Australians at War Film Archive

Vincent Cesari (Vince or Caesar) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 14th May 2003

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/148

Tape 1

00:30 So as we said before if we could start at the start. Where were you born?

I was born at Queenscliff, down at the heads at Port Phillip Bay, on the west side, on the other side of Sorrento. I'll have to divulge my age,

01:00 on the 4th of December…1921. Dad was down there, well, all my family was all there at that time. Of course, work wasn't so plentiful in those days, so roughly round about 1923,

01:30 Dad started playing football with Geelong….with a fisherman's team at Queenscliff, and they got rubbed out after the big blue, the fight and all that, it took place in those days. Then him and Jock (UNCLEAR) and David Warren and Noel Racen, and all of them, they went up to Geelong. But my father, he mostly played in the Second Eighteens. And round about 1926 when he busted his ankle, that's when we shifted up town. He got a bit of a job

02:00 with what you call parks and gardens of Fitzroy, so we shifted up to Prahran in Melbourne here. But then, unfortunately, the family broke up. It took place in those days the same as it does now. And anyway, from there on all of my sisters, they went with the aunties, and I was with my father. And he was with Prahran Football club.

02:30 He went from Prahran to St Kilda, and he was with St Kilda for eight years, and then he went to South Melbourne, and he was with South Melbourne for twenty-two years. And he was still working in the parks and gardens, in Fitzroy Gardens there, with Melbourne City Council. And of course, along the line he…A couple of breaks he had away from that with the Melbourne Fire Brigade, you see, which will come in later.

03:00 From there on he stayed with them until he retired from work, and then he went and worked for the trustees at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He kept the oval and all those sorts of things. He passed away when he was seventy-eight years of age.

How old were you when the family split up?

I would have been round about five. That's when we shifted from Queenscliff to Melbourne.

03:30 I was the youngest out of four, we had three sisters and myself. Later on, the parents remarried again and they had two more….half sisters, put it that way. Because, unfortunately, the age and time and the mortality rate gets you down a bit, and there's only three of us left now. My sister over at Essendon and my half sister

04:00 down at…down the road somewhere, anyway, I can never think where she lives, and myself here.

And it was just you living with your dad?

Yeah, I was with my Dad all the time, unfortunately, I didn't have so much freedom, like the girls did. But we went on from there, and then schooling and things like that took place, but then, as I say, when you are getting back around to the early 1930s, when you're leaving school,

04:30 there was no work. It was like today, but in those days there was none of this money over the counter or paid into your bank account and all that sort of stuff. I finished up in a couple of orphanages, actually. You just couldn't get accommodation. You could get accommodation but you had to pay for it, and if there was no money coming in you couldn't pay for it. And I finished up getting sent up to a place called the Kiewa Valley,

05:00 which is up in North East Victoria. I was milking cows up there for a living, on a princely wage of five shillings a week. Now that five shillings is fifty cents in today's money. The hours were short, but by Christ they started in the very early hours of the morning until late hours of a night time, seven days a week, no overtime. The only way I used to get out of a bit of work was when I was working for Mr Quirk…I would go to church with him on Sundays, so I didn't have to work on the woodheap. 05:30 How old were you when you were milking cows?

Thirteen years of age. I only got as far as the seventh grade in those days. I don't know what your equivalents are today, but yeah…So that was it there. And of course you moved around. When he didn't have any more work for me, well then I went to another bloke and another bloke and I finished up…I came down over to Aunty Ford's place,

06:00 and then to…Freddy Deakin's place, and then from there on…I stayed there until I was nearly seventeen. I got a motorbike licence because I went over to New South Wales and got that, if you were seventeen you could get one there. And I came to Melbourne and I worked….Today it's a flash place down there,

06:30 the Australian Jam Factory in Chapel Street, it used to be. That's where they used to make the old tomato soups and canned peaches and apricots and all those sort of stuff.

Where the cinema is now? The Jam Factory?

Yes, the Jam Factory they call it nowadays. It's big money today. But for forty-eight hours a week there then, you'd be getting the princely sum of thirty one shillings a week.

07:00 That's like three dollars ten cents.

What sorts of jobs did they have you doing there?

Oh, carting cases of stuff up to the women peeling the pears, coring the stone fruits, all that sort of stuff, carting the rubbish. It wasn't mechanized like it became later on. Then…just before I turned eighteen,

07:30 I decided, well, the war had broke out in 1939, and I decided, 'Well, I might go and join this navy caper.' Number one, because I came from Queenscliff, which is on the heads at…Port Phillip Bay, I should say. From there I thought, 'OK, I'll go there.' But when I got down to Port Phillip Bay to sign up,

08:00 chappie down there, an old navy bloke, he said to me, "Look son, you're only seventeen. If you join up now, which you can if you want to," he said, "All you're going to get is two shillings a day, because you're under the age of eighteen." He said, "You're best to nick off, put your name down," he said, "Nick off and come back when you turn eighteen when you'll get five shillings a day." That's a pretty big lift, thirty cents. So anyway, when I did that,

08:30 and of course when I went down there, they said, "Well, what do you want to be?" I said, "I wouldn't have a clue. What's it all about?" He said, "Well , you've got engine room branch, stokers and all those sort of things." He said, "You'll learn a lot." I said, "What do you learn?" He said, "You learn about boilers and engine rooms, refrigeration, steam and diesel dynamos, converting salt water to fresh water." He said, "And lots of other things," he said. "Driving motor boats…"

09:00 I'm thinking, 'It's getting a bit good.' So I said, "Righto then, what's the other like?" And he said "Of course the cream of that one is being in such hot conditions, you only work four hours on and have eight hours off," like on board. He said, "Whereas if you join as a seaman or a steward or that, you work four hours on and four hours off. Now in that four hours off, you've got to scrub decks, you've got to wash paint work, you've got to do…" And I said, "Oh mate you've lost me.

09:30 I'll come back as a stoker." Well then, I went home again, and I got called up on October, 1940. And that was earlier, the first part. And they said, "Righto, do your medical exam and this that and the other now." And then on the 21st of October, myself and there would have been around about twenty of us altogether, we all went in on the one day. We had to go to Williamstown,

10:00 because Port Melbourne was all the signalmen and all the seaman and all that, but Williamstown was the place with all the engine room branch. It was a very sad induction into the navy because….that was October then, and in the November we were just about ready to go to the Flinders Naval Depot where they manufacture sailors, as the saying is, and the first casualty of the war,

10:30 of the Australian war, happened at the heads. A minesweeper called the Goorangai. She was shifting ships from Queenscliff across to Sorrento ready for the next morning, and it was dark, and everything was blacked out, there were lights on, and the Duntroon, the passenger boat going to Tasmania, she came down and chopped her in half. And she sunk and lost twenty-six blokes on board, went with her. And of course, we went down to Flinders

11:00 and the first induction down there was one month on the bullring, or the parade ground. Run around with a rifle on your shoulder, you smartened up and looked like sailors and all that sort of stuff. The bloke in charge there…there was twenty of us in a squad there. And those twenty, we stuck together right through until we finished our drill and then we went into the engineering rooms. We learned all about boilers and engines and things like that,

11:30 until we finished that. That was early in 1941, and then we were drafted out to various ships. A lot of our fellows went overseas to the Mediterranean, and then we got drafted onto the old destroyers, which the commander Mr Govals [?] said, "They're that old they're bloody scrap iron." He said, "Call them the scrap iron flotilla from Australia." But then, 12:00 he was really taken aback with them, because they were doing more work than what some of the Royal Navy 's later model ships were doing. Of course, when I got over there, it was on the tail end of the evacuation of Greece, and of course, we didn't go right into Greece. We just had manoeuvred around the outside, checking up…or escorting stuff. They were taken from there to Crete, the island of Crete,

12:30 and when they were put in there, it was only going to be a temporary set-up, because the Germans had taken over Greece. And then the next thing was they were going to take over Crete. There was no worries in the world there, they had everything in the world there, aircraft and troops and all good equipment. Our blokes only had little bits and pieces that they had knocked off out of the African Desert before they went to Greece.

13:00 Anyway, what happened then was the evacuation of Crete was on, because the Germans came over and paratroopered into the place and something was up there again. And unfortunately, on the first trip to Crete we went to Crete, there was three of us, there was Billy Middling, Spanner Freeman and myself, w were standing on the break of the fo’c’sle on the main deck, and all of a sudden we were under aircraft attack and Spanner Freeman said,

13:30 Oh, me shoulder, me shoulder." Down he went on the deck. And Billy Middling said, “Get up you silly bugger, you're not going to get any medals there." We looked down and there was blood coming out of his overalls, and then unfortunately when we took him in and got him into the sickbay...We never had a doctor on board, we only had a leading sick berth attendant. From there, well, we had to wait until it got dark to get the doctor off the Royal Navy ship, the Auckland, the sloop. He came over

14:00 and he had one look and he said, "Well, I can't do anything for him." He said that the shrapnel or bullet had embedded, it had him on the collarbone, on the left hand side, and went straight down, which we found out later on, had lodged between his heart and his lungs. Then of course, we had to turn around and put him in sickbay and give him morphine injections to ease the pain all the time. In the navy, you didn't stop and go anywhere where you could get attention,

14:30 you had to keep on with the convoy to Suda Bay, up in…Crete. And from there, we had to wait until they were unloaded, load them up with some of the troops coming back, and start back, convoying them back again, until we got about twenty-four hours out of Alexandria and then we were allowed to leave and go ahead. They had an ambulance on the dockside for him, so he went off in that one there.

15:00 And then went back and then we were put on what we called the Tobruk Ferry Run. Of course, that was under siege. The Australians and all of them up there in Tobruk, they had gone in and put the perimeter up, and the Germans couldn't get at them. What's his name? The old fox, the German Commander bloke [Rommel]. And anyway they tried to get them out.

15:30 And the only way they could survive is by the destroyers running in and of there, like every night there virtually, or every second night, whichever it was. They'd go over to the wharf and load up with supplies, reinforcements, like troops, ammunition and that. Then we'd go up to Tobruk, and we had to wait till there was no moon up and then ping our way into Tobruk harbour on the ASDIC [anti submarine detection committee - sonar] , because there…There was no

16:00 navigation lights. You couldn't have lights there on the count of the German Stuka aircraft used to come over. And everything going in and out the place, whether it was petrol, oil, food, anything at all, had to go in and out of a night time. When you went in there, there was no wharf, because it had been bombed to pieces, and they had floating pontoons. The ship would go in alongside the pontoon when it got there. And on one side you'd be unloading the troops

16:30 and the ammunition and the supplies and stuff like that. And on the other side of the ship, the port side, if you were starboard side in, the stretcher cases would be coming around. And meanwhile we'd be turning around on the ship….All the mess deck tables and that were hung up on the deck head, so you had all the decking clear, and we'd put them in there. We used to get around about

17:00 forty, perhaps up to sixty, stretcher cases. And what wouldn't go in the break at the fo’c’sle had to go up on the upper deck. And you had to lash them up onto the steam pipes and various other things around the ship itself, because their heads were inboard and their feet on the stretcher was facing outboard. And like you know when you'd do some high speed turns, those stretchers used to run out nearly to the edge of the ship, and when you turned the other way around they'd come back again.

17:30 And besides that, on the way up, you had out….like on the way up, when you came off watch, irrespective of whether you were a stoker seaman or otherwise, you had to get into the mess deck and make sandwiches. There was none of this high faluting fillings. There was bully beef or salmon or something like that. A bit of butter, or tinned butter, you put a bit of butter on it for them and that. And then we used to make, what we called in the navy, ‘kai.'

18:00 It's cocoa, really, but it used to be made out of blocks of chocolate, and that used to be melted, and then you put the condensed milk into it and then water on top and let it cook up and serve that to them. Of course, when we got moving, after we got out of the harbour, we started back to Alexandria, you get out to top speed as far as you can go, well, the old ships, they were built in 1916, when you work this out,

18:30 they were commissioned in '17, and by the time 1941 had came, they were a few years old, you see. They came out here in 1933, and…Anyway, what happened from there was, we'd go out with the dixies….with the kai, let it cool down a little bit, then give them a little sip, because they were laying on these bloody stretchers, they couldn't do much,

19:00 and half the poor buggers hands were bandaged up, they couldn't do nothing. You'd be breaking off bits of bread and that, and you give it them, "Take your time, mate, take your time, mate. We've got all bloody night before we get back into Ally." If we get back that is, of course. We were lucky, really. We lost the [HMAS] Waterhen, she got sunk on that trip. It was a near miss and they had to finish up getting rid of her. Then the [HMS] Defender, she got sunk.

19:30 We were in what they called the 10th Destroyer flotilla, with a Captain Waller, who was a Captain D, as the saying is. Then each ship, they had to run in pairs. They were running in singles, but they had no one to lean on if they ran into trouble. So they bought out the ruling then that two ships had to go up together and two ships had to come home. And it was amazing to see, like when dawn came, because you had to leave Tobruk,

20:00 and get down to a place called Mersa Matruh. That was sort of a line where the Germans had got to, and the British were this side of the line and the Germans were that side. And if you were lucky enough, you might get one aircraft to bolster your morale up, not that it was going to do any good, but you'd do that. We ran off from there and get into Alexandria. It used to take us around about thirty-six hours before we got into Tobruk, on the way, because on account of having to manoeuvre around

20:30 and look inconspicuous where you were going. But every bloke, all the Arabs and that, they knew where we were going before we left.

How long did that go on for?

The Tobruk Ferry run?

Yeah.

I reckon it went on for around about five months. There is a parallel between Anzac Cove and Tobruk, when you study their history,

21:00 the time they were under siege, and how they got out…They had to get their supplies in by sea and had to get out by the sea. Anyway, getting back to the other…Then we'd get back down to Alex, run in alongside the wharf, get all the stretcher cases off, the walking wounded and everything else on board. We had a crew of one hundred and thirty-four, and we'd have say roughly, a round figure, say around fifty stretchers and forty walking wounded, another ninety.

21:30 And all the destroyer is an upper deck and that's about it. Anyway, we'd do that and go out and oil up, and take on water, and whatever, and if we had used the ammunition, try and get that. It was no good, we couldn't use our four-inch guns because they never had enough elevation. They were built for the '14-18 war, there was no aircraft, and they only had roughly about a thirty-five, thirty eight degree elevation.

22:00 So mostly it was only small arms stuff. But then even that….On the wing of the bridge they used to have the old Lewis guns, that was the ones they used to have on the old aircraft, A gun there with a round pan on the top, they were still working. The only other armament we had was Italian Breda guns, when we went into Bardia a couple of times there, not only to pinch stuff,

22:30 but when we heard they had Breda guns there we went in for the sole purpose of knocking a couple off, and as much ammunition as we could, and when we got all of that on board then we got into the winery department and we knocked off all the wine we could knock off. The Australian sailors are a very innovative lot, you know. It was no good leaving it there because someone else was going to knock it off. And that went on, I suppose, until we

23:00 finished up getting down to the stage where we were doing eighteen knots. So admiralty said, "Look, you'd better get out. You're becoming a hindrance to yourself and everyone else." And of course they had other ships there, the big mine layers, the…English mine layers, they were doing forty knots. A knot is a mile and an eighth on land speed record. They'd have the fact that the mines used to come out, so

23:30 they'd put the stretcher cases up there, locked the back door up and head for home. They'd be down in no time. So then of course we got sent back to Singapore then, and that's how we come to be locked up there. Because we thought we were coming to Australia for the refit, but then they said, "Well, we can get the refit done in Singapore quicker and cheaper." So that was it. And then of course

24:00 what we did from there, we went into a place called Keppel Harbour, which is on the bottom end of Singapore Island, and just across the way the waterway, on the other side, I think it's Sentova Island… Well, that's where they had the 9.25mm guns, for the protection of Singapore. They weren't worth a trumpet. We were only stokers and we knew that. Because they were poking out

24:30 down towards the….Dangar Straits, and facing towards Java, heading south. But now there was only one, two, three, four, five, five of them in an arc there, but when they put them in there, they didn't think about turning them round and putting them over the other side so they could fire up into Malaysia [Malaya]. They could only fire a hundred and eighty degrees, that's all they fired. And of course they weren't worth a crumpet.

25:00 What date was that you were in Singapore?

That was 1941. We came out of the Med[iterranean Sea], I think it was round about the beginning of June, 1941. And then we went over there and we went down to the…The [HMAS] Perth was over in the Mediterranean, and the [HMAS] Sydney had come home from there. And then we did a bit of a run around the fleet and they all clapped us and we said, "See you later, Jack, we're getting out of it."

25:30 Then of course we had to go over and come out through the Suez Canal. That was a real education for us little blokes who had never been away from home. The night before we got into the Suez Canal, the Germans had been over and dropped mines in the Suez Canal, what they called the acoustic mines. As the ship's going forwards, the propeller noise travels up in front of the ship

26:00 and it sets the mine ticking away, and when you get about half way over she blows up. The old Pommies, they had a bit of a thing up their sleeve. So what they did before….There was us and two other destroyers going down to Port Tewfik, some merchant ships, there was about ten or twelve ships altogether. So what they did, they had an old merchant boat there, and they put him in stern first,

26:30 and he had to go all the way down the Suez Canal, stern first, so the propellers were going in reverse, and two or three mines exploded before the ships got to them. There's always counter….do something and counter measure it. Sometimes we were dead unlucky if you didn't get on the right side off it. So off we went and we went down there and we got through to…

27:00 the Bitter Lakes, I think they called them, and after we got through there we went on to…From the tail end Lakes, the river that runs through there, down to Tewfik and we stayed over night there. Now at Tewfik was the HMAS Parramatta, the Australian sloop. When we left in the morning to come on down to Singapore, or the Red Sea,

27:30 she went into the Mediterranean to take our place, but unfortunately she got sunk. I think they lost a hundred and something odd fellows. She got a torpedo in the guts one night and that was it. Of course we went on down to Aden, which is now ….one of those new names they've got. Then we went from there across to Bombay. Now it was while we were between Aden and Bombay that we got the signal

28:00 from Alexandria that Spanner Freeman, who was the bloke I told you who had the shrapnel, or bullet in his shoulder, they couldn't get it out, had no hope, they never had any equipment, and gangrene set in and he passed away. There was two of them we lost through accidents in that domain. The other bloke was a warrant gunnery officer; he was on loan from the Royal Navy.

28:30 Bombs were falling and he was standing on the upper deck near the twelve pounder and a bomb landed close in and the shrapnel went through him and just ripped him open. We only lost the two blokes in the Mediterranean. Then, of course, we went from there down to Bombay, and down to Colombo, and down the Malacca Straits to Singapore. And while we were there, we was on the dock there and we had to take everything, all our gear, off and up to the Seaman's Mission.

29:00 It was all right just going ashore, and living ashore. And we were there for a couple of weeks, I suppose, until they made arrangements for us. The majority of ships went home, or the ship's company went home, and they had what they called a care and maintenance party. That's like ERAs [Engine Room Artificers] and seamen and that. I think there was round about thirty of them stayed behind to work with the dockies when they were stripping the thing down.

29:30 The only funny part about it was we looked at it and we thought, 'This is going to be really good,' because the dockyard workers were all Chinese, and all the parts they were pulling out were all marked in Chinese. So we didn't know what the hell…Whoever came along to put them together again, how they were going to work out…unless they had Chinese blokes to put them together again. Anyway, we came home and had leave. We went down to Flinders Naval Depot after we had leave and…

30:00 So by the time we got there…We got a passenger boat home. A Dutch ship called the Marnix. This was something really good for sailors, living on there, a bunk to sleep in instead of old hammock and good tucker. So we came from there down to Batavia,

30:30 and from Batavia out and down through to Fremantle, and Fremantle through to Melbourne, we came home from there. Well, in that particular time, when I joined Vampire, being away at home again….I was only away in my first draft five, six months all together. And I rang my wife up from the station pier, said, "What are you doing?"

31:00 She said she was still at work. She used to be a waitress. She says, "I'm still at work. Why? Where are you?" I said, "I'm at station pier." She said, "What?" I said, "We came in today, we're probably coming off tonight." I said, "I might be home tonight." Because my honeymoon was a bit short sighted, like. I got married on the Saturday and I was back at Flinders Naval Depot on the Sunday morning. So it didn't last too long, because we were on the first draft. So we had leave and that,

31:30 and as I say, we went to Flinders, and then from there we just sort of mooched around the joint and parted ship, as they called it, and then the draft came out for whatever was going to take place. Then the Vampire draft came out, and we looked, and there was about three of us, Billy Middling, Tracky Donavan and Mickey Millar. Went over and had a look, our name wasn't on the list.

32:00 I thought, 'Geez,' you know. It always works on the system. You never volunteer in the navy. But when it upsets your….plans you've got in the future, we always reckoned, well, if you didn't go back to that ship there, you was going to go to an eight inch cruiser. And we said, "No, no, no, no." So we had to put in a request to go and see the senior engineer. I think it was eight of us finished up going in

32:30 there, the old crew, engineering branch. And he said, "Righto you, Cedric…" Or Caesar they used to call me, because with an Italian name like that, I was always classified the only wog in the Australian Navy at that time. So, you know, there was never any hardship. Even the officers used to call me Caesar. That was the easy way to remember the name. So Bluey Thompson says "Righto, Caesar, you've got the floor.

33:00 What's the beef about? I'm not going through youse one at a time." I said, 'Well, look sir, we thought it would be better if we went back to a ship we know rather than one we don't know, because it's pretty old and we've got to know how to look after this little thing.” He said, "Don't come in here telling me." He said, "I'm the left-handed commander. And I know the navy does the right thing by you fellows to put you where they think you'll learn something." He said, "But if that's your attitude, I'll make certain you'll go back."

33:30 So he did. So yeah, we all went back. And of course from then on….seas did not go according to what we thought was going to happen. We thought we were going to be sitting up there in Singapore, nice and quiet. Japan hadn't come into the war. The Germans weren't around very much…well, as we thought. And as I say, we came on there and we were only half the crew. We went back on a Burns Phillip boat.

