the RSL is there, the bowling green is there, you go down that street to the jetty, and you go down there to have a, not the jetty the lookout. The lookout,

and you’ll see all these monuments. We have done that over years now. You don’t need a big monument, little ones.

Freedom. Fighting to pull Germany up, well pull Hitler up.

He nearly did. If he had have believed his generals he would have won it.

I most likely would be all right. You most likely would be all right, but the poor old Jews wouldn’t be. I am not a Jew lover but I don’t believe in torturing people like they got tortured.

Only when I read the paper, I never heard of anything else. Only what was in the papers or come over the radio or something.

I couldn’t tell you.

Yes I was off New Zealand coast when war in Europe ended, and I was off the New Zealand coast when the war with Japan ended.

We got full, we got bottles of beer and we drank them.

We’re free. Everybody had a drink that day I think.

No. I don’t remember where I was. It was the greatest asset we ever did letting that bomb go, because if we hadn’t, we’d still

be fighting Japan. They were very tedious people to fight. Now I have only read all of this since the war. But they were very devoted.

Well good. Shortened the war didn’t it? It cost two hundred and fifty thousand lives or something, I don’t know what it was, cost a lot of people.

Now we’re getting bombs sent back the other way, not knowing where they’re going off. I don’t know how they’re going to fix that either.

Only little bits and pieces.

No, they asked a little, the two girls are

more interested in the war than the boys. Julie and Lizzie and Graham come to Anzac Day with me. And I have got something ridiculous to tell you. For thirty years after the Anzac Day march the mine sweepers always put on some sandwiches and beer, under the tree at the back of the shrine.

We used to bring our car in, clean up the place and leave it spotless and everything like that. And now we’re not allowed to do it. Not allowed to bring the car in anymore, they have stopped us doing it, and they reckon if we don’t watch out they’ll book us for having grog. Now isn’t that ridiculous? After thirty years we have been doing it. Every Anzac Day we have always

had a drink and a sandwich under the tree. And we met our mates and we all yak and now they have stopped us. So what we have to do now is we have to go to the Naval Association in Toorak Road. Because that’s where the Victorian Naval Association is in Toorak Road. 146 West Toorak Road South Yarra. But we used to just go there and go home, now we have got to go to south Yarra and muck around

a lot of people won’t do it.

I won’t answer that question they might put me in gaol. Bullshit that’s all it is. We weren’t doing any harm. They never even made a tyre mark on the grass, we were very careful,

but we used to sell grog see? They booked us for doing that.

No I don’t know who used to, they used to sell it. I don’t know which one it was, someone did. You find a bottle in something and you put your money in the till.

No I don’t think there is anything I have held back. No I don’t think there is anything, I have been quite open I have got everything on the table there.

Never went through my head. The only thing that I was worried about was that I would have a hang-fire on the gun and when I, it was my job to open the breech and get rid of the shell or find out what was

wrong with it, that it would explode and blind me. I was scared of going blind, that’s the only scare I had in me was going blind. And I don’t think I have told the kids that either.

My marriage?

Yes.

Oh just picked up oil. The ship was loaded in twenty-four hours and we were on our way.

I went there to Tarakan.

Now, Batavia.

Sorry that’s Balikpapan I’m talking about. We went to Batavia then we went to Balikpapan to Tarakan and then we left for England.

Yeah we were picking up the oil. We called there, I don’t know whether they picked it up or not, we might have just topped up. We only took the ten thousand tonnes of it.

Oh I don’t know whether they did or not, because all I was I was a gun layer I had nothing to do with the oil part of it at all. That was the sailors, the seamen on board the ship, not me.

I don’t know what they picked up, I don’t know how much oil they put in it. But we only carried oil and water. Right then we went through the Red Sea to England. Arriving on the 4th of January 1940. It was early wasn’t it?

Yes. Oh God yes, the war was over when the Japanese got in.

Oh I just went ashore to the Shell pub.

In Batavia. When the, Shell tankers, the Shell company had clubs in every port around the world, and being on

that ship I was allowed to use their facilities. So we used to go ashore and use the swimming pool, go and have a drink. You changed of course from your togs to have a drink. And everything like that. It was very very good, those clubs, those Shell clubs were excellent in the East Indies and West Indies, wonderful.

