Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Newcastle and I spent the first twenty-one years of my life there. At the end of that time I joined the navy. I spent four years in the navy.

During that four years I met up with Hazel Cameron who eventually became my wife. We married about six months after I had my discharge, which was in June of 1945.

Since the war, well I had three and a half years after my discharge which…

Here we go…

Yes. The first three and a half years I had great difficulty in settling down. I had three jobs in that time. I worked for L.J. Hooker [Real Estate Agency]

to begin with but I was put in charge of his accounts department and they were all ladies. All the men had been taken into the services and they almost drove me up the wall. I went back to Les Hooker, he was a marvellous fellow and I told him that I was to resign because I couldn’t tolerate the women that I was working with or were working with me. I said, “I’m used to working with men who will do as they are told.

These women just won’t act this way so I can’t stay.” And he said, “Don’t resign.” He said, “Take all the time you want. Go about the town and find the job you want and then come back to me and tell me you are leaving.” That’s the sort of man he was. He was an excellent fellow. From there I went into Qantas and I stayed with Qantas for

a short time, about two and a half years I think from memory. Things weren’t really good there then. They had a high turnover of staff. They were only just getting going as a commercial airline and pay rates were fairly low and I had a job offered to me in an oil company, an oil distributing company, and it was much higher money and so I moved to that.

And I stayed with them for nearly twenty-two years. From there I…the Americans of course own the oil industry, or most of it, and they sent out an efficiency expert who said, “Now that computers are coming, you have a computer in Melbourne you won’t need all these people in Sydney.” I was offered a job in Melbourne but Hazel and I got our heads together on this

and at the time we were caring for our spastic nephew, we had roots here and we didn’t want to move. I had to go back to them and say, “No, Melbourne is not on as far as we’re concerned.” And they said, “Well there is nothing else to do but to pay you out.” So they gave me a small amount of money, I would say. It was less than twenty thousands. But anyway the thing I said to Hazel, “Now

I’m fifty,” and she was a few years younger than myself, “Now is the time to do a trip overseas.” I’d had my share of it but Hazel hadn’t been outside Australia before. And I told her about various places that I would like to take her back there so I went and bought two round the world tickets. And so we set off then and spent six months travelling around the world. I left the

company in June and we came back the end of December. Then of course I had the job, I had to find a job. I had to go back to work somewhere. Ampol offered me a job. They rang me and said, “We believe you are in the market for employment.” I said, “Yes.” And the personnel officer asked me various questions and, “How soon can you come over and see us?”

They were at Balmain and we set everything up and then he said, “And how old are you Mr Churchill?” I said, “I’ve turned fifty.” ”I’m sorry, we can’t employ you at fifty, you are too old. If you had been forty-seven or something of that sort we could have taken you on.” But he said, “I can give you a temporary job for the next ten years if you want but there will be no superannuation or anything of that sort in it.”

And so I said, “Well that doesn’t suit me.” So I hung out a bit longer and eventually I approached one of the friends I had made in Qantas who had risen to a fairly high level in the economic side of it. He said, “Yes, certainly, we can take you back but we can’t match the salary that you were on. We could give you just

a desk job and that would be it.” So I went back with Qantas. I spent the last ten years of my working life with Qantas. They had compulsory retirement at age sixty and so I just managed to get ten years in with Qantas and that was it. We did a good deal of travelling in that ten years too but well that’s

when I really retired. I didn’t go back into employment again. We both… am I going on too long?

We both were interested in horticulture. By that time we were living in this house and we had had a house earlier on that had a garden but we didn’t know a great deal about the garden. Things just sort of popped up here and there and so

we thought we’d do a home gardeners course. At that time the Ultimo was the place in which they taught horticulturists. Ryde hadn’t opened up at that time. And so I went down there and saw Tom Paramore and said, “My wife and I would like to do the home gardener’s six-week course.” He said, “There’s

a two years waiting list for the home gardener’s course but if you and your wife are interested enough why don’t you enter the full horticulture certificate course. There are three subjects but you can please yourself, you can do one or you can do two or you can do the full three.” So I took on horticulture and soil science and Hazel did the horticulture with me. We went through with the Swains girls.

You know the two girls from the Swain family of Swains Nursery? And a few other notable people who were professional nursery people but with us it was just gaining knowledge to build our own garden. So we did that. I might say that when we sold the house that we had it was a much bigger house than what we’ve got now and it was the garden that sold it.

Because the agent brought some people out to look at the house and he didn’t bring a key. They rang us that night and said, “We’ve seen your house from the outside but if the inside is anything like your garden then we want it.” They happened to be a student doctor who was in his fourth year at Sydney Uni [University]and his wife was nursing at Camperdown Hospital so

the location suited them fine. All he said then was, “Could you hold off till Saturday afternoon, because my father has a horse running at Randwick and he’ll be coming out from Canberra on Saturday and we’ll come out and see you on Saturday afternoon.” It was all luck as far as we were concerned but Dad came out in his Mercedes Sports [automobile]

and he said, “You’re asking less for this than I paid for my car.” But anyhow I said, “Well we wanted these young people to have it because we liked the look of them and we sympathise with them.”

Going forty-five years since

we started to build. I designed the house and we engaged a builder. We didn’t build it ourselves of course. We contracted a builder to build the house for us. But we did all the outside work, the planning of the garden and so forth.

Oh yes. We belong to…Hazel was

at the time she was the president of the Pymble Gardening Club and she is still in a Gardening Club. Pymble folded up but she is in Yeronga Gardening club now. We also belong to the Horticultural Society and the Geranium Society. We are into horticulture anyway and we had a plant stall at Hornsby Hospital last weekend and we’ve another one coming up at the church Flea Market as they call it

in October this month so there you are.

Well I was born in Newcastle. Did my education in Newcastle.

24th March 1918 so I was right on the end and getting towards the end of the First World War.

Well my father was a sick man for most of my life. He always complained that he had ulcers and he was a man that wouldn’t go to a doctor but he took

other peoples advice on what to do for ulcers and so-forth but he eventually died at age fifty-six from cancer of the bowel or bowel cancer as he put it. He died at fifty-six but he was very sick for many years. I had trouble or great difficulty I might say in finding a job when I left school. It was

right in the height of the Depression. I was thinking to myself, “I can’t find a job so I will have to make one.” The local fruit and vegetable man offered me an incentive to do something. He said, “If you’ve got nothing better to do I’ll buy some fruit and if you can go round door to door and sell it and I’ll split the profit with you. You can get fifty per cent of the profit.”

I did that for a little while. He would just buy say a case of apples and I’d put a price on them and go round door to door selling apples on a pushbike. Then of course it occurred to me that if I was working on half the profits I might as well get a bit of money together and take a hundred per cent of the profit. And so I did that. I said to him, “I’m not selling for you any more

and I’ve got to know the run of the market.” So I would then go down to the market and buy case by case of fruit and go from door to door. In that way I worked up a clientele and so I decided then that I would have to branch out. I had an uncle, a great uncle really who was my grandfather’s brother. I never knew my grandfather. He died young in life.

But this great uncle was a bachelor and he was the only one I could approach. I said to him, “Could you loan me ten pounds? I want to buy myself a horse and cart, a pony and cart.” So he did that. He loaned me ten pounds which he refused to take back after I started to make money. But the thing was that I did develop quite a business out of that. I was selling all kinds of fruit and vegetables

and it was a seven-day a week job. Six day a week actually serving people and there was always work to do. So I went on with that for four, more than four years, four and a half years something like that and then I gained a job with BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary].

Well I thought that he wasn’t very sympathetic as far as I was concerned. We had a few differences. As far as my business was concerned he thought he would like to come in on it

at one stage. He wasn’t well but he tried going from door to door. I said, “All right, if you can get some new customers for me.” But he gave up after a few months because he just didn’t have the personality or he wasn’t able to sell things as we would have liked.

Oh he was a carpenter actually but

he worked most of his time in a coalmine. He wasn’t a miner. He worked up top on jobs that they had to do with carpentry.

No, none at all. He was unemployed quite a lot. The mines in those days, they were frequently on strike and he would quite often go to work and then come home and say, “No, we’re on strike”, you know.

But really and truly I was the breadwinner as far as the family was concerned but when I joined…You were asking about my parents. My mother was rather a quiet woman. She ran the house as best she could. I was helping her quite a bit. It was hard going. Dad wasn’t earning much money and I was earning much more than he would

and so I sort of helped out the family by providing them with all the fruit and vegetable they would want. Dad did try to grow things in the back yard. He would plant a row of peas or something of that sort and then of course my pony would get out and eat them. I became quite attached to the pony I had. He was a pretty pony. I was offered

…a man offered to buy him from me once when I had him in the blacksmith’s shop. He said he would make a good show pony and he wanted his daughter to have him. And I said, “No.” I was quite attached to him then. I had an uncle by marriage who had been into horse racing in early life. His father trained horses and he

went into riding and he presented me with a small saddle. I think they called it a training saddle, very light, and I used to ride the pony when I had a bit of time because where we lived the end of the road used to just go off into the bush. It was good riding country and… what did I want to tell you? This was getting back to my father.

The horse was very friendly. He used to…I’m talking more about the horse now than my father.

Well by that I meant that he wasn’t at all close to me.

He was very critical as far as I was concerned. My mother was more…I was closer to my mother than to my father. If that’s a way I can put it. If I wanted anything it would be always be through my mother. I had a brother three years younger than I and I felt my father was more inclined to him. He didn’t want him to follow the same

lines as I did. And we were distinctly different personalities.

Well she was one of eleven children, I think, in that family. She had lots of sisters but apart from associating with

her sisters, helping them out when she could or they helped her out quite a bit too, she never belonged to any groups and she didn’t have much outside life other than home.

Yeah, that’s right.

That’s right.

Yes she was.

I don’t know, I don’t follow that.

Oh I would think my mother’s family, her brothers particularly. She had two brothers who took part in the First World War. One was in the army and one was in the navy. Uncle Bill as we called him, he was in the navy and he had a great influence on me and I think he was one that influenced me to join the navy.

I…What am I thinking here?

I think he had the greatest influence on me because I had talked to him about it and he said, “The navy is one of the services I would recommend. You can go anywhere, you can do anything providing you do the right thing and keep your record

clean.” And he was a blacksmith by trade and it was he that I used to go to with my pony to get him shoed and so forth and I was close to Uncle Bill and not so close to my father’s family. I never new my grandparents on my father’s side. I knew the grandparents on my mother’s side. But the thing was that

I…as far as going into the services were concerned, I had a number of mates you’d call them and we were together one time. We were close to Merewether Beach. We spent a lot of our time at Merewether Beach. A few of us had been for a swim and we came up to the Hotel and we were having a drink and a few of the boys said, “We’re going up to the army. Are you coming up with us.’ And I said, “No. I don’t want to be in the army.”

I had a particular friend at work. I was at the time working at BHP and he said, “I’m going into the air force. Would you like to join the air force with me?” And again I said, “No. I’m not inclined to join the air force.” But when I saw a public notice in the Newcastle Morning Herald saying that there was a recruiter coming up to Newcastle on a particular date at Adam San Drill Hall, the time and told

me what requirements we needed to enlist with him. It was you had to have at least hight school education and you had to be accustomed to handling small boats. What else? And one of the conditions was you had to be prepared to spend at least two years with the Royal Navy. I said, “Well that’s for me.” So I went and enlisted. I

didn’t consult my parents at all. And then I went home and I said, “I’ve joined the navy.” And my father’s reaction to my mother was, “What did you let him do that for?” He wasn’t at all happy about it and from my mother’s point of view she said, “Well how are we going to get on without you?” Because she was relying on what money I was paying into the upkeep of the family.

I said, “Well the BHP have offered to make up my salary. The shortfall between the civilian pay and the navy pay and they will make up the difference.” So I said, “You can collect that money from the BHP and I will just depend on my own.” And the BHP did say to me, “We’ll make up the difference between your pay and the service pay

and as you gain rank so will diminish the amount.” So that held me in check because I thought all the way through my years of service, “I can’t afford to take money away from the family.” So that was the way it went and my mother was quite happy about that.

Well schooling. I couldn’t go as long in schooling as I would have liked to have done. My parents just couldn’t afford it, school clothes, and sports clothes and so forth. That just couldn’t be done.

When I left, as I say, I intended to find work and I got into this little business that I set up. I went to tech at night and I did a diploma entrance course. My idea then was that if I could get into something like metallurgy I could get in with the steel works and

I could do the metallurgy course. But they informed me then having been through the preparatory course, that you can’t do metallurgy unless you are already employed at the laboratory at the BHP. So that was frankly impossible as far as I was concerned. So that was the end of my formal education I might say. I had

…outside of work I joined the boy scouts when I was eleven. I know it was eleven because at that time I was very friendly with the Boswell family and the family used to own a set of boxing gloves and we used to go up to their place and put on the gloves and spar around on their front lawn and so forth. And they

put it to me once, the boys were in the scouts and they said, “Why don’t you come down to the scouts’ hall on Tuesday nights?” They said, “We have a gymnasium down there and you can work out there.” So I took them up on that and I went down on Tuesday nights. This was another influence towards the navy because the instructor there was a petty officer from the naval reserve, Petty Officer Civil. He used to come out and he was the instructor

in the gymnastics and so he was quite a fine fellow too. The thing was that the Newcastle show was coming on and he said, “We’ll put on a tableau for the show.” So they selected me as part of this tableau and just before this show was to come off some of the scout leaders came along to see just how we were progressing. They said, “Who is that fellow? He is not one of ours.”

I hadn’t bothered to join the scouts. I just went along to their gymnasium. So it was…They said, “What are we to do? It’s too late to pull you out of the tableau but can we get you to come into the scouts? How old are you?” I said, “I’m eleven.” They said, “You’re really too young. Twelve is the joining age of the scouts but we’ll make an exception and we’ll sort of bring you in.” And this was one of the things that was good for the navy too.

One of the questions they asked me was, “Were you ever in the scouts and what rank were you?” I said, “I was a patrol leader.” And so that was a good point as far as they were concerned. So I stayed with the scouts until I was about sixteen and they went into rover scouting and at that time I became interested in the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association]. Again it was the fact that they had a beautiful gymnasium there.

Well they had all sorts of physical activities like the rugby club and I became quite a regular visitor to the YMCA. I became a social secretary there. I used to run the dances and the things of that sort. The YMCA and the YWCA [Young Women’s Christian Association] were both in the same building on different floors and

and we had great success in providing the social activities in that way.

Oh very much so. I mean I had…before I started this business as I said I went round to various places and put my name

in for a job but I didn’t get a very good reception. You had to really know somebody. It wasn’t just what do you know but who do you know? And that was the case in Newcastle anyhow. It was very difficult.

Oh well if we went back to my schooling days

a lot of the….the primary school that I went to was nothing like a primary school now days. Most of the children that went alone there went along bare foot. The parents just couldn’t afford to put shoes on their feet. Some of them were in dire straits. I remember there was one young girl in our class that she couldn’t speak very well. Her father had endeavoured

to destroy his family with an open razor and he had cut part of her throat, he had killed himself. There were lots of suicides around about us in those days and it was really a dreadful time.

Oh just that there was no work. There was no way a man could

upkeep his family. There was no social services as there are today.

That’s right. Yes. Yes. I was very much aware of it in the early days.

Yes. I would usually wear sandshoes. It was sandshoes and

you know even to say, “I want to play on a football team.” Soccer was the game we played then but no one could afford a pair of soccer boots. It was just that you’d play in your ordinary shoes or not at all.

No. I can’t put my finger onto any influence it had on me except that...

It is very hard to put it. Some people were sympathetic and did what they could for those that were

worse off than themselves. But I remember small things like they had inspectors that used to come round to the house to see what conditions you had. They weren’t looking to see whether you were comfortable or anything like that. They were looking for loopholes. “All right. You’re on

the dole. Should you not be doing something better?” As I say my mother came from a large family and one of her sisters was quite well off and she would buy something for my mother and I can remember Mum being quite upset because this inspector came round and he said, “How can you afford that?” She said, “My sister gave it to me.”

And it upset her to think that she wasn’t supposed to have any niceties in the house at all. That was the inspectors role was to say, “These people are not as badly off as they claim to be.” It was really food coupons and things like that that they used to issue in those days. I remember one of my scouting friends particularly, his father had a grocery business.

He sold just about all forms of groceries through his shop. People went to him for supplies. When he sold out to an English family who came out here, the Englishman was quite a nice fellow and he gave credit to lots of the people who were poorly off. In other words he’d supply the groceries

on credit and he never got paid. He eventually went bankrupt. That was the way it was. People just took the food. They knew they couldn’t afford to pay it but they took it from him because he was that kind of man. He was prepared to carry it and hoped that things would change and people could afford to pay it and he’d get his money in return.

Yes. There were a few public-spirited people like that but…

It seemed to me to be just to catch people out.

I can’t understand it

and that’s what upset my mother to think that a man would come round and sort of go through the house and look and say, “How can you afford that sort of thing?”

Yes.

That’s right.

Well it upset me a little bit. I don’t think it had much to do with

forming of character but I’ve heard my mother and father in those days, I could hear them deciding, “What are we going to do. Are we going to get a tin of condensed milk or are we going to do something other than that?” They had to choose very carefully just what they purchased with this coupon system. So they were in very

poor circumstances really. That’s why my mother was very upset really when I said I joined the navy. I said, “Well all right. You take what money comes from BHP.” My young sister, she is eleven years younger than myself. She said she remembers it quite well, that she used to go over to BHP with my mother each fortnight and collect the money from there.

Yes. While I was in the services.

I thought it was. I thought it was. It restricted me though because later I was twice recommended for an officers training course and I declined because I knew that I’d take money away from the family so that was the way it went.

BHP had put it to me that way. That they would make up the difference until I gained rank and as I gained rank so the amount coming form BHP would lesson. If I went hight enough and took an officers training course and became an officer with a civilian income to match more or less what I’d get outside, well there wouldn’t be any money coming from there. It would diminish as I took rank.

Yeah.

Well I think the influence of the scout movement

and the time that I spent in the YMCA, I feel sure that that lead me along a path that I did have feelings towards my fellow man sort of thing and aim to do the right thing.

No. I was thinking along a different track all together.

Before you said we would record this I started out to tell you how I made a pet of my pony. I really, really liked this animal and I had a parting with him eventually. But when I had him we built sliprails down in the corner of the back yard. Well of course my pony just got his teeth in the

sliprails and knew how to slip them himself and go through and destroy my father’s vegetable garden. If my mother put a rice custard out on the windowsill to cool off my pony would go along and help himself to us. He would unlatch the front gate which had a latch over it and he could open up the gate if he wanted to. My younger brother decided that he would like to ride the pony sometimes

but he only ever attempted once. He took him up into the bush. My pony came back first. My brother came back on foot. He was never then able to get near the pony. It would pigroot and play up generally when he got near. So whatever he did when he went up into the bush I don’t know. But my father to, he took the wrong attitude towards the pony. The pony

playfully would as I went to put his feet in the box he would grab my clothing in his mouth and my father took it that he was going to bite him. To correct him he got a paling which he reckoned wouldn’t hurt him but would make a lot of noise and he slapped and slapped the pony with a fence paling. And after that he could never get near the pony. So when I got to about age eighteen

my mother and I were the only two that could handle the pony at all in our family. And by that time I had become social secretary as I said of the YMCA and I was getting into going dancing, going out with the girls and so forth and my mother said, “If you are going to be away you’ll have to get rid of the pony because I can’t look after him all the time

if you’re going to go away for a weekend or something of that sort.” That was when I had to sell of and get rid of him. But the chap that bought him from me, whenever he lost the pony he would always come up to our place because the pony would come back home. He’d undo the gate and come in.

He was really, yeah. He was a beautiful animal and I really treasured him. We

didn’t have a dog or a cat or anything of that sort so that was it.

Oh four years, five…four years. So there you are.

Not a lot. The one that was in the army, he

came to live with us. He was a bachelor. He had never married and he had shrapnel in his hip which had been there for a long time. They said they couldn’t take it out in those days. They said, “You’re just going to have to put up with that.” He walked with a limp. But he didn’t talk to us a lot about it. I can’t say he did but the great uncle that I

had, he was one that made a scrapbook. He took great interest in the army. I borrowed books from him that were published and I got quite a good insight into what happened in World War I from the clippings and the books that he bought on the war as it was going on. He followed it through. He was an Englishman or a Welshman I should say.

Well it didn’t seem to be such a horrible sort of a thing. They were inclined to make a joke of things. The cartoonists in the books that he presented to me anyhow sort of said, “It’s not what you were, It’s what you are now” and all that sort of thing.

They were quite entertaining really and I didn’t have any fear of war. When I joined the navy I didn’t think of war as being such a cruel thing. I was well aware that people were being killed but I never had any thoughts of being killed myself. I always prayed that I would never be dismembered. Never lose a leg or lose an arm or

be injured severely. As far as being killed was concerned that didn’t bother me one bit. I had no fears as far as that was concerned.

Yes. That’s right. Yeah, to a point. I wanted to be in it and yet I was discriminating. I said, “No, I don’t want the army, I don’t want the air force. The navy is what I would like to get into” and then I saw the opportunity when the recruiting officer came to Newcastle.

