Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in Boulder, near Kalgoorlie in 1921 and I lived up there until I was round about six and went back down to Fremantle to live.

Mum,

she had her family, her father and mother living with her. Grandfather was one of the bosses on one of the mines. We were within, probably, about three hundred yards of the whole series of mines that were there. In those days they didn’t have open cut. It was all deep mining. So we lived within about three hundred yards and

Grandpa was one of the riggers and he did a lot of, you know, he could have been called out at any time. And my father worked on the mine. He was woodcutting for a long while. That was another area, east of Kalgoorlie, and he did the woodcutting for the boilers.

Well,

very nice people. You know, Grandpa was very good. He was unluckily killed on the road when he came down to Fremantle. But Grandma lived to a very old age too. You know, nice people, typically of, probably, those days. They originally came from England but then they went

to Moonta in South Australia because they were tin miners originally in Cornwall. And they came out because tin was the product in Moonta in South Australia. And from there, of course, the gold strike came, everybody flocked to Kalgoorlie. And we shifted, we were in Boulder which is the, you know, suburb of Kal.

Oh, not very much. Hard living. It wasn’t a house as the people know a house now. It was virtually a frame covered with hessian. Which you whitewashed and when it dried it was waterproof then. But the outstanding thing I can remember is one of the big floods we had there.

And Mum used to open the back door and the front door and the water just went straight through. That’s how you drained your house. But it was fairly level where we were so of course you didn’t get much drainage.

Oh, they were a novelty. You used to flood the subway there too, which is still in operation, up in

Boulder. And still remember going down to see the, because all the traffic was blocked, the trams and everything, we, I liked it there up to a point. As I say, can’t remember too much.

Oh, yes, like all kids.

Just paddling and

falling in. And I’ve always had a nice scar on my finger here, which was a mark of recognition in the navy. Where I was, we used to have billy goat carts. I didn’t because we couldn’t afford them, but had billy goat carts and I was sitting in the billy goat cart and the billy goat actually took over and slammed me into a

galvanised iron fence and sliced my finger wide open. Of course in those days you didn’t have them stitched or anything. You just bandaged them up and away you went. So I’ve always had that on my navy papers and everything. ‘Noticeable scar’.

Oh, it was just a part of, kids get a lot worse off these days, I think. Broken arms on their skateboards.

A lot of them, yeah, a lot. You’ve been to Boulder at all have you?

A lot of the better quality homes are still there but they’re still just homes. Talking about that, it was only on a thirty foot block, it turns out, our house. Which was turned up many, many, many years later when we

had a dispute over the land title and I went back there to check on it and it was thirty feet wide. It was an eighth of an acre. Well, you didn’t want much more than an eighth because you had to have the money to build.

No, I came down to Fremantle. Went to Bicton.

I was the eldest and all the others were born in Fremantle. All the rest of my family. The two brothers, three brothers actually, one was killed. And my sister. They were born later. I was the eldest.

And I came down when I was six.

Mum had two brothers who’d been in World War I and they were both quite badly, particularly one of them, Wally, he was badly gassed and he was virtually on his last legs. And he had nobody to look after him. Because in those days, they did have a repat hospital there at South Fremantle but

conditions were pretty primitive. And she felt that she could look after him better. So we just upped camp and came down to live. And of course, the other brother he was not, her brother was not in very good condition so she had the pair of them to look after.

In Canning Highway, Bicton.

No, the home’s gone. Actually we didn’t live there. We came

down and her sister was very, very good to us. She let us have a twelve by twelve shed up the back of her house to virtually stay in that. And we sort of lived there until Mum bought a house in Canning Highway, not very far away.

Oh, she took out a loan and she was the brains behind the business. She seemed to do everything from what I, you know, all that side of it.

Oh yes, she was a good hard worker and tried everything. So we bought this house in Canning Highway. Old weatherboard place that’s since been demolished.

Well, he came down and used to do a bit of casual

work on the wharf. In those days Fremantle was a very busy port and there was always ships in and out and nothing like the containers we have now, where you only have a handful of men to load the ships. So he used to get casual work on the wharf. At one time there, he was working for main roads. He got a job on the, rebuilding Canning Highway.

Around the Applecross wireless station there. Do you know that at all?

Well, Canning Highway, in those days, was an old limestone road between Fremantle and Perth. It was an old limestone. So they decided to do virtually like a dual highway and one was raised about forty feet above the other. And

they built this section of it again, virtually from Canning Beach to East Fremantle. And he had the job of, with a sledgehammer, cracking open granite blocks for the foundations.

Well, when you’re hungry and you’ve got no work, what’re you going to do. So I used to have to take up his dinner to him

and his billy of tea and everything. Because it wasn’t very far from us, where we were living. After that most people were on the dole. What do we call it now?

Yeah, same thing.

Still there.

The dual part it virtually finishes at Melville Reserve.

Well, Melville, that was the bottom of it. That was virtually the start. And the top part and then it went up that steep hill.

Quite a good engineer feat because it’s still working now. You never see any cracks in that section of the road.

In the heights, yeah. And you’ve got quite a bit of median strip in the middle. Quite a big strip. Well that was mainly because of the slope of the land.

There was no other way they could have done it, short of taking out the middle and it would have taken millions of tons of shifting to bring them together. So they just left it as the original. The old limestone road, they patched that up. And that’s the one that runs to Melville Motors. Virtually runs into

Melville at Northlake Road. And the other part goes up the hill to Stock Road.

So that’s why it’s happened. Because they didn’t have the money to, or the digging equipment to shift that quantity of material.

Well, it does look odd, yes. Now you come to mention it.

To me it just seems the natural thing. But that’s why. But a credit to that section going up from Melville Motors to Stock Road, that’s the one going to Fremantle, that’s why it’s so well built. Because each bit of granite was hammered out with a sledgehammer. No getting the crushings from up in the quarries.

Handmade highway, yes. Beautiful.

Well, it was very, very hard. As I said, we shifted into this shed and but for Mum’s sister and her husband, I think we might have almost starved. But he was a very self supporting character. He had all his ducks, WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s, honey. He had his own hives and everything. He was very self supporting,

Mum’s brother in law. And he just helped us out.

He was a mystery man. I was never damn sure what he did, to be honest. He was a mystery. He had a lot of little tricks. He was what you called a wheeler and dealer. We refer to him now, in hindsight, as a wheeler and dealer. But he

got back. He had a lot of little tricks up his sleeve and his family never went without anything. He was a good man.

Yes. He had been known, he had another house down on the river at Beach Street, that’s almost East Fremantle, Bicton. And

he had a trick of, he worked on the wharf occasionally and when they were loading export timber, you know the good export timber, good four by twos and six by twos, all that good jarrah long length. He carried a lot of it on deck, in those days. And some of it has been known to fall overboard in the harbour because, on the incoming tide, and it carried

right around East Fremantle and came ashore there. And there’s a few beams of his house that came from that timber. Mysteriously fell overboard when loading over the slings. That was the excuse given.

That’s another Beach.

But this was right near a place called Castle Hill. Opposite the, you wouldn’t remember it, of course, where the old sugar works were. You know, the old Colonial Sugar Works. Well, they were from Beach, Beach was directly across the other side of the river.

Yes, that was my favourite swimming place.

Well, they had to teach me to swim first.

I was taught by my cousins. They were all very athletic and they taught me at Point Walter. Because Point Walter in my, or the early time, was the spot of Fremantle - South beach,

in one area, Point Walter in the other. And everybody went to Point Walter because the trams went there regularly. And so I learnt to swim off the jetty. And it was a good thing I learnt too, going in the navy.

Oh, they were very athletic. They could run like

damn hares. If they played rounders they were better than any of the recognised baseball players now. And they were very smart and strong.

Oh, they were about four to five years older than me, most of the time, all of them. They varied some, according to their age. Some came down to my age but the

majority of them were older.

Well, I was born in 1921. I think my brother was about 1924, I think it was. Just as we got down here, ’24. And they progress on. I’m about fifteen years older

than the youngest.

Had one sister and three other brothers. One’s in Melbourne. He’s a cripple. And the other’s in Bunbury. He’s the champion footballer and cricketer so he did alright.

He played

In WA [Western Australia] most of the time, but he did go to Melbourne. Achieved a bit of notoriety over there by being disqualified for life. But he came back here.

He played with, he was with Melbourne, he was due to play, he signed up or semi-signed up with Melbourne football club. And he was,

they couldn’t sort of make out whether they were going to use him or not. So he went and played with a proprietary team up in the Dandenong Ranges. And they found out about it and up before the tribunal and they gave him life. Which was strange. But as it turned out it was rigged completely because his local club here wanted him back and

they said they would lift the ban if he went back to West Australia. So he came back to East Fremantle and played on there. And they lifted the ban and, admittedly, I mean, work it out for yourself. It was crook. It was crooked.

Yes, yes, that’s how it was.

No, he was always East Fremantle.

They probably did. They would be playing about Toddy’s time. John Todd. But that’s the way it goes. But I’ve always been East Fremantle because Victor was in the East Fremantle area. And it’s the only colour I can see.

Ah, well you might say I did. I had an auntie in South Fremantle, right across the road from South Fremantle oval. And I’d go in there quite often on a Saturday morning and I didn’t have the money to go into the ground, but everybody had, a lot of people had pushbikes in those days, well, the majority of people had pushbikes and we used

to prop them up alongside the fence and stand up on the seat and look over the fence. And at three quarter time they opened the gates. So if you wanted to see the last quarter, it was always free.

Oh, I’ve felt as if I’ve always seen them,

followed East Fremantle and particularly, because East Fremantle Oval was rebuilt many, many years, East Fremantle Oval, there was no such a ground. There was a ground but it had been let go into disrepair. And they, I played my only winning premiership on the very old

ground. But in East Fremantle and South Fremantle shared the one oval. They had a set of rooms each. So it was the home ground for both sides, south and east.

Only in the Ex Scholars because I came out of Ex Scholars and that was up to 19… and then I joined the navy. So that was the end of my football. Well, not the end of it, I did play a couple of

matches in Melbourne, some in Adelaide and in Darwin. But that’s the way it went.

Well, I don’t know, I was a lot older than them. And of course the next brother to me was killed on the road not far from our house. So he was the nearest to me and

possibly it left a gap.

Six. Yeah, he was only six. He’d been to the Sunday school too. That was the worst part of it. It put me off churches for ever after that. I thought, well, if anything like that can happen after you’ve been to Sunday school, there’s something wrong

with the balance. Partially, I suppose, it was my fault. I took him and I should have brought him home but he was trailing along a few hundred yards behind and dashed across the road and hit by a taxi.

Very little. Not many, it was all bikes. Nobody could afford a car unless you were very, very, a bank manager or something like that.

Oh yes. Most of the carrying was done by horse and carts. All of the wharfs, the bulk of that was horse and cart.

Oh, yes, yeah. I pottered down there a lot. I was always curious. Curious about them. I saved postcards of ships

in those days. As years went on and the big super liners started to come through, it was always a great kick to get a postcard of one of those.

Sometimes from the shipping office in Fremantle, you know, the agents. And sometimes sneak on board and make a nuisance of yourself until they give you a postcard.

You could. But I didn’t. Unfortunately my brother, not the footballer, the other one in Melbourne, he was a fairly destructive cow and he virtually threw them all out. So I had to start again. I started after the war again and built up a big

collection again.

Well, we always regarded him as the nutty one, you know. He did a lot of eccentric things. Well, to me it was eccentric.

Well, when I joined the navy I was very cold and where I worked we had ferries

and the ferry masters were issued with a beautiful, big overcoat for winter.

At the Tramways and Ferries in those days. And I came back from Melbourne and I said to one of the chaps in charge of the stores, you know, “Any chance of an overcoat.” And he says, “Oh, yes, we’ve got a few spares now because people were joining up.” All our chaps were joining

up. And they weren’t qualifying for their uniform. So he gave me this beautiful coat which I wore a few times. When I went away to the Middle East I left it behind. And when I came back, as it turned out, it had a hole about that big in the back of it. He had successfully got very, very wet one day, wearing it, and

put it in front of the fire. See, we didn’t have gas. Nobody had gas. Not too much of it. And, of course, he didn’t worry and it burnt the back out of it.

Slight mistake.

I went to Bicton Primary

in, was just about a quarter of a mile away from our house so it was just a matter of walking there. A fairly young school and a little bit, as it turned out, as I went to the high school, I found it was a long way behind some of the other primary schools in that area, the more established ones. I don’t know why because they seemed to have good teachers but that’s just the way

it worked out.

Up to six of the primary, one to six. But that included bubs. You had a bubs class and then you went to first and then you did one, two, three, four, five, six. But sometimes the teachers taught two classes. You might be combined. You’d have forty in the class and you could have

second and third or something like that, to make up the numbers. So sometimes you were doing second and third, sometimes you might be doing fifth and sixth. Sometimes you’d just to sixth. And after that you passed out of it and went to the high school.

Oh yes, it was rough and tough. We had no facilities. No facilities at all.

Well, now they have cricket pitches. They have

football grounds to train on. We played on the road out in front of the school or just up from the school, played cricket. Which made you damn good cricketers because you were played on a very erratic surface and you got a very erratic bounce. So you’d become very sharp in dodging flying balls. And wickets consisted of a piece of galvanised

iron propped up. You always knew when you were out because of the hell of a bang it made and over went the galvanised iron.

I always remember playing football and swimming. Swam a lot down at Bicton.

I played a

bit of rounders. That was the girls game but we could join in with that. You know rounders? Not with your, what they use now, a proper baseball bat, but we played with a tennis racket.

Oh, well it was virtually the same thing with the same bases but it was bowled to you, it was only a tennis ball but you didn’t

use a baseball bat, you used a tennis racket. And, of course, you could get on to it too.

Yeah, you’d run the bases. The girls started it and the tomboys played with them.

I think I was. As it,

I could do, yeah, most things I could do quite well. I didn’t have any trouble at school. Except, as I said, when I went to the high school I found that I was well down the grades because of the facts that Bicton wasn’t a top school.

Oh, yes. They were very good, yeah, very good. Oh yes, there was none of this calling them,

you know, what will I do now, Jack, or anything like that, like they do now. The kids virtually run their own, you hear them talking to their teachers. We get horrified. Gee, imagine saying that to one of my teachers. Even when I went to the high school, you know, it was never a case of Jack. It was always Mr Dolan or Mr Fieldliss.

How do you mean?

Well, they had their normal breaks like playtime, lunch time, afternoon. And it used to be around about half past three before you broke up. In the winter time it was even later. Now,

they no sooner go back from lunch than they’re knocking off again. I think the hours were longer. We had, I think I mentioned it once before to somebody, they brought in free milk for us because everybody was very, very poor. Nobody had any money. The clothes you wore were usually somebody else’s in the

next strata, you might say, that they handed down. And you wore them irrespective of their size and shape and everything. You wore bare feet most of the time. And food was equally as tough to get.

Bread and jam. Not much honey, you know, because that was a bit

exclusive. But we, having excess through Uncle Mitch, we were able to get, he’d give us a little jar every now and again. But no, we survived somehow or other. The milk, the third of a pint of milk came free while I was at primary. They started, I think, about the second year I was there. And that was a third of a pint in the morning.

Everybody lined up for their Pascomy milk [?]. Little tiny bottle. It was quite good. Very, very helpful for people who couldn’t afford it. Very creamy. I can always remember how you had to push your finger in the top to go through the cream. It was that thick.

No, no. No they do a bit of fiddling with it. And

we, occasionally, I’ve never worked it out even to this day, but I think the parents and citizens in common with the education department, who must have given them a grant, they put on an odd meal for some of us that virtually couldn’t get a lunch. And a lady just across the road from the Bicton school, she cooked it all and

at lunch time we went across there and all got a, a sort of a limited ration, like a pasty or something like that. Something nice and hot and, don’t ask me, I’ve no idea where it came from because I left the school and I never bothered to go back and find out where it came from. I think the parents and citizens put up some money.

But I really… I’m in the dark there.

It was very generous of them. But, as I say, people were very generous in those days. I couldn’t have gone to Fremantle Boys, in some cases, because I didn’t have the clothes. Now I would have been, probably said, “Oh, I could wear that.” Sleeves down here or something or a big long coat. You know, for a boy it might have been

or it might have been the father. But they threw it out and somebody else wore it. Better that than nothing.

Can’t remember much about that. It was always substantial and Mum was a good cook. A lot of soups in those days. The working class relied on cook. It was, you know, they’d go down the butcher shop,

soup bones all the time, cook it up, plenty of vegetables. And it was very substantial and very filling too. And puddings. I can always remember rice was, obviously, very cheap because the puddings, or sweets, I call them puddings, I don’t know whether you do or not.

Bread and butter or rice. Well rice was very, they always reckon,

I always say I’m almost Chinese because I ate so much rice. And then vermicelli came in later on and between that and bread and butter, as you say, bread and butter. But nothing elaborate like the fruit salads or anything like that. You couldn’t. Got an apple you were lucky.

No, no. I still like pea and ham.

I like that still.

Does she? Yeah. Very nice, yeah.

Fremantle Boys in, it’s still there as a, you might have even been there one time or other. It’s a film, they make films there.

Yeah, that’s right.

That’s Fremantle Boys. I think that’s what they call it. Have you been there at all?

An old brick one right opposite St Mary’s Church. That’s Fremantle Boys.

I didn’t have a uniform. Cut it out. We were lucky to get there.

So that was the old Fremantle Boys and it had been established many, many years before as a high school. It went from seventh to ninth. After that you had, if you wanted to go on from ninth, at ninth standard you sat for the junior. What was called the junior certificate in those days. And if you wanted the leaving you had to go on to a school like

Perth Modern. Perth Modern School, up in West Perth. Or if your parents had money you could go to the colleges. Scots College, Wesley, and in the case of the girls, to Methodist Ladies or Presbyterian Ladies, or the other schools - Christian Brothers in Fremantle. But not too many of us

went past the ninth, if we got to the ninth. A lot of people left in, after seventh standard. They just had to get a job.

Anything that was coming up. Anything, you know. A lot of, you might say, semi labouring.

Well, the wool stores took a lot because there was always that handling

of the bales. A lot of people worked in the wool stores. There was just, on the carriers, you know, they were still using the horse and carts, to assist the driver.

They were mainly Sumptons and that sort of thing. Sumpton Brothers.

I’m not too sure. They use to all congregate down in, near the wharf near Cliff Street. They had troughs there. I think the troughs are still there, as a matter of fact. They used to water the horses. If you go down there, right at the Cliff Street entrance to the wharf, I think you’ll still see troughs there. They left them there as a sort of a relic.

Yeah, they’re

circular. They’re circular and, of course, they used to just back their horses up to them for a drink.

Oh, that was a turnaround completely. Because we sat for exams soon after we arrived to sort us out. You know, find out, they had professional classes which took

languages. It took French and German.

It was a good school. It had top class teachers. Very strict but, you know, quite human. They weren’t afraid to give you a damn whack with the cane. But everybody knew where they stood. And they were good teachers. We were graded accordingly and we did the

exam very soon after we arrived. And we did this exam and they sorted out professionals to general to the other, the lower class below that, which were virtual, the labour class, you might say. So I finished up in the general. Which, under the circumstances, with the knowledge that I came to Fremantle Boys with, was quite good.

I realised after, it was quite good, because we had all that catch up. In seven standard, I think I was doing a lot of catch up. But after that, in eight and ninth, I was up level with them all by then.

Just a general standard. Arithmetic, English, spelling and all that. What you

could expect at a school. And we were just graded accordingly. About twenty five to thirty in a class and away we went. We had an excellent lot of teachers. A great sporting crowd. We had Jerry Dolan, well, he coached stateside football, East Fremantle for many years, he played.

No, I didn’t have any option. That was the only school we could go to. Well, I couldn’t afford to got to Scots College or Wesley. Apart from the fact that they were up Swanbourne area. Claremont area. No, that’s, didn’t have any option. I was quite satisfied and I don’t think, I’ve never regretted. But, as I say,

I, you know, the professionals they learnt from a real, almost German, French and English. Not French and English. French and German. And that was ironic, after, when the war broke out, most of the professionals went into the air force. It was just a sort of,

class, almost say class distinction. We were only joking about it a couple of weeks ago. A lot of them joined the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] and the rest of us joined the riff. So we had the riffraff. But had good teachers. A good range of teachers and very dedicated too. We had a number one tennis player in Western Australia at that

time. We had, as I said, Jerry Dolan. We had the fast bowler for the State in the cricket. I’ve still got a bruise on my back where he hit me. I’ll always remember that one because he nearly went through me. We didn’t have real cricket pitches. We had a concrete pitch but it was surrounded by gravel. And the gravel pebbles would filtrate onto the concrete. And you get a fast

ball coming down off a fast bowler and it hits one of these pebbles, well, it just changes direction. And I saw it coming, turned my back and, oh, right in my kidneys.