34:00 We went back up the East Coast of Australia, Port Moresby, Surabaya, Semarang, Batavia and then on to Singapore. Now the other half of the crew came up from Perth on the Zolandia, who was convoyed by the Sydney. And the Sydney, unfortunately, when you look back in the history, she was the wrong boat in the wrong place in the wrong time. When she got up to the Sunda Straits, which is between Java and Sumatra, and she's going to head in there and go around the

34:30 go around the Banka Straits and go to Singapore, the Admiralty had notified the Durban to go from Batavia, to return to Singapore, but in the meantime they said, "Well, divert out and pick up the Zolandia off the Sydney and she can go back to Australia and you bring her back up." That's when she came around. And on the 19th November, 1941, that's when all the problems started and she got sucked in by she got sucked in by Detmer, I think his name was.

35:00 But, of course, the Sydney bloke, Burnett, he was the new chum. He wasn't like Collins….When Collins was going to challenge a ship, he'd challenge on extreme range and such forth like that. Anyway, what actually happened, they sucked him in and he got in there and of course the side guns opened, dropped the thing down, bang…They weren't even locked up at action stations.

35:30 Of course, that's when she caught on fire and she went round the other side of the Kormoran and she got more belts there, and of course…Daylight and darkness doesn't stay too long up there, and by this time it was after six o' clock, so she sort of disappeared over the horizon and she was on fire….But there's always the thing that went through our mind, 'Well, why didn't they heave to?" But then again, we don't know what the condition of the ship was, or the crew were,

36:00 we know she got a hell of a belting by only what the Kormoran Germans had told us. And I don't think they told us the whole truth. And of course, she went off and from that day to this, she was never seen again.

Did you hear this story at the time, or have you only been able to put the pieces together since?

Well, I've made a history of it. I've got paperwork down there and I've been through the whole lot. I've got diagrams of the area, and no-one can be certain where it is.

36:30 And do you remember what you were told at the time, on your way up, at that stage?

No, we were in Singapore then.

How did the news come to you?

Well, the news came in by signal on board ship. They put it on the notice board, HMAS Sydney….Well, they didn't know nothing, because they didn't do anything. But when they eventually came there, that news was over four days old. Because what actually happened was, when the Sydney went off

37:00 in the dark that night, that was the last she was seen of. No one knows nothing. The only reason….how they got some of the whereabouts of this…I can't think of the name of the four funnel troop ship that came up there. Yeah, it came along one morning, four days after the Sydney disappeared.

37:30 They had a bloke up in the crows nest…As we say used to say, "He's up the crow's nest getting the eggs out." He reported to the bridge that he could see a raft with men on board it, so they had to go over to...The Aquitania was the name of that ship. And they went over to check them out. They dropped a boat over 38:00 and went over there and got them off this raft and took them back to the Aquitania and when they went on board...Now the Aquitania had a very cosmopolitan crew. She even had Germans on board her, like in the boiler room, that was a coal burner, and they were there and they were snooping round, these blokes, and they couldn't work out who they were. And of course, anyway, this bloke said, "They're Germans." So of course they tried to get in amongst those blokes,

38:30 because they were Gestapo blokes. "Close your mouth, you're not allowed to talk." All right, anyway, off she goes and gets the boat up. Now they don't send a signal, they don't break WT [Wireless Transmission] silence to send a signal. So she went on down towards Fremantle. Then when she got to Fremantle and she reported in that she had these Germans and they were off the Kormoran. In the meanwhile,

39:00 the other crew of the Kormoran had got off their ship in the lifeboats. Now you've got to work this out. There were six hundred and forty five on the Sydney disappeared, gone, the whole ship. The Kormoran, they've got time to turn around and place their charges in the ship, because she was damaged. They've got four hundred men on board, and they've got three hundred and eighty something odd survivors, that got off her.

39:30 Now they'd rowed their boats...Some of them got onto rafts and things like that, to a place where there was some well off the Western Australian coast where the cattle drop there. And an Aboriginal stockman, he caught up with these blokes, he went back and told a policemen. The sergeant got up and he said, "Well, let's face it. We'll have to go out and see." So they commandeered an old model 1928 Chevrolet truck,

40:00 with a four engine in it.

Tape 2

00:30 Getting back to Singapore I think.

Well, we'll go back to Singapore. We know what happened there, that those men just disappeared, with their ship, and they did not even get one little piece of wood. Anyway, when we got back there we had to do our working up trials and things like that, which we did. And then we went over to a place called Sarawak, on one of the islands there.

01:00 The white Rajah was there and all those sort of blokes, at a place called Kuching. And we were treated like royalty. We were allowed to sign the tab and drink the beer and all that sort of stuff. We reckoned it was a good navy then. But on the way back to Singapore, we ran into a few Japanese destroyers out on manoeuvres. From there on we said, " 'Hang on, what's going on around here?' We couldn't do nothing, because nothing had happened then.

01:30 And then of course, by the time we came back in fully to be commissioned, like back as the navy, it was roughly about early in December…The tail end of November, early December, and that was it, you see. Then, of course, we were running round and the [HMS] Prince of Wales and [HMS] Repulse turned up in Singapore,

02:00 plus a few other little odds and ends like the [HMS] Electra and the [HMS] Express, the [HMS] Tenedos and I forget the other one. There was another one there, anyway. They turned up and we said, "Oh, Christ, they're starting to put a few ships in there." Because the old [HMS] Durban and the [HMS] Dragon, they were there. They were like us, our boat, they were built in the dim dark ages. Anyway, that was it, you see,

02:30 Then around about the 5th December, we were given the task, us and the Tenedos, was given the task of escorting the Repulse to Australia to do a show the flag job, in Darwin and then around to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and then back to Singapore. Showing the flag, like the British Navy is going to be out there.

03:00 Which, we started off all right, but we got down below….either between Samarang or Surabaya, and all of a sudden we get a recall signal, "Get back to Singapore as soon as possible." Now this was on the 6 December, the day after. So we get back in, get back to Singapore,

03:30 and go alongside and oil, and the Repulse went alongside and oiled, and all things like that. Now, it becomes a bit confusing, date wise. Alfie (Rancer? UNCLEAR) was the chief soaker, he said to me, "OK Caesar, four o clock in the morning, down there in the boiler room." Which was going to be the 8th of December. Got the picture? Right. I said,

04:00 "What the bloody hell's going on, Alfie?" He says, "We're going to be raided in the morning." I said, "Oh, Christ." He was in the Mediterranean with us, and all of the blokes, the old Mediterranean boys, two of them were in A Boiler Room with a leading hand and a stoker….and all the staff in the engine room was all the old hands. And anyway, we turn around and we say, "Oh, bugger this, this has got to be a joke." But it wasn't a joke, because 04:30 at four o clock in the morning, on the 8th, there's these bloody aircraft dropping bombs. One of our ships was lucky to get out of before it started. That was the [HMAS] Kanimbla. She was up near the causeway and we were alongside, just a bit away from her. A stick of bombs dropped across her, it didn't hit her, it straddled her. And we got one down alongside of us. We thought, 'Oh bloody hell, these are fair dinkum.' Then of course, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, they started to open fire.

05:00 By that time then bedlam had broken out. The island was starting to flare up with fires everywhere. So come dawn…And anyway, from there on, we got into...Like in the morning, our skipper, that was (Porky Moran? UNCLEAR) who had come off the [HMAS] Canberra onto us, and our old Skipper, John Walsh, he'd gone from there, later on to the [HMAS] Darwin and then on to Canberra.

05:30 He tells us, "Japan has not declared war, but they’ve just bombed us, and they've bombed Pearl Harbor." And all this. And then on the other side of the International Date Line, it was only the 7th over there, you see? That's where the confusion gets into. Anyway, by then the Admiralty got their heads together and they said, "Well, we'll have to do something here." And at twenty-five to five that afternoon, we were starting to head out the boom gates

06:00 to go to sea with the Prince of Wales, the Repulse, the Electra, the Express, the Tenedos and ourselves, the old Vampire. We thought, 'What the bloody hell we are going out for?' So anyway they said, "We're going up to Khota Bharu, and some of those places up there, on the way up to Thailand where the Japanese…." So silly they were,

06:30 instead of coming down by sea and getting shot at, they went around by land and came down right through Malaysia [Malaya]. That was the easiest way to get down, see? And anyway, we got out there, that was on the 8th, and that night we got lamped by a reconnaissance aircraft. On the 9th, we went heading out towards…We went past Khota Bharu and had gone on a bit further up into Thailand area.

07:00 Then, we've seen a periscope, we'd been sighted by a submarine, so they know where we are, and of course, anyway, then the…I think his name was Brook Potham, the admiral in charge, said "Well, we'll turn around and we'll go back." On the way back…Well, that was late on the 9th, well on the 10th, early in the morning, we were on our way back to Singapore, and we were coming down the coast and we went to a place called Kuantan.

07:30 We had a landing there. We sent an aircraft in, a reconnaissance aircraft, and they said, "No, there's nothing there." They came back and landed alongside the Prince of Wales, picked it up and bought it back on board. Of course the Tenedos, she was an old destroyer, she broke down the night before, so she'd been sent back with strict orders, "If you see anything at all, do not break WT silence.

08:00 Just keep going." Of course, that left only three destroyers and two capital ships which then...I think it was roughly about eleven o'clock in the morning, the high level...Well, we'd been lucky, we had had a covering of foggy rain, misty rain, and they couldn't penetrate that. We could hear them flying around, but they couldn't see us. At around about the eleven o'clock mark, they got a break in the clouds

08:30 and they lamped the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Then the high level bombers came over and they hit the Repulse first. She got a bomb down the aft funnel and, of course, it blew out the boiler room down there. We started to head back, flat chat, as fast as we could go, she was holding her own. Well then, by that time, the torpedo bombers came in. They were zipping down there left, right and centre. And anyway,

09:00 they took to the Repulse first, but Tennant, he was the captain, he was manoeuvring around left, right and centre, missing the torpedos. For a big ship, it was pretty good. But then Brooks Potham said, "Steam in line ahead." As soon as he steamed in line ahead…Gotcha! The first one hit the side of her. The other ones, they started on her, they came in and laid one of turn aft, one of turn for’ ad,

09:30 dropping torpedoes. And then they did the same thing to the Prince of Wales. I think she got hit with about eight or nine torpedos. Naturally, she started to tip over. It was massive. We used to say to the Pommies [English] afterwards, "You're a pack of idiots, you know. When they were knocking those bloody holes in the side of your ship with those torpedos, why didn't you cut holes in the other side to let the water out?"

10:00 We used to start fight after fight. Up in the canteen we were, up in Singapore, at the naval depot. But the Repulse was more to us, because we were closer to her. On board there was five Australian midshipmen doing their time. And this Guy Griffiths, I was telling you about, he was one of those midshipman and unfortunately,

10:30 out of the five of them, one of them didn't get off. He was a bit like that Teddy Sheehan in the Armidale. He was strapped up in an Oerlikon gun, but he couldn't get out of it. And of course when the ship rolled, he went with it. We got about two hundred and ninety, I suppose, survivors, picked up out of the oil, fuel water and that there. We picked up Captain Tennant,

11:00 he was the skipper of the Repulse. And we also picked up the [UNCLEAR], as we called them, the padre. He was in the water swimming around. He was sitting on the depth charges on our way back to Singapore. We went back to Singapore with what we had on board, and the Electra and the Express, they went to the Prince of Wales, and they picked up the sailors in the water. Then the Express had got alongside the Prince of Wales, and put a rope on her. 11:30 Then all of a sudden when she was starting to fill up with water and she was tipping, she bloody near took the Express with her. They had to cut the ropes with axes, but they couldn't get the tension off them. Anyway, they got out. But overall, I suppose, there was roughly around about fourteen hundred on one ship, and roughly nearly fourteen hundred on the other. That's twenty-eight hundred on there. And out of that, I suppose,

12:00 there was eight hundred that got killed in action that time, and the rest got home. But then, there was a problem. We got to Singapore, but what were we going to do with them? There was no ships, there was no transport…Everything was coming into Singapore, but nothing's coming out. The stupid part of it all was, we used to sit up on the upper deck saying, "That's another boatload going in. They'll be Prisoners of War or be killed, one of the two." Then our next thing was,

12:30 we were sent up to a place called Endau, which was up the Malaysian coast. The Japanese Navy was up there. We thought they were transport ships, that was according to the information we received. When we got up there, they weren't, they were Japanese warships. And of course us two old boats went up there to fire a few torpedoes around them, which we did. But we were that close in they went underneath them and ended up on shore. Yes so, to get into Endau,

13:00 there was islands all around, and Endau township was built on the Endau River. And you come out of there…Now there's a channel going around one side of the island, picks up your main channel to get to sea, and when you're coming in you go the other side, so there is no confusion of ships. And of course when we went around. we had to go around the island and come out again. And Moran said "Well, we'll go in again. we've got a torpedo to go, and the (Tanis? UNCLEAR) has got two." Go back in again,

13:30 all the ships had made different positions, everything's moving. Once we got in, we couldn't turn around and get out. We had to go round the islands, and that's when the searchlights came on. and the eight inch cruiser was there and then everyone…With what gunnery we had, we could handle that. So we were just firing at the searchlights and damaging them that way. Then, when we got around a bit further, two Japanese destroyers were trying to cut us off and the Tannis[?] was behind us.

14:00 The search light hit the Tannis and the eight-inch cruiser blew her out of the water. We couldn't go back and do anything for them. I think they lost….roughly about sixty percent of their crew in the first hit. They did get away, some of them, but a lot of them were taken Prisoner of War. When we got around the other side, we could see that the Japs were far quicker than what we were. And anyway.

14:30 someone down the stern section of the ship….By this time, we were ordered in the boiler room to make smoke….I used to always love that. You shut off all the air and out comes black smoke. But then everyone down the gunnery and all the staff down aft, they had to come fo’r’ad because they could breathe. What actually happened was, before some of them came up, on the quarterdeck, there was a couple of smoke floats.

15:00 Someone pulled the rope by mistake, and ignited one of these bloody smoke floats up. They said, "Get the thing over the side." It gives off this great yellow glare. As it gave off the great yellow glare, a Japanese destroyer passed it. It lit up the side of it and a Japanese cruiser, bang…It didn't blow her right out of the water, but it damaged her that much she went ashore on the rocks. We kept going to get in front of the other one and we was lucky enough to get out.

15:30 Sorry I'm a bit confused about that. So the smoke flare came out. The yellow cloud...

Yeah.

And so you could see the Japanese destroyer?

As it hit the water, it gives off another glare when it starts to make smoke. And as the Japanese destroyer went past, our crew could see that, and so could the Japanese. And the Japanese thought it was us, and they've turned their guns around and fired on there.

At the smoke?

16:00 At the smoke, where it's illuminated the side of her. We got away from that. I came up out of the boiler room at one stage there, we were belting down the track at about thirty knots, and the old ship was rolling a bit like that. And up on the top of the main mast, you could see the search light of the Japanese ship, still centred on that, but it was going up as we were going down…going over the hill as the saying is.

16:30 But what they were doing, they were firing in front of us, but they were just bringing their guns up too quick all the time. That's how we never got hit. Then, of course, we went back and we got back into Singapore the next morning. And from there on, it was just chaos. The bombers had been in and all that. We did some more convoy work. What happened from there, we went back down to Batavia

17:00 because we got put on submarine patrol, down to Batavia and then we did two ships out of Batavia, the [USS] West Point and the [USS] Manhattan with evacuees, through the Sunda Straits and out. And on the way out we were running into a big heavy swell, twenty-five knots and the old ship just would not handle it. And the old plates opened up on the side and started taking water. Then we had to wait out there then off a volcanic island, 17:30 Mount Krakatoa, we had to wait off there then for a convoy that was coming in from Colombo way, and take them up. We were leaking water that bad….Here's another quirk of fate. The [HMAS] Yarra was with them, and she was told to give all her plates over to us and we were going to... Instead of us going back to Singapore with the convoy, and she was to go to Batavia. Now we went to Batavia

18:00 to get fixed up and she went back to Singapore. Now that's how we got away from Singapore, well from Java actually, because like we took six ships over to Ceylon. But then the Yarra on the way back, it was a (UNCLEAR) I think it was, a troop ship, she was on fire and she went alongside to pick up survivors off it, which she did. We went on and after this took place, then the Java Sea battle started up,

18:30 we were out of it, we were over at Colombo. And of course, everything that was in the Java Sea just about got sunk, even down to the Perth and the [USS] Houston and all them. But then the Yarra, she was taking ships on the other side of Java for Australia, but she ran into, I think it was it was three cruisers and two destroyers, and she got sunk. There was only thirteen survivors off it.

19:00 Of course we were over at Ceylon now, and of course we were attached to the…I suppose you would call it the Eastern Fleet. We were attached with the [HMS] Hermes. Now we used to be with her in the Mediterranean, but for aeroplanes on board, they had those old Swordfish torpedo bombers, which would only do ninety mile an hour anyway, or ninety knots, whichever you call it. They had two wings and a torpedo stuck out underneath them there

19:30 You're doing about eighty mile an hour when you're going into a ship to drop a torpedo. Which they all....you know...the suicide group. But anyway, as I say, when we tied up with her at this particular time, we were in Trimkamalee, up the top end of the island, it's a big deep water harbour. From there on, she was in there, too, and we

20:00 moved out. When the Japanese aircraft carriers got out in the Indian Ocean, and we got the message, "Get out of the harbour in a hurry, and head south," and all that sort of stuff, which we did, but we didn't go down far enough. They said, "It's all clear. Come back." And it was when we were on our way back… It was on the 9th of April, 1942, and that's when we came back. And the next minute, we look up… aircraft, off the Japanese aircraft carrier.

20:30 Which then got stuck into the Hermes, sunk her and then they swung around and came to us and hit us. It was roughly round about half past eleven in the morning. I was in the aft magazine with four other fellows, all stokers, passing up ammunition. And of course, me, being a whinging type of a bloke, I said to Alfie Wrench,

21:00 I said, "Look Alf, we're in the boiler room all the time at action stations, but coming out, we're getting our own four hours watch, we're coming out of that there, we get action stations again. Why can't the watch below stay below and we from the back end go to that boiler room, and the front end come to the forad boiler room?" "We'll give it a try." That was the first time they tried it. Now, that was providence, I suppose, because we're down there,

21:30 and the Japanese…there was thirteen aircraft attacked us, from what I gather, and they got nine direct hits and four near misses. Now of those nine direct hits, six of those went through the boiler rooms, came down, smashed the bloody steam lines and that, but didn't explode, actually, because she was that old and that thin, nothing much to her, semi-armour piercing bombs were going straight through her,

22:00 but they were doing all the damage breaking the steam lines. Which, if you go into a boiler room, there's one entrance in and one entrance out through the air lock. And that's where she got hit. Now in A Boiler Room there was two stokers, there was the leading stoker and the stoker petty officer, well, he'd just been made a chief. And in B Boiler Room there was a stoker and a leading stoker, or sometimes a stoker PA. Right, now, the same thing happened there.

22:30 They got out of that boiler room, but they had to get past all the steam pipes to get up to the upper deck. Not a very nice thing to say, but it'll give you a rough idea, they were scolded to pieces. But the body was still mobile, still going….They got up and got over the ship's side and onto the raft, but they died on the raft. The salt water hit them, see. That was there. And then the skipper, Porky Moran, he was on the wing of the bridge; he got a direct hit up there. Bang.

23:00 Cleaned that out, cleaned him up. That last one I'd showed you out there, McDonald and Peel, they had gone down below the stoker's mess deck to set the depth charges off, so when she goes down, she's destroyed then, so the enemy won't get the guts of the depth charges, you see….Not the depth charges, the ASDIC, for finding submarines. On the way back, the side of the ship stove in. McDonald was on the outboard side of Peel,

23:30 he died, he got out but he died. But Peel lost one of his lungs, from the blast. He got off on the thing and he survived. McDonald died on the raft. And what's his name, Shore, he was a Royal Navy signalman on loan to us…Quirk of fate again, he said, "I can't swim!"

24:00 And Big Tiny Mooney and Lofty Cullen said, "Now's the bloody time to learn!" And they picked him up and blew his life belt up for him, like the Mae West thing, and over the side he went. And as the ship went past, a two hundred and fifty pound bomb landed alongside him. Never saw him again. And then we were down in the aft magazine, and I said, "I'm buggered if I know, but this thing's lifting up in the arse end here." I said Get over to that phone and see what's going on." 24:30 He says, "There's no one answering me." It was dead as a dodo, she'd been cut, the wires had been cut. And no-one had told us to abandon ship. So we were up that ladder…. you know, because you're not supposed to get out unless you're told to go. So I was the senior hand, so I said, "Well, we're all going, let's go." So it was a matter of pushing each other up, trying to get this bloody hatchway up. So Bluey Knight was the biggest bloke, and he was the first bloke, so I said, "Righto Bluey, now when you get up, you get that there up there and clip it back."

25:00 The five of us got out of there then. When we got out, McGamma was on the other side, the port side. He'd been pinned with a depth charge, so we got him loose from the depth charge, blew his thing up, and said, "Get over the side, mate. You're on your own." And we went over and jumped on the other side. Now the whole carnage came up. We lost nine killed in action, and thirty injured, like with shrapnel and stuff.

25:30 Now people can believe this, or not believe it, but I can tell you it's gospel truth, on the oath of God, the hospital ship Vita, which we used to handle in the Mediterranean times, and we towed her off the bloody beach at one time and took her back to Alex [Alexandria], she's gone from Trincomalee to Colombo, she was on her way down, and when the Japanese could see that ours was finished, the Hermes was finished,

26:00 two of them took off….Now this is the story we got from the crewmembers off the Vita, who picked us up….They dropped the boats in the water, there's a photograph out there of it…What happened there, these two aircraft went down and the Vita was there, and of course, they're flashing their lights like, you know, a signal. The blokes on the Vita couldn't understand what they were signalling, and the Japanese couldn't understand what the Vita was signalling.

26:30 So they did one thing. They flew up and that's the ship going down there, they flew across the bow of the ship and they machine gunned the water like that, and come around, flew around the back of the ship, and come around again to the front and machine gunned in the water again, and flew around the back again. The skipper must have bloody twigged that something was on. So he decided to turn around, and when he turned around and started to head back where he came from, the two planes came down and waggled their wings,

27:00 dipped their selves again and flew off for the aircraft carrier. And that's how we come to get picked up by the Vita. She was on her way to Colombo.

A signal by the Japanese that you were stranded?

Well, they were machine-gunning in the water, not at any people, it was just to make the thing turn around. It was the only way to get them to turn around. Because they couldn't understand what the blinking lights were all about, you see, and of course that was it. That was the same as, as I say….Nicking back a bit now…I forgot that.