Oh yes.

A lot of Dutch people.

They all worked for the Shell Oil Company. And they had their wives, some of their wives were natives, as well as Dutch people. They were very nice. As a matter of fact I met one of the doctors there he was a very nice man. Just by accident.

Oh, all we did was stay there for twenty-four hours and on to the next one. We didn’t stay long in port mate because we could fill the ship in twenty-four hours. Ten thousand tonne of oil and put in on board in twenty-four hours by the ship. We had the pumps to do it.

As long as they supplied the oil we could take it.

No.

No never noticed anything wrong, I wasn’t there long enough to observe it. I would go into a bar or

go into a café or whatever it was and wouldn’t notice. See we had no race relationship in Australia in my opinion prior to the war except we had a little bit of problems with the aborigines. That was the only race discrepancy. Hello love.

Well there has always been friction

between the aborigines and the white people here. And that goes back to when the Poms did it and not us, and the aborigines won’t get it out of their thick skull that Australians today are not the Poms that did things to them a hundred years ago. The Poms did it not the Australians, we’re six generations

from that now. Well that’s my opinion, I think it’s sound. The Poms chained them up and everything in those days and made them work for nothing, but that wasn’t me.

I never had shore leave I would just walk ashore. The ship was only there for a short stay so you could just go ashore for a few hours and come back again.

The club.

Yeah and Tarakan, and use their swimming pool.

Yeah, all beautiful marble. You have got no idea what they were like, they were beautiful clubs. Heinekens.

Heinekens or Anchor Beer they used to sell.

That was two or three years later mate. See I am covering from 39 to 46 or 45. Now I have been to Tahiti I have been

to the Azores Islands I have been everywhere. I said before I went around the world twice before I was twenty-three.

Yeah.

Bermuda was a beautiful island and when I was there, there wasn’t a motor car allowed on it except the official cars. Everybody rode push bikes or horses. Now I believe that Bermuda is the American

wealthy playground. Catalina Island off the California coast I believe that is the British playground, wealthy. Bermuda, I can’t tell you too much I didn’t see too much.

All places are similar, all buildings are big just a little different in design.

A few days.

Actually the USS Lexington was there when we were there, the aircraft carrier.

43.

Not then, no. No convoy there then, the ships were running free there.

And you’d run around the Quays. The Caribbean.

Yeah Florida Quays. You run down the Quays into the Gulf of Mexico. And then I think it was 44 that she warmed up there, they sunk hundreds of ships then the Germans in Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico.

Yes, Horta de Faial. Just for orders we went there for. The skipper got his orders for where he was to go. I don’t know where we went., but we called in there and we were there for two days, we laying off shore, we never went ashore there.

I never went ashore.

Oh Jesus Street. Yeah I did go ashore, caught me out. I did go ashore there, we went ashore once. And we were sitting in the International Pub. The Germans were there, the Italians were there, we were here, and the street was Jesus Street where the brothels were. And there were steps to go down into

Jesus Street and the prostitutes weren’t allowed past those steps. I remember that now.

Portuguese.

They played Spanish music. Or similar.

I never went to them. I was a bit particular where I went mate.

I didn’t want to get into trouble.

Yeah I didn’t want to,

I didn’t want that no.

Use every protection that was offered or that I could get a hold of.

Yeah. Use them occasionally.

Oh they used to give you a tube before and a tube after. You use that, that fixed it.

I mentioned before only a couple of times doctors did. Doctors gave

you just a talk but they didn’t tell you anything more than what you knew.

Oh not much.

Not much difference at all. Very austere, just a bed and that was it. A bed and a wardrobe, something like that, that’s all they had, most of them.

You weren’t there long enough to find out. It was in and out.

Five pound.

Yeah five pound Sterling, mostly everywhere.

Yeah you didn’t want to do it too often, only when you had to.

Oh I

don’t know that was their worry not mine.

No. Nobody ever talked about it.

Closed circuit.

Yeah well we’re as I said before we’re the silent service.

Finalise your little bits.

