Australians at War Film Archive

Francis Selby (Gordon) - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 6th May 2004

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1899

Tape 1

00:51 Thank you so much for your time today. To begin with can I ask you to share with me an overview of your life from where you were born

01:00 to where you are now?

Yes. I was born in Wiltshire in a place called Swindon in 1919. I suppose I spent perhaps the first five years of my life there before my father moved because of the Depression that was coming along, my father moved up to Oxford, got a job there. We moved to Oxford with him

01:30 and I went to school. I did most of my schooling in Oxford. From there, in the Depression years of the early 1930’s he had to go to London with work so my mother and I carried on living in Oxford until I was fourteen. Then she decided that she wanted to go to London to join him so I went to live with my grandmother back in Swindon for a year.

02:00 Went to school there then joined the navy direct from school at age fifteen. I joined the navy on 15th August 1935 and was sent to HMS St Vincent which is a shore establishment for training boys in Gosport on the opposite side of Portsmouth Harbour to Portsmouth itself and there I spent

02:30 something like just over twelve months learning how to be a sailor and all sorts of other things as well. When I finished there in 1936, about September 1936 I was sent to Chatham, Chatham Barracks because my parents were living in London so I was allocated to Chatham Depot. I spent about two months there before being drafted from

03:00 Chatham Barracks to the battleship Ramillies which at the time was lying at Chionesse. Ramillies belonged to the home fleet and in January 1937 sailed with the home fleet to the Mediterranean for combined fleet exercises there and whilst in the Mediterranean volunteers were called for to go from Ramillies and join ships of the

03:30 Mediterranean fleet. I volunteered and was sent to a cruiser, HMS Galatea and I spent the rest of my boy service in Galatea, became an ordinary seaman in Galatea. We operated basically from Malta and were involved very much in the Spanish Civil War activities, looking after merchant shipping etc. in

04:00 the western part of the Mediterranean. Galatea came home, went back to Portsmouth in 1937 for the coronation review of Edward VIII and it’s there I met my wife, during that time. Then we went back out to the Mediterranean and stayed there until April 1938

04:30 when she came home to be paid off in Devonport and I was then returned back to Chatham Barracks. In Chatham Barracks I straight away went on a gunnery course there to become a seaman gunner which is a three month job. Whilst I was doing that course I was rated able seaman. Immediately I finished the course they were asking for volunteers for submarine service and I volunteered straight away

05:00 and was drafted from Chatham Barracks after the gunnery course to HMS Dolphin which is the submarine base in Gosport again and I joined submarines on or about 5th September 1938. That was the time when Chamberlain was just coming back from Munich to say peace in our time and so I was immediately involved in helping to store up submarines

05:30 alongside for war. I finished my submarine training course in about November 1938 and immediately went on and did professional examinations for leading seaman rank, which I passed. In January 1939 I was drafted as an able seaman to what was known as Reserve Group A

06:00 in Gosport. Reserve Group A consisted of three submarines, that’s Oberon, Otway and Oxley. Oxley and Otway were originally Australian submarines which had been returned to the Royal Navy and Oxley was in dock in Portsmouth. The other two submarines were used weekly on day running for training classes. We took one of those submarines to sea 06:30 on daily exercises with training classes so that we had one and a half crews to man the three submarines but one of them was in dock. In June or early July 1939 the reserve fleet was called up with war being in sight and the three submarines were brought up to full commission with reservists.

07:00 I was allocated to Oberon and Oberon was alongside in Dolphin on 3rd September 1939 when war broke out. Almost immediately, within days, sailed from Portsmouth up to Dundee where a submarine base had been established for operations in the North Sea. We did one patrol in the North Sea and it was decided at the end of that patrol

07:30 that the submarine was mechanically unreliable and so was delegated for training duties with the anti- submarine school at Portland down in the south of England. We stayed there doing that sort of mechanical mask job for something like six months until May 1940 when Dunkirk occurred

08:00 and Oberon was used as sort of outer ring of defence for the ships evacuating the troops from Dunkirk. When we arrived back in Portsmouth when that was over I was drafted out of the submarine and went to the gunnery school in Portsmouth for a conversion course to a new gunnery rate which took a fortnight and from there I was drafted to

08:30 Harwich to join H44 as it’s second coxswain. Harwich at the time was being used as a submarine base for the older submarines. When I say older I mean submarines that existed from World War I and they were the small submarines, H class, which were being used to go out into the North Sea and keep an eye open for

09:00 possible invasion fleets coming over from the continent. I did one, two, three patrols in H44 before I was drafted again, this time to Barrow in Furness to stand by a new submarine being built which was HMS Upholder. We eventually commissioned HMS Upholder in Barrow and then went to Scottish waters to do trials. Completed those and

09:30 returned from Scottish waters to Gosport once again and eventually sailed from Gosport on 10th December to Malta. On the way to Malta we did a few days off the Atlantic ports where the Germans had set up their own bases after the invasion of France and eventually we finished up in Malta on 10th January 1941.

10:00 We started our first patrol at the end of January but in between whiles we had to go alongside to be degassed, that is to be demagnetized and while we were there we were subjected to a very heavy dive bombing attack that was our first taste of what war was going to be like in the Mediterranean.

10:30 From there I did fifteen months in Upholder and then during that time I was promoted to petty officer and eventually in February 1942 my captain asked me if I would leave Upholder and join another newly arrived submarine as it’s coxswain which meant I was going to be made an acting

11:00 chief petty officer straight away but of course Upholder was almost the end of her commission then, was almost due to come back to the UK so it was a fairly difficult decision to be made but on the other hand it was quick promotion for me, I was still only just twenty two at the time. So I said, “Yes”, I would go and I joined a submarine called the P39, it didn’t have a name, just P39. P39

11:30 did one patrol at the end of February 1941, didn’t see anything, came back to harbour on the 6th March, it was bombed in harbour, alongside and was severely damaged, was towed around to the dock yard and there we, the crew, were utilized in getting the rubbish out of the submarine from the bombing and

12:00 making the submarine reasonably seaworthy for a trip home to England for a big refit. On 26th March we were bombed again and this time the back of the submarine was broken so she was towed round to be beached in one of the creeks off Grand Harbour in Malta and the crew were retained there to strip the submarine of anything that was usable to be used as

12:30 spares for other submarines. At that same time the remainder of the submarines coming in for patrol were required to sit on the bottom of the harbour because of the very heavy bombing that was going on and the bombing, a lot of it was directed towards the submarine base because the submarines from Malta were really effecting the replenishments going to the Africa Korps in North Africa

13:00 so we sat on the bottom during the day and just did whatever work was required for storing or maintenance etc. at night during the dark hours. When submarines came in the crew of P39 were used as relief crews so the submarine’s crew could go away to a rest camp away from the bombing area and we did the storing and maintenance etc. to get the submarine ready for sea again.

13:30 Eventually it was decided that the situation was too tense for submarines to operate out of Malta. So it was decided to shift the whole flotilla from there to the eastern end of the Mediterranean but the crew of P39 was retained temporarily because the submarine Olympus was due to come in to Malta from Gibraltar carrying stores for the garrison in Malta.

14:00 We were there to help unload the stores and then to embark as passengers in Olympus for the trip back to Gibraltar and eventually back to the UK to commission another submarine. We unloaded Olympus and we sailed in Olympus on Friday 8th May 1942 and we were seven miles out from Malta when we hit a mine and

14:30 the submarine sank and we had to swim ashore. Only seven of us made it. That happened on the Friday, on the Sunday the seven of us were put aboard the Cruiser Welshman which had arrived in Malta with a convoy for transport back to the UK. We went back to the UK.

15:00 We were kitted up again and sent on survivor’s leave and from there, when that was over I was sent up to Scotland to be coxswain of the submarine L26. L26 was being used then as a training submarine. People joining submarines went to Blyth to do some shore training and then were sent from there to Scotland to do some

15:30 sea training in a submarine. I stayed there in L26 for a year during which time I qualified as a torpedo coxswain and at the end of that year I was sent back out to the Mediterranean in charge of a draft of people to join HMS Medway which was the depot ship for submarine flotilla operating out of Algiers.

16:00 Shortly after that I was drafted in submarines HMS Sickle. I did a couple of patrols in Sickle. I had to go back to Maidstone. Because I was newly on the station I stayed in Maidstone because Maidstone then sailed from Algiers via Alexandria and went to Ceylon as it was, Sri Lanka now. There we were based in Trincomalee. We arrived in Trincomalee in

16:30 March 1943 and I straight away was sent out to do one patrol as a passenger in the submarine Storm and when we got back into harbour I was drafted to submarine Storm as it’s coxswain. I stayed in the submarine Storm operating out of Ceylon and eventually from Fremantle in Western Australia until

17:00 January 1945 we returned back to the UK at the end of January. When VE [Victory in Europe] Day came about on 8th May I was still on leave but was recalled and sent to Norway to pick up a German submarine that had reported in to

17:30 Norway at the end of hostilities. We sailed U2529 back to Londonderry in Northern Ireland and there I stayed there until August 1945 and then went back to Dolphin as an instructor in the training area and I stayed in that instructing job for three years,

18:00 training ratings joining submarines and eventually in 1948 I was drafted from there to the submarine Truculent and I stayed with Truculent until the middle of 1949 when she went into dock at Chatham and most of the crew of Truculent at the same time were moved from Truculent into another submarine which was just coming out of dock in Chatham,

18:30 HMS Alliance and we took Alliance back to Portland and carried on with some anti-submarine training there until as far as I’m concerned until February 1950 when I was categorized as being unfit for RN [Royal Navy] service

19:00 because of eyesight. My eyesight had deteriorated. So my captain then started writing letters. Letters went to flag officer submarines and from flag officer submarines to admiralty and admiralty agreed under special circumstances to allow me to remain in the navy provided work could be found for me in the submarine service. So I took up the job then as the assistant to the officer’s training officer

19:30 in submarines in Dolphin and there I stayed for nine years doing that job. In 1958 when I was getting towards the end of my period in the navy. I should have retired from the navy, gone to pension in December 1959 I should say before that that part of my job there was

20:00 taking the classes of sub lieutenants up to Manchester to see how batteries were made by Exide and of course I got to know a lot of people in Exidein those trips. At the end of 1958 Exide invited me to join them and of course I still had a year to do in the navy but they arranged with admiralty that I could be released. So I was released in April 1959 to join Excide.

20:30 I went to Manchester for twelve months working in the factory, learning how to be a works manager and from there I went to London for six months learning how to be a general manager. From London I was sent out to New Zealand with my wife to manage the factory in New Zealand just outside Wellington in Lower Hutt. I stayed there with

21:00 Exide until 1968 when it was obvious that my next move was going to be somewhere like Karachi which I didn’t fancy, nor did my wife, so I resigned from Exide and I joined a firm of New Zealand management consultants and with them, my job was to travel around visiting client companies both in New Zealand and in Australia

21:30 and eventually after about a year it was decided to open up an office in Sydney and I was asked if I would like to come to Sydney to live and to run the office here which was how we came to be in Australia. That lasted for two and a half years when my wife and I both got fed up with living out of suitcases and in and out of aeroplanes because we travelled all over Australia in that time.

22:00 I resigned from there and joined Ampol. Ampol at that stage was proceeding to build a brand new residential conference centre out here at Ingleside not only for it’s own senior staff but also for commercial purposes to lease out to other companies

22:30 wishing to do training and I eventually became manager of the Ingleside Development Centre as it was called and there I stayed until 1984 when I retired as I was sixty five but Ampol asked me to stay on and I stayed on for another three years under contract until 1987 when the whole complex was sold to Westpac

23:00 and is still their training centre now. At the same time a chap was building a new conference centre in Windsor called the Rum Corps Barracks to get it started off and I was offered a job so I finished with Ingleside on the Friday and started at Windsor on the Monday and I stayed there as the marketing director for something like two and a half years. Eventually

23:30 I had a heart attack and had a heart bypass and so retired. We bought this house here during the time I was at Ingleside and here we live.

And children?

I have one son who lives upstairs with his wife and I have three grandsons who all live in Western Australia.

Excellent overview.

24:00 Does that put you up to speed?

Spot on. Thank you for that. I’d now like to go back to the very beginning and ask you about your childhood and memories of growing up. What are you first memories of childhood?

I can remember going to the cinema on Saturday mornings in Swindon. I suppose I must have been about four or five years old then. I can remember a lot of the time

24:30 in Oxford because I had a very happy school life in Oxford.

What memories do you have of Oxford?

Almost as soon as we got, I was just on ten years old when we arrived in Oxford and I got a scholarship and went to the City of Oxford High School and straight away got into the cricket team and also into the soccer team.

25:00 That made life very pleasant there. I can’t think of much else really apart from ordinary school activities, etc.

Were you much good at cricket and soccer?

Yes. Although I say it myself, I was a pretty good bowler at cricket and I enjoyed it very much indeed. When I joined the navy at boy’s training

25:30 I was in the cricket team, I was in the soccer team, I was in the hockey team and I was in the swimming team.

All round sportsman.

Well the navy, the services generally are very good for sport.

Swindon. You remember the cinema when you were a child. What memories actually do you have of that?

Cowboys and Indians, lots of shouting, plenty of popcorn on the floor.

26:00 It used to be on the Saturday mornings in those days and kids all went on Saturday morning because they didn’t go to school and the place was full of children of about my age and there was a lot of noise and a lot of gunfire on the screen etc. etc. Of course they were all silent movies anyway.

Were they American movies?

Yes.

Were they more popular than the English ones?

We didn’t really know

26:30 whether they were English or American but they were American. Tom Nicks [?] and what have you, I can remember. I can’t really differentiate between English and American at that stage. Much too early in my life. First time I can think about seeing an American film was when coloured films came into existence and I was living in London at that time.

27:00 Your memories of your mum and dad. What was your dad like?