Oh, he was fast. He opened for the State in cricket. So he was no slouch. And he said, “If you want to play damn cricket, you’ll face up to me.”

No softies. He apologised after.

Yes, we played the Christian Brothers and Perth Boys and Perth Tech. Perth Tech was a, that was the technical college. They did carpentry and metalwork and all that sort of thing. That was along Newcastle Street

in, I think the building’s still there but I don’t think they have it now. They have too much equipment at their own high schools.

Oh, quite often for the school matches, we’d play before the curtain raiser for the league games. So we got quite a bit of experience, exposure you might say.

They had the seconds. Had the seconds. But the main group that they recruited from was what they called the Ex Scholars. In Perth it was called Metropolitan Juniors but the Fremantle group were called Ex Scholars, up to 19. And most of the, a lot of the league teams recruited from them. They went from Ex Scholars into league.

Oh, as a sporting area, yes. We had, in the tennis, we had the title holders. Bike riders, we had the chappie that was, I think he was Australian champion on bikes. They were quite a select group.

Not in my time. No. And then, from then, later, while I was there I got mixed up with a family called the Doigs and they had a yacht. And I became crazy on yachting. So I only played football then in the winter when we weren’t

sailing. But we started very early sailing in the summer so virtually out of football most of the time. And I never had time for cricket because we were yachting. I only sailed on the yacht and learnt on the yacht but I was one of those fanatics.

Well, the original one was an eighteen footer.

It wasn’t even closed in at one stage. But later on the chappie who owned it put a decking on it so we didn’t get so much water. Then he built, he had me, he got interested in a class that was racing here called Sharpies. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those at all? They’re a German design and they had become quite the hit in Europe at

that time, round about 19 say, 38, 37. And he thought, a couple of them had built them in Perth, and he thought he’d like to build one. So he wrote away and you had to go through Royal Perth Yacht Club. Very, very snooty in those days, yachting. Royal Freshwater Bay and Royal Perth were virtually controlled almost everything. And we got this,

had to get the designs out from Germany which created a bit of a problem because they were all in metric. And metric wasn’t heard of in those days. You were in yards and inches. So that’s where a bit of my experience of school came in because did a lot of the measuring in yards, feet and inches, got to convert the metric stuff back. So he built this,

he built the Sharpie but we still raced the 18 footer.

Not really, no. Well, it’s turned out quite handy now because I can handle the metric system better than a lot of people. They can’t go backwards, see, I can go backwards into yards and feet and convert miles into kilometres and all that sort of thing. But the modern kids, they haven’t got a damn clue now. If

they go to America, you know, they strike the miles.

Oh, it was. You used to, see, the yachts were such that they needed a certain crew in number. And if the wind was blowing very, very hard,

a good sea breeze going, well you might need six. All you did was just sit on the side to give it weight. Stop it capsizing. And that’s where I graduated. I started there as one of the leaners, as they call it, leaners outers. And was always a competition to see how far you could lean out then. See if you could touch, lean over backwards and touch the centre board which was on the bottom

of the boat. But I learnt from there and graduated. Eventually I could sail as anyone. And rig it too. So I learnt a lot.

Oh, I was down at the yacht club just hanging around, making a nuisance of myself. My mate said, “You want a trip? They’re looking for a bit of weight.” You can imagine, looking for a bit of weight. Here I am, what at thirteen or something and I didn’t

have much weight. But it was more or less numbers. So that was my experience in yachting.

The Doig family. Yeah, part of the Doigs. Well, if you’re a South Fremantle supporter, you’d know the Doigs. But they were also East Fremantle too. And I, where we sailed the yacht from, George Doig and Charlie Doig lived there.

But the family that I used to go with, they were about fifty yards away from them. Almost a separate family. The Doigs are like rabbits, they’re everywhere.

Yeah, Smiths yeah. Like my doctor. He’s a Doctor Chit. I said, “Oh, Doctor Chit?” He said, “Yes.” He said, “They’re the Smiths of the Chinese family.”

Ah yes. Old Norm, he’d brought his wife out from Scotland. He was in World War I and he came out, built himself this house right on Blackwall Reach. Do you know Blackwall Reach? Yeah, well, he’s the, the house is still there. It’s the last house along that waterfront before you enter Point Walter Reserve. If you’re ever

down that way, have a look at it. He built that himself. So he was very, very clever and he brought his wife out and built the house and, in conjunction with one of his brothers, or relations, they set up the Fremantle tanneries, down in South Terrace. You always knew where a tanneries was because you could smell it for about

twenty miles, I thought. It was absolutely rotten.

Not quite, that’s further down. But this was more towards Mills and Wares [biscuit factory]. Almost the Mills and Wares factory. So he was part owner in that.

Oh, the biscuits and the, oh, it was a shocking smell. When I used to go and see him

my stomach used to go up and down, you know.

Oh, the biscuits are beautiful. You ever go through Mills and Wares factory, did you?

We went through many, many years ago and it was in the days when they were still packing them

by hand. Particularly the mixed packets. So all the different mixed biscuits came down and they were all individually, you know, they put individually, to make a mixed packet. Of course it’s all done by damn machines now.

Went looking for a job.

Every way. Ask, write, you know, through the paper. Apply for anything that was going. And, gee, they were hard. Jobs in those days went to who you know, who your father knew or you had to have a connection somewhere along the line. You know, you’d go for an interview alright but you wouldn’t do any good because it was,

they were almost picked out before you even turned up. But I suppose they want to make it look a bit real. I’d reached the stage where I was thinking of going back to school again just to double up. I had missed a subject in the junior exam. I’d taken eight and I only got seven. And I missed out on, of all things, maths.

Maths A. That was 2 and 2 makes 4. And I’d missed that one. I’d passed the geometry and algebra and all that stuff. But that was Maths B. But I thought I’d go back to school and sit again to complete it. And a friend who turned up one day in the lunch hour when I was home and said would I like a job.

So I said, “Where?” And he said, “Harbour and Light Department in Fremantle.” Of course I didn’t know what it was but it was a job. A job was a job. You don’t pick and choose. And so he said, “Get dressed and come down with me and see the boss and see if you like it or if they like you.” Not for

me to like it. And he was to be, he applied for a job in Perth in a better department. Anyhow I was lucky, they gave me the job.

It wasn’t hard. They had a magnificent, it turned out the boss there was a thorough gentleman. He was dying of cancer but he was a real, a real gentleman manager.

As a matter of fact, after I’d been there half way through, the Victorian football team came over. The VFL [Victorian Football League], that’s the big team, came over to play WA one Saturday and he said, “Are you going to the football?” I said, “Oh, I’d like to. Can’t afford it.” So he pulled out his wallet. He said, “Here’s a pound.” And he said, “Take yourself off.” He said, “Leave here at

eleven o’clock.” Because we worked on Saturday mornings. And eleven o’clock he said, “Off you go.” With a pound. Now a pound was more than my week’s wages.

A pound. A pound to go to the football. I thought I was made. But that was the type of man he was. His brother, he ran the Harbour and Light Department which was

the controlling body for all the outlying ports like Bunbury, Albany, Esperance, Hopetoun and all the northern ports too. But, of course, in those days they were only just jetties. They didn’t have a permanent staff or anything there and if they wanted a pilot, you had to send a pilot. If you wanted somebody to unload, they all had to turn up from

various areas. So this department controlled them. They had all the charts for Western Australia. So many ships coming into Fremantle wanted a chart, say, to take them to Esperance. Well, we had the charts. So it was quite a, and in the olden days it was the, it was built

right near, you know where the fish markets is? Well, it was the building on the corner. It was demolished. I don’t know how they ever got it through, demolished it. It should have been, it was one of the harbourmaster’s first homes built out of hewn limestone.

Fremantle.

Across the road from the Cicerello’s.

Yeah, you know there’s a museum there now? A museum and it, we were right on the corner. And we, in the early days, all the settlers, as they came off the ships from England, they all registered there. So we had these huge big registers that could tell when somebody arrived

in Western Australia. People used to come, you know, always checking up on their relatives or for various reasons, perhaps to get social service or something, they often come and check the records in this book.

I was the junior. And my job was varied. I did the mail, ran messages. They even had a funny arrangement there,

great on health and they had a purifier for the water. And I had to, it had an arrangement in it that collected all the brown scale. I had to scrub that regularly. I had to light, it had I think about five open fireplaces in it, in the winter time I had to cut the wood and light the fires before the staff arrived. So they all had a nice warm office. And

I ran messages. Take charts down to the ships on the wharf. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Well, he gave it to me; I think he was just that type of chap.

Oh, not much traffic. More

horse and carts.

Yeah, Fremantle was quite, you go down to Fremantle today and it would be almost as busy as then. Because everybody came into Fremantle to do their shopping. All the supermarkets, you didn’t have your supermarkets out in the suburbs like we do now. People came to the

Charlie Carters and all that. It was a big deal when Woolworth’s opened down there, and Coles later on. But I liked it. I was only there about eighteen months and I had applied for a job with the railways. Mum always had the idea that if you got a job with the railways you were set for life virtually. She had us set on the railways. So as soon as I passed my junior,

I whacked my application in for the railways and just let it ride. And in due course I got a reply from the railways. Come up there for an interview.

A place right at the top of the Barrack Street, you know where Barrack Street crosses over the railway line? Well, directly

in front of that was the controlling body of the railways. They called it the accounts and audit branch. And the boss, the real boss, was there. And you had to go and see the real boss, too, for an interview. You didn’t see any lower lights.

Well, it was to see this character. And he had a reputation second to none, you know. Very tough.

Bromfield. Everybody, I think, my age in Perth would remember A. Bromfield, yes. But he was, I think he was the leading stamp collector in Australia at that time. So I got a call up to him, got a transfer up there. But I’d had a nice little accident

while I was with the Harbour and Lights. I was going home on my bike. My bike at this time, I used to ride the firm’s bike. That was a wreck when I went down there. I had to fix that, stripped it right down and fixed it all. Got it mobile. And I was going down Canning Road, Canning Highway

towards, would you know the Leopold Hotel at all? Well, you know it’s at the bottom of two big dips. Well, I was careering down the one from Fremantle and hit my friend’s back wheel, a Swansea. That was the recognised brand for Fremantle. Everyone rode a Swansea.

Except later on when Hubert Opperman came along with his famous riding and everything and they brought in the Malvern Star [bicycle]. There were a couple of other brands in Perth I found out afterwards, like Gordonson’s. But the Swansea shop was right across the road from the Town Hall. Almost where the,

where High Street, where Adelaide Terrace meets the High Street. Right on the corner almost alongside the clock. And everyone, they were so liberal with their terms. If they didn’t have the money you’d go in and say, “Oh, Howard.” Two Gordon brothers actually ran it. And you’d say, “Haven’t got the one and six this week.”

“Don’t worry, pay it next week.” That’s how they ran their business. Because you wanted a part, you could get a part. You could get it on appro or anything. Try it and if you didn’t like it. So they were marvellous. That’s how they kept their business going.

Not now, no. They were marvellous. And they employed, if anybody was sort of renowned

as far as cycling went, they were on the staff. He had about six or seven working for him, all good cyclists.

I think it might have cost about, I think three pound, nineteen and six, I think I saw them advertised for. That’s what, nearly eight dollars.

One and six a week. Paid it when

you felt like it. Several years. Well, fifty two times one and six, what’s that?

Fifteen cents a time. No, but they were a marvellous firm and that’s how they carried on.

No, well, then I left the Harbour and Lights and went to the Railways and they said,

“No, we haven’t got a job for you here at the moment.” But they were affiliated with, they controlled the tramways in those days. So it was railways and tramways. So they transferred me over to the tramway office in 514 Hay Street.

He was alright. He sorted me out and, no he was a very hard man.

A messenger again. Running round.

No, not in Perth, no. They never had a bike. You’d travel on the tram. It was mainly round the city block.

Oh, nothing real. Accounts and that sort of thing. Also the electricity supply

was in the same building. Not the main electricity supply, which was down in Murray Street, but this was the outlying suburbs. They were under separate bodies in those days. Cottesloe and up in the hills. Fremantle had their own power supply. They controlled it from down there. Everything was very divided in those days.

Councils had a lot of control over things like that. And even the tramways at Fremantle, the Melville Shire controlled the tram after it left Petra Street up to Stock Road. That was their little section and they owned it and controlled it. And you paid a separate fare for that.

No, same tram but you had

to pay, pay a separate fare. Halfpenny. A half penny.

I was still living there, yeah.

By bus.

It was called the south suburban in those days. Their office and garage was down in Point Walter Road just across the road from the Leopold.

That was the south suburban. That was run by a chap called Ron Carroll. And they controlled that. So sometimes, if I wanted to, I could walk down to the garage and many a time, coming home from Perth on the last, almost the last bus, I’d get over-carried up to Petra Street and back to the garage and then they’d wake me up and I’d

have to walk back.

Oh they were all private. Metro bus ran the section on the Stirling Highway. Then, of course, we went to Claremont and they had the United Buses there. And all private companies. Because we were involved in the takeover of all those companies many years later. But this was in 1937.

My wife was the switchboard, she was the ‘hello girl’. It was all plug ins and “Hello, yes.” I think there must have been about thirty working there. Of course, the electricity supply,

as I said, was in the same building. But that was the section that dealt with the outer suburbs.

Oh dear, I don’t know. I think one of my jobs was I had to fill the urn. Fill the urn for the morning tea. Because she made the morning teas. And

I don’t know, things just developed along. But eventually I got, I was transferred down to the car barn, what was called the car barn. That’s the section where the MTT [Metropolitan Transport Trust] had their set up later on. Across the road from the police station, right across the road from the WACA [Western Australian Cricket Association]. The cricket ground. And I was there, I went down there. We

had our workshop there too, for the trams and buses and trolley buses. See, trolley buses came in later on. They were a brand new idea.

We were only laughing about that last night, as a matter of fact. All the other boys were, I’d take her to the pictures or,

I think it was the Piccadilly or one of those. And I must have been very brave or something, expecting to be knocked back. And I think she must have been hard up or something and she said yes. Unfortunately that was the night that half the office staff had decided to go too. And, of course, we were spotted. And before we got to work the next morning it was, everybody’s,

and some of the boys that were older than me, accused her, “Why didn’t you ask me if you wanted to go to the pictures?” That sort of stuff. There I was, the junior, and I’d come along and virtually snapped up the prize, you might say.

Well, I must have been, I must have been a cheeky little devil..

Any road, it worked.

Mount Hawthorn. Of course if I went up to visit her at all, up at Mount Hawthorn, the last, there was only, they didn’t have all night buses and my bus left from right outside the corner of St George’s Terrace and Barrack Street. That was the East Fremantle, South Suburban one. And it left

at a certain time. I had to get a bus in from Mount Hawthorn, dropped up near the Wentworth Hotel, run like the devil to catch this thing. And I have missed it too. And there I am in Perth, got a long walk home to East Fremantle. I have actually walked half way home and, you know, some kind person coming along in car.

People were like that. You want a lift? Oh yes, please.

I think the biggest one we, were around for the ‘Gone With the Wind’ introduction in those days. And some of the early westerns. They were good films. Of course that’s

all you went to. Everybody had films to go to. They were cheap.

Oh, it had been brewing for quite a while. Because the Germans were on the prowl in ’37, ’38. Even ’36. I mean they, even when the Olympics were on, they

were very difficult to deal with. As you know, Hitler walked out on the Olympic Game presentation because one of the dark chaps, Jesse Owens, won a couple of the events, the sprints. And he refused to sit in the stand and watch the presentation. So he walked. So they were getting difficult and, of course later on they moved into a few of the smaller

countries in (UNCLEAR) and Czechoslovakia and all around there. They virtually took it all over. So it was only a matter of time.

Oh, it was pretty general knowledge. It was in the papers, yes. There was nothing, at that stage, of concentration camps. That was, I suppose that was in dreamland.

Nobody could ever dream there was every going to be such a thing as a concentration camp. So we just went along. But things were starting to get hairy all the time. ’38 virtually was just a matter of marking time then. And, of course, we had nothing. Australia had nothing. England had nothing. Nobody had anything bar Germany, and Italy, of course.

Of course Mussolini got in on the act too. He decided he was going to be a big player. And so we just carried on like that, just waiting. Just a matter of something happening.

Not in the sense that there was going to be a war, but scenes particularly of the German side.

The big massing of troops that they had and they way they were regimented. As a matter of fact, one of my teachers at Fremantle Boys, he went over to Germany, he was the one that taught German, and he went to Germany and he was over there for about six months. And he came back converted, well you might say a converted Nazi. Because he saw what was happening. How everybody was regimented, even

the kids, six year old upwards all had to join the Hitler Youth Movement and everything. He came back and wrote glowing accounts of the merits of the German arrangements. It wasn’t until later on that we found out about him. I don’t know where he finished up. I don’t know whether he was interned or not. But that’s, it just gradually was coming to a head.

No, everybody was too busy looking after their, just existing. We were coming out of a depression at that stage but there was still a hell of a lot of unemployment. That was one of my jobs at the tramways. Every

week they lined up outside to see if there were jobs. You’d get forty or fifty people out the front door. And it was my job as the junior to go in and see the traffic manager. “Are you seeing anybody today, Mr Hullett?” And, “Can’t see anybody.” The only way you got to see him was the old story again of influence. If you got a letter from your member of parliament or somebody that

knew Mr Hullett, it was exactly what I said before. Who you knew. And he’d say, “No, not seeing anybody today.” So you’d have to go to the, eighteen or something, go to the door and tell all these chaps, “Nothing doing.”

I think they were used to it by then. They’d been out of work for so many years.

Oh, no, they just took it for granted. Well,

I think they got to know you after a while. But some would break the barrier by getting a letter from their local member of parliament, and they’d get in there. Sometimes it worked. Of course nobody was leaving.

Well, it just

came as a big announcement, we’re at war. That’s all there was too it. A lot of people were, some people, particularly you might say the unemployed, at least they could see they were going to get a job doing something. But it just came along and we were so far away that it didn’t really interfere with us. And yet I was only

reading, oh say a couple of years ago that one of the…

Well, see the war was declared in September ’39 and I didn’t virtually join until ’41. For a start I was too young. I was only nineteen then when I joined up. So I was virtually seventeen then. And I

had no reason, as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t really involved. I couldn’t have got in , in any case, because I was too young. It did make a big difference at work because all our chaps joined up in mass because they were all older. Some were around twenty five, thirty. So, of course, it was a case of every day

them coming in and handing in all their gear and off they went. And then we had quite big marches through Perth. You know, you had the big marches through Perth as the troop ships came through. We just went along. But then, of course, AIF [Australian Imperial Force] went to the Middle East and

it was an up and down fight over there and then, of course, the casualty lists started to come out and start to hit everybody. Because they published the casualty list in the ‘West Australian’. So you could look through there and, oh, who was killed.

Actually knew, oh yes.

Oh, like one of those things. Just took it

in your stride. Well, what could you do? You couldn’t do anything about it. But, and then friends, my sailing friends started to join up. They were perhaps twelve months older than me and they got through into the air force and army. So eventually I, I had tried to join the air force myself. Thought, you know,

typical young, thought, “Oh, that’s exciting.” Join the RAF [Royal Air Force] or the RAAF. But Mum wouldn’t sign the papers, see. Didn’t have very good reputation. Apart from the fact that there were a lot of casualties just in training in those days. The planes were pretty primitive. Well, they weren’t primitive but the ones handling them just weren’t experienced. So she wouldn’t sign the paper so

eventually, after a lot of arguments, we had a lot of arguments and how. And I said, “I’ll join the navy.” So I went down with one of the Doigs. We decided we’d both join up at the same time. And I got accepted and he was knocked back, he was too short. They had a crazy idea that you had to be a minimum of about five foot ten to be in the

navy. Which in reality, as I found out later on, was the stupidest thing out. Because a short person was better off. Because he didn’t knock his head on, he could get into the more confined areas. But anyway, they refused him and I was accepted.

Not that many of them joined the navy, strange as that may seem.

Any road, down I went and eventually got called up, 1941. So off I went. Down to Leeuwin Depot. That was right opposite where I’d first started work, across the road from where I started work. So I was back in my own area again.