Do I dream?

Oh I used to have a few nightmares occasionally, but no don’t dream about it at all now.

No I couldn’t tell you what it was, just woke up yelling. Woke myself up, woke my wife up, she sat me up occasionally. But no there is nothing much of that now. I am a pretty stable sort of person.

No.

A lot of people had troubles, no I didn’t have any troubles.

I had a job to come back to I had no worries at all. I have only had three jobs in fifty years.

I worked for Myers for fifteen, I worked for a finance company for fifteen years, I worked for twenty years for the RMIT. That was it. I don’t like moving around, I don’t like changes.

I didn’t, I didn’t know I was going to have a dream it just happened. You might have a dream, everybody has dreams.

No, no.

About fifty fifty, but no I’m all right. I have a dream, the nightmares I had are gone I haven’t had a nightmare in a long time. But you just yelp.

I don’t know what I’m yelling about, don’t know what it ai about even.

What the hell is that?

No.

No.

Never heard of anyone going troppo, no, none of our men had.

I have never seen any. I have never seen any mental conditions associated with sea life. I have

never seen a bloke miss out on doing his duties. That’s me personally, I don’t say that it didn’t happen.

No, never happened.

No. Never had strange behaviour.

I have heard about it but never seen it.

Oh not really I have just heard that he is

so and so, and he is so and so and that’s it. I don’t know. It’s no good saying hearsay, I only talk fact.

You’ve got your questionnaires all ready.

Start again.

No.

Oh there was, I was on the Viatap and one bloke was bottled in his bunk, someone whacked a beer bottle across his nose and nearly killed him. But they were Liverpool Irishmen, and that’s like that in any ship you’re on. That was the stokers up in the fo’c’s’le.

That happened in New Zealand.

Christchurch I think it was. That’s the only time I have heard of a bloke being knocked around by a fellow sailor. But they don’t know who did it, no-one spoke.

That’s what they used to call it. There used to be the Liverpool Irishman and the Glasgow Redskins. They were from England, sailors from England and they were bad buggers, they were they were hard. You only had to go on non-unionist and they’d murder you.

You’d only have to go non union and they’d murder you.

They were very very strict. I was on a ship that was held up for three days because there was no tomato sauce on board. They wouldn’t take the ship to sea. That’s the sort of thing that, there was no give and take with them. Do you understand that?

There was no tomato sauce on board, someone might have wanted tomato sauce so they wouldn’t take that ship to sea until they got tomato sauce on board.

Yeah.

I have been to Cardiff.

Cardiff is not. Glasgow. Glasgow Scotland. Liverpool England. Liverpool Irishmen and Glasgow Redskins. Very tough sailors mate.

And they all sign on together, they are all mates. That’s it.

Never worked with them at all but they were on the ship, they were on the ship doing their job. Engine room or seaman. And I was doing my job just looking after the guns.

No the English pubs are different to us. All the English people use their pubs as a home and a pleasure house. And they go home to sleep, but they go down to the pub every night, after tea or before. Some go before tea some go after. And they use their pubs different to what we do here. We use our pubs as a drinking house, they use their pubs as a pleasure house.

Different living all together in England.

They’re the same.

Keep out of them.

Some of them, we didn’t know better.

Nothing. I never got in trouble at all when I was at sea. If I thought a place didn’t look too good I would go.

Well you could, I don’t know whether, you could pick a place that wasn’t too good when you walk in. You survey the situation, look at it and say I don’t like it here and away you go. If you like it you stay, have a beer and stay.

No, no. Just like ordinary people mate. Just like ordinary people, some are rough some are not. Some can hold their liquor some can’t.

Once I got the uniform on I was quite happy, but it didn’t do any difference to me to what I was without it. It never made any difference to me at all, but it was nice to have it on.

Oh yeah of course you did.

Course you did. Didnt’ do any good.

Oh no.

Oh yes. Danced in England in my uniform in the Oxford Gallery in Newcastle on Thames, with Peter Furly and his band and Vera Lynn was there sometimes. It was very very good, I loved

ballroom dancing, I still do but I can’t do it.

Yes.