I suppose looking on at my uncle Bill, that’s my mother’s mother. He was ex-navy, World War I. I looked…He was more of a father figure to me than my own father was and he recommended it more or less to me. He said, “If you do the right thing and behave yourself you can

go anywhere and do anything that you want.” And I found that that was the case. In the years that I was in the navy I was never refused a request. I was requested to do certain things and we will talk about that. But they treated me very well. I think perhaps the name may have helped a bit. Churchill was a very popular name in those days and I went to Britain and there were many doors opened to me in Britain

and even the ships I visited I think everybody treated me with kit gloves until they found out just which side of the fence I was on. But so it went. I do believe that my name did help quite a lot. I don’t know whether I should be talking about this later when I come to war years.

I had yes. I had put my name in with them and I had said I would like to be employed in that way.

Well initially I thought that I would be able to get into metallurgy but

that door was closed to me. I couldn’t get a job in the laboratory but they offered me a clerical job so I said, “All right. I’ll take that.” So that was how I came to be under the secretary. He was really my top boss, the secretary of the BHP in Newcastle.

Eighteen, nineteen. Not to sure now. About nineteen.

About three years.

Oh well I don’t know how you mean? What were they like?

Well I didn’t find any difficulties with BHP. They treated me fairly well. But they…I was in a sort of position where they were sort of training their people to go through the plant itself. It was a big plant

and so there are various mills and so I found that I was put into a sort of a tally clerks position to start with and kept tally of the production of plate steel and then put into the office, the little office in the complex itself which dealt with the plate steel, the orders from the various people who used the plate steel in Sydney particularly

and we would make up the shipments that had to go down to Briscoes and various iron and steel people that used that product. So then they would move staff from one office to another you see, and move them round the plant getting them used to the whole set up. And I found that interesting.

Oh yes. Yes. It was a big complex. I thought you would understand that.

Oh yes. It employed thousands. It was the backbone of Newcastle as far as employment was concerned.

They used to bring the ore in, in the ships and they would put it through the smelters and you could go and see the fellows working on furnaces, you know the red-hot jobs, bringing out molten steel. The plate mill comes particularly to my mind. They would bring out the plate steel that was red hot

and then with bars and that trying to steer it into cutters that would cut all the edges off and then roll it out to the thickness they wanted. And then the big cranes would come over, magnetic cranes would come over and they would take the plates off and put them in a stack. It is hard to put it into words.

Well

it was the whole process from the ore right through the smelting to making steel to pouring it and getting it to smaller blocks that they could then heat up and roll into plates and that sort of thing and then, of course, eventually going to a guillotine that would cut the plate to the size that the customer required. And then of course they

employed people painting the names of the people who were to go to whatever order they were filling. And there was the shipping side of it where they had to be loaded up and put onto rail or ships or whatever. It was quite a big complex really.

That was only one side of it. They rolled out plates there and then you’d go to another mill where they rolled out rolls

…Oh I don’t know. Anything to do with steel they brought it out.

Well, let me think. It was one of the top jobs with BHP. I think I was aiming a bit high perhaps but you’d have to

know the chemical side of the whole thing. You’d have to know the laboratory, just how steel was made. It’s hard to say but it was a highly paid job. Some of the top men in BHP were metallurgists. They had sort of graduated through the laboratory and through

the metallurgy side of things.

I don’t know. I suppose the BHP put some restriction on the course. They said that you can’t do a course in metallurgy unless you are already employed in the laboratories so it was just not, the course wasn’t open. It wasn’t open to everybody. It was sponsored by BHP I think.

Well they did. I think they did expect me back and I did go back after…

Yeah. I had better.

Yes. When I was discharged, of course, I had to think again about employment. I went up to Newcastle first of all and I went out to BHP and seen the…I got an interview with the secretary there and the job that I was offered was exactly

the same as the job I had left four years beforehand. People that I had worked beside had moved up the scale quite a bit and I couldn’t have anything more. They put it to me quite bluntly that, “Well you weren’t here when we needed you. Now you’ve come back you come back in exactly the same position as you were when you left and you work your way up from there.” Now I didn’t

like the sound of that. To me it was a pretty poor offer really and beside the fact that by that time I was planning to marry a Sydney girl who didn’t want to leave Sydney and we were thinking of getting married and so I said, “I’ll have to find a job in Sydney.”

Well the feelings in the early days were this Second World War wouldn’t last more than six months. In the beginning we were sort of deferring enlistment until

it looked like it was going to go on longer than we expected. I think that when I enlisted BHP probably took the view, “Well we don’t need all the men and if you wanted to be in the services you’re contributing to the welfare of the country anyway.” They probably took that view at the time. But when time went on and they were getting short of men they had to close

the gates. When I went back in to visit them I met up with a few of the fellows in the mills that I had worked with. They said, “You were lucky. You got out before the gates were closed. We would have liked to have joined the services but the BHP wouldn’t allow us.” They did at some time or other say, “We have lost enough men to the services.”

Yes. That’s right.

And that was it. See some of them were there and they couldn’t get out of it because it was a protected industry. And I was one of the fortunate ones I think that got out before that was imposed on us.

Oh where was I? No, No. I can’t clearly remember.

Well as I said a while a go, when the war broke out the general opinion was that it would all be over in six months. They thought it would be over pretty quickly. We went to the First World War and it was four years and it wasn’t going to last like that. It was just going to be a quick battle and it would be all over.

No.

I don’t think I would have been very much aware of it. I don’t think I could have been very much aware of it.

I can’t clearly remember when war broke out or whether it looked to me as though war was looming. We did get the news where Chamberlain was going to make a pact and a treaty was signed to say we wouldn’t go to war. Of course they turned around on that and everybody was aware of that I think but no. As an individual I don’t

think I had any thoughts of it becoming a real world conflict.

November 1940.

Well yes. I do know that.

Well,

I don’t know. There seemed to be… I can’t put my finger on it at all. This is before I went to work for BHP. At that time I was…

Well maybe that was so and that is maybe why I got a job.

You know up to that time I just was outside of BHP but then I was glad to get into it.

Yeah. No, wait a moment… Let me think.

That’s right.

That’s right, yeah.

No. Wait a minute. No. I was in BHP at that time. I can’t clearly remember the dates now.

Well the public notice in the newspaper was attractive as far as I was concerned. It

was the forces that I wanted to be in. It specifically said, ‘for service with the Royal Navy. Be prepared to go to Britain and serve with the Royal Navy’ because there was no war on out here at that time. The pacific war just wasn’t on the horizon. We couldn’t see it and so I thought, “Well this is what I want.” I think I always

had an idea that I would like to travel. Having this uncle I spoke of who took a great interest in me, in the First World War. He spoke to me quite a bit about things at home, back in Britain and I thought, “I’d like to go there. I’d like to be back in those parts” and so it was an opportunity to go to Britain.

And so there was a spirit of adventure as well as joining the service that I wanted to be in.

Oh we always regarded Britain as home as far as we were concerned. It was always spoken of as home. Most of the people in our neighbourhood were of British

descent and they spoke of home as though they had never left it. They were only over here temporarily sort of thing. That’s the way it was and the people that I went to school with were the children of Welsh and Irish and English. All British people. We didn’t have many other countries. I can’t think of any children who were

Greek or Italian or anything of that sort. They were all Brits in one way or another.

That came later I think. No.

Well we are nationalistic Australians even now. But even now we’re still British at heart. We subscribe to the magazine This England and it’s a beautiful magazine and we enjoy reading it. It takes up back. We have both seen it now and been back a few times and so it means a lot us.

At the same time my wife belongs to the flag association and so forth. She is nationalistic as far as Australia is concerned and yet she still values the fact that her parents were English and…

It might have been a little different with me but see Hazel is first generation. Her parents came out from the UK. My parents were both born in Australia so I was a second-generation Australian sort of thing.

No, personally no but the people around me did and when you were speaking to adults they would say, “At home we did this and that.”

You know, this great uncle I had - did I say I never knew my father’s father, I never knew my Grandfather on that side? But this great uncle, he often spoke of home. And he told me, “We all went to private schools at home. We didn’t go to public schools like you people do here.” I suppose that influenced me too.

Well the newspaper advertisement or the public notices I should say

just gave us the date and the fact that the recruiting officer would be at Adam’s Town Drill Hall between such and such hours and the conditions on which we would be enlisting. So I went along there and I didn’t know many of the people. I know one fellow in particular, he was also working at BHP and he went along at the time that I did,

And commander, he wasn’t a commander, he was the Lieutenant Frolic came up from Sydney and we had to go through sort of an interrogation in so far as what out interests were. And they asked me, the boy scouts was one thing and they asked me, “Did you ever join the boy scouts and what rank did you have?” That all went down on record. They put you through tests like being able to read a clock backwards, upside down

sort of thing. Well all right the scouting was good. You knew how to handle ropes and tie knots and all the rest of it. And what else? They particularly tested us for hearing because we were going into what they now call Sonar. It was called asdic in those days. It was a secretive sort of a thing but we needed to have near perfect hearing.

They put us through tests the way they do. And then they took us up town and took us into a doctor’s room and he went over us physically and checked us out to see if we had any abnormalities or anything and there wasn’t much else. There wasn’t much else. There were sickbay attendants there taking notes all the time and putting down figures. Measured us up; weight and height and all the rest, just things like that

and generally overhauled. Then they took all their records back to Sydney. They said, “You’ll hear from us in due course.” This is how my enlistment went. This chap that I met who worked BHP I said, “Look, if you hear anything from them let me know and I’ll do likewise.” So he told me one Thursday I think it was in the week. He said, “I’ve got a

letter from the navy and I’ve got to be present at Rushcutters Bay on next Monday. They’ve sent a travel warrant with it to get a train and go down and report to Rushcutters Bay.” So that Thursday when I got home I was looking for the mail. No, there was nothing in the mail, then Friday. Nothing came on Friday. So Saturday morning and then I rang him back and said, “Who signed the letter that you got?” And he said,

“Commander Newcomb.” So on Saturday morning I got on the telephone. “I want to speak to Commander Newcomb.” And so I stirred up Commander Newcomb then. I think I was a bit stroppy in those days and I said, “I want to know why I haven’t been called up. This friend of mine, this workmate of mine, he went through the procedure at the same time I did and he has got his notice

to report on Monday morning.” He said, “Well there is some question about your weight.” I said, “No. There is nothing wrong with my weight.” I said, “I’m nine stone nine. That’s my fighting weight.” I said, “I’m into amateur boxing.” I was at that time. I was training with the boxers anyway. The thing was I said, “I’m nine stone nine and I’m five foot six and a half.” Something like that. And he said, “Your weight here

makes it sound, there must have been a slip of the pen or something like that. It’s nineteen stone, not nine stone.” I must have been a pretty huge sort of a bloke. I said, “I haven’t got an ounce of fat on me and I’m a better man than this other fellow.” I praised myself up and he turned around and said, “Look. If you are as good as you say you are be here on Monday morning.” But she said, “I’m sorry it is too late to send you a travel warrant so

if you are prepared to come down at your own expense you’re in.” So I talked my way into it.

That was where he said there was some question about your weight.

No. I didn’t think it was that way. I thought that he must have thought some how or other that either I was shorter or something. But he said, “There’s some

question about your weight.” I said, “My weight is perfect. I have been in training and I haven’t got an ounce of fat on me. I am as fit as any man could be.” I went on with it and I was really telling him. I didn’t think…I realized later that you don’t speak to commanders like that but I told him in no uncertain terms that they were missing out on me.

He was an excellent fellow. I met up with him later and I’ve had occasion to speak with him a couple of times. In later years I told him of our conversation and he said, “Did I say that?” I said, “You did.” He was an excellent man.

I bought a ticket. It is funny because I hadn’t

been to Sydney all that much. I didn’t know Sydney. I had an aunt down here and we used to come down for the show at times, my mate and I, and we’d sleep on the floor at my Aunt’s place. I went and bought myself a ticket. I went down on the train in time to be at Rushcutters Bay as they wanted and

when I got off the train at Central I had to ask a policemen of all people, “How do I get to Rushcutters Bay?” And he said, “Get a tram here and go up to King’s Street and get any tram going up King’s street and it will take you out to Rushcutters Bay.” I said, “Where’s Kings Street?” And he said, “Where are you from?” Well there were a lot of people passing through Central about that time in services from the country and I said I was from Newcastle and he said, “And you don’t know where Kings Street is?

Get on a tram and ask and he’ll tell you that.” Anyway that was all right. I was as green as that. I didn’t know where Kings Street was. I got there out there okay and I just sailed through with the rest of them.

Well I had to get off the tram I was on from the railway at the intersection of Kings Street and get a tram up Kings Street because a tram going up Kings Street would take me out to Rushcutters Bay.

Oh well there were quite a few of us milling around in civilian clothes. And they put us through another medical testing hearing and general overall testing but hearing in particularly. Once we got through the medical side of things they just had us line up and we had

to take the oath. Well the fellow that had enlisted or he worked at BHP and he had been called up, he backed out when it came to taking the oath because he was a married man and his wife had told him that if he signed up that she wouldn’t be there when he came back. He knew there was the possibility of going over to the UK and his wife put it to him that if he went off

she wouldn’t be waiting for him. So he backed out. He eventually went into the Merchant Navy. He went onto BHP ships really. At that time that’s where we just lined up and we all took the oath together. We didn’t take it individually. You were given the opportunity to step out if you wanted to and he was one of those who stepped out when it came to that point.

When we went to Rushcutters Bay there was no accommodation for people and so what they did was gave us a uniform, old kit and so forth and put some money in our hands and said, “Go up around Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and find yourself some accommodation.” So I did that.

I thought I had already covered that but do I go over it again?

We were given a uniform and we were also given a hammock which was just a canvas thing

that had eyeholes in it and we were given the clues and so forth and we had to put the whole thing together ourselves and do our hammocks up. From there on it was schoolwork, it went back to school kind of thing. That was about all that Rushcutters Bay consisted of in those days. They had a canteen where they provided meals and so forth but there was no accommodation in the place itself.

There were schoolrooms there and so we had to go to school then and learn all about what asdics were all about, tracking submarines and so forth. We did a short course there and we passed out, if we passed out of that part of it we were on the way to the UK [United Kingdom]. They took us then down to

Kuttabul which was down on the harbour alongside Garden Island. It is just an old ferryboat and they put us on board there and they were waiting for a convoy to take us away sort of thing. And they gave us very short notice on that because I remember I went ashore one night and I took a little kitbag because I was going to stay overnight and I left it in one of the shops on the Quay.

I asked the fellow would he mind if for me. I will be back later and then we got the call that we would be going out on the Aquitania that night and I couldn’t get back to pick up my kit bag so I left it to my landlady. I rang her and said, “Can you go down to this particular shop and ask them and get it down to the Aquitania for me.” So she did that but I didn’t see if for a while and I thought

it was lost all together but they only had it….They had the name Churchill on it but they had sub lieutenant Churchill but it meant that I was on subflat. But anyway it turned up and that worked out all right.

Well we took everything with us. Once we went away we had out big kit bag with clothing and

we had our hammocks, sailors carry their hammocks just about everywhere. We are not like the army. We don’t carry kitchen utensils or eating utensils. We just have our uniforms and that’s about it.

Oh yes. You could carry personal items if you wished to but as far as I was concerned I didn’t have anything particular.

I know the chaps I went away there was about twenty of us out of my class who went away. I was saying earlier that Bill Cooper was the youngest and I was the eldest in the group of twenty and one fellow had a big book of Henry Lawson’s poems and so forth. I said, “Are you going to carry that around the world with you?” But he did. He was so wrapped up in Australian poetry.

They were mostly…The people I went away with were mostly university students or budding lawyers. They were a really good group we had amongst us. When we got to the UK we were told….I’m getting ahead of myself now.

Yes.

Just wearing headphones and listening to…this was all….I don’t know how they do it but they apparently recorded the sounds that the asdics listen to when they sent sonic waves out through the water

and you listen for an echo. If the echo comes back you have to distinguish what that echo is and whether it’s a ship or a shoal of fish or anything of that sort that can give you an echo and they sound differently. We had to be able to identify those things. And we did exactly the same thing when we got over to the UK. The UK wouldn’t believe that we went through a course like that at Rushcutters Bay. They said,

“No, It’s not outside Britain.” We had to swear to secrecy on it. We were told we were not to keep diaries and we were not to make any record of these things.

Anti Submarine Detection...

Anti Submarine Detection… what’s the C for?

Anti-Submarine Detection… Sonar’s easier.

Well it was a British invention that was designed to

detect submarines in particular. It was an anti-submarine device. The Germans didn’t have it on their ships but we had it on ours and so we were able to pick up their submarines when they didn’t expect to be detected. But it’s not easy to describe.

They have an oscillator on board the ship depending on the type of ship. The one I was on had a fixed ship. You had to steer the ship according to where you wanted the oscillator and others just turned around. But the thing was the oscillators sent out these super sonic sound waves through the water. And it’s something like Radar is with aircraft, you know? They would

pick up the aircraft on a screen? Well we could do the same thing there only we picked it up on a graph sort of thing. It was an iodized sort of paper that you could see the wave come out and if there was a blip in it you could see it on the paper as well as hearing an echo or something in your ear. So it’s all recorded there. We

had to listen to various sounds. You could listen to the sounds in the sea like porpoises and that, they make noises and even a shoal of fish sounds very solid at times.

Well you get a, depending on the size and the mass of fish but it could sound like a very solid echo.

You could mistake it for a submarine or something of that sort in the water. I can show you a photograph there in the Mediterranean where one of the destroyers got a distinct echo coming off somewhere and they went in and they dropped a depth charge on it. I’ve got a photograph of them holding fish like that. The fish were about

about that big but everybody got in on it. The fish all came to the surface and fed the lot of us. We shared it with all the ships around about. But that was just a mass of fish.

If it was coming off a submarine or anything metallic thing like that it was a really distinct sharp echo, a distinct sharp sound.

You would get other sounds that were much softer and you get other noises mixed in with it. You can say, “Oh well, it’s not metallic. It’s not a submarine. It’s something else.”

Well you hear it sometimes quite regularly on TV [television] now. That’s what we had to listen to all the time. We didn’t

only rely on the sound waves. We could also record hydrophone effects. We could switch off the soundwaves and then it was like a microphone and we could listen to the beat of propellers of other ships round about and you could even track a submarine by that way if you knew it was there. You could

stop pinging as they used to put it. They described it as a ping. You often could just listen for the sound of the motor to see whether it was moving, which direction it was moving and that sort of thing.

Well we were tested for hearing particularly. We were tested more than once.

Oh well there was the schooling. You had to get through the schooling part of it. That was to do a lot with the machinery that went with it because on board the ship we would have to maintain the machinery that was there. You know, the batteries and condensers and what not, you know? Electrical work really. We had to have an understanding of what was necessary

to maintain this equipment.

Well my recollections of it was that I had nobody to see me off. It was all very sudden. Too soon for anybody to come down from Newcastle and

I just felt very happy about it really. I got up in the rigging, high up in the rigging of the Aquitania and I was able to look out at the people on the Domain who were waving to us as we went out. Because it was a big convoy. It wasn’t just the Aquitania. There was the Queen Mary and the Mauritania and I don’t know what the others but it was quite a big convoy that went out.

And there were thousands of AIF [Australian Imperial Force] people and nurses. Even on board the Aquitania the navy was only a small group compared with the army and the nurses on board and I imagine the same…I don’t know what was on the Mary and the Mauritania and those boats but it was quite a big convoy that went out. It was the middle of the day and it was a beautiful sunny day and we were going down Sydney

Harbour and everybody is sort of seeing us off. It was quite exciting really.

The mood on board the ship? I think it was very good. I was taken with our fellows. When I say our fellows I’m mean the AIF boys and that. They had a marvellous sense of humour some of them. They made a very happy trip of it really. To begin with weather wise

we were very fortunate. We went out on a beautiful day and they said, “You’ll know when you go across the Bite because you are going below South Australia there, it’s always rough going across the Bite.” And it was not. We went down around the bottom of Tasmania and came up through the bite and it was like travelling through the lake. We went through the Indian Ocean and it was really beautiful.

It was a good time of the year and the boys of course set up their two up schools on board the deck and we had boxing matches and… what else? I’ll tell you something funny about it. The diet on board. Apparently they had cases and cases of eggs brought on board, lots, because they had thousands of people there

and what they used to do was just turn the steam on the cases of the eggs. Don’t cook them individually. They would come out hard-boiled, really hard boiled almost black inside. And they’d feed us up eggs and pickles and we had pickles and eggs. We had that a number of times so that when the officer of the watch came through, “Any complaints?” Someone started, “Cock A Doodle Doo” and everyone

took it up. “Cock A doodle Doo.” We were fed eggs so often, hard-boiled, really hard boiled eggs that some of the boys just wouldn’t eat them because they said, “Fancy eating that stuff.” I would eat somebody else’s share because I was that way that I would eat to keep my strength up. I couldn’t see anything wrong with eggs even if they were really hard-boiled. But it amused me to have these fellows.

The officer couldn’t make himself heard because everyone was ‘cock a doodle dooing’. They made it clear we were tired of having eggs.

Oh I don’t think the diet changed very much. It was all set up and that was the way it was going to be. It was a big job feeding thousands of troops like that.