Oh, just learning how to march and obey orders. Whatever they told you had to be right. Only did it for a short time before we were drafted to Melbourne.

About five or six weeks. I had no uniform. Used to go on a daily basis in civvies. We’d be out on the

Esplanade there at, near the fish markets, running up and down there. We’d occasionally run from there to South Beach and back. Yeah, we worked up quite a bit, well, we weren’t in bad condition. And then from there onwards it was just wait and see. They usually sent a draft to the training depot in Melbourne about once a month or six weeks.

A bit of rowing. Not much else.

They were what you call whalers, about eighteen footers. And everyone got out and had a row. No motor boats in those days. Just generally learn. Had no

gear apart from a little bit of working gear. But we got most of it when we went to Melbourne. I didn’t have a real uniform. As a matter of fact I was barred from wearing a uniform when I came, went to visit my lady.

Well, sailors have a very bad name, apparently and she didn’t want to be seen with a sailor. So I was told, wear

civvies.

Didn’t worry me one way or another. It was a woman’s prerogative.

Well, it was different. It kept you busy. And it was virtually only a nine to five,

or eight to five job. And I think I was pampered very early in my naval career. I was spoilt rotten I think. By types of things like that. So we were just waiting to go to Flinders Naval Depot in Melbourne.

Oh, everybody had a hammock. But in most cases there were

no places to hang them. So you virtually used the hammock and slept on the floor. It wasn’t winter so, of course, it wasn’t cold. We had, the meals were quite good.

Oh, just the same as we have at home. Perhaps a little bit rougher dished

up.

Oh, there might have been. I didn’t even know about these things at this stage. I did as I was told. You can’t go far wrong if you just, if they say jump, you jump.

It was a big

hall. Just one big hall. It’s still there at, I think it’s in Croke Lane, if I remember right, in Fremantle. I don’t know what it’s used for but it’s still a big hall.

Oh, must have been about fifty or sixty. And, of course, they had a few permanent ones that were based there that really knew what to do. They

helped to run the place. They were the permanent navy blokes.

They were alright. They just treated us a bit like we were fools. But then we were too, as far as the navy went. Took years of experience to get through all their red tape. So we, we survived.

A chap used to come round selling morning teas. Every morning you’d stand easy, ten o’clock. And he had lovely hot pasties and pies and this sort of thing. Just, he had it on a little compartment on his bike. Came round regularly. Little apple pies. With a limited amount

of money we bought what we could.

Oh yes, yes. That’s why I’m always into stand easy now.

We were sent to Flinders Naval Depot.

Oh, luxury travel. Sleeper cars. We, because in those days the train only went,

the express only went to Kalgoorlie and then you caught the overlander. The interstate one. And we went sleepers, sleeper cars. Couldn’t believe it, all the way. Dining car arrangements. Best of meals. Transfer at Kalgoorlie onto the interstate one. That only went to Pirie, Port Augusta

and then down to Adelaide.

Oh yes, yeah. Except for the one from Adelaide to Melbourne. It’s the overlander that’s always a sit up train. I think it still is, having travelled on it recently. Then down to Cerberus at Western Port. That’s right down Port Philip Bay. And we

arrived there in April.

Sleep and eat. Of course the train is not like the modern train which practically runs non-stop, perhaps except for an odd fuelling. See, we always had to stop for water. At regular intervals they had to stop for water and everybody got out for a walk around the area. So you saw a lot of

Australia outback. Silly things like chasing rabbits and that sort of thing. Rabbits were wild. Get out and see the natives and everything else, people we hadn’t seen before. Not in that state any how, not out in the middle of the Nullarbor.

Oh, yeah, we saw them all.

Oh, they were just different

to what we struck here in the city. A lot more primitive but that didn’t worry us and we didn’t worry them. It was marvellous travelling. And we got to Melbourne and we’d only been there about six weeks and they said, “Oh, you’re all going back to Perth again.”

Marching again.

Marching, marching and more marching. And just learning, we hadn’t got round to our proper training as far as our different branches went. You all congregated in the one group. Group of about twenty five and all mixed. All mixed ratings. And just to learn how to march and behave yourself.

Oh, no, no, no. Still interesting. And we were given leave about every fortnight. Weekend leave to go up to Melbourne.

Oh, well, going up to Melbourne, the big city. And that was an experience.

You had to get up to Melbourne. Find somewhere to stay. There were a few navy, they called them navy leagues or something, that provided accommodation. Limited accommodation. And you could stay there or the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association], or one of those palaces.

Oh, yes. We went up with them and I think on a couple of occasions I met some of my friends by arrangements

that were over there in the air force. And we’d go to the football and, you know, we’d see all these big time footballers we’d only heard about or read about. And it was interesting, very interesting.

Oh, not to any

great extent. Never worried us, too busy sightseeing. We were tourists in those days. We were too busy looking. To go to a big game of football was an experience for us. To get over there amongst the Melbourne crowds.

Oh, I think they’re more, like they are now, more dedicated.

They’re all fanatics. But to go to the different grounds too, the atmosphere was all different. We were tourists, that’s what it amounted to. We’d only been there about five or six weeks and then they said, “You’re going home again.” Turns out that they shut the naval depot down.

Flinders.

Flinders Naval Depot. That’s the biggest one in the Southern Hemisphere and they shut it down. Here it is 1941, in the middle of a war, and they shut the depot down. Because it was tradition to have a shut down in the middle of the year.

If you worked it out and tried to tell anybody, it’s more than strange. It’s queer. How could you,

in the middle of a war, shut down, it’s like putting the white flag up and saying, we’ll have a truce. I don’t think Hitler would have done that.

Well, no. We’d already signed up as either

cook, seaman, stokers, all that. We’d all been classified before. But it was only the initial training, the training, the marching and all that discipline before we were separated into our classes.

Well, I just picked out stoker. I thought it would be

interesting. I didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t real know what it meant except all my friend said, “Oh, shovelling coal.” That’s what they all said, “Oh, you’ll be shovelling coal all the time.” And I says, “Oh, I don’t know.”

Very little. A ship was a ship, that’s all I knew. I’d seen them down at Fremantle Harbour but I hadn’t spoken to anybody that was in the navy so I didn’t know.

But I’d had that much experience on water that I took it for granted that it’d be alright. I wasn’t afraid of the water, you might say.

Oh yes. We wrote backwards and forwards. And

I got cold, later on it got freezing cold and she knitted me socks and gloves and beret. It was freezing cold. Western Port must be one of the coldest parts of Victoria. It’s right down there on Western Port Bay and the wind comes up from the South Pole there. Oh dear.

I don’t think we had time. We were always, you know, so busy. Training and we had some good experiences there. Bad ones too. The food was good and bad. Thursday, pay day, you got paid once a fortnight, Thursday was always tripe day. Well, to me tripe was tripe

and they did it on purpose. I realise it now that they did it on purpose. They served you tripe but the canteen was a privately run canteen and it stocked up on pies at that particular day because they knew that most of the tripe would be thrown out. Do you like tripe?

I don’t either. You can imagine us, I’d never had it before, it just didn’t appeal, so

you bought a pie. All went over to the canteen, bought a pie.

I don’t think I really have any bad ones. I saw, that was some of the rackets that were worked there. They talk about rackets these days, but that was the start. Another one that I found out after I was getting towards the end of my time there, I was given

the job of cleaning out the canteen. And part of the canteen had several rooms and they gave me the keys. And we went in and unlocked one of the rooms and I couldn’t believe, it was about twice the size of this and it was full of Comforts Fund writing paper, which was never issued to anyone. If you wanted to write to anybody, you had to go to the canteen and buy a writing

pad through the canteen, the private operator. And there he was sitting on all this, virtually tons of writing paper that should have been issued out.

Not so many there. They came up later on in life. But that was just typical of it. And new entries,

what we were classified as, new entries, couldn’t get a drink of beer. That was only reserved for what they called the permanent ones. Permanent navy boys. We were new entries and they were perms so they could have a beer but we couldn’t.

Well, they just served it, they had a bar for them. So we weren’t involved in that at all.

Well, yes.

It’s rather funny. It had a name that’s always stuck in my mind called Murphy’s Flash. I think that’s self explanatory. I guess Murphy was the chap that had the contract for the bar, another private operator, and they called it flash because it was, sort

of struck you like lightning, I gather. Murphy’s Flash.

Well I did, after we came back from Perth again, we went to our engineering classes then and we learnt how to become stokers.

No, no, we went back the same way. Went back exactly the same. We still had the same privileges and everything. We were treated well.

Oh, it used to take about six days, I think. From Melbourne because you had to keep going from point A to B to C and changing all the time.

See, the train between Melbourne and Adelaide only ran, ran overland every night. And then you had to go up again to Pirie, to change again. So you were shunting all the time. Then up to Kalgoorlie, get off again, change again. Overnight trip down. You could waste a lot of time getting nowhere.

Oh, I didn’t notice much difference. I’d hardly been away. Just a few weeks and I was back there. You just couldn’t believe that something like that could actually happen.

Fortnight. Or a bit less than a fortnight.

Free, yeah, completely free. Just had to report to the traffic

office just before we left. Back we went again. But then we started real training. As I said, as a stoker we had a proper petty officer to teach us and we took a lot of notes.

Later on?

They didn’t.

You just reported to the office and they checked you out and said, “Right. You’re on such and such a train. Turn up or else.” Everything started when we got back to Melbourne again, or Flinders.

We were sorted into engineering classes then. The seamen left us and the cooks and all the odd ones as distinct from us.

And we just became a separate engineering class. We were given our notebooks and away we went to be taught. Taught properly then.

Well, I did have my notebook the other day. It detailed everything. What different oils, oils and coal and how you, what you had to do. What

basically got the ship running. And the different, everything was different but it was taught to us by an experienced petty officer that had been through the ropes and he knew it. And we just went on. There was a boiler at Flinders Naval Depot that we all went down and had a look at. You know, stand there looking at this great, awesome thing. Eyes open

and mouth open.

Well, I don’t know. That’s what we’ve got to work. That’s what we’ve got to do. But then I finished that and then they called applications for engineers, office corps applications for engineers writers. And they say they were for the, our new Corvettes were just coming on the market at that stage.

Just kept being built and they wanted one for each to look after the engineer and this sort of thing, one stoker. I said, “Oh well, it’s different. I’ll apply for a course.” It was a six week course and I became an engineer’s writer. Which is very, very handy at Flinders. Because it got me out of so many, got me perks that I wouldn’t have normally. If, for instance, they were having

a march somewhere, I’d say, “Oh, I’ve got a course on down at the engineers writers course.” “Oh, well, you’re excused. Right oh.” It was very, very handy. Got me, I wasn’t normally going to these places, but it was a good excuse to get out.

Well, a writer to, in the navy, they call it writer in the navy but he’s really a clerk. He does

clerical duties. But he had a lot of odd jobs. He’s more or less the messenger for the engineers, it turns out. But that’s on theory side of it. But on the practical side of it, it never works out anything like that. The engineer’s the least of your worries as far as I was concerned. I was always responsible to the Chief

Stoker. And I used to, like, checking on all the oils every day, or several times a day we’d check on the different quantities of oil we were using. And that meant going around all the different tanks dipping them with a big, heavy weight which you’d drop down. You know, see where it marks and then check it on the scales. There was about six tanks on board and you had to do those.

Sometimes under water because they were on the deck and the water was going through them all the time. And looking after the lubricating oils, the various lubricating oils. Odd little jobs. I was, you were working for everybody.

Oh, I think, well, not for reality no. I found after I was more

working with the Chief Stoker than the engineer. And possibly the hardest part of being an engineer’s writer was that I never, ever saw a ship, our ships enter or leave a harbour. And I thought that was disappointing. Because there’s nothing like coming up to a harbour and you get a feel of what’s ahead of you. If you’ve been in there fifty times it wouldn’t make any difference. But, as soon as

you got within four or five miles of the entrance, they piped what they called ‘Special sea duty, men fall in’. And part of the engineer’s writer was special duty in the engine room. And you had to stand there between the engines and record every movement that comes through from the bridge. If the bridge bells rang slow ahead, fast ahead, stop, you had to record times and whatever

the movement was for both engines. It had two engines so you had two lots of bells going at once. And you might be down there for three hours sometimes if they had complications.

It is a bit crazy. Well, on the bridge, if they’re steaming along and they’re coming into harbour

and they realise they might be going too fast. They might be doing what we call ten knots. Well, they might want to go down to eight. So they’ll ring the bell down to the engineer room and it’ll ring slow ahead. And at the same time they might speak through a voice pipe form the bridge down to the engine room and they’ll say “A 110 revs.” Which means 110 revolutions on the engines turning over. There’s two,

there were two engines on them. And you would have to, you as the writer would look up quickly and say, it might come through only on one engine, if he wanted to turn the ship, it might go slow on that one, faster on this one. So you’re getting contra movements all the time. And your job was to write them down. Six forty, 0640 or something, slow ahead. And then

full ahead on this one if you wanted to spin. Like that. So you recorded all the movements but they came down from the bridge. And, in turn, you rang a bell which went through to the boiler room alongside because they were blind in there. They didn’t know what was happening. And they got a message to say, slow ahead. They would ease off on their pressure so they wouldn’t cook the boiler too much. In other words,

it’s, valves were set at 200 pound pressure and over 200 pound they would, the safety valve would lift and there’d be a sssss, out through the funnel. So it was a matter of cooperation. But the only part was that you might be down there for, say, three hours if they were having difficulties getting

into a mooring. And I regretted it because I never saw an entrance of any harbour.

Well, you still had to record them. See if, at times I thought it was not always essential but it was in case they had an accident. You know, some of the harbours you go into are not quite as clear and precise

as Fremantle. Where it’s, you come in and you’ve got a clear wharf. For some of them where it’s very congested, they only had buoys and you don’t go alongside, you go up to the buoy where you had to manoeuvre to get a hook on to that buoy so that you’re swinging on the buoy. And it’s not as easy as it looks on a very windy day. Or at night time. So there’s a lot

of movement of the engines.

Possibly the worst one I can ever remember was at Williamstown. And we came in there late at night, that’s Williamstown near Melbourne, and we got caught in the strong wind and instead of getting in one position we got

wedged virtually at the tail end. It was a harbour, or the mooring was that shape, like a U shape. We should have been on that side but the wind got us and swung so that we were down at the bottom end. No way to go forward, no way to go back and the wind blowing us onto the wharf where we shouldn’t be. So we had to call tugs in to

tow us out to the other spot.

Oh, the captain. But he could blame the weather. I mean it’s extreme circumstances. It’s not going to happen every time. But with a small ship and a howling gale and Melbourne can get a bit rough, it can happen. But some of the other harbours we went into were full of wrecks. You

fell your way in, you just grope your way. So that’s why the bells are ringing all the time. They’re ringing every few seconds. You know, they’re going along and all of a sudden they’re looking down at a partial wreck. They’ve got to manoeuvre because they can’t afford to lose a ship. It’s, that’s why the time was taken up.

Mainly an accident, yeah.

Yes. I do confess I did have to tell a lie once. I did, the captain pulled me up there once. What happened was, we have two chappies in charge, one on each engine. And they’re standing about that far apart. Well, the order came through, a certain movement,

and this chappie here put the lever in the wrong way. I screamed out to him, “You’re in reverse instead of ahead.” And, of course, he swapped over straight away but he’d set the propeller moving in the reverse direction to make the ship and of course it did swing us and you could just feel the ship, just feel the ship bump on the wharf. And I knew she’d bumped but

it didn’t do any damage. Anyway the skipper had felt it up on the bridge and he pulled us up after, the two of us. He said, “Did you notice anything different?” I said, “No. All the recordings came through OK as far as I was concerned.” He looked at me and I’m sure he didn’t believe me. But I couldn’t put this other chap in because he would have got a blast for it.

Well, it stops a lot of the disputes. They can say, you were going too fast, you were going too slow. You were turning at the time and all that.

Oh, it goes right through. But on the whole it didn’t happen to us much.

Well, I could be one of the, yeah. But the least of my, it’d be more likely the two chaps on the two throttles. One of those on the two throttles. They were twin engines. Twin engines, those corvettes.

They have, the lever moves from the different settings. You know, stop to slow ahead, half ahead, full ahead. And reverse too.

No the bells are all the same. The bell

only rings to, as it moves it gives a ringing sound so as to sort of alert you. Make sure you’re not asleep. Not that you are.

Yeah, they have, they call them special sea duty men. They have special

ones to take the lines. The special lookout on whichever side of the bridge so that he can point it all out if there’s anything on the road. Because the skipper’s got his eye, you know, he’s dead ahead most of the time. And there’s mooring gangs. Three lots of mooring gangs. They’re all wanted at the time. The rest of you

are supposed to hide out the way.

No. Only just, you’re the engineer’s writer. You do both engines. So you’re virtually got to watch two lots of bells, two lots going at once. Sometimes, you know, you’re just about bell happy sometimes.

Oh, the first time I ever did it, it was very confusing. And also if they’re busy doing the throttles, the only way you can tell the revolutions you’re doing is to put your hand on top of the engine as it’s going up and down. And you have to count those. And look at the clock so you can say

thirty times and if it’s, it depends on how long you watch it, that’ll give you the number of revs you’re doing. There’s a little, part of the motor’s going like that all the time on the type of motor we had. And it’s ticking up and down and you count it. So you’d sometimes get the chap, you know, you’d get your hand out and count them, so you’re doing fifteen revs per quarter of a minute. Sixty revs or something. Purely a matter of

The boiler room is completely independent. They have a stoker petty officer down there in charge of it and sometimes one stoker, sometimes two. It just depends on what we’re doing or what we were doing.

They are virtually blind in there because they are sealed in. They don’t know what’s going with the outside world, no more that you do here in the engine room but they are more sealed in because they’re under air pressure and everything. So they’ve got to be rightly told whether we’re going to go fast or slow, or stop otherwise they build up too much steam pressure and, as I said,

the safety valve will blow off. The valves are set at 200 pounds per square inch and if it goes to 205 “Spffff”, you have a big outburst of steam, and by design or something this safety valve or the outlet for it is very close to the bridge, so the first one to hear it is the captain, and he’s not very

impressed if this thing blows off in his ears virtually!

If they know…they don’t know it can happen. Similarly if we go from slow and suddenly get the order to full ahead, full speed, well they open up the motors to give them all the power without telling the boiler room, and immediately their pressure just goes like that, goes

down, and it takes a hell of a lot of work to get it back to its 200 pound again because otherwise their engines are only running on three quarter power, even though they’re full ahead.

They have a voice pipe too, a little thing you…[blows into it]. It has a cap on it. You take the cap off and…[blows again]. It whistles like that

at the other end and they put it to their ear, and you can tell them.

What we’re doing, if it’s absolutely essential. I mean it doesn’t go on all the time.

Well if we’re going to go to full ahead. If we’ve got full ahead we’ll say bring it through, plus it’ll be before we open the throttles right out to give him just that little

bit of a second to get everything going in the boiler room, so that he can anticipate a big drop in pressure, otherwise he’s got to work very hard.

“We’re going full ahead.”

That’s basically what we talk about, not very much.

We’re getting it in the engine room, the same thing,

“Full ahead” or we just get the bells, or they might tell us. They might say they’re going to run in and drop a pattern, what they call a pattern of depth charges.

It will blow the hell out of everything and if we’re not told, we’re not prepared for it, and of course if you’re running in at low speed, and you drop a

pattern, it nearly blows you out of the water too.

Full speed if we can, full. You’ve got to be fast otherwise as the charges go off there’s 500 pound of TNT [trinitrotoluene - explosive] in each one of those and you’re dropping one, one, one, one. They drop them in a diamond, so you get four of those going

off almost simultaneously. It just about lifts you if you haven’t got speed up you get a real jolt.

We’ve had cases where we’ve only been doing about nine knots, which is not very fast and they’ve dropped a pattern off the back, and

it hasn’t damaged it but it hasn’t done us much good either because everything’s loose. It blows all the circuit breakers in the engine room, which controls all the lights, so you’re all in darkness for a few seconds. They have emergency lighting, which comes on but it means that the electricians have to race down there and reset all their circuits, and everything because the whole lot blows.

An error of the officer on the bridge. I think the worst one was when I think he got excited because he thought he was onto something and he forgot to tell the engine room that we were going to drop them.

He didn’t have a very good reputation but he was a bonza bloke [good man]. Tony Gilbert he was, a chap from South Australia but he was a bit loose. We nicknamed him Wrong Way Tony in the finish because he actually got us going the complete wrong ways.