My father and my grandfather before him were farriers. My grandfather had a farrier business in Swindon with two outlets there and of course this was the days of horses and carts around the town. Eventually that gradually dried up with the advent of motor vehicles and so when the,

27:30 I suppose about the middle of the 1920’s when things started to get a bit tight my father gave it away. My grandfather had died and my father decided to give it away and try elsewhere and that’s how and when we moved away from Swindon.

What is a farrier?

Blacksmiths, horse shoer. I can remember as a kid going down to the forge

28:00 on Saturday mornings or afternoons and just watching him. He used to make horse shoes, fit them on to the horses. He’d put steel tyres onto the cart wheels. All sorts of things. My father was a very skilled blacksmith-cum-farrier. He eventually finished up as the farrier to the English polo team and

28:30 toured the world with them.

Not a bad job.

On the way there he was employed at Epsom doing race horses as well.

Do you have memories of your grandparents?

My grandmother yes but not my grandfather. My grandfather I am told had one of the early Ford motor cars and used to take me out in it, so I’m told, but

29:00 I really don’t remember him. My father was also a pretty good soccer player. We used to play soccer quite a lot. My grandmother lasted until she was ninety six and in fact while my wife and I were living in Hampshire my grandmother came

29:30 to live with us during the last years of her life. I suppose she lived with us for ten years. Yes, I know quite a bit about my grandmother.

What can you tell me about her?

Well she came from a place in Wiltshire. She was a very small woman. She used to tell us tales about how they used to live and cure their own pork etc.

30:00 All sorts of tales of the old days.

Such as?

I can’t really recall anything to mind. She was really one of the old school, if you know what I mean. I know I’m one of the old school now but she was one of the older old schools.

30:30 A bit more just about your dad. He was a good football player, soccer player, a farrier, what was he like as a father?

Didn’t see a great deal of him because he was away a lot of the time either looking for work or working away. It just happened to be a bad period of our lives, in those days. In 1926 there was a general strike in England which affected him very considerably of course and that led

31:00 almost straight on into the recession at the beginning of the 1930’s.

What are your memories of the Depression?

I can remember the hunger marches. They marched through Oxford actually. I can remember that things were very, very tight indeed financially. For everybody, but certainly for us.

31:30 I spent a lot of time living with my mother without my father being there. So my mother really brought me up in those years and those years I’m talking about are from age about ten ‘til fourteen. That’s about it.

Did you mum expect or want you to do small

32:00 jobs around the place to bring in income for the household during that time?

I was too young for that and too tied up with school. In my school days we used to go to school on Saturday mornings as well.

If you could share with me just a little bit about your mum. You said that she brought you up mainly during that time. What was she like?

She was a tower of strength. She had to do the job of

32:30 both father and mother and did it quite well I think. What else can I say?

What memories do you have of her?

None very much. She spent most of her time at home. She didn’t go out very much, couldn’t afford to go out very much anyway.

33:00 I really can’t answer that question properly.

That’s all right. At Oxford, can you describe for me the house that you lived in? Which one?

You lived in a few did you?

We were in rented properties all the time. They were all small houses. Most English houses in those days

33:30 were small anyway. I suppose they were a kitchen and sitting room downstairs and a couple, two, sometimes three bedrooms upstairs. We didn’t have much garden that I can remember in any of them. We lived in four different houses in Oxford.

34:00 The one that I can really remember backed on to Oxford railway station. I used to spend my time at my bedroom window watching the train engines, railway engines going past.

Did you have siblings growing up?

No. I’m an only one. My son’s an only one.

So in this particular house near the railway, where was the toilet and the kitchen?

34:30 The toilet was outside the back door. The kitchen was inside the back door. There was a dining room alongside the kitchen and a very small sitting room at the front of the house. That was the ground floor. Upstairs there was a bedroom, a bathroom,

35:00 with no toilet and that was it.

For future generations who will naturally have plumbing and all those sorts of things, can you describe the toilet, was there flowing water and plumbing there?

Oh yes. It was an ordinary toilet, the only difference was you didn’t press a button, you pulled a chain.

And the bath?

It was an ordinary bath, no shower. With a gas operated

35:30 geyser for hot water.

Would you bath every day?

No. Like most blokes I suppose of that age, as little as possible. Bath night was always one night a week.

And the house. Did it have electricity, gas?

Yes, both.

So in the kitchen, can you describe what was there, was there an electric oven,

36:00 what was the situation?

Gas cooker, sink with hot and cold running water. Not much else to describe. No refrigerator. No microwaves of course. That was it, just the basic essentials.

So no refrigerator, how did you keep things cold?

36:30 We didn’t. You had a pantry which you hoped would keep it cool or cold. Mind you, there’s not much trouble in keeping things cold in the UK. My wife and I never had a refrigerator until we moved to New Zealand.

And what jobs and chores did your mum get you to do around the house?

I used to do

37:00 a little bit of errands down to the local corner store or I’d have to clean up my own bedroom occasionally, as little as I could help. What else? Cleaning silver. I wasn’t allowed to wash up but I was allowed to wipe up. And just help out generally around the house.

37:30 Other than that, nothing.

So memories of school, where did you go to school?

Well my infant schooling was done in Swindon at a place called Gorse Hill School. From there, when we moved to Oxford I went to a church school called St Frideswides and I got a scholarship there to the City of Oxford School.

38:00 When I left Oxford I did a year at Swindon College before joining the navy.

Infancy. Do you have any memories of schooling while you were in?

No When do your first memories of schooling come through?

My first memories of actual schooling was after we went to Oxford, as I say I was about nine or perhaps just on ten years of age.

38:30 The school holidays in Oxford weren’t the same as the school holidays in Swindon. I used to spend my holidays usually with my grandmother who still lived in Swindon. On one occasion I can remember I was on summer holiday, I went down there and the school that I was at we used to get six weeks holidays. When I got to Swindon the schools weren’t on

39:00 holiday there and the school inspector came round one day and insisted I went to school. So I lost half my holiday and had to go to school in Swindon. That’s the most vivid memory I’ve got.

These days you have a normal school term throughout the state. What was the break up of a school year then?

39:30 In the UK, I suppose this goes back to the Industrial Revolution to a large extent when factories used to shut down for a week, generally speaking. But the factories in Manchester for instance wouldn’t shut down at the same week as the factories in York or in Birmingham and consequently school holidays coincided with the factory shut downs. You’ll find that in Manchester

40:00 they have a week which is wit week. Everything stops in Manchester in wit week and the school holidays for summer are added on to wit week. In Swindon it was a big railway building establishment in Swindon, that’s where the majority of people worked so when the factory shut down there then everybody shut down,

40:30 all the schools went on holiday but that didn’t coincide with what happened in Oxford and Oxford wouldn’t have coincided with what happened in London.

We’ll just pause there and change the tape.

Tape 2

00:44 Just to continue on discussing schooling. Were you good at studies and studying?

Yes, in answer to that question.

01:00 It’s very difficult to blow one’s own trumpet but yes, I was quite good at school. I had a classical education. I’ve always been very keen on maths. I’m pretty good on English, English literature, grammar etc. I was brought up learning French, Latin and Greek.

01:30 Geography, yes and no, history I was quite good at too. I suppose if you asked me what my strengths were it would really be maths and English.

You mentioned on the previous tape about a scholarship you were able to get in Oxford. Can you describe that for me?

It’s just a general scholarship, a competitive scholarship.

02:00 The Oxford University provide these scholarships each year for so many children. It’s competitive and all the public schools, children of ages ten and eleven can enter for it and I happened to be good enough to get one. I had a choice then of three schools that I could go to. One was

02:30 Magdalen College School, one was the City of Oxford High School which I chose and the other one was called the Building School I think, I can’t remember that properly but I think it was the Building School.

That you went to?

No, I went to the City of Oxford High School. The scholarship included all school fees etc. It included

03:00 all books. It included all school uniforms as well so it was a big help to my mother.

They must have been, your parents, greatly relieved?

Yes.

Did they throw a party, were there celebrations as a result?

No, not that I can remember.

Just growing up during the Depression years, what are your memories of Christmas and birthdays?

03:30 Didn’t celebrate them very much. Christmas, yes, to some extent, there was always something a little bit extra at Christmas, but not a great deal. There was not so much emphasis put on the partying basically because the economic situation most people were in than there is today. But Christmas was a bit different from all other weekends.

What place did

04:00 religion have in your family?

Not very much. I was a choirboy and got paid for it too.

How much was that?

I think I used to get thirteen pounds a term. Three terms a year. That was quite a bit of money to help my mother with.

04:30 At what parish was this?

St Frideswides, Anglican parish.

That was the school that you would later?

No, that was the primary school I went to.

Did religion itself play a big part in your life and that of your mum?

No.

So how did you end up joining the choir?

Because it offered some money. Well I went to St Frideswides Primary School

05:00 and they asked for, I went to Sunday school as well. I think that’s probably where I came to be in the choir. You’re bringing back memories now.

Any more memories coming back?

Not at the moment, no.

Did you muck around in the choir?

Yes. Because I was a fairly big bloke I used to get the job

05:30 of swinging the old incense thing in front of the priest as we went round.

What sort of things did you get up to when you were a choirboy.

I really can’t put my finger on any of them. The usual giggling sort of things that happened. I don’t really remember much about that.

Would the priest discipline you at all?

No.

06:00 I suppose they tried to but there were too many of us.

Discipline in your life, did you receive any discipline, given your dad was away, from school or your mum?

School was very much of a discipline, certainly was. It was an all boys school I went to. It wasn’t a combined education school. The masters were in general pretty tough.

06:30 There was certainly no messing around allowed.

You were quite good at studies. Where did then the fascination for the navy come from?

Because I wanted to do something and get out from where I was. I had just passed my school certificate examination and I was living with my grandmother at the time and I really didn’t

07:00 see anything for me in Swindon at that stage. The opportunity arose to join the RN [Royal Navy]. They were asking for recruits so I volunteered and joined.

How did you come across this opportunity?

Basically in newspaper advertisements. We’re talking 1935 at the moment so we were just

07:30 coming out of the Depression years and they were looking for people and it seemed to be the right place for me.

Did you know anyone that had been in the navy?

No. I didn’t know a thing about the navy when I joined it. Did you know much about the First World War?

Not a great deal, no. My father was involved in the First World War but to what extent I really don’t know.

08:00 So describe for me the journey of enlisting in the navy.

I went to the recruiting office in Swindon and there they put me through some very elementary tests and said,

08:30 “Yes, you seem to be all right but you’ll have to go to Southampton for a real interview”. They gave me a travel warrant and I went by train on my own to Southampton to the recruiting office there and they put me through some more rigorous sort of tests from the point of view of English and maths or arithmetic, eyesight etc. and

09:00 eventually wrote to me from there to say I’d been accepted and I should report to HMS St Vincent on such and such a date and sent me a railway warrant to get me there.

These tests, were they more than just academic tests?

No, purely academic and the maths was purely simple arithmetic, stuff I’d done when I was ten years of age.

09:30 What was the education standard of most fellas around fifteen?

Are you speaking about the navy or generally?

Those who would have applied at that time for the navy.

It’s very difficult to relate that to anything but perhaps I can explain this a little bit better by saying that when I actually joined the navy

10:00 in my class in boy’s training my education was a long way superior to most of the others. I was very fortunate in that respect. In saying that I don’t mean to denigrate them, they just hadn’t had the opportunity.

What was the response of

10:30 your parents and your grandmother upon the news of being accepted?

Not very good. None of them really wanted me to but I insisted and insisted and eventually my father signed the agreement.

So what were their hopes for you?

I honestly don’t know. Originally their hopes would be that I would go on to Oxford University from school and probably do a classical education there,

11:00 but I didn’t see that as being for me in the circumstances. There was no way that they could have kept me at uni and I couldn’t have kept myself.

Given that your dad was in London for a fair bit of your early teenage years, how did you approach this whole subject of applying and going to the navy with him?

Well first and foremost I just went to the recruiting office without him.

11:30 He didn’t know anything about it until after I’d been to Southampton when he had to sign the agreement. Then we had a little bit of an up and downer but eventually I think he saw that I was determined and that was it.

So you were accepted and you went to St Vincent’s, explain the first few days of arriving there, your

12:00 impressions of St Vincent.

Well, not having time to think, being chased from hither to thither, being kitted out, trying to learn how to put a sailor’s uniform on, stitching my name into each article of clothing that I was issued with, including my socks,

12:30 learning how to wear boots. What else would you like to know?

Do you remember the very first day of arriving?

Yes. Would you like to know what they gave me for supper? That was my first meal and it was macaroni cheese, navy style.

Did the navy have a twist on macaroni cheese?

No, it 13:00 just happened to be it. Basically I enjoyed it. Looking back on it, I enjoyed my boy’s training. The first few weeks was a little bit rough, learning how to look after myself having always been at home with Mum or my grandmother. Having to do my own washing, my own ironing, make my own bed and all that

13:30 sort of thing, it was a little bit rough. Getting up at six o’clock every morning, rain or shine. After I settled into that which took perhaps a month, getting used to the routine of things, I enjoyed my time as a boy, basically again because I was not too bad at sport. I didn’t find what they were trying to teach me too difficult to absorb.

14:00 I suppose I also reacted to discipline fairly well, I didn’t rebel.

So what did you pack for the journey to take with you into the school?

I wore my best suit and my grandmother packed my lunch which I was too excited to eat. When I got there

14:30 on the following morning they kitted me out and they took my attaché case and they stuffed my best suit into it together with the lunch that I hadn’t eaten which arrived home at my grandmother’s place about three months later and she was a bit overwhelmed.

A bit horrified at the sight.

15:00 That was all. We were told it wasn’t necessary to take anything except what you were standing up in.

How many boys arrived at Gosport with you?

Well the class that I joined there would have been twenty five, thirty but there was also, one of the first things you do there is a

15:30 very basic education test and from that very basic test they split the entry into two, one of a lower achievement standard and one of a higher one. Each of those two groups would have been about twenty five to thirty boys. You all lived in the same dormitory but you went through

16:00 a different method of training. The group that I was in did a lot more schoolwork than the others did. They on the other hand did a lot more parade ground work.

And the accommodation there?