Well it was a beautiful ship really. I was fortunate because we went away with,

as I say we were a small group. We had one officer in charge of us, his name was Bill Davis. At that time Bill Davis was only a lieutenant. He finished up as a rear admiral. And his son, I think, he has come through since is also Bill Davis. But this Bill Davis was a lieutenant and he was in charge of our group and he treated

us very well. He selected me as his runner. I had to report to his cabin every morning. I usually went down while he was a breakfast. We went though the mail and censored things and that type of thing and if there was anything to be delivered to the nurses or the troops well I was sent on a mission. I was his boy sort of thing. So we had a pretty close relationship there.

I found him a really good man. He was too. When we were going across…Well I had better talk about the crossing first. As we through the Indian Ocean it was beautiful weather and the flying fish used to come off the bows like that. I had never seen them before but you could watch them for hours. You saw the fish

just come off the bows and diving in. The nights were really balmy. I said earlier that we were in sub-flat which was below decks a couple of decks down and we were supposed to sling our hammocks down there and that was where we were to sleep. I didn’t do that. I took mine up onto the fo’c’s’le and I rigged it up on the fo’c’s’le so that when I was lying in my hammock I was watching the mast

going back and forth like this. I put a, you always had a spare hammock. I put my spare hammock over the top of my actual hammock so that I didn’t get any due or spray onto myself. I slept out there beautifully. The only thing was I had to get up bright and early the next morning and take my hammock up because the crew of the Aquitania would come through with their hoses. They always hosed the down the decks first thing in the morning.

To me it was a really beautiful trip. We went up to the Maldives Islands and it was when we left there that the convoy split up. The Mary and the Mauritania went up over to Singapore over that way and we went on to Bombay. As far as I know the Aquitania was the only one that went to Bombay. Some may have gone into the Red Sea.

About a month. Now this is where Davis was a good man. Before we got into Bombay he got us together and he gave us a lecture on what to do while we were in Bombay. He said, “Now it looks as though we may have to stay in Bombay for quite a while. We are waiting for a convoy to take us around and while you are there,” He said, “If you behave like men I’ll treat you like men.”

He said, “The only time I want to see you is on pay day.”

No. It’s all right. It is only my throat. It won’t effect how it records I hope…. Yeah, he put it to us that way that you behave and he said, “If I have no complaints from you the only time I want to see you is on pay day.” And that was the only time we did see him the whole time we were there but he spoke to us about what to do while we were there. He said,

“When you go back home, if you get back home, people will say did you go onto Malabar Hill and did you do this or that?” He told us what to expect and where to go and what to see there. I thought it was very helpful in that way. The thing was he said, “We are going to be there a while so I won’t put you into barracks and if I do you’ll have to be deloused when you come out.” He said, “I’m going to split you into two

groups of ten, ten into one hotel and ten into another hotel. You will be living with civilians so you’ll just have to behave yourselves and take care.” So that was the way it worked out. The same Bill Cooper was one that shared a room with me and we lived there and ate the same food as the civilians. We used to go down to breakfast in the morning and there was plenty of fruit and fresh bananas and that sort of thing

and the food was very good. What we used to do, well Bill and I anyway and one other fellow, we used to go down to Breach Candy Swimming Pool each morning. Breach Candy was a Europeans only swimming pool. The Indians weren’t allowed to use it. They had both indoor and outdoor pools and beautiful lawns each side and

you could sit back in the deck chairs and the waiters would come around and ask if you wanted drinks or anything else. That was the first photograph I sent back home. Just lying back in a deck chair there in my swimming costume and I put on the back, ‘In action in Bombay’. In action was right. But we had a wonderful time there.

With the locals?

Well it was a strange place. I wrote quite a letter to my young sister and she took it to school and the school mistress had said, “You should be writing for the newspapers,” but I tried to describe Bombay to her. It is both modern and the old Bombay. They still have their cattle walking

through the streets and so forth. Then there was the more modern part. We were up right near the gateway of India if you knew Bombay at all. We were in Frederick’s Hotel which was just behind Green’s Hotel, which is a big tourist place. Oh one of the things I remember there was too the

cinemas usually started about ten o’clock at night. They had beautiful barmy weather. They said there would be no rain the whole time we were there because it doesn’t rain in those months. They know just when the rain is going to come. And we were there in the early part of the year and they said, “We won’t get rain before April.” The nights were beautiful so we used to go out and have a drink or two and then we would go to the cinema.

And you know how sailors have little runts? I remember Baker. Baker was one fellow that even when we were in class you used to have to nudge him every now and then. He would go to sleep anywhere. He…Oh and they allowed cigarette smoking in the cinema. They had little cigarette trays in the back of the seat. Apparently Baker went to sleep with the cigarette in his mouth and dropped it down into his front sort of thing and he let out a scream

that nearly brought the house down.

What was being screened? They were English films, they weren’t native films. Of course there were a lot of English people in India at that time. When we eventually came away we came away on an Orient Line boat, the Ormonde and there were English army families going back home

on board with us. That’s another part of the story but no, one of the things we did…We used to come back. We would swim most of the morning, laze around come back to the hotel for lunch and then we would have a siesta until about four o’clock in the afternoon or something like that and then we would go down around the markets. The markets were always very interesting. They were always trying to sell us things. I remember I bought a

watch. I had a gold watch that was given to me for my twenty-first birthday but I left that at home. I said, “I don’t want to take that with me.” I bought myself a watch for about ten shillings I think down at the markets but it had such a loud tick, cheep watch, that if I was sleeping with the other fellows they’d say, “Put that watch of yours under the pillow. You are keeping me awake.” The thing was too they have what they call

a thieves’ market. If you lost anything, say a gold watch or anything like that you could surely go down to the thieves’ market and buy it back again. That was where they displayed their wares.

No. I didn’t take any valuables with me. I made sure I left that sort of thing at home.

Oh Sister Street.

No, Sister Street was in Egypt. Sorry.

No, the girls in cages?

Well Davis told us about that. One of the things he said, “You might be interested in seeing the girls in cages down at Grant Road.” That was the name of the place, Grant Road. So three of us got our heads together there one night and there was a fellow Johnson there and a fellow McHewet and McHewet finished up as a doctor in

Manly. But at that time he was fresh out of a bank and he was still doing his studies while we were on board. So we put our heads together and thought we are going to do a tour of the houses of ill fame kind of thing but the three of us go together. If one weakens then the other two will drag him away. Well out of it all Johnson was the only one that was in any way attracted to one of the girls there. We started

off and we got into a Garry. You know, the driver sits up front and the three of us sat in the back. He took us to a high-class place first of all. It all looked very plush and the girls were well dressed and quite attractive and that. But we made excuses all the way along. “No. It’s too expensive.” So the Garry Driver would then take us along to another place and he took us onto a few places like that and then we said to him, “Grant Road.”

He said to us once, he had run out of places to call on us and he said, “You want Japan girl?” “Japan?” I thought he meant jump on but he was talking about Japanese girl. Apparently there was some place that he could take us where there were Japanese prostitutes. But we were tired of it by then and we said, “Just take us down to Grant Road.”

So we went down and we just went along Grant Road at a slow pace. We didn’t get out of the Garry. They were like prison cells really, right on the footbath and the girls just sat behind the bars and if you were interested they could open it up and take you behind a screen into a screened off area.

Well I felt it was the lowest of the low.

You’d be a pretty poor type if you wanted to get down there. Anyhow, we didn’t have any difficulty with the three of us except that in one of the earlier places we went to there was a rather plump young woman got around Johnno. Johnson and he was inclined to… We said, “Don’t forget we are going.” We used get a little bit scared, well not scared but we used to keep close together because some of them had men sitting on the steps

and you had to go down the steps to get out of the place and we were just a bit afraid. We kept our wits about us to make sure they didn’t produce knives and have a bit of a go at us because we were just in there to look and out again.

None at all as far as I know. It was never mentioned.

Army men?

No. I can’t recall that we ever had anything of that sort. No. I haven’t any recollection of it if there was. I feel pretty sure we didn’t have anything of that sort. But anyhow that was

a marvellous trip as I say and Bombay was very interesting. There was only one day there when Ramadan was on when we were advised to stay off the streets. We didn’t have to but they said, “Stay off the streets because they start throwing dyes and stuff around and you could get your uniform ruined” because we were in whites by that time. White long trousers and suit. They ruin your uniform because they were splashing around these

coloured dyes and so we did that. We just had a lazy day and there was only one day in Ramadan that we couldn’t get around. But there was plenty to see and it was quite interesting. There were some dances that went on there. The Mission to Seaman used to run dances there. One of the fellows got to

know one of the girls there and she asked where we were staying and she said, “If you like we can come and pick you up with a car and take you out to Juhu Beach at night and we could have coffee on the beach or something like that.” She said, “You need to bring a friend along with you because I’ll have an Anglo-Indian girl with me,” and so he asked me would I go so the four of us went out.

She turned up with a chauffer driven car and they brought along all the coffee and so forth already made and we just went out and got onto Juhu beach. There were quick sands and that there. We had to watch where we went if we went in for a swim at all it was usually in the shallows. We didn’t go out in the quicksand. And it was quite pleasant. The Anglo-Indian girl took

me to her home there one day. She wanted me to meet her mother. We went there and it was a very poor Indian class type of place, you know. Timber rooms and usually painted green or some colour like that. But that was all there was to it. It was just that they used to call and collect us and take us for a run around the place.

We met them again at the dances.

We did.

We went to a dance or the cinema at night and we ate and slept well and generally enjoyed ourselves. We were there for about a month, four weeks and a bit.

Eventually the Ormonde came along. We had to

board the Ormonde and it was to take us around to the UK. We went from Bombay down to Mombassa and Kenya and went up into the River there and we had about seven hours ashore there It was just long enough to go down round the markets and look at the native people there with the long ears and very, very dark. And we

bought some cigarettes there that were terribly strong. We could barely smoke them. They were very dark tobacco. It was just a seven-hour run we had ashore there and then we were on our way down to Cape Town. Well that was when we really struck the heavy seas. Before we got into Cape Town I was on the bridge there one night and

I was out on lookout on the wing of the bridge and the seas would come up in front of us like a big wall and crash down over. Now it was a fairly big Orient line boat and it would crash right down and spray right up to the bridge. But I found that a good way to ward off seasickness was to sing. I was never a singer but I sang my heart out up there because it was just beautiful and it made you feel so small because

here we were out in this black ocean. It was very dark. There was no moonlight and all you could see would be the wall come up in front of you and then crash down and you go down in a trough and then come up into another one. They were huge seas.

Oh my song goes round the world and I was Richard Torbera, songs that we heard on the radio so much. I was just singing for all my heart’s

content. I really enjoyed it. It was the first time we had struck really heavy seas. As I said going up had been beautiful but when we got down towards the Cape there and heading into Cape Town it was really rough. And I enjoyed it. It was exciting.

Well that’s what I say was the cure for that was to take lots of deep breaths and get out in the fresh air and

I was out in the fresh air with a bit of spray thrown in with it but it was quite good. I felt that I was so alone in a dark world. You know? There was nobody else around me. I was just out there with the sea and I just felt like that, so big. So small I should say. Anyway we went to Cape Town and the Cape Town people were very generous.

They used to come down to their wharf there and we were there for about a week. They would come down with their cars and offer to take us out somewhere for a run. So a lady took three of us, that’s right, she took us out over Table Mountain, took us over to the Constantia.

Over the other side where they had their vineyards. Sweet Constancio wines. She told us a bit of history. She took us to her home there and said that her father had come out from Chester and set up a vineyard there and he had done quite well for himself and family. And she was very good in that she took photos of the three of us and she took our names and addresses, like home addresses, and she sent them back to our families

saying that we had been in Cape Town and all was well and so it went. So they were very good like that

Yes. We did go ashore and have a few drinks together some of us, before we left because we waited there about a week and then the captain said to us, “There was no sign of a convoy so we are going to try and go across the Atlantic on our own.”

He said, “It could be dangerous so any of the civilian families that want to go ashore well get off there, now is the time to do it.” I don’t know. I think some of the army families that were going home may have got off. We don’t know about that. One of the peculiar things I found, we went ashore and had a drink or two before we took off and

in the hotels they always had a big sign up. “No Treaties.” We asked, “What’s this ‘No Treaties’?.” Well if there is a group of you you’re not allowed to buy a round of drinks. Everyone had to buy their own individual drink and it cuts down on drunkenness because you don’t feel it is your turn sort of thing. And that was very good I thought but anyway.

We left Cape Town. We were heading up to

to the West Coast of Africa up to Freetown and Sierra Leone and we found we had an outbreak of cholera on board and amongst the merchant crew. We finished up having to bury two of them at sea. They were just done up in canvas and there is a service said over them and they are slid down into the sea. So we were patting ourselves on the back saying, “We’re all right. We’ve had cholera injections,” and so forth.

We found out later they are only forty per cent effective anyway but at the time we felt quite confident that we would be okay.

You could hardly call it a funeral. A service with just a reading was given. Something that was appropriate to burying people

as you would here if you were lowering them into the grave and they just said a short prayer over them and then they were allowed to slide down a plank sort of thing and into the sea. I think they might weight their boots down or something of that sort, I don’t know. As far as we were concerned they were just encased in canvas and after a few words were said for them

they were just slipped off the side and away they went.

Well as I say we felt quite confident. We had no fears. We felt confident that we had been injected against cholera. But we learned later that those injections are not a hundred per cent. They are only about forty per cent effective so the medical profession tells us.

That is all there was to it really.

We went up into Free Town and we just stayed there a short time and there was no convoys or anything in sight so we were still on our own and we went out across the Atlantic and we must have gone almost over the mid Atlantic. We went over the top of Ireland

into the Clyde that way but all the way we were zigzagging and keeping a pretty strict lookout for submarines. I was down on the afterdeck late one day, it was evening and I saw the wake of a torpedo going past our stern. It was a florescent wake. There was no mistaking. It was a submarine that went across and just missed us

by I suppose it might have been up to forty or fifty yards away. That was the only sign we saw of the submarines. We were very fortunate. We went all the way across there and over the top of Ireland and we went into the Clyde.

Oh I just became more aware that there were submarines about. They were certainly there because they had

intercepted quite a few of the convoys coming across from Canada and so we were very much aware of the existence of submarines. But that was the only evidence that I witnessed anyway was the wake of the torpedoes that went by our stern. We must have just got by at the right time.

I don’t think we had fear.

I didn’t have any fear personally. I felt very confident that we would get through. I don’t think it ever worried me in that way. I don’t know about others. You know going away affected some people one way and some people another. One of the fellows that went away was us for the first week or so away he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. He was homesick, you know, really homesick.

I was never like that. I was glad to be away. I suppose others had different feelings but as far as I was concerned I wasn’t afraid of it.

Well I think I can say that Bill Cooper was one of my very best mates because I was more or less about five

years ahead of him I think. I could treat him more or less like my son and he seemed to look up to me a bit. I thought a lot of him. I thought he was a great guy and there were a couple of others but we got parted. No. He would be my favourite because when we were in Bombay

we always went swimming with Bill and we went out together round about the place. But on the Ormonde things were a little bit different. I can’t think of anything. The only thing I have to mention here is we went over the top of Ireland into the Clyde but we didn’t go straight up the Clyde. They pushed us into Loch Long because we were under quarantine

having had cholera on board so we flew the yellow flag to start with. But they only kept us there a few days. Then we proceeded up the Clyde right up into John Brown’s Yards and of course it was John Brown’s ship coming home and of course they ‘Cock A Doodle Dooed’ and made a great fuss of us going in there and so it was the end of the journey as far as we were concerned. We had made it to

Scotland. Do I go on from there?

When I went up the Clyde I thought it was the most beautiful place on earth because when we looked out the sides the Hillsides were like a patchwork quilt, all the yellows and greens. It was all like farmland and that but it was just like a patchwork quilt and it was an absolutely beautiful country.

I felt really excited about it. I don’t know. Hazel said she had the same feeling when I took her back there later. She got quite a stirring in the blood for Scotland.

Yes. I did too come to think

of it now. When I was at home in my late teens. Not long before I joined the navy I had a particular girlfriend there. She was living with her grandmother and her mother had died apparently and the father had gone off to marry again and she lived with her grandmother up the top end of Newcastle, up near Newcastle beach, just behind the hospital there.

She was Scottish and she took me along to the Presbyterian Church there and this old lady talked to me about Scotland and she was rather disappointed, she was telling my mother later, that she wished she had seen me before I left because she could have given me people to call on over there. She was still closely tied to Scotland. I had a great opinion of her. I thought she was a marvellous woman.

But there were other Scottish people that I met around because earlier on I was saying that our locals were pretty well all Brits. There were quite a few Scots among them. They were great people as far as I was concerned. But I did enjoy that trip up the Clyde because all they did there was they took us off the ship and took us straight to the central railway station, which I thought was like Sydney Central.

It was the big railway station in Glasgow. We were to get on a train that night and go straight down to Portsmouth. I remember we hadn’t been fed for a while and we hadn’t been paid either since we left Cape Town, we hadn’t received any money. There was Bruce Royal and myself and there was

canteen on the station and I said, “Let’s go into the Canteen to get something to eat.” But he said, “I’m broke.” And I said, “So and I but I’m hungry too.” So we went in and ordered a bit of refreshment there and when the girl came along I said, “Look I’m sorry, we’ve only just arrived and we don’t have any money.” She didn’t quite know what to do, the waitress, she went back to her people but there were some merchant navy fellows sitting near by and they paid up for us so we got a meal.

They did provide food for us later but at that time we were particularly hungry so we took advantage of the place. But they put us on a train that night. We travelled overnight to Portsmouth and that was our first experience of actual war bombing because when we pulled into Portsmouth Station it was early morning and some of the tracks were vertical

instead of being horizontal. There had been bombing the night before and we moved off the train, they moved us into the Royal Naval Barracks and even while we were being drafted into the barracks the time bombs were still going off around about the place there.

Oh which bombing?

Oh just the fact that we are into it now. We are into the southern part of England and they are particularly bombing shipyards and so forth. It wasn’t a very pleasant stay and I was glad it was only a matter of a few days that we stayed there.

I think we actually only spent two nights there and I know it rained because there were so many holes in the roof that it was hard to sling your hammock without getting a drip into it. I know the first night they gave us a bit of shore leave and you can go to the shore for a while so our first thought was, “There is a hotel up on the corner and we can go and have a drink up there.” We opened the front door and there was nothing

behind it. It was just the façade of the place and there was rubble behind it. We thought, “We are really into it now.” It didn’t effect us badly but I felt that I was glad to be out of there. About three days later they put us back on a train and back up to where we came from. Back up to Scotland, into the same railway station and we were then to get a…

We took another train I think. I can’t think of how we got down to Greenock. But anyway we got down to Greenock and then we got a ferryboat across from Greenock to Dunoon on the other side of the Loch. We were in the estuary of the Clyde by then.

Dunoon was a beautiful place. It was more a village.

The naval school that was there had been a convalescent home before the war. It had beautiful gardens with a stream running through and a bridge over the stream and it was my first sight of a plane tree I think because there was a line of plane trees and I thought they were absolutely beautiful. You know the platanus…Do you know them?

They have beautiful bark and nice

big green leaves. It was a lovely spot and the village was very nice. Reservoir up the back of the village and I found that there was an Australian up there in charge of the reservoir. He had been over there in the First World War and married a Scottish girl and he became the engineer in charge of the Reservoir. So that was a nice introduction. He took us up to his home and introduced us to his daughters. You know we didn’t have children but you know,

but anyway.

The only thing was when we first entered the Clyde we

didn’t go directly to Glasgow. We went into Loch Long and that was where we lay for a few days while the authorities satisfied themselves that there was no need for further quarantine.

I really don’t know. I suppose they checked around the people that were on board. Whether there were any complaints or any signs of cholera among the people that were on board.

But no, it was only a matter of a few days and we were on our way up.

Well for a while there we had to stay out of the area that these people had been living in. It was sort of roped off and we didn’t use that part of the ship. The people that died there, well that was sort of set aside and we didn’t go in there.

But that was all there was too it.

What took place? Okay. Dunoon has a sort of a landing wharf there and there is a big statue of Mary of Argyle. It’s a beautiful big statue and it stands right up on in the centre of the wharf there.

I remember when I took Hazel back later we went back to Dunoon for a nostalgic visit. That was the second time we were over in Scotland. We went to look up some people that I had made friends with there and she mentioned that as we got off she said, “I saw the statue of Mary Queen of Scots,” and they said, “Oh no, no. Not Mary Queen of Scots. That’s Mary of Argyle. She is a different person all together.”

The Scots didn’t want to be identified with Mary Queen of Scots. Anyhow, that’s beside the point. No they went up to the school and it was a beautiful spot. It was a lovely spot. We had to go to school again then. They put us into classrooms and they were heated classrooms. And do you remember me telling you earlier about Baker who was always nodding off? He was going to sleep. We’d have to nudge him all the time

because in a warm school like that he found it hard to keep awake plus the fact that he had been on century duty the night before and in the early hours and so we had to make excuses for him there.