Thereafter whenever we’d meet him…I met him many years later in South Australia, everybody says, “Hello, here’s Wrong Way Tony!” He accepted it!

He was a sublieutenant and he just happened to be on watch that particular watch, doing the four hour watch, and he lost himself.

It’s just so involved. We were taking a very big convoy through to Malta. We were taking quite a few ships, 60 ships at a time on some of those and there was only nine or ten escorts, and we were going west at the time, and we ran into another

convoy coming the other way running east. It was pitch dark at night sometimes. It was pitch dark and it’s not as easy as it sounds when you’ve got 40 ships. They’re spread over 15 odd miles and they’ve got 60, and they’re very close to one another, and there’s a lot of zigzagging, and turning, and the escorts are on the outside of this great big screen.

Somehow or other we turned too much. We turned too much and dawn came, and we didn’t know what had happened except we felt that when we go full ahead everything vibrates, the whole ship shakes, and that’s what woke us up. We were going flat out and what it turned out that we were on our way back to try and join

original ships. What had happened was the sun had come up and they suddenly realised they were going east. The sun was rising in the east and it should have been at their stern. We should have been going west. Apparently in the night through dodging and turning, instead of going that way, they had come around to this way, and

caught onto the tail end of the convoys. There were still ships ahead, so they thought they were right. Apparently he thought he was right.

It was the wrong one.

It only lasted an hour or so.

Just a general joke. That’s why he got the name eventually Wrong Way Tony, after that chappie that flew

the Atlantic, one of the pilots, back in the early days. I think they called him Wrong Way Corrie or something. He thought he was flying one way and it turned out to be the other way. Anyway, poor Tony, he was always tormented over that but he took it all in good stride. He said, “My lookouts never told me!” See he has a lookout on each side of the bridge up

there with him. They’re on the extreme sides of the ships. Their job was to keep spotting but in the dark they missed it too, probably talking or something.

We were at the tail end. We quite often did the tails and we

just turned right around with the other crowd. These things happen.

I never saw the report! [laughs] I think that would be between the captain and poor Tony.

No, no, no, excepting everything in its favour, the huge number of ships involved, conditions

at night. You see no ships carry lights. Everything is blacked out. You can’t have a light. And there is an excuse. He just turned around too much. I don’t think you could blame anybody for that. To anybody else it might seem a bit crazy but when you see

a huge convoy, when you see some of these big convoys at sea, they take up miles, square miles. From where you are you cannot see the other side of them and you don’t know where they are. You don’t see your brother escorts. You don’t see them at all because they’re 15 miles away.

We still laugh about Wrong Way!

Poor Tony died a few years back but the sequel to it was another one of our friends down at Cottesloe here, he was as funny as Tony. He was an excellent seaman, a first class seaman but he was always good for a joke and at any rate we used to carry on about Wrong Way Tony Gilbert, and we said to this Peter

one day when we were in Adelaide…we’d actually met Tony, and the usual banter about Wrong Way. “Hullo, here’s Wrong Way Tony.” He said, “I’ve been giving that some thought.” He said, “I’ve realised that I wasn’t the only one up on the bridge that night. My lookouts should have told me what was happening.” So the matter finished then but we decided to carry on a bit with this Peter.

When we came back from Adelaide we said to Peter, “Tony said he’s not taking the blame for all this wrong way stuff. He said I turned to Cuff and, ‘Cuff, where’s the convoy?’ Cuff replied back, I haven’t seen it for two hours sir!” Of course we told him and Peter said, “I mightn’t have either.”

Poor Peter had a heart attack about two years later and he still believed that he was on the bridge, and we never had time to put him right. That was the sequel to it, so we still laugh about it but it was a crude joke, I know. Poor Peter but he was that type. He really didn’t… “I could have been there too,” he said.

What can you do?

Well, lots of things like that. If you didn’t have a bit of humour you didn’t survive. That’s what it amounted to. There were some good men, good men, characters.

I don’t know about pranks. The worst

prank nobody would ever admit to it but we had an old stoker that came to us once. He’d been in the navy about 28 years I think and he was a bit of a wanderer, and our tables, like our mess tables, we had 14, so they had to be big

enough to set to accommodate 14 people. They were fixed to the deck inside by rods with a thumbscrew there in case you wanted to take them up. Well between these two bars was another bar less than six inches from the ground or from the deck. Well, we woke up…we were

in harbour and we woke up the next day, and everybody’s looking, and poor Fred is inside. He’s got his head somehow in between and he’s inside the table, only his head. He’s somehow got his head under this bar, which is only that size and his head’s that size. We never knew to this day who did it but obviously he came back a bit

full I think and somebody undid the screws, lifted it up, pushed him in there, and screwed him down again but nobody ever admitted to it.

There he was! He couldn’t get out because he had his head jammed in completely under the bar.

Yes it was a bit raw I think! [laughs]

Oh it was good for a laugh.

Oh that was way back, yes! Yes that came almost 12 or 18 months later!

That’s all.

That’s all. I’m ready to go. I’m ready to go but all I’ve got to do is find a ship and they didn’t have any ships. They had us trained but no ships, so eventually I was sent to South Australia and drafted to a ship called…that’s my ship, the Gawler.

When I reached South Australia, the depot in Adelaide, they said, “Gawler? Where’s she?” I said, “I don’t know. I’m here to go to her.” Nobody knew anything about. So they contacted Flinders again and they said, “Send him up to Whyalla,” a place called Whyalla up in the Gulf.

So there was another engineer writer there for the ship called Kalgoorlie and the two of us were sent up to Whyalla. When we got there we found the BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary] shipyards in Whyalla and Gawler was just an empty shell, almost a wreck, and Kalgoorlie was in the process of being finished off.

Well, I knew it was a ship but I didn’t know it was in such…well not disrepair, but…they built four ships but they could build the hulls quicker than they could sort of outfit them, like they could build a house, but it took a while to put cupboards and all that sort of thing in. So there was the two of us up

there and no ships.

It was going to be fitted out, yes. She was going to be the number three in the list to be done, whereas the chap I went up with, he was for Kalgoorlie, which was number two. So it was going to get priority. So I was up at Whyalla with the chief stoker and the chief mechanic,

and that was all. The three of us were up there and three for the Kalgoorlie, so we had the depot to ourselves.

A lot of clerical preparation for it and learning all the time too because used to go down and watch things put on Kalgoorlie. You know, “Oh there’s…!”

We’d never seen parts. We watched the boilers fitted, actually lifted off the wharf and put into the ship, and the engines put in the ships too, and fitted out. All the fittings were going on.

It was! It was! It was learning. It virtually meant that I knew every…by the time we

went into commission we knew every nut and bolt in her because we saw them all fitted, and knew where they went, and why they were there in some cases. When Kalgoorlie commissioned we went out on her trials. She did sea trials in the Gulf [of Carpentaria] and we being visitors, we were allowed to come out with her,

about half a dozen of us.

We were attached to the BHP shipyard and it was all learning. They had their little problems. They had the Federal Police there once over some of the fittings that were being

fitted on the ships. Apparently they claimed that they were inferior quality of something. They had the Federal Police go through the yards checking on all the stuff, and the day we actually went out on our first trial we hit the sand bank at the entrance to Whyalla Harbour, and it was reported in the official report that somebody had sabotaged the steering engine

between a certain hour, between half past six and half past seven or something. We were going at eight o’clock and that was the official report, that somebody had sabotaged her. Luckily for the Gawler, the Whyalla harbour had been dredged and at each end of it was not rocks but sand. So when

we lost steering we just veered hard over and hit the sand bank, and it was deep water, and we just hit the sand bank, bounced back into the channel again.

Well it was claimed to be sabotage. I don’t know. The official report said sabotage. That was the first thing before you went to sea, you always checked your steering engine and they

tested the engines, while you were alongside tied up they just ran them slowly, and they tried the steering engine too, to see if it worked. The steering engine was right down in an isolated spot down in the back, down in the stern somebody could have got in there. Somebody could have got there and who would have noticed because with all the workmen around all the time, anyway it was put down to sabotage. Nothing

came of it.

It took six months, a long while! I thought it was never going to happen but see they finished Kalgoorlie off first. She commissioned in three and a half months. By the time that we and my friend arrived, and of course after they’d done Kalgoorlie they swapped to Gawler.

The Pirie was the fourth one and she was a wreck too, so she was the last one to be finished.

They’re just a hull sitting in the water, a rusty hull. You’d think it was ready for sinking instead of going to be a prime ship. It’s amazing what they can do!

The thing that I realised and I found out much later that the four ships that were built by BHP [Broken Hill Propriety Limited] were in the superior class as far as quality went. Their finish was like looking at the finish on a Rolls Royce compared with an old Ford T Model. Some of the other ships I was on later on and you could see the difference

in quality of the finish, even just the painting alone, inside and all that. It was real top class! Of course they had built their ships be going to Scotland and bringing out tradesmen from Scotland. BHP went home to the Clyde and picked up all these, and offered them a job for them and their families back in South Australia. So they were really

top class tradesmen, whereas the others were learn as you go sort of business. You could see the finish, the actual finish in them. All the painting and general finish was luxury class.

How do you mean the mechanics?

I think that once it got down to the quality of what went into them, that was very suspect because it was Australian built most of it and run off by backyard companies. Anybody

could tender for a contract I suppose, for various fittings. They put diesel generators in. We had a diesel generator that virtually fell apart, had to be completely thrown out, scrapped. That was a model called the Southern Cross, which was quite a well known company in Australia but we had two generators and the other

one was a Gardner, and Gardners were fitted in buses, and that sort of thing. They’d run for ten years without even any maintenance but the Southern Cross just virtually collapsed in a heap. You couldn’t blame BHP. You couldn’t blame anybody except the quality of the material. And it was wartime. They were just trying to do their best.

Well, the main engines for one of the ships, they were built up at the Midland workshops here and they were quite complicated, and they lasted. We only did one refit in the course of my life on the Gawler anyway. Admittedly

her cylinders were worn a fair way down but they lasted and they were doing a lot of work they were never supposed to do, high speed work. They were never supposed to. They were like, shall we say a Ford T trying to tow containers. That’s what it amounted to. The comparison was like that.

It’s about time I suppose! At Whyalla we had the food arrangements handled by a contractor. They didn’t have navy cooks and they’d let the contract out to a female cook at Whyalla.

Of course there was only about six of us up there at one stage and the food was absolutely terrific! It was just like home cooking and, “What will you have today?” She spoilt us but when we went onboard for the meal, what a contrast, cold eggs, nothing like it. I think we were ready to walk off

and go back to our Nell. That was her name, Nell the cook. She spoilt us rotten!

Variable depending on the day! Terrible on a rough day, particularly the first few trips we did. We went from

Whyalla down to Adelaide and then we went to Williamstown. We did quite a bit of trials, testing and getting the OK from the real navy. They had to come onboard to have a look and see everything before they actually paid for it I suppose, although the Gawler was actually amongst a group of ships that were paid for by the English Government. The English Government asked the Australian Government to build them.

They would pay for them as long as they were manned by Australians, as long as we supplied the crews but they had the power over them once they were built. The English Government had the power to take them wherever they want. So Gawler was one of 20 that was part of that group.

Yes, yes but she was

really RN [Royal Navy].

Yes, she was really Royal Navy but manned by Australians. That made the difference. But until we got over there, amongst the RN we were still in Australian waters. So we did the trials in Victoria and then we sailed for Sydney, and that’s where we first got our first dose of rough weather. Nothing like round Victoria for

rough weather. It certainly broke me in at any rate.

I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I suppose just walking! You didn’t walk. You got thrown. They were rough ships and they took a hiding. It took a hiding certainly going up there. I think one chap broke his wrist and another one fell out of his hammock. That was just from Melbourne to

Sydney.

We regularly lost people to seasickness, quite a big interchange of crew over the first…until we left Fremantle. There was always somebody going off. On the last trip when we left Adelaide to

come over we had to come through the Bight and call in at Adelaide to Fremantle, and we put six off at Fremantle here that were completely hopeless. They couldn’t move. They would have died. They wanted to die I think.

See we were picking up new members of

the crew all the time and replacing some of the older ones too because there was a fair amount of interchange early in the piece. So we had to put them off at Fremantle and pick up another group.

If you had half a day I could tell you what they thought of seasickness, but the Australian Navy

called it seasickness and they accepted it as seasickness but the Canadian Navy never accepted seasickness as an illness. They reckoned you were just parasites and there was quite a long fuss, although they did go towards developing a seasick pill, they did more work towards the pill than the Australians did. But the Australians, you had to go on a bigger ship that’s all,

like they’d put them on the big troop ships, like the Westralia and a few of those that were carrying troops. Big ships used to run between Fremantle and Sydney interstate in those days. They were taken over and they became troop ships, and they were 10,000 tons, whereas these things were only less than 1,000. So it was a big difference. I suppose they survived. They certainly left us at any rate but

they wanted to die. They just used to lie on the deck and the water would wash over them. “Do you want something to eat?” “Aaaaaagh!”

Not really, only once. Only once I was violently ill and in the tropics we used to take salt tablets because of the excess of sweating, and I

was doing a watch this time, relieving some bloke who was sick, and I’d just taken me salt tablet, and I was standing between the engines. One of the other stokers had a habit of always tapping you on the back or slapping you on the back, you know, “how ya going” or something. He walked up and slapped me on the back just as I had me salt tablet in me mouth here. I went [coughs], straight down went the salt tablet. Of course they

were big tablets, big tablets and concentrated salt. Well it hit me stomach and it was just like…they give you salt don’t they, to make you sick to bring up poison. I reckon within five minutes I was up on deck and I was sick as can be with this damn salt tablet but you get over it. That was different to the real seasickness because it was just salt, but I was crook

for that short time.

I don’t really know! Somebody would have to do it! It was only for a short time. I just dashed up on deck and I was sick over the side, and it was all over but it was those salt tablets. You just had to suck them and not swallow

them. Hell!

One of those things that happens.

We were at Fremantle for about three weeks and we were virtually getting ready to go. We knew where we were going by then. We were going to Colombo.

Storing, putting extra stores, filling up every tank, all our oil tanks because it’s a long run to Colombo and as it turned out far longer then they expected.

We were doing the Rottnest patrol sometimes because they had a few local ships here that didn’t like going to sea and every time they went out, they’d signal in that they had engine trouble, condenser trouble, any sort of trouble to get back in again. Of course we were just here, righto out we go. So we spent quite a bit of time doing that. It was a patrol

from North Fremantle up as far as…halfway up to Jurien area.

Yes, yes! We were always alongside down at Victoria Quay. So we did quite a bit of patrolling up there. That was terribly monotonous because you just cruised up and down, up and down, up and down. You could see Cottesloe and all

the fine trees, and there you were out there. But anyway eventually we knew we were sailing because we were all given a needle that night, and none of us could walk after that.

There were several local ones but by that time the Yanks hadn’t arrived and neither had the English. You see Fremantle became a big submarine base after and the Yanks came with their mother ships, and the English had their mother ships too.

Oh yes.

Eventually we sailed but we only went out as far as Gage Roads, out there and anchored. It seems that they were a bit suspicious that some might abscond. We knew we were going. It was only a matter of when and so they sailed us out into Gage Roads and

we anchored there, and eventually out came a couple of motorboats, and they had about five or six blokes onboard, five or six various seamen from Leeuwin. It seems that these were the rebels that they wanted to get rid of. They’d been playing up at the depot and they decided there’s a good way to get rid of them; put them on Gawler and take them over to Colombo,

and drop them off there. So we picked up these five or six, including my friend that I told you about, Peter Cuff. The one that I told you was the Wrong Way man. Well he came onboard. He was doing stoppage of leave at the time when he came onboard and when we came back a couple of years later he was still doing stoppage of leave, from another offence, that is.

Anyhow, we sailed with them

Not in a sense, no. They were just normal people. At shore and at depot you could get into strife a lot easier than on a ship. You had different…we called them in later years the ‘Cut Lunch Commandos’.

They just threw their weight around a bit.

We’d come off ships and we’d been used to our routine, and we ran in for a real

precise routine that they had worked up themselves. I suppose they were quite harmless but over the years we’ve just nicknamed them ‘Cut Lunch Commandos’ because they never did any fighting but they just annoyed us when we came back to the depots. So we always called them Cut Lunch Commandos. It’s just a sling off.

Yes. You had a few of them,

they had made efforts to go to sea and for some reason, we worked out the reasons but nobody would have them. The commanding officer wouldn’t have them, shunt them off back to the shore and they usually became, one of them in particular became in charge of the shore patrol at Perth, and Fremantle, and that was his sole job towards the latter

end of the war, in charge of just making sure your hat was on correctly, and all this sort of stuff. It was petty but he felt very power drunk.

We had a few of our blokes that would take on the patrols. We had a few good fighters.

I didn’t. I kept out of that trouble but

there were some good ones and particularly when we went overseas, and our chaps got tangled up with the English patrols ashore. They gave us a lot of trouble early and it was only our captain that got the rebels off. He’d go ashore and sort it out with the big brass ashore. We were

very lucky with our captain. He was a very gifted man in that he joined the Royal Navy, not the Australian Navy and had gone right through until he was a lieutenant commander but he not only had that in his qualifications, he was an aristocrat, English aristocrat descended from Henry the 8th. One of his

relations was Henry’s wife, Lady Jane Seymour. So he had that tradition alongside him. He had RN, Royal Navy alongside his name too and he only came out I think because of the Depression when they cut their Forces right down. He came out to Australia as aide de compte to the Governor of Victoria. That’s how he came to live in Australia. So we had him

as the captain but he had a terrific influence ashore because those in command were those that had carried on, didn’t come out of the navy and so he knew them all on a Bill and Jack basis, instead of “Yes Sir! No Sir!” He didn’t have to respect rank. His was a Jack and Bill, so he could get our chaps out of a lot of trouble and get things done too.

So it’s the old, old story of influence.

In those days they were sending one corvette away usually with a tanker, which was destined for the Persian Gulf. They were taking empty tankers back to the Persian Gulf to fill them up

again and so we took, instead of a private tanker, we took an American tanker, the Trinity, and we were supposed to escort her. Anyway, we went to Exmouth Gulf. She had all the equipment for the new airfield. They were going to build a secret airfield at Exmouth Gulf called Learmonth, and it was called Operation Pot Shot. So

she had a lot of equipment to make jetties and that onboard, so we went to Exmouth Gulf first. While she unloaded we just laid at anchor. That’s where that painting is taken, at Exmouth Gulf. The previous ship to us, the Bengal, one of the Indian ships, she had run into two raiders not far out from Exmouth

Gulf. So it was decided that instead of going her route we would go further west and further south in a big arc, and then head north for Colombo with the idea that we’d refuel off the tanker. Unfortunately the sea came up, very rough seas and we couldn’t oil, and we were starting to run out of oil,

and we were virtually stuck because we were bouncing round. We had very little oil and we tried to oil off the tanker with the lines, didn’t work, and the American captain being US Navy was very cocky, arrogant, and he screamed out over his loud hailer to our chap, “Come alongside! You’re like a honeymoon bride,” which didn’t go down too well with

everyone. So they decided to come alongside and she’s a 10,000 ton tanker, we were less than 1,000 tons, and she’s solid as can be, and we’re bouncing, “Bang!” We clashed and knocked six holes in us, and shook the ship almost to pieces. She was a big ship. She hit us hard. So it was decided that fuelling was out and they took us in tow.

So they towed us for six or seven days still in that big arc to dodge the raider area and we got close to Diego Garcia, and they let us go, and we went in for oil there. So everything worked out all right but if we struck any more raiders or anything like that, heaven knows what could have happened because we had no fuel to run.

When we got to Colombo yes, they patched up all the holes.

They didn’t plate them. They just weld over them. They weren’t huge holes. All the plates were pushed in but luckily they were all above water level, well above water level, where her big fenders had just been rammed into us. So

there it was. It was an exciting trip! Diego Garcia, I don’t know whether you know it at all? It’s American owned now. It used to be an English base and the Americans in latter years with all this Persian Gulf, Iraqi, Iran, they took over the whole island, bought it. They bought it from the English I believe and shunted all the

natives back to Madagascar or Mauritius, or one of those islands there, paid them well to leave their home, and they developed it into a sort of interim base when the ships come down from the Gulf. So I believe they have quite a big base there.

That was going to be our operation centre, so

just convoying.

I couldn’t count them. We went in all directions. We went up as far as Bombay several times, across to Aden and back to Colombo, down to Diego Garcia, and back there with convoys, always supply ships.