The accommodation was very good, big dormitory of course. They had about sixty or seventy boys in the dormitory and

16:30 we used to have to take our boots off at the front door, we weren’t allowed to walk on the cordasene with our boots on. And we had to keep it clean and tidy all the time. Windows had to be open so far and no further. Every Saturday morning was captain’s rounds, everything had to be sparkling. Again, I didn’t enjoy it all

17:00 at the time but looking back on it, it wasn’t bad training.

Can you share with me some of the personalities that joined up with you?

Well, quite a few of the boys that I was with had come from what was known as the Naval Hospital School which was the school for the children of deceased

17:30 ex-servicemen or ex-servicemen from World War I and it was a naval training school where they’d already learnt how to wear a uniform and tie knots and that sort of thing so they were very much at home in the sort of environment we found ourselves. Your question again?

Some of the personalities.

18:00 Well I suppose the same as amongst any group of people. There’s lots of people that you get on with very well and lots of people that are a little bit offish but generally speaking it was quite a happy sort of combination. You learn to look after one another. You learn to thwart the authorities and make sure you didn’t get one another into trouble.

18:30 Good training, in fact.

Any fellas not cope with the discipline?

One or two. They used to go over the wall. They didn’t get very far of course. They were not received back in. They went out of the navy and they stayed out of the navy.

19:00 Can you share with me one of those stories where one of the fellas left?

Not really because we didn’t know he was going. All we knew was the following morning he wasn’t there and we didn’t see him again. Unless you had family living locally or friends living locally

19:30 there was nothing you could do anyway. You didn’t have any money. My pay as a boy was five and thrippence a week of which I received sixpence, the rest was put to my credit in the ledger. You were almost better staying in the choir, weren’t you?

Well, sixpence a week wasn’t bad. Used to get a half day,

20:00 three half days a fortnight, a Wednesday, a Saturday and a Sunday. You never used to get the Saturday and Sunday together and you had your sixpence a week to use. You could use it on whatever you liked. You weren’t allowed to smoke of course. You weren’t allowed to have cigarettes or the smell of tobacco about you at all. That was

20:30 fourteen strokes with the cane if you were caught with that. We had those half days which meant that you could go out of the barrack gates at one o’clock and you had to be back by six but again, in 1935 you could go to the cinema for thruppence so that wasn’t a bad run. You could buy

21:00 a bag of chips for a penny. Of course the other thing they did when you joined the navy was put the clippers straight over the top of your hair so you had no hair left. So we used to buy jars of Brill cream sort of stuff and try to make it grow quickly. You might have a penny left over to buy a bar of nutty.

21:30 But you know everything was provided, you didn’t need really very much cash at all. In fact you weren’t allowed to have very much cash. If your mother sent you a pound that was confiscated straight away, you weren’t allowed to keep that.

Confiscated to be given back at a later date?

To be given back at a later date, yeah. But you weren’t allowed to have that money lying around which I think, again, looking back on it now, was probably a very good idea

22:00 because you really didn’t know what the other bloke was like or where he’d come from.

Could you just give me an idea of a typical day starting from waking up in the morning to going to bed.

At boy’s training?

Yes.

You’d be awakened at a quarter to six. You’d have to be up,

22:30 dressed, washed and ready to go by half past six when they issued cocoa. Then you would go to, depends, either the school or you’d go to gunnery training or you’d go to seamanship training until seven thirty, eight o’clock. Then you’d go to breakfast.

23:00 At nine o’clock you’d fall in on the parade ground and be inspected and then you’d go off again to classes of one or the other. Twelve o’clock you’d have your dinner it was in those days, we didn’t used to call it lunch. That was your main meal of the day. One o’clock you’d be back doing classes again, falling in on the parade ground and doing whatever classes for the afternoon. That would last ‘til

23:30 five o’clock. Five o’clock you had about half an hour to yourself and six o’clock was supper time. After supper if you were lucky you had the rest of the evening to yourself but you had to be turned in by nine o’clock. Lights had to be out by nine o’clock. That was a general day.

24:00 Once a group and each group of boys had to take this in turn, once a week you’d have to do your laundry in which case you’d be woken up at five thirty in the morning and you’d go down to the laundry, do your own washing, put it into the drying machine etc. and later in the day pick it up and it was up to you to fit in some time

24:30 to iron it if necessary, etc, etc. You had to keep all your gear clean of course. If your instructor was not particularly happy with the way the class was going at any particular time you might also have to get up at five thirty and go over the top of the mast in your pyjamas still. The mast was about one hundred and fifty feet high.

25:00 Up one side and down the other. Wednesday afternoons was sport, if you weren’t on half day off. Saturday afternoon was sport and you were encouraged to play something or other. Now and again in the evenings

25:30 you’d have the opportunity to go swimming. We had a swimming bath. Part of the seamanship course training was to go down to Portsmouth Harbour and sail boats or row boats and that was it. Sunday of course was divisions when everybody had to parade in their best suit.

26:00 Special occasions, I think the only one I can remember was when the first Queen Mary was launched and did her first trip down the Solent. We were all dressed up and we were all marched, as a whole establishment down to what we call Stokes Bay to see the Queen Mary sail past from Southampton.

26:30 I can’t think of much else.

Just a few questions on what you’ve said. The instructor, for instance, if he wasn’t happy he’d make you climb the mast, was that on board a ship or a land based mast? A land based mast, yes. St Vincent itself is a fairly large, it did cover a fairly large area.

27:00 The back of the area was all the buildings. In front of that and coming on to the road was a big parade ground. Almost on to the buildings, on the parade ground but close to the buildings the mast was there.

Given the winter’s quite cold in England, were there any changes or differences to training or routine?

No, not that I can remember.

27:30 The only changes I can really remember is that you wore blue caps instead of white ones and instead of the white flannelette shirts you wore, in the winter months you wore a blue jersey sort of thing.

The issue of bastardisation, was there anything like that during those early days?

Not that I know of. There could have been of course

28:00 but I never saw or heard of any of it. Lots of boy’s pranks of course on one another but bastardization, no.

Boy’s pranks? What stories can you tell me?

Well I can’t really remember any of them in detail. The sort of things that happen when you get a load of boys together, or a load of blokes together for that matter.

So what happened to you with respect

28:30 to these pranks?

Not very much because I was a big bloke.

Size does matter then.

Yes.

So what pranks did you play?

I was too busy doing other things to play pranks very much at all. I know it sounds very odd but I really can’t remember that.

So where did you want to go to in the navy?

29:00 What did you want to do?

I wanted to go to a ship and go round the world. What I didn’t realize when I joined the navy was that when you joined the navy to go to a ship to go round the world you don’t sit on the upper deck looking at things going past, you’re bloody well working all the time.

So what did you know about other parts of the world at the time?

Nothing very much. I’d never been anywhere

29:30 outside, I’d hardly been outside the town I’d lived in. I’d certainly never been north beyond Oxford. I’d certainly never been to places like Wales, or Ireland or Scotland. I certainly hadn’t been across the Channel. I didn’t know much about anything. A very narrow existence in fact.

So what was boy’s school

30:00 preparing you for in respect of the navy?

Boy’s school for the navy?

At St Vincents.

Oh, to be seamen.

So where did you go after St Vincents.

I went to Chatham and then joined the battleship Ramillies.

How long were you at Chatham for?

About two months, that’s all.

And what were you doing there?

Nothing very much except cleaning up.

30:30 Cleaning up what? Domestic cleaning up. Keeping the place tidy. Just waiting to be sent somewhere. The barracks are just a holding depot really to man ships as required. Except that with Chatham Barracks there was also a gunnery school attached.

31:00 Was there a particular posting you were hoping to get on board a ship?

Yes, I wanted to go to the West Indies but I never did get to the West Indies.

What was it about the West Indies?

Nothing, just sort of fantasies that boys get. I suppose it happens everywhere that

31:30 these things sound to be attractive. Certainly when I was a boy, even when I was an able seaman, you had to have a very light blue collar otherwise you were seen as being a new boy. You had to look one of the old boys who had been somewhere and done something. My son was the same when he joined the RAF [Royal Air Force]. I think it’s just

32:00 general standard that you don’t like to be seen as the new boy. You like to be seen as an experienced person.

Describe for me what happened when you received orders to go to the battleship, what was your response?

Very excited until I got there. You asked about bastardisation before in boy’s training, that’s where I got some bastardisation.

32:30 Boy’s routine on board ship was to fall in at six o’clock, that’s half an hour before the general hands fall in and then you had to get all the deck washing gear all ready for when the hands fall in to scrub decks in the morning before breakfast. We had an instructor in Ramillies who was a chief PTI [Physical Training Instructor],

33:00 Physical Training Instructor and he was, I should say about five foot six and had been a navy boxer. I was six foot one and he used to take it out on me, used me as a punch bag, there was nothing much you could do about it. Of course when you were scrubbing decks

33:30 you used ordinary sea water, straight out of the sea which in November, December, January is not very warm and we weren’t allowed to wear shoes or boots, or anything, it was bare bats, bare feet. The worst job of all, you’ve seen pictures of battleships with a long spar going out from the side with all the boats tied up to it, somebody, some unfortunate

34:00 body, had to go out there sitting astride that spar right out to the end and scrub that with cold sea water as well. That used to be my job. I was very pleased to leave Ramillies, it didn’t take much volunteering.

How come you got nominated or selected for that particular job?

It’s the difference between five foot six and six foot one.

So your

34:30 size was at great help when you were at St Vincents but was the bane of your life when you got to Ramillies?

Well, just that particular bloke, that’s all.

How many from St Vincents actually went aboard Ramillies?

Only me. Most of them were boys from Portsmouth or Devonport. I was a little bit unusual coming from Chatham because boys from London area

35:00 right down as far as Oxford would have gone to another similar established at Harwich called Ganges, HMS Ganges. So most of the boys in Ramillies, I suppose all the boys except myself were from Ganges.

Given that initially you were going aboard a battleship was there any sort of excitement?

Oh yes, big ship, with eight fifteen inch guns etc.,

35:30 my goodness me. This was really something. But it began to pall a little bit after the first two or three days.

What happened during those days?

That’s when you found out what you were expected to do.

Did you have an action stations on board?

Yes. I was a communications bloke in what was known as the fighting top, it’s the very top of the foremast

36:00 there, you’ll find the range finders etc. for the guns. They didn’t have any other communication except internal telephones in those days so all the orders had to be passed by telephone.

Can you describe for me on board the accommodation, where you slept and the mess?

Hammocks and in my particular case

36:30 we were in an apartment alongside a six inch gun battery and it was very rudimentary. Bearing in mind the Ramillies was a World War I battleship so it was a piece of space that was just allocated. You had mess tables and hooks on which to sling your hammock, that was it.

37:00 Do you remember first going to sea? Your first journey?

Yes, travelling out to Gibraltar.

How did you cope with seasickness and the sea?

Touch wood, I’ve never been seasick in my life so I don’t really know. I’ve seen people who have and I very much pity them. I was very fortunate, never been seasick.

Can you describe for me the layout

37:30 of Ramillies?

Not very well. Ramillies had one funnel, had a foremast which incorporated the bridge and the communications platform and the fighting top, the range finder etc. and it had an aftermast which

38:00 I suppose kept up the radio aerials, didn’t have much other use for it. It had four fifteen inch gun turrets with two fifteen inch guns in each. On the upper deck there were, one, two, three, four, I would say six six inch guns either side, port and starboard

38:30 and various other, in the super structure, various other pompoms or point five machine guns. The deck below that was very much accommodation, office deck and so you gradually go down to store rooms and engine room etc.

What was the culture like on board?

39:00 I wasn’t there long enough really to find out the culture. I never did find my way round the ship really. I was only there three months. There were certainly lots of parts of that ship I never even saw.

You’ve mentioned this fella that gave you a hard time. At that point were you second guessing yourself and wondering why you’d joined the navy?

39:30 Yes. How to get out of it. But you know, it’s one of those things, you come across it every now and again in life, don’t you.

We’ll just stop there and change tapes.

Tape 3

00:48 Just one thing that it’s easy to forget I guess when you’re talking about this now and for people who are listening to it is just how young you were. You were only a fifteen, sixteen year old.

01:00 How did things like the beating on the ship and the darker side of things affect you at that age?

Made me a little bit despondent but I suppose it’s fair to say that it didn’t last too long with me. I can imagine with people that suffered it for a considerable length of time it would very much have depressed them.

01:30 Who did you have to help you through hard times or to look up to in that respect.

Nobody. That’s not to say that there isn’t a system in the navy or wasn’t a system in the navy at that time. I think anybody of my age again at that time would have found it very hard to admit to the fact that they weren’t particularly happy.

02:00 Why do you say that?

I think it’s just natural human nature.

When you first went into the training school for example were you home sick?

No. I can’t ever remember saying, “Sell the pig

02:30 and buy me out”, which was a typical expression in those days. What sort of a sixteen year old were you. Obviously you were quite smart, studious at school. What were you like when you joined the navy?

That’s a very difficult question to answer.

03:00 Ask me another one.

How about I give you some examples and you can say whether you were or not. Where you a good mixer, were you shy, were you outgoing?

No, fairly shy. I don’t think that I would have put myself forward at any stage, if you know what I mean. I certainly wasn’t a leader.

03:30 That’s mainly I think because again thinking of the navy in the early stages that a lot of the boys I was with had all been together for some considerable time at the Naval Hospital Training School. They all knew one another and knew fairly well what to expect whereas I didn’t. So I was always inclined to keep quiet and watch what was going on and try to do the same.

04:00 After the Ramillies you were posted to the Galatea. How did that differ from the Ramillies?

A smaller ship, a completely different ship’s company. The ship’s company of Galatea all came from the Devonport depot and not the Chatham depot. It was a much happier ship. Because it was smaller it was happier, everybody seemed to know everybody. The catering was much

04:30 better for whatever reason. I think we were better accommodated there and better looked after as boys.

When you first come on board a new ship like that, who shows you the ropes, who takes you through the ship?