27:30 When the torpedo bombers, and all that, had sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, some said, some dickhead in the paper wrote, "Oh, they machine-gunned this," but they didn't. We were in the picture all the time. We were sitting there watching a Punch and Judy show. But no Japanese aircraft fired at those blokes in the water. None. The only reason we come up with this is, because we were navy and those torpedo bombers, they're all run by the navy,

28:00 and those aircraft off the aircraft carrier, they're all run by the navy. That's the only reason why we got out.

So there was solidarity between navies?

Well, I think so, or something like that. But Jesus, don't ever tell that to an army bloke on Singapore there, because some of those blokes, "You've got to be joking." I'd say, "No, no." "Those bastards, they used to jump on us and baited us, even after they surrendered." And all that sort of stuff.

28:30 But anyway, that was the end there. And we finished up in the hills, Kendi and Diatialla and those kinds of places.

How long were you in the water for?

About nine hours before we got picked up. We got picked up just before dark. We were quite happy about that. We got a bit of a feed when we got back on board, when we got on board the Vita. It was only the old bizzo, a lump of bread and a chunk of meat and that was it.

29:00 There was no a la carte sort of menu. We were that buggered after being in the water….Because my missus [wife] used to say to me, "How come you don't bloody like the water?" I'd say, "Well, if you'd been swimming around in that water for nine hours and you can't put your feet down the bottom and have a spell, you get a bit weary of where the next pothole's going to be." You see…

Did you have anything to hold on to?

Oh, no, we just had life jackets on. We only had…

29:30 one, two, three, four, five, six....Six, what they called 'Carly Floats.' They were the big ones. But the wounded had to be on board them, and all the rest of them are hanging on the side, like around the side. But then, of course, we experienced what the other poor buggers over the years, before that, we'd seen swimming around with this oil fuel. Your eyes were sore, it got in your mouth, up your nose, your body was covered with oil fuel. It's not very nice.

30:00 It's not a beauty treatment, I can tell you that for sure. But anyway, as I say, we got down there and then overnight, early in the morning we got down to Colombo, and then they mustered us all up, we had a wash and so forth like that, give us what clothing to get rid of our junk off us. We went ashore to the….navy barracks they had there. It used to be a school of some sort.

30:30 And then they sorted us out for a couple of days there, checking us over and things like that. Pretty rough, I can tell you that for sure. None of those Harley Street bloody specialists looking at you. "Yeah, you're all right, you can see, you're eyes are all right. Off you go." It didn't matter if you had a broken leg, as long as the bloke didn't see it. Then we went out and then they….sorted us out to the three places,

31:00 up to Kandy, Diatiala, and some other place there…A rest camp, they were. It was quite good, well, we thought it was, we were getting paid for a holiday. That was it. Then of course, we all came down to….There was a navy depot down in Ceylon, anyway, over near Slave Isle it was. We stayed there for nearly a fortnight,

31:30 until a ship called the Dominion Monarch came in and then we got passenger home from there, you see

Back to Australia?

Back to Australia, yeah. Then we got into Sydney Harbour at the same time as the Japanese submarine had got in before. And everyone was saying, "Oh, this'll do me. I'm going to have a bludge on the Kuttabul." That was an old Sydney Harbour Ferry they had put alongside Garden Island as a depot.

32:00 One of the officers up on the bridge, one of the blokes says, "Can I have a lend of your glasses sir?" He said, "Yeah." The bloke said, "Buggered if I know, there's a funnel sticking up out of the water." The officer said, "Give me a look." "Oh," he said, "Yeah, that's the Sydney Harbour Ferry you're talking about. That's where she got blown up there." Of course, these blokes were going to get on and become permanent boarders, they reckoned, "Bugger going to sea again."

32:30 Then we got drafted out from Sydney, back to Melbourne and things like that. I finished up back at Flinders Naval Depot with a few of the other boys. Then I got my draft to Canberra, that was to Stapleton and we went up to Brisbane to pick her up. When we got to Brisbane, the train was late getting in on account of the floodwaters, which held them up. It was an hour late, and the truck was there to take us down to Finger Bay Wharf.

33:00 We went down there and of course the [HMAS] Canberra and the [HMAS] Australia had sailed. They were on their way to the Solomons to pick up a convoy in New Zealand. So we said, "Well, back to the depot. Let's get ourselves brittled in here." I said to Jock, I said, "Don't go volunteer for nothing while you're here. Just stick around."

And you were lucky to miss the Canberra, weren't you?

Oh yeah, yeah. So anyway, that was there,

33:30 and three weeks later a bloke, the signal officer said, "Hey Caesar, were you on draft to Canberra?" I says, "Yeah, Why?" He said, "Don't unpack your bag." I said, "Why?" He said, "Well she got bloody sunk in early hours of this morning." Well, you know…I thought, "What are we going to do here now?" Go get a draft to New Guinea, on the merchant ships, the blokes used to walk

34:00 off the ship and the silly sailors had to get on and fire the ships up to Port Moresby or Lae or Madang… Anywhere up there like that, to get them up there, and then come back again. And the merchant seaman used to come back on board again and get all the goodies. We got nothing. So I said to Vic, I said, "Well, we've got to get ourselves a little job." I got the motorboat driving job for a start, then I found the jolly boat was at Kangaroo Point workshop, so I switched from there to that one,

34:30 that put Mick Stapleton into the motorboat crew. And then Jock May, he got into the...He was something inside with the chief stoker's office. I said, "Stick in there, Jock. Whatever he tells you. If he says you mop the floor, mop the floor and don't argue." So we stayed there for a while and then the draft came out.

What were you doing on those boats? The motorboat and the jolly boat?

The motorboat and the jolly boat? Running messages up and down the...The jolly boat

35:00 is a fast motorboat, a small, fast motor. It only had a four cylinder Ford motor in it.

We can go for about one more minute.

Then the motor boat, the bigger one, it would carry any troops up and down the river. Sometimes we'd used to get caught of a night time with these voluntary coast guard boys and that. Just in case mines got dropped by an aircraft 35:30 into the river, you'd have a big drum on the back and you'd let it go and a big balloon would go up in the air. And then the job was...I used to be on the motor, operating the winch, and also looking after the engine on the boat. So you had to go nice and slowly, so she wouldn't get too far away. Now then, they had a bloke with what they call the Aldis lamp. A lamp like that, a pretty powerful lamp it was. And every now and then he'd flick, shine onto the balloon up there,

36:00 representing a mine coming down, you see. Then he'd switch off. Now all these people on the bank had to work out roughly where it was going to land in the river. You know, you play games. We used to do all of those sort of things like that. Then of course, we used to go down past the….the Brisbane Gardens.

36:30 Sshhht. You used to see some terrible sights there. "You behave yourself."

Could you describe some of those sights?

Well, there was a bit of canoodling going on. These ex-servicemen blokes, with a couple of bottles and a woman down on the beach there, and no worries in the world. Of course, where we were in the depot, we were quite secluded, because alongside the depot, the Brisbane Depot, Moreton Depot, was the City Morgue.

37:00 And of course that used to serve our purposes if we were thinking of breaking shippers as the saying was. Instead of going out the main opening, we'd go round the back over the wharf and run past the motorboats and up through the morgue and out the main gate. When we came back, we used to knock three times on the door, get in, give the bloke a packet of cigarettes, get out there and get back in again. Absent without leave. That was that there, then.

37:30 Then the draft came out to go to England. We had to come from Brisbane down to Melbourne, and we left from Station Pier.

Tape 3

00:30 You were just about to leave for England.

Oh that's right, yeah.

What did you leave on?

We all came down here to Port Melbourne Naval Depot. That's when Port Melbourne Naval Depot was there. They've pulled it down since. We went got onto the...passenger boat...I'll catch up with the name of that one.

Yep.

They have a habit of slipping me or a minute or two. Anyway then we

01:00 went from Port Melbourne to Wellington, New Zealand. We picked up a lot of Americans there, that were coming out of Guadalcanal, going home to America. Then we went over and we finished up getting into San Francisco. We landed in there, and then we had to go across from the wharf there, which is now known as the Fisherman's Wharf, where you can spend a lot of money, if you've got the money to spend.

01:30 And then we had to go across to a place called Oakland, on the ferry across to the other side. Then you pick up the train, to go across America by train. There was four hundred of us going over there on…the Manhattan, I think it was, yeah, the Manhattan. And from there we went onto this train, through the Rockies [mountains] and all that sort of thing, right across America.

02:00 It took us five days, because in there they've got different rules and regulations for the troops and that. And we had these Pullman class carriages, and all that sort of stuff. The Negro porter looking after us, making our beds up, "Oh, how long has this navy been going on?" Anyway, we finished up...we got through and then we had to go up to Boston. We stopped over at Boston for about ten days, waiting for a ship,

02:30 to get across the Atlantic. We didn't know whether it was going to go from the New York area or a bit further down, or going on go up to Canada. But anyway, we finished up going up to Canada. We went up there and got on a ship called the Louis Pasteur, that was a French one that was pulled out of France, taken to England, and they dollied her up and used her as one of the fleet. She was a fast cruiser. She went on her own, no escorts.

03:00 Going over there, I was a bit bloody worried about this thing, because it was that far north, the icebergs were around you. I said to Josh Mayer, I said, "Jesus, mate. I hope these bloody things don't get like the Titanic and want to get into you." Then we went across. I think it only took us…what? From the time we left Halifax to the time

03:30 we got into Liverpool, it was only five days. No escort, no nothing. And then we got into there, and then we went across England by train, naturally, down to a place called Chatham, and that's where the Shropshire was in the dockyards getting repaired, or….refurbished, and all that sort of stuff.

04:00 Anyway, the Australian Government had worked out with the British, "We'll pay for the refit and all the new equipment you're putting on board, and you give us the ship for nothing." We could have got the American cruiser, for the Canberra, but it would have taken us nine months to learn all about it. But the Shropshire was the same class as the Canberra. It was like walking off one ship and walking onto another one, see. A few alterations, not much. And of course that was there and we got on there.

04:30 We were living in the dockyard area, because she was still in dry dock and all that. So we just fitted in with the working parties, and all those sort of things like, in what we had to do and learn the ropes and all those sort of things. Because you've got to realize, those ships were built in 1928. We weren't getting nothing new. Anyway, but she'd had engine refits and all that sort of stuff done, and all this extra armour on board her and a radar.

05:00 We had no radar out here. We didn't even know bloody…We knew that radar picked up something. That's why we used to say some blokes, "Jeez, you're like radar. You'll pick up anything." And yes, anyway, we were down there and by the time...We got there in April, 1943…

05:30 Around about August, September, we were ready to break out and go up to Scapa Flow, which was up in the north part of Scotland. A place up there where we could have our gunnery trials and engine work ups and all those sorts of things. And from there on, that was it, a continuous grind all the time, like. We were there at a bad time, to a degree, because…

06:00 They were just coming out of twilight to go into winter….Autumn, autumn's the next one after summer. And of course, this twilight you'd be walking around out on the deck, at a quarter to twelve, and it was still bloody daylight. The sun had gone down, but it was still daylight.

06:30 It got dark round about, say, quarter past, half past twelve, stayed dark for about two or three hours, and then bang, up comes sunlight again, you see. Being up so close to the North Pole and all that sort of stuff. Yes, so anyway, we was in and out there and running around to different places, working with the fleet and things like that. I'm just going to digress a minute, I forgot to tell you…

07:00 Those photos you've got out there of the 460 Lancaster Squadron. But that's me cousin, was up there, so we got ourselves a little niche under the table for a couple of weekends up there, because we used to get free travel. And the Pommies used to say to us, "How come you blokes get free travel and we've got to pay?" "Oh, we're very highly trained men. We've got no money so we get trains, this, that and the other."

07:30 And of course, what we got for a fortnight's pay, they were lucky if they got that for a month. That's how badly paid they were.

The Americans?

No, no, the Pommies. Sorry, I shouldn't use the word Pommies, but it sounds all the same to...Yeah, so anyway, we finished up up there and then...Yeah, it was September….It must have been August when we went up there. We had all just about cleaned up everything there and we saw this

08:00 bloody radar stuff, firing in pitch black at night time, they'd got a big target on an island. You'd fire your eight inch guns, eight from the eight inch guns and get seven direct hits out of eight. I'd never seen that happen before. By the time we'd finished there, we came around to Glasgow. We had two days and nights in Glasgow, waiting for a convoy, which we took down to Gibraltar.

08:30 Down through the Bay of Biscay, and all that sort of thing, you know. They were giving us a bit of a treatment down there, but we were lucky again, there. The whole convoy, plus all the ships, the war ships, overhead pattern like low cloud. And they couldn't get in, they couldn't get low enough.

So when you say they gave you a treatment, there was a....

They were annoying the shit out of us. They knew we were down below there, but they couldn't find a hole in the cloud

09:00 to drop bombs on us, see. Then one morning, about thirty-six hours before we got into Gibraltar, we get up in the morning and there's an aircraft carrier and the fleet, and there's about another three or four more destroyers. We said, "Gee, what's going on here?" Then we found out why. Because the weather bureau got the forecast to say…it'll disperse.

09:30 Of course, when it did, there was a German aircraft up there. It was pretty rough. I've got to admire these blokes. Like what they've got today, they are different aircraft carriers, but in those days they were run along the flight deck and up and away. They had what they called these Sea Fires. Spitfires modified for sea work, you see.

10:00 Anyway, we watched them and the old thing's going down, and you see these old films there….And up she comes like this, and she gets over the top, and she sits there like that and shoot, shoot, shoot. Three aircraft will take off in the matter of about three seconds. Right up each other's backside, as the saying is. Well, five aircraft went up, they shot down seven German aircraft, came back and all five of them landed on all right. And when they were coming 10:30 along, the ships going up and down like that. And they're coming down and they sit behind them like that…And when the carrier was down here, when she come up at this point here, just jump on like that, and straight in, hook him, get him out of the way. And the whole five of them got in there.

You were able to watch this on deck?

We could watch this from the upper deck of our ship, the Shroppy. And then we went on from there down to Sierra Leone, in West Africa, and we stayed there two days. She was a rugged sort of a joint there, like.

11:00 Leave was only given to chief POs [Petty Officers], leading hands and bedsmen. Anyone under that? They weren't allowed ashore. She was a rough joint, I'll tell you that, and plenty of disease there, too, I'll tell you that for sure. And we finished up doing some work there, we got out manoeuvring with the fleet, and then we went on from there down to Cape Town. And it was when we was in Cape Town,

11:30 this bearing in the engine room kept on getting hot all the way down, and when we were down they decided we would go up to Durban and spend a few days there and check it out. We found out what was wrong. They had the wrong bloody covers on the blocks, the turbine blocks. Where it goes out from the turbine to the propeller shaft to go out the bottom of the ship to turn the screw.

12:00 And the oil in the box wasn't returning properly. It was just like an automatic box, but when they took the tops off them, the (MERAS? UNCLEAR) one bloke says, "There's your trouble." He says, "What?" "Well that thing there should be over the other side there." It was like a starboard side one. So they took the starboard side one off and had a look, and it was identical to that one. So what they'd done…Instead of having one spare

12:30 for port side, and one for starboard side, they had the two port side ones still on the casing on the wall. So they put that in there and that got rid of that, from there on. But then, as I say, we had to come home across from South Africa to Australia on our own, and that was one of the very crook things. I lost out getting

13:00 the Atlantic Medal over that. The Atlantic Medal is like the Pacific, you've got to do a hundred and eighty days, in that area. When we'd done one, from the time we landed on the east coast of America, that's when the landing time starts. By the time we'd done all the work there, right through,

13:30 coming down the South Atlantic until we got to Cape Town, and instead of doing the eight days in Cape Town, we did the eight days in Durban, which is around in the Indian Ocean. And we were four days short of the one hundred and eighty days, so we didn't get the bloody medal, the Atlantic Star. Our draft it was. The other's got it because they were there ahead of us. Then we finished up coming across what they call the Roaring Forties, which is down the bottom end…

14:00 The joint where the war was on down there….On the same line as Terra Del Fuego in South America, straight through there. When the seas come up from the Southern Ocean coming into the Indian Ocean, by the time the ship was down between the two waves, sitting here, all you could see that side was water,

14:30 all you could see that side was water. And she'd do around about fourteen or fifteen knots, roll….Not a degree, roll, every time she went up on that there, still going ahead.

How was seasickness in those conditions?

Yeah. Some got it, some didn't. I had it at the start, sort of got over it.

You got used to it?

Yeah. You got used to it after a while, yeah.

15:00 That's forty degrees south, isn't it from Argentina…

Yeah, that's right. You go straight down there until you get off Fremantle, and then you've got to turn and come straight back in to Fremantle.

That's where you were heading, Fremantle?

Yeah, that's where we were coming on our way home. Like I say….Well, the Japanese ships didn't go down that far. We were well equipped to look after ourselves to any great degree.

15:30 As I say, from there we stayed in Fremantle for a couple of days, and then round to Sydney. We got into Sydney in the middle of October, 1943. And a bit of leave and a bit of repair work, like tightening up here, and tightening up there, after coming home, and then she was ready to go up north, to pick up with the American Fleet. She went in with the

16:00 American fleet, and made a hell of a difference. Well, they even admitted that the radar on the Shropshire was better than their radar. When another American ship came into the fleet, they used to be told, "You will take note of Shropshire's radar bearings." They'd pick up aircraft or whatever the case may be, and they sent it out to the fleet, 16:30 to check all their receivers to see they were in sequence with it.

Were you on the Shropshire?

I only had about two months on it after that. I came off and went on (UNCLEAR). Bloody stupid. It's now 1943, you've been in the navy since 1940, the ship's not going to go where they're handing out pancakes. I said to a couple of blokes, "What do you reckon? We're going to put in for these (UNCLEAR). They want stokers for these engines."

So you could apply for that?

So we had to apply for that.

17:00 And anyway, we got picked, so we went back down to Flinders, and I got me first Christmas at home, in 1943, from when I joined the navy. And from there on, in 1944, that's when we started to move up into the islands to pick up the boats. It took us, what, eight weeks course down at Flinders Naval Depot. We did the course down there.

For Fairmiles [Motor Launches]?

For Fairmiles, yeah.

17:30 And then I finished up, that was 1944, and I came off her in January, 1946.

So, January, '45 to January, 46….more or less….

Pardon me, January, '44. Christmas '43, I got back and got home, then '44 was in Flinders doing their course,

18:00 and a third of the way through we were heading north to different postings for…what's the name there. Up round New Guinea and those places. I was on loan to (UNCLEAR) 804, 805, 820, I got the final permanent one, was the 808. That's when we was up past Madang, at Alexishaven, was up there. I went up there to

18:30 Morotai, and a few other places, and then we came back down to Lae, and then we went across to Bougainville. We finished up over there, and then of course, by the time we'd finished at Bougainville, as I say, the war had finished then. That was August, 1945, and we did the last action with the 818, on the 8th and the 9th,

19:00 and then on the 15th when Japan…..That completed, that was it. And we all went back. It was the 804, 805, 818 and us, 820, and the Lithgow, we were going around different places picking up Japanese peace negotiators….for signing the documents and all that. And then we finished up, after that was over

19:30 in around about…August, September, October…October, we were sent from Torokina back over to New Guinea, then we did a bit of a refit there, and then we went from there up to Rabaul. And we finished up port directory ships up there, and we were there until the middle of December. And that was our penance

20:00 for after the war. And then other ships come up and took over, because the occupation force had come in and things like that, you see. I came home on the 9th of January.

Sorry, what were you doing from '44 to the end of the war? You were up in the islands then, were you?

Yes. Up in the islands all through then. The war was still on then. That was running up and down the coast, like (Ratsu?UNCLEAR), Porton Plantation, down to Buin,

20:30 and Choiseul Harbour, Treasury Island….Doing the old ‘stir up the Japs’. We've got to keep them moving, and then, of course, what they were doing was they were shifting the troops around by submarine. You see, because actually Torokina…. Bougainville I should say….Torokina was the harbour in the centre. The Americans and Australians had gone through the centre. Now the Japanese were down

21:00 the bottom end of Buin, and they were also at Portland Plantation, which was the top end. As long as they were staying there, "Well, we'll talk turkey, we won't harass them." We used to do all our movement of troops up and down the coast. We used to go by what they called 'barge.' Patrolling with a barge, just in case any of them might pop their head up, might have a shot.

21:30 You never shot back?

Oh, you was allowed to.

And can you describe to me your coming home? Your return back to Australia.

Well, the return back to Australia was very eventful, actually. We got down as far...after we left Rabaul, we went over to Madang, and from Madang around to Port Moresby and down to...We were supposed to go into Cairns, but we didn't get into Cairns.

22:00 We got into Townsville. And when we got into Townsville, I had a leading stoker on with me…Well, actually, he was on the Shropshire with me. He was a bit of a bloody hard bloke to handle, actually. He was sent up to Town to do something or other for one of the motor mechanics, or something. When he got up there on the Katoomba… The troops were coming down from New Guinea, and all that. She came in, and he got into a pub with them,

22:30 but he forgot that he had to come back to the ship. Of course, when I got back to the ship, they said to me, "Where's Stanford?" I said, "I wouldn't have a clue." They said, “Someone's sent him up the town." I said, "Don't know where." So when he did turn up, he came back on board and he was pretty full. And anyway, along the line he disappeared, but someone seen him going through the dockyards into the canteen over at Magnetic depot there, that was in Townsville, the depot there.

23:00 So he said to me, "You'd better go over and get him." I said, "No, send someone else over, don't know him." "You go over. You're the stoker." Of course, get over there and he's got a pot of beer in his hand, staggering round. And of course, in the meanwhile, I've seen a sub-lieutenant sort of go ashore. I thought to myself, 'What the bloody hell's going on there?' I said to one of the blokes, "Well, I don't know what's going on. I don't think we'll get him out of there."

23:30 Because there's only one door in, one door out. To get out the other way, we'd have to push him out the bloody back. Well, I just happened to look up. He said, "Have a beer, Caesar." I said, "Righto. I'll have this and we'll go, straight away." When I looked up the track, there's the sub-lieutenant with two blokes from the naval patrol from the depot coming down to the canteen. I said to Stanton, "You'd better get moving, mate. The bloody officer of the watch is coming down here with two patrol blokes."