We went to Addu Atoll, which is the Maldives, which is just before Diego Garcia. People go there for holidays now Addu Atoll. They call it the Maldives Islands. You’ll see it advertised. They’re beautiful atolls but they’re out on the water. They have no height at all but they’re beautiful lagoons. I believe it’s perfect for diving.

No I never went ashore.

Well, I’m a bit fussy about that, too many damn sharks! As soon as you anchor there are always sharks around. So we operated around there. We helped to bring the 9th Division Australians home from the Middle East in February of that year, ’43.

After the Battle of Egypt in El Alamein they rested them, I think up in the Suez Canal area, and then the big troop ships, the Queen Mary, and them went up the canal, and picked them up. We didn’t know what was happening but we took all the store ships down to this Addu Atoll, which is a lovely mooring for that type of ship,

very deep water, narrow entrance into the Atoll. So of course the first thing we knew, take the tankers and all the store ships down there, something’s coming and we took the store ships, tankers inside the Atoll, and then just waited. In the next couple of days down come the Queen Mary, the Aquitania, all the big ships escorted by battleships and everything. They went into the Atoll

and got fuelled up ready for the run to Australia.

We were outside patrolling for subs, making sure nobody got into the entrance.

There was only about three of us then.

Not really, no, didn’t take that much notice. You know one was like another at that stage. We were with English

ships quite a lot, destroyers, anything at all but the big troop ships were quite a sight. Sometimes we went into the Atoll for fuel but we never got close enough to talk to them. We didn’t know who was onboard actually. It wasn’t until later that we found out it was the 9th Division coming home and of course they’d been brought home because of the New Guinea episode. We were

desperately in trouble up there, so these poor cows had just done the fighting in Egypt, now they were coming back to Queensland I think, ready to go to New Guinea.

We took the empties back to Colombo.

Ready for something else and then

the Burma front got…they got into trouble up in Burma. Most of the supplies for Burma was coming through Bombay and then railed across India but something went wrong with supplies, and they were running out of ammunition. So we had the job of taking an ammunition ship up to the Burma front and that was one merchant ship full of ammunition, and

two escorts, which is very unusual, two to one. They usually give you one ship, one ship but it was that valuable because it was full of ammunition, so they gave us two escorts.

Colombo.

We picked her up in Colombo and ran her up. A lot of the ships went to Chittagong; a place called Chittagong is a little bit further

up than Calcutta. We only dropped it off at Calcutta and we went in there, and the ammo ship was unloaded from there, which is fairly close to the front.

Calcutta, we weren’t there for very long but that was a funny episode because we all nearly

got run in by the Indians there, because they gave us night leave and we’d oiled. We picked up oil and there was a place called Budge Budge. Around that area they have a habit of double banking their names, Budge Budge and Paw Paw, and all that sort of stuff. Why I don’t know! So they gave us night leave to go into Calcutta,

about 15 mile. They sent a bus for us with a driver and away we went, a busload of us. By that time it was pitch dark and the next thing there was a hell of a noise outside, screaming, yelling, and there was damn blokes with rifles running everywhere. It turned out that our bus driver, being an Indian had got lost. He got lost and

there we were right in the middle of one of the main airfields guarding Calcutta, Spitfires all around us. We were in the damn middle of them there. We naturally shouldn’t have been in there and it was lucky they didn’t get panicky, and start shooting.

Well, we didn’t know where we were! It was pitch dark. All you could look out and see was damn aircraft, so we knew we were on an airfield but how he got onto there I don’t know!

We’d just left the ship! We were going up to Calcutta, into Calcutta. So there we are!

Nothing! We just had a look around Calcutta. We were sailing the next day.

Had a good look around the place, a quick look.

No there was nothing to buy. Restaurants? Couldn’t trust them at any rate!

We looked after ourselves too much for that but it was quite a funny trip and we got away with it.

It was a big enclosed port, very, very densely packed with ships, a lot of buoys. You never went alongside a wharf. You tied up at a buoy all the time and the ferryboats come around, and picked you up all the time.

Yes, all taxi stuff.

Colombo? Oh yes, they gave us leave to go up in the hills once, after we’d arrived and been there a couple of months. They sent us up into the tea plantations for about five days by train, not very far up but it’s very steep hills and we went up there to…the navy had a rest camp there.

They were very good, the Poms [English]. They looked after us fairly well.

Just amble around and rest, and sleep, and get looked after, even a cup of tea brought to you for breakfast, and all this sort of stuff. Of course servants were cheap.

The accommodation wasn’t anything startling. They were only sort of bush huts. It was a tropical place but

it was a change to me coming from Perth, all these tea plantations and bananas, and all that. I mean you bought your bananas by the big…

By the big bunch and just chewed them as required!

No, Colombo was just good and the films were always good. You could always get a decent film because somehow

or other they managed to get, right through the Middle East there, they always seemed to get the latest films. We saw films there that were released in Australia 18 months, two years later. So how they got them I don’t know, part of the arrangements.

At the local theatre. The only trouble is they all had cane seats and they had what they called cane bugs.

We all wore khaki shorts and you had to buy a newspaper. It was the first essential before you went to the pictures to buy a newspaper and put it there, so that the bugs didn’t bite you in the soft part of your legs.

Cane bugs.

They were like insect bites, yes. They called them cane bugs but I don’t think they’re like our bugs.

I hope so!

Heaven knows now! I don’t know.

Sometimes we walked, rickshaws. Some of us even had a rickshaw race along what they call the Galle Face. Have you been to Colombo at all? No? Oh well, we were going

out to the…a little bit further out and about four of us decided why not swap with the rickshaw drivers, and we’ll pull them, and they can sit in there, and we’ll have a race. So we had a race along the foreshore, quite exciting!

They’re harder to pull than you think?

Oh yes but they were nothing compared to the blokes that pulled them in Durban, in South Africa. The big Zulus [South African natives], they had a style of their own. They come down the hill and they only touch the ground with their feet about every forty feet! They floated! They hit the ground, leapt up and floated,

and then hit the ground again. You’re sitting there and you’re going down a damn hill with these blokes! They were mad! They were worse than some of our drivers here.

It was and then of course going to Bombay, that was a completely different city all together. See that’s a huge city. I mean that’s got almost

the population of Australia I think in the one little area. So it was a huge place. Only recently the latest bit of terrorism bombed one of our favourite places, the Gateway to India. That’s at Bombay and the terrorists let off one of their bombs but they didn’t hit the Gateway. It’s a big archway, a big archway like that and they call it the gateway because

the big ships used to drop their launches there with the passengers onboard, and they walked off into Bombay through the Gateway.

Yes! Yes it’s a bit of a thrill. It was a magnificent city just the same, Bombay. They call it Mumbai now. I don’t know whether you’ve seen the change of names? It was always Bombay but now it’s Mumbai.

I think it’s easier to say, “Mumbai!”

Just wandered around like tourists, lovely air-conditioned theatres, the latest films, quite good and we were made guests of the social groups there, Beach Candy Private Club or something it was, out on the ocean side

of Bombay. You’d go there for a good meal and they had lovely swimming bars too. You could have a swim there in perfect safety. We were looked after fairly well. Of course we looked after ourselves too, even went to an Indian theatre one night just to see what it was like, just a hell of a lot of noise!

They make a lot of

films there now as it turns out. I believe Madras and Bombay, no girls want to work in the offices. They all want to be on the films. I only saw that on the telly the other day.

You never noticed it because they were all jazzed up and everything.

Let’s say from what we’d seen of our own, I’d sooner take the Australians anytime but we went off for meals because our food was so crook half the time that we were glad of a good meal for a start. That was the first thing we ever went for, a meal. Then, “What do we do now?” We’d go to the pictures.

Give or take, providing it was within 48 hours of leaving port, it wasn’t too bad. There’d be a bit of fresh meat or something but after that everything in the tropics goes off so quickly and we didn’t have any air-conditioning or much refrigeration. So even a loaf of bread two days out and it’s green, spuds the same, potatoes,

they were all up on deck, and they’d just go mouldy. So meals weren’t very good. We were always glad to get ashore and fill up like camels.

We had the normal meals, seven o’clock in the morning, 12 o’clock at midday and

six o’clock at tea, although as I said, you always had stand easy at ten o’clock, and at three o’clock in the afternoon there was always a meal, not a meal, a light meal, tea and whatever was going for the watch that was going to go on at four o’clock. Watches went in four hours; eight till 12, 12 till four, four till eight,

round the clock. So the four o’clock crowd always had a cup of tea. Well we had a cup of tea with them too, if we weren’t working.

I worked the roster as a writer just the same, not to the same concentrated effort as a lot of the stokers because I was classified partly as a day worker, virtually like an officer worker, seven

till seven, whatever happened but if any one of our stokers…see we only had 11 of them onboard, if any was sick, was really sick for various reasons I’d stand up there and do their watches, give them a break. So that’s where I got all my practical experience doing watch keeping.

Stokers. There was only 14 in there.

One writer. Actually there was 11 in the mess. They were designed to have two stokers on every watch. That was six, plus the same number

of leading hands, that was nine, plus two day workers, what they call day workers. They’re ones that can do odd jobs round the place during the whole day. So that made up your team. You worked four on and eight off but later on we went into four on and 12 off, four hours on, 12 off.

It was a big

relief but it meant more work while you actually worked because instead of having two in the boiler room, you only had one and so one had to do the work of two. On most occasions he could do it.

You got that extra four hours and under the system of four hours and eight off you kept getting that middle watch, 12 till four in the morning

but this way it rotated. It went four hours forward, so you didn’t get it every night and it gave them a better break, and worked out better. They were fresher.

No aircraft at all

round there, not even up in Calcutta but you always had the submarines. They were regularly picking off ships but they liked to pick off the unescorted ones. They didn’t go for the escorted ones too much at all. Besides you never knew what you were getting when you got an echo, what they call an echo from the ASDIC [Anti Submarine Detection Investigation Committee] equipment. It could be a big shoal

of fish. It could be a whale or anything but it always had to be checked out.

No certain ones let’s say, not around that area. There were a lot of ships lost but always ones that were prowling on their own.

About one out of every three. You could get two dummy ones and they’d have to search, go backwards, and forwards, backwards, and forwards until they were dead certain it was only an echo. See anything can leave an echo, as I say, a big shoal of fish.

They were pretty proficient yes. They had a hard job, tucked

away down there in the bowels of the ship.

We all loved a depth charge attack because we all had a hand in loading. Once you fire a pattern you’ve got to automatically load the throwers again. As I said, they were 500 pound,

so you can’t pick them up the depth chargers. They’re quite round and you can’t manhandle them, so you have to have a little derrick there, and as soon as the thrower throws one out you have to get the derrick onto this fella, and hoist him up into position onto the depth charger thrower again ready for the next. So everybody used to…we used to love standing around and help load.

And watching the bang, yes, watching the big bang. The ones off the stern of course, they just rolled off but the two each side were thrown. They threw them in a pattern, usually a diamond pattern.

No, no. There was no

risk of an accident, certainly no risk of a collision or anything like that, so it wasn’t really necessary. We stood around in case there was any damage. I had to be fairly close to the engineer in case we lost one of our propellers or something like that, and have to go up, and report to the captain what had been done, but it never occurred.

Oh yes, terrific explosions 500 pound, particularly if they’re set shallow. If they’re only set 25, 50 feet or something they’re virtually in the water and they’re gone straight away, but further down the concussion is spread out a bit further, and you’ve got further to get away.

Everything rattles, even your teeth. Everything rattles and bangs. Above the engine room quite often there’s a big skylight, which you lift up for fresh air. It’s propped open and everything, but many a time they both come down with a terrific crash, just sheer vibration.

Oh yes, very noisy,

very noisy, bang, bang, everything rattles, even the plates you were standing on in the engine room, the whole thing went.

It didn’t seem to, no. They were all set on sort of blocks that gave them a little bit of movement, like the boilers. The boilers moved around too.

You’d have to drop them very close. You’d have to be set very shallow and you could be down below a decent speed too. See you’re supposed to go virtually full speed as you’re dropping

to give yourself time to get away but if somebody slips up and you’re not doing the speed, and they drop them quickly, you could get a bang. On one occasion I’d gone down to get some water from the water tank…water was always a big problem onboard, drinking water and I’d just got down there, and lifted up the round lid of the water

tank, and was bending in to put my dilly in, and they dropped a pattern then. I felt that one because it vibrated in the tank itself and the water tank is only 20 feet from the stern, so you didn’t have much distance between that and the charge, but most of the time they were quite exciting.

Oh yes! Everybody did I’m sure but always hoping that you might get

one. With a convoy you couldn’t afford much time like that to waste on them, to take yourself away and hunt what they called a ping. That meant that part of the escort where you were was unprotected and that could be the time when somebody would strike, and so

you really…they’d quite often drop them quick to force them down in there, force them down deep while the convoy moves on. The main thing was to get the convoy through, not sinking submarines or whatever’s there. People think it was the other way but it wasn’t. The cargo was more valuable than the damn submarine. You lose a 10,000 ton ship and it’s full of

everything. It could be carrying anything. You don’t know what’s onboard. Wheat, it could be a whole load of wheat. Imagine what that…you lose that from going to a port, a lot of starvation. Same with an oil tanker, you’ve got to get them through at all costs. Don’t worry about the submarine attack, get him out the way. Until later on when the English

brought in special U-Boat hunters that did nothing else. They went out as a group of say seven or eight and that was their sole job, just to wait for a report there were subs in that area, and concentrate, and they did no escorts at all. That was their sole job and they were very successful because they did nothing else. They were prepared to sit there for three days

and just wait for him to run out of air. He’d have to come up.

Smoke him out virtually, yes but to a convoy those tactics didn’t pay off.

As I say, it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, which

comes first? The main thing was to get the supplies through. You could hunt him around for half a day and the convoy’s 100 miles away with a blank hole in their escort, and escorts were scarce enough to find at any time.

Clear the path, yes.

Sometimes we went out with two and sometimes we were up as high as nine, nine or ten, depending on the size of the convoy but the big ones we had sometimes nine and ten.

We had all the mine sweeping gear in the world onboard and it was never used once. It was just a waste of damn money.

No very little, not much mining done around there. The Mediterranean, there was a lot of mining done there but we never had the job sweeping. They had the English sweepers that were specially designed. We had the gear but we never used it. See there were three types of mines. That was the moored one. There was the acoustic mine, which went off with sounds and the magnetic mine, which was attracted by your magnetic

thing. Well all the ships finished up with a magnetic strip around them, which demagnetised the attraction, so they were clear that way. The other moored one, well everybody was supposed to know where a minefield was because as they laid them they were supposed to chart them but there was always a risk of one breaking adrift. When we lost a big troop ship once, I didn’t find out until

30 years that she’d actually been torpedoed and not mined. We thought she’d been mined but it goes to show you can’t tell the difference.

Yes.

She just disappeared. We’d been to Malta and then we carried on down to

Tripoli, a place called Tripoli.

In 1943.

Yes. Eight of us, eight of the corvettes were just sent to the Mediterranean. They were light on in escorts and at the time things were brewing for us with the invasion of Europe. So we went up in two lots of four. We were one

group of four and the other crowd were the second lot.

Our main base was Alexandria, just through the canal and into Alexandria, the big port. That was the main English base there.

All the convoys going west through the Mediterranean formed up there, escorts and everything. Everything formed up.

We entered the Mediterranean and the first thing was we couldn’t go ashore.

They wouldn’t let us ashore because we wore khakis, the Poms wouldn’t.

They were used to whites, white shorts, white everything and we weren’t, according to them, in the rig of the day, as they call it. So we had to wear

blues, our blue suits and it was quite hot, quite hot up there in the tropics, near Egypt and the desert. So that was another job for our skipper. He had to go ashore as soon as we got to Alexandria, go ashore and see his mates again, and say, “My boys, that’s all they’ve got, khakis. They either do that or they’re not here.” It was all right. I believe it was one of the damn admiral’s wives

didn’t like them but that’s beside the point. Anyway, so that was our first thing there but after that we got on all right.

It’s a beautiful place. It was beautiful, huge port and good facilities. The English had been there for so many years that they’d established a real fleet club and it was a

club too for us. Beautiful meals, and you could have drink, as much as you liked, and they played bingo. We call it bingo here. What do they call it? Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference, bingo it is. You could sit there and play that, and first class films again ashore. We had quite a lot of fun there, quite a lot of

fun. We got leave once. We got 48 hours but that wasn’t long enough. We would have liked to have gone up to Cairo and seen the Pyramids but you’re so close, and you couldn’t go. We just had to bypass it but it was a beautiful place and that was our base for six or seven months there.

It depended how long we were away. It depended where we went. If we went to the other end

of the Mediterranean, we could be away three weeks or more but it was always worth coming back to. It was the only place, the only place in the whole Mediterranean you could come back to and say, “I’m going to the pictures. I’ll have a feed. I can even have a rest.” Wherever you went, you couldn’t go to Malta. There was nothing there. Tripoli had been bombed right out. Benghazi was just a shell. They’d fought over that place 50 times

I think. Gibraltar had nothing. I mean the view was all right but you can’t enjoy the view, look at the monkeys! So Alex was our base.

Typical Egyptians, damn rogues, thieves and vagabonds, pinch anything! If you didn’t anchor the damn ship down thoroughly they’d take that.

They’d take anything. They got up into the captain’s cabin and half cleaned that out. You’d be on the wharf going out slowly and they’d even nick towels off a line just inside the deck. They’d nick anything! Oh they were robbing cows.

That led to another funny story with my friend down at Cottesloe, Peter. With the thieving the captain wanted to go ashore, so he said to Peter, “Cuff come up to my cabin and with your 45 on your hip,” because he was what they call a quartermaster, virtually a receptionist

onboard. A quartermaster is just a receptionist really. He stands near the gangway and anybody that comes onboard has to go through him virtually, just a glorified name for a receptionist. Of course he always wore his .45 revolver on his hip. So the captain said, “Come up Cuff and sit in my cabin, and look after everything.” So in due course…we didn’t know about this till after, the next day,

back comes the captain from his conference ashore several hours later and this chap is sitting in the captain’s seat with the captain’s cap on his head, and he’s as drunk as a lord. He’s been into all the captain’s whisky and gin, and he’s that drunk he can’t stand up. The captain said, “I don’t think

you’re fit to carry on Cuff. I’ll get the quartermaster to relieve you.” He never did a damn thing about it. As I said, he was a thorough gentleman. He just realised Cuff had fallen for the old trick, put it in front of me and he’ll drink it! [laughs] But he was there because the ship’s chronometer and everything…one of our ship’s chronometers from the cabin had disappeared.

Oh they were…put your hand down and they’d take it. They haven’t improved I don’t think either, but that was Alex [Alexandria]. It was a good port, good port facilities and a well organised mob ashore. The funniest act was the French battleship that was there. When the French surrendered they scattered them all around the various ports. Some surrendered to the Germans. Some

were sunk by the British. Some made themselves neutral. This French battleship was in Alex. She’d been there for 1941, 2 and 3, and the standing joke about her was she couldn’t shift because she was wedged in by champagne bottles. Every time you came in you had to sail past Lorraine. She had the awnings up, lovely

awnings for the guests and everything, and they seemed to have a damn party every time you went past her, and that’s what they always said as a joke, she couldn’t shift because the champagne bottles wedged her in. A rumour they say!

Shorter range but more violent,

more violent completely. The other was spread over thousands of miles. It’s a big place the Indian Ocean. When you go from say Aden to Bombay, Colombo and then to Calcutta, and then down to Addu Atoll, that’s a huge area. That’s why a lot of the ships were sunk around that area because they sailed completely unescorted. They went

isolated. Now they all thought they were safe and they’d steam off on their own hoping that the area would give them safety. It didn’t but you can be unlucky. So that was the main difference but the organization was a lot better from Alex.

We seemed to know what we were doing. We seemed to have a real object too and we were leading up to the invasion of Sicily. We didn’t

know at the time but we knew things were going to happen and you felt that you were…well taking the first lot of supply ships through to Malta when it got…actually the relief for Malta, just to take them in, and just see the people.

Well, they were starving. They came onboard and they were taking all our scraps off the tables, and everything.