You have an instructor, the boys always have an instructor. That’s his job. He could be a leading seaman or a petty officer, usually a leading seaman

05:00 and that’s his job, to look after the boys.

What was your instructor like on the Galatea?

Difficult to remember but he would have been a leading seaman with perhaps eight or nine years in the navy, fairly well experienced and very supportive. In other words if there’s something you wanted to know

05:30 he was always there to be asked and quite happy to be asked which made life lots easier.

What common difficulties did you have getting to know a ship?

Only to find your way around and get used to the routines, get used to what was expected of you and to get to know what not to expect.

06:00 What was there to expect on the Galatea, what was your role there?

Basically, my role there was as a junior seaman. All sorts of jobs related to seamanship, handling ropes, wires.

06:30 What else? That was because of the division I was allocated to. Had I been in another division, shall we say the fo’c’s’le division, I would have been working around anchors and cables, quarterdeck division would be working around, scrubbing decks and polishing rather more but generally

07:00 learning as much as you could about seamanship.

What was your division again?

Topman, that’s the middle of the ship.

Where were you housed on board the Galatea, where was your mess deck?

Just forward of the midships on the first deck down from the upper deck.

You mentioned it was smaller

07:30 than the battleship, how big was it, can you give us another description of the Galatea?

Ramillies would have had something like fifteen, sixteen hundred people on board. Galatea would have had something like five hundred, six hundred. In tonnage, Ramillies would have been something like twenty eight thousand tons, Galatea would be more like

08:00 six thousand, seven thousand.

Can you describe your accommodation on board the Galatea, where you slept and ate?

Just a mess deck which would be perhaps three times the size of this room. I suppose we had twenty, twenty five boys and above the messes you had rails on which you slung your hammocks at night.

08:30 Mess stools and mess shelves to keep your utensils in. Just a general sort of a mess.

You slung hammocks?

Yes.

How did you find sleeping in a hammock at sea?

Quite good actually. The getting in and the getting out was the most difficult bit, especially the getting out.

Was that the subject of boy’s pranks?

09:00 Yes, occasionally, but of course it was a dangerous one so you were very much warned against it.

What would happen?

Well you could break a bloke’s neck if you slipped his hammock. If you changed the way he’d slung his hammock to a slip knot affair at one end he would slip

09:30 straight out of it as soon as he got in and if he slipped out at the wrong end he’d come on his head and all the decks of course are steel.

What about the food. You said it was better on the Galatea, can you describe what you were eating in the Royal Navy at that time?

Breakfast was always a good meal.

10:00 We always had plenty of, not every day of course but eggs were on the menu quite frequently. We had bacon occasionally. We would have fish sometimes for breakfast, plenty of bread and butter. Dinner, the mid-day meal was dinner and that would always be three course with soup, a main meal

10:30 and some dessert of some description which would be pineapple and custard or in Galatea we used to get quite a few tarts made. Manchester tart which was tart with custard on the top. Supper would be a reasonable meal but not a very full meal but quite adequate.

Who did the cooking?

11:00 Sounds strange but cooks.

Sounds strange but I assume six hundred people there were different galleys.

No, there were only two galleys, one served the officer’s messes and the other one served the troops and the troops all lived on what is known in the navy as general messing so all the troops had exactly the same meal and it was all cooked in the one galley.

11:30 Of course there was a staff of chief cook, two or three POs [Petty Officers], leading cooks and cooks to look after that. You peeled your own potatoes and put those up there, the rest of it was provided.

So how was it distributed?

You were allocated, in whatever mess you happened to be in, your messes would be of fifteen, twenty people,

12:00 you had your own utensils and each day the leading hand or the senior hand in the mess would allocate two people to be what we called cooks of the mess. It was their job to go the galley, get the meals, it was their job to wash up afterwards and keep the mess deck clean.

What was your opinion of that job, was it a favoured one or one that people didn’t like?

No. Just another job that had to be done.

12:30 Can you explain the system of watch keeping and how you worked in that topman part of the ship?

Watch keeping, boys didn’t keep watches in harbour but at sea we would be in four watches, the whole ship’s company would be in four watches. They divided into port and starboard and those two were divided again,

13:00 subdivided into two. The first part of port watch and the second part of port watch, first of starboard, second of starboard and you would do four hours on and twelve hours off. Your four hours on watch, as a boy anyway, you would certainly be probably a lookout or you would be assisting the quartermaster on the wheel.

13:30 You might operate on the telephone exchange, all sorts of things. Of course your working day still carried on around those watches, everything else still had to be done.

How did they signal the end, change over of a watch? It was piped over a tannoy system.

Would you have to stand to in the mornings or were there any other rituals you had to do throughout the day?

14:00 Yes. The first thing after breakfast would be quarters clean guns where all the seaman would have, would all be allocated to certain positions around the armament and guns had to be kept clean and ammunition ready etc. but apart from that, no, you used to fall in and be allocated whatever needed to be done on that particular day. You were either

14:30 on the end of a paintbrush or a scrubber or a polishing rag.

What was your cruising and action stations on the Galatea?

The Galatea? My gun action station was on the four inch high angle, anti-aircraft gun as a loading member. Cruising station I was on the bridge as the quartermaster’s

15:00 messenger. I can’t remember any other one.

What did the quartermaster’s messenger have to do?

Whatever was needed around the wheelhouse and of course carry messages to wherever they were needed.

As a boy on that ship what did you see of the captain?

15:30 Very little. The captain had his own quarters back aft and he had a sea cabin on the bridge. If he wasn’t on the bridge he was usually in his cabin. Every now and again you might see him walking around the upper deck depending on the state of affairs. I was about to say I wouldn’t know the captain from a bar of soap but that’s not quite true. When the captain walks

16:00 past of course you all stand to attention. That’s about all. You would see very little of him unless you happened to be a defaulter then you’d see a lot of him.

How was the discipline enforced on the ship?

You’d have what is known as a regulating staff. There is a master at arms who was a chief petty officer and he has to assist him two or three or maybe four regulating petty officers.

16:30 In these days, since my time in the navy you have leading hands who are called leading patrolmen. They are really the ship’s police.

What punishments would they hand down?

They wouldn’t hand down any, they weren’t entitled to. In fact, if we speak of Galatea, the only person really

17:00 empowered to hand down punishment would be the commander, not the captain, the commander, the executive officer. Any wrong doing you’d be brought up in front of the officer of the watch in the first place. He would investigate it, the preliminary investigation and then decide whether there was anything to be continued or whether he could just dismiss it with a caution or a warning or a blast.

17:30 If it was passed on then you came up in front of the commander’s defaulter’s table and again if it was too serious for him to consider then you were passed on to the captain. The captain would see defaulters probably once a week, commander would see them every day.

What was the worst thing that could happen to someone if they were before the captain for example?

The captain,

18:00 I don’t know what his ultimate powers were but certainly he could authorize up to fourteen days in the brig but anything, I think I’d be right in saying anything more than that would have to go to the flag officer commanding the squadron.

18:30 Obviously as boys on board you were told all this to keep yourself in line. What did you get into trouble for?

Not being there on time, skulking, not being dressed properly, being on the upper deck without a cap on, having dirty kit, not lashing your hammock up properly. What else?

19:00 And the worse punishment that you had to do?

That I had to do? I suppose the worst punishment I ever had in the navy was a day’s stoppage of leave and pay for being late in arriving from shore, I think.

Was anyone ever put in the brig on the Galatea? 19:30 Not that I can remember.

There were no major disciplinary…?

Not that I can remember. I think if there had been we would have known about it anyway because news travels very fast.

How does the news travel round on a ship? Obviously the tannoy pipes instructions,

20:00 what other means of the ship communication?

Daily orders were typed out and posted up and you are required to read those on a daily basis. There’s no excuse for not having read the daily orders. So today for instance, if you were in harbour you should know what’s going to happen tomorrow. If you were going to store ship or ammunition ship or you were going to paint ship etc. you were

20:30 forewarned about it. That’s the commander’s responsibility. The rest of it is really by word of mouth. Much of it is just completely routine.

Obviously the standards of dress were very high, can you describe the uniforms

21:00 you were wearing at that time?

You had four suits, actually you were issued with more than four but there are four suits involved in this. Your number one uniform suit was the best suit that you wore for divisions and to go ashore. Your number two

21:30 uniform suit was one that was not quite as good as the one you went ashore in, it was probably the one you went ashore in last year, just a little bit worn. The number one suit had gold badges on, the number two suit had red badges on and then you had a number three suit with red badges, which was your oldest third suit and that was the one you normally wore around the upper deck. If you were going to be doing

22:00 rough or dirty jobs you could be wearing a duck suit which was a white canvas sort of a suit or you might even be wearing overalls but it was frowned on in my day to be wearing overalls on the upper deck unless you were actually painting ship or something of that nature.

What colour were these uniforms?

Dark blue serge except for the duck suits of course, they were white.

22:30 Headgear?

Cap. The sort of cap you still see sailors wearing. Blue in the winter and white in the summer.

And what sort of things would fall below standard as far as the dress regulations were concerned?

Unrepaired tears in your suit or

23:00 not having your collar on properly, the blue collar that goes down the back or having a dirty flannel, the piece of white that shows here, dirty shoes or boots, hair too long. Again, that was in my day, I don’t think that happens now. Not being properly shaved.

23:30 What else?

How long were you on the Galatea for before it left for Malta? Were there other duties around England?

I was never in the Galatea in England except visiting England for the coronation. I joined Galatea when she was in the Mediterranean.

So where were you based? Can you describe exactly what your home port was?

I’m sorry, what do you mean by

24:00 home port? Where we were mainly based in Galatea? In Malta. In Sliema Creek. We were secured to buoys, foreward and aft. Galatea was the flagship of the destroyer squadrons. We had three destroyer flotillas attached to the Galatea and Galatea carried the rear admiral destroyers

24:30 as well as a captain.

What were your impressions of Malta when you saw it for the first time?

Bit difficult to answer that. Didn’t really see much of it as a boy because our leave was very much restricted. Excited of course to be abroad, as it were.

25:00 I can’t really answer your question other than that. It became a very different place during the war, I just wondered if there was any comparisons from the early time you were there.

No, I didn’t know very much about it in Galatea.

So what was the role of the Galatea while you were in the Med?

Basically patrolling the Spanish seaports and the sea ways outside those ports.

25:30 The Spanish Civil War was going at that stage. The destroyer flotillas were very much used in making sure that British merchant ships were not interfered with by the Spanish ships from Gibraltar through to Tulon so we called in occasionally at

26:00 places like Barcelona and Valencia. Occasionally we would call in at Gibraltar and stay there for a few days and now and again we would go across to Tangier or Algiers or Tunis. We did once go down to the Greek Islands but that’s the only time I can ever remember going into what I would classify as the eastern part of the Mediterranean.

26:30 Obviously Britain wasn’t involved in the Civil War in any respect, what rules were there about your coming into contact with vessels or homeports?

Nothing at all really. About entering Spanish ports I suppose there were a lot of diplomatic things to be settled but certainly a long way outside my sphere of life.

27:00 We were really only interested in British shipping, making sure that was safe and not being interfered with.

What incidents occurred in the course of those duties while you were on the ship.

I’d seen the bombing going on in Barcelona, I’d seen it happen in Valencia. I can remember seeing quite

27:30 a few Spanish ships when we visited Palma in Majorca but that’s about all.

Can you describe what you saw of the bombing in one of those Spanish ports?

Not a great deal. Heard rather more than saw. It was very spasmodic sort of thing. It wasn’t the very heavy sort of bombing we got in World War II.

This was German planes?

28:00 Well presumably they were Spanish planes but they may have been German or Italian, but I wouldn’t know.

Obviously you’re a young lad but you’re in the navy, what did you know about what was going on in Europe at the time?

Very little. Wasn’t particularly interested, strange as it may seem. More interested in seeing the world, as I thought.

Did you ever think about

28:30 being involved in a war in that time?

No, not at all. I never joined the navy to be involved in a war.

It seems in hindsight a bit of an oversight on your part.

Well, I suppose one always ought to have that in the background of your mind but it certainly never occurred to me that a war might happen and I might be in it.

Did seeing bombing in Spain impress you about the seriousness of the military at all?

29:00 Not particularly, no. We were too far away from it for that.

Your own ship, did it come across any suspicious vessels? Were there guns fired?

No. Only in practice.

We’ll come back to guns in a moment but the other big event that wasn’t of a war nature was the coronation review, can you tell us what happened,

29:30 take us through that story?

Yes. We sailed from Malta back to the UK and the coronation review was held at Spithead which is the stretch of water between the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth. I can’t tell you how many ships were there but I think all the navies of the world were represented. It was quite a sight actually. A fantastic sight.

30:00 There must have been something like eighty, ninety, a hundred war ships there of various sizes and descriptions. What else? The fleets were inspected by the king in the royal yacht. Other than that there was

30:30 a hell of a lot of hard work polishing and scrubbing.

Can you describe what happened during that inspection?

They just sailed up and down the lines of ships, that’s all. Of course, each ship saluted as they went past. That’s about all.

What happens on the deck?

Everybody lines up and

31:00 cheers ship so you lift your hat and wave it as ordered, shout as ordered, when ordered.

Are there any other types of formal naval drill for an occasion like that?

No, not really. Apart from dressing ship, you dress ship overall with flags etc. from bow to stern and at night you’re lit up,

31:30 lighted up over all.

Tell us about the leave you got on that occasion.

I think I got about two week’s leave on that occasion. Not over nightly, I mean going home for two weeks and my parents at that stage were living in London so that’s where I went.

32:00 That’s where I met my wife.

What was London like in the midst of that celebration?

Just London. There was nothing special going on there, not that I saw anyway.

How did you meet your wife, just on a side story.

Just met her one day walking in Hyde Park.

32:30 Started talking. When I went back to sea, went back to Malta, she and I corresponded by letter and of course we got back together when I arrived home eventually, the following year.

Was there any sort of romance struck up during that two weeks that promised a future?

Would you define romance?