24:00 And I said, "If you don't get out now, you're liable to finish up in the calaboose." "Ah, no, no, no," and of course, anyway, they come in the bloody door. I'm here, I turn my back. I don't want to be seen. Anyway, I get my pot up, I thought, 'I better drink this down in case I don't get to finish it.' Anyway, this subby, he said to Stanton, he said, "Stanton!" he says, "I demand that you go back to the ship immediately.

24:30 We're waiting to sail." Stanton says, "You insignificant little so and so and so and so." He said, "The war's over. I don't have to put up with your antics any longer. Get out of me way." And of course, he called the sub-lieutenant a naughty word, too. And he said, "Caesar!" "Me? No."

25:00 He said, "You heard what Stanton said." I said, "No, sir." I said, "I'm talking to these blokes here, having a beer." I said, "I told them in the first place I didn't want to come over here." He said, "You heard that, and the PO and the leading hand here of the patrol here heard it also." He said, "Unless you admit it, you'll be with Stanton in the cells up there." I said, "But I didn't hear nothing," which I did. Well, that was it. I finished in the bloody cells,

25:30 on me way home from discharge. Anyway, later in the afternoon, they sent for me, I had to go over; there was only three blokes in the engine room. There was the motor mechanic, Stanton and myself. You've got to have a bloke to look after the bloody fire drill and all that sort of stuff on board. And they said, "Well, you're out." I said, "Well I'm free, am I?" "No you're only on open arrest.

26:00 Now, you'll go back to the ship. Now around the ship, you're not allowed to go here, you're not allowed to go near the ammunition lockers in case you're going to blow the bloody thing up." Bloody idiots. So I did that, and the next morning they came up and they said….Well, they couldn't sail the ship because they hadn't got enough engine room crew, so they had to send to Brisbane to get some stokers up to take her down to Brisbane. Anyway, I believe she had a rotten trip down. Got really bashed from pillar to post on the way down.

26:30 But anyway, I had to take all my gear off, and take Stanton's gear off, and put it in the depot. We got put in the cells until the ship sailed, in case we damn blew it up. Bloody idiots they were. And that was it. We finished up getting laid off by the bloke up there. We got two days stoppage of pay and leave. That was the Friday, so that would have finished on the Sunday night. And from there on…

27:00 On the Sunday night, we were on a train heading back down to Brisbane. Oh bugger this…We got home and then that was it. Then when I got down to here, Port Melbourne, that's when I got discharged from here, on the 9th. Then you got twenty eight days leave as a settling in period, looking for a job and such forth like that, but you're time cut out there.

And how was the reunion with your wife and family?

27:30 Oh, a bit strange, a bit strange. The kids were only little. Barbara, that's the eldest one now, she would only have been about five. And Judith, she was '44, she would have been a bit over two years. But then, you know,

28:00 it was a case of looking for a job, and I finished up getting a job up here. Well, down the road, I thought it was a boiler, but it wasn't, it was a foundry works. I got out of there And I got out of there when I got burned on the leg. Out, "See you later." When I got up here on the boilers up here a Lingan Mills, up in Jaffney Street. I finished up there for five and a half years. And from there I went down to McRobertons' there on Fitzroy, when they were down there, and from there I finished up at the soft drink place up here in Coberg.

28:30 And then the last twenty-two years I finished up working for the Coburg council. What did you do for them?

Oh, like driving trucks and machinery and digging trenches and laying pipes, storm warm water pipes, all those sorts of things. For the last thirteen years I finished up in the office, doing the book work and ordering stuff for jobs and in and out, and a spare driver,

29:00 if one was needed. I used to do Meals On Wheels at times, for the elderly citizens out of a station wagon. And when the big bushfires were up here in.…Isn't it bloody terrible when you can't think of names? You go up through Bacchus Marsh…

29:30 Gisborne. There were bushfires up there in '83. And I used to drive the bus from there with the relief crews. All the trucks went up, and they had to take crews up to relieve them and bring them back, to put them on two different times when they are cleaning up and that. Of course, that lasted about three days. Well, it was like the old story; it was on the weekend, so you didn't get paid for it. But you got free beer and a feed, anyway.

30:00 How was your first year back? Re-integrating into civilian life?

It was a bit strange because people did things differently to the way we were taught to do it. You couldn't fight against them. You had to turn around and say, "Well, righto, I've got to alter way of doing things. So what's going on here?" But the idea of the fundamentals of the boiler were still the same. You had to have water in the boiler, you had to have a fire there to boil the water

30:30 to make steam. That was the same as in the navy. You had to learn...The only trouble was that when it was up here, they were coal burning boilers. When I was in the navy, I was always on oil burning boilers. And I had to learn, myself, how to drag the ashes and clean all that stuff out, and keep the fire going, keep half going and the other half out, when you're building it up. I found it was very hard to keep the main pressure of steam up,

31:00 equal pressure up. You'd have to learn it. Of course, up there it was mainly…how would you put it? For dyeing wool and dyeing white socks and things like that. Different things like that in the big vats they had. And they used to chew through steam like, you know, going out of water. We used to say to them, "Put smaller pipes in there." "Oh no, they've been doing that for so many years."

31:30 You can't pull those out.

On a personal level, how was it living on land again?

Well, you was rubbing shoulders with other ex-servicemen coming out. Not in the boiler rooms, really, but in factory and things like that. And the same here…how would you put it? The wife wasn't a…

32:00 how would you put it?…a very sociable girl at times. She didn't like going up to the pub, but somehow or another, time used to get away on you. In those days I never had a motorcar, I only had a pushbike, you see. We finally got over that. It's just I had been so used to doing this and doing that when you wanted to do it, or you went up into the town with the boys, or something like that.

32:30 And then all of a sudden, this all had to come to an end. But if she had of…She didn't drink. That isn't to say she was a bad girl, or anything like that. The kids were alright, they were alright, we had no trouble with them. We had the four of them and we got an old car and started to move around. And things started to flatten out then because I started to play football, what they called the Sunday Amateur League.

33:00 As I said, like the kids and the wife used to go to the footy and that with us. Here I am, still being bloody stupid on it. I got a trophy, from Monterensy, I'm the drink boy. I mixed the cordial up for them at quarter time, half time, three quarter time

33:30 and the final. And I'm also property steward. Take the bag around and take the rings off their fingers and the things out of their bloody ears, and the things off their neck and their wallets and all that. I've got to look after them until the game's over and give it back to them. They were some of the things the buggers used to give me.

Do you think the football environment was similar to the navy environment?

Well we had sports in the navy.

34:00 But the main sports, on the smaller ships, were cricket, because when you look at cricket, it only takes eleven man. With a football team you could have twenty, twenty, at least, in those days, eighteen plus two. But then again, there used to be an old racket. One bloke put it on me really early in the piece. It was in the Mediterranean. He said, "Caesar, do you play sport at all?"

34:30 "No, not really." "I'll give you a tip, mate." He'd been there a long way ahead of me. He said, "I'll give you a tip. If you want to get a run on shore when you're duty watch, always volunteer for the cricket team." He said, "Even if you can't bloody play, still look intelligent, hold the bat." Of course, you'd have leave to go ashore and after the game you'd have a cup of tea, not much grog. The little old ladies used to put it on for you.

35:00 But a cup of tea and an ice cream cake and sandwich, which you didn't get back on board. We learned that very quickly. Sporting fixtures, number ones. I played here and I played there, I didn't even know what I was talking about half the time. No, it's a very strange thing, but you learn to adapt.

And did you have much to do...Did you seek out other ex-servicemen,

35:30 ex-navy people when you came back?

Oh, yes, I was on the Shropshire committee for thirty-two years, and then I give that up. It was getting too much, you know. And I was on the Vampire committee and the Foresaid Association. And I'm president of that one there, the Fairmiles. We meet down at Williamstown.

36:00 It still keeps you occupied. And then, as I say, with this football here. When my grandson was in the under 19s, I went over for one match. That was eleven years ago. I'm still there. (UNCLEAR) getting up early in the morning and going over there. I go in there and I say to the kids, "OK, have you done what your mother said?" "What's that, Vince?" "Have you combed your bloody hair and cleaned your teeth before you come here this morning?"

36:30 And they say, "Oh, you're a bloody stirrer."

When you came back to Australia, were you surprised by what people did and didn't know about the war?

Not only then, I am still amazed and surprised at it. Just as a quick bit off the top. I was up the doctor's the other day, and this bloke come out of his surgery to the counter. "How are you going Mr Ray Boxer?" He said, "Christ, what are you doing here?"

37:00 I said, "I'm going to see him to get some tablets, keep the body in position." And he was a survivor off the Canberra. Ray Boxer. He used to have a mattress factory here in Coberg. Well, his father had it originally, and him and his brother took over. His brother was a bloody no hoper. He wanted to be on the grog all the time and didn't want anything else much to worry about. Ray bought him out, and started up a little place of his own, making

37:30 doonas and sleeping bags and things, the smaller stuff. About half a dozen of them could handle it and they sold the big factory, give his brother half the thing, "See you later." So that was some of the things you looked at, and you still see these blokes. We had a turnout down at Middle Park, down there, Tuesday, a week ago. You know, get together

38:00 and a few beers and a luncheon and such forth. And we've got another one coming up in October. At the end of next month, I'm going to Tasmania, because by going to Tasmania next month it's a celebration of the Shropshire turning over from Royal Navy to Australian Navy, on the 25th of June, 1943.

38:30 So the reunion's on the weekend. I'll be going over on the 26th, 27th, 28th. I'm going over on the new Princess or whatever you call it down there. Get some sea time in.

Why do you think reunions are important?

Well, it keeps the old camaraderie spirit together. You can talk about what you want to talk about and you can…

39:00 Someone will say, "He's a real bastard," or something like that. But you was all depending on one another. Things like this go on, and they still do. You see them at the reunion, and a bloke says, "I should have punched your bloody head in years ago. I'm too old do it now." "Yeah, fair enough." But no, we've been up to New South Wales

39:30 to Coffs Harbour and all of those places up there. There's another place up there, I can't remember that one. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse, their mob were up there. And we used to have our other meetings up there later on, At Albury. So the Melbourne blokes would come up and the Sydney blokes would go down. Time has taken over and the old body is disappearing

40:00 off the face of the earth. It's taking over. We've got to the stage where we only have eight in the committee, eight at the reunion. And Guy Griffiths was there and I said to Guy Griffiths, "Whether we like it or not, we've got to wind it up." So what money we had in hand, I think up there they had the traineeships. The traineeship Aubrey, for the Sea Cadets. And we turned all the money over to them, because we used to have a yearly trophy. The best one that handled everything for the year,

40:30 he or she got the trophy. And they got enough now, with the money we handed over, they've got enough now to carry on for about seven odd years.

Tape 4

00:30 If you could tell us again the story behind each of your tattoos.

Well. It's like the old story, the old navy bloke's always drunken ashore and he's got tattoos on him. Well, first of all, when I was in the Mediterranean I got the kangaroo and all that sort of stuff put on my arm there.

01:00 And that one there. The 'Anchor' and the 'manus' and my wife's name 'Vera' in there. The bloke said afterwards, "That's a bit strange. You never put a woman's name there in case she dies, sir, and you get someone else." She finished up being with me for sixty one years, so there it is. And after the Vampire was sunk, we got the old bat, which was the Vampire's little thing we had on board, to depict it, with the date there,

01:30 The 9th of the 4th, 1942 and the rising sun. A bloke said, "Christ, it was the rising sun mob that sunk you. So what's the difference?" I was thinking of the old ANZAC [Australian and New Zealand Army Corps] badge on the army cap, you see. Well righto, I said, "I've served two ways," so we get two seagulls put up the top there. They haven't flown very high those seagulls.

Could you just hold that a little bit higher just so…

02:00 we can get an idea what they look like?

Oh, yes, and that one there.

So the Mediterranean one….Whereabouts exactly did you get that done?

Alexandria. See, you're actually speaking when the ships first went over there, Malta was the naval base. Well, Malta there, and Gibraltar up the other end, the Atlantic end. But when Italy come into the war, well, from Malta to Italy, it was only about half an hour's flying time and

02:30 of course in the Valletta Harbour, it was a one way in and one way out harbour. They said, "Well, there's a few ships sunk there, so we'd better evacuate from there and take all the fleet base down to Alexandria."

Did you get those tatts [tattoos], your first ones, with some mates or did you go in by yourself?

Oh, no, I went in with everyone else. The chap there that was….Billy Middling. There was Billy Middling,

03:00 he was a stoker, and a bloke called Coco Anderson, he was a cook, they used to go off. And between the wrist there to the shoulder, on both arms, they had twenty-two tattoos. One would go ashore and get one on, and then the other would go ashore later and get two on, so he'd be one in front, whichever way they reckoned.

Was it always depicting something significant in the service times?

Oh, yes. Maybe sometimes,

03:30 but not always. They had the old tattoo artists there, like he had a thing on the wall there. And some of the things I've seen done on the older, permanent navy blokes, which we caught up with when we first went to sea, they had full rig sailing ships across the whole thing. And they were going back the early part, like the early '30s, the tattooing, even here in Melbourne,

04:00 but they got them done maybe on three or four different sittings. They'd go down and be in that much pain with it, and then they'd probably go to sea….with half a ship tattooed on there, and when they come back get a bit more done, and they sort of kept building on to it all the time. It was a navy thing, more so than what the army or the air force were. The air force, they were a funny lot. We used to call them, 'The Bloody Pansies.'

04:30 How come? What was your opinion of them generally? What was your opinion of the air force? Why did you call them 'Pansies'?

Oh, it's a very hard thing to say, because wherever we were and you needed aircraft support, they were never there. Well, because we never had them, number one was the thing, but we always blamed them. That was their fault, not ours.

05:00 Digressing a little bit, to a little description of Singapore. When Singapore fell, there was twenty-six Hurricane fighters still in boxes on the wharf in Singapore, in the dockyard there. They had never been taken, they'd never been put together, and that was it. And all they had was those what they called those old Brewster Buffalo aircraft. They were about on the same par as the original Wirraway they built here.

05:30 They had two machine guns synchronized through the propeller. That's what they sent out when the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk. We wirelessed for aircraft support, and we got one Brewster Buffalo. I don't know what one Brewster Buffalo was going to do, but he didn't stick around long. He just flew around, waggled his wings and went back home again. Discretion was the best part of valour, we always maintained. But no, as I say, my cousin, he was a flight engineer,

06:00 And I used to say to him, "Jeez, you could have joined a man's service like the navy or something like that?"

What was his answer to that? He said, "Well, one day we might be of help to you." He was working in the future, not in the present.

And what did you think of the army? You were involved in evacuating and rescuing them….

Well, the army. That's the reason why I joined the navy, because I couldn't see any sense in walking up and down through….Well, we didn't visualise jungle in those days,

06:30 But they were all in the Middle East. Sandy waste when you start to look along the coastline there. I thought to myself, "Christ, like living in the dirt,' and stuff like that. I'm not a washable fanatic, but at least a shower once a day or something like that's not bad, but those poor blokes….They used to have a water bottle, and out of that water bottle, which they were allowed to fill up once a day, I believe.

07:00 That was for drinking purposes, shaving purposes, and washing purposes. So you didn't get too much to wash, I can tell you that for sure. A bit around the face and the eyes and that was it. And sleeping out in the open there…Just another one, when we went over by troop ship to the Middle East, we went to Tewfik, that's at the top end of the Red Sea,

07:30 the bottom end of the Canal, and we had to go by train from there across to Alexandria, through Cairo and that. And when we got there it was in the afternoon…I suppose it would have had to have been…on the old temperature gauge, it would have to have been somewhere around about ninety degrees, late in the afternoon, around about the four o'clock mark when we were getting on the train, and all these army blokes, they've got their balaclavas on and their hat on the top,

08:00 and scarves around their necks, and their big heavy coats on and long pants, and I said to them, "Do you always get around like this?" And he said, "It's getting towards night time." I said. "What the bloody hell's that got to do with it? It's got to be nice and warm. It's still warm now." And we only had tropical rig on, shorts and shirts and singlets and our little round hats on our heads, no coats, no nothing, and we were getting into these old dog boxes to go from there over….

08:30 The bloke said, "Around about twelve o'clock tonight," he said, "I think you'll find out why we've got these coats on." We found out why, it was freezing cold. But they had to carry everything with them, where when we got on board, we had a locker, you put your gear in there, and you only had your work locker for your overalls and things like that, and your locker for your good stuff, your going ashore stuff. And so we learned the fundaments of war early, and why.

09:00 Plus the fact that they had to carry all their cooking utensils. These little pots that they had to stick over the fire. which we saw later with some of the boys when we got ashore and we moved inland a little bit to have a bit of a look around, there they were making a cup of tea. It was the easiest way of boiling a billy I've ever seen. What they used to do is put up a couple of iron rods in the ground and a bar across. Fill the billy up with water,

09:30 if they had the water tanker with them, that was enough tea for say, maybe, ten or twelve, and the crew of the tanks or a couple of tanks put together. What they used to do for that is make a circle, heap the sand up in the centre, go over and get the jerry can of petrol and tip the jerry can of petrol into the sand, put it back out of the way, strike a match and up comes the flame and boils the kettle, or boils the pot as the saying was.

10:00 I thought, 'They've got some bright ideas, some of these boys.'

Sounds like you had a bit of respect for the Australian Army?

Our people?

Yes.

Oh yes, because like…We knew, when we were called to try and evacuate them or something like that, they were in a desperate position. And they've got to sort of, how would you put it, get out or be killed, one of the two. Maybe lucky enough to be taken a Prisoner of War. Then, as I say,

10:30 like because, their backs to the wall, they had nowhere to go. They were more or less, every time…Well, of course, naturally, every time we were called in it was an evacuation to sea. But yes, they had a lot to do. Because, we were in a different position. We knew that what we were on, was a ship, and that ship was virtually an iron coffin. Because if you was going to get hit

11:00 it could get hit in the magazine and up goes the whole lot, or you could be hit and half the ship will disappear, or torpedo or anything like that, you see, and there was always that little bit left over. Now, our flight was entirely different to them, because if you didn't have boats to get into the water, and depending on where you were, whether you were in the Tropics or the cold weather, like say the North Atlantic or something like that, well…And especially when

11:30 you got the Russian convoys going up to Murmansk and the Archangel and things like that, well, they reckon the estimated life up there, if you wasn’t prepared for it, was about two and a half minutes in the water before you froze to death. It was that cold. But then, when you get down to the Tropics, you get the opposite. You've got the sharks and things like that looking at you, looking for a feed.

Did the fear of sinking play on your mind before your experience with the Vampire sinking? 12:00 That was never going to happen to us. Because, like, in the Mediterranean we'd been tied up with ships over there getting sunk and things like that, when was on convoy, and going alongside and getting them out, or pulling them up out of the water and things like that, it was never going to happen to us. But because, like, with some of the positions, the situations we'd been in, well, you could have said it could have happened to us. Like, with the way the Prince of Wales and the Repulse turned out. We could have been there,

12:30 we were just the sitting duck, we couldn't do nothing to defend ourselves, virtually. That one there and then also up at Endau, the night action we had up there. The Thanet got sunk and we got out, but once again, we were the lucky ones as the saying was. But you say, "Oh, and these other blokes," and you say, "Well, how do you go about it?" If you got back into harbour and you got ashore

13:00 and after a few beers in the canteen, you say, "Oh so and so. He wasn't a bad poor bastard, you know. It was a bit stiff getting knocked off the way he got knocked off." It's gone. It's the day-to-day living. As I said, you were paid a princely sum of five shillings, or eight shillings a day, to risk your life for someone else that was sitting around doing nothing.

Who did you think you were risking your life for? Who do you feel you were serving for?

13:30 Well, number one, you were actually…Well, no-one's ever that desperately, profoundly, notified to say that you're definitely, one hundred percent, Red, White and Blue, but you thought of your own country. What we were thinking of our own country for, I'm buggered if I know, at times, because it was that far away from it. It was so open, when you look at the whole of Australia, and the layout of Australia.

14:00 apart from Tasmania, we were on the bottom end of the world, as the saying is. Then when we was away, you didn't get a great deal of news, like the day's news…Not like sitting at home today, you're in your lounge and you see a war going on, people getting killed and things like this. But in those days, everything that came over the wireless, like news bulletins or anything like that, was always, at least,

14:30 a fortnight behind time, because the censorship used to hold them up. And if a ship got sunk, you didn't get that. The only two ships that my wife can tell you about was the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. She was in the picture theatre at Albert Park when the news came over that the two British battleships in Singapore had been sunk, and they give their names out, and of course, our ship's name got a mention. Oh, panic stations, on for good and proper. But then,

15:00 as I used to say to her, "Well, no news is good news." But to see the issue today is entirely different. People are in the pub having a drink and saying, "Look at that bloody lot. Bloody idiots." But we went away, I would say, duty I suppose to the country, that you sort of said, "We've got to go out and stem the tide before it gets here."

15:30 And once you were in the navy, what would motivate you to keep working or to keep going?

Survival. One word. Yeah, that's it. You went around your tasks, it's no different to getting in your car and going to work, the same as you people do, whatever trade you're in, off you toddle to work to work in the morning, and no-one knows whether you're going to work or not, or whether you're going to get home. Because the lass I rang up just a minute a go or so, the phone call before that,

16:00 the bloke was looking at her, and she works up at Keyser, and I said, "Where in the hell have you been?" She starts at half past eight, and there had been a big car smash at the end of her street there, and the ambulance and the fire brigade and everything was there, and no-one could move, they were all boxed in. See, now, this is a point of life….I've got a poem out there somewhere, it's called 'The Clock of Life.' It's wound up once on the day you're born and when it stops you're on your way to the cemetery.

16:30 You sort of work on that issue.

Did you believe in fate when you were serving?

Yeah, I suppose so, because you look at it and you say, well, "No news is good news," and if anything's going to happen, well, it's going to happen, and that's it. Whether you're going to be in that spot…As I said earlier…in the early part, when we were going up the creek there

17:00 when we was in the Mediterranean. There was Billy Middling, Spanner Freeman and myself there. Spanner Freedman, the bloke in centre of the two of us, he got hit in the left shoulder, a lump of shrapnel or whatever went down there, and he died later on when was on our way between Aden and Bombay. Now, it could have been any one of us three that could have got that lump of shrapnel. Well, the air raid was one, but we don't know whether it came up, or whether it was something from something else in the air,

17:30 like from gunfire or something like that that had gone up and come down, and bang, that was it. So you say to yourself, and…I would say the same of Ed Lecott, he was a warrant gunnery officer, he was standing there directing everything, and all of a sudden the bomb went off and one bit of shrapnel came out and got him and that was it, bang, finished. And you could have two or three or four blokes around him.