They’d had a hard time, what ’40, ’41, ’42, virtually three years of almost complete hell. I’d hated to have been there then. But that was it because Malta was the main base. If we’d lost Malta, we’d have lost the Mediterranean . That’s what it amounted to. A lot of people didn’t know it but Malta had the best…

Malta, even in the Battle of Britain time, they gave Malta priority with radar, so their radar could pick up the raiders planes coming quicker than the English could pick them up coming from France because it was so essential. They had to keep it open because it was right in the middle of the Mediterranean surrounded completely and yet if we lost that we were gone. We’d have lost North Africa,

possibly Syria, Iraq and all that oil area could have gone. A lot of people didn’t know that of course but we didn’t know too much about it either, except that’s why Malta was so valuable.

Well, not very much actually happened because the whole thing was…

it’s a terribly long story. Like they’ve written…they’ve made films about it. They’ve done everything.

We didn’t notice much difference. We were just running supply ships all along, particularly to Benghazi, which is just south of Malta and Tripoli, which is another big port there.

It was just part of a general build up but the troop ship we lost, they were going back to…they were a lot of Frenchmen and they were all going back to Alexandria to rejoin because they could virtually see that we were starting to get possibly on top.

She had a hell of a lot of troops on her.

She had about 1700 I think it was and we’d been anchored alongside her in Tripoli Harbour, so we got to know it. It had particular markings on her funnel. The only trouble was there were two sister ships in the one convoy, right in the frontline. They were the frontline of the convoy and we got up one morning, and looked out like we always did.

You always get up and stare out, and see what’s happening out there, and I said, “Where’s the Yoma? Where’s the Yoma?” They said, “There she is over there.” I said, “No that’s the other one.” It was half past seven in the morning and next thing the bells went, and everything, panic stations, and we did an about turn dashing backwards behind the convoy, and when we got there they said the Yoma’s gone.

Well she must have gone in ten seconds. She was there one minute and gone the next, and she’s got 1600 odd onboard, and we could only spare two of the corvettes, the Lismore and us, and a couple of little smaller barges to pick them up. Of course the whole convoy just steamed through, right through these poor cows in the water. You can

imagine you know, about six or eight ships ploughing. They didn’t know. They just couldn’t stop either, just go through them. So we had the job of stopping and we were a rescue ship. So that was a job and a half. We picked up 400.

Just anchored, just stopped dead and some of them

swam over to us, some of them floated over, and we sent all our boats away, rafts and everything, and hauled them in all various ways.

Yes. I had the job, being a good swimmer I went away in one of the boats and our job was to go out a bit further, four or five hundred yards out

in a big arc to try, and see if there were any poor cows swimming out there but see they all had their damn army boots on, most of them. They were damn goners but all you had to do was to swim in amongst all the…all the debris keeps coming up from the ship when she breaks up too. It comes up and there’s damn rubbish, and junk floating around in between bodies. You’re trying to sort out who is alive and who is not alive. If you think they’ve got a chance you

pull them into the boat and take them back. If you think they’ve got no chance why worry, so you just leave the poor cows. So we got 400. Lismore got 400. I think she got a few more than us and I think we lost about 400 that day.

I was a good swimmer, so it never worried me in the water. I could swim like a damn duck.

To see these poor cows drowning but…they never had a chance. Of course once they got onboard they were worse. Once they got onboard they wouldn’t go down below decks into our mess even and have a shower or even having a damn drink of water. They all stayed up on that top deck and they wouldn’t go down below. They were terrified I suppose and I don’t blame them. They were dead scared and of course

it made us very top heavy. The ship kept…it’s like everything else, if you overload it, it can be ill-balanced and they just said, “We’ve got our quota. We can’t handle another body.” So they stacked the dead ones down on the stern and we took off for Derna,

a little port nearby that was part of the 9th Division, one of the places they’d fought over a lot, Derna. So we ran in there and they ferried the survivors ashore but that was the hairiest trips we’d ever done because she was so top heavy that when she rolled, she rolled like that, and she rolled over here, and you thought that she’s not coming back. Then she’d slowly right herself and slowly roll that side. It was all the damn…

onboard. They wouldn’t…they didn’t care a damn. We were the ones who were doing the worrying and so we dropped them off there, and Lismore did the same. Lismore had a few more than us. Then we carried on to Alex independently but we had all the…we didn’t drop the dead ones off because they just stacked them down the stern until we got to Alex a couple of days later.

It used to be quite ironic because on those ships there wasn’t much room to really sit around and talk, and the stern part was what we call our quarterdeck, well the navy calls it a quarterdeck, and officially on a big ship no ratings are ever supposed to go down below a certain mark. That’s officers only, for them to walk and have their smoke and talk,

but on the small ships the whole ship was…there was no quarters like that. So of course we’d just sit amongst the dead blokes. What could you do? Take them back to Alex and they offloaded them there. At least they got a decent funeral.

About a dozen of them there were and a couple of our callous blokes even took their boots to wear. Well, they were no use

were they? But they were all army blokes. So that was the Yoma. It wasn’t until…oh it must have been ten years ago…we always argued whether she was mined or whether she went down with a mine because being the leading ship she would have hit the mine, or whether she was torpedoed, and I decided to write to German archives, the German Navy Archives. I sent a letter

off, a bit of a blind letter. I told them the details, “Did any of their subs have a hit at that time?” And back come all the details, in German of course! I had to take it to a German around here and got him to translate it, and it turned out it was a submarine that had sunk her alright because the exact time on his

record was 07.30; “07.30. Hit a ship.” She gave breaking up signs and he departed. He didn’t hang around. He just got the one hit and cleared off, and it confirmed exactly what we’d believed. It was a submarine. But see, all the escorts in the world wouldn’t have done any good because he took a ping at it. He had all the ships lined up and picked the front row, and then he

dived straight away, and went away. How could you chase him because you had all these bodies in the water and everything. You couldn’t have dropped a depth charge.

They were shocking you know, arms and legs off. Well they’d been chopped up by a lot of the propellers of the ships going through them and you can imagine. They were chopped up poor devils and they drowned in addition.

Anyhow, we did our bit. We got 400 out of the water, saved 400.

Well, we had a sick bay man. He had some bandaids and aspros. Actually he was quite good. He got commended after for his work on them. He did a lot of…not surgery

but a lot of stitching. He did a lot of stitching and that sort of thing, and he was very good. It’s a pity he never went on to become a doctor. I found out later he sort of gave it all away, never became a doctor. He should have been a doctor.

Not so many burns, no. The explosion just threw them straight into the water and then along came the next ships with their propellers, and

if the wash didn’t get them, and bump them, the propellers would churn them up, and throw them out the back. They didn’t have a chance really but 400 out of 600 is not a bad percentage really. We only lost 400, so a good percentage.

Some ships went down, never had a survivor. One ship, the Ceramic

was sunk off South Africa and she had one survivor out of almost a similar number, and he was only a survivor because the submarine surfaced, and they wanted a prisoner to confirm that they had a sinking, so they took him back with them to Germany, and they never knew what happened to that ship until after the end of the war in Europe, and he was released. He come off the Ceramic.

So we did better than them.

I suppose the main thing was the invasion of Sicily. I think that was the big build up in July. As I said, they were after Sicily because Sicily

controlled the Mediterranean. That was the big island and it had the main German Air Force base there. From there to Malta was only 45 minutes flying time, so you can see why they pelted hell out of…they not only pelted hell out of Malta but they picked off all the convoys coming through at the same time.

For a lot people early on they must have had a hell of a time. They must have gone

through a lot of problems.

We were at Benghazi, which is the port on the African side and we just lay there waiting for the orders to pick up the convoy coming through from Alex, and they sent them through in two lots. They sent all the cargo ships that were going to land. We had the

eastern side of the island to worry about, Sicily to worry about. The Americans had the western side. So it was a combined effort but each one had a separate side of the island. We eventually sailed and picked up this convoy coming through from Alexandria. We all had to paint ‘Mediterranean Slow’

up on our bow on the wooden deck. We had to paint MS [Mediterranean Slow] in a big, white, huge thing, so our aircraft would know we were Mediterranean Slow.

Well it meant that we were friends of our aircraft, otherwise they could see the ships down and they might hit first, and ask questions after. So all those ones had MS

on their bows and you could read it from thousands of feet up. The big troop ships that came along after the faster ones had ‘Mediterranean Fast’, so they could be recognised too. So we sailed from Benghazi and picked up ships left, right and centre from there but we were at sea for several days before the invasion because they kept circling to try, and throw the Germans off. They didn’t want them to know

where we were going.

The exact number I couldn’t make a guess. From what I read of the records there was damn thousands, not in our convoy but they came from everywhere, landing barges and they came off the North African coast. They just come from everywhere. It’s a fairly tight area there.

Oh yes, yes. We had the other three Australians with us for a start but like everything else, it was a well planned effort, but you can’t ever take anything for granted, particularly weather. We got to within less than 24 hours of the landing and a howling gale came up, a

real gale, not predicted, not expected or anything, and it was as rough as hell. We used to look at the poor soldiers because they were already in the landing barges a lot of them and these flat bottomed landing barges are only 60 to 80 feet long, and they were getting belted. We thought, “How are those poor devils ever going to land ashore and be fit to fight?” But it was too

late to call it off and the only thing in our favour was the fact that the Italians and Germans thought it was too wild a night, and they relaxed too because they thought that nobody would be out in this weather. Then the blokes in the canoes couldn’t find the landing spot. They sent these chaps in these little two-man canoes to

guide the ships in. They had to find their markers first and it was so damn rough they couldn’t find their markers, and they had to in turn pick up the markers to signal back to the ships with the flash lights that it was safe to come in. They were about an hour late finding their markers but eventually it went off.

It was interesting and

we got almost there, and then we had to turn back for about half an hour. One of the big ships in the convoy, all her deck cargo shifted in the storm. All her landing barges and everything started to break adrift, and we had to go back, and stand by her in case she rolled.

Pick up the crews but it turned out

all right and by dawn the weather had flattened right out. It had gone from howling gale…you couldn’t believe it could happen like that. It was a beautiful Mediterranean morning and it turned out that the ship that we were standing by was the commodore of the whole convoy, so we took him in. We were about a half an hour behind but of course they were all landing everywhere, so

we took him in. We went through a lot of bodies in the water and it wasn’t until…I think I was reading only three years ago that they were our troops, and they were all our glider troops that they sent over in gliders. A glider they have to detach from the towing plane and then they’d glide in,

and crash, and the pilots of the planes reckoned the gunfire was too heavy, possibly from…don’t know who it was, and they dumped half the gliders out in the sea. They lost 260 or something I saw in the paper, just drowned, glider troops, specially trained blokes too.

Nothing in particular. It was a virtual surprise. Of course the Germans didn’t come over for awhile. We had all the escorts. The planes were escorting us from Malta.

Mainly our planes because it had been a virtual surprise but the only trouble was the Spitfires [fighter aircraft]

only have a limited range. They can’t fly all day, not like you see in the films. They could do a quarter hour coming and a quarter hour over us, and a quarter hour going back for fuel. They’ve got a limited…they use so much juice, so they can’t. But it was very quiet until later in the afternoon and then in the night time they really hotted up when they came over but

it was pitch dark, so they couldn’t see us, and we just slowed down to crawling speed, and the planes would be down on the water looking for us but before they see us they’re gone.

I suppose we must have been about two miles off shore but we were doing anti-submarines patrols then, just in case the subs, the Italians or Germans decided to come. We were doing submarine patrols

and about midnight we got the signal, “Proceed to Malta.” So we went back to Malta, got out of it. The only snag was we got out of the frying pan into the fire because all the troop ships, the big troops ships, like the 20,000 tonners had been right in on the shore dropping the troops…it was pretty game actually to take a big troop ship in that close. Some of the big Orient Liners…I don’t know whether you would remember them

but they were the big ships that used to come here just after the war and before the war. They were the luxury passenger liners for the trip to England and they used them as troop ships, and they were wanting to go back to Alexandria, so we had the job of taking them back to Alexandria full speed, and full speed to us is only 15 knots, which is just virtually about 18

miles an hour, and these troop ships can do 15 knots going in reverse almost. So we had a problem to keep up with them. The trip usually took six days to go from Alex to Malta. We did it in three days going back with the troop ships, full, flat out to the board. The ship was pounding and shaking. We got back in there and we were almost a wreck. All our brickwork in our boilers

had broken adrift, fallen out. It took us 24 hours to fix the brickwork up. Everything was just shaken. We weren’t designed for that sort of thing. That was a job for the destroyers but they said they were too busy. They’re the fast ships, like they do 30 or 40 miles an hour. There we were, we had the job of taking them back. The next time we went to Sicily we just had the

normal slow convoy.

Not so much my job, I knew we were eating up oil but we had enough to do three days. We could do three days. That would be alright but apart from that it was a matter of whether the engines would hold together. It’s like taking

my little car out to Amaroo Race Track, racing it round and round, and round, saying, “I wonder how long the motor will stand up?” They were just doing jobs that they were never supposed to do but I suppose when you’re shot you’ve got to use them.

I’m a leading stoker then! I’d already been promoted, so

I was still doing exactly what I had been doing. It didn’t change. Then we went back to Sicily for a second helping then but the Germans were more active then. They knew we were there and of course they came over at night, and dropped their big cantilever flares, their big flares they dropped with a parachute, and they light up from here to Rottnest,

just like broad daylight. They’d drop them from high up and the fighter planes go up, and have to try to shoot them down. Of course you’re sitting on the water there and to them, they can see every movement you make but they weren’t after us. They were after the bigger stuff. So we left them

but a lot of those bodies from the glider troops were still floating around. They hadn’t been picked up. Nobody had made an effort. Then the Germans…we found out later on they’d used their new glider bombs on a couple of the ships and that was something new. Nobody knew anything about them. They’re launched from an aircraft at about 20,000 feet and they’re radio controlled. They’re quite a big bomb too

and they’d launch them from 20,000 feet, and just pick their target out, and just direct it by radio, and they never missed, a direct hit. Of course they got a couple of our, not Australian but English ships.

We knew there was something going on but they called them glider bombs. See

they came in without any…we’d heard of the glider bomb but we never were told and they weren’t glider bombs…they were glider bombs in a way but they were radio controlled, which is completely different. The Germans were pretty smart characters but I believe that was the first time they tried them and then later on of course when the Italian fleet surrendered, they got

one of the big battalion battleships on her way down to Malta to surrender, and they got one of their big ones, virtually brand new, blew her to pieces with the same bomb. So they were pretty effective.

Well you don’t know. Actually it’s surprising how little you know of these things. You pick some of it up later on but

you’re out there. You’ve no idea of time. You can’t tell…you lose track of time. You don’t know whether it’s six o’clock in the damn morning or midday, or something. The time is so varied and goes sometimes quickly, and you just haven’t any idea. I don’t know how people can describe it to the exact minute because I’ve never been able to. If you’re busy and something’s happening

time goes. You say, “Oh what is the time?” All I know is just if a fella felt tired we had a sleep on the deck, that’s all. We’d just lie there.

You’ve got all the chances but with hundreds of ships around, the odds are

is this glider bomb guy up top picking you out or is he looking for another target. You’ve just got to take your chances but we were fairly lucky. They were never after us. They were after the troop ships or the supply ships. They’re more important than an escort ship. So there we are. We did two trips back to Sicily and

then the third one we went through there.

That was the greatest bungle you could ever imagine, on the German side this time. They fouled it up properly. We’d been to Malta, dropped off ships and then we went through the straits, and turned over to the North African side, and we got to a place called Iran on the 12th of this month,

and of course it was a Thursday. Well sailors always say you never sail on Friday, or on the 13th. Anyway, the next day we were sailing with this convoy and it was Friday the damn 13th. Nobody took any notice of superstitions and we got out there off the Spanish coast, and we were only about 100 miles from Gibraltar virtually the night before, and everybody’s thinking…it was one of those perfect

nights. The Mediterranean can only be perfect but the water was just like a mirror, beautiful all day, flat, calm, no wind, no nothing and we had quite a large convoy, about 40 ships with us, and we were sitting up on deck. The stokers always sat just behind the funnel there. That was their lounge up

on the deck. It was about half past nine at night but it was twilight. See twilight in the Mediterranean is broad daylight. So it was half past nine and we’re just sitting up there looking around, and the Spanish coast was over to one side, and we’re looking out, and “Gee there’s a lot of activity on the shore there. A lot of trucks going up and down.” They seemed to be going that way, some going that way, backwards and forwards. We’re having our cups of tea and

drinking away. “God there’s a hell of a lot of trucks again! Where are they all going?” And all of a sudden there was a hell of a bang, whistles went and everything, balls went, a couple of bangs and we did a straight turn, and next thing they looked further, and it was German torpedo bombers, a whole squadron of the cows had been over hiding in the lee of the hills, just circling, waiting to

form up ready to come at us but of course they had been seen. Those on the other side were a bit closer than us. They saw them and of course when they came they were met by these 40 odd ships, all shooting at them. So that was a circus and we was at flat calm; of course immediate panic stations. They signalled through to us to make smoke.

Well, the signal came through, “Make smoke” to try and cover up the whole convoy, and throw these damn planes off so they didn’t know where they were going, and they’re just as liable to crash into the sea. So it being a perfect night, a most perfect night that you’ll ever find, the smoke screen was useless. We turn it on, the smoke went straight out of the

funnel and it just stayed there, like a damn big ball, and it was only our movement through the water that actually moved it a little bit, only the ship moving. See normally it should stream out right behind you and cover everything. They tried that and they have what they call smoke floats onboard too. They’re big cylinders and they lay, instead of a black smoke, they lay white

but the white stays more on the surface. So of course panic stations, down all the seamen race and release all these white smoke floats, same thing happens! They’re just stationary too, except we’re moving away from them but they’re not doing anything as far as protecting anybody. So the whole thing was farcical but the only thing about it is with all this smoke going around it misled them because when they got back to their base, the

Germans, they made the most extravagant claims, hundreds of thousands of tons of ships sunk and everything, because they’d seen all this smoke, and to be honest we looked, and looked all around at the convoy, and I think I wrote in my diary something about seven or eight ships sunk for sure. The official record was two ships were damaged.

I never believed that ‘two’. I was sure there was more just the same but that’s the official figure. You know what officials are like when they try and fiddle the counts but at any rate we just got into line, and formed up again. The planes took off for…it turned out they come from Sardinia, I found out later on from a report.

About ten minutes later all the firing started again but away from us over on the far side of the convoy and we all looked across, and there was one solitary German coming in, and to this day we argue whether he was after the equivalent of Hitler’s medal or something for being the hero, or he was a damn lunatic. Anyway, he came in. He had about 40 ships…well 20 ships at

any rate, all firing at him and he’s down at water level. He only lasted a couple of minutes. He travelled about a quarter of a mile I think then “bang”. There was just one big explosion. I don’t think he even got a shot in. He was gone but he may have thought with all the smoke and confusion around there that these were easy shots, easy victims. They only carried one

torpedo, so they can only have one shot.

I’ll bet when he went up with a bang he did! But no, it went like that and we just carried on to Gibraltar. The chap very close to me, he got a round through his thigh. That was a chap from South Australia but he was only about six feet from me. He was up on deck but our

whaler, that’s the 18 foot boat, that had more holes in it than anything. They raked the ship with machine gun fire and I think the whaler copped the lot, except this poor fella got a burst in his leg but that was our sole casualty then, and the official figure came out that two ships had been damaged, and seven planes had been destroyed,

officially confirmed at seven. Well, when I was chasing archival stuff I wrote about that incident too and back come all this stuff from Berlin about the raid they carried out, and the bloke who led the raid, he admitted that 15 of his planes hadn’t turned up after the raid. So we did a lot better than we expected. There was 45 of them.

According to him he lost 15, so that’s a good percentage, a very heavy raid. The ironical part about it was that in his report he said that reconnaissance aircraft had picked up this convoy heading east going to Sicily with supplies. Well, we laughed at that because we were heading west and it turned out that he got the wrong convoy. The other convoy

was about 40 miles in another direction. They’d come through the Atlantic, through the Straits of Gibraltar and was heading to Malta, and that was the one they were really after because they were all full of ammunition stores, and he picked on us, and we were nearly all empties, empties going back to England!

On their part yes. They got mixed up.

In the sun or something he must have lost sight of where the east and the west was. Anyway, that was his official report and he lost 15 ships. We were a bit unlucky in a way. The other four of our Australian ships were with the other convoy. So they reckoned they did well. They got out of it and didn’t even get touched. But the Germans gave me all the reports on it, except they were

exaggerated, the number of ships sunk and all that sort of stuff, terrific damage done.