33:00 Was this woman a potential fiancé or just a friend?

Well, very much a friend at this stage and very much a fiancée after I got back.

I guess, I’m not putting words in your mouth, but the romance was one of letters, or correspondence while you were away?

Basically, yes.

What did you know about women? The navy’s a pretty blokey place.

33:30 Nothing. I’d had very little, other than the female members of my own family which is only my grandmother and my mother, nothing. I didn’t know anything about women.

How were women seen within the British Navy at the time?

What a difficult question to answer.

34:00 I don’t really know. I can’t answer that one.

As boys within the navy were you told about things like brothels or VD [Venereal Disease]?

Oh yeah, well you knew about that anyway. You hear all the other, older sailors chatting about this when they’re back on board.

34:30 What went on in that respect in Malta?

Nothing. The brothels I ever heard about were in places like Tangiers or Palma or Algiers or Tunis,

35:00 that’s all. I certainly never heard anyone mention a brothel in Malta at any time. I have no doubt there probably was one or two or three but I wouldn’t know.

VD was a problem in the navy later on. Was there formal instruction about that at any time during your education?

35:30 No formal instruction, no. You just heard the old sailors remarks on what the treatment was like and how awful it was and don’t get it if you happen to have it, if you can’t help it. 36:00 I asked this question earlier about the first ship you were on but during your time on the Galatea were there any particular older sailors that took you under their wing or helped you particularly?

No, we relied, depended entirely on the captain of our division, the captain of the top who was a petty officer and the leading seaman who was our boy’s instructor. I suppose there were

36:30 other petty officers and chief petty officers around who you could always ask questions of but that was about it. You picked things up generally as you went along and if of course you were interested in things of a seamanship nature anybody would help you.

As you’ve already said, you knew nothing about it and you weren’t seemingly very interested

37:00 in the political affairs but what was the first sign that there might be a war coming that you became aware of?

When I was in Chatham barracks after the Galatea paid off I was in the gunnery school and then it became quite evident that there was a danger of war occurring. I suppose that was mainly from newspapers we got there.

37:30 There was no general attitude around anticipating war until August of 1938. Then they started exercising mobilization of the reserves but that was only an exercise at that stage.

How did that prospect of a coming war once the mobilization

38:00 started effect your view of what you were doing in the navy?

Not at all to my memory, not at all. We’re talking about the 1938 mobilisation.

So what happened in the navy at the time? Can you explain the changes that you saw when the reserve was

38:30 brought up?

When they call the reserve up, the navy at that stage always had plans for what they called mobilization and always during peace time there are ships in reserve where they just have maintenance people on board. The plans are always in existence for bringing those ships

39:00 up to full complement with mobilization. So every now and again you would be required to fall in on the parade ground or in the drill shed and get into your particular allocation block, I mean block of people and when the thing actually occurs then of course the reserve people are there as well but until then it’s just purely an exercise

39:30 and quite frankly at that stage an exercise I didn’t really understand.

Where did you go after Chatham? What was your next?

I volunteered for submarines and joined HMS Dolphin in Gosport. Dolphin was the submarine base.

Can you briefly tell us the story about how you heard about submarines?

Yes, notice went on the board asking for volunteers

40:00 and everybody in the navy knew that being a submariner gave you extra money. My pay as an able seaman at that stage was three shillings a day to which I added an extra thruppence by becoming qualified in gunnery and the submarine pay was another three shillings a day. I had a fiancée at that stage. There wasn’t any question about it.

40:30 We’ll just have to stop there because the tape’s run out so we’ll change it over and pick it up.

Tape 4

00:51 We were getting up to the outbreak of the war. You posted yourself to submarines. Was it simply a question of money?

01:00 That wasn’t the outbreak of war, that was the outbreak of the Munich crisis.

I said we were getting up towards it but yeah, we’re still a year off before the actual outbreak of war, just on your posting to submarines though, was it simply a question of money?

Yes.

Did you seek to find out what about what you were getting yourself in for?

Purely money. What did you know about submarines?

Nothing. I’d only ever seen a couple. I’d never been inside one.

01:30 It was a small ship as well, submarine is a small ship and I knew from what I’d been told that the smaller the ship, the happier the ship’s company. It seemed to me to be a very good opportunity, killing two birds with one stone.

So what did you find when you arrived at HMS Dolphin?

A load of submarines

02:00 alongside being stored ready for war.

What was the standard of the British submarine fleet at that time, what were they like these submarines?

Very well trained, plenty of expertise there and the majority of the crews were of the older type. When I say older I’m talking of people of

02:30 twenty five years of age and upwards to age forty. Very experienced seamen and stokers and telegraphists and quite a decent band of people to be with.

I’ve heard others say that the submariner is a particular type of naval person, a sub-section within the navy if you will.

03:00 Very cliquey. But that’s the same as a fleet air arm.

How did that become obvious to you when you first went to Dolphin?

To me, the biggest shock I got when I went to Dolphin was that when we went to divisions which always happened on a Monday morning in Dolphin, we didn’t dress up in our number one suits, we dressed up

03:30 in overall suits. That was the rig of the day, all the days of the week, overall suits. The discipline as I’d seen it in the gunnery school was very much relaxed. There was discipline there but a different kind of discipline. It was more self-discipline than anything else. You didn’t need people shouting at you

04:00 from morning to night. People knew what they were supposed to do or had a jolly good idea what they were supposed to do and just did it.

What were the first things you were trained to do when you arrived there?

In submarine training? Well when you arrive you do four or five weeks in a classroom and during that time you do perhaps two or maybe three days at sea

04:30 in a submarine and you go through all the systems and routines in the class room area so that by the time you join your first submarine you have a fair idea as to how a submarine works. Not all the detail, but a fair idea. Each submarine is a little bit different from the next one of course so you have to get used to your own submarine when you join it.

05:00 You also have to get used to your own superiors too, their likes and dislikes, as you do in any part of the navy anyway. What else can I tell you about it?

For the archive, how did a submarine work in those days? Not the technical side but what were the limitations of the submarines that you were on in those days?

All the submarines I served in, those days

05:30 or later, were diesel electric which meant to say they dived during the day and had to surface at night to recharge their batteries. They exercised quite a bit. When I say exercised I mean they went through all sorts of routines quite a bit so that you eventually became very well versed in what the submarine

06:00 could do and what you were supposed to do as well. So eventually a lot of things happened virtually automatically, you didn’t have to be told do this, do that, do something else, you did it. You knew what had to be done.

How big were they?

They varied in size. The ‘H’ class which was still in operation during the war were of about five hundred tons

06:30 displacement and carried something like twenty two, twenty three total in crew to the biggest ones would be the mine laying submarines and they would have something like sixty, sixty five people on board and would be something like fifteen hundred to two thousand tons displacement. So there’s quite a difference between submarines.

07:00 What did you do on the first training or familiarization trips that you went on?

During the training? You simply dived during the day, you were instructed in the routine for diving, what had to be done and who did what, how the trimming was done and where the trimming tanks were and how the trimming was effected, how the main

07:30 motors operated and what was required of lookouts etc. on the bridge. Steering, you got on the helm. In a big ship you had very few opportunities to steer a big ship, that was a quartermaster’s job but in a submarine of course all the seamen have to steer. And generally get used to the layout of a submarine too.

08:00 Obviously the quarters were a lot more confined to those you had become used to. Can you describe the layout of the first submarines you went into?

The layout, they do differ very much from one submarine to another, from one class of submarine to another. In Oberon, which was my first submarine, there are one,

08:30 two, three, four, five, six compartments, each separated from one another by a watertight bulkhead with watertight doors which are normally kept open at sea and the forward of those is the tube space where the torpedo tubes are. Immediately behind that is what is known as the fore ends which is where the spare torpedoes are kept and also part of the crew live.

09:00 Beyond that is what is known as the accommodation space which is where the ward room, the officers’ and the chief petty officers’ and the ERA’s [Engine Room Artificer’s] messes and usually the galley are. Then you come through the next bulkhead to the control room where the main controls of the submarine are for diving and surfacing and navigating and depth keeping etc. and also at the far end, at the after end of that

09:30 is the wireless office and the radar and ASDIC [Anti Submarine Detection Investigation Committee] control. Then you come through another bulkhead into what is known as the engine room where you have your diesel engines and your main ballast pump. At the after end of that is the motor room where the main motors are controlled from and beyond the bulkhead there again you come to the after ends and

10:00 that is where the stokers were messed and also in Oberon there were two after tubes as well so we had a pair of re-load torpedoes there too.

How much space did you have to move around inside them?

From memory, not too bad in Oberon. It was a fair sized submarine of about

10:30 fifteen hundred tons, so in most places I could walk around without bashing my head against something overhead. Not everywhere but in a lot of places. From the point of view of sleeping, certainly some of the people slept on the deck, others managed to sling a hammock in the fore ends. For the chiefs and petty officers, ERA’s etc.

11:00 in the ward room there were bunks which were hot bunks, you probably shared two bunks between three people. The stokers back aft were the same as the seamen, some managed to sleep in hammocks, some on the deck and some on the mess stools.

What about the other comforts of living? Did you have much room to eat or wash or sleep, sleep you talked about but eating or washing?

11:30 Well you ate and slept in the same places so if you were living in the fore ends then you had to take the hammocks down to eat and if you wanted to sleep you had to stop eating.

How much water was there in a submarine?

What a difficult question to answer. That varied between submarines. Usually,

12:00 depending on the size of the submarine, I suppose the smallest submarines would carry something like four to five weeks anticipated requirements of fresh water and the larger submarines would have something like six to eight weeks but then fresh water would be rationed anyway, not in peace time but certainly in war time it’s rationed.

12:30 These days they do have distillers for making their own fresh water but the submarines I served in you just had what you carried with you.

How much water was the ration, how much did you have to use?

13:00 When it became necessary to ration, and rationing wasn’t necessary all the time, you’d be down to something like two or three hundred gallons a day for everything within the ship. That’s for cooking, for washing up, for toiletry and for drinking.

Can you describe the toilet facilities?

13:30 Very much the same as you have at home, at least I imagine you have at home, except of course you discharge the contents of the toilet pan by air pressure the same as you do in a yacht but you do it there with air pressure. You open a couple of hole valves, one which is a non-return valve and put air pressure into the holding tank underneath and just blow it overboard. What you have to remember 14:00 to do of course is to not leave the valves open otherwise somebody blows and it doesn’t go overboard it comes in board.

Was that a common mistake for someone learning their way on a submarine?

Not common but not unknown.

What were the repercussions of that?

A lot of cleaning up to be done, of people and places.

14:30 I shudder to think.

Oberon was unusual in that it had, the crew had two toilets at the after end of the motor room and they were for whatever reason sited alongside one another so that if you were using the inboard of the two toilets the

15:00 contents of the tank had to pass the outboard toilet before it went out through the pressure hull. So if you happened to be in the outboard toilet with the flap valve open while somebody was blowing the inboard one, you got his.

And yet people on board a submarine generally got on quite well in these conditions.

Yes. You get used to these sort of things. In an ‘H’ boat which was a very small one there was only one toilet for the crew

15:30 and that was sited right after, the very after place of the submarine right in the middle so if all the water tight doors were open as they normally were, when you were sitting on the throne everybody from the fore ends right through the submarine could see you there.

You mentioned the valves that controlled the toilets workings, these were similar to the way the submarine was raised and lowered?

No.

How did that work?

16:00 The submarine has what are known as ballast tanks. There are two types of ballast tanks. There are external ones and there are internal ones. An external ballast tank submarine is really a submarine pressure hull with the ballast tanks built outside of much thinner metal, they don’t have to withstand pressure, well not very much pressure and you have a valve at the top of each,

16:30 they’re separated and shall we say in the average sized submarine you’d have six of these separations. For six tanks you’d have six vent valves on each side, that’s twelve all together and in the bottom in most of them, but not all, you’d just have what are known as free flood holes, they’d be open to the sea. But for safety reasons, at least two of those tanks

17:00 would have valves in the bottom known as Kingston valves which are large flap valves. In order to dive in a submarine those main ballast tanks have to be completely flooded. So to flood them all you do is make sure the Kingstons were open and open the vents in the top to let the air out. So you got, when you opened the vents, you got a great rush of air going out and the water comes automatically into the bottom and down the submarine goes.

17:30 Once it’s down then you’ve got to get to trim the submarine fore and aft so it maintains a level keel and you have internal tanks from which you pump water to and from the sea, sorry you flood from the sea and pump out to the sea or you pump from one to the other to maintain the trim. Of course your trim will vary depending on circumstances, how much food you’ve eaten during the day, how many torpedoes you’ve fired,

18:00 how much fuel you’ve used, etc. etc. Trimming the submarine is a constant affair but once you’ve got a general trim then you’ve got hydroplanes at the forward end and the after end of the submarine to maintain depth and angle. The smaller submarines, the ‘H’ boats and the ‘U’ class submarines had not the ballast tanks

18:30 on the outside, there’s ballast tanks inside the pressure hull and they operated in exactly the same way except of course they had to be built of much stouter material because they had to withstand the sea pressure.

How were those trimming operations controlled from within the submarine?

By the officer of the watch from the control room and he would have a system of

19:00 switches there above his head. His place would be generally behind the two planesmen and he can watch what’s happening on the depth gauges that the planesmen have and also on the bubble which is giving him the inclination of the submarine and he simply reaches up and twists a knob which lights up something at the pump, tells the pump operator

19:30 what to do but prior to doing that he would order over the tannoy system or over the telephone, “Open this valve” or “Shut that valve” etc. to whoever’s in the local position would do that.

What were the valve controls themselves?

The vent valves? Hydraulically operated from the control room.

20:00 So you have a panel in the control room where the main vents, as they are known, controlled by levers which control hydraulic pressure to the valves themselves to open or shut them as required. So that if the officer of the watch or the captain decides he wants to dive the boat, he simply says “Open main vents” and one bloke does the lot in about five seconds flat.

20:30 Getting back to the inside of the submarine and the conditions for you. You said you didn’t know anything about it. What was your experience of going out and diving in a submarine for the first time like?