18:00 It's like, as I say, the Book Of Life, you don't know when your number's up. You come into the world with nothing and you go out with nothing, as the saying is. Especially in the navy because they drop you over the side when you're at sea.

After you experience an amazing survival in the sinking of the Vampire, was it hard to get back on a ship and do the routine and continue as normal?

No. Not really.

18:30 At that time, it would have been…'40, '41, I'd been in the navy thirteen months then. The old story is you've always got to put on a bit of a front for these young blokes that come straight from Flinders Naval Depot. And you say, "Oh, you don't want to worry about this, son." Like, we're were old timers, by that time. If you was on a ship for more than a week or two and another draft came on, you never told them how long you was on for, you see.

19:00 They got the impression you'd been there all your life, as the saying is. Well, the first ship we got on after the Vampire was sunk was the Vita, the hospital ship. Well, we reckoned that was a good one, because…how would you put it? It had all the markings of the Red Cross on, and all that sort of stuff. Okay, well, it was good, it got away there. Where the foul up came in later on, I don't know,

19:30 when the Centaur got sunk, she was the hospital ship, there was a lot more tied up with that than was ever published. When you look at all the names of the transport company names on them. When we went down there, it didn't seem to take any worry…But at that stage, we were that exhausted after being in the water for nearly nine hours. And then from there on, the next ship was the Dominion Monarch. It was a passenger boat, when we was coming from Colombo back home,

20:00 after this, to have leave and stuff like that. But then again, that worries you a bit, because you was on your own, there was no escort with you, and all she had was an old six-inch gun on the tail end of it. What that was going to do, I wouldn't have a clue. You might as well…We used to say to the boys, you'd say, "We'll get a bag of potatoes up there and throw them at them." But then, when we got in, like, you know, home

20:30 you know, you sort of said, "Well, I wonder what the next one's…" The next one, the next ship, as I say, was going to be the Canberra. By getting on to that one there, I wasn't very happy at all, there was a cruiser routine against an old destroyer routine. So were sort of hesitant when the draft came out, and you got that draft, but you was a bit relieved when you got to Brisbane to find out she sailed an hour beforehand,

21:00 and then of course, three weeks later she was sunk in the Solomons. There you go again, you see. She had a crew of about six hundred and eighty on board her. It could have been a few more, but then out of that there was eighty odd that got killed. And the majority of them blokes were in the same position as I'm in, boiler room or the engine room, because you've got two torpedoes in her. And of course, from there on, well, you just sort of played it by ear all the way.

21:30 So did you feel particularly vulnerable in the boiler room?

Well, yes, because the boiler rooms were virtually all situated in the mid-ship section of the ships. You'd have the boiler room, and just behind them is the engine rooms. And naturally when the torpedos fired, from what we learned of the old system from the torpedo boys on board…

22:00 When she fired, you fired at the bow of the ship, sort of thing, so by the time the torpedo travels through the water and the ship moves up, mid-ship should be the centre, where she's going to whack it. And when you look at the side, the steel plates aren't that big. You think to yourself, 'Oh, they'll take anything.' But then at times, armour plating machine gun bullets will go through that, too, so what's the…Where's your sense of not being destructible?

22:30 And what was your role in action stations? What would you have to do then?

Well, our action stations actually varied. Sometimes, later on, when I got onto the Shropshire, the senior….like you had usually a chief stoker, a stoker petty officer, a leading hand. Then in the four boilers

23:00 you had a stoker on each boiler. But you always had at least one senior stoker, and maybe even a couple of what they called juniors, and they had second-class stokers. You see, once you join up you do so much time like in your training on the parade ground and engineering shop, and then from there on when you go to sea…Now when you go to sea, you've got to be at least in the navy ten months with four months' sea time.

23:30 You could be in the navy ten months and have only two months' sea time, because your drafts have been mucked up and you haven't got here and you haven't got there. But then you've got to go over to get your four months sea time in to become a first class stoker, which was a pretty big thing because you got three shillings a day more money. But yeah, so….Like in there…And you look around yourself and you say "There's a crew there of seven blokes in a boiler room," and bang! See you later, and that's it.

24:00 No. It didn't sort of worry you, and that was there. But then if you weren't in there…The engine room branch took up what they called 'Fire and Repair Party,' working the hoses or whatever, steam hoses or….for electrical fires, the old foam jobs. That there, and then damage control, 24:30 which could be anything. Like if you get a bulkhead that's been hit on the other side, and you've got lumps of wood lying around, and they bang them up and put…cleats, not sort of cleats, you can't drive them through the steel. What you've got to do, you've got to shore them up and put your bars up and put your chocks underneath, belt them in underneath, to try and support the wall, so she's got a pressure of water against the other side, and you're holding the pressure up on this side, with the shoring up of the timber work….

25:00 Which had happened a couple of times, not in our navy, but within the American Navy….The Philadelphia, I think was one of them. The bow broke off it in a typhoon and they shored up all the bulkhead that was exposed to the sea, and what they did then, they put the ship in reverse, the engine and the boiler room hadn't been damaged, they put the ship…

25:30 Instead of going boring into the rough sea with the bow, or minus the bow, then they went backwards, and they went right back to America, or wherever they went to get repairs done, and they built a new bow on her.

Did you have some sort of drill or practise for action stations?

Oh, Christ yes. When we was in the Mediterranean, twice we had it. Abandon ship regulations.

26:00 We were steaming along, and the watch below stays below and half the crew will say, two thirds of the crew will say, "Righto, abandon ship stations. We'll take so and so and so and so, at a time." And then, right, and then they'll sort of heave two, and swing the...Because we only had three boats, the motorboat, the whaler and the skiff. The motorboat was only a run around thing, taking the officers ashore,

26:30 or picking up mail, stuff like that, you see. The whaler, she used to carry…She was a twenty seven foot long boat. It was calculated out with the set-up of it, she used to carry twenty-seven people, on the oars, and things like that. She could carry more than that, you could put more weight on. That was one man to a square foot. And then, of course, the little skiff, they used to use that for training with the sailors up yachting and all that sort of jazz.

27:00 What they called 'Seamanship Pass House.' You had those things there like that. You'd have to make certain all that's going. So then, if you wasn’t in those three departments, then you were in the ammunition supply rooms. Sending the shells up …Like on the old Vampire, The cordites were in wads, as the saying is.

27:30 And the routine of that is, the shell goes up first, goes into the gun and then the wads of cordite come up and then the firing cap put in, the breach is shut and off she goes. But one of the nights we had a night action there, no-one seems to know on B Gun what happened, but they were panicking…I suppose there was a bit of panicking there. Some bloke got out of turn. You've got to have a rhythm working all the time, from what I can gather.

28:00 I was never in that department. I was only the observer doing the hard work, at times. Anyway, what happened from there was, there was a miscue somewhere along the chain coming up, and there was no shell on it. And then the ram came in and pushed it in and then the cordite came in and pushed it…Of course, when they fired it, there was no shell came out, just a sheet of flame. There was some humorous things happened, at times, but apart from that there was no worries.

28:30 But it was always…a relief sort of thing, once action was completed and you broke off and went over the top and you went back to normal routine. It only seemed like a few minutes before, and it may have lasted half an hour. And you turn around and you think to yourself, 'Good Christ,' you know. Time was crawling at that time, but after it was over, you said, "It couldn't have been half an hour, it only felt like five minutes."

29:00 In the old days the ships were laid out differently. The fo’c’sle section was where all the sailors were. The quarterdeck, or the stern section, that's where the officers were, and in between there was the boiler room and engine room. But later on in life, after the war and things like that and they analysed all this,

29:30 at times when the stern section got hit, it wiped out a lot of the officers. It doesn't matter where you go, you've got to always have leadership. Although, in the navy at times, the old system used to be We Against Them. They were giving the orders and some of the orders we didn't like, but you couldn't say what you thought, because if you did you'd be on the charge for insubordination.

30:00 So you'd just sort of keep it up here and think, 'We'll get even with you somewhere along the line.' And of course….as we always used to say, "Between you and us, it's we against you." But without them, you couldn't run a ship, because their brainwork is a little bit different to ours. It was like everything else, that's why they put you through an education test, to see how good you are, what you can do and what you can't do.

30:30 But when you're coming up, say, for navigation, you've got to do your shooting of stars at the night time, and the sun. Learning how to use all your bizzo for where you're going to, and learning how to real all those charts…Well, the average stoker wouldn't know what the bloody hell it was all about. Like in the boiler room, as long as the sprayers were going 31:00 or the shovel was in your hand and you was putting coal in and you was making steam, you was moving, but anything else? No, it didn't affect you. It's just one of those things where you…Team work was the main thing, but as I say later on, when they reconstructed the shipping, part of the crew were divided down the ship, and the officers, half of them moved up forad, in different places up there.

31:30 Could you describe the boilers in the various ships to me? Perhaps the Vampire to start with… How you got it started, how you ran it, that sort of thing?

Well, the Vampire was oil burner, and the Shropshire was oil burners. They were virtually a stock standard type of a burner. The whole situation with them was they were what you called

32:00 a three-drum boiler. You had two lower drums and one top drum. The idea of that was, the water was in the bottom drums, it went up through what you called fire road tubes, which takes the first part of the oil...the fire going in, or the flame going out the oil burners, or if it's on a coal burner, the heat out of there generates…

32:30 Now the water is conveyed from the bottom drums and the top drums joined together, like both sides, and you had your….four rows of fire tube boilers, fire tube tubes, it's a bit confusing that one, then you've got at the next bank there will be about twelve water tubes. The water is down below, that's heated, and it starts to boil.

33:00 Now when it gets up to the top drum, the top drum is only half full of water, because the steam has got to rise off that and it goes up through your valves over to your engine room. Now there are two types of steam, as the saying is, one was saturated steam, or wet steam, and the other one was super heated steam. That was the dangerous one of the two, because what actually happens with that,

33:30 on the saturated steam, the steam would go over to your turbines and things like that, but you had to watch that in case you get a rush of water because it'll rip the blades off the turbines. But with the super heated steam, that used to come out to the tubes on the front of the boiler, which used to re-dry the steam out before it went over the engine room. Now that was that deadly, that if you had a slight leak there,

34:00 and if you passed your finger across that leak like that, whatever part of the finger from there is gone, it just burns straight through you, it's that hot. The pressure on a saturated steam boiler, you'd be steaming at two hundred and fifty pound, but on the super heated steam boiler, you'd be up to six hundred and fifty pound per square inch. So you can show how deadly it was. Of course if you had a fault, it'd just gone bang and she blows.

34:30 Of course, in the end, when you were working in the engine room, after they had all left the boiler room, you had to be draining…let off what they call the steam cocks. That's any accumulation of water in that section, you let that go until it comes out of the steam run and then you shut her off again. Tat kept it dry and keep working on there.

35:00 The turbines on the Vampire, they had two twenty thousand horsepower turbines. You can imagine that with your motorcar or something like that running around in front of you pulling you along. But then that was two boilers. But when you got onto the eight-inch cruisers you had eight boilers.

A lot more people in the boiler room, isn't it?

Well that's right. You've got ...each boiler room you've got to have at least one stoker on each boiler,

35:30 so you've got eight for a start. Then you've got the stoker for the officer in charge of the fan controls, and you've got the leading hands, so you've got another four there. So there's twelve on the watch. That's only there. But up top, you've got what you call the fan controls, and you've got two stokers up there, because up there you've got to have forced draft for an oil burner, because the air comes in from the big fans up top, pushed down into the boiler room, and you're working

36:00 under at times in there, up to six pounds per inch of air pushed into the boiler room. The reason being is that when it comes down into the boiler room, it goes into the boilers and that boiler and keeps the flame inside. It's like oxygen supply to make the oil in the fire to get maximum efficiency out of your burners. But if those fans,

36:30 if they broke down, or to get into the boiler room you've got to come through an airlock. You've got a in the bottom and you got a light at the top. And first of all, you look into the glass and you see there's no one in there and the light is on inside. So you open the door and get in. Once you've gone in, you've got to shut that door properly and lock it down. And then you can open the door when you go down the ladder, you can open the door to go in the boiler room, then shut the door straightaway after you.

37:00 Now that doesn't break the pressure of air in the boiler room, but if for some freak of a misunderstanding, you didn't shut that top door and you came down there, and you forced the bottom door open, well the air would rush back up there and take it away from the air that was going into the boiler room, and you get what you call a back flash, And that was pretty deadly if you were standing in front of where the fire came out.

37:30 Apart from that, it was pretty good with it. Did that happen in your experience? Any black flashes?

Oh, I can't remember it happening. It may have happened….at action stations. If a ship got hit, and the fans were going and the boiler's….but when it got to that stage, you didn't know much about it. On the front of each boiler she used to carry ten sprayers.

38:00 And at times, like you would never use the ten unless you were an emergency, pushing along….You mainly had four to six to eight burning. Cruising normally, you'd only had four on. Like if you had two boilers going, you might have the third boiler in B boiler room, you'd have her on stand-by. But then, the same with the cruisers, you'd have four boilers in one boiler room going,

38:30 but in the other boiler room you'd have four boilers on standby. So that in a matter of five minutes, bang, you were up to full steam…Well, you were up to full, and it was only a matter of the five minutes to get all the steam valves open to get all the steam over the engine room, when the turbines demand more fuel, as the saying is, to push them along. When you look at the Shroppy, she was a ten thousand ton cruiser… well, it went up to twelve, because of all the extra stuff on her.

39:00 And she would push along, in her heyday at thirty-two knots. Ten thousand tons.

That's a lot of power.

Yeah.

Tape 5

00:30 I was wondering how you got along with the officers and superiors?

It was all right…How would you put it? The engine room branch never had a great deal of bearing with them at times because….on the destroyers you virtually only had a senior engineer, which is normally only a lieutenant,

01:00 maybe you might have had a warrant engineer officer or something like that. They were, unfortunately, in those days….it was a queer set up when you look at their routine because an officer goes in and goes to college, things like that, it depends…War time's a bit different when they come in, but officers used to come off what we used to call 'snotties' or mid-shipmen.

01:30 But they…could go into the navy at the age of thirteen, and things like that in those days. And they did all their schooling….four years in college, maybe Jervis Bay or whatever college was running down at Flinders Naval Depot, things like that. They had a mongrel life, as the saying is, because you used to have old chiefs, chief petty officers over them that had been given a hard time by the officers beforehand, so they said, "We'll teach you buggers,

02:00 what you're going to do and what you're not going to do," sort of thing. Routine, even if you blink your eyes, it was punishable by death or other such punishment, hereafter mentionable….at least according to the book that was. Yeah, so, no, when they came to sea they usually came off as a sub-lieutenant. Some of them….You hear some of the older officers talk,

02:30 in these days, "He was a bloody idiot." That was their impression of a fellow officer, just starting off… One of the humorous things I had involved with me was, when I was on Shropshire was up at Scapa Flow and I used to be the jollyboat driver. And what had happened was, I'd been out in the jollyboat. I'd taken; I think it was John Collins, our captain. I'd taken him over to the HMS Howe,

03:00 the battleship, and coming back, I'd come back in alongside, and when the boats were in the water you'd tie up what you called 'the boom.' That's the bar coming out of the side of the thing there, and you've got your rope tied up and you've got a ladder. So you've got to climb up this ladder, it's swinging out in mid-air until you get onto the boom. Then you go into the boom and across, and then up the side of the ship was steel rung ladders, fixture on the side of the ship. And it was a cold wet morning, this morning, and of course,

03:30 there was no coat on, I had me uniform on, a pair of runners on, because you never used to wear in there because you couldn't get them off in a hurry, they're too heavy, you see. Anyway, I'm about half way up the steel ladder when my hand slips, and my foot slips and down I went into the cold North Sea business, in Scapa Flow. And there were some ERAs working on the motorboat there,

04:00 and I swam over where they were and got up. I said, "Run us round to the quarterdeck gangway." I get around there and I get up out of the boat onto the gangway, go up…Because, naturally, the ships have got a port and starboard side, left and right hand sides. One side is for the officers and one side is for the sailors. And of course, we'd come in and that was the closest side, the boom was out on the port side. Come in there and of course,

04:30 up I walk, up the ladder to the…quarterdeck. Now the quarterdeck is a sacred ground. You've got to do the right thing there, you're supposed to come on board and salute yourself when you got on board. Now I've got my hat in hand and it was full of water, so I tipped it out a couple of times. This sub lieutenant there by the name of Thrum….You still see it today, as I saw it years again in 1943. He said,

05:00 "Stoker, what are you doing coming on the quarter deck without your hat on your head?" You could be stark bollocking naked, but you was dressed as long as you had your hat on your head. I don't know why, but that's what the routine was. I said, "It's full of water." "I don't give a damn what he says. Put it on your head!" Down comes the water. He says, "What do you mean by breaking ship?" I said, "I didn't break ship, sir." I said, "I got out the jollyboat and I was getting up the steel ladder there

05:30 and my foot slipped and bang, that was it, I was on my way down to the water." "I'm going to run you in for attempting to break ship." "OK." So I couldn't argue with him, because discretion is the best part of valour. Once again, shut up. So he said, "Turn forad! Dismiss! On the double!" Off the quarterdeck. You could walk then. So I went straight down to the engineers' cabin, there was lieutenant commander…

06:00 I can't think of his first name. We used to call him Peanut Dine. He used to love eating peanuts. So he got that name, Peanut Dine. He said, "Come in." I said, "I can't sir. I'm sopping wet." He said, "The steward will wipe it up. What's your problem?" So I told him. He said, "You've got to be joking." I said, "Nope." He says, "Right." He gets his cap off the peg in his cabin, the engineers’ cabin.

06:30 He put his hat on his head and he's dressed, you see. "Right, follow me!" Up on the quarterdeck. We get on the quarterdeck, standing there to attention…And Dine was only a two and a half ringer against a sub lieutenant. He don't say sub lieutenant, he says, "Thrum! What the bloody hell's going on with you? You run my rating here in for breaking ship. Now your own common sense

07:00 that no bugger would want to jump in this water when there's nowhere to go anyway." And he says, "You'll withdraw that out of the daily orders, immediately." "But, sir, the rules and regulations…" He said, "The rules and regulations are in the book. Your brain tells you whether you go by that or your own book." And I thought, 'Oh, that poor bugger getting dressed down.' If you were in trouble with this bloke, you'll get the guts kicked out of you.

07:30 But anyway, as I said, it got withdrawn, and Dine said, "All right, off you go." I went down and got changed, and all that sort of jazz. But these are the way things happened. But after a while that bloke turned out all right, I had no trouble with him. Because I was, more or less, what they called 'Upper Deck Stoker.' Instead of being down in the boiler room, I got too cunning for that, being in the boiler room, all the time. So I saw the chief stoker and I got the job, as the guard's going around,

08:00 on board, he had all these motorboats….Like on board you had all the motorboats and you had these different places on the upper deck, like toggles and things like that on funnels, with the expansion grip wires coming out. Other places had to be greased and stuff like that and….the engines in the motorboats had to be turned over by hand when you were at sea, to stop condensing of the salt air getting into them, and things like that, you see.

08:30 If you just worked it nicely, you could start round about eight o'clock in the morning, and start doing your rounds around the upper deck, and you'd be right then till ten o'clock for a bit of a cup of tea, somewhere along the line. You'd know where to go. Either in the blacksmith's funnel, they'd have a little shop in there, with bricks and things like this...a bit of hammering and stuff, not much, and then the brick locker flat with the blokes always hiding in that bloody joint

09:00 with a pot on the boil. And then you go round and keep on going. And then come lunchtime, you have your lunch. And then by four o'clock in the afternoon you were ready to.…Bill would say, "Oh, you've done a terrible day's work. You'd better knock off now." Some of those things, like wiping engines down and cleaning up the capsum engines and things like…down on the main deck that was. The winches were up the top,

09:30 when they used to pull the anchor chains in, used to come in through the capsum engine, but that was always down one deck below to keep the weather off, and you had to keep that clean because the sailors were living around that, because it was on the mess deck. Different things like that….You learnt after a while how to look intelligent doing nothing, and you always had your box with you,

10:00 something like carpenters have. You had in there an oil can, a tin of grease, some rag and…a couple of spanners, things like that. At times you might be caught, an officer would say, you'd be standing there and you'd say, "Now what am I going to do next?" You'd put the box down, and you've got to be quick on the mark. All of a sudden, a voice might say to you,

10:30 "Stoker! What are you doing?" You'd look around; there'd be an officer there. "Well it's like this, sir. I've just doing the so and so and so and so…" Lies would come that easy to you after a while, you would say, "I've just finished doing this and...." I got to be known as 'The Just Man,' just going to do it or just done it, you see? Whatever the case may be. And then you'd say, "Now I'm going down there to do so and so."

11:00 Or just get some of these other things fixed up or greased or whatever… "Right then, keep moving and don't make a mess on the upper deck," because on the cruisers they used to have the wooden deck, and the poor old seaman used to what they called 'Holy Stone,' or 'Plummy Stone,' whatever they called it, with the old scrub, scrub, make it look white…I don't know what the bloody hell for. As I'd say, "If you make it white, those blokes up in the aeroplane could see it better that way." But no, they were fastidious buggers, they were, 11:30 because the captain used to walk around there, and that was their part of the ship, and if they were going to get lumbered, the captain would grab them, and then there was always a bit of a dressing down. It was mainly discipline to show the junior officers that the senior officers can get dressed down the same as they can. But apart from that there…Peel, when I was on the Vampire

12:00 in Singapore actually, when we were leaving with the Repulse to come home to show the flag on the 5th of December, 1941. And he said to me, "Caesar? What are you doing?" Because he was with us in the Med. So I knew him because I was a motorboat driver. He also had a pet name, he had a bit of a skin… And I don't know whether…Peel, like, fair enough,

12:30 with a bit of a dark complexion, he was always known as the Black Prince. The Black Prince in the days of King Alfred, or whatever his name was, he was the mongrel bloke in the army. And he said to me, "Look! I've got washing ashore. Can you race up to the main gates up there, and the place on the other side of the road," he said, "as we're leaving shortly and I want to get my dhobi [washing] back."