Well like navy accommodation. We had to sling our hammocks and get ourselves into them

each night and each morning you lash your hammock up again and put it away and bring it out when you need it the following night. But the food was good there and they fed us well. As I say it was all back to class work and we were doing more or less exactly what we were doing in Rushcutters Bay but they wouldn’t have it. They said, “No, you couldn’t have done this. It must have been different. This is the only place where you’ll learn about

anti submarine detection,” and so we couldn’t convince them but anyway they put us through it all again and we did all our schoolwork in Dunoon and then they coached us down to Campbeltown, which was down on the Mull of Kintyre right down the bottom of Campbeltown. They call it Campbeltown. Ii was in Campbeltown we boarded a ship down there to do a little bit of practical work.

We were there for a few days.

Oh I’d say it was very good, they were very thorough. They were very conscientious about their work. The locals were very good to us. I took advantage of some of the shore leave we had.

They let us roam the town at times and when the local dance was on we could go to the dance if we wanted to. But I took advantage of it one afternoon and I got on a tourist bus to take us up round the lochs. I had to pay my way there but there were a couple of, as I described to Hazel, couple of old ladies. I learned later that they were only in their early fifties but they were old ladies, that sort of

befriended me when we were on this tour. I was on my own and they said, “Come up home and have a cup of tea with us.” So I went up to their home which was a big old stone mansion really called Donacade. Donacade had a croquet green at the back and they taught me how to play crochet and we sat by the fire and had a cup of tea an duty said,

“Any time you feel like it, you want to sit by the fire and come up and have tea with us. Come up at any time”, And they were very attentive to me and I gathered that they ran it as a sort of boarding house really because there were other people there that they introduced me to that worked in Glasgow but they lived down there and they used to travel back and forth.

But I didn’t question that. The fact was that they did invite me to go up at any time and I did go up a few times. I said to Hazel, “It was only just round the corner from the school” Well when we went back some years later I took Hazel and I said, “We’ll go up and have a look at Donacade.” Because she got to know them because when I came home we sent them food parcels, things they were short of and Hazel corresponded with the people that befriended me.

And so I said, we’d had a look around the town of Dunoon and then I said, “We’ll walk around to Donacade and see if the people are still there.” Well we walked and we walked and it was a warm summer’s day and Hazel said, “I thought you said it was just around the corner.” Well it was when I was twenty-two but it was quite a long way. It was quite a way. We had to ask a man coming the other way, “Do you know where

Donacade is?” “Just up over the top of the hill there.” And we had walked for miles to get to it. Now to me that was no distance at all. I’d just trot around there and sit beside the fire for a while and talk about home because they knew of people that had come out here.

It was very nice. The Scots were very hospitable really. I remember one day it was pouring rain. It really rained and rained up there

and we were in the school at Dunoon and three or four of us decided to go for a walk. We said, “We are tired of being cooped up here in the rainy weather” and so we put on all of our sea boots and oil skins and hats and so forth and we went for a walk in the rain and a couple or the WRENS [Women’s Royal Naval Service] went along with us, they did the same thing. Oh one of the fellows had married a WREN [member of WRENS]

and so she came along and she brought a mate along. We walked along the coast of the estuary down to Innellan and we got down to Innellan and some people got talking to us and they said, “Come in home.” They were on rations and yet they still provided us with all the necessary to put on afternoon tea. That was quite good. That’s the sort of people they were quite good. They were very hospitable.

Well Campbeltown. My first impression of that was the women who were working. It was a fishing village sort of thing. It’s right down…I don’t know whether you know that point, the Mull of Kintyre. It’s like a finger that goes down the top of Scotland. There is only one way in and one way out. You can’t go round any other way. So you go down right onto the point there and there is this fishing

village. Well the women were lugging in great baskets of fish. The women were doing work that the men used to do. Apparently all the men had gone into the navy or something of that sort and left the women to do the hard work, really. It was hard work. They were doing it. They were hauling in loads of fish.

We were on board ship.

We were just to get the feeling of being on board ship and to get the feeling of looking out for aircraft and that type of thing. I do remember though they piped, they usually give you orders like this, they piped, “Hands to swimming stations.” If you wanted a swim. So being an Australian we got into our swimming costumes and I went into the water like that and I got out of the water like that too. It was freezing cold but the English

fellows that were on board with us they got in and swam around and they thought it was great. But oh it was really cold and then they let us have a roam up over the hills and that just to keep us fit. It was quite interesting.

No. I hadn’t been drafted. It was all part of the training.

Nothing else really.

No we didn’t have to do any asdic work. It was only a matter of getting us used to shipboard life and that was all there was to it because as I say we didn’t do anything out of the ordinary but swim or go for a roam over the hills

and that type of thing. We were supposed to be doing practical work but I don’t recall any actual work that we did there.

It sounds like a holiday.

That’s when the drafting part of it came into it. When we went back to Dunoon the drafting office was there and that’s when we split up.

We’d completed our training so we were sent off in different directions.

No further training. It was complete. We passed out as operators.

I don’t think it was very much different. They claimed that their training was better than we could have had. They honestly didn’t believe that we had done similar training in Rushcutters Bay. The instructors wouldn’t believe it but they put us through it all and we did it all again and I think we were well trained by the time that we

came out of it.

No. All simulated up until that point but it was enough to…Oh we had to know other things like aircraft recognition and that type of thing. They put up in the

in the school and told us and put up silhouettes of different and told us, “This is a Messerschmitt and this is a Stuka,” and they were all the silhouettes of the different kinds of planes and so if you were on duty and you sighted a plane you had to be able to identify it if possible. Anyway that was all there was to it.

No. Not on board a ship with submarines. No. We didn’t do any actual training like that.

Well the simulators were good enough. I suppose it’s like aircraft. If you can fly the simulator you can fly the aircraft. That’s all there was to it but that’s where

the…Once we came back from Campbeltown that was the finish. We started getting sent off here and sent off there. It became a personal thing then and I was just called up one day and told that I would be going to a destroyer.

It was a bit tough. It was a bit tough. I felt quite lonely for a while particularly as all they did was gave me a chit, which says

that I was going to a destroyer which I was to pick up in Hull, and I didn’t know where Hull was, but I was to go there and pick it up and I was completely on my own. All I was to do was to go to Glasgow and get on a train and go down to Hull. All the railway stations and dockyards and so forth had RTO [Rail Transport Officer]

officers that could check you out and tell you where to go and which way to go sort of thing. What happened with me was I knew my way back up to Glasgow. That was no effort. I crossed in the ferry and got on the train and went up to Glasgow. I thought Glasgow station was like central and all the trains came in there. So I went to the station that we had used when we went to Portsmouth and back and I went there and I searched around for a while

and I couldn’t find out where to get a train to Hull. And finally I went to the RTO and said, “How do I get a train to Hull.” He said, “You are on the wrong railway station. This is only the Midlands. You want to get on the east coast line. That is over on another station.” But they said, “It’s too late for you now. You won’t get away tonight. You’ll have to spend the night in Glasgow.” I did that. I had to spend the night. There was no option.

So I had to find this other second station when I got up the next morning and I got on a train and of course there were no signs on any of the railway station to say where you are. I didn’t have a clue. I knew I was on the right line because that’s where the RTO told me to go. And I got on a train and we were ((UNCLEAR) - holding) every now and again but I didn’t have an idea where I was. I could have gone all the way to London and

not found it except that I …You are always told too to be careful. “Don’t talk to other people about what you’re doing, where you are going.” They are always guarding against people getting information from us. So there was a couple sitting opposite me. In those trains you sit opposite each other and they were talking to me

and they found out they were Australian. And I said, “Look I have to go to Hull. How do I get to Hull.” They said, “We’ll tell you when you get there.” We went down through the east coast there and through York and they were very good because there again they had their cut lunch or morning tea or whatever it was and they shared that with me. And we just had a general talk and they were pleased to know I was Australian and all that sort of thing.

People generally were very good but I just…

Well that is the funny part about it because when I reported to the RTO on the dockyard gates they said to me, “Well you are a day late. You’d better hurry because if you don’t get moving you’ll miss your ship.” So I went helter skelter from the dockyard gates down to my ship. They were having me on because they had had a raid the night before

and they had dropped a bomb quite close to the folk sail of the ship and it had done some damage to the sharp end. the fo’c’sle and we were laid there for weeks afterwards. Well it wouldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks while they repaired the ship. It didn’t really damage the waterline but it damaged some of the superstructure. These fellows on the gate, I could have gone down to London or somewhere and spent a few days and I still would have been back in plenty of time

to board the ship. So it meant that we had to spend time in Hull then. Hull was bombed pretty regularly and this is a story that I think is of important. I had a feeling all the time that I was lucky, that I was being looked after and there was somebody watching over me.

One night in Hull I decided, “Enough of this staying on board ship and doing on board ship each night. I’ll spend a night ashore.” I took enough gear, shaving gear and stuff to a boarding place, a building there where you could get accommodation and so I booked myself in, left my gear there,

and then went off and got into some of the hotels there. They used to sing a lot over there. They used to get in their hotels at night and they’d sing and go on . It was quite warm company. You got to know people and when I came out of there it was time to go back to the accommodation something said to me, “Go back to your ship.” So I did that.

And that night there was a raid. I went back the next morning to collect my gear and the place wasn’t there. It was just a heap of rubble. They were fishing out bodies. I thought, “It could have been me.” Sorry about that.

It gets to me a bit. It was just a clear message to me, “Go back to your ship.”

It seemed to be a voice. As though someone spoke to me. “Go back to your ship.” I didn’t go back for any other reason. I had my accommodation booked and I had set out to have a night ashore and I was told to go back to my ship so I did and that was the outcome of it. When I went back the next day there was nothing there. It was just a heap of rubble.

That’s right. It’s hard to define it, isn’t it? But I’ve had it happen to me since. I’ve had to make a decision on something and clear-cut been told what to do. It always turned out to be the right thing.

Yes, it did.

I felt that I wasn’t meant to be killed. That was about it. I had stronger. I didn’t worry before about being killed but at the same time it was reassuring to me to think, “Someone is watching over me.” That’s the way it felt. And I thought, “Well I don’t think I’ll be killed.” I prayed only ever prayed then that I wouldn’t be injured. That was the thing.

I hated the thought of losing an arm or a leg or being really knocked around. But I did get knocked around a bit later but that happened later.

Well I must admit I prayed a lot. I was never a really a good churchgoer at home. As I said the Scottish lady introduced me to the Presbyterian church and I was a bit critical of it but I was never what you’d say a real church goer and yet I had a faith right from when I was young. I think I got a good grounding when I was at school because in the public schools in those days

they used to have a minister come and visit the class and give you a lesson on religion. I think he got through to me because I did believe in sort of a spirit looking after you or some forebears or something watching over you. But no I had faith and I did pray a lot.

Particularly later on when I got into tough situations and I prayed my way out and it worked.

Well I found because I hadn’t had much to do with the merchant ships before I went away but I found that a lot of the merchant seamen were very…well you could almost call it superstition because when we were on the Ormonde and we were going across the Atlantic on our own and there was the danger of submarines and all the rest of it,

I remember one of the merchant men saying to us, “This ship won’t be sunk.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Look at the cross up on the funnel.” It was only in the welding but nether the less there was a cross up on the funnel and he had his faith in that. And I thought to my mind that was a bit shallow. The fact that you’ve got a cross up on the funnel to my mind won’t protect you. I don’t know.

After lunch. It’s that time is it?

It was my teeth.

Well it wasn’t all together unfortunate it was just that Bill was just a boy more or less,

seventeen and we took him round to Green’s Hotel. I don’t know whether you know but it is right opposite the gateway of India and it’s a real I’d say flash Hotel, gentle people go there. Anyway we went in and sat down to have a drink and we were served with waiters and Bill had a couple of beers or so. He got real pally with the Indian fellow to the point of asking whether

he was married. And he said, “Oh yes, married and got children.” Bill was getting that way he was telling him he was getting married when he got home. He was going to…I meant to ask him sometime what happened to the girl he was going to marry because he didn’t marry her. But no anyway the short of it all is when we come to go back to the Hotel, back to Frederick’s Hotel which was just round the block we were sharing a room.

That is three or four of us in the one room. And we were trying to put Bill to bed and he missed me and he said, “Harry. We’ve got to go back and get Harry.” “Harry’s here.” (UNCLEAR) and Ken couldn’t get sense through to him and I was trying to put him into bed and he had his arm in plaster and he was swinging it around and caught me like that and I more or less bit his arm and took the top of my bottom teeth so I had to go to a dentist who was just across the road

who was an American dentist and he had a couple of American girls looking after him there. But he didn’t do much to them except to deaden the nerve and even them off a little bit, take the roughness of them. I remember at that time I was still a bit green too because the girls said, “The first time we’ve met a shy sailor.” I couldn’t speak to them.

Well if he mentioned it it’s in his mind.

Mmm.

No we haven’t except that I was late to join the ship. I was a day late.

The fellow on the gate of the dockyard told me that I would have to hurry. “You are a day late and if you don’t get going you’ll miss your ship.” When I got there, there had been a bombing the night before and the fo’c’sle was pushed in. A bomb had landed fairly close and had dome some damage to the fo’c’sle so

we had to wait then until that was repaired before we could go to sea again.

It was a couple of weeks. We were sitting in Hull and it wasn’t the best of places to sit in really.

I remember we loaded ammunition and we worked around the ship generally. You could always find something to do on board ship. There are always painting jobs, scraping off rust and

going on and generally tidying up. I do remember the loading shells on because we were playing it like football. “I’ll pass it to you and you pass it to me” and we were going like that. I quite enjoyed it. It was good exercise. I didn’t mind exercise in those days. I kept myself pretty fit.

Vivacious.

Did I give you that name?

You’re getting a bit ahead of me.

Well the Vivacious was one of the what they termed the V and W destroyers. They were all named ‘VW’ like Vivacious. The Vanessa used to tie up along side us, the Waterhen and all those with V and W names were a class of ship that were built

just after the First World War and they were in mothballs more or less when the Second World War broke out and so they were the mothball fleet. They were brought out of mothballs and made ready for service in the Second World War. There were twenty years between the two so they weren’t new ships. They were pretty old.

Oh yes I could do that. Do you know what a destroyer looks like?

Well there is all the superstructure up front, your bigger guns and the bridge, the bridge over the top there. You come down steps and you get on to the…we call it the deck proper, which is not much above sea level. It’s a straight deck that leads down after the wardroom. The wardroom

was in the tail end and the officers’ bunks were just forward of the wardroom. What more do we want? There were anti-aircraft guns on either side of the bridge and on the lower decks too there were Oerlikons, anti-aircraft sort of things. There were depth charges in the rear end and that was about it

I think in a general description.

The interior? Rather primitive. We were paid what they called hard laying money. We didn’t have any real comforts on board. The only washing facilities we had, like bathing, was a row of basins and a tile floor and the English people we found didn’t bath too

often. As Australians, I made friends with a bloke called Herbert Palica. We called him Pud Palica but Pud was a Tasmanian and he and I used to get in there together and strip off and get buckets of water and tip it over each other. “I’ll shower you if you shower me sort of thing.” And the English fellows commented on it. “You Australians are always washing. Cleaning up.”

But we weren’t supposed to do that particularly when we were at sea. When we were at sea we were supposed to stay in our clothes at all times. You undressed because you could go to action stations at any time. But we used to get that way that we’ve got to get out of our clothes and have a wash. You couldn’t go on living in clothes all the time, particularly there where it was really cold.

Some of them do, yes.

We had a sick bay attendant in our mess, a young fellow and we had to tell him to change his underclothes. Really and truly we did. A sick bay attendant mind you. He started to break out in sores and so forth and we said, “Look. Change your underclothes or at least keep yourself clean.” That’s the sort of fellow he was. A lot of them we found in those crews they were not permanent

navy fellows. They were just conscripts, they were conscripted. “You go in the army and you go in the navy” and that’s the way it was in Britain. So at one time there were three of us Australians on board. One was Keith Dalwits. He was a Sydney boy. He was well up in the fire brigade but he didn’t live till sixty, he didn’t make sixty. But Palica has since died too. He’s gone.

Our of the three I’m the only one left.

The rest of the crew were all British but some of them, a few of them had never been to sea before and some of them were former permanent navy. They had retired, they’d gone from…I remember one fellow was a farmer and he

got a pair of nice kid gloves for me, fur lined kid gloves and he said his wife makes them at home and she was a real professional. He took measurements of my hands and next time he went on leave he came back with a pair of nice kid gloves for me, with fur lining. So when I would go ashore I would be all done up. It was good. I had them for years. Hazel will tell you. They wore out.

Now you’ve got me.

This was one captain that I only ever heard him say two words. “Out of my way.” That was the only thing. We just happened to be on the gangway when he was heading to the bridge and he said, “Out of my way.” I never spoke to the captain and I couldn’t tell you what his name was.

The first lieutenant. The first lieutenant is the man on pretty well all ships that run the ship and so close to his crew. He runs the ship. The captain

is there but the first lieutenant… If you make a request for anything you go before the first lieutenant first. If it requires the captain’s okay well then he’ll move you on to the captain but you’ll never go directly to the captain.

I’ve lost his name. I’m sorry. I can’t remember that name.

Oh the ship itself?

Well we were based in Sheerness which is on the Isle or Sheppey in the Thames Estuary. We were based as the 21st Destroyer Flotilla and we were set out when I was first joined doing E boat patrol. That’s where we were patrolling the channel and E boats [Enemy boats] were like our motor torpedo boats. They were very fast. They would come over through the night and enter into the shipping area and do a lot of damage

to our merchant ships.

Yes.

It was a very fast moving motorboat. Not as long as a fare mile. Very, very much like, if you knew a motor torpedo boat. They could carry at least a coupe of torpedos on the front and they had Oerlikon guns and so forth on board

and they used to come in and fire their torpedoes and shoot off again and we were supposed to try and tackle them before they got past the buoys. We used to use our asdic equipment to try and track them at times but one of the tricks they had was they would moor behind a buoy when we were around. If we got a ping and we knew if was coming from there then it was a buoy but the ship or the boat was just behind it

and so we had to watch out for that. But during that time when we were just doing E boat patrol we would go from the Thames up to the Humber and then from the Humber back to the Thames again and we did that a few times. And in that time we used to watch the planes going overhead. We could see our planes going this way and the German planes going that way and then vice versa. But usually in the early evening they were going to do their job inland.

We were instructed not to fire on any of the aircraft because if we did we would be drawing attention to ourselves and we couldn’t afford to lose a destroyer just for the sake of having a shot at an aircraft. The aircraft have got their job to do so they won’t worry about you. They’re going in to drop bombs inland or around the ports and let them just go about their business. We used to watch them go by.

There would only be two of us. We were interchanging a bit. We would be going north and they would be coming south. There would be two out of the flotilla I would say. We only did that for a short time and then we got sent up to Scapa Flow which was right up over the top of Scotland, near the Orkney Islands

No. Not to my knowledge. I got a ping there once in the channel

and according to the map there was nothing there in that spot and yet the asdic officer, he agreed that there was a definite metallic ping so unless it was something that had been sunk fairly recently or even an aircraft that had come down into the channel, it might have been hearing that but the thing was we went over it and dropped depth charges on it and nothing came to the surface but I know

some of the fellows down in our engine room got a bit upset about it. The next time I went up on deck they said, “Don’t get to dropping depth charges. Some of these fellows have been through so much bombing they can’t take much more.”

It was something there. Yes. It had to be a ship of some kind that had been sunk or an aircraft might have gone down there. It wasn’t on the map according to the navigator.

Couldn’t take much more of the bombing. When the depth charges went on, they’re down below and they get the full blast through the ship and it’s a real thud. It hits the, particularly the fellas down in the engine room. Some of them had been through a lot of bombing and they were like that, that

a bit more bombing and they thought something was up and their nerves would give.

They were, yeah.

We had one fellow on board who had got the George Medal. I said, “How come you got the George Medal?” He said, “I was on a mine disposal squad.” He said, “We had to go in and the bombs would drop and they would be in the building or on the ground somewhere and they hadn’t exploded.”

His job was to go in and defuse them and that takes a lot of courage you know. That’s why he got his George Medal.

No. I couldn’t remember his name.

Yeah. He got it for bravery when he was on shore with this bomb disposal squad.

Oh sure, sure. I just passed that off. They were having a go at me. “Don’t do that to them it upsets them.”

I think so. Some of them were very panicky and I don’t blame them because there was a lot of havoc over there. Once we got to London we knew it was on.

Well it depends on the ship. On the destroyer you are sitting in like a phone box only you are sitting down and the little canopy has only so much room in it. You’ve got a recorder in front of you and you’ve got double headphones on

and you are plugged in and you can switch your oscillator on or you can switch it off but your oscillator will create the sound waves, super sonic sound waves and it would go out with the noise that you often hear on TV really. How would you describe it?

It is not a pinging sound until it hits something. It’s a sound wave that goes rrrr-brr

and comes back. It’s the coming back we can measure the distance between where it left and where it pinged off so we know there is something so many yards out. It’s recording on the graph too, the graph is going and you see the spot on it where it gives an echo. It’s the echoes that we are interested in, not the going out part.

And that was on a destroyer. When I come to the Mediterranean I will give you a different description all together. I really can’t…I know the box had to be blacked out. I had curtains on either side.

And if I got a ping I was to always call the asdic officer to confirm it and apart from the dial….yeah I had a… I’m trying to think of it. It must have been a compass arrangement because I could give the direction of it, just where the ping, because the oscillator

was going around like this and it was in the sweep and so I would have to have a compass arrangement there and a recorder which is on a sort of iodized tape I should say and that’s about it on a destroyer.