Quite exciting. But on the other hand you’re doing it in pretty fair weather conditions. You’re doing it in a submarine which has already got a basic trim on so you don’t get absurd angles. You certainly don’t get

21:00 a lot of rocking and rolling in fact it’s very difficult to know that you are dived except you can hear the air hissing out of the tanks when you open the valves and it all goes very quiet after that.

What about claustrophobia, what kind of an issue was that for new submariners?

Well, certainly none to my, I really don’t know anyone that suffered from claustrophobia.

21:30 There was no place for anyone that did. I’ve seen a person start to get that way with depth charging going on but that’s all.

So can you describe your first few trips out and your impressions of submarine life?

Are we talking prior to the war?

Still talking

22:00 prior to the war, your initial orientation, the training you did.

Well in my case it was a question of getting used to what I was supposed to be doing, getting used to what sort of instructions I could expect to receive, understanding what I was supposed to do either by instruction or by knowing what I was supposed to be doing

22:30 at any particular time. And in fact, it was a learning curve all the way through.

What things were difficult for you during that learning curve?

I can’t remember anything being particularly difficult because everybody is so happy to help you out

23:00 with answering questions. I can’t think of anything difficult. You start to get to know the routine fairly quickly. In peace time it’s a fairly humdrum sort of a job.

23:30 Can’t answer it more than that.

How did it differ from the operations of a ship that you’ve described to us already, with things like action stations and watch keeping?

Watch keeping was different of course. In as much as in a submarine in my day you were in three watches so you had two hours on and four hours off. As a seaman,

24:00 on the surface you were either a lookout or you were helmsman or you were a messenger in the control room passing instructions or orders from one place to another. When you were dived you could be on the helm, you could be operating the forward hydroplanes or if you were a senior seamen you could be operating the after planes.

24:30 Not much more than that.

Were there action stations similar to what you had on the ship?

Don’t call them action stations but yes, they call them diving stations. Your diving station, as the name would suggest is when you were going to dive the boat but that doesn’t mean to say

25:00 that you have to go to diving stations to dive the boat, you can still dive the boat off the watch in a well trained submarine crew. That was very commonly done, certainly during wartime because you tried to give people as much rest and sleep as possible.

A couple of things from what you just told us, the helm controls, what were they like in a submarine, can you describe them?

25:30 Very easily, hydraulically operated from the control room. There were other ways of controlling the helm in emergencies but the helmsman sits there with a wheel, he is normally facing forward, has the wheel in front of him and has a strip across where your gyrocompass repeater is there and all he does is steer whatever course is required.

26:00 If the gyro is not working he also has a magnetic compass reflected down from the bridge but that’s very seldom used, it’s very difficult to use in the first place.

What kind of visual reference is there for the helmsman?

None. All he’s got is the gyro strip in front of him. He’s got a voice pipe alongside him from the bridge.

26:30 So orders are passed from the officer of the watch on the bridge down through the voice pipe to the helmsman. All he has to do is remember to shut the voice pipe off when you dive.

Where is the bridge?

On top of the conning tower. I think what they layman would call the conning tower is actually the bridge. The tower is inside the bridge structure

27:00 and the tower simply consists of a trunking that goes up with a hatch at the bottom and a hatch at the top. The bridge is where navigation is normally done when the submarine is on the surface.

What was inside that area?

The bridge or the conning tower?

I guess both.

Well on the bridge you have, again in my day, you had an upper deck steering position which was used

27:30 when you were entering or leaving harbour or confined waters where the helmsman could see where he was going. You had telegraphs where the officer of the watch or the captain could order speeds which would be passed down to the engine or control room. What else was up there? You had mountings for machine guns on the side of the bridge.

28:00 In the latter stages of the war you had an after platform on which there was an Oerlikon gun. And you had a gyrocompass repeater. You also had the magnetic compass up there. Not much else, space for lookouts and the officer of the watch.

28:30 Prior to the war there would be a miniature chart table up there.

That took up an area within the conning tower?

No, on top of the conning tower.

On top of the conning tower. What was in the rest of the conning tower?

The conning tower is simply a ladder to get you from A to B down and not much else. It was simply access to the bridge really.

29:00 Are there any other hatches or entrances or exits outside that main hatch?

Oh yes. Talking about escape to begin with, the conning tower is an escape tower. The gun tower, there’s access to the gun where you carried a gun which was exactly the same as a conning tower that was an escape access and you had another

29:30 what we know as DSEA [Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus] escape hatches one in the fore ends and one in the after end of the engine room. Other hatches, in Oberon which had forward and after tubes, there are two torpedo loading hatches which are set at an angle so that your torpedo when you’re loading it from outside the submarine into the submarine

30:00 goes down at an angle like that on rails so the hatch itself is angled, something like that.

Could they be used as escape?

No.

What training did you get at Dolphin about escaping from a submarine?

Two days in an escape tank. In my day it was a thirty foot tank and today, for the last forty years

30:30 it’s been a one hundred foot tank and you are taught how to use the escape apparatus and you actually go into the tank and go up to the top of the water. You do everything in practice.

Could you take us through one of those drills, what you had to do in an escape tank?

I can’t tell you what happens today, because it’s quite different.

No, what happened then is more interesting.

In my day 31:00 in the latter part of my day all you do is to go into a small chamber, a watertight chamber at the foot of the tank which represents the fore ends of the submarine shall we say and there you open up a flood valve which allows water from the tank to come in, and build up a pressure inside until the air pressure, you’ve

31:30 compressed the air that was in the tank sufficiently to stop any more water coming in when the pressures are equalized. At that stage you used to put on a nose clip and then you would open the lower hatch, pass up to the top, open the upper hatch, climb out through the upper hatch and then go up to the surface but because

32:00 you’ve been breathing air at the pressure at the bottom of the tank, as you go upwards that pressure diminishes and so what you’re actually doing is breathing out all the way up. You have no wish to breath in at all and even if you did you’ve got a clip on your nose to stop you from doing it.

How much water are you under?

A hundred feet so

32:30 when you enter the tank at the bottom you’ve got forty five pounds per square inch pressure.

Are there any problems with decompression?

No, you shouldn’t have at that depth. I think decompression starts to become a problem over about a hundred and twenty feet.

So what was that experience like? It sounds almost terrifying to me, what was it like for you as a young trainee?

There was no problem,

33:00 just follow instructions. And anyway, if you were bothered by it you wouldn’t let anyone else see that you were bothered.

Were there any accidents while you were training?

Not while I was training. There have been accidents but not very many.

We’ll come back to what happened when you were involved in a sinking sub

33:30 later on, so we’ll see how that drill came to the fore. Just to continue and finish off my description for the archive, I was talking about, the helmsman has no visual reference, the bridge can see when the submarine’s on the surface, what about when the submarine is diving?

When it’s dived, a periscope.

Can you describe for us?

A periscope is simply a long tube that is controlled

34:00 hydraulically to go up and down. Normally it would be down, there is a periscope well that goes down to the bottom of the submarine so that the top of the periscope is not sticking above the surface of the water. When the officer of the watch wants to have a look around he simply orders the periscope to be raised and the engine room person on the controls

34:30 there simply raises the periscope hydraulically by operating a lever and depending on the height of the officer of the watch he stops it when necessary and just manually pulls it around. I believe these days they’ve got mechanical or electrical methods of training the periscope, in fact I think in the absolute latest submarines they don’t even use a periscope.

35:00 Was it used only when the submarine was near the surface of the water?

Yes. You can’t see through the periscope, you can see hardly anything through the periscope down to about fifty feet and below fifty feet it’s a waste of time. You don’t use the periscope when you’re on the surface usually because the vibration of the engines, if you’ve got your engines running, the vibration,

35:30 it’s a possibility that could damage the lens in the periscope.

So when you’re diving at depth, portholes are redundant?

No such thing as a porthole. There used to be in the very original submarines but not in any I’ve ever been in.

So what sensual,

36:00 sensory, what is the sensory experience like then? You can’t see you’re underwater, you said you wouldn’t know you were diving, what clues do you have to being in a submarine under water? Well you’re not using your engines so the vibration and the noise has stopped, your motors are quiet, there’s hardly any noise except some of the auxiliary machinery might make a humming sound and of course if the after planesman’s not doing his job properly

36:30 you get an angle on the boat either up or down but that’s most unusual too.

You say it’s quite silent. Noises that carry through the water?

I didn’t say silent, I said quiet.

So what are the noises you can hear?

Well you can hear a pump running for instance or you can hear ship’s ventilation running. You might hear the refrigerator running. What else?

37:00 You might hear hydraulic fluid hissing through a pipe. You’d certainly hear air hissing through a pipe and you might even hear salt water being pumped through a pipe. I can’t think of anything else. You might hear the screws if you’re trying to do anything like a high speed.

37:30 You might hear the screws hitting the water.

Are there any noises that carry from outside the submarine?

Yes.

What are they?

Well under normal circumstances none but if you were doing an exercise and somebody drops a grenade over the side, fifty or sixty feet away, you can hear that quite plainly.

38:00 You can certainly hear depth charges. I can’t think of any other.

What about whales?

No. You can hear them on the hydrophones but you wouldn’t hear them within the submarine. At least, I’ve never heard of them being heard.

Can you describe the hydrophones, what were they?

Hydrophones are really

38:30 loudspeakers in reverse I suppose. In the submarines that I served in they are situated in the forward end of the keel and are operated electronically and again, in the submarines that I’ve served in, are controlled by an operator with headphones.

39:00 So he’s actually listening for noises. These days of course it’s quite different, the noises are reflected onto a monitor and you can see the pattern on the monitor and it’s possible, again I’m going back forty, fifty years, it’s possible for a well trained ASDIC operator

39:30 to be able to pick up the rev beats of the screw of a passing ship in front, be able to tell what speed that ship is doing. There’s also a means of underwater communication between submarines, very seldom used because anybody else can listen in to it, but it is there in emergency.

40:00 Was there in emergency.

Is that like a telegraph system? How does it work?

Yes. Just like telegraph, Morse code.

We should stop there, we’re about to run out of tape.

Tape 5

00:43 Gordon we’ll just kick off with a question on what we were discussing off camera about what changed from World War I to World War II subs, asking permission to go through, affecting the trim. What differences were there in submarines from World War I, the older style to the new?

01:00 Basically I suppose accommodation would be one of the big differences and secondly would be mechanical operation. Much more hydraulically operated equipment in the more modern submarine than there was in World War I.

01:30 Apart from that, I can’t think of very much difference.

You mentioned to me that originally when you were passing through the command section you had to ask permission to go through. Yes.

Why was that?

Well, because the original submarines were that small that two people passing through the control room which was the centre of the submarine

02:00 going from right forward to right aft could make a difference to the trim, either bow up or bow down. As submarines got bigger that became less of a problem but even during war time it was still fairly common practice to require somebody to ask permission to move forward or move aft and the officer of the watch if three or four or five people wanted to move, he would stop them.

02:30 The same that it was always, during war time, a requirement to ask permission to go on the bridge because you didn’t want more than the officer of the watch and the lookout on the bridge if you had to dive in a hurry.

What would be the reason for somebody to want to pass from forward to aft or aft to forward?

Go to the toilet.

You wouldn’t want four or five fellas lining up.

Not all at once

03:00 but that’s one I can think off. There could be a multitude of others. An electrician might want to go forward to see to a fuse that’s blown etc. Engineers might want to move around to operate some valves. All sorts of reasons.

So really just general maintenance?

General maintenance and general running of a submarine. You might want an extra

03:30 can of tinned milk from the store forward and take it aft to the stoker’s mess. Somebody’s got to go and get it.

Now travelling forward, where were you when the war was declared?

In Oberon alongside the jetty in HMS Dolphin at Gosport, on Sunday morning just about to go to

04:00 a church service.

How did you hear the news? Through a wireless?

Word of voice. It was just spread around Dolphin like wildfire. Everybody was expecting it of course. The word just went round, “It’s on”.

What was the feeling amongst the men?

I suppose the feeling was

04:30 wonderment at what was going to go on, what was going to happen and some of the people I was serving with at the time had World War I experience, not very many, but some. Of course their experience didn’t stand them in any very good stead with what happened in World War II. Really and truly nobody really knew what to expect.

05:00 Anyway we weren’t left in limbo for very long before we were shot off to Dundee to find out for ourselves.

How did the naval base change as soon as war was declared?

Dolphin? Well it was bereft of submarines. Normally there was a flotilla of submarines operating out of Dolphin

05:30 but all those submarines apart from the reserve ones immediately went up to places like Harwich or Dundee. So they’d start patrolling, they probably went before the war started, but patrolling the North Sea from there. Other than that, no noticeable change.

Were you at all aware of what the Germans had as far as submarines?

06:00 No. You’re talking about me personally? No.

So what happened to you from that point on after war was declared?

As I say, we went to Dundee. We did one patrol from Dundee in Oberon which lasted about a fortnight. When we returned to harbour it was decided that the

06:30 submarine was mechanically unreliable to do that sort of work. First we went to Grangemouth which is near Edinburgh, did a short docking there and then on down to Portland to run as a mechanical mouse for anti-submarine training. Just stepping back and looking that information in detail. Leaving Dundee, what were your expectations as you went out?

Didn’t have any.

07:00 Didn’t know what to expect. I suppose we were on edge a bit because we didn’t know what to expect but in actual fact it was a very quiet period. It was almost like taking a training class out, almost.

And what went wrong with the engine?

Mainly engine trouble, yes.

What are we talking about in respect of trouble?

We’re talking about

07:30 not being reliable, not starting when you wanted them to start etc.

So when you went out, was the engine running the whole time, was it turned off and on?

It goes on and off because as I said a little earlier you dive all day and surface at night and use the engines to recharge your batteries. The same again at night you’d be using your engines to get you from A to B.

08:00 What’s your speed underwater versus on top?

Underwater speeds in the submarines in my day would be anything between one and a half knots and eight or nine knots. Most unusual to go above nine knots. There were submarines specifically built to do that but not any

08:30 that I served in. Today of course it’s quite different with nuclear submarines.