Oh beautiful mate. She is a very plain girl, but she had a beautiful voice.

Oh just her usual songs, what was it? Now you’ve put me on the, We’ll Meet Again and the Siegfried Line. hang, We’re going to hang our washing on the Siegfried Line. Oh there was a number, she used to sing all of those good songs, they were really good songs too. Then there was Hutch,

a bloke by the name of Hutch. Leslie Hutchinson, he played piano and sang too, he was very very good.

Me?

Not really.

Yeah I can’t repeat them.

I can’t repeat them not on your life.

No, no. Not on your life. I am a bit proud. No, I know some ditties and all of that but I prefer not to put it on tape.

No don’t know that one.

Will you?

Where did you learn that from?

No the songs I know the army sings them and the air force sing them too. But I played piano there, I don’t sing much

and I don’t know much about it. I can’t sing because I sing flat.

Tailor made. By Robbie the tailor in Elizabeth Street Melbourne. Cost fifty bob. Beautiful suit, velvet cuffs.

Because the ones they issued didn’t fit you properly, that harsh bloody material too. We used to get the nice smooth material. As we said serge, smooth serge.

I’d say a hundred percent went down and got them. And then we, our issued collars were about that wide and if you have a look I have got my collars about that wide. Now my mother was a seamstress and she made my collars but a lot of them used to go into town and buy them. You go and have a look at the photograph over there afterwards and you will see where my collar is a bit narrower

than what it was when I was in the gunnery school.

What we used to call it, it was tiddly ring. Tiddly ring. You could get away with some of it, but don’t go too far because you couldn’t get away with the rest of it.

Well we reckoned the uniform that we

made was a better looking than the one that was issued. But the ones that were issued was what we were supposed to wear. So we used to call it tiddly ring. And sometimes you’d get pulled up, but I was a leading hand so I never got pulled up.

Yeah. It’s just that they were too Pommy like.

Well they altered theirs but they altered theirs a different way. They used to like them cut away down here, we didn’t do that. You can have a look over there and you can see the difference, that’s the best way to see, visual education is better than.

No never on my ships no, I heard they have been on a number of ships but in those days, when I was in the navy they weren’t game to open their mouth, they would get it shut quick. Now

I don’t know, I don’t I think they have gone too far, let them go too far myself.

No.

I would put them out. No they interfere, same as army or air force I wouldn’t have

them in. As a matter of fact I don’t think females should be in a combat area either.

I think it’s a man’s world, I think it’s a man’s job. Females can be in the background feeding up to them, but not in the fighting. I am old fashioned I know but that’s the way I feel and the way I was taught.

Well it all depends whether he gets a Jimmy’s report, which is a first officer’s report or a captain’s report. And the next one is court marshalled. And the jonty, he is the regulating

petty officer, he gets the charges all ready made out and then they go before the captain, if it is a captain’s report. If it is a jimmy’s report it goes before the first officer. That’s the three ringer not the four ringer.

Well he might fine him. Within the navy when I was in it they never fined anybody, they took it out of your

Whole, you used to have to do extra work. Such as run around the deck with your rifle above your head and they’d make you suffer. Now they fine them, which doesn’t make them suffer much, their pocket suffers but it doesn’t make you suffer. They used to take it out of your body.

Put a hundred and sixty pound pack on your back and you’d have to run around the parade grounds.

Go and stand and hold a six inch projectile in your arms. Stupid things.

Yes I have heard the term silent contempt. I have never seen it portrayed by anybody have you?

I have heard of it but I have never seen it happen.

Silent contempt is just someone mute.

Join the service, join the navy. It’s the greatest life in the world mate. I wish I had my life over again, I would have been in full time forever but I couldn’t do that because my parents wouldn’t sign for me.

Being an only child I think may have helped that. No, navy has got a good tradition, they are very efficient now. At the present moment I am quite happy with them, don’t take any paper talk of them, out of one sentence they make a paragraph. According to what we read in the papers

even our ships that have been going to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, they can hold their own with the world. The only thing we are crook on, our submarines are not up to scratch so they are not as good as the sailors that are on board. That’s politics. All I can say is good luck to any sailor that’s around.

That’s it?