No, no waste of time. It was 70 years later and nobody would bother but they were very free with their archival stuff. They don’t conceal anything. They give you every damn detail, the name of the bloke who led the raid. A month later he got even with another convoy in virtually the same area

but it was all American and he belted the hell out of them. He really had a birthday. He got about five escort ships alone without the merchant ships. So he was no slouch.

Every time you came into Malta you could say you were under air attack because they were over you. They didn’t always raid but. They were nearly always looking for you,

I think counting how many were down there and what was there, whether it was worthwhile going.

They were the worst ones, at Sicily and this fella here. See further east in the Mediterranean was virtually becoming our territory. Once they won the battle of El Alamein

and kicked Rommel right out of North Africa, well the North African airfields were all out, so you didn’t have the same trouble. Some of the early ships must have had a lot of really tough times but we were well able to take care of ourselves by then because they’d given us extra guns on our stern. We had two more guns down the stern.

Swedish ones called Oerlikons. They fired a

fairly big shell about that size, quick firing out of a big drum. The only trouble was you had to keep loading them all the time, loading the drum.

We got them just as we went into the Mediterranean. They decided to give us more and they swapped one of our Oerlikons for a Pom-Pom, which was a bigger shell still ... [technical break]

a bigger one, which nearly blew us apart the new one, when it was fitted. They maintain them always at sea, the seamen and we were sitting up there where the big one was, and he had it trained right out over the stern, and it’s one of those they operate by their feet. They fire by putting you foot on it and

God we were sitting there, and the next thing “bang”, and this blasted shell went straight out over our heads out, over the stern. He didn’t have the safety catch on it, there’s this flaming great shell. They don’t say accidents happen. They’re caused.

Damn fright. Absolute fright and abuse, abuse to

him too! It hadn’t been fitted that long and I think they were still feeling their way around with it. On the bigger ships they used to have what they call multi ones. They have eight barrels and they’re all firing like that, eight at a time. This was only a single barrel but on the big cruisers and that where they want to throw up a lot of rubbish, they call them Chicago Pianos, eight, eight, eight firing or

you can have a four, or you can have a single.

They called them Chicago Pianos after the gangsters. [technical break]

Not really, no, no, no, all reconnaissance stuff, just looking at us, just having a look because once you get down the

Indian Ocean there’s no aircraft down there at all, so nothing to worry about. So we dropped our convoy off at Gibraltar and continued on out into the Atlantic the next day for a few days, and we thought we were going to England then because we went up the Spanish coast, and we thought, ‘hello, we’ll be up in one of those English ports’. Halfway up the Spanish coast we met a

convoy coming from England and all we did was change escorts. They picked up our convoy and we took theirs, and took them right through to Alexandria again. So we missed out. We thought we were on our way to England. Actually at one stage there it was reported we were going up to England for the D Day [June 6 1944] invasion, which was in a few months time but the ship was just belted. The crew was alright. They reckoned the crew needed a rest but I thought they were all right and

as far as the stokers went, they were ok but the ship was just…the engine was starting to knock everywhere. So they sent us down to South Africa for a refit.

About six weeks.

We were in the middle of a mutiny on the way down, at Mombasa.

The ship we were going with, the engineer mutinied. It was the Maryborough, another one of the corvettes, and on Christmas Day he got a bit full, and we were due to sail that afternoon to take a ship with POWs [Prisoner of War] on down to Durban, and he got on the whiskey, and he got in the engine room, and wouldn’t let anybody come near the

engines. He had a big steel spanner in his hand and he was going to kill them all. So by the time they worked that out and gave us orders to sail, we moved down the Mombasa Harbour, and fouled up the boom across. They have a submarine boom across the harbour and they hadn’t lowered it far enough for us, straight into it. It wrapped around our screws. So we’re

stuck there on that thing and they had to get the divers out to cut us loose.

Oh God, by that time it was getting towards dusk. The ship that we were going to escort had been sent out of the entrance and told we were coming. Then they told them to circle during the night, circle outside the harbour. So the next morning came and they sorted out this character on the Maryborough. It turns out later he had a tumour

on the brain, so he probably had a bit of an excuse for going crazy and when we came out in the morning, the poor old Burma, she’s high and dry on the reefs, high and dry on the shore, not only on the damn reefs! She had gone right through a gap in the reef and was virtually piled up high and dry. So we had 1,000 Italian POWs to ferry off that thing then, back into Mombasa and they were a

bad lot those Italians. A lot of them were Fascists, the real bad type. You know the type that really fought with Hitler after and some weren’t Fascists, so they had to have guards onboard to separate them. Each of these Italians wanted to tear one another apart. You should have heard the language they were using on one another. We had 1,000 of them and the story was that we were never welcome again at Mombasa.

So they sent us down to…we thought we were going to Durban and they said, “No Gawler’s going down further. She’s going down to a place called Port Elizabeth.” You’ve probably heard of that? They play cricket there. The Australians have just been over there and played a few tests. So we went to this little place about the size of Fremantle, Port Elizabeth and got six weeks. The South African Navy League

took us under their wing. First they give us a big feed when we arrived.

Everything ashore, in the Navy League Head Quarters and then they said we’ll pay your fare up to Johannesburg on the train, and accommodation. So the ship’s company was divided into two halves and half of us went up, and the other half stayed, and then we reversed when we came back,

and we had 14 days up in Johannesburg, an overnight trip. It’s about 700 miles but on the express.

Nothing! Just sat back and enjoyed ourselves.

I didn’t, not very much, no, not very much. You’d have an odd one. So we arrived in Johannesburg and we had 14 days up there sightseeing, tourists.

Johannesburg is a very modern city. It’s very high. It’s up high and you have to get used to the breathing at first.

Altitude yes. The altitude is a bit high but it’s surrounded, like Kalgoorlie, with these mine dumps and we had a trip out to one of the mines, the biggest, deepest one in the world. They fitted us out with all the gear in the world, caps, hats, shoes and boots

I should say! They took us down this damn thing. I think it took us about 20 minutes to go down, it and gave us an escort right around there, watched the South Africans, how they work hard. They don’t do anything. They just wear white overalls and say, “Drill here! Drill here!” And all the poor blacks just have to do all the work. The white blokes don’t even get their overalls dirty. We had a marvellous time.

Of course there’s good theatres, plenty to eat and we stayed at the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association], and they even paid our board and lodgings there, the South African Navy League.

I really don’t know. A lot of them were Boers and you know that we’d had the Boer War

60 years before, 40 years before and they couldn’t do enough for us. So we had a marvellous time there.

Oh God, they were marvellous to us and after we came back the refit took a few more days longer than they expected, and they said, “Right we’ll book you in, in twos and you can go up on some of our farms.”

So each of us got, with a friend or a mate, we were sent up to a farm to stay there for a few days and we went up to the middle of the wild, amongst the baboons, and everything.

Just the baboons mainly and ostriches of course. It’s lousy with ostriches. So we had a very good holiday

in Port Elizabeth, and so we had a good time.

They were on top of the world then but they reckoned we needed a rest. I didn’t think we needed a rest but we were on top of the world by then. We’d started to win and there’s nothing like a winner, is there? When you feel you’re starting to win? Well, we’d moved into Italy. We hadn’t but the troops had and

we felt that we were a bit robbed coming away from it! We did all right.

That’s where the argument with our present government and the other government started. Yes,

the Russians were desperately short of supplies because the Germans had run right through to Moscow almost. They were on the outskirts of Moscow and they couldn’t get any supplies. They tried to take them round the north through Murmansk, through the Arctic part. But that was terribly tough because in the winter time the ships were just about rolling over with ice falling on them and so they

worked it out that why not…somebody had the smart idea, bring them round the Cape of Good Hope, up to Aden, across from Aden into the Persian Gulf, up to Iran, and build a few ports or enlarge the ports, make them capable of taking heavy lifts, and then put them on trucks or put them on rails, and take them up the back door, into the back

door of Russia. So that started and it gradually grew and grew, and eventually 80% of the Russian supplies went through there but they were never given any credit.

We just took cargo ships up to the entrance of the Gulf. The entrance to the Gulf was only like Fremantle to Rottnest.

It’s a very narrow gutted thing and then it fans out but if you control that little gap there, you don’t need to worry about the rest, and the Germans heard about it in due course, as they always do, and they sent out a squadron of U-Boats [Unterseeboot – German submarine] to try and knock them off. So that created a bit of panic for a while but they were based in Malaysia or Malaya and of course they had troubles

too with supplies, and repairs, but that was the story. We used to just drop them there and then carry on back to Bombay or went to Aden. But the last trip we left Colombo, and they told us if we did the trip, and successfully completed the trip we’d get five days in the rest camp again at Colombo. So

we took off for all ports; Cochin, Bombay, Persian Gulf and that was the worst trip we’ve ever done because we did a lot of damage on that trip, because we ran into the monsoons, and the monsoons are the equivalent of our typhoons here, or cyclones I should say, English. Americans are typhoons and the monsoons are just as bad. We

really got a hiding going across to Aden. The convoy had to be abandoned. We just had no chance of keeping sight of anybody. The only ones that were safe were the big tankers fully laden. They just sit in the water and they go through everything. They don’t rise an inch but they’re continuously awash, but they’re safe and we did a lot of damage, damage everywhere.

Well, there wasn’t a part of the ship that wasn’t waterlogged inside and out, everywhere, the captains cabin downwards. Water; it found its way in. There’s a breakwater right up the front of the ship that’s supposed to break the seas down a bit if they hit instead of carrying in right through the ship. They hit this breakwater and spray out. It sheared that right off, took it right off. That’s

steel, just took it right off the deck, the seas. We had no crockery. We had no nothing, couldn’t cook. They couldn’t cook because they couldn’t keep anything on the stoves, besides it was too dangerous.

Five days. Five days of that and we were running very short of fuel by then because our engine room speed was

almost top speed, and we were doing four miles an hour up on top, so we were virtually flat out with the screws, and only creeping forward at four miles an hour, a hundred miles in a day. That was a hiding.

They just signalled to the commodore, “Every ship for itself.”

Just disperse in all directions and say, “Righto! Look after yourself.”

Well if we couldn’t handle it, the submarines couldn’t either because they couldn’t come to the surface. It was just too wild. So we carried on to Aden. We picked up some of the convoy about the last day out, just before we got to Aden. So then we had to go back, did the trip backwards again and we got up to Bombay just in time for the big explosion, which

wiped out Bombay. You’ve heard about the big bang up there have you?

An ammunition ship went up in the harbour. We never went into the docks, as you might say, where they have wharves and everything. They were a separate part of Bombay Harbour but we used to always anchor out opposite the Gateway to India, just put your anchor down and ferry yourselves ashore.

They took a lot of supplies, as I said for the Burma front from Bombay overland by rail. So apparently this ammunition ship came in and they took it right into the docks. I suppose it was general practice. I don’t know. She was quite a big thing and one morning they noticed a bit of smoke coming out of one of the holds, never took any notice.

Reading the reports they took no notice of it and 11 o’clock came, 12 o’clock come, the smokes still coming. It seemed to be getting a bit worse. 12 o’clock they all knocked off for dinner, the whole damn…all the dockies and everything went. One o’clock when they came back she was starting to glow a bit. Imagine an ammunition ship starting to glow! She must have bee very close to going. About half past one she went apparently.

They never found any part of her. It took out a huge quantity of ships. It took all the dock area out, just obliterated. They did put the casualties down at 10,000, which makes the Bali one seem like a little fizzle but of course the Indians being as they are, they sleep everywhere and 10,000 could be a guess

that you’d never prove because if you went ashore you walked on them wherever they were. If the tramline was being repaired they’d sleep in that cavity between the tram lines. They had nowhere to sleep. Doorways, if you walked to a doorway you were likely to walk on half a dozen of them and so you can imagine what the explosion did. So our crowd were given the job of helping but

all I heard was that…I wasn’t given the job but there was a report that she’d been carrying, in addition to the ammunition, a huge amount of gold bars for the Bank of India, which was in a pretty bad state, and they seem to think that these gold bars disappeared at the same time as the ammunition ship went. Some of our blokes, optimists as ever went off. They thought they were going to pick up

these damn gold bars. I mean they could have been damn 50 miles away or in the harbour, or anywhere. So that was Bombay.

That was a major explosion. It was a major disaster of the war actually. It sunk a dozen merchant ships and about three Indian Navy ones, plus blew an enormous hole in the docks, and the poor old Fort

Stikine, I think its name was, she just disappeared completely, and yet there was so many amazing escapes. People were just pelted against walls and all they left was the hole where they went through it, and others never got a scratch, and they were equally as close. So it was one of those things. So we were shunted off to Colombo and in due course we got our five days leave

again, and that was as promised. They kept their word, sent us off to the plantations again and we came back, and we were lying there just deciding where we were going, and we heard the Launceston was coming home. That’s another one of the corvettes. She was coming home to Fremantle for a refit and oh well, “Good luck to them” we said. Within

24 hours before she sailed or less than 24 hours, 26 six of us were picked out and said, “You’re transferring onto the Launceston and 26 off the Launceston are coming to Gawler”, the ones that had only been over there a short time. They picked us out because we were the originals of the crew. So 26 of us came home on the Launceston to Fremantle. So that’s how we left

but that was an uneventful trip home. There was nothing to it. It was just a matter of sailing.

It was in a way but it was so quick. It was all over in 20 minutes. You don’t get any advanced warnings or anything. We were just told to pack our bags, collect all our gear quick and the motorboat’s waiting for you to run you across to the Launceston. We hardly had time to say goodbye to them. I would have liked to

made half a day because I’d been with those chaps ’42, ’43, ’44 and they were like my brothers. We just didn’t have time, straight onto the Launceston and we sailed. I still torment some of the chaps that transferred back to the Gawler from the Launceston. I know a couple of them quite well, “Thanks for standing aside to let us come

home!” They go crook then, “Oh we didn’t let you come home!” Anyhow, it worked out all right. So we came home to Fremantle.

Well, the chief stoker in particular, I’d known him for the whole time and he was a real funny old gentleman. To talk to him was an absolute education.

He was a real Cockney and he had a language of his own. I mean not bad language but a way he described things. He’d been at the Battle of Jutland, which was a big battle in World War I in the North Sea with the English battleship and he’d been there. I think he was 16 or something when he fought in that battle as a stoker shovelling coal or doing something but to listen to his stories,

you’d roar with laughter. He had names for things that only the English have names for some of them. One of the battleships, the English battleships, she was still in operation in World War II early, was the Royal Sovereign, a big battleship and he always called her the ‘Tiddly Quid’. He never referred to her as the Royal Sovereign. It was always the ‘Tiddly Quid’. Well, in navy terms ‘tiddly’ means

very smartly dressed, very smart. He’d be a toff. Tiddly is sort of toffily dressed and then quid was the equivalent of a pound, an English pound. They always called it a quid. Well, they did out here for many years too, quid. So the Royal Sovereign was always a ‘Tiddly Quid’. If you spoke to him that was the language he used and often when I’d give him all the dippings from the tanks,

“Sit down ‘ere.” He had a little cabin and you’d sit down here, and he’d tell me some of these damn jokes. He was a proper riot but he was strict, strict but very, very fair too.

Oh yes! Yes you never knew what he was…at times you’d have to say, “What’s that Steve? What are you talking about?’ Well, when he said ‘Tiddly Quid’, “What’s he on about here?”

He was a funny man, come from Victoria but I never had time to…

The engineer, I barely had time to say goodbye to him and of course that was the funny act about the engineer. His name was Goble, so I don’t know whether you realise the significance of Goble but the Propaganda Minister under Hitler was Dr Goebbles, so he was always Dr Goebbles.

He spelt his name G-O-B-L-E, Goble but Goebbles was G-O-E-B-E-L-L-S or something like that. Of course the nickname stuck straight away, so he was always the Doc, Dr Goebbles, not to his face. Then we used to laugh about some of the other characters and we always thought, at one time, we had all the Germans spies in the world onboard because

our radio operator, our leading radio operator was a chap called Rochow, R-O-C-H-O-W. I think it’s Polish or something, and immediately they used to call him…everybody got a nickname after a while, and he was called the Baron. Of course we added onto that. He was always the Baron Count Von Rrrrochow. He answered to it! In the Mediterranean he’d be on watch in

his radio room right alongside the Stokers mess and they weren’t allowed to send messages but they could always listen, and he’d listen in to Berlin, and we’d say to him, “Hullo Baron, how many reports you putting in tonight about us?” He took it all in good stride! We had another chap called Schmidt and my name was Preen, and it was a well known name in German

circles because he was one of the leading U-Boat commanders. He got into the Scottish anchorage up there at Scapa Flow and sunk the battleship very early in the war. Very clever he was, went in through the islands, and in through the nets, and everything but his names was I-E-N, P-R-I-E-N. He was destroyed later on in the war but he was a U-Boat ace. So we had

another chap called Baumgarten, as German as you’d ever get I think. We reckon we had half the damn Germans in our navy!

Oh yes, I’d say, “He’s my uncle!” [laughs] I think we were all prepared. “That’s Uncle George!” But poor old Baron Count Von Rrrrochow! Everybody took him off. He was the most meek and mild chap!

They were a good crew, yes. They were sifted out after awhile. We did have a couple of no hopers. When we went to South Africa we lost one bloke down there. He was a bad egg, one of our mess but he was crude and he went ashore. He was

a bit of a loner, ashore nearly all the time and he got very badly beaten up. I think the natives nearly kicked him to death. I got the job of going up to see him in the hospital and he was very hard to recognise even. We left him behind. I don’t know what happened to him after but that was just part of life.

Oh, they always made you welcome. There was no…we had a chap called Brentan too, that’s right. He was the next one and he was an Italian really. His name was Brentani. He still lives around here but he changed his name to Brentan. So we had damn German names and Italian names, and

everything all onboard.

Not very much. You never had the opportunity to go aboard them. You might be tied up alongside them. Sometimes we were banked three together on the one buoy. Moorings were very tight at times. There wasn’t much room, particular y in Alex Harbour but everything was on a waving basis or something. A few you might know from Fremantle. You

might have a talk to them but on the whole you stuck to your one crew.

Not very often, no. You stuck to yourself and it as like everything else, you stuck together. Even when you were ashore you always made sure you were in threes, never less than twos, threes or fours.

For safety’s sake.

Thuggery was still pretty rife. If you walked down the street in the middle of the night, they’d think you were looking for trouble, anywhere, so we always made a point of hanging around in a group of say three, just for our own protection. Well…this chap in Port Elizabeth see? He was out on his own.

Oh no, no, no. It was always the civvies ashore. They just didn’t like us or they just…they were no worse than they are now. I mean robbery is pretty rife around here, not this suburb but in the state, isn’t it? Robberies, they pick on anybody. It was the same then, so we always hunted in a group of three or four.

No. I think we took them all. I would say Alex was the worst spot but we didn’t have any trouble there, but of course that was full of spies. I mean how we ever got to sea without everybody knowing us. That

was just a fallacy because the moment we knew we were going to sea we all had to raise steam and up went all the black smoke from the chimneys or the funnels. So if they knew 14 ships were going out, there’d be 14 lots of black smoke going up, and it was nothing for them to sit out on the groins [jetty], and send signals. I think all our movements were pretty well known. If they didn’t find out that way

they’d send an aircraft over.

I heard him a few times but only by…we weren’t allowed in the wireless cabin. It was only a tiny little cockpit actually but the old Baron, as we used to call him, he used to tune in quite regularly because he could speak German too, the Baron Count Von Rrrrochow and he could listen in to the real German broadcasts.

Just rubbish like everything else. Every side told a lot of lies. They all fabricated things to suit their own stories but you listened to them and they never lose any aircraft, they never lose any ships, they never do anything wrong. But all we had the feeling was that by the time we came back through Alex the last time, we were definitely winning.

We knew we were on top. Well, we’d landed in Italy by then but of course that turned out to be a wash out too because they were there for 12 months and never moved. That was costly.

We was of the opinion that it saved Stalingrad all that. See stuff was going through there in,

not in 10,000 tons, they were getting a million tons. 80% of their supplies went through there. It must have helped because the Americans sent over whole trains, engines. Some of the ships would come and you could see them. They had the locos stowed up on deck, big locos and flat tops for carrying things, and rails to lay the tracks that had been destroyed. So they must have had

a terrific impact up there. That was without the general supplies. Tanks, you could see the ships going up with the whole deck covered in tanks and they were only going to one place at that stage, Stalingrad. Not much credit is given to the Americans for that because they really organised the supply line. They had a bit of trouble with the Russians early. The Russians wouldn’t let them come past a certain point.

they’re very obstinate cows Russians. If you ever do one you’ll find that out but I think it had a lot to do with Stalingrad. Later on when the Russians gave out a medal for helping them, they only concentrated on the Murmansk crowd and that was the one that was the most costly of the lot but they never gave any credit for the amount that went through

the Persian Gulf, 80% of their supplies. Of course, then we ran into the argument of the Federal Government here not recognising it.