What was your objective on this particular journey?

You mean the first patrol?

Yep.

The objective would have been I suppose to look for German shipping of any sort. I suppose when I say shipping I really mean war shipping.

09:00 We didn’t have open warfare at that time. You weren’t allowed to just attack merchant ships, you had to surface and warn them and give them opportunity to abandon ship. That didn’t cease until the war had been going three or four months. That ceased because the Germans sank, I can’t remember the name of the liner,

09:30 it sank a ship in the Atlantic with a number of Americans on board. Once that had been done then the Brits themselves declared open war.

So there were certain rules up to that point?

Oh yes, there’s always rules to war.

Any other particular rules such as this?

Oh yes, you

10:00 observed life saving for instance. If there was a survivor in the water and it’s possible to pick him up, you pick him up, just normal rules of shipping really, rules of the sea. Certainly at the outbreak of war we were not allowed to attack merchant ships without first challenging them on the surface and giving them the opportunity

10:30 to abandon ship.

So during this trip you’ve mentioned the mechanical problems, what was the feeling amongst fellas in respect to having to return home?

Jolly good, relief. When I say relief let me make it quite clear what I mean, they were very happy because they knew going to Portland they’d be able to get weekend leave every now and again and a lot of the people lived in the

11:00 London area etc. so this was a good billet to be.

Were the boys itching for a fight?

No, quite the reverse I would think. Not adverse to having a fight but not going looking for it.

What was your biggest fear on board a submarine? 11:30 Don’t know I ever had any. I must have had at some stage. I really can’t answer that question, I don’t know.

Did you have a frustration on board,

12:00 a most difficult thing?

Plenty of frustrations I suppose. When you get served up with a meal of stuff you don’t like, when somebody is five or ten minutes late relieving you on watch. What other sort of frustrations are there? Being kept at sea an extra twenty four hours when you were expecting to be in harbour.

12:30 All sorts of things.

So after Oberon you went to Portsmouth?

I went back to Gosport, to Dolphin. Then was sent from there to the Portsmouth Gunnery School.

What were you doing at HMS Excellent.

Just converting, I was a qualified seaman gunner and at that stage they split the gunnery rates up

13:00 so you specialized in one thing or the other and I had to specialize as a gun layer rating so it was a fortnight’s course, that was all, just reinforcing stuff and going into greater depth with stuff that I’d already learnt as a seaman gunner at Chatham Gunnery School.

Could you just explain the two levels and the qualifications, what they give you from the first one to the second one?

13:30 In gunnery?

Yeah.

You start off as a third class rating which in my day was a seaman gunner. You then went to a second class rating which was a gun layer. From there you went to a direct layer which is the chap in the battleship who was right up top, laying all the guns electronically. From there you went

14:00 to gunner’s mate who was really the parade sergeant major of the gunnery world.

In respect to a submarine, these new qualifications?

You only had two gunnery rates in the submarines I served in. One was the gun layer himself and the other one was the third class rating which I was in a seaman gunner or an LR [Layer Rating] three.

14:30 A gun layer would be an LR two or a gun layer.

This particular training was to help you in respect of the gun on board the submarines?

No, it’s any gun.

So when we speak of any gun, meaning you could be transferred to a ship?

Yes, I could be transferred to a fifteen inch battleship

15:00 and operate in the turret.

What was the likelihood of a fella being transferred in or out of submarines back to ships?

Most unlikely, certainly during war years. You had to have done something very stupid or become medically very unfit.

Then why do the training at all

15:30 if it’s ship’s training rather than submarines?

In case you might be transferred back to general service. To illustrate that just a little bit further, take another rating, the coxswain of a submarine. He was what the Americans now call a chief of the boat. Prior to

16:00 quite recently actually there were two types of coxswain in the submarine service, one was a submarine coxswain, the other one was a torpedo coxswain. The submarine coxswain could be any chief petty officer or petty officer who had not done any particular course but was thought by his captain to be qualified to do the job.

16:30 He in my day was paid nine pence a day for that, for the coxswain’s rate. If however he was ever transferred back to general service for whatever reason, he wouldn’t be the coxswain of another small ship he would have to go back to being a petty officer or a chief petty officer seaman,

17:00 full stop and would have to requalify in any other non-substantive rate. If however the same chap had done a qualifying course whilst he was a submarine coxswain and become what was known as a torpedo coxswain, then when he went back to general service, he would still be the coxswain of another war ship, destroyer or

17:30 corvette or what have you and he was paid a shilling a day for that.

So just with respect to the two coxswains, the torpedo coxswain and what the Americans called

Submarine coxswain or a chief of the boat.

Chief of the boat, the difference between the two in respect of their roles?

Well the coxswain in my day was responsible for the discipline of the crew. He was responsible for the liaison

18:00 between the captain, the first lieutenant and the troops. He is responsible for maintaining records applicable to the crew. He is responsible for all the vittling, the catering etc. He is responsible for any medical attention that was required. He was a watch keeper and he was of course a seaman as well. What else?

18:30 That’s enough to be going on with any way.

And a torpedo coxswain?

The same thing but in a surface ship. But then in a surface ship that torpedo coxswain would also have a supply rating to assist him with the catering etc., he wouldn’t have to do it. He would oversee it but he wouldn’t have to do it physically. And he would have a medical orderly to assist him with the medical problems, might even have a doctor on board.

19:00 So it was a different sort of thing.

Excellent. From Portsmouth you went to Harwick?

Harwich.

Harwich, forgive me. What was happening there for you?

Harwich during the early years of the war was used as a minor submarine base. It was mainly a base for

19:30 armed trawlers operating. Harwich as you may or may not know is the terminus for one of the cross- channel ferries so the railway line from London runs right up on to a jetty at Harwich and the ships, the ferries can come alongside that jetty so you transfer straight from the train to the ship. Ideal for submarines, they just laid alongside the jetty and the submarine’s

20:00 crew instead of having a parent ship lived in the station buildings. The submarines there in 1940 were all of the ‘H’ class, late World War I vintage and were used for about ten to fourteen days patrols at a time out in the North Sea mainly off the Dutch and Belgian coast too watch for

20:30 possible invasion by the Germans. Bearing in mind I’m now talking about mid 1940 which was just before the Battle of Britain when invasion from the Germans was an expected affair.

Just with the ‘H’ class and the ‘O’ class. The ‘H’ class was a better submarine?

No, very small. ‘H’ class was 1918, 1919

21:00 vintage. Had four torpedo tubes, about five hundred tons displacement. The ‘O’ class, Oberon, was launched in 1926, had much more refined equipment on board, had six forward and two after tubes, quite different, much bigger, fifteen hundred tons displacement.

When you arrived, I take it it was H44,

21:30 who greeted you when you arrived at the submarine?

The coxswain. He told me where I could sleep which was wherever I could find space because it was so small. The living conditions in ‘H’ boats were very primitive. I know I spent one patrol sleeping, when I could sleep, on a bale of waste behind the port engine.

22:00 It was as bad as that. There was no galley as such and you didn’t carry a cook, one of the seamen did the cooking and usually did it on an ordinary open radiator turned flat on it’s back. There was no galley as such or a range or anything like that. As I say, very primitive.

22:30 Can you share with me an understanding of hygiene and cleanliness on board? What were the rules and regulations?

None. Generally speaking during war years you could wear what you liked once you were at sea and because of the water restrictions you could usually perhaps clean your teeth once a day, wash maybe once a week and

23:00 that was about it. There are variations to that depending on the size of the submarine, the sort of operation it was on and the time it expected to be at sea. Cleanliness was not really something that you had to bother about. It wasn’t a major important factor.

You’ve spoken about water in respect to

23:30 gallons per day the ship might get but in respect of yourself, how much water do you get personally?

I suppose you might have four or five cups of tea, not coffee in those days, tea or cocoa during the day or night. Your food would have been cooked in water and you would have been using a little water for washing up dishes etc.

24:00 Cleaning your teeth maybe a tumbler of water in the mornings, that’s about it. Wash when you think you could manage it.

How long were you on board H44?

From about June 1940 until September.

Could you tell me about some of the patrols

24:30 you went on?

Not very much because we never saw anything, never did anything.

What are your lasting memories of the boat?

Now you’re asking the question, you might get the right answer but you might not want to put the words on tape.

Fire away.

It was not very pleasant at all.

25:00 It was a very rough life. You were jolly glad to get back to harbour, get in board and have a shower etc. and get some decent food. It was rough living.

Just for myself and people that might be watching this in fifty or a hundred years time, can you just share with me the memories of that rough living to give us an idea of what happened?

Well, the ‘H’ class submarines were not

25:30 built for creature comforts at all, full stop. You ate wherever you could. You ate whatever was available which wasn’t very much bearing in mind it was rationing in those days as well. You depended very much on the ability of whoever was deputed to be the cook of the boat and he was not a qualified cook, he was a seaman

26:00 or a stoker and accommodation itself is very, very primitive. The lucky blokes slept on the deck. The problem was finding space in which to sleep. I’m now talking about the troops of course and not necessarily the ward room or the chiefs and POs. What else can I say?

26:30 That’s what I call rough living, bloody rough living and added to that of course you were in a small vessel in the North Sea which would get very rough at times so you can imagine the crockery sliding around all over the place etc. and you were rolling or pitching and tossing. Not particularly pleasant.

Did fellas get sick at all?

I suppose some did.

27:00 Seasickness is always a problem in the navy. Some people suffer from it much less than others. Some people suffer from it to the point where they have to be discharged from the navy.

Could you describe for me the smell on board H44?

Have you ever smelt diesel? Well that’s what you smelled on board H44. Diesel combined with battery gas,

27:30 chlorine, not chlorine, hydrogen.

So when you got back to shore, cleaning and washing yourself properly, could you get the dirt, the smell off?

You never really got rid of the smell, ask my wife, she’ll tell you.

28:00 You can scrub yourself as much as you like but you never really get rid of the diesel smell from your skin or your hair or your clothing for that matter. You can’t even get rid of it from the food. I can remember on one occasion when we were up in Scotland some boats used to go across to Ireland to do some work. We’re talking war years. Because of rationing in England you couldn’t buy a bar of chocolate

28:30 but we used to get people to bring back chocolate from Ireland for us. My wife and my son wouldn’t eat it because it tasted of diesel, been in a submarine. You spoke earlier about, used the phrase, ‘a happy ship’, was H44 a happy boat?

I wasn’t in it long enough to tell you that.

29:00 I don’t really know. It wasn’t happy as far as I was concerned but mainly because of the conditions, not the people. I wasn’t in it long enough to be able to get to know people thoroughly and so I really couldn’t answer your question.

So after H44 you went on to HMS Upholder.

29:30 Why were you moved on from H44, what were the reasons for that?

Because they decided they were going to create a new submarine flotilla operating out of Malta. Once the Italians had been almost driven out of North Africa and the Germans started putting the Africa Korps in they decided that the best way to counteract that would be to

30:00 put a submarine flotilla at Malta to attack the transports refurbishing the Africa Korps and so they, in a hurry, started building smaller submarines, the ‘U’ class submarine, of which Upholder was one and sending them straight out to Malta for that specific purpose.

30:30 When I say smaller, they were smaller, not quite as small as the ‘H’ boat. They were of about seven hundred tons displacement on the surface. Of course they were modern, had modern equipment on board and for the troops, the accommodation was not quite what it could have been, there were still people having to sleep on the deck or sling a hammock here or there but it wasn’t quite as bad.

31:00 As I say, everything was new. It was quite a change to go to a new submarine.

Just to give us an idea of numbers of men, could you tell me how many men were on board the Oberon, the H44 and now this new ‘U’ class?

Oberon would have been something between fifty five and sixty. ‘H’ boat would have been something like

31:30 twenty two and Upholder had thirty one. The ‘S’ class would have had forty nine and the ‘T’ class would have had sixty and the ‘A’ class sixty five.

So in respect to the ‘H’ class and the ‘U’ class which you were about to go to,

32:00 slightly bigger than ‘U’ class you said but there’s a fair few more people on board.

Yes.

What sort of problems did that cause?

None really. In fact in one respect it was better because all the crew lived together, you didn’t have a separate stoker’s mess. The seaman and stokers, telegraphists, signalmen, all lived together in the fore ends. That was one of the problems of course was the accommodation in the fore ends, with so many

32:30 people but then of course you were hot bunking anyway. The chiefs and POs, the ward room and the ERAs, they didn’t have ball room palaces but at least they had bunks. Well, most of them had bunks. If they didn’t have a bunk it was the mess room table for them.

You were transferred to this new class was there more

33:00 or different training you had to go through?

No. Only to learn the actual boat itself. I was in H44 as a second coxswain and I went to Upholder as the second coxswain which meant to say the upper deck was my responsibility so anchors, cables, wires, ropes, all the seamanship side of things was my job.

33:30 So I understand the role of second coxswain, he is just under coxswain?

He understudies the coxswain but his own specific department is upper deck.

So when did you get this promotion?

When I went to H44. Whilst I was in Oberon in the beginning of 1940 I think I told you that I passed for leading seaman professionally in January 1939.

34:00 I was made a leading seaman in March 1940. I went to H44 as a leading seaman and became the second coxswain and I moved from there as a leading seaman to Upholder as a second coxswain.

So arriving now to this new boat. Can you share with me before departing and leaving towards Malta, the preparations that needed to be done?

34:30 We did two months at sea. We commissioned in October. We did two months of running up trials we called it. That’s where the captain takes the submarine to a training area or a quiet area outside the training area and goes through all sorts of exercises, a) to allow him to get to know his vessel 35:00 and what he can expect from ship handling point of view and b) to train the crews up to the way he wants them to operate. That takes, as I say in Upholder’s case, something like six to eight weeks. After that the vessel is inspected and put through certain exercises to make sure that everybody else is satisfied with what’s going on and then you’re ready for operations.

35:30 Do captain’s of submarines have different expectations they place upon the men?