So you really are sitting there with head phones on all the time with this listing to this rrrrr-brroom.

or no brroom on the end of it just a… but you get all sorts of funny noises at times in the sea.

Oh porpoises, whales, fish generally. They can make noises.

Oh yeah. I did mention it earlier but this happened in the Mediterranean again. Just off the mouth of the Nile we were with a couple of destroyers

and we were going out to pick up a convoy which didn’t exist. It was torpedoed before we got to it. We thought we got an echo, a distinct echo and the destroyer…We were in a little bit of doubt about it but one of the destroyers decided to go in and drop charges on it anyhow which they did and then the surface was covered in big fish. Big fish, so long. And we hauled in some

they hauled in some and we shared it among the ships that were with us. We had enough fish for everybody. It must have got right in the middle of a school of rather big fish but they gave off a real echo. There is no doubt.

Yeah.

There again now there was three of us on the destroyer, three Australians and so we took it on…

let me think. We took it on as two on, three off. We spread it anyway. Two hours at a time we were doing it then we had a rate, two on and four off. That was it. Two on and four off. We operated between the three of us.

Oh yes, when you are at sea.

Can I relate it to the Mediterranean a bit?

Well in the Mediterranean there was only two of us asdic operators and so we worked all the time we were at sea we worked two on and two off, two on and two off all the way through the night. As far as sleep was concerned you got your sleep in two hours or hour and a half lots. Now I got to

believe that you didn’t really need sleep because what happened to me one night was I came off watch at about two in the morning, never undressed, just dropped of my duffle coat and kicked off my sea boots and dropped onto the bunk. We had bunks then, not hammocks. Dropped onto the bunk and I could have sworn that somebody came and shook me so I got up and put my coat back on and sea boots on and went back up on the bridge

and they said, “What are you doing up here?” I said, “I’m back on watch.” They said, “You only went off five minutes ago.” So there it was. I laid myself down, went to sleep and then woke up and went back up. And we must have been tired anyway but you were doing it automatically. So sleep was not really necessary. It was only your state of mind.

Oh we were, we were at times. If we spent any great time at sea it was two on and two off and it was tiring.

But the equipment we war operating on in the Mediterranean was different. That was on a fare mile. A fair mile doesn’t have an oscillator that moves. It has one oscillator which is dead

ahead so that if you get a ping there you bring the ship onto that and you shorten the distance, shorten the distance, until you get over the top and then you drop your charges and go for you life. So there was a different situation. You are steering the ship. You are on the wheel so we were not only asdic operators we were Coxswains as well. We had the wheel of the ship and we took all the orders from the skipper

or the first lieutenant as to harder port, harder starboard, slow down, pull ahead or whatever.

What we seemed to do in Scapa Flow more or less was escort the big boys, the King George V, and I can’t think of some of the names of the really big

battleships that we had. We’d take the KGV [King George V] down to the Clyde and leave it there. We probably go back and take something else down to Forsythe...

No. Into the Scottish, where the Bridge is.

Yes. I was trying to remember the name of it. Forsythe. That must be it. Anyway, Firth and Furth.

But we were all the time escorting. We were escorting the big boats because you know the big fellows they have destroyers racing all around them. They’re more manoeuvrable, they’re faster and they’ll tackle any submarines that’s around and likely to torpedo them.

No we didn’t but on one occasion when there was a convoy coming across from Canada and the convoy got really battered

by submarines and so a whole string of us went out. There was a whole line of destroyers going from Scapa Flow right out to the horizon and we all did a great sweep and to my knowledge I don’t think we found anything. We couldn’t find the submarines.

Yes.

Not really good.

Apart from the fact that it was extremely cold at times. We used to freeze up and I didn’t like that one bit. We weren’t kitted up for all that type of thing.

Well it could be very rough at times. Well even the channel. The channel was quite rough. I should tell you this bit. When we were doing that run up and down from the Thames to the Humber

we at times took some army fellows on board just to give them experience of travelling across by ship in case they had to go to the continent or something like that. So we just bought them aboard as passengers. Well the seas got so great and we were healing over at times and the guardrails on a destroyer on the lower part of the deck are not far above sea level. The guardrails are actually going in the water and these fellows

were ready to jump over the side because they thought we were going to capsize. We actually had to physically hold some of the back saying, “Look, look. We’re not going over. This is part of the routine.” When it got very rough we used to have guidelines on the desks, especially the officers anyway had to come form their sleeping quarters down aft and come up to the bridge and well we had to too go down to our gunnery places and depth charges and all that.

Just a rope line. It was sort of set off to give you something to hang onto. There was on use hanging onto the guardrails because you would finish up over the side anyway.

Oh they weren’t navy. They were army and some of them were conscripts. They had just come off the farm or something like that and they were so sure that when we healed over that

we were going to keep on going, so they were all prepared to jump.

Well that was the conditions in the channel. It can be nice. If you have ever travelled over there you go across in the ferry and you can have a nice smooth trip but another time if the wind comes up

it really builds up according to the tides and the wind and that type of thing.

The cold. I couldn’t stand the cold. When we were coming up to the winter the Tasmanian fellow and myself got talking and we said, “Look, we are going to get out of this before the winter really sets in” so that’s how we come to be out to the Mediterranean.

We both applied for a draft to the east. Well the pacific war hadn’t really got going and we thought we might be sent out around Colombo and the draft officer said, “How about the Mediterranean?” I said, “Yeah sure. The Mediterranean would be okay.” So the two of us got drafted out to the Mediterranean.

Keith Dalwitz, Herbert Palica – Pud Palica. Dalwitz was nicknamed ‘Glamour’ and he was a real glamour boy. He had nice curly hair and good looking young fellow and he had been a first grade footballer. Palica had too. Palica was a top Australian Rules player being a Tasmanian. But he was always full of statistics. He

could tell the English people just how many bushels of apples they shipped out and how many potatoes they got. He was off the land I think. But oh no they were nice fellows.

Oh yes. They would be.

No. I met up with them. They

came across later than I did. I was on my own there for a while. They came up a little bit later than I did.

It was Palica.

Well as I said earlier you go to the first Lieutenant with a request and he said to me, “Now why

do you want to leave us?” And I said, “Look. I’ve got four layers of clothing on and I am still cold. I can’t tolerate the extremely cold conditions we have up at the Scapa flow.” We had come down by that time far enough to make the complaint. He said, “Okay. I just wondered if there any more behind it.” I said, “No. It’s just that I would like to get into a warmer climate” and Palica backed that up. He said the same thing.

He said, “I come from Tasmania but I can’t say I’ve experienced it as cold as I have up here.” Because there were ice flows and that sort of thing there at times. Something came to my mind a there moment ago and I can’t…oh I know. When I was talking about us going back and forth and talking about fruit. I went ashore… I can’t think of the name of the spot now…in the Humber there was a little village, Immingham,

I think it was, Immingham. We used to tie up at Immingham and we were just allowed a little local leave. We couldn’t go very far a field but I walked up to a fruit shop up there and I saw grapes and they had a big ten on them and I thought, “That will be good.” I usually bought a few of their apples but grapes and it was only ten shillings a pound or whatever it was.

I didn’t realize. I was used to grapes at home, ten pence or whatever. Poor girl, she weighted them out and then said it was ten shillings. I said, “I wouldn’t pay ten shillings for a bunch of grapes.” These little things that happen, I don’t think you are very interested in that.

No. I didn’t buy them. I wasn’t affording that. They were a luxury at that price.

Pretty miserable but I know I ruined a good burberry…You know the overcoat we have, a nice well made English Berbary? I wasn’t provided with oilskins and so forth and I got out in cold wet

conditions and hauling on greasy wires and so forth in a good burberry, I ruined it. I couldn’t afford to go out without a coat on, it was just so cold so I wore my good burberry but I ruined it because of that. But oh no I never really got sick but I got sick later. That is the funny part about it. When we left

the UK to go to the Mediterranean we were going to go back to Free town and round the cape. This is just another story but the change from the cold conditions into the steaming hot conditions, almost on the Equator, that proved too much for me. I finished up in the ship’s hospital for five days with near on pneumonia. I got really sick. It was just too sudden a change.

But I was pretty fit at the time too.

It was a shock.

Oh well I wouldn’t say it was the happiest of ships. I wasn’t really sorry to be leaving it because while I had a few close friends there were others there that resented

us. They not only resented us because we were Australians but the fact that we were paid Australian rates of pay in sterling and we were getting more money than some of their petty officers. We were only able seaman and we were getting more money than some of their petty officers. Now the able seaman , well the petty officers weren’t too happy about it but there is nothing they could do about it. They were being paid the English rates and

we were being paid the Australian rates, which is higher anyway and we were gaining twenty-five per cent on the exchange. We were getting sterling pound for pound. The same thing happened when we moved out to the Mediterranean. We got paid in Egyptian pounds which again was a little better than sterling.

That’s right. Some of the petty officers particularly on board ship weren’t too happy about us for one reason or another. They wouldn’t even let us wear a tally band or anything. Now a days they get along with Australia. They wouldn’t allow anything like that. “You’re no different to us.”

Oh pretty badly I’d say.

I don’t know, just in their attitude I think. That’s about all I can put it down to. The only time I ever made a friend of one of them was they used to give us a tot of rum. That was something that struck me that I didn’t mention too about Portsmouth. One of the first questions they asked when we hit Portsmouth, “Are you T or G.” I said, “What’s T or G?” “Are you a temperance or a grog?” And I said, “What’s the difference?” And they said, “If you are

temperance you’ll get threepence a day more than if you have the tot of rum. I said, “For threepence I’d just as soon have to the tot of rum.” I wasn’t a rum drinker but when I got my tot I found we used to get neat rum. And it was good rum too, over proof. I used to put half of it in a little bottle and I’d drink half if I was going on watch in the middle of the night and it was a bit cool up there, it would help me and keep me warm. But one of the petty officers was

going on leave and he said, “Have you got any rum?” And I said, “Yes. I’ve got a small bottle there. You can have it if you want it.” “Are you sure?” “I’m sure. I don’t want it.” He took it away on leave with him and he was a friend of mine after that. I bribed him.

Well the request was accepted on the destroyer. They then sent me back to Dunoon which was our centre, our drafting office and….

No. We were taken off the destroyer the Vivacious and we were taken back to Dunoon where our drafting office was. The drafting office then said, “Well all right

there is a question of where to take you.” We simply asked for a draft to the east. They said well, “How about the Eastern Mediterranean?.” We said, “Okay. That would suit us fine.” So from there we were told to proceed to Bristol to pick up the Highland Princess. The Highland Princess was a merchant one and from there and it went from Bristol up into the Clyde

to join a convoy. There was a big convoy of about forty-two ships if I remember rightly counting the escorts and so forth and some big fellows out of that. We went down to Freetown and so on round the cape that way. That was about the worst trip I think we made. The Highland Princess was a merchant ship and people,

the troops, ourselves, were expected to live in the hold, the ships hold. The only ventilation was an open hatch up top. While we said no smoking was allowed down in the hold some of the boys just couldn’t resist having a smoke and the air got pretty fowl down below. Now I was given the job of…I was supposed to be well up in gymnastics and so forth

and physical training and so they detailed me to exercise the troops up on deck each morning. Well I did that for the first few days coming down from Britain down to Freetown. But that extreme change made me sick and I was supposed to be the fit one. I don’t know whether it was that or just the fowl air in the hold but I put it down to the sudden change in temperatures because

we left Britain a few days before Christmas and we finished up in Freetown for Christmas. We lay there Christmas day and it was steaming hot. The good people in Britain had provided us with a typical Christmas dinner with plum pudding and the whole lot and we sat there with nothing except a pair of shorts on and sweat

running from our nose, eating Christmas dinner. I’ll never forget that Christmas Day because it was good food, there is no doubt about it but that was the only good meal we really had on there but you could barely eat it because it was so rich and it was hot too and the temperature was so extreme well that was a fact that the sweat was just running off us.

This was before. Now wait a minute. It must have been after. I’m out of line there. It is only a matter of a few days from the Clyde down to Freetown.

Well there was nothing unusual about it except

that it was uncomfortable and the food wasn’t good. The food wasn’t good on board there at all. It was just more or less thrown at us. Honestly I’ve seen bags of potatoes just opened at the top and tipped like that into a cauldron and just boiled. There was no sorting out the ones with spade holes or the dirt from the potatoes and then fished out as they are and passed over to you.

It was pretty tough food on board the destroyer but it was always a bit edible. At one stage there I forgot to mention I had a heart put on my plate. That was it. That’s lunch. A heart, a whole heart and you had to cut into it and eat it. Well I ate it.

Yeah, a sheep’s heart.

They didn’t waste anything in England in the way of

meats in those days but anyway that’s beside the point.

It was really. It was pretty tough. We were still on board there when New Years Eve came up and we lost one Scottish fellow overboard. We don’t know what happened to him but he just disappeared on New Years Eve. They tend to play up on New Years Eve but whether someone pushed him or he fell or what

he was missing the next day and we never did know what happened to him. He just went missing. That was a bit sad.

Oh well I think there was a bit of a question in their minds as to did someone push him. I mean they didn’t all get along with each other. As far as we were concerned we sort of kept to ourselves a bit

Yeah.

We didn’t reach it directly as that. We went as far as, we stopped at Cape Town on the way out if you remember when we left India but this time we skipped Cape Town and went round to Durban which I thought was very nice. It reminded me of home because it was all tiled rooves and nice clean beaches.

We went into what they called a rest camp at Claremont outside of Durban and laid there for I don’t know how long. It must have been just a few days. But then we got the Ile de France. It was a beautiful ship.

Yes. A passenger liner.

It was a luxury liner really.

Only in that it was beautiful in it’s lines, it’s appearance, it’s fittings. The whole thing was…Well it was going from one extreme to another. We had a ship that was unbearable and this one was like being on a cruise. It was really nice but we’d had a little rest in Durban and we were ready to go. So that took us up to the Red Sea

and got off at Port Tewfik.

Oh we didn’t stay there. We just disembarked at Port Tewfik and got on a train and went up to Alexandria.

Yes. Yes. There is quite a tale form then on. In Alexandria we were sent out to a place called Sidi Bishr. Sidi Bishr is just outside of the city and it is the end of the line as far as

transport, like the trams go. It had been an army camp but they transferred it over to the navy as the army moved away up the desert sort of thing. We were laying our hammocks, there was no provision for hanging out hammocks. We just laid our hammocks out on the sand. We were living under canvas there for a

while and I met up with some of the English fellows who were already there and they were to get a draft out and in a day or two I would see them back again. I said, “What are you doing back here?” “We are survivors.” They wouldn’t get very far out of Alexandria and they were torpedoed. The Italians were taking them off. It happened once to one fellow. I saw him come back twice. I said, “Are you a survivor again?” He said, “Yes. Second time.” So I thought, “What have I let myself in for?”

Yes. Oh yes. We were Royal Navy.

It was a distinctive army camp that they took in navy. The army moved out and we came into it and we had to adapt ourselves to sleeping on the sand.

Our hammocks just got unrolled onto the sand and you slept on them then. If you didn’t get Gyppo Tummy while you were there, well there was something wrong.

Well it was pretty hot and sunny and I’ve seen fellows peeling a bag of potatoes there and you could smell the potatoes and you knew what they were grown in

because the smell was terrible really. But never the less they got washed and were served up and quite a few of us including myself got Gyppo tummy. It’s like a dysentery really but the thing is if you reported it and you went to sickbay that was it, you’d have to take treatment. But if you just put up with it you overcome it anyway. I spent a lot of time there for a few nights just,

the tents were here and the latrines were down at the front gates somewhere down there with a few palm trees over top of them and I spent the night trotting from the tents to the latrines and back to the tent again. Up two or three times a night for a while and just worked it out.

I always reckon if you went to sickbay they treated you like

a sick person and they really made things tough for you.

Well I went back to my thoughts when I first joined the navy in Sydney and a few of us went ashore one night and we were all new recruits and the next morning I didn’t feel at all too good and went up to the sickbay and said, “I’m sick on the stomach.” “All right.

Lie on the bench,” and prod around. “All right, into hospital.” I said, “What, hospital? I’m sick on the stomach.” “Suspected appendicitis.” And this was on a Friday and I was supposed to go on weekend leave but my weekend leave was cancelled because this silly sickbay bloke decided to put me into a bed. I thought, “No more of that. I’ll steer clear of these people.” That’s what they do to you.

Yes. That’s what I did anyway. I know a lot of them went up and disappeared but I didn’t want a break.

Well it seemed to me we were losing so many ships at that time that they must have finished up, this is only my assumption, they finished up having more men ashore than they had ships for them to go on to.

And it was a question of, “What do you do with them?” You move them around. So they took me, this is my own personal set up, they took me out of there and they said, “You’re going out to Fleet Air Arm Base at Tecurlow [?].” I had nothing to do with the Fleet Air Arm but nevertheless that was where I was going and I found myself out there under canvas with another group of Australians and we were

apparently gathered together all in one tent, Australians. There must have been more than one tent. There were six or eight of us. I’ve got a photograph there of some of them and we had no duties there. We were just living there, getting our meals, lazing about and that was about the time that the Japanese were coming in and so we…the buzz went around that we were going to be sent back

home for the Pacific war but nothing seemed to be happening. We were just there and we were getting a bit fed up with it. We were watching these fellows come out with their parachutes on and they hop into a little aeroplane. It was an old swordfish…I think I said walrus last time but it was a swordfish, open cockpit and it would come back later and come back and land. They were going off like this all the time, these

Fleet Air Arm fellows. And so I said one day, this was the way, I was always a bit stroppy [upset] I think. The boys wanted to know were we going home or were we waiting for a draft or what was happening. Why were we hear? I said, “I’m going to find out. I’m going to the CO’s [Commanding Officer] office.” So I went up to the COs office and knocked on the door and of course his aid came to the office door and said, “What can I do for you?” And I said, “I would like to speak with the CO” and he said

“And who are you?” And I said, “I’m Churchill.” So he put his head round the door of the CO’s office and said, “Mr Churchill wants to speak to you” so he ushered me in. The CO was quite a nice chap and we sat and had a nice little chat. I said, “We are getting a bit fed up with this here. We are just lazing about and we are not doing anything for anybody.” I said, “Are we going home or are we here on draft?” And he said, “Well as far as I know you’re not going home. You are just here awaiting draft. They want to put

you onto something or other.” But he said, “You’ll just have to be patient and wait it out.” I said, “Well.” I put another question to him. I said, “These fellows going up in planes on their own. Are we allowed to go up with them for the ride?” And he said, “Oh yes. If you see one of them coming out on his own just approach him and if he’s agreeable to take you up, well go for it.” So that was it. He was quite

nice about it. So anyway we went back and there was a particular friend I had at that time was Sid Selby, he was a Sydney boy. And I said to Sidney, “How about if we got up in one of these planes?” I said, “The CO said that it’s okay as long as we get permission from the aviator.” We saw one fellow coming out and we tackled him and he said, “Oh yes. You can come up. Just go into the office and sign your death warrant. You are

going up at your own risk.” We had to do that. We went in and signed the paper saying we were going up at our own risk and I sat behind the pilot facing the front and Sid sat in the gunner seat at the back facing the tail and the pilot never said a word to us. He didn’t tell us where we were going or what he was going to do. He must have been laughing up his sleeve the whole way. He took us up along the coast and he climbed and climbed and got right up the Libyan coast

over a beach there and he climbed up and then he took a dive. Well when he first banked over turning round and I thought I was going to fall out because it is an empty cockpit and it’s a long way down there. And I was hanging on with fingers and toes and so we started to dive. I went down and across the beach like that and then flat out across the sea. He was just practising torpedo bombing but as he went into the dive like that I could feel this wet stuff hitting me in the face. And it was only Sid, he was being sick in the back

and of course the air stream was bringing it forward and I was copping the sickness. It was awful but anyway I got rid of that. I think Sid recovered by the time I did another dive or two. I imagine the pilot must have been…he didn’t say a word, you know. He must have been…

Yeah. So that was it.

But poor old Sid, he didn’t make it home. He got torpedoed on the way back from the Middle East. We lost about six or eight of our asdic fellows were on the Ceramic and the Ceramic got torpedoed in the Indian ocean coming back from Port Tewfik. They didn’t make it. You know.

I can’t remember. At least I don’t know. I’ve never had it spelled out to me in that way.

I only found out after I came home because I came home a good deal after it apparently. I asked, “Where is Sid Selby these days?” And they said, “He’s not with us.” So anyway he was a good guy too.

It did. Sid and I spent a bit of time together. I had met him previously

out at the asdic school. I met him up in Glasgow and we went around a bit together. Nice bloke.

Not all of them. There was one other but I can’t think of his name now. He was a Newcastle boy. That’s how I know of him. I should have remembered his name… I can’t remember. It will come back to me but not now.

He was one. There was two, I had a group there…I don’t think there are any survivors out of that lot.

Yes it was.

Yes. That’s why I was correcting you. I learned later that it was a swordfish. It was a swordfish not a walrus. They are much the same thing. They are both open cockpit planes, pretty old really.