13:00 And I said, "I'd better go and see Alfie Wrench, and let him know I'm going." "I'll do that. You get going because we don't know how long we've got." In the dockyard there, there's no taxis, it's all walking. By the time you half jog, getting up the gateway, it's a fair way up. I finished up getting his laundry, getting it back and getting on board all right. But I had no trouble with him. And even the navigation officer

13:30 or any of those at all…Moran was the unknown quantity, because he was the new skipper who'd come on board. He was the commander, whereas we'd only had Johnny Walsh, he was the lieutenant commander. And he was a down to earth sort of bloke. Like, he'd been in the Mediterranean on the ship for about eighteen months, so he knew the routine, whereas Moran had come off the Canberra to us, given his first command.

14:00 But, unfortunately, he turned out pretty disastrous. He got killed when she got sunk. And along the line, Walsh was sent to Darwin for a bit of a refresher course, and he went from the Darwin to the Canberra and he was on the Canberra when it got sunk and he lost the sight of his left eye. But that's the luck of the draw.

And did you get along well with the people in the boiler room or the crew at large?

Oh yeah,

14:30 not only in the boiler rooms, you see, but once you left the boiler room you all lived in the same...What the called the mess deck. Now you look at the situation of the ship…we'll come back to the Vampire. For that size you had...I think she was round about twenty-seven, twenty eight foot wide, like on the beam, and she'd taper down the waterline, naturally.

15:00 But on that mess deck there, your living conditions…there was twenty-seven stokers, like stokers and leading stokers, lived in that one little thing. It would be around about twenty seven foot wide, at its widest point, and roughly around about thirty-five or forty foot long. But in the top end they'd have what they call the hammock bin,

15:30 that’s when you slept in your hammock. They had no bunks or beds in those days. The hammocks had to be pulled down, lashed up and stuck in the hammock bin. There was….low lockers across the front of that. There was something else, I can't remember off hand what that was there. But something used to come down from the upper deck in that….It might have been one of the barbettes from the guns, from A Gun. A Gun was on the flat deck, and B Gun was mounted up behind it, or coming

16:00 in behind the stokers' mess deck. That's what that was, and that was there. Now twenty-seven blokes in there, well, you don't have much room to move around in. And you've only got two tables to eat off, they're running from aft to forad on the port side, and the same on the starboard side. Now roughly you could sit round about fourteen to each table, that gives you plenty of room. But at sea,

16:30 the whole lot were never sitting down together, because you had part of them in the boiler room or the engine room, or whatever the case may be. But in harbour, OK, you were all sitting down together, mainly. It used to be a bit of a bug bare, because mealtimes coincided with when you were coming off watch. Now, unless you had a mate on board, or we used to call them a 'Scran Offo,'

17:00 you referred to your food as Scran. And what actually happened from there was you had to turn around…Like if you were on the morning watch, that's four o'clock in the morning am until eight o'clock, and then the relief that comes in for the first, that's eight o' clock in the morning until midday, that's the first watch. Now, if you had a bloke that was in between watches on the mess deck,

17:30 when the tucker was dished out, it would come down to the mess deck, there were twenty eight stokers on the stokers mess deck, it didn't matter what part of the ship you were in, the whole lot came down in the one issue and you had to...the mess deck…or Dodger, as we used to call him, he used to dish the tucker out. But sometimes they'd be lashing it up there and they'd forget that the boiler room crew was down there and the engine room crew was down the other end…And

18:00 so there could be four of youse in the engine room, and two of youse in the boiler room, that's six, you've got to keep six tuckers, six amounts of food for you. If it was all gone when you got there, it was stiff bloody luck because you missed out, and you'd have to get what was left around the joint. But then if a bloke, your Scran Offo as the saying is, he'd take it up on a plate and stick it in the galley for you to keep it warm and you'd go down there…Now your reciprocating duty was to make certain

18:30 that whatever shift what you was on, you got his tucker and done the same thing, you see. Yeah. but apart from that, living conditions were pretty good. But the humorous part of that was, the ship used to run on oil, but those B&W class shift in the galley used to run on coal. And at times in the harbour, we had the coal shift for the galley

19:00 and we had a stove…it was maybe four foot wide, by about, oh, four by four, square there, and you had to cook meals there for roughly around about…There was a hundred and thirty-four in the crew, I'd say you'd whip off about ten for the officers' quarters. They had their own little galley down there. Cook used to look after them down there. So you're looking at about a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and thirty blokes had to be fed

19:30 out of this galley. There was only about…four cooks. They had their hands full. But we had no refrigeration on board, not like in the days of refrigeration when you could go to sea, like on the cruisers, we had a cool and cold room. All the frozen stuff would be in the cold room and the cool room was whatever you was partly thawing out.

20:00 And you could stay at sea and feed….Oh, peace time in those days used to be round about seven hundred on an eight-inch cruiser. During war time, they got up to the stage where they could have had eleven hundred on board. But you could still feed those blokes meat and stuff like that for six months. But on ours, all we had was a bit of a refrigerator…Like, if you looked at some of those old fashioned antiquated ones in a shop,

20:30 like opened the doors up like this and stick some meat in here and a bit of butter or something like that. But, as I say, if we was going to sea for six days, as your maximum time, you had to be on economical steam, the amount of oil fuel you could carry. But from there on, well, a truck would pull up from the vitelline stores and they'd give you six days supply of bread,

21:00 for each mess, they'd bring it down to your mess deck, right, that's yours, that, that and that. They would bring meat on board for six days, put it in that fridge, eggs or vegetables or something like that, and you knew bloody well they weren't going to be any good to you. So what you used to have to do, was make a real glutton of yourself in the first three days, because after the first three days, the bread you had on the mess deck was nice,

21:30 get into it early, nice and fresh. It was fresh in the first two days, but on the third day it was getting a off now, a bit dry…So from then on, you'd cut a slice of bread off, and you see these little green things appearing in there, the mould, mildew, or whatever you call it. The damp air getting in, see. That was the third day. Well then, when the fourth day was coming up, it was getting better still. And then the fifth day,

22:00 you bloody threw it over the side, there was too much in it. And the same with the meat. If you didn't get into that meat quickly, and live like kings, the old refrigerator wouldn't carry it on. They used to run on only 110 amps, like in the ship, but that didn't make any difference. But they had no insulation and stuff like that to keep it, to any great degree. Because these old things were built, roughly,

22:30 as I say, around about the 1920s and stuff like that. They were good things when they were new, but they were getting bloody old in 1940 and '41. So then the veggies, they were the same, the salt air used to get to them so they'd go rotten, so you'd throw them over the side. So you'd start living on tinned potatoes, tinned tomatoes, tinned beans, tinned carrots, bully beef, salmon or whatever was in the tins… Or sardines, whatever was in the tins.

23:00 Your sixth day must have been pretty slim?

Pardon?

Your sixth day must have been pretty hungry? Not much left.

Oh, well, let me put it this way to you. They had a thing…All the services had the same idea. If you don't over feed the troops, the stomach shrinks, and the stomach doesn't need so much to fill it up you see, so you learn to live with it.

23:30 And that's why, hence, you became like….you see those big bronze blokes like that, about that wide, because they used to shrink with them. Some of them adapted to it and some didn't. But no, it was just one of those things. But you never...Then they had what they called a repayment messing on those ships. So seeing you was doing without on certain things,

24:00 they used….The make up of your pay, when you were on board, which is separate, only pay once every three months, on this repayment messing. they used to give you….Some ships used to give nine pence a day and some used to get one and thruppence a day. In those days that was fifteen cents, or nine cents…eight cents actually. And that would be paid there. Now the mess deck dodger's duty was he had to handle this money,

24:30 because when it was paid out, and he had to eke it out…But when we was in harbour we would live a little bit better than when we was at sea. Now he'd go ashore, and was gifted with that woman's instinct of buying vegetables or this that and the other. Something that was going to be eaten, not something that was going to be thrown away. And a few little odds and ends, like a good bit of butter, not tinned butter, and all that sort of stuff. And he'd work on that line.

25:00 Yeah. You sort of supplement yourself. Well then, of course, when you got leave, which was when we was in harbour, the ships company was virtually on the lay out, at sea….The seamen were in two watches, and the stokers were in three watches. The stokers used to work four on and eight off. The seaman used to work four on and four off. Now they were what you called 'steam watches.'

25:30 When you got into harbour, you went into three watches for leave. So there was one third of the ship's company had to be on board at all times. You could take the ship to see, and in case of emergency, you could bring it back in, and all that sort of stuff. The other two watches, whether they all went ashore was another thing. Depending on how much money you had in your pocket, that was the thing.

26:00 Right, you would go on shore and have a few beers or something like that…But you would always line up somewhere where you could have steak and eggs or something like that, which you didn't get on board. Fried eggs, I'm talking about. Because boiled eggs, they were easy, you just throw them all in the pot and let them boil. The book says they've got to boil...Once they start boiling, they've got to boil them for three to five minutes. And if make them hard enough when they hit the deck they won't splatter everywhere, they'll just stop in their shells.

26:30 Well, those sort of things would go off, well then, that saved the money in this repayment messing caper. Then of course, towards the end, whatever money was left over, like on that three months, say, round figures, there might have been twenty-seven pound left, which there probably wasn't, but that would be a pound each to the twenty-seven stokers on the mess deck,

27:00 or you'd divide it down and you go ashore and have a few more beers. No that was it. When you got on the cruisers...Well, they had everything on board. They had the bakeries on board. You had the big ovens and all that sort of stuff. One the Shropshire, as I say, she had a total of nearly twelve hundred, eleven hundred odd something blokes on board. That was taking the army, navy and air force…The Australian Army, Air Force and the American Navy,

27:30 Army and Air Force, so they could work with the conjunction…What their ships knew…..Their routine when they used to transmit stuff around to them, where we didn't know half the stuff, and we wasn't going to learn it, anyway. Now on board there, instead of having individual messing, like everywhere, they built on what they called the cafeteria mess deck, after the same size as the American Navy. And they used to have

28:00 an aluminium tray separated into various compartments. So that when you went up in a line to get your…Before the cooks, they had these bain-maries, and all that fitted in The only thing you had a bowl for was Weeties and something like, or soup and stuff like that, and a cup actually. Got no saucer though. Off you'd go, you'd pick up your cutlery as you went through,

28:30 come down and right…In those days, it's not the ones they run today. There's two or three or four menus to pick from. The hot and cold water sailors, we call them today. And of course, there was a staple set up, maybe some 'red lead,' that was tomatoes, on toast. And the old cooks, they had their work cut out.

29:00 They'd be chopping up bread and putting them in these toasters and that, and would come out banging them out left, right and centre. Some would be cooked, dome would be half cooked, but at least you got a bit. Then there could be boiled eggs or fried eggs, or something like that. On different days, different meals. And then you went on from there. Dinner time? You had plenty to eat, there was no worries. And then of course….Not as much on the destroyers but on the bigger ships, the officer of the day, it was his duty,

29:30 which had gone back from diddy ought splash to the days when the sailing ships, when the officers had to go down and find out if there was any complaints about the food. But no bugger was bloody game to complain that the meat was crook or something like that, you just ate it and that was it. But on the mess deck, they were generally right. They'd come down and see you there, and if you had a complaint you told them. And that went back to the chief cook, and the chief cook was pulled over the coals for it.

30:00 "Rectify this, rectify that." I know that at one stage in the game, when was in Chatham, at the dockyard area there, and they were doing the cooking…And some bloke got the twig on it that the meat…Our meat used to come over, and it was supposed to go into the special areas, like the refrigeration part for us, to get the meat from…But somewhere along the line, those Pommy officers had got into the stage where,

30:30 "What's going on here? They've got good meat, we're eating horse meat." So they were doing the switch. They were putting the horsemeat into their refrigerator and the good meat, the beef and the lamb and all that, into their refrigerator. And of course, when I'm coming out, one bloke on the mess deck, he said, "Officer? I think there's something wrong with this meat, sir. It's rough and it's tough. It might have come from the bush…" And he said, "Well, I reckon it's horse meat." Well, that started the ball rolling.

31:00 They checked it out and sure enough it was. And there was a big stink over it, and we got our meat back on track. These are the things that….Like, you know, tradition used to be carried on. I don't know whether they still do it like that today, but nevertheless it's...It was an education. Some of the things were good they done in the navy and some were bloody terrible. But no, apart from that everything else worked out al right with them.

And how about shore leave? What did you get up to then?

31:30 What did we get up to on shore leave? Well, goodness gracious me, now…Do you want the censored one or the uncensored one?

I think the uncensored one.

Well the first thing you did when you went ashore, on the boats or such, you'd be anchored out; a motorboat would take you in. Well, the first place you went to was...Well, before you went ashore, you were all mustered on the upper deck for inspection to see you looked the part and all that. And the bloke would say,

32:00 "These places are out of bounds. So and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so." You'd bear that in mind, yes, you'd put that in the computer up here. Now the first thing you'd do was go and have a few beers, then you'd get talking, "I wonder why these were out of bounds? We better go and check them out." And you found out they were dens of iniquity where the ladies were, and all that sort of stuff. And this one here was a bit a pretty low-life, low-level nightclub where you didn't go in there,

32:30 otherwise you'd get your bloody throat cut for thruppence, as the saying is. Something else would be something else, like if you wanted to buy souvenirs to send over, they were the touch merchants. So you'd go somewhere where you could do a bit of bartering or something like that, yeah and…But leave, during wartime, was only a privilege, as the saying is. But then on the other side, you never got leave much,

33:00 like when you was overseas...all night leave, but you could get leave up until eleven o'clock or twelve o'clock. So you went off at four o'clock in the afternoon and the officers reckoned that was enough for any silly sailor to go ashore and get half whacked and get into a blue and come back, and get back on board. If he's lucky enough, he'd get back on twelve o' clock. Then of course, you had to be a certain point to pick up the boat to go back to your boat.

33:30 Sometimes, in the Mediterranean, we didn't run our own liberty boats. They used to have these big...I forget what they used to call them, pinnaces I think they used to call them. They would take anything up to about sixty odd blokes, I'd say. Now they were pretty big sort of barges. They used to come around to all the ships. They'd know when the leave jiggers was on, so they'd know when to come in and pick them up and take them to the one,

34:00 point them in the dock area where they were going to go off, and where you had to be back to pick that one up at a certain time. And that was it. And of course, in the Med there was always a few humorous remarks, like coming back of a night time, some of the silly sailors would be half whacked, like…And the officer of the watch would look into the boats and sing out, "Is there any more ratings for so and so?" "Nah."

34:30 And of course the Australians would send up some derogatory remark and he'd say, "Silence in the boat!" "You Pommy so and so!" Well, he'd have to run the whole lot in. There was one bloke coming back to ship one night there, and we get along this light cruiser, the [HMS] Flamingo, and he says, "Anymore ratings in that boat down there for the Flamingo?" He said, “No, I've got some bloody water WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s down here." Well that was the Waterhen, so the Waterhen was a water WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK .

35:00 "Silence in the boat! If you don't, you'll all be on a charge!" "All right, coxswain, get the thing away quickly." Sailors were funny animals; they never had enough time to think before they shut up before they got into trouble. And when they got into trouble they were still crook on it.

Did you get into trouble on shore much?

Oh, occasionally, you'd get into a blue or something like that.

35:30 But then of course, different places had different things. The shore patrols were run by Red Caps. They were army, British Army, they were the policemen's identification. So you got out of the way of them. They were real buggers, they were. They'd belt the shit out of you, as the saying is. But sometimes we'd get picked,

36:00 like on board ship, for the duty watch. They might put a petty officer and three ratings ashore as well, the duty watch. They had nothing, but sometimes you might have had a pair of gaiters on the bottom end of your pants. And around here, you might have a jigger that had NP, Naval Patrol, and that's all you had, on a webbing belt around your waist. No baton,

36:30 not like the Yankee Army or their blokes, or like the Red Caps. They would either carry a bayonet or a waddy to smash a few heads on the way through. Yeah, things like that. But we had a bit of a run in one night over there when we was in Singapore. A local street, I think they might have called it Bugis Street now, I think. It used to be called Lavender Street, in those days.

37:00 There was four of us stokers wandering around the joint, and the old madam of the joint said, "Come inside sailors, and have a glass of wine." That was the start off. We went in and had a glass of wine and then, "We better be going now, we've got to get back to the ship. Then of course, a three story building and you've got to get down the stairs on the outside. The ladies were a bit crook, they weren't getting any business. And of course,

37:30 our boys were saying, "Oh, go inside and hide your head in the pillow." Of course the next minute, out comes this girl with this bucket and threw it all over the top of us. It was what they call a cleaning doovy, the Condies Crystals in the water. We had white uniforms on, and by the time we got back to the ship, they'd look at our uniform, and the Condies Crystal sort of got into the suit, so you couldn't wash it out, so you had to throw it away and buy another one. But we had some humorous things there, at times.

38:00 A lot of things I can't explain on camera, I suppose. But the Sister Street was another one. That was in Alexandria. They started off at the front end, high money up this end, and a couple of ackers down the bottom end…

Ackers?

They were piastas. They were piastres.

38:30 But the money wise was another thing, going ashore. We used to learn how much was in a pound. You had piastres and millens. There was a thousand millens to a pound and a hundred piastres to a pound. And you had to work in between them. The same as Indian rupees and cents, a hundred cents to a rupee there.

39:00 But Ceylon was only….I forget how many cents to a rupee down there. The same of values but there wasn't so many there. Singapore was the same, the same currency as we've got here. A hundred cents to the dollar, the Singapore dollar. But you soon learnt, learnt the hard way. I only got touched once, as the saying is. Oh, life is what you made it.

39:30 But no, all in all, if you used your own nous and didn't get into trouble you were all right. But the sailors always liked to do a little bit extra.

Tape 6

00:30 It's running now.

…up there, you go into these places…A bit more pleasant looking place, not rough as guts. Then if you was running short of money, Sister Street, as you went down, the variations of what was going to be presented to you was getting a bit less in decor in the house and in the room and all that sort of stuff,

01:00 until you got down the bottom end, down the cheap stuff, well you only get what you pay for. That was in Alex….I can't remember the name in Bombay there, but we went out for a taxi ride. And they have a...It's a very unfortunate thing, you know, in life, but these women, they have their good times until they get to a certain point and then they go down the hill, but they can never get away from the trade. In Bombay, the real down to earth…

01:30 There could be anything wrong with them, deformed and…They start off in the good stuff, and then they get down to what they call 'The Cages.' They're supervised, but if you want to go in there and take a chance, well, that's your bloody problem, no-one else's. But they'd be next door, a couple of bloody cents, or rupees…down there.

02:00 But it was bloody terrible to see them. When you look at it, prostitution's the oldest bloody profession in the world, the saying is…It was going on in the days when the world first started, I think.

Could you tell us about your experience with Captain Collins on the Shropshire?

Yes, well, the old John like…

02:30 He was a stickler for navy routine. And also, he was a hard man, but he was a just man, from what I can gather…I had a lot to do with him because, as I say, being jollyboat driver, that was the idea of that. It was a fast transport across the harbour for officers only. Sometimes you might get someone who's got dispatches to take ashore, chief petty officers or someone like that,

03:00 and you whack him in the boat and you rip him off. But at sea, he was definitely a seaman. Like his old ship, Sydney, what happened to her would never have taken place if John was on board. Because, I can remember at one stage, when I was on Shropshire, when we come home….We're getting a bit ahead of ourselves….If he picked something up on radar 03:30 and had to be challenged, he'd go in…I think the Shropshire had about a thirty thousand yard range on her guns, like not actually maximum, but getting towards maximum. That's when he'd challenge the ship. If she didn't come to order with what recognition he wanted, the next challenge was a shot across the bow. "We're not mucking around with you blokes. Now smarten up or else." Now if they didn't come up with something there,

04:00 the next range was into you. Unfortunately, with Sydney it didn't work that way. Generally speaking, he run a pretty tight ship, as the saying is. The officers were on the bloody ball all the time. They were looking over their shoulder to see where John was, and he just had that happy knack of being able to keep the ship running. A couple of incidents that took place

04:30 when we was in England, and he dealt pretty hardly with it…Well, he didn't deal too hardly with it, he dealt with it according to the book. One was, we had a chap…still can't work out whether he woke up or something like that, coming back from London, when you come into Chatham, you come in the Tube, on the train. Whether he woke up and….whether he anticipated the train was at the station or what it was,

05:00 because the light's in the tunnel, he opened the door and walked out, the train was still going. He died, unfortunately. But he put on a pretty good turn, like, the autopsy took place, there wasn't anything they could come up with. Anyway, he arranged the funeral. The chap was buried at Chatham cemetery. That was one, disastrous. But then the next one that came up, was a place

05:30 …there was four seaman had been ashore, and there's like there's Chatham and the next one out, a little village out there…When I say a little village, it's like going from here to Brunswick, it was a place called Gillingham. But in around there, the port defences...There was part of it all, heavy mesh wire up and things like that. 'Do Not Come In Here,' a minefield had been laid in there.

06:00 on vacant ground sort of thing, you know. Anyway, these blokes coming back from the ship, mucking around like, and one of them got on to something there and threw his cap over the fence. As I said to you before, you can be stark bollocking naked, as long as you've got your cap on your head you can go onboard the ship and salute the flag. The bloke panicked. He said,

06:30 "I can't go on board the ship without my hat, it's like I'm undressed!" So what they did, they bunked him over the big wire fence to get his hat. Of course, naturally, he got his hat all right, but as he walked away, bang, up went the landmine and he got killed. Now, in the morning when they came back on board….I will stand correcting, but I don't really know what the charge was

07:00 or what happened when they came on board. But I don't think they reported…or according to what I can remember John saying when he lined us up on the quarterdeck…I can't remember actually saying that they reported him missing or what had happened, when they got on board the ship. But evidently, it's like all sailors, they can't keep their bloody mouth shut. Someone said, "Where's so and so?"