Nothing, nothing. We were never there.

Well, they acknowledged we were in the Mediterranean because we got official headlines from the Minister, because they knew

we were in the Mediterranean, so at least they acknowledged that and they gave us permission to actually write home, and say we were there, which broke the censorship rules but by then it was already in the papers so, so what. But the Persian Gulf, a dead loss, a complete dead loss. Nobody wants to know. Nobody wants to know anybody. We were quite lucky, our ship, because we didn’t do over much running there but some of the poor cows were over there for two years and I

think they should have been recognised, particularly in view of what’s just happened. Some did 35 days up there and they’ve got two medals and a hundred dollars a day extra for 35 days in air-conditioned ships, and no submarines or aircraft to worry about, and all that. There’s a lot of inequality but that’s old news.

It depends where you were. I mean the Persian Gulf area was very hot. We recorded 150 odd degrees on the top deck and that’s getting hot. It was that hot that you couldn’t touch the metal. We wore our gloves all the time, the metal

was so hot and while we were waiting for the convoys to come down the Gulf, like the empties to come back, as soon as they came down they formed up at the entrance of the Gulf, and took them to Aden or Bombay, we usually tried to keep moving just to circulate some air. We never had any air-conditioning. These ships that had been up there, beer rations, air-conditioned…have you ever seen their supply ships?

Eight choices of meat! Meat, eight choices! I had a trip on one of them and we had a five day trip up from Albany on one of their ships. I’ve never seen food like it. The Hilton Hotel was nothing to it!

Whereabouts? In the engine room?

Just fans, forced, just pumping air down all the time.

They never told us. We often looked at the…in the boiler room…the engine room was alright because that was virtually opened. It wasn’t sealed. It had one, two doors and a hatchway up above you. In a pinch you could have got out there but the boiler room was completely sealed

and we often practiced how fast we could get up the stairs, steps, and there was another two openings on the port, and starboard sides big enough for a man to get out of but you had to unscrew a lot of what we call ‘dogs’. They had to be unscrewed before you could lift it but we often timed ourselves how quick we could get up those stairs, just out of…I don’t know,

fill in the day you might say.

A few seconds but to get out through the airlock, that would take you a few more seconds because that was a bit further.

It depended where it hit. If it hit in the damn boiler room there wouldn’t be any because it would blow the ship to pieces too, with the boilers.

They’re not. They’ve got a bulkhead right across, a steel bulkhead. They’re not joined in any way.

Just on the [blows], just blow.

No, no, no, no way of talking to one another. As I say, the occasion doesn’t arise

very often to talk to one another. The boiler room is a separate entity. They’re divided up on deck by a passageway about that wide right down the middle and coming down you go to the left into the boiler room, and right into the engine room. No trouble.

Working under the direction of either the leading hand or the petty officer, or the chief stoker. It’s a multi-job; boiler room, attending the boilers, engine room, jack of all trades, a lot of oiling up behind the backs of the engines, right at the far side of the engines, very, very hot because there’s no ventilation there at all,

draining parts of the greasy, oily parts away from the pumps, throwing it over the side, checking on the steering engine right down the stern at night. That’s a bit hairy if the ship is rolling very hard because you have to wander down there on your own. You’ve got nobody to look after you. You could actually disappear down there and it might be half an

hour before they’d know you’d gone. But no, a varied job, quite interesting.

I don’t know…high speed but you don’t do that very often, so at cruising speed, quite comfortable.

Well you’re using up so much oil. You’ve got

all the boiler room, particularly you’ve got all your sprayers going, usually the whole lot and you can’t clean them properly because of the extreme heat, and you’re looking into the furnace all the time, and everything’s going, everything’s moving at once, and there’s no margin for error.

You have to look there to see that the sprayers, where the

oil spraying out of…see the oil is heated and then pumped under pressure through these sprayers. They come up through a pipe and it’s like down into a smaller hole, so that it virtually is under pressure, and as soon as it hits the small hole it sprays. And of course being re-warmed it burns more easily, and quickly or it virtually almost “poof”! She’s gone and burning because the oil being sometimes

of not a top quality, carbons up, just like your car engine does. It carbons up and it has to be…except it doesn’t do it slowly. It does it quickly and becomes a coating that has to be chipped off. You have chipping hammers or steel pipes with a sharp edge and you have to chip it off, at speed. At slower

speed you can shut that one down, take it off, put a spare on and do it properly over at a bench but at high speed your using…you’ve only got four, one and three, and you’re using the whole lot to keep up the pressure. It’s hard work, hard work and hot.

It plays up on the eyes because you’re looking into a red hot furnace and

we should have had goggles but nobody seemed to know where the goggles ever went to. They were never there to use that’s for sure, but there should be special infra-ray, infra-red…something, whatever they had, to protect your eyes.

No…don’t make a mistake! Don’t allow any oil to build up.

Don’t allow leaks to get in the tray at the bottom of the boilers because if that went up, you went up too. There’d be a fire everywhere, so you just had to watch and the stoker had to watch those trays to make sure no oil dripped into them. He’d have to get down and hand mop them up.

It was up to a point I suppose. You could always wash your hands.

It was only oil.

I enjoyed it, yes. It was an experience that you don’t have every day and of course the longer you’re at it, the easier it sort of became. It became half mechanical and it wasn’t until towards the last

12 months when I passed my PO’s [Petty Officer] exam, that you find it a lot different going down there as a stoker or a leading stoker to become the PO, the petty officer, and in charge of the boiler room. It’s a lot different going down and having somebody else in charge. You can always pass the buck sort of but when you go down there in charge, you’re it and you’ve got a stoker under you then, and the first few times it’s

quite a challenge you might say. It’s like being put in charge of a plane or something as a pilot. You’re all right when you’re a co-pilot. You’ve got somebody else to fall back on. It’s the same thing. It’s all on your shoulders and you can’t afford to make mistakes because everybody will know about it quickly.

I don’t think so, no! I don’t think so.

All right. It didn’t worry me. I did everything. I’d try anything, making water. I liked making water from the seawater, through the condensers or distillers I should say. It was quite a challenge to see how much you could make and how pure it could be. If you made the water

it had to be perfectly pure for it to go to the boilers. You couldn’t have the slightest amount of salt in there because it created a scale inside the tubes. The boilers were like that shape [makes triangular shape with hands] and two little drums here, and a big drum up there, and hundreds of dozens of little tubes feeding up from the bottom, one to the other. The water went through

and the flames hit those tubes. If any of those got coated up in any way they could burn out and you’re in trouble. So you had to make sure that water was pure. When you were making the water in the engine room you tested it every 20 minutes, less than 20 minutes sometimes if you were in doubt, just in a little beaker and

a few drops of silver nitrate in it, and if it went cloudy, you knew she was salty, switch it over to the water tanks that you drink but keep it away from those boilers. It had to be 100% pure.

It was top quality but a little bit of salt would even kill you. If it showed the slightest cloud, a very faint cloud,

straight onto the water tanks and then until you got it back clear again, but the moment you were feeding into the boiler tank it had to be perfect.

Just boil it up and cool it down, bring it in from the sea, put it in this big distiller, and

just boil it, turn the steam on underneath it, it boils, the steam rises, flows through to what they call the condenser, which has cold water running through tubes, and the steam hitting the tubes condenses into water, and you drain it off. You either drain it to the water tanks or the feed tanks for the boiler. It’s really quite simple.

Yes, well there’s a valve. Pressure forces it through too, and pumps it through. You can play around with it a bit but it’s a thrill to get it perfect, you know? Some were a bit sloppy. You’d occasionally get a sloppy bloke that didn’t care a damn.

You had to make sure and test it regularly, make sure that it didn’t cloud up. You had to stop that clouding.

Being correct. There was no excuse for it if you were testing that stuff but the leading stoker usually did it in the engine room, but

he had another one above him. He should check that regularly too, what they call the engine room artificer. He was the one in charge always and you just had to make sure. You couldn’t afford…well, the whole ship virtually revolved around that water. Strange as it may seem but that’s what it was. It’s like sending a damn bomber out with rubbish in the fuel.

“Bang!” Away she goes! She can’t fly. We couldn’t move without pure water and it had to be pure. You couldn’t pick it up ashore. I’ve had a few clashes with a few chaps from some of these other skirmishes you might call. They’ve claimed they’ve got very, very ill from the water,

from the distillers. I said, “You can’t. Impossible. If you were checking all that properly the water coming out of there is perfectly pure.” In hospitals in the old days or they might even still do it up to a point, they used steam for sterilising. I said, “You can’t get anything purer than sterilised water that’s been boiled.” “Oh we’ve have stomach trouble.

We’ve had this…!” I think they’re damn impostors. That’s only my personal opinion.

But there it is!

It’s 12 months from the war actually and I arrived back, and I got 14 days stoppage of leave the first day I

was back. So I ran into the Cut Lunch Commandos again. All the eastern states crew of Launceston were sent straight off. The West Australians were told we couldn’t have leave until we did the refit. In other words, you don’t do the refit, you don’t get any leave, so we were virtually shanghaied but all the other chaps were sent by train

all over the rest of Australia. I suppose it was fair in a way because we were the experienced ones off her, although I’d only been on her for a short time, but it looked good at any rate. And the first morning back this petty officer from the depot, hadn’t been to sea in damn 20 years I think, and he came up, and said,

“Get the hoses out and scrub the decks down.” I said, “That’s not my job.” He said, “Scrub the decks down or else.” So I said, “I’m not doing it.” So I had to go up to the first lieutenant and he gives me 14 days stoppage for not washing down the decks. I said to him at the time, I said, “You mean to say that all the seamen are going to come down to the engine room in a minute and clean up my engine room?” “Oh no,

that’s different,” he said. So immediately he give me 14 days I got me pen and paper out again…the navy has, you have rights of appeal despite what they think, and so I wrote out another request, to see the captain this time. And they put it through fairly quickly, so within an hour I’m up seeing the captain. He asked me why. I said, “I want to get off the damn ship.” I said, “I’m sick of it.” I said, “I’ve only come back here after two or three

years and I’ve got 14 days stoppage the first day for not scrubbing down the decks!” He said, “That’s not very fair is it?” He asked the petty officer what the circumstances were and he said, “What a lot of rubbish!” And he wiped the charge straight off. He said, “Are you prepared to stay here for the refit?” I said, “Under those circumstances I will, as long as we do the engine rooms and we’re not going up,

climbing up the masts, having to paint the mast or get down on your hands and knees, and scrub decks.” I said, “That’s nothing to do with us.” He said, “I agree.” So I stayed for about five or six weeks, about six weeks I think doing a refit and I’d made arrangements then…we decided to get married on the 11th of November. So I got discharged from the ship just in

time for the ceremony but I didn’t have a ‘best man’ or anybody. All me mates were out of the country or out of the state. They were everywhere and I had to shanghai one of the crew off the Gawler that stayed. He was a bit reluctant but I shanghaied him along and the wedding went off alright.

In Mount Hawthorn, at the local church in Mount Hawthorn in Kalgoorlie Street.

There were quite a few, quite a reasonable number, a lot of our friends. Of all the people that attended, all our wedding groups, there’s nobody alive. There’s none of them alive.

So we were married and

got 14 days leave. I think it was 14 days. It might have been a couple of days extra. I went back to Leeuwin Depot then to wait and they just gave me a soft job looking after boilers of all things, little wooden boilers about that big, fed by coke or wood, or anything around the depot, just for hot water for showers. Quite a

come down but nice and easy. I enjoyed that and then December came, January came, and February, and there was no sign of the war finishing. At that stage nothing was really happening. We were in a sort of a stalemate. The Japs were still fighting as hard as ever. So I thought, “I’ll

sit for me petty officer’s exam” and in due course fronted up to the engineer, and he has all his offsiders there with him asking you questions, and he said, “Ok. I’ve got good news for you and bad news.” He said, “The good news is you’ve passed. You’re passed as a petty officer.” He said, “The bad news is you’ve got ten minutes to grab your bags. There’s a ship waiting for you down at Fremantle. She’s due to sail. Get everything. You’ve got ten

minutes.” So I had to grab all me gear and they raced me down in the car to the wharf, stepped onboard, and we’re off again on the Horsham that time, and all points north. I didn’t know where it was going and I had another nine months on her.

Darwin, mainly

Darwin, mainly Darwin. Of course not long after I joined her the Germans surrendered, so I’d been at sea for the Italian surrender. I was at sea again when the Germans surrendered and of course August came, and we dropped the bomb on Japan, and the Japs pulled out. So I was at sea for three surrenders. I reckoned that was

pretty good. The last one was the best one of course, when the signal came through, “Cease all offensive operations,” and all that sort of stuff. We were able to turn the lights on onboard, lights on, on the decks, instead of stumbling around falling over and bumping yourself. You were able to walk around with the lights on. So there we were in Darwin and the navy didn’t know what to do with us. They couldn’t discharge us all

at once, so they gave us the job of surveying. Surveying they called it and it was finding out the depths on the reefs, and everything, from Darwin to Thursday Island. We spent a few months on that, back with about five other ships, just all spread out in a line, just all with their ASDIC equipment sounding the depths. Apparently the charts hadn’t been done

since Flinders or something, way back in the damn early days. They didn’t know what water was there and so they made out new charts thanks to us. Then the Japs [Japanese] surrendered, so we went over to Timor with the Occupation Force over in Timor, so we were over there for a few days.

Well, it was nothing spectacular. The

Japs were as cocky as ever. They were very cheeky and didn’t want to do anything. Luckily it didn’t involve the navy much but the army chaps ashore had problems with them. I don’t think a lot of them were Japs. A lot of them were Koreans and they always said that the Koreans were worse than the Japanese.

We looked at them and gave them a bit of cheek,

and got a few souvenirs ashore there, shackles. I think I finished up with a camp stretcher. I had a crib board. Have you ever played crib? I got a sign out of one of the officer’s quarters there and apparently it reads in Japanese…I took it into the Japanese Embassy, and they read it for me. It says, ‘Officers wash place or wash room’.

It’s in Japanese and I made that into a crib board to play. I’ve successfully lost that somewhere inside, in me junk but, so we went over there for a few days and then back to our surveying again, and eventually sent to Fremantle to pay the Horsham off. So we spent another two or three weeks cleaning her up like a new pin. She was immaculate. All the oil tanks were drained

and everything. Now it seems silly because they were only going over to Garden Island to just be put in mothballs as it turns out. So they’re all moored over there waiting to be either sold or scrapped, or whatever they decide. So that was it.

It doesn’t worry me that much. I think by the time they’re ready to be scrapped, they’re

ready to be scrapped. People forget that steel corrodes quite badly and they’re screaming about some of this wrecking, and sinking for diving, and all that. There’s nothing in the hull at all. They’ve virtually gone down to paper thing. It would cost millions, millions and millions to even maintain them, so why worry? Sink the cows and get them out the way. So that was

how we finished, to do the trip on the Swan. Well she was going to be scrapped and sunk just outside near Dunsborough as a diving wreck. So we had a trip on her up from Albany to here. We went down by bus and boarded her at Albany, and came up. They were using her as a training ship at the time.

They had a bunch of officers onboard training as navigators, so they went into lots of little crannies and nooks just to teach them navigation, but it was quite enjoyable. We had a try on her. They gave us the run of the ship and it was an experience.

I think that must have been about six years ago now.

Going back?

Oh yes! We found the navy a lot different to what we’d been used to, the complete lack of discipline that was onboard that ship, shocking! The stokers! An officer came down and asked…I was sitting in the mess with them, all sitting around. They all sit around drinking beer and watching TV [television], and he came down, and he said, “We’ve got a job for you three blokes.”

They said, “We’re too busy. We’re not going up there.” He said, “Oh is that your attitude?” And just walked off. I mean if it had been on Gawler or anything like that, boy oh boy, there’d be an explosion. Straight away they’d have been the chief stoker or something but he accepted it and they called the captain ‘Boss’. They don’t seem to have any respect for anybody

but that’s just what we found. They asked us to report in how we found the navy and that’s what we put down. It was just one of those things.

Well, it’s changing on the more modern ships because some of the later ones have a big…they have jumbo engines in them, like virtually the same engines that power the 747 Jumbo

jets. They have two of those. When they wear out or are due for a refit, they just haul them out, throw them ashore for a refit, put new ones in. It’s so simple now. Some are run on gas. They differ a lot. The Swan was an old one run on oil and it was an experience to watch them but I didn’t like the lack of discipline.

I thought it was a bit sloppy.

Not very much. We were still at sea, so we just carried on, didn’t do much. We just still did our surveying. They said, “You’ve just got to carry on.” That’s when I got hurt. I got hurt more after the war than I ever got hurt during it. I was driving the motorboat

then, amongst other things and we were dropping these marker buoys for the surveying. They’d drop these marker buoys at intervals but then you always had to go and pick them up or shift them, and I was bringing the motorboat back, and she had a chap that always steered it, but I was looking after the motor part of it. We came

alongside and they have…I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen the big davits or box that comes down. They lower over the side like two claws and they drop the ropes down. They’ve got a big hook on the bottom of them, a big steel hook, which catches in a ring in the bottom of the boat. The idea is that one chap puts the ring on there and you’re there driving it, you put it on the rear but

the ship’s rolling, and they’re swing madly in all directions. The lookout above us is supposed to sing out, “Look out! There’s one coming. It’s getting a bit close to your head,” or something. The next thing I was sitting there and ‘bang’! I got knocked out with one of these. About a 25 pound steel big block hit me on the back of the head. I wasn’t very impressed.

It gave me a nice old headache etcetera . I think it’s thrown me jaw out. I’ve had a lot of trouble with a crook jaw after but it was just one of those things that shouldn’t have happened. But I did find all the ships varied. They all varied a certain amount depending on…I think it comes back to the officers always. If they’re a bit sloppy the ship becomes sloppy and

just felt that this one was…as a matter of fact I often said, “I hope we never have to go up near Japan because I know we won’t come back.” I didn’t think we’d last ten minutes up there compared to what Gawler would have. It was different, different arrangement. You get a different feeling. So there we are. So the war ended and eventually we came back, and paid off but

I couldn’t get a discharge then for some reason. The war ended in August and I didn’t get out until the following April. I don’t know. They just used me up, used me up. I had all the…we ran on a point system for discharge and the point system…I think they lost my points. It went on overseas

service and length of service in addition, and you built up a series of points. The higher your points were the quicker you got out. I didn’t work, didn’t work and it turned out to be a very expensive operation all round because I lost me priorities for war service homes. I nearly lost me job at work because I wasn’t there and it was a complete foul up. At one stage

there I was drafted back to Brew[?] at Fremantle and she was one of the Royal Navy ships that was going back to the Royal Navy, back to Colombo again, and I was drafted to her, and I thought at one stage I was going to take her back to Colombo again but I got me discharge just before then.

Well, I suppose a trip over there wouldn’t have been any different to what I was

doing. Anyhow, that’s the way it went.

Things are so different now. I’ve always said, “Never volunteer.” I volunteered once and look what

it did. But in hindsight or looking at it in every other way, it was an experience that nobody else can ever have. I met people. I learnt a lot. People taught me things that I couldn’t do. I couldn’t splice rope or anything, you know, the odd things. I learnt all those little tricks and you learnt a lot of experience, and

a lot of…you’re not frightened to take decisions because, as I said, you go down to the boiler room, you’re on your own. You make them and I think it stands you in good stead. You’ve got to have experience with a number of people because you’re going to strike all sorts. Everybody is different.

Well, I learnt a lot and I don’t regret it now but then I was one of the lucky ones. A lot of my friends, some when I was at Flinders, they got their…they were very happy. They got their first ship drafted, their first ship. A couple of blokes I used to sleep with went to the Sydney. They went from Melbourne to Fremantle, to Geraldton and got sunk, never seen

again. A couple of other drafted, first ship Perth, goes up to Java, sunk again, never sighted. So it’s…I don’t know, the draw you might say. You can’t look ahead. You can’t see round corners I always say, probably just as well.

I learnt a lot after the war too. I learnt a lot. I think it was just as big a struggle after the war as it was during the war because during the war we had the protection of the navy looking after us. They did the thinking for us up to a point but when I got out into civvy street [civilian life] I was on my own.

You had nothing to help you.