Oh I don’t know. Quite possibly ten days or something or best part of two weeks. The thing was that I got pulled out of there fairly

smartly after that. I don’t think I was there more than a week really but I left other’s behind I know. But they called me back to HMS Nile where the Sphinx was, HMS Sphinx in Alexandria and they said, “Now we are sending you up to Cairo.” I said, “Why Cairo? There is no navy in Cairo.” They said, “It’s something we don’t want you to talk about very

much. You shouldn’t talk about it. We want you to keep it quiet but we are assembling Fairmiles on the Nile at a little village called Shubra. We want you to go up there and stand by the ship. We want you to go onto one of them eventually just to keep an eye on the stores, issue stores to the workmen of the morning and see that The asdic

equipment is properly installed and so forth. That is all you are required to do. You will live in Cairo and you’ll get the tram out every morning to Shubra and Shubra is the end of the line.” And that’s what I was doing for a while, something like six weeks. I watched some of the Fairmiles being built. What was happening was

they were bringing out in crates, they were brining out the engines, Hall Scot engines and all the equipment out from the UK in crates and the Egyptians were building the hull. They are wooden ships, wooden deck and the Egyptians are really good at that. Well I had six weeks there and in that time I enjoyed it because I did have a lot of free time…I just simply had…The only problem I had…

I wont’ go into that… I had better mention it I suppose. The only problem I had while I was there was I couldn’t get any money. I was in contact with Port Said, that was the nearest pay office and I said, “Send me some money. I’m here and I can’t afford to buy toothpaste let alone anything else” and one place you could enjoy yourself was Cairo. The thing was that they said, “We can’t give you

a proper because your papers haven’t come back from the UK as yet. All we can do is give you a couple of pounds, a few pounds at a time.” That is what they did. They gave me a sub as they called it. Because we didn’t have pay books like the army do. They couldn’t tell whether I was overdrawn or whatever. So I used to frequent

the New Zealand forces club because that was one place I could get cheap meals and good meals and they made a great fuss of me there, a lot of Maoris and New Zealanders and so forth. “Oh Sailor. What are you doing up here?” “I’m on leave.” I’d lose my hat and I’d have to go chasing round after it. Someone wanted a sailors hat on. It was good fun but the thing was I couldn’t talk to them about what I was doing.

Well they didn’t want the opposition knowing. There was a lot of 5th Column going on in Alexandria and Cairo, there was quite a lot. We can talk about that later but the thing was they were trying to keep it as quiet as possible that these boats were being made up at Shubra and so anyway I watched the ship, the boat that I went down on,

call it a ship, I watched it being built from the keel up. I saw the keel being made and watched it and the Egyptians that worked on the boat, they were quite good-humoured fellows that enjoyed their work. I got to like them after a while. They had a good sense of humour and I palled up particularly with a Maltese electrician who was supposed to be fitting out the boat and installing the

asdic equipment. He wasn’t very up on English because he had to asked me, “What’s this?” “Oh that’s the Amplifier,” you know.

My activity? Well as I say the first thing I did in the morning was get on the train and go up to the terminus at Shubra. At the terminus there was a little tin shed like a waiting shed there which

some of the Egyptians were sitting there with glasses of tea. They didn’t have cups. They always tumblers of black tea. I would sit there and have a glass of tea with these fellows and then make my way and walk down to the Anglo-Egyptian Ship Building yard. It was run by a Maltese with a Turkish wife, red headed woman, very nice people. And all I had to do

was issue the stores. The electrician wanted this and wanted that and we would get out all that and that would keep him going for the day and anything else that they needed out of the stores would get issued . Then we’d shut up shop. I could go back to Alexandria and the time was my own. The afternoon is off. thein that time I went up, we weren’t very far from Giser and I went up the pyramids and seen the sphinx and things like that.

I went to the zoo…The Cairo zoo. I also went to King Farouk’s Hygienic Museum and that was a show.

Oh it’s an awful place. Everything is done in life like from cleaning your teeth to births, abnormal births.

All this sort of thing is all set up in a museum. I remember I went there with a couple of other fellas that had come up at the time and we visited this place and it was just before lunch and when we came out I said, “Where are we going for lunch?” And they said, “Lunch? We’re sick in the stomach. We are not ready for lunch. We will go and have a drink somewhere first.”

It didn’t only have abnormalities. It went through the usual things. At the entrance it had a show of how to clean your teeth, you know? And that sort of thing but when it got up into the abnormal childbirths and that sort of thing it was awful. Even to…I can’t describe it. It was really life like and they had set up a whole museum on that. This

Hygenic Museum it was called. It was trying to advocate that they practice hygiene. A lot of them weren’t very hygienic the Egyptians. They didn’t have, they weren’t set up like we are. They lived on the land and there were no mountains immediately there. If you went out on the train it was nothing to see people just squatting on the side of the road doing their business

and that type of thing. There were lots of flies around.

Yeah.

Well if I remember rightly they are a hundred and twelve feet long, bigger than the average yacht, a hundred and twelve feet long They are a single deck with a bridge and a wheelhouse just one-step up. They usually have a gun of some kind mounted up there, a four inch,

smallish gun and then Oerlikons, this was the one I was on anyway. They had one big Oerlikon at the back and then they had Vickers machineguns on each end of the bridge. Not much else to describe.

Well that’s what we’ll come to. We are going through a description of the boat. They were shallow draft and so we could use them for special duties, which we eventually did anyway. We may as well go to that. When we got into operation…We carried depth charged of course down aft and it was essentially an asdic boat, a boat for fighting submarines. We were fast, we were manoeuvrable.

We had a shallow draft and we could go into places where ordinary destroyers couldn’t get into. One of the early assignments we had was to go up the coast and go behind the enemy lines into Derna and go in as far as we possibly could, about turn and fire

with everything we’ve got on us and kick up a racket just to see what kind of armament they had on their headlands and then bow out, get out as quick as we can. They wanted to see if it was feasible to make a landing behind the enemy lines and so they used us as a target. “You go up and present a target and see what happens.” We came out of it all right. We didn’t see much in the war of armament on the headlands at all.

But Derna Harbour is fairly small and a little pocket.

I don’t know what their PT boat was, yeah patrol boat sort of thing. Yeah something like that. It has a hundred and twelve feet of nice slim lines. I have photographs of them if you want to see them but you might see that later. But we were really sorted out

for special duties after a while. We were trying to initially, trying to get convoys through to Malta. Malta were in dire straits and we couldn’t get supplies through to them. We were losing so many big ships going through. We were detailed one morning to pick up two tankers that were going to take up supplies of fuel and so forth and all we saw in the morning we were to pick them up was

as the dawn came all we could see was a glow on the horizon and we went up to it and sure enough there was one ship had already sunk and the Brambleleaf, I can remember the name of that one, the Brambleleaf was still afloat but it was on fire. There was oil over the top of the water and so I could see one fellow floundering in the oil covered water so I dived over and swam out to him.

And I tried to get hold of his arm to bring him back into cleaner water and get him aboard the boat but his skin was always coming away in my hand. He was badly burnt and you couldn’t get a sort of decent grip on him. The only part I could get was round his waist. Anyway, I did take him out and

by that time there were some lifeboats come off the other destroyers that were around and we put him onto a lifeboat but I got a message later to say that he died anyway. So it was all for nothing but we tried then to find the submarine. We went around and….

Well

it just depends on how you see it. One thing I’ll say about it, we were good swimmers and a lot of the other fellas weren’t or some of them couldn’t swim. And I never worried about the Eastern Med [Mediterranean], never worried about it but they told us when we went there that there were no sharks in the Eastern Med. You see huge ones down around Arden and you saw them up round Gibraltar but not in the Eastern Mediterranean for some reason,

they won’t come through the channel. I’m way ahead of myself yet. I haven’t told you about coming into the Mediterranean.

The boat was still on fire but there was just a slick of oil over the surface. Whether it came from that boat or from the one that sank

I wouldn’t know but there was fire on the boat itself. Where I went into it wasn’t on fire there but it was very oily and slippery but I though first it was oil but it was his skin coming away when I tried to get his arm. I just had to get him back as best I could. They lifted him into the lifeboat but they told me afterwards that he died. So I thought, “Oh well.”

Only about

a hundred yards or so. We were good swimmers. We finished up… We are getting way ahead of ourselves but I mentioned earlier about there only being two of us on board the ship. There was Dick Vaber and myself. Dick has since died but we used to work two on and two off on board. Now we were both good swimmers. He was a

Mossman boy and we used to play water polo and that sort of thing in the Mediterranean. We’re diverting a bit. I was going to tell you how funny it was one night, we went shore one night in Alexandria and they had a habit of moving these ships. When we went ashore we were tied up against a wall and when we came back there was a boat identical with ours tied up

against the wall but it wasn’t ours. Oh no. That’s wrong. No, that’s right. There was one tied up beside the wall but it wasn’t ours and I said, “Where is ours?” “Oh it’s in the stream, in the middle of the harbour.” And so I’m calling out to it. It had a number 355, “355.” We wanted to get back on board ship and they were supposed to come back and pick us up.

Well I couldn’t make anybody hear. I’ve got my story wrong there.

And I was also enjoying myself in Cairo.

When the,

355 was the number that I was going down on, when it was completed it was like launching the Queen Mary. They had a big ceremony and the manger of the shipbuilding yard and a few dignitaries. We then had to take the boat down to the Sweetwater Canal which leads into Ishmailiya, which is about half way through the Suez Canal. Ishmailiya as some people call it.

We had to push and pull. We didn’t use our motors because there were dhows. We had motor tyres on either side because the dhows would come up and bump against us and we weren’t using our own engines. We had a little boat like a Thames Launch to pulling us forward but it couldn’t stop us so we used to have to get out and hang onto the lines to try and pull us back when we had to go through

lochs. And we went through the lochs there and they warned us, “On any account, don’t fall into the canal. If you do you go straight to hospital. There’s all sorts of wogs. There’s so much that if you fall in don’t hesitate. Go straight to hospital.” But anyway.

Too much rubbish in the water. It wasn’t a very wide

canal the Sweetwater Canal. It’s only narrow and it’s got these Lochs to contend with plus the other traffic coming and bumping alongside us. We couldn’t sort of start up engines and manage on our own.

Well as I say we took it down the Sweetwater Canal to Ishmailiya. The pilot came aboard then. We had to take it into Suez you see and take it to Port Said. The pilot just said, they invited him down to the wardroom to have a drink and he did that, he went down below

and they said to me, “Will you take the ship up through the Suez Canal?” Well that was the proudest day of my life. Here was my new ship, it was my ship. I had seen it built from the keel up and knew every inch of it and here I am on my own taking it up through the canal. I was always afraid I was going to hit the side at times but I managed to get it up there and into Port Said and I was really proud of it. It was a beautiful ship and that turned out to be one of the happiest ships

I was ever been on. Hazel talks not about the captain and the First Lieutenant. Well they both write to me regularly. The captain published a book called, “At sea level.” He spent six years on small boats like Fairmiles and he said the water was always lapping at where his bunk was. He was always at sea level. The first lieutenant, he was a really nice fellow. He

was only about two years older than myself. That would be about right. Anyway he’s a very nice chap. He lives in Ipswich now in the UK. The last time I wrote to him I just put a footnote in the letter and said, “If ever you publish your memoirs I would like to read them.” Well it wasn’t very long after

it, it landed on the front door step. Not his published one. He said, “We only printed it for the family.” In the beginning he said it was for family only and not to be used for commercial purposes. He said, “We only had thirteen copies made and they are nicely bound. I’m sorry we can’t bind it for you but we got it all together again and here’s your copy.” So he sent the whole thing to me and he said, “Now, of course, I’ll have to

adopt you because it’s for family only. Anyhow that’s all right because I always regarded my crew as family anyway” so that was very nice of him. Ken Hallows was his name. He was a real gentleman.

355. They don’t have names. They just give them numbers and 355 was the one I was on and

we took part in some real actions there. We were in the evacuation of Tobruk. We were the last boat to come out of Tobruk. We also witnessed the El Alamein campaign from a grandstand view really.

That was the evacuation.

With the evacuation of Tobruk we were over just below the roadway… Navy House in Tobruk is up on the hill and thee is a roadway leading down to it and we were just down below and we were sheltered behind a merchantman, a wrecked merchantman, a merchant wreck I should say and there were a couple of other boats outside of us so that we couldn’t move until they

went out. They had been shelling us for quite a while before we evacuated. The shells were coming over. They were going mostly over Navy House. Some of them were landing a bit short but they were trying to aim at the town behind and break the perimeter so they could get through our troops and we had been there for a while. We had put up with

this noisy barrage and the captain said to me, “I can’t get any signals from Navy House. Will you walk up with me and we’ll see what’s going on?” So we started to walk from 355, started walking up the roadway to Navy House when a shell landed right behind us and it blew me right off the road. It blew me out for a while. I fell off the road and I landed

on the side of my head and my shoulder and when I got up and came to, the skipper had really suffered a shock too. He said, “I thought you had broken your neck. You landed on that part of your head.” But anyway he said, ”I think we’ll go back to the ship.” We were badly, well he was shocked and he came off the ship

because he was knocked about. He pleaded sick.

I don’t know. I’ll tell you more about the evacuation first and then you’ll perhaps understand. As far as I was concerned I had lots of blood, I didn’t know what was what. I was bleeding and I had a lot of skin off. When I got back to the ship we didn’t carry any medical

people on board and we had medical equipment and so forth there but you had to look after yourself more or less. After I had cleaned off I thought, “Well I haven’t got any bones broken, it’s mostly skin that I have lost.” Something hit me at the back of the head, which knocked me out. I don’t know what it was but something hard. And I didn’t feel all that bad and I thought, “Well we’ve got to get out,” By that time

the order to evacuate came through and by the time I had cleaned myself us we had got the order to evacuate. My action station was on the wheel because that’s what I was saying earlier about the asdics had to also be the man on the wheel and so I took the wheel of the ship and I had to wait first of all for

these other two boats to go out. Well one went out and it was sunk. It was a direct hit because the tanks by that time were coming along the opposite shore of the harbour and they were just taking pot shots at anything that moved there. The second ship went out and they weren’t Fairmiles, they were HD [Harbour Defence] Fairmiles. They were diesel driven. We were on high octane fuel. We had two thousand gallons of

aviation fuel, high octane fuel under our decks and we had twin Hall Scot Engines. The second ship went out and it got hit right on the bridge. One of the seaman took the wheel and he brought it back. It was on fire when he brought it back and our skipper, as I say he had already suffered some shock and he was saying, “Push it away”, because he was worried about us

with high octane fuel on board and a ship coming alongside. But we didn’t pay much attention to him. We just…Well some of our crew just pulled the burning ship beside us and they went on board and took off the crew. They only got about seven people off the boat. The others were wiped out and then they pushed the burning vessel away and we were free to go.

By that time army people and so forth, we finished up with about another forty-five people, Indian army and English army and a mixture of people on board, they were all taking passage out with us. So I was on the wheel and we started out and we were going all right. We were zig zagging all over the place and these tanks…

Oh as we were going out there was one tank coming along our side of the harbour who was only three hundred yards away and it was trying to catch us but we managed for a while. But what worried me was part way down the harbour, about half way down the engine stopped and I thought, “Now what’s happened? Here I am on my way but I have no engine.” It wasn’t for very long. Apparently what happened was the

leading stoker was up on the bridge with the skipper and he heard that the engines weren’t functioning properly and he dashed down below to find that in the panic the mechanic had forgotten to turn the oil on. He switched both motors off and then he got one going. The other had burnt itself out. So we finished out we had to come out on one engine but that was okay. We got going again.

It was probably only a very short time but it seemed like a long time to me. I thought we were going to get hit and I really prayed about it. Anyhow we got going and then a smoke screen came up. One of the motor torpedo boats ahead of us put up a smoke screen, which I think helped us quite a bit but as we were going through the

entrance to the harbour we collided with a, because of the smoke and so forth we collided with a landing barge that was trying to get out and there were four people on board it. And so we went as close to them as we could and told them to jump and three of them jumped and got on board our ship, our fellas pulled them on board but the fourth one he couldn’t make it. And the skipper said, “Go ahead. We can’t stop just for one

man.” We just had to go ahead and leave that fellow.

Oh well it was a case of you’ve got to make a decision there. You either stop and pick him up and turn around or something of that sort. You are just leaving yourself open then for all those other people who are on board. So that was the skipper’s decision but as I say he wasn’t in a very healthy condition himself. Because he didn’t want to

take the boat alongside anyway. But the thing was that we got out of there all right with one engine going but the next thing we had to worry about was the Stukas came over. The Stukas used to dive bomb us and it only needed one cannon shell to go through that wooden deck and two thousand gallons worth of high octane fuel, it would go up like a bomb. But we manoeuvred one way and another and we got out

of it okay. We got back from Tobruk. We went back to Mersa Matruh. Oh the skipper disappeared. The first lieutenant took over. We got back to Mersa Matruh and the skipper pleaded ill and he went off at Mersa Matruh and the first Lieutenant then took charge of the ship and we went from Mersa Matruh…Oh we unloaded all of the wounded and evacuees and he took us back to Alexandria.

So that was…

It was really. The skipper didn’t come back. He pleaded nerves or shellshock or something of that sort. And so he didn’t come back to us but this skipper that came aboard, he was an excellent type. He was the one that still writes to me now. He wrote this book, At Sea Level.

None that I know of. Wait a minute…it’s very hard to say. We had some…There was only two Australians on board. There was Dick Vaber and myself. We weren’t effected all that much. I didn’t plead ill at all.

From the time we evacuated to the time we got back to Alexandria was five days. In that five days I dressed my wounds. I decided there was nothing broken. There was only skin off here and there. I didn’t know about the lump at the back of my head but I decided that I wasn’t going to do anything about it because I didn’t want to leave the ship for one thing.

I was happy enough on board there. So anyhow we got back to Alexandria and then we proceeded to Port Said where we were going for repairs. We got back there okay. We got a new skipper come on board and he was an ideal type.

They were in a pretty bad state really. It seems from what they told me that the first lieutenant was at the wheel when they went out and apparently it was a direct hit on the wheelhouse and it was just simply, that’s the way they told me, that

it took of his face. His body was lying there. One of the seaman took over the wheel and he was more or less standing in his body steering the ship and bring it alongside us. He was telling me. He said, “It was an awful sight. It just clean whipped half of his head off sort of thing.” But it didn’t knock his head off. It just took his face away.

No. He was lying beside the wheel but this fellow…The rest of the crew were just sitting behind on the bench they have in the wheelhouse. They were the only ones that survived from that boat. But no, the fellow that took the wheel was wounded in both legs but he just hung onto the wheel and bought the ship around.

Well we didn’t have much bother with them. We only transported them from…Everybody that could make it got down and got on board. We didn’t refuse anybody. That the only ones that stayed behind there was a couple of fellows stayed behind to… demolition people. They were going to demolish the wharf or whatever was left.

They stayed behind. I don’t know what would happen to them. They would probably be taken prisoner of war or something of that sort. They weren’t our people. I mean they didn’t belong to our crew. But they were demolition experts and that was their job so they stayed at it.

Yeah. As I came out of the harbour I felt sure we were going to be

knocked because they were giving us a real pounding with the tanks. You know, they were the Panzer Division. They were big tanks and they could fire pretty accurately too apparently. They weren’t missing very much.

Oh I don’t really

know. “Please God help us. Help us to get out.” It was a rather a dramatic experience but well we made it out. That was the big thing and afterward we just heaved a big sigh of relief and thought well…The only other thing we did was we had flagons of rum we put out on the deck because

a lot of them travelled on the deck overnight and it was pretty coolish and we said, “Oh well look anybody that wants it can take it.” I noticed there was some left the next morning, they didn’t clean it all up but that was just to help them on their way. We did have quite a few wounded. We couldn’t get any sleep ourselves because their wounded occupied all the bunks and

we just couldn’t sleep. We went for quite a while without food and without sleep too. It’s hard to imagine how we did it but it was done. You just do these things. You go with it.

Well it did help me but at the same time I think that was one time I felt, “This is it. I doubt if we’ll get out of it” and I had a sort of a feeling…how do you put it? I know it flashed through my mind

that I had nobody to worry about. I wasn’t engaged or anything of that sort. There was only my mother and father. I felt calm enough but resigned to the fact that if I die I die, that’s about it but I’ll do what I can while I’m alive.

And that was the sort of thinking that I was doing at the time. And at the same time I was asking God to help us through. It was an odd feeling. I could see a lot of my life just behind me and I thought, “Well I had done the best I could.”

Yes. That’s right.

That’s right. I seemed to get a flash of the whole of my life and I thought, “Well I haven’t got many to mourn me

but my life was my own.”

Oh I don’t know. Except that I

was a bit unsettled when I came out of the navy but I had a lot of experience from there on and I decided that I should just take one day at a time and do what I could for that day. But apart form that no, I didn’t have any regrets. I know it was an awful experience at the time but I was thankful afterwards that we did get through as well as we did

an that I didn’t suffer a lot. I had some defects with my hearing and I think it was a result of whatever it was that hit me on the back of the head, just behind the ear. They asked me once when I got back here and I had to go before a board and they said, “Did you bleed from the ear?”

And I said, “Quite honestly I don’t know because I was bleeding from so many spots, so many parts. My knees and my shoulders and…”

Can I describe it?