07:30 "Oh, shit, that's right. He got blown up in the land mine coming back from Gillingham last night." Then, of course, that filters through the ship. Then eventually he's been posted as missing...well, not missing, absent without leave, AWOL [absent without leave] is what the army blokes used to say, or adrift is what we used to say. Anyway, a few pointers went out and someone

08:00 dropped the word here and there, and the police ashore sort of picked up the body sort of thing. They knew where the mines were, they'd been in, picked the body up, and of course, we never had HMAS Shropshire. When I was on Vampire, we had the names of the ships on. But then they bought…the law was, all those tallies had to be taken off our hat and just HMAS put on. So no one knew actually what ship was in port if you came ashore.

08:30 Well anyway, they got back from the shore patrol and the police came down to the ship and they'd evidently picked up his passport. I've got it inside there still. And it had his photo in it, the identification photo in the book. We had a book when we was in England, like identification. And they come back on board and that's when the ball starts rolling.

09:00 And of course the whole thing got wound up and wound up, and when they got presented to John he looked at it and said, "My God!" Anyway, so he said…He declared lower deck, so every bloke that wasn't on watch up to the quarterdeck to hear what is going to go on. So gets on top of one of the gun turrets, he addresses them and he says...Well, the words he referred to, without swearing or anything, that. "A pack of flaming idiots

09:30 that were returning back to the ship…." And what they did, and he told the whole story to the ship's company. And he says now, "There will be a funeral tomorrow. We will give him full naval honours," and such forth, which was. Anyway, from there on he said, "Right, now the three ratings who were ashore with him will report to the quarterdeck when all of the ship's company is dismissed." And they got finished up, lashed up, twenty-eight days cells

10:00 for what they did. Now there's another one there….A couple of them got ashore and ran out of money. And on the counters in the pub, you've probably seen them, donations for the bloody Red Cross or unmarried mums…no, that's wrong, that didn't happen in those days, you didn't know about that. But you know, all those sort of things like, and anyway they finished up...

10:30 These two blokes there, they were a bit short of bloody dough so they knocked this bloody thing off. When they went outside and they busted it open, this wooden box, there was the princely sum of a penny halfpenny, one penny and one halfpenny. The halfpenny wouldn't have been worth bugger all in today's money, the penny would have been worth one cent. So anyway, they got caught up with. So he said, "The severity of the case as you look at..."

11:00 He said, "I will not have these men on board my ship." So he drafted them all, and dishonourable discharge on arriving in Australia. That was John's metering out of punishment. Whatever fitted the case, that was it. And of course, anyway, from there on, well…But at sea, he was a man who knew his job. Navy officers are queer creatures.

11:30 They join the navy to be an officer and they learn everything, but then they get to the stage where they specialize in one branch, sort of thing. With John, I think he specialised in gunnery. Someone else might specialise in navigation. Someone else, nowadays, might specialise in radar and all this, things like that. And they're more outstanding in that, because they're fitted for that,

12:00 more so than what they are for sea time duties. But they still do their sea time duties, like navigation and things like that. As I said, with him, he was a master of tactics. He believed, if he picked something up….Like on Shropshire, we had radar to assist, because she had twenty-one sets of radar on her. And of course,

12:30 to use the main set, which you'd never do, you used to have to break WT silence, Wireless Telegraphy silence, and they'd come down for that. They would give your position away. But you had a local set, the next set under that, your first local set, would give you two hundred and fifty mile range without breaking WT silence. And you could pick up anything around the circle, around you, for two and fifty mile. And that's why she was so good when she attacked up into the

13:00 American Navy, because she could pick up aircraft and box them up. I don't know much about it, I've seen it, but I wouldn't know nothing about it. I know it's like an image coming through, in those days, not like television, but it came through in a pattern on the screen, and the screen gave you the...How many of, say it was aircraft. roughly how many aircraft was in the first fifty miles until it sorted itself out a bit better. Then it could work out there,

13:30 then it could tell you what they were, bombers or fighters or what they were. They could pick them all out by their sizes. Because they had the brains trust, they knew all these mathematical equations. And yeah, that was it, you see. And he'd pick up a ship….At that stage, we'd lamp him early, we got out of the stage where it was come to visual. Then he would say, "Right, thirty thousand yards," or whatever the case may be.

14:00 He would then signal them to identify themselves. But he would never ever expose the whole side of the ship to them. He was always the bow in, the nose was so she made the smallest target they were looking at. And you had the four eight inch guns, the two turrets, looking at her. Then he would give them the option from there, and if they didn't give within a certain time…The officer of the watch's job was

14:30 was to know what the recognition for the day was, from the moment he stepped on the bridge. It should have been handed out from officer to officer. On the Dedipmar, on the Kormoran, be buggerising around between that and the other, and he played Bennett for a sucker, and he fell for it, and that was it. But John, no, if you didn't… come up with, mate he'd give you the one or the two warnings, and the third warning was the shot across the bow.

15:00 "Smarten up or else. The next one's going to hit you." And that was it. But generally speaking, I was away with him up in the Philippines in 1974. The Shropshire mob went back to the Philippines for the 30th anniversary of the landing in the Philippines in '44.

15:30 Anyway, we were talking in there and he did admit…which he didn't do to many people...We was talking in there, and I said, "Well, give us an overall impression. What was your life actually like on board the Shropshire as the captain of the ship?" He said, "To tell you quite honestly, very lonely."

16:00 At sea, any captain anyway, is in what you call your day cabin at sea on the bridge. Pardon me….You've got your sea cabin on the bridge. In harbour you've got your day cabin down the quarterdeck end. But you virtually, at times, eat alone, you live alone and do anything in your book work alone.

16:30 Except you've got a steward to look after you. Ring the bell and, "Get a glass of pink gin," or something like that, if you're a bit thirsty. But it was only occasionally, like on the bigger ships, they ate with the whole officers company. And then, I will stand corrected on this, but from what I can gather, there was an officer appointed

17:00 as officer of the mess, like captain of the mess. Now he had the privilege of inviting you in, or you in, or you in, for a meal. No one else could do it, unless they went through him to ask certain permission…It might be a relation who came on board, someone to have dinner with you. Now the captain, that was Collins, had to be invited in to that mess

17:30 by the officer, the senior officer that was left. Queer routines they had in the navy, I can tell you that for sure. Georgie Wellington...He lives over in Pascoe Vale, he was in….I can't think of his name, the Royal Navy bloke that came out at the tail end. He took over the Shropshire because he was an eight-inch cruiser man, in peacetime.

18:00 But he was a different bloke all together. He wasn't so 'Pusser,' as we used to call them. Like Pusser's issue and Pusser's Navy did this, and all that. But he….worked a different routine. A quiet bloke, a short bloke, humorous….A little bit of a diversion. When John was a fairly...He wasn't a great tall,

18:30 like a muscle-ly looking bloke. He was a bloke that looked the part, but he had little skinny legs, that was his only trouble, and when he was in shorts they showed up pretty well, in the tropical rig. But his other bloke, he was that short, the railing around the bridge there, he could just barely see over the top. I believe one of the ship's carpenters, ship right as they called them, one day there,

19:00 on the bridge appeared two boxes. One on the port side, one of the starboard side. And when he came up on the bridge, he passed the remark, "What are those two boxes doing on my bridge?" That put a sort of a question up, as to how to explain this.

19:30 And they said, "Well sir, it was like this. Someone reckoned you were having trouble looking over the railing on the wing of the bridge here. So what they did, to save you stretching yourself up like that, was they put that little bit of elevation there. Only us on the bridge will know your standing on the box, but no-one outside will know, and they will think you're much taller than what you are." "Bloody good idea! Bloody good idea!" he says, and that was it. And those boxes stopped on the bridge.

20:00 What we were talking about...Well we'll have a look up. That's the Porthole. That is the name of the ship. So that was a different, but John, he had his own set-ups around him. As I say, on the bridge, he had everything in his hands and he turned around and he got things done

20:30 in his own way. But as I say, he was a pretty fair sort of a man….What would you like next?

We're not actually going to be able to talk….

That's one of the Shropshire.

21:00 We're not actually going to be able to talk to you while you turn the pages…

Oh, just a minute until I get his name. It's so frustrating. Ah, Nichols, Captain Nichols, yeah, RN [Royal Navy ].

Oh sure.

I'll show you that after. It's all the names of the people who served on the Shropshire. Nichols. And later on during peace time,

21:30 after we had been out of the navy, he was out here with his...He had lost his wife and he came out here and we had a naval reunion. And we were sitting down, and they were going to call on Captain Nichols to say a few words in response to the speech of the ship and all that sort of thing, the toast of the ship. And of course, some bright spark,

22:00 when he stood up there, they said, "Just a minute, sir, just a minute. You've missed out on one thing. Two ratings went to support him either side and they brought a chair out, stood him on the chair, so he could speak. And that's when he said he appreciated the bloke that thought about putting the two boxes on the wing of the bridge. But John himself, he was a man who studied…The navy was his life.

22:30 His wife, I can't think of her name, she went to the Philippines with us. She was a qualified sister, a medical sister. And during the war, she worked in the hospitals and things like that. They lived in Sydney, in their own place.

You mentioned before with the jollyboat, you dealt with dispatches. Is that how you got mail in to the men?

At times, yes. Like the jollyboat was a...

23:00 It was a name that was given to a type of rowing boat. It only took, say, Lord Nelson to shore on his own, and some of these other admirals like Beattie, and all of those blokes from England…Privacy. They had no one to worry them. They might have displaces with them and things like that, so they couldn't be sort of mucked around with. But on the jollyboat, it was just like a fast motorboat. Small,

23:30 only be around about twelve to thirteen foot long and not very wide. It never had a very big motor in it, only a 410 converted over for salt water. You, as the driver, you were sitting up like a normal motorcar, with a steering wheel in your hand, like an ordinary motorcar. And your gear lever was down the side here. You only had two gears. The head and the stern,

24:00 you accelerator, and that's all you had in it, virtually. But I was a bit of a dead loss. I was the only one who…When we was in Chatham, the jollyboat was down in the base, as we called it. Like from behind where the Shroppy was in dry dock. And they were looking for there...The sailors used to muck, they were always in bloody trouble with the engine, for some reason or other, so they decided to put the stokers on. 24:30 Well, now the experiences I'd had with the jollyboat was up in Brisbane after the Canberra was sunk. I was there, because her motorboat had been left ashore, over at Kangaroo Point workshop for repairs, and of course, naturally, she was there and didn't have a driver. And I couldn't drive her from a bar of soap, because I'd only been driving the old one lunger off the Vampire, "Oh yeah. I'll be able to handle this." Yeah, until they found out they performed. But I didn't do it in front of anyone. I did all my practise up around the bend in the river.

25:00 drove up there and that. And I found out there was a different routine all together to use. When you was approaching the ship on the gangway, you had to be careful what you were doing, because otherwise, you would lose points very quickly with the officers. Now instead of going the same way, looking at the ship alongside of this way, and then going back…..No, once you shut the motor down, you lost all steerage way in her.

25:30 She'd make up her mind which way she was going. So the only way you could get in with the jollyboat was to come in at an angle of around about forty-five, fifty degrees to the gangway. Run in it, full bore, more or less, until you got within about four or five feet from her, then you'd ram your…Get ahold of your gear lever, pull that back straight through into reverse, scream here in on full bore, turn your wheel around

26:00 so the rudder is turning in, then take your foot off the accelerator, knock the gear out of there and grab the gangway, and you're alongside. You pray to Christ it works like that every time. I only had one bad foul. We had bloody rough weather up in Scapa Flow there, but she bunged up against the side. But the officer of the day said, "Fair enough. It could have been worse. You could have sunk the bloody thing." So that was the praise you got from an officer, at times. But no.

26:30 They were around about in harbour, there, and you got the signal from shore that the mail was coming down to the dock or the wharf, or say in Sydney, Man O War steps was a routine place. You go there and you whip the jollyboat off, you pick up the bags of mail, they throw them in the back where the officers normally stand, get back to the ship, do the same routine with them,

27:00 and then you have a working party at the bottom end of the gangway, and they'd unload the mailbags on, and such forth, or you might have had to take stuff ashore to someone over there, or take one person ashore or something like that. And of course, off the record, sometimes it was used for transporting the rabbits. Now when you hear that word rabbit,

27:30 you think of that little thing that runs along the ground and you eat him. No, rabbits were…The Rabbits were the undetected criminal stuff in the navy. Like, you know, you was knocking something off and you wanted to get ashore to someone who was going to wait for you over the wharf, and he was going to grab it and whip it off and take it somewhere else. Or cigarettes and things like that, which were pretty hard to get ashore. They were classified as Rabbits if you was knocking them off and sending them on. Sometimes it might be

28:00 a couple of dozen eggs for someone. You'd met up with someone ashore, "Oh, yeah, I'll get you a couple of dozen eggs, no worries in the world." Dishonest stuff, you know. Punishable again by death, or other such punishment, hereafter mentioned in KR [King's Rules] and IA [?]. That was in the old days, now it's QR. King's Rules and QRs Queens Rules. So they've just changed that over the top.

28:30 Of course, the old cook on the Shropshire, he had a café in Sydney. Iziard's Café, I don't know if it's still around, but anyway, it used to be up George Street. And occasionally some very suspicious bloody stuff went ashore. Not so much in the jollyboat, but in the motorboat you could hide it better there. Slip it over the side of a night time, in the dark, maybe something for his café. Maybe a few

29:00 eggs or some bacon, a side of bacon, or whatever the case may be. But the driver who went up there, he always went up with the (UNCLEAR) and got himself a feed, steak and eggs, or whatever the case may be. And for some strange reason he never got an account given to him. Strange things like that went on there, the same as the army and the air force. We can't all be perfect.

How often would you get mail in on the boat?

Every time you went to port, every time you went to port, yeah.

29:30 Of course, nowadays, it's a different routine. You've got your helicopters racing back from ship to ship, and when the mail comes in you're at sea. But you only got it, in my time, when the ship was in harbour.

How did that work? Say your wife wanted to send you a letter, did she know what port you were...?

No, she didn't. What we used to do, anyone writing or wanting to send you a parcel would put your name, your rating and your name and all that,

30:00 HMAS Vampire or HMAS Shropshire, care of the GPO [General Post Office]. It didn't matter what post office you did. And, of course, naturally the GPO, and the censorship area there, they knew where you were serving, and then they would pack it into the bags that was going to go to that area. And then it got to the post offices in those places, then they'd sort it out, ship-wise.

30:30 Maybe, there were six ships working the one area, and they'd sort it out into separate ships, and then when you come in to pick your mail up, well, you got your own bag of mail. Sometimes on the Shroppy there was a big bag of mail, a couple of big bags of mail. And there was a special bloke called…he was the fleet postman. It was a very prized job it was, too, because you didn't do much else apart from sorting mail. That was after the officers had been through it and did all the censorship

31:00 and cutting out bits here, there and everywhere. You're putting something, saying, "Well, he's not going to read every letter that goes in that thing before it goes ashore." But then, at the same time, you can be unlucky to get caught, too. And then you' get cells….You can get up to the cells for disclosing where you were. You might have a stoppage of leave for twenty eight days, or thirty days stoppage of leave or extra duties as well, on top of that, and things like that.

31:30 Once again it was them against us, or us against them. Then we was up at Bougainville, some bright sailor got an idea like, "Oh, Mum, by the way tell Jody," or George or Charlie or whatever the name was, "How's that Bougainville tree going in the back yard?" See, like, you know, little things they used to slip in, but a couple of them got caught on those sort of things.

32:00 And if you were a rating, that was like a leading hand or a petty officer, well you did your rating, and that was a drop in pay, anyway, for a start.

Did you look forward to those letters?

Yeah. But then you had to answer the bloody things, see. And it's not always…just like the day...I've got a stack of letters out there that I have got to get around to doing something…But things haven't been

32:30 progressing along as they should have been in the last month or so….always something to deter you. Turn outs somewhere, out with the kids, or doing something else. And I find that you've got to sit down to write a letter, you've got to be doing a little bit of thinking of what you are going to write. Not like some people, they can waffle off, like writing a book or something like that, you see. And of course, anyway, as I say, that part has dropped back.

33:00 But then I worked out after my wife passed away, she was always the birthday girl writer upper, and the Christmas card writer upper, so I worked out a system last Christmas that everyone that was in Melbourne got a phone call. A miserable bugger I am. That only cost me twenty-five cents against the forty five cent stamp, plus buying the card, plus writing the envelope and all of that.

33:30 The ones who got a card were the interstaters or oversea-ers. Of course, now a lot of that stuff there has…not been neglected. But birthdays, I've got to write everything up on the calendar. And this interview caper...I had that booked in for last week on me calendar, I had to find that out when the girl sent me the letter down and told me the dates were the 14th and the 15th and all that.

34:00 Did you get time on ship to write letters?

Yeah, you had what you called the Make and Mend time. Every Wednesday afternoon was Make and Mend. But then when you were off watch, you had time to write your letters then.

And did you receive parcels in the mail at all?

Oh yeah, bloody stuff at times, cakes and stuff like that. But sometimes, the women weren't up with their cooking, it was mouldy by the time you got it. It might take two months before it catches up with you.

34:30 But then they worked out the system. You put a bit of rum or something like that in it to preserve it, and get the sailors full at the same time. You couldn't sent us anything because we never had any...We only had a set uniform. They couldn't send us a gaudy shirt of anything like that. And then of course Comforts Fund used to supply us with a lot of the necessities, like toothpaste and all that sort of stuff.

35:00 a comb to comb your hair with…And they used to feed us these rotten cigarettes which made me that bloody crook in this latter part of life. But that was it. I never smoked before I went in the navy, so I've got to blame them for all my troubles. But they look after me. I'm on a disability pension. People say, "Jeez, you're on a disability pension." I say, "Yeah, but you can only see the outside. Get inside and it's a bit different."

35:30 But apart from that….I think life's been pretty good to me.

Was your navy life pretty good to you do you think?

Well, I never had that much trouble in it. I adapted pretty well to it. A lot of them didn't. The ones we found out that who had the trouble was the mummy's boys. Mummy used to wet-nurse them and all that sort of thing, but us blokes that had been pretty rugged up the bush, and all that sort of thing, learned to do for yourself.

36:00 That is washing, ironing and all that. And of course, with that washing and ironing caper, when you were short of money, on the Shroppy there were three of us, Stanton, Curtain and myself, we used to run what we called the ‘Dhobian Firm,' washing overalls….We used to take them to the upper deck boiler room, or the upper deck overalls, wash them, we had a washing machine in the stoker's mess there, we were in charge of the water and soap and stuff like that, and we used to hang them up in the boiler room. Within one hour after you washed them you got them back again. 36:30 They dried out there, because you wouldn't be able to hang them on the upper deck. We had lines rigged up in the boiler room and that was alright. Of course, the old chief stoker's overalls, do them for nothing, so we had the privilege of doing the boiler room. You had to use your brains a bit. And a shelling was a shilling in those days. Apart from that, as I said, once you learn to adapt you were in business.

Tape 7

00:30 I would like to ask you a little bit more about what you were telling us previously regarding your father, and how you were living with him when you grew up. That is sort of unusual.

Well it was unfortunate, one of those things. They had separations and all those sort of things in those days. I was only, what, about three years of age or something. There were three sisters and myself,

01:00 and the mother decided to wonder off with someone else And Dad said, "Well, righto." And so the family broke up from down at Queenscliff. Dad and I stayed at Queenscliff because he was...After the Geelong, the Queenscliff football…the fishermen's team football got rubbed out over the grand final. They won the grand final, won the fight and got rubbed out. And they got fined five pound each player.

01:30 Well, out of that team there were Jocker Todd, Noel Rason...I can't think of the other bloke's name. Anyway, there were about four of them and Dad went up to Geelong. And Dad mostly played football with the Second Eighteens. I think it was around about 1926, he busted his ankle up and he couldn't play.

02:00 But he was also pretty keen on the football, and he did the massage work and rubbing down and strapping ankles and all that sort of stuff. And then we shifted from Queenscliff up to Melbourne, and then as I say, the girls had all gone with aunties and that, and then of course we lived at East Prahran at the time. He was with Prahran football club. He was there for three years

02:30 with them, and then went to St Kilda Football Club. That's when they used to play down at the old oval at St Kilda Junction. And anyway...

And he worked full time for the football clubs?

No, only part time. The training periods, and Saturday afternoons.

Part time, OK.

But he was employed by Fitzroy City Council as a gardener in Fitzroy Garden area, the areas out around the joint there. And anyway, as I say,

03:00 he finished up, he had eight years he had there, and then he went to South Melbourne and when he was at South Melbourne….How would you put it? South Melbourne had a team of eighteen champions, but not a champion eighteen. They never won a premiership. Some of the names, when you start to read them off, they're really big names. And Bobby Pratt especially came out to Coburg here, and kicked a hundred and fifty one goals in one year.

03:30 He had Coburg here. But then, of course, after that, when Dad got up to the stage of retiring from the parks and gardens, he still worked with South Melbourne for a while, but then he used to do a lot of work around the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He got employed by the Melbourne Cricket Ground looking after the oval, and the grass and all that sort of stuff, and all the little nick knacks around the joint there. And that's where his last phase of life was spent there.

04:00 From there on…As I say, he passed away at the age of seventy-eight and that's about twenty-five, nearly thirty years ago. And of course, what knocked the old boy off was what nearly killed me at times, was those dirty, filthy, rotten cigarettes. But anyway, that was that. Of course, you don't realise this, but anybody that's been to the Melbourne Cricket Ground that has…

04:30 How would you put it…That how would you put it, has been down the dungeons, underneath there, there's a continuous cold air floats around the joint, because it's all…you can get in a vehicle here and you can drive completely round underneath all those stands and come back to the same place where you got away from. Because all the loading and unloading is done from down below there. And of course from there on….It was a cold drafty joint and he always had a cough,

05:00 cough with this chest trouble, emphysema, things like that, and it took him out, unfortunately.

Your father served in the First World War, he was in Gallipoli. Can you tell me a little bit about where he served, other locations…

Well, no, not really. I've got papers out there and I look at the things….And I say, I know he was there, but he wasn't there on the main part. He was in the reinforcements that went in,

05:30 and then he was there when he evacuated Gallipoli, and then they all went to England and then they went over to France, I don't know what part of France it would be. But if I know my old man, it'd be somewhere where the women are, anyway. It'd be all right. But then….the 10/22nd, I think, is the battalion he was in. Don't ask me what they did.