Well I was thankful in a way that

it was not as bad as it might have seemed. At first sight I had a lot of skin off and a lot of bleeding but I was able to manage it myself in the five days it took us to get back to Alexandria. I didn’t go to sickbay like I said earlier, I didn’t want to be taken off the ship.

Well this shoulder I think was one of the worst parts and the side of my head was grazed more or less on the side and the knee was out of my trousers and the knee didn’t feel too good but it wasn’t a deep wound.

No. I can’t say that…The blow on the back of the head I would say was the worst thing of all. I can’t say that…and the effect that it had on my hearing and I finished out with spondylitis. An ex-ray I had back here, I didn’t tell the x-ray people anything about what had happened in Tobruk,

they just x-rayed my neck and he said, “You’ve had a traumatic fall sometimes.” I said, “Oh yes, I did that.” He said, “It’s noticeable. You’ve fractured your neck and it has grown back again but you’ll probably have a bad neck for the rest of your life.” I said, “Oh well. If that’s all it is then that’s all.” No. I didn’t need stitches or anything like that.

I just dressed some of the parts that were bleeding badly and did the best I could with the first aid equipment.

Well we went back to Port Said for repairs and they did send us down to a rest camp, they called it, at Timsah. Timsah was on the

Suez too. I got down there and I found that there were all sorts of people there. Fellas that looked like foreign legion and all sort. They came from army. It was just a place that they could put people into and they could have a bit of quiet rest for a while. At home here we talked about asparagus at one time and Hazel said. “It was a luxury in the war years.”

I said, “It wasn’t where I was,” because I remember once we went had lunch served to us one day and they said, “It’s asparagus for lunch.” And there was a big boiler and it was full of asparagus. We all had to dive in and help ourselves to as much hot asparagus as we wanted. But oh no, we could swim there and we could laze about for a while and just sort of get yourself calmed down a bit.

Eventually I went back to 355 and that was where we tied up alongside the submarines. The submarines used to go into Port Said for any repairs that they needed and we challenged them to water polo from time to time and they were keen on that so we played water polo and that’s where Dick Vaber and myself helped a lot because ewe could swim better than most.

And although the submariners nearly drowned us at times but they were good blokes. They took us on board and made us feel at home and one of them was going out on trials one night and the skipper of the submarine approached our fellow and said, “Look. We’re short of one crew. Could you loan us somebody just for the trial run?” I went out on it.

I said, “Oh I’ll go out for the run” and it was a new experience for me and so I just went out while they did the trials and came back again and I thought they were a great crowd. I thought, “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll volunteer for submarines.” So it was, it took a while for them to do anything about me. They took me off the ship

but…

Well I would say…I’ve skipped a whole lot. I have talked about Tobruk but I haven’t talked about Alamein and I haven’t talked about our exploits when we went over to Crete and picked off people that had been living up in the mountains.

When we came out of Port Said we were back into action again, that’s right. We were put onto special duties then. The Alamein business came up… I’m trying to think what was before Alamein. Yeah, that’s right

Alamein came up next. That was the thing. At that time when we went back to Alexandria there was a bit of a panic on there. Some of the blokes we were dealing with, the clubs and restaurants all had British Emblems up and they got word that the Germans were about forty miles out of Alexandria

and they changed their signs. They were putting up all the signs with Swastikas and what not. They changed sides because there was a lot of fifth Column working and some of them were just on one side or the other whoever was there. And there was quite a lot and some people were evacuating out of Alexandria going back to Port Said, some of the navy people but we had to stay

there for a while. We were told to stay there then the next thing I knew was we were told about Alamein, about the timing of it. We had to organize a mock landing. We organized a mock landing and we went up the coast behind enemy lines and we went into a little place called Smuggler’s Cove and as we went out of Alexandria

we made ourselves known. We went out when it was daylight so anybody in the fifth column that saw us go out would say, “They were just landing barges with nothing in them, just a tarpaulin across and perhaps two men sailing the boat, or the barge.” We had a whole string of vessels going from Alexandria out to the horizon more or less and we went out and we went up the coast there. The idea was we were to put on a mock landing

into Smugglers Cove as though we were going to go to ashore there and that timed to coincide with the push to Alamein that out people were doing and it was intended to draw some of the German people off the front and bring them down onto the coast and I believe that worked so some of the army

fellows told me. It did work and they did send a contingent down to the coast just to cope with the landing that was taking place there. Well there was no landing, it was just a mock affair and so we got out of that all right but we were at sea. We could see all the blasting that was going on. We had a grandstand view of the Alamein push.

Mainly just lots of smoke and

flashes and noise and you know, it was obviously a blast. It was a really strong push through there and that was when Montgomery turned the tide and pushed the Germans back.

It doesn’t register in the mind. We were just hoping that this was going to be the turning point. We thought it would be, they had gone to enough trouble. Montgomery waited until he got reinforcements and he had sufficient power to make a push and as I say with our help on the coast and that…Our people knew a

little bit more about the desert in that area than the Germans did so they were able to get through. We pushed them all the way then. We went right up as far as Benghazi with them, following the troops all the way.

I’m trying to think… That was about the time that they went back. They retook Tobruk, they took Mersa Matruh, Tobruk and then Bardia and then

we went on to Behghazi. That’s as far as we went with them. About that time that the Americans came in. They came in from the opposite direction to Tripoli and we were put on to what they called special duties and that was the time that we went over to Crete. There was some of our AIF, when they were,

a lot of them were taken prisoner of war when the Germans took over. The Germans were still in occupation there and some of them escaped up into the mountains, our fellows, the AIF fellows went up into the mountains and they lived with the Cretans up there while the Germans were in occupation and we were told that we were to go in at night and take about fifty of these people off.

And when we got there the Cretans generally had heard about it and there was more than fifty. There were the best part of a hundred people waiting there to be taken off. Anyhow the thing was that we loaded up with all that we could carry and it was about a fourteen-hour journey back to Mersa Matruh and we took off I think two women,

that had married into our, the AIF guys had married these girls and so we took them off as their wives. We did more than one trip there. We went back again later and we took off a lady, I can’t remember her name now but she had been working with the Germans in an office where she knew just what was going on. Oh, we said to them…

well let’s finish this. She used to pass on information from the German side through to the Cretans and get information through to our own people and she must have been suspected of it because she found that her flat had been raided and so she decided it was time for her to get out and we were

especially asked to get her off and so we went back for more. I think in all we made about three trips to Crete but we said to them once, “Well how is it the Germans don’t know about it?” They said, The Cretians keep it a secret until after the event and then they go back and boast about it but it’s too late for the Germans to do anything about it.” The big mountains…

we were going in on the southern side and they were over on the Northern side so it was a real barrier there.

Yes. That was what we went in for initially, was to get the AIF fellows out.

They were in pretty good condition. They had been living well with the families in Crete up in the mountains. The mountain people looked after them.

I don’t know that any of them suffered a great deal from it. They were probably better off than being in a prison camp anyway.

That’s right. It sounds as though they could have been. The Cretian people apparently remained loyal to our side.

I don’t know, I would have to look it up. The skipper wrote about it in his book but I just can’t remember. It was a foreign sounding name. I couldn’t really tell you what nationality she was. She got some award for it anyway for the work that she had done there while she was working for the Germans but working for our people at the same time.

What interaction personally? Very little because again my position was on the wheel and I know that there were lots of people coming on board but they would take her straight down to the wardroom and make her comfortable and look after her. So I didn’t have much personal contact with the people at all. It was a case of

staying on the wheel and looking after the ship. That was the advantage of such a shallow draft. We could go into four foot six or five feet of water. There was a lot of rocks about and we had to be careful about getting in. We were going in, in the dark. You couldn’t use high beam lights or anything of that sort.

Only that it’s quite a small harbour. It is a round harbour with hills behind it. There didn’t seem to be much town that we could see. It may have been that it over the other side of the mountain but the first

time we went over to Crete it was a new experience for us and we had on board a couple of London boys. One of them was a real cockney. I asked him once what he did before the war. I said, “How did you come to get in the navy” and he said that they were conscripted into the navy. He said, “I was a ‘Terrie Logo’.” I said, “What’s a ‘Tarrie Logo’?”

He said, “You know how the wooden blocks were placed in the London roads and they’d tar over the top of them? More recently they’ve gone for ((UNCLEAR) - mcadam) type roads” so he would pick the wood up. And he said, “I had a hand barrow and I used to load up with the tarrie wood and I’d go around the suburbs calling Tarrie Logo and the people would buy the fire wood from me.” He was a little cockney fellow that just sort of peddled things around like that.

He told me that he had married and he told me a bit about that. It seems that they weren’t very well educated. Well anyway, the first trip we took to Derna we came back and we had to wait in Derna. We were going back the next night. We took commandos over on that raid. We took the commandos over and we dropped them one night and we were supposed to go back the next night and

pick them up and we were waiting in Derna. Well while we waited in Derna there was a bit of a swell running and the ship went backwards and forwards, backward and forwards all night long. When we awoke the next morning he was lying on his bunk and he was frothing at the mouth and looked in an awful state and we called the first lieutenant up and he said, “I think he’s either had a stroke or his had an epileptic sort of a turn”

and so we had to take him off. I think the stress was just too much for him. And the other fellow too. he didn’t actually go sick but he was really shook up about going back into Derna again. I think they felt, you know, felt the strain just in having to…it was a sneaky operation. We knew the Germans were occupying the island.

I can’t account for it any other way. It was just too much for him to take in, mentally I mean.

How do you mean?

Well he was frothing at the mouth.

Oh I don’t know. I can’t think what happened there. I’ll finish with this cockney fellow first. We took him off and they put him into hospital for a while and then I saw him round the shore base before I came home. I had to wait a

while to get the trip home. I saw him almost face to face and I tried to speak to him but he just looked right through me. He couldn’t sort of comprehend at all. So something went wrong brain wise, I think. But the other fellow, Spall, he just didn’t seem to be able to manage to do the things that he was asked to do. And he had to leave the ship after a while because

he wasn’t much use to us and we couldn’t carry any dead weight. We had a limited crew and we just couldn’t carry dead weight with us and that’s all it was with him. I know one….I talked about coming out of Tobruk on one motor and he was asked to take the wheel one time to give me a break and he wasn’t on it very long and the first Lieutenant said to me, “Will you go back on the wheel?

He can’t steer the ship. He is all over the place.” So I had to go back on the wheel. I think I did about six hours on the wheel at that stage taking the boat back. That was by the way.

Action stations, yes. We had a coxswain who was an English

fellow and he used to get seasick as soon as we left harbour and he wasn’t much use to us as far as taking over the wheel was concerned. I think he must have come good later reading the skippers book about what happened after I left. He had to take over but he always pleaded that he was sick when we got to sea.

A typical day? In harbour or at sea?

Well at sea it was, we always had some duties because we had to keep the ship clean. We had to do all our own sort of house keeping you might call it.

We didn’t carry a cook so we had to take it in turns preparing meals. Some of them were good and some weren’t. I told Hazel that I prepared Christmas dinner one day and I always reckon I can’t cook but she said, “How did you prepare a meal for Christmas Dinner?” I said, “We bought a turkey.” I forget how big it was now but it was a big one and I stuffed it with tinned sausages

and it was all done on a paraffin stove and anyway it baked up all right and I don’t know just what I did at the time but everything seemed to work our all right. The skipper at the time voted that it was a good Christmas. He’s the one that wrote his book, At Sea Level and he was quite happy about it. They had to eat. One thing about the Fairmiles and this was a thing I liked about submarines too,

we were all more or less on the one level. The skipper and his first lieutenant were the only officers on board and they had to eat the same food we ate because it was the same person that cooked it and put it together. So that’s the way it went. We fared pretty well. I could tell you a few tales but I don’t think you’ve got all that much time have you? I don’t mind the time.

Well as far as I was concerned having done the trips to Crete, as I say we didn’t go any further along with the army beyond Benghazi. Well that was when we came back to Port Said again and I volunteered for Submarines. I was taken off the 355. The first lieutenant went off too. He went onto a ship of his own. He became the captain of one of the other Fairmiles and then I had to wait for them to…

I thought they’d maybe send me back to the UK but instead of that they sent me home and when I got home I found that we were about to commission a Dutch Submarine which was on loan to the Australian navy. They were about to commission it in Sydney for the purpose of training asdics. And I thought, “Well that would suit me.” I had had enough of overseas trips

and I had only crossed the equator six times in those few years. So I went onto this new boat. But it wasn’t actually a new boat that wasn’t actually a new boat, it was a very old boat and a small one at that. We only had a crew of about thirty-two I am able to name. I thought there was thirty-five at one stage but when we got to jotting down names we could only find thirty-two. This was after the war.

So you can imagine it was quite a small ship. The O boats [submarine] carry seventy odd people. We were only about forty-three metres long. It was a small boat for a submarine.

What we call N39.

I was impressed with the way the submariners work. They are a different kind of people. They all have to pull their weight. In their training they have to learn their boat from one end to the other. You have to know all the positions in the boat and what needs to be done. If one

section of the boat is locked off for some reason and flooded you had to know where you could take over and do somebody else’s job. I thought in itself that was an interesting training. They were all more or less on one level although there were chief petty officers and we only had three officers on board. They were mostly English

people. I’d say there were two thirds English and one-third Australian. The Australians were… only two of us were asdics and then there were telephonists and few stokers. But apart form that the torpedo men were all English, the skipper and the first lieutenant and the sub lieutenant, they were all English fellows.

So it was only about a third of the crew was Australian. It appealed to me but the other boats when I visited them and got to know them, I was taken with their attitudes and their and camaraderie. I thought, “They are all people who know their job and they worked together.” That appealed to me.

Well there again I think I was very fortunate. As I said I went away on the Aquitania and I came home on the Aquitania. I knew the Aquitania backwards really. No that’s what happened. I had to wait a while in Alexandria for the call to

join the convoy and when it came through I was to go and board the Aquitania so it was a surprise to me but a welcome one because they got us a cabin on the way home and looked after us. When I say we there was about three of us shared a cabin but that was good. It was better than we had when we came out. So the Aquitania did the job again and brought us home safely.

Where did I go from there? First of all they wanted me to do a higher course in submarine detection.

It could lead to being an instructor in asdics but some things came up in my personal life that I said, “I don’t really want to do that.” I had been set down to join a class but then I went to Commander Quince who used to be a teacher up at Knocks College and I put it to him. I said, “Look

I really don’t want to do this. I want to stay in Sydney if possible and this submarine was going and I would like to go onto this particular submarine.” And he said, “All right. We’ll organize that for you.” So instead of doing the higher course in submarine detection I did a course and I passed out as a submariner.

I did a submarine course instead of the other. So it is on my record there, qualified submarines.

It’s a personal thing that I don’t like to talk too much about. Am I allowed to do that?

Family related.

I had met Hazel. I met Hazel when I went down to Jervis Bay originally on the one and only trip we did as a practical trip before we went away. We did a run from Sydney down to Jervis Bay and back and that was our sea training. And she was holidaying down in Jervis Bay at the time. I met her then but

I just sort of said to her, “Can I see you when I get back to Sydney?” I did see her when we got back to Sydney. I saw her once or twice but it wasn’t very long after and I was on my way to the UK. We corresponded while I was away. Oh she gave me a photograph to take with me. It went around the world sort of thing. So we were then really getting serious about each other and I said, “I’d like to stay in Sydney. I think

we might be getting married.” Anyhow he accepted my explanation and that was it. He was good like that. I might mention at this stage that Palica went back to the UK again. Remember Palicia that was with me? He came out from the UK to the Mediterranean. He went and saw Commander Quince, Quince was a very

nice fellow and he was always very sympathetic. He would listen to a good story. I said to Pud Palica, “How did you get back to the UK?” He said, “Oh I told Quince that I was engaged to a girl in Scotland and I would like to go back.” So he let him back on another trip. So that’s the sort of man he was and a good naval officer at the same time.

Oh I don’t know how often. She wrote to Americans and she told me a few funny stories about that but I haven’t got time to go into them now I don’t think. I know she sent one, they asked for a photograph of her and she sent back some very ancient photograph of a girl holding a lily in front of her with long plats and all the rest of it. It wasn’t her and they woke up straight away.

But anyhow.

We were commissioned to train asdic operators so that we had to go outside and submerge and the corvettes or Fairmiles or whatever they were that they were training and the aircraft took part

in this too, the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force]. They had to try and find us and if possible they dropped small charges on us. They weren’t charges that were heavy enough to do any real damage to us but we could feel them if they got a hit with us. We could hear it. We could hear the explosion. But they were only eight-pound charges. I couldn’t tell you what the full charge would be but they didn’t do us any real harm but they would register a hit.

And so we operated mostly between Broken Bay and Jervis Bay. We carried torpedoes but we weren’t required to fire them because we got loaded on at Neutral Bay there at the Torpedo factory. And so we did more than ninety dives in the time we were in commission but it was an old boat.

It was built in 1922 so you can imagine than it wasn’t set out to do any long trips. There was very little comfort in them. We had no bunks. We slept on battery boards or more or less lying on the floor when it was overnight…That’s our phone again.

We weren’t set up to sleep except when we went down to Jervis Bay or something like that we would only spend a night or two at the most out like that. And we would just have to make ourselves as comfortable as we could on the battery boards and things like that. We didn’t have any bunks as such to accommodate us. It wasn’t designed that way, I mean

it wasn’t set up that way. It was designed to carry people and bunks originally but I think they forgot to put the bunks in when they restored it. As I say it was very old and as far as preparing meals was concerned all we had was a hotplate there. We could make a cup of tea or coffee or whatever and that’s about as far as it went. Any food we took on board was taken from Rushcutter. Most submarines anyway have a mother ship.

They go back to get food and stores and that to accommodate or to look after themselves on a particular trip that is going to take three or four days or something like that. And we would get food from Rushcutters Bay if we were going down to Jervis Bay but as far as sleeping arrangements were concerned it was quite primitive.

You want to go down into the conning tower? Well if you are in the conning tower and you go in that way you go down quite a ladder or two. You go into a chamber about half way which you use for your escape if you have to escape and then you go through that again to the floor of the operation room. That’s where you’ve got your periscopes and the asdics are on the side

and there is telegraphy and all that sort of thing all housed down there. That is the operational area. Immediately behind the operational area was quarters for the officers, just a bunk or two there and that’s about all. From there back were the engines and torpedoes. There were

two torpedoes forward and two torpedoes aft. We carried spares of course. I think they carried about six in all. But as I say we never had to use those. We didn’t come in contact with any enemy vessels. And in the forward part, coming forward from the operating room, there was the battery room was the next one, that housed

all our batteries. The batteries were big five foot high sorts of things, huge batteries, wet batteries. And then ahead of those there was another compartment which was a main torpedo housing area. Spare torpedoes and the forward torpedoes for firing. That was the layout generally. There was

only one toilet on the boat and that was it. They called them boats, they don’t call them ships. They are boats. But the trouble with this was they were really old I’m afraid and they tried to restore it. They were a bit unfortunate when the Japanese tired to enter Sydney Harbour or they did enter Sydney Harbour and they let off a torpedo that was intended for the American ship

that was there and it went under the Kuttabul. Do you remember reading about that? It destroyed the Kuttabul and in doing so it went under the submarine and it didn’t do any real damage but I believe the engines weren’t in as sounder position as they should have been. It seemed to create a lot of engine problems. But our main defect

that we found was that the batteries weren’t properly ventilated. We were aware of this all the time we were operating. I say we did more than ninety dives. There was a collection of Hydrogen gas in pockets that if a spark set it off it would destroy the battery completely.

That’s actually what happened to us after I was on board there for twelve months. All the time they were sort of overhauling the boat and we were going out, we were going down Sydney Harbour and we were in about the region of Shark Island and fortunately we dressed ship. You know how they dressed ship when you are going out? Everybody got on deck and lined up so there was nobody down in the battery room at the time. We were lined up on deck and then boom.

The battery room blew up and it damaged not just one battery but it damaged a number of the batteries there and how it all happened was I don’t know. The engineers reckoned it was something to do with the engine being faulty and creating sparks and the sparks set off the hydrogen gas that accumulated from the faulty battery ventilation. And so they explored the possibility of getting

batteries but the current English submarines that were round about here, their batteries were no use. They just couldn’t. It wasn’t worthwhile and they decided to decommission it. As far as I was concerned that was the end of my career.

Mainly asdic. We weren’t transmitting sound waves so much as doing hydrophone effects. We could listen to the beat of the boats above us and you could detect what kind of a boat it was and approximately what speed it was doing, which direction it was moving. We used that to move ourselves around to avoid being hit by these charges that they were dropping.

That’s the way it went. I didn’t have any other duties. There was only two of us on board and the other fellow had done the higher course in asdics and his main job was to see that the equipment was kept in shape and look after it generally.

All I did was to operate it when it was necessary. But between us we managed pretty well.

Well it’s something that never bothered me. People said, “How do you stand being cooped up like that?” Because you couldn’t see anything. When we dived the main thing I had to do was they’d say, “Close number four, Kingston.” So I would close the Kingston. They would

operate on vents and Kingstons. The vents blow the water out and the Kingstons let it in so if we were going to submerge we’d release the Kingston and let the tanks fill. There was a few funny incidents happened there because of our people not knowing enough about the boats or something of that sort.