06:00 They were probably cooks or bottle washers or something like that. They don't know much about the army set up at all. But I know they went back to England, the battalion went back there around about 1916, because it was in 1916 when the two Australian football teams put on the exhibition match over there. They put it on the Red Cross charity and I think...I've got the book up there with his name in there and the write up of the book, and some of the old footballers in there,

06:30 the names are still vivid in your mind today. And I think in that day, they raised somewhere around about nearly three hundred pounds, a lot of money over there. It was just going around and...There was no turnstiles, no grandstands, no nothing. But they believe, when you look at the write up of it…As I say, they raised this money and it was nearly three hundred pound, and silver coin,

07:00 and they were in penny-halfpennies, and farthings were used in those days. And I was a bit stiff in a way, myself, because when I was over there in 1943, we were to play a return match to the Airforce. They had already played one match beforehand, the Australian Airforce. They were stationed down from Sheerness, down from Chatham. Now we got down there, and we were all ready to go out

07:30 and over come an air raid and buggered the thing up. Otherwise, I would have got the…Guinness Book of Records for father and son, two football matches, two wars. But it wasn't to be. That was it. But no, then he came home. He got discharged. he got a bit crook and that. He got discharged around about 1917, before the war ended actually,

08:00 and back to Queenscliff. And then he worked from there in the Port Lonsdale lighthouse. It was different things, was work, trying to...I presume coming out of the Services in those days, it was like trying to find a job after you've been away for… I think he was in the army for seven hundred and fifty days. They went by days. The navy went by years. I don't know which was the greater, but when you look at seven hundred and fifty days it is nearly three years, anyway.

08:30 Yeah, from there on he finished up working down the fort at Queenscliff for some time until we shifted from there up to Melbourne, up here, and then, of course, he got into the football world and things like that world up here. He had the parks and gardens. And also during that time, he had time with the Melbourne Fire Brigade. And that's where he got his knowledge of the fire brigade, because then

09:00 when he was in the army, he was down at Queenscliff in the fort, teaching unarmed combat to troops down there. And then Heidelberg Hospital…which, incidentally, before I joined the navy, I worked on the foundation over there. Jennings was the builder in those days, and it was all pick and shovel work, not all these mechanical diggers. And that was in 1939,

09:30 getting up towards before war broke out. And of course, what actually happened over there, when the Heidelberg Hospital opened commissioned, they needed someone with fire fighting experience. Well, Dad had had time with the Melbourne Fire Brigade, he put in for the application. And when he was down at Queenscliff doing unarmed combat, he was only a corporal. But when he got to the job over there…

10:00 He started off as a sergeant and he finished up as a star sergeant over there. He had an old four-by four Blitz wagon, like a Chev truck, but the ladder or two on top would never reach the first floor, I don't reckon, if you extended it out. He had to go around checking all the fire fighting equipment, like the hoses and things like that, and the auxiliary little hand pieces, like for fire inside the hospital,

10:30 and foam and all that sort of stuff. And he also used to look after the canteen over there. He had to go up to Broadmeadows to get stuff for his job, and while he was there he would get all the supplies up there to take back to the sergeant's mess and the canteen over there. And if anyone's ever passing the Heidelberg Hospital, in Bell Street, after you go over Waterdale Road, heading west, on your right hand side there are little old garages there

11:00 where the fire fighting unit used to be housed, it's still there. And next door to that is a little workshop and next door to that was my father's cabin. And it's still sitting there. There's a bit of history there. Heidelberg Hospital now isn't what it used to be. It's like us poor blokes in Victoria, we haven't got a military hospital we can call our own. We're just thrown in with the mob at Austin Hospital. But all the other states have all got their…even to a private hospital,

11:30 they've got their own hospital. And Mr Kennett [Victorian Premier] most certainly didn't have ours, and unfortunately that was it.

You said something quite interesting before. That both your grandfather and your father served in the Home Defence. Your grandfather in the First World War, while his son was away at war, and your father in the Second World War while you were away at war. Do you want to explain about that?

Well, my grandfather first came out to Australia in August, 1888.

12:00 He was a musician, he come from Italy, of course, like all us wogs. He came out here with the Italian Philharmonic Orchestra, and they were under contract to play in all capital cities in Australia and New Zealand, and Tasmania, which was a separate identify on his papers, for twelve months. I think they were brought out by some group

12:30 by the name of Sorenson's in Sydney. And so anyway that was OK. Then, of course, when the kids, my father, my uncle, my aunty, they were born in Sydney…the grandmother came out later. So they were all born in Sydney, and of course when the contract all ran out up there…He was also a tailor by trade, and so anyway, when they shifted,

13:00 they came from Sydney to Melbourne, they settled down at Queenscliff. The grandfather opened up a bit of a tailors shop down there and did other odds and sods. He played in the band or whatever they do with those sort of things. And Dad, after the war, the First World War, he was in different other jobs. And during the tail end of their time down there, my grandfather joined what they...Well he couldn't join the Army, because in those days…

13:30 I don't know how the nationalities or taking out papers happened. But anyway, he was allowed to join the home guard, and he spent eighteen months in the home guard, walking around knocking on doors and seeing if all the little old ladies are tucked in bed, I suppose. But no, Queenscliff was a pretty deadly area, because it was on one side of the heads of the bay, and Sorrento's on the other side. Which, incidentally, the first shot in the war that was fired...

14:00 The first Australian shot that was fired in 1939 was from Sorrento. Some German ship was trying to get out of the joint there, and they had the light across the heads and fired a shot and, "Turn around and get back, or otherwise." And that was it. And later on, as I say, the grandfather died….I just forget what year it was now, it was about thirty odd years ago.

14:30 When Dad joined the B grade or home defence in the Second World War after serving in the First World War…I joined the navy in October, 1940, and he went in the Army part in December, 1940. I come out in January, 1946, and he come out in January, 1947. But anyway, yeah, so that was it.

15:00 He was the home guard that time, a reversal of set up, you see. But anyhow, that's how that goes there.

You mentioned that you married before you went overseas.

That's right. 1941.

'41, yeah. What was it like being a married fellow in the service compared to being a single fellow? Can you compare that?

Very restricted, very restricted. You had your limits and bounds, I suppose, like we weren't all Christians, but you know…

15:30 Number one, you didn't have as much money, because you were making your allotment out to the wife. In those days, the princely sum was five shillings a day, of which you had to make an allotment out to your wife of three shillings a day, and then the government paid so much more on top. She used to get about four pounds four, somewhere there or around about, per fortnight.

16:00 One lot subsidized by the other, and I used to get two shillings a day. So that means to say, you had to do some something to get an extra quid, as the saying is in those days. So that was quite easy done, being an old loaner and that up the bush, I did me own washing and ironing and that sort of stuff. Well, I found that some of these mummy's boys who joined the navy, didn't even know how to hang a pair of socks up, let alone wash them.

16:30 So you registered yourself with the first lieutenant on board, you wanted to start a bit of a washing firm up on board, or the Dhobian Firm, as we used to call it. And he goes through the list of things there...shirts, that sort of thing. Well, to wash a pair of socks and hang them on a line for some bloke, that was a penny…one cent I should say.

17:00 Then a shirt, like a going ashore shirt, that was thruppence. To wash a full naval uniform and press it was one shilling and sixpence. It was pretty good, you know. I wish those prices were still here today at the dry cleaners. Yeah, those sorts of things give you a few more bob, race ashore, have a beer or two, maybe buy something to send home at times. Which was pretty lucky, because practically all the stuff that got home, that I sent….except the day the ship was sunk…All the stuff we brought

17:30 when we thought we were coming home, which we didn't get home, we brought all that stuff, and that got bloody sunk with the ship. Of course, in those days, tea was very short in Australia…this was 1942. And we got all this, Broken Orange Pekoes, I think they called the tea in those places in Ceylon there. We had that down there, and I reckoned when the ship went down, there must have been enough brew took place down in the ASDIC room, where everything was stashed away in the stoker's mess deck,

18:00 underneath there, that all went with it, the clothes and that…And of course, the wife was expecting the first nipper, which was Barbara, and she was born on the 13th of May, and I had been around buying little dresses and things like that, coming home, and then, bang, everything went by the wayside.

Oh, that must have been terrible.

I know where it is. It's down there in the water there 18:30 off the Batticaloa Light there, off the Ceylon coast. I don't think it would be worth much now, though. But no, that was just one of those things.

You and your wife must have missed one another?

Oh yeah. We didn't have an argument for that long. As one bloke recently said, he was in the navy fifteen years and had a real happy life. No worries, no nothing. But now, all of a sudden, this new system they've got in the navy today, at least you've got to go home on leave.

19:00 And he said, "Jeez, that's when all the rows started." So he said, "I come back on board ship again." So whether that was hell, I don't know, but anyway, as I say…Leave was a privilege, as I say, and I was lucky because I was married on the Saturday, and was on draft on the Sunday and that was sort of…a bit of a kick in the backside, as the saying is. Then again, we were only away

19:30 about six months anyway, from the time we went over to the Mediterranean and came to Singapore, and waited our time out there before the ship was handed over, and then came home. I was home for about twenty-eight days leave, I think it was. And then we had to go down to Flinders Naval Depot, and from there, well, that was in August and then we…

20:00 The drafts came out, and when I didn't get back to the ship, I went there, and I said to the Vera, I said, “Well, the drafts have come out. I'm going to put in to go back to the Vampire." So not only that, but there was eight other blokes in the same boat as myself, and we all put our names down and that's it….The lieutenant commander down there, Bluey Thompson, he tried to tell us that the navy was doing us a favour

20:30 by giving us another ship for experience. We said, "We'd rather go back to one we know, than one we don't know." Of course, hence we did. The final words as we walked out of the engineers office of Flinders, he said, "You could be sorry you made this decision." We didn't realize the ship was going to get sunk. So that was it. But no, we never had that much trouble. We had a few blues, but who doesn't have a few blues? It keeps you on your toes.

21:00 But after, unfortunately, she's passed away now, twelve months ago. We had sixty one years and a couple of months. And as I've always maintained to her, all I've done for all my bloody time is kept another man's daughter.

What did she say to that?

She'd say, "You got more treatment off me than what you got off your mother before they separated." "Oh, shut up."

21:30 Do you think navy men are different to the men in the other services?

Oh, well, I'd put it this way to you, I think they are to a degree because they lived and operated in a tight community. In the army, they were spread around here, there and everywhere. Tents here, tents there,

22:00 a hole in the ground somewhere else and a barracks somewhere else. The air force are much the same, a few tents and things like that, in a lot of them, but they were a bit bloody wet-nursed. They had cabins and buildings to live in with a roof over their head and that. They were a bit different to the army, permanently I'm talking about, because they went to a squadron and that's where they stopped, until the squadron moved. But the army could be here today, and over the hill tomorrow and somewhere else the next day, you see.

22:30 But the navy was different because wherever you went, your house went with you. And that is one of the reasons why I joined the navy, because I didn't have to carry a pack around on my back. At least you got a bed…Well, we didn't have a bed, we had a hammock to sleep in in those days. And at least you got a couple of good cooked feeds a day. It all depends how you were, how your tummy was, whether they were going down and coming up, or otherwise.

23:00 A bloke said, "The bloody navy 's good, you get eight feeds a day. Four down and four up at times." I said, "Gee, that's good." And I was crook the first couple of days I was on board. And I can remember the bloke that I….he was a draft ahead of me, I just happened to know him, and I couldn't go in the mess deck. As soon as I went down in the mess deck. I'd get really crook in the tummy. I'd go up there and under that motor boat, oh boy, oh boy, the fish used to get a feed.

23:30 And Bill used to come up with a bit of dry bread and he'd say, "Get that into you. It'll do you the world of good. It'll leave you with something for the next turn." But then after about a week, that was it.

When you went back on land and had twenty-eight days leave, did the seasickness come back when you got back on the boat again?

No, but I'll tell you a funny thing, though, that happened, real humorous you know.

24:00 After we came home on leave that time, and we went back to Singapore and started back to sea again, when the ship recommissioned, this is….We left home round about September….September, October, one of the two. We got back into Singapore and we started on the run there. Anyway, when we got back to Singapore and we started to go to sea again, 24:30 I'm getting this bloody seasickness and the sea was flat calm, you know. Not a wave in it up around that tropical area at that time. Oh, I was bloody crook. And old Doctor Edwards….he was our first commissioned bloke, Russell was our second doctor. And I said to Doctor Russell, "Jeez, I'm buggered if I know. Here's a man coming out in this sea and getting bloody seasick."

25:00 When do you get seasick?" I says, "Every bloody morning, I'm getting up and I'm bloody crook as anything." He said, "Come and have a yarn to me in the sick bay." He said, "You've been home on leave, haven't you?" "Yes." He says, "You married?" "Yes." He says, "When you get a chance write home and ask your wife if she's pregnant." I was getting bloody morning seasickness in Singapore, and she was having a free run. It was always a laughing point on the mess deck. "I've changed my sex lad."

25:30 But after that, there was no worries. That was a humorous point of life.

Were there ever times when you saw blokes who couldn't cope with the stress of it all in the war?

Yes. One of the chappies that went over with us to the Med, he went to the Vendetta, Stanley Myers, he came from Frankston. He went over there,

26:00 and Stanley, he got what you call chronic seasickness. He just could not handle it on the small ships, being the old B & Ws. Anyway, what they did, when we left the Mediterranean, that was in end of May, beginning of June, '41…The Perth was in there and the rest of the ships were in. Well then,

26:30 I find out afterwards, I got a letter from them, I find out he's been drafted off the Vendetta onto the Perth, which was the same type of cruiser as the Sydney. That settled him down a bit better, and that was it. Well, he stayed on the Perth until it came home to Melbourne here, after it come out of the Med. Then he was drafted to, I think it was, Williamstown Naval Depot, because he had been the stoker, he'd had his leave and come back and he'd been put down there.

27:00 Now this is where the unfortunate part of life comes into it again. On board the Sydney was his brother, and when she came in to Williamstown, at that particular time, she was short of a few men. And ironically again, Vera's relations were tied up in it. What's his name? Peterson was his name. I can't think of his first name again.

27:30 But he was a warrant gunnery officer off the Waterhen. Now the Waterhen was sunk in the Mediterranean on the run back from Tobruk, and he'd come home and he was at Williamstown Naval Depot, because he lived at Williamstown, his wife lived there. Anyway, the Sydney sent up the depot saying they wanted a couple of ratings, some seamen and some stokers and whatever….warrants, upper deck blokes….

28:00 Oh, Jimmy Peterson, Jimmy got the draft as warrant gunnery officer on the Sydney and Stanley Myers, the stoker, got the draft on the Sydney on account of them being short of stokers. And the story from then on is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Off they go, and then they were tied up when the second half of the draft came up to Sunda Straits, off the take over by the Durban.

28:30 Anyway, Sydney on the way back runs into the Kormoran. On board the ship is Jimmy Peterson and Stanley Myers and Stanley's brother. Bang. See you later. I haven't seen them from that day since. That is the ironic set up of the navy. You didn't know where you were going or what you were doing. As I say, all through seasickness, if he had of stopped on the Vendetta, and then….The point of law comes up,

29:00 out of the five destroyers, the old scrap iron flotilla, there were only two survived the whole war. That was the Stuart and the Vendetta. And that's how stiff you can be on a draft.

When you were up in the Pacific, did you ever hear or any mates or know anyone who had gone troppo [mentally unstable]?

No, not really. No. I'd heard of the army blokes ashore, but they were on home brew,

29:30 'Jungle juice' as the saying is. You'd make it out of potatoes and all those old fermented vegetables and what have you. We had a go at the old stuff at times there. I think it was the old essence of lemon, powerful brew, a little bottle of that, and I think it ripped the lining off my tummy at times. I couldn't eat nothing for days afterwards, so I thought that wasn't worth the issue. But I do now that in the fleet,

30:00 the Kanimbla, which was a converted passenger boat, in those days, like to an armed merchant cruiser, they made a brew up there and it was very deadly. There was one bloke….Well, two of them, actually, went blind, and then I think the other blokes, they finished up with ulcers, it burned the lining off their tummies. It really played up merry hell with it. That was a big scream from there on, about making jungle juice on board.

30:30 But of course on the smaller ships, you didn't have the facilities they had on board those things. They were the hot and cold-water sailors like today.

Was it ever treacherous in certain points of the islands to come in and out because of coral?

Well, yes. Because the simple reason is the whole coastlines up in the Pacific areas had not been updated,

31:00 surveyed properly or otherwise. But there was a....I don't know how it come to get the name, but coral, as you know probably, grows. And then what you call Nigger Heads grow out….Instead of being in the reef, like straight up, they grow out sideways, and this is where, later on, when we was on the smaller boats, like the Fairmiles, they used in to within half a mile

31:30 or somewhere less than that of the shoreline, at times. But then, once again, the only way you could find out where the coral reefs, once the tide moves in and out a bit, covers them, is off your ASDIC gear, which you also use for pinging submarines. You've only got certain charts, and some of them weren't much better than the school atlas which we had in those days when we went to school.

32:00 And, of course, like, if you were moving along at a fair pace, it took you a few minutes before you could swing the ship one way or the other to get away. But there was a few scrapes on the side, but….I think there was only one, the 82 something or other, she hit one of the reefs getting out of one of the ports up there at New Guinea somewhere. She finished up sinking. They towed her back to the base at Madang, but she went down.

32:30 It wasn't worthwhile repairing her.

One of the Fairmiles?

One of the Fairmiles, yeah. But with the bigger ships, well you had the deep water all the time, you see. Now, the old method in the navy was the lead line. You'd stand out the side and swing the rope and throw it forward and she'd drop down the water, and every ever six feet, which was a fathom, was be marked by a different coloured piece of rag, or rope, going through it.

33:00 And they'd say, "By the mark, sir, so many fathoms." If they said two fathoms, they'd know it was twelve feet. But they never had time for all that sort of stuff. And of course the bigger ships, they had all the proper equipment there, they could do the soundings as they went along. And of course, but they never got in close there, like maybe three mile off the coast. Just a quick incidence there. A friend of mine, he was in the invasion in Balikpapan,

33:30 up in Borneo way, and the Shropshire at that time was in the bombardment there. And she was standing nine miles out to sea, throwing shells in over for the troops to go in there. And he used to say, "Yeah, here he comes, Caesar, the nine-mile bloody sniper." But the Fairmiles, they used go within half a mile of the coast. But the whole thing in those days…

34:00 The coastline was never mapped properly. Captain Cook might have done it in 1600 or 1700 whenever he came out in his little sailing boat. And the only way they did it, they did it the same way with a heaving line, or a lead line, or whatever you called it, or in a rowing boat dropping the thing over the side to see what it is, when they struck the coral reef on the east coast of Australia. They did an amazing job,

34:30 but the government, in those days, was like the government of today, they were too frightened to spend a bloody quid where it is necessary. Now they want to put a toll road for you to drive you car along, which you pay in your registration for. But no, it's one of those things in life. And reefs, as I say, they grow, and it's one of those underwater plantations,

35:00 which you don't know because you can't see, until you strike it. And boy oh boy, she's pretty rough stuff they tell me. I've seen a couple of Liberty boats up off the coast there, coming out of Cairns, that hit them and broke the Liberty boats clean in half. Right up, and it was very solid.

We're just reaching the latter part of our last tape. Of all the ships that you served on, did you have a favourite? And if so, why?

35:30 No, not really. They were means of transport. They were a means of living, earning a living, I should say. No, I suppose the Vampire would have been the best one I suppose, the first ship. The Shropshire would have been all right, but it was too regimental. And the little one, the Fairmile,

36:00 in the officers department, the junior officers, like the sublieutenants, they were go getters and they wanted to make a name for themselves, and you could see that they were heading in the wrong direction. But you couldn't say, "Listen here, mate, back off and just take the thing day by day." But you couldn't tell them that, though. They were up and coming officers. They didn't last any longer than what I did. When the war was over, the skipper told us all,

36:30 "Unfortunately the war's over and you are now being made redundant." And I had never heard that word used. And I said, "What's wrong now?" "Well the war's over and we don't need youse any more." And he said, "By the time we're finished up here, finished up there, and you go home, you'll be turfed out and you'll get a few bob in your pocket and a suit and you'll find yourself a job." And that was it!

In these last couple of moments that we have, is there anything about

37:00 the war that we haven't touched that you would like to say a word about?

Not really, not much. It's only casualties and things like that, which you don't talk about. Like, you were lucky to miss out and come back in one piece. But generally speaking, you have covered pretty well everything that's been…Like living conditions, where you were, what you'd do, and what you was allowed to say on camera, and such forth like that. There's a couple of things that we can't tell you.

37:30 But no…But generally speaking, when you get human beings all thrown together like that, it's a mass of different ideas. And you look at this thing and you say to yourself, "Was it any better a way of doing it?" Now today, as far as I am concerned, it's too soft soap navy. In our days, when you walked up and addressed an officer, it was discipline, "Sir, so and so and so and so." Today, I've been down in the boats down there,

38:00 they're leaving harbour. "Oh Jack," that's the skipper, "Jack? What'll we do now? Will we do this or do that?" There's none of this sir business, no authority as far as I can see. I don't know how they match up. They've had this bloody set up in the Gulf and things like that, but that hasn't been a war. That's just been a policing exercise at sea. When you've got one on one side throwing something at you and you've got to throw something back, it becomes a different ball game.

38:30 No, as I say, I think myself today, it's too pussy foot and all those sort of things. But anyway, that's not my form. I can't get a Guernsey [a chance]. If I could get a guernsey I would go back for six months. Just check it out.

You would?

Yeah. I'd go back for another run, if I had the chance to get on one. No worries. I don't think they'd have me. They'd say, "You're too bloody old."

39:00 But when you work it out, you've got to be pretty nimble to be on a ship, with the rolling of the thing like that and your feet work. and getting up and down ladders and hatchways and things like that. And some of those hatchways, at your build, you'd be steaming to get through some of them. In the old days, in the boiler room, to get into the lower drum, you had to get in headfirst like that, and if you panicked inside and your body swelled up through heat, you couldn't get out of the bloody joint.

39:30 So what we used to do then was is get the salt-water hose and stick it on you to cool you down, so we could drag you out of the thing. But, as I say, I'm going to Tassie next month on account of it's sixty years since the Shropshire was turned over to us. I've decided the aeroplanes are no good to me. I'm going on the Tasmania ship, so get my seats lined up.

Wonderful Vince. We've enjoyed it very much. I think we'll have to stop there. We're at the end of the tape.