In one instance we were trying to submerge and we couldn’t get down. Gus Fisher, who was our chief, he was a very experienced submariner. He was Australian but he had served in Britain on Submarines and he said, “Tell the lieutenant to close the vents because all we’re doing is blowing bubbles.” We were letting water in through the Kingstons and he was blowing it out because he hadn’t turned the vents off.

So we were just creating bubbles and we weren’t getting anyway. And another occasion when we were down at Jervis Bay, everything on this boat was operated manually. There was no automation about it. The steering was all done by a big ‘werly’. The hydroplanes were operated by two huge wheels and they had two of them, Gus Fisher this fellow I told you about, and Terry

Rosebrook was on the other wheel. He was our chief petty officer. Gus said he wouldn’t give me a bubble sort of thing. He couldn’t get evened up with him so Gus took it into a dive and he dived down about forty-five degrees and then he pulled it out as soon as it touched bottom. There was a sandy bottom down there fortunately.

We went down like that and then up like that. One minute everything that was movable went down one way and then in a second it was all coming back the other way. But we came out of it all right. If there had been anything to trap us on the bottom we could have been down there for a while but we just bounced off the bottom. He pulled it out as soon as it touched.

It wasn’t really safe. We were aware of the trouble with the hydrogen gasses and the collection of it. We were aware of that for a long time and we used to go into Garden Island and ask them to try and do something about fixing it. But quite frankly I don’t think they knew enough about ventilating a submarine to get it right somehow and it should

not have happened. We knew that the gas were leaking there and we thought well that could happen any time. But there again we were just fortunate we were on the surface. If it had happened while we were submerged it would’ve been in real trouble.

No. They didn’t allow smoking on board. You don’t do that.

Any submarines that were here during the war years were either American or British. The British submarines used to come in but we just didn’t have one for asdic training. You were saying when we were in the UK did you have any actual training with a submarine? Well we didn’t and they perhaps realized that too that we should have an actual submarine. We were training asdic people on simulators but

they never had any actual experience so this was going to fill the bill as far as that was concerned. We would just become the target for aircraft or the surface vessels. Quite a few of the corvettes had a go at us and so it went.

Oh that is something we had to practice regularly was the escape apparatus. Now in the UK they have a long tank and they go in the bottom and they let themselves in through the water and escape up through the tank that way. We didn’t have those facilities

here so what we used to do was in the summer months particularly we used to go over to Clifton Gardens and if you know it might have long jetty there going right out into the harbour. We would go out on the end of that jetty and don the Davis escape apparatus which means to say you put a clip on your nose, take a mouthpiece that you clamp...you couldn’t go on board if you had false teeth. You had to have your own teeth. That was a stipulation. So you

clamped the mouth piece between your teeth and you had a little flask of oxygen on the front of you here and you give yourself oxygen if you need it and down you’d go. We used to put a line on ourselves so we didn’t get lost because sometimes when you start walking on the bottom of the harbour with little fish going by and all that sort of thing you can lose your sense of direction. And you could finish up like being

lost in a forest or something and you couldn’t see where you were. So we’d take a line down with us and like all divers we’d give a tug, “Pull me up,” sort of thing and they’d do that. But we didn’t have any real difficulties. I found it was quite a pleasant experience really, just to go in there and walk around the harbour for a while and then sort of come up and let somebody else have a go at it.

That was one way we used to do it. Wintertime when we decided it was just far too cold to go we went up to the Tattersalls Club and they’ve got a big swimming pool there and we used to put the apparatus on and go and sit on the bottom of the swimming pool. We got used to breathing that way, using the bag that is in front of you. The other thing was…

There is a bag on your chest arrangement. The

flask of oxygen was below the bag and you could feed oxygen into the bag if necessary. You didn’t want to use too much of it because you take in too much oxygen and you come out and have a small drink and that and you’re right for the day. You get drunk very easily.

No. But what was I going to say?

The other thing was there was an apron in the front that you could unhook and you could hold out in front of you and when we were in the harbour we used to use that instead of coming up quickly, you hesitate every now and again and we would put the apron up and it would hold you in position. It would stop you rising to the surface or slow your movement so you didn’t get the bends and that type of thing.

That was all there was too it.

Well I enjoyed it. I though it was real novel sort of arrangement. When they come to put the tunnel through somebody said to me, “Are you going to go through the tunnel?” and I said, “I’ve been under it. Why would I want to go through?” “Just to say that you’ve been under the harbour,” and I said, “I have been under the harbour. Walked around there.”

Not quite. I imagined that…I did imagine in the beginning that I might get sent back to the UK.

But instead of that they sent me home and this was the opportunity. Once I got home I was a bit disappointed when I got home. Things went a bit flat. Do you know what I mean? It is hard to describe. I did have a problem on away and another and of course in that three years that I was away the place had changed. It wasn’t boarded up or anything like that

when I went away because there was no war on here but when I came home it was quite a different place. I felt we were treated differently somehow.

Well I became accustomed to having a drink and we still had six o’clock closing in the hotels here and if I went into a Hotel and asked for a drink I couldn’t get served

because they had all their regulars, you know. They had businessmen and so forth. You are in uniform and you just can’t do that sort of thing. I don’t know. I always had an aversion to queuing up for things. If there was a que then I wouldn’t be in it. I’m still a bit that way. I hate queuing up although we have to do it at times.

Well…

We are going to have another tape are we?

Well after the submarine paid off I was asked to go on an HDML [Harbour Defence Motor Launch] which was a diesel driven motor launch smaller then the old Fare miles were. One of our leading architects was the skipper

and he took us down to Batemans Bay. That was all we were to do. We were just doing a run down to Batemans Bay and back again. I don’t know that there was any real purpose in it unless you could call it a patrol run but when we got down there the weather became very rough and foggy, very foggy.

So much so that the locals, the fishermen said, “Don’t go out in it because the weather is bad and you could have trouble.” And the skipper said, “We’ve got the instruments and we can find our way out.” And of course we cruised out and after we had cruised around a while he decided to go back again. We couldn’t find the entrance to Batemans Bay.

We had a lookout right up on the front there to watch out and then we came across broken water, you know, rocks and the rest of it and we backed out. Eventually we got to a spot where there was no breaking so we realized we were inside the harbour but we still couldn’t see. There was so much fog around there. So again I don’t know why they always pick on me but the skipper picked on me to get in the little dingy that we had

and row ashore and see what and we set out and then we had second thoughts about it. He went back and got another fellow and said, “I think you’d better come with me.” He let me off. I don’t know why the change was made and the two of them just disappeared and we sat out there for the night. We dropped an anchor and just sat there. And the next morning they had spent the night in the Hotel there.

We did some silly things there I thought. They were inexperienced people and he pulled into a beach one day and he said, “We are going to do an exercise with hand grenades.” Well I don’t know whether some of them didn’t know what hand grenades were all about or what but I got onto the beach there at one stage and I got behind a rock

and somebody threw a hand grenade and just as well I was behind a rock because it exploded really close to me. Nothing hit me but it worsened, I had ear trouble from Tobruk, you know, and it became worse. My own voice was reverberating and it effected my hearing completely so when we came back to Sydney I reported to sickbay and said, “Well

the hand grenade was too much. We didn’t have any earplugs in or anything of that sort and with the explosion so close it’s upset my hearing.” They then sent me…They put me into hospital first of all. Specialist had a look at me and said I had remnants of adenoids or tonsils so we’ll have to remove the tonsils. But when you get tonsil’s removed

at an adult age it is a pretty awful operation. I finished up, Hazel used to come out and see me and I had a sore throat. It was a terrible business. I went through that and it still didn’t help my hearing. I don’t know how they thought that was going to do anything much about it. Then they sent me for further tests and hearing and the next thing

I knew was I opened one of the envelopes that gave a report on my examination for hearing and it said, “Recommend discharge.” So I thought, “Oh well this is it. I’ll take the discharge.” I didn’t protest.

Oh no. I didn’t protest. I’d just put it in to where it belonged to the Rushcutters Bay people and it wasn’t very long after that that I was discharged. Then I had to think about you know, we were planning to get married and so I said,

“Well look wait six months until I get myself settled into a job.” Because I did feel a bit unsettled. I was disappointed all together about my homecoming. So I started to look around. They had a place set up in Martin Place there where they tried to rehabilitate. I did go back to BHP, I told you about that, you don’t want that again do you? And they weren’t offering me anything and I wanted to live in Sydney anyway. Hazel

didn’t want to leave Sydney. And the spastic boy was born the year we were married and so we looked after him for over forty years.

Hazel’s sister’s son. She had a daughter who was quite normal but when the son came along he was jaundiced and he was spastic. As a young baby he couldn’t sit up. He didn’t seem to have any

spine. But he improved over the years. He walked when he was ten after going through a lot of splints and so forth. But getting back to myself, I had to look around for work and the first people I worked for were L.J. Hooker. They offered me a job as coxswain of the Admiral’s Barge. That was the first job that was offered to me and I said, “No. I don’t think I would like that.”

It is like a taxi driver’s job. It would be bring the coxswain over to the city and wait for him and take him home. I said, “No. I think I’ve had enough of that.” I had been studying accountancy when I was with BHP so I thought I would carry on with that. They said, “L.J. Hooker has had all his men taken from him. They have gone into the services so we’ll give you a job looking after his accounts.”

And so that I thought would be all right but the staff that I had under me were all women and they knew that they were governed by or controlled by manpower and they just played up. If I asked a girl to do something like the cashier reported in sick one day and I said to one of the girls, “Will you take the cashiers job this morning?” She said, “No I won’t. I won’t do that. I don’t like handling money.” And so I said to someone else. “No. No.”

And they just wouldn’t do what I wanted them to do. I couldn’t do much about it. They said, “We know you can’t sack us. You just have to take it as it comes.” So I got that way I was really frustrated with it. I was working nights and so forth trying to keep up with things. And I wasn’t being paid any overtime but Hooker

was good to me. He was a real gentleman. I went to him and I said, “I can’t stand this. I am used to working with men who will do as they are told. ” I said, “These girls are going to drive me up the wall.” So he said, “Don’t resign. Take all the time you want. Go around the city, find the job you want and then come and say to me, ‘I’ve got another job.’”

He was good like that. He was very good. He used to take me out to the lunches he had. He had lunch with his managers. He used to bring them into the Lakes Golf Club every month and I always went along with him and he was a really good fellow. He was actually Chinese, did you know? His mother was Chinese and he dressed very well. When you were talking to him you could notice that there was a little difference in his eyes to normal but

not markedly so. But the Chinese community now advertise that he was one of their top men. “He was one of us.”

Anyway I found that Qantas were advertising at that time for people in accounting and so forth so I went in with Qantas. I felt I was doing all right there but the pay was

very poor. They weren’t covered by any union or anything like that and they weren’t really paying well and we needed the money and I was offered a job with the petroleum people. And there was much more money and even as I went to the job the boss said to me, “We can’t start you on the salary we agreed upon.” I thought, “What’s going on now?” He said, “We’ve got to pay you more because there is a new

award came out so there is more money in it.” So I was quite pleased about that and I stayed with them for something like twenty-one years. And then the American experts came in and said that computers would do all the work for you. “We don’t need workers in Sydney. You’ve got a computer in Melbourne and that’s where your control should be” and….

Well it was difficult for me. I was kind of mixed up. I really didn’t want to get out as soon as I did but when it was put that way, ‘recommend discharge’, I thought, “Well why

go against it” kind of thing. I didn’t know what I was going to go into next. I didn’t want another episode like this business on the HDML. I didn’t want to get into that again and I didn’t quite know what I wanted but I didn’t feel that I was quite ready because it was the end of 1944 and the war was still on and I felt that I

had a way to go yet but they couldn’t see it. But I was really disappointed in things generally.

That’s true too. Hazel has been a tremendous help to me. We waited for six months. We didn’t marry,

I got out at the end of the year and we didn’t marry until June. We waited about six months and in that time I worked for Hooker and worked for Qantas. Yeah, I was working for Qantas when I was married. That’s right. We weren’t, yeah must have. Anyway the thing was that at that time I got that way I was consoling myself with drinking mates

and so forth. We were living in the flat at McMahon’s Point at that time. We had a flat to start with and then we moved up to the penthouse then. We had an ideal set up except that it was a four-storey block of flats with no lift and with a penthouse on the top. You could walk right round it and it was a nice little place for two people. You had to be fit because you had to climb stairs back or front.

And I joined the Submarine Old Comrades Association by that time and I went to some of their meetings. And to be admitted to the meetings they had a Lieutenant at the door and you had a tot of rum before you went in. And I came home a couple of times and came up the back stairs and Hazel said, “How did you get up those stairs?” And I said, “I pulled myself up with my arms.” But anyway I was drinking too much.

Not for too long. I took her advice. She said, “I think you’d be best if you didn’t attend those meetings.” I said, “I’m inclined to agree” because I never did like to go to excesses like that.

I couldn’t settle myself to Anzac Day and that sort of thing. It was all…I had very mixed feeling about things. I suppose I might have been a bit too

emotional with that because I used to get quite upset about the treatment with people. It wasn’t easy at all to accept.

Twenty five years. I didn’t go to an Anzac Day march for twenty-five years. I just couldn’t face

it. And it was only on the twenty-fifth anniversary that some of the people who I had known in the services said, “It’s our twenty-fifth anniversary. You should come in.” So I went in and met up with a few of the fellows but still again there was too much drinking going on.

And I can’t say that it did me the world of good but I have participated since but I am very careful when I go, particularly now days. You just have to watch yourself, stay sober enough to look after yourself.

No. No. I did early on but I don’t now. I have somehow reconciled

myself to it a lot and I think that’s where Hazel has been very patient. And when I look back I think of what she had to put up with in the early years but then I think looking after Ross helped us a lot. Working for the spastic centre and seeing people who were really disadvantaged and you learn to appreciate

your own advantages and admire their fortitude because they are pretty game people some of them. Are we getting to the end of it are we?

I think that did us both a lot of good just taking care of not just Ross but other spastic children too. We

felt that they needed us and we felt that we wanted to be needed I think. So I don’t know. I can’t enlarge on that any more. We did a lot of work for them over that forty odd years.

Mmm?

Yeah. Oh well even changing to this place that was something that I was forty when we decided to do this, build a new house or have a house built I should say. And I said to Hazel, “Now’s the time to do it.

“Now I am forty and come sixty I probably won’t be able to cope with it.” You just drew up plans and that and away it went.

Yes. I personally felt that veteran’s affairs…Well no veterans affairs still hadn’t been formed…No it hadn’t been formed at that time

when I was discharged. It was formed later. But I lost the hearing completely in this ear. It’s completely deaf and I have a bit of difficulty with the other hearing. Generally I wasn’t all that well but I still kept up trying to keep myself pretty fit.

But they put me on a twenty per cent pension and I thought, “Twenty per cent was pretty lousy for a loss like that.” But I don’t know.

It took a bit of understanding with some people. I was a bit embarrassed

in fact at times because I wore first of all a return from active service badge. I would get on the tram, they were trams in those days. I’d get on the tram and an elderly lady would get up and give me a seat and it was too much trouble half the time to explain to her that, “No my legs are okay. It’s not my legs that caused me to be discharged.” And oh I don’t know.

Oh I think…I joined one group that was supposed to be ex-naval association and things went wrong there. I think somebody pocketed the money that we had and it broke up. Things just didn’t go according to plan and it fell through. So I think they have reformed it properly since but I never bothered to go back into that.

Oh apart from those overseas, the skipper and the first lieutenant, they have been very good. But at home here nobody really. Bill Cooper. I hear from him occasionally but it is only very occasionally because he had a couple of, he had two sons.

I coaxed him to come in to an Anzac Day when I back and he promised me he would. He came in and saw me but he said, “I’m going to watch my son play football.” So he didn’t march anyway. That was all I saw of him at that time. We’ve just had a talk on the phone every now and again but that’s all. I can’t say, there are not too many of them alive now

really, the people that I was in any way close to. As far as those that went away with me I don’t know. Yeah. It gave me a bit of a lift I think when I did that interview with Channel Seven on

the submarine association. They sort of put me into that but it was just an odd thing that happened. That’s all. No I haven’t got any real association with people like that. I’ve gone to the meetings sometimes and I do march with the submariners because they go off first and I am able to stop out and try and meet with some of the others later.

But I go there and they are mostly fellows who were post war submariners and so forth. They’re a different generation. All the older boys just seem to have dropped off somehow or they have gone into retirement villages. I did have one or two contacts that are now out at Narrabeen and they don’t bother to come into the Anzac Day marches or anything like that.

They say, “We have a service out here.” So they have their own service out at Narrabeen.

Well I hoped it would mean a reunion. I have made contact with a few people who were Fairmilers. Not on the same basis as I was. They were in different areas and I got to know a few of those but we are falling apart there.

Last Anzac Day we had a very small group and they were talking then about, “Are we going to continue or bow out?” and I am suggesting then that we go with the corvette people. They are pretty strong although they reckon their numbers are dropping fast. So where we go from there I don’t know. But no I haven’t a lot of association with the…

Yes. I was proud of the name when I was serving and even from the things that I’ve told you can appreciate that I was treated very well everywhere I went. In fact if I was going back I would have been wise to stay in the UK a bit longer because people did treat me very well. Many doors opened to me and as I say

I was invited to fork luncheons and so forth where there were quite notable people there and I think it was all because of my name. So it prompted me when Winston retired I wrote to him and told him that we were proud of our name and how his name opened many doors to me while I was in the UK with the navy during the war years.

And that was just a short note that he wrote back. And I thought oh well I did that and it gave us a kick to think he even sat down and wrote it so there you are.

Well where was I? I think at that time, yeah, at that time I think I was still with Qantas… yeah that would be right.

I was still with Qantas and I was in a position there where I couldn’t very well just walk out and I know there were a lot of people celebrating outside but I had a job to do that had me…I just couldn’t leave it and so I didn’t really see a great deal about it. Hazel came home and said, “I thought you might have celebrated a bit.” But there

just wasn’t the room for it. I had to carry on with payrolls at that time and the payrolls had to go through. I couldn’t just neglect it so that was it. I didn’t really appreciate it. Not the way some people did. They gathered in the streets and made whoopee sort of thing. No. It didn’t…

Not really. I don’t know. I was terribly mixed up in some ways. But I didn’t really have anyone to celebrate with. That’s what it amounted to. There was nobody I could really turn to and say, “Well lets go out and have a drink on it” or something like that.

I don’t think Bill was out then, Bill Cooper. I was impressed with him one day. It was when I was still working with Qantas and I was walking down Bridge Street and I saw these two policemen coming towards me and I didn’t think I knew them until they just about drew level and Bill spoke. And

I really appreciated it at the time. It was one of those times when I thought I needed a mate.

He was telling me that they were just on their way to learn about computers and he just said, “God Bless you Harry.” And

it really touched me.

Yeah. That’s right. It can. It was just a few words and that was it. But oh no time has passed and we don’t have a bad life now I don’t think. We both get on pretty well and

we’ve had lots of children in our life, none of our own but still it doesn’t matter. We’ve done a lot of travelling. That compensated a bit. I was made redundant when the American people came in. I wasn’t actually redundant. They offered me a job in Melbourne and of course we couldn’t leave Ross and couldn’t pull up

roots here and so we said, “No,” and we had to take out a handshake kind of thing. It wasn’t very much for twenty-one years service. It was less than twenty thousand dollars but I said, “Now is the time for us to take a trip. We are young enough to enjoy it.” We had this house by then so I just went and bought a round the world ticket and we went away for six months.

I was able to let Hazel see a bit of the world. Then she got the bug then and she wanted to travel so every opportunity I got during the time I was with Qantas, I went back with Qantas. I told you I left them earlier. I still had a friend back there. He had got to a good position in the company and I said to him about coming back to the company

and was that possible? And he said, “Oh yes. We’ve taken people back before.” So the precedent had been set. He said, “I can’t match your salary but I can give you a job here.” So I took that and very opportunity we got we still had some money in our hand and if it was three weeks holiday I might take two weeks of my holiday and add it on to Easter or something of that sort, public holidays

and do a trip around. Like we did once, we went up to Taiwan and we went to Japan and into Hong Kong and then home. We did short trips around like that.

Well you don’t get free trips but you get discounted fares. That’s was the big thing. We did have one trip and I was

able to take Hazel on. I had to pay her way but I got the trip for free because I was going over to South America on business. The Chilean Airlines owed us quite a bit of money and I suggested that I wanted to go to South America and they sent me on a trip. So they did, they agreed. They took me as far as Tahiti and then we were picked up by Chilean Airlines and it was all first class travel

and I organized sort of a tour of South America. It didn’t all come off. We did all the west coast as far as Lima. We were to go over the other side but there was a general strike on in Buenos Aires and they advised us not to go because just everting stopped. So we came back to Fiji. That was one of our favourite places. We went over there from time to time, pretty regularly as a matter of fact.

We only needed a few days and we could go over to Fiji with quite a cheep run.

No. I can’t think of anything. I think I’ve covered all the service parts and tried to explain how I felt but it’s difficult to say.

I don’t know.

Thank you (UNCLEAR) and Graham.

She’ll be wondering. It’s six o’clock, five past six.

Well there you are.