Yes. As I said a little earlier, parade ground discipline is very much relaxed but there is another sort of discipline in a submarine and that is much more self discipline. You know what you’re supposed to do,

36:00 you know what’s expected of you and you do it without being told. Now that’s not to say that you’re never told to do anything, it means to say that on every day basis you know if you’ve got to go on watch, you know what you’re going to do when you get on watch, nobody has to tell you. You know if you’re in harbour and if the cable or the anchor needs to be inspected, then you do it, you get on with it. If something

36:30 wants greasing or oiling, you do it, you know jolly well it’s got to be done. That’s your responsibility and you carry that responsibility, nobody else is going to tell you. They will tell you if you don’t do it but they don’t specifically tell you to do it.

You’ve shared with me earlier though, obviously people are different, we’re all different in different ways, were there shirkers on board that didn’t take hold

37:00 of their responsibilities?

Yes. But they were only board for about three days after they shirked. It soon gets known by everybody concerned and you get rid of them, one way or another. First and foremost you put a boot up their backside and if they still don’t improve you put two boots up their backside and if they still don’t improve, out, get somebody else that will.

Can you tell me a story where this actually happened?

37:30 No, I don’t know of anybody like that because they don’t usually get that far anyway. They’re usually weeded out in training. Because you volunteer for submarines doesn’t mean to say you’re going to be accepted. I think the majority of naval officers are very wary as to who they accept

38:00 or recommend as a volunteer and who they don’t so that you usually get the cream of the cream coming in to submarine training and if there’s any sort of misfits there they very soon get weeded out again during the training period. These days I believe once they’ve done

38:30 their shore time training and joined a submarine they do what they call part three training, actually as part of the crew of the submarine and they don’t get their submarine dolphins until they’ve completed their part three training and passed another examination. So it’s a weeding out process all the way through.

Life for you is going to get a little bit more interesting when you get to Malta but up to this

39:00 stage did you feel that you were really a part of the war effort?

No. Well, yes and no. I suppose Dunkirk made me feel a little bit of the war effort and the situation in Britain in the middle and late 1940’s made you feel like this because London was being bombed and rationing was on etc. but from your,

39:30 what I take your question to mean, no I didn’t.

Can you just share with me, because I have skipped over, your role in Dunkirk?

Nothing, just as an outer ring, just in case the German Navy tried to attack some of the ships rescuing the troops, that’s all.

What did you see?

Nothing, we were far enough away from it not to see anything but we were there in case.

40:00 So you didn’t see aircraft or other shipping?

Not to my knowledge.

Did you realize what was going on at the time?

No, we certainly weren’t told. My wife wasn’t told. We went to sea one day for exercises from Portland expecting to be back in harbour at five o’clock that night and I didn’t get back to harbour at five o’clock that night

40:30 in fact I didn’t get back to Portland, I finished up in Portsmouth a week later.

What was she notified or told about your movements? Somebody from Portsmouth or Gosport rang the local coast guard station in Portland and asked one of the coastguards to go across and tell my wife where I was. We didn’t have telephones in those days, at least people of my standing didn’t have a telephone and that’s how she found out where I was.

We’ll just stop there and have lunch.

Tape 6

00:50 Can you tell us Gordon about the crew of the Upholder when you joined her?

In what respect?

01:00 Some of the major people within that that you worked with?

Well the Captain’s name was Wanklyn. The first lieutenant was a chap by the name of St. John. The torpedo officer’s name was Reed and the navigator’s name was, and he was an RNR [Royal Naval Reserve] officer,

01:30 his name was Band [?]. The coxswain’s name was Tuck, the torpedo gunner’s mate’s name was Carter. The chief ERA was Baker. How many more do you want to go down?

Any of those in a bit more detail. Firstly the captain, when you first met him

02:00 what kind of a man did he strike you as?

He’s not quite your height but not very far off [interviewer is 6’4], had a beard, very quiet, very unassuming and a very pleasant person to talk to. Very helpful and quite different from

02:30 my impression from earlier days in the navy of what a naval officer was like.

Who did you work most closely with as second coxswain?

The first lieutenant.

Can you tell us a bit about him?

Yes. I’ll tell you about the second first lieutenant because the one we commissioned with left us before we went to Malta. The second one’s name was Crawford and I’m still in

03:00 touch with him and he again was a very quiet and unassuming sort of a chap but very much on top of his job. Once he got to know me he virtually left me alone to do my job.

How did you work together, why was he the closest person to you?

I was responsible to him for my part of the ship.

When you first joined

03:30 the Upholder it was new and it was set to go to Scotland for trials.

No. Sorry, yes.

What were those trials all about? Can you describe them?

I suppose the reasons were threefold. First and foremost to as far as possible test all the machinery. Secondly to give the captain and the officers a very good idea as to how their submarine would react under command

04:00 and thirdly to give the crew a jolly good idea of what would be required of them and how to do it in what was then a fairly new class of submarine.

What was new about it? You mentioned it was more comfortable, what else was advanced about?

Well the class of submarine, the ‘U’ class submarine the first one was not until 1937

04:30 and there were two following that and then Upholder was one of the next six to be launched. They were launched in a bit of a hurry to get ready for the Malta business.

What was advanced about them?

Well the equipment they carried was fairly well advanced, certainly from the older submarines.

05:00 They were internal ballast tank submarines and apart from the ‘H’ boats that’s the only ones the submarine service had. I can’t tell you much more than that.

What was the armament of the Upholder? Four torpedo tubes forward and four re-load torpedoes in the torpedo stowage compartment. Eight torpedoes all together and she had a twelve pounder deck gun

05:30 and a couple of machine guns.

You described the layout of the Oberon, the first submarine you were on. Can you describe the layout of the Upholder?

Yes. Again divided up into compartments. There was less room inside the boat because the ballast tanks were inside the boat. They took up quite a bit of the space. We had a tube

06:00 space for the four torpedo tubes. We had a torpedo stowage compartment with four re-load torpedoes in. The accommodation space had the ward room, the petty officers mess and the ERA’s mess and the galley. Sorry, not the ERA’s mess. The control room had the ERA’s mess and the controls for diving, surfacing the submarine etc., controlling it.

06:30 At the far end it had the ASDIC cabinet and a radio cabinet then the engine room and motor room and the after ends were virtually all in one piece. There were no after tubes in Upholder just the four forward ones. One conning tower up to the bridge. There was no gun tower. If you wanted to man the gun you had to do it through the conning tower and go through a

07:00 door in the front of the bridge.

The bridge itself, was that similar to the other bridges?

Very similar indeed. Only in size was it different.

The quarters for the crew, what were they like on the Upholder?

Upholder was very fortunate, we had all either active service or

07:30 reserve crews. In other words I’m talking about professional navy people other than one. We had one ordinary seaman who was a listener for the ASDIC set. The rest of the people all had been in the navy for a few years anyway and knew what it was all about. Not in submarines necessarily, but in the navy.

You mentioned they were comfortable, what were the arrangements

08:00 for sleeping?

A bit more space, a lot of people still had to sleep on the deck or in a hammock forward, all of which had to be dismantled of course because that was the mess and the seaman and stokers, telegraphists all messed together in the one place. Ward room was reasonably comfortable. Small but reasonably comfortable. PO’s mess the same and ERAs were probably as well off as anyone on the boat at the forward end of the control room.

08:30 As the second coxswain did you have a bunk this time?

No.

Where did you sleep in that boat?

On the deck, forward.

A couple of things you mentioned there that we didn’t go into before I’d just like to pick up on, one is the ASDIC operator, you talked about hydrophones, what did the ASDIC actually do?

ASDIC is an active sort of a sound system.

09:00 I can’t remember what ASDIC stands for but something to do with submarine detection. There is a transducer right at the forward end of the keel in a ‘U’ class submarine which receives any sounds from around the submarine and transmits them through to

09:30 headphones which are placed in the control room with a control panel and the operator can also traverse the ASDIC receiver through three hundred and sixty degrees so he can do an all round listen. In Upholder our ASDIC operators were, there were three of them

10:00 and two of them including the senior one were telegraphists who’d been trained in ASDIC operation and the third one was the listener I described a little earlier.

That was obviously a specialist position?

Yes.

Did you ever operate it yourself?

No. I’ve listened in myself with a spare set of headphones but I’ve never operated it.

The other job I’m curious about is the stokers, what did they do in a submarine? 10:30 Upholder carried six stokers. Two of them were leading stokers. One leading stoker assisted the chap we called the outside ERA, the chap who was responsible for all the machinery outside the engine room. The other one was responsible in the engine room with the chief ERA and another ERA and the other four,

11:00 one was a messman for the ERAs and the other three did whatever was required from day to day, greasing, oiling, what have you, a little bit of maintenance here and there. They were mechanics in effect but not qualified mechanics.

These were electrically run these engines can you describe a bit about how they were run?

11:30 No. They were diesel engines but in Upholder it was what we classified as a diesel electric boat. In other words the engines did not drive the propellers all the time. There was a clutch between the engine and the motor room part of the shaft and another clutch between the motor room part of the shaft and the propeller. So when you were

12:00 on the surface both clutches were in and the engines when running were driving the propellers which were driving the submarine. When you dived you couldn’t run the engines so you took out the engine clutch and drove the propeller through the tail clutch by the motors.

How often did you have to come up to the surface?

12:30 How long could the ‘U’ class submarine dive for?

The maximum I know of for a ‘U’ class submarine was about twenty seven hours but normally you’d be simply dived during daylight hours. You’d dive when you first sighted dawn or just before the first sight of dawn and you’d surface after dusk.

What was the routine when the submarine surfaced?

13:00 Recharge the batteries, that was the main object of resurfacing. You have lookouts on the bridge. You’d have an officer of watch on the bridge. You’d have engine room staff in the engine room, electricians in the motor room and seamen operating both as lookouts and as helmsmen etc.

Was there chance for the crew

13:30 to get up top if you needed to?

Generally speaking no but on occasion if conditions were right you could get permission from the officer of watch one at a time to go up on the bridge to get some fresh air, that was all. Basically for the majority of people in the crew they didn’t see daylight from the day they left harbour to the day they got back in to harbour.

What was the effect on your body of that?

14:00 Don’t know, I never felt any difference. It’s something you get very used to.

What about the air quality. Can you describe what that was like after a long dive?

Pretty awful. After a long time you start panting a little bit, drawing for breath. Eventually of course when you get a complete shortage of oxygen you start to get,

14:30 what’s the word I’m looking for, can’t think of it. Once you’re deprived of oxygen you start doing stupid things and CO2 poisoning of course would eventually kill you.

Hypoxia?

15:00 What did the effects, can you expand on that a little bit, what were the effects if someone was short of oxygen?

Well you start getting drowsy in the first instance and then you start, I think hallucinating is too strong a word but you start doing things or thinking things that you wouldn’t normally do.

15:30 I can’t think of much else.

Was there an instance in your time in submarines where someone was clearly affected in that way?

No.

Nobody went a bit mad?

Not in a submarine that I was in.

There were stories of it happening in other subs?

Yes. Not completely mad but

16:00 being incapable of carrying out their normal duties or incapable of being trusted to carry out their normal duties.

Another question about air quality is smoking, what were the rules on that?

Only allowed to smoke when you were on the surface and the engines were running. On some occasions in some submarines the captain would allow what we called one all round at some stage

16:30 during the day while you were dived but that was all. It depended entirely on circumstances and on the particular captain of the submarine.

Were you a smoker yourself at this stage?

No. That is not to say I’ve never smoked a cigarette but I’ve never been a smoker.

After a time up in Scotland you went back to Gosport and then set off for Malta. What was the purpose of your job there?

17:00 Job where?

In Malta. What were the submarines doing there?

The submarine squadron in Malta was there to intercept the transport between Italy and North Africa for the replenishment of the Africa Korps there. Malta was picked out as an ideal submarine base halfway between the two and the submarine

17:30 squadron, or flotilla as it was called then was built up when Rommel took the Africa Korps into North Africa to replace or boost up the Italians there.

What was the state of the war like at the start of 1941 when you arrived in Malta?

In Malta? There was some bombing etc. going on but not a great deal

18:00 and most of it was daylight bombing. That gradually increased during the year. After June when Germany invaded Russia, that lessened off funnily enough. Then of course when things got a little bit hot in North Africa it came on strong again particularly on the submarine base because the submarine flotilla there was really effecting

18:30 Rommel’s ability to fight a war.

Can you describe the submarine base for us?

Yes. It’s called Lazaretto and it was originally an isolation hospital many, many years ago. Built of sandstone like most buildings in Malta were and fortunately because of the ward system in a hospital

19:00 made very good messing arrangements for submarine crews when they’re alongside. Only one submarine could get actually alongside the base at any one time but they had buoys laid very close to the shore where a submarine could lay secured to a buoy forward and aft and put a gangway from the submarine to a floating gangway which took you to the shore. Basically it was just the same as being alongside.

19:30 The food of course was a little bit iffish because Malta was under siege at the moment so food could get a bit short but I suppose we were looked after fairly well in the conditions.

How many submarines could tie up in and around that base?

At any one time? One, two,

20:00 four. But you hardly ever saw four in harbour at the same time. You might see three and sometimes it would be only one, they’d all be at sea depending what was happening, if convoys were expected or anything of that nature.

Overnight, where would you sleep if you were at the base?

20:30 To begin with in the messes but when night bombing became prevalent we had an air raid shelter at the back. We used to go down the air raid shelter.

What contact did you have with the Maltese population?

Virtually none. Didn’t get enough time in harbour to have contact with anybody particularly.

What was the general routine then while you were operating

21:00 from Malta?

Routine in harbour or at sea?

Both I guess but start with the routine in harbour.

In harbour generally you’d expect to spend ten to fourteen days at sea and something like seven to ten days in harbour. That would be the general routine. In harbour you might get part of your crew

21:30 away to a rest camp for a couple of days otherwise you’d be restoring. You’d be carrying out maintenance with the assistance of base staff. You’d be reloading new torpedoes to replace the ones you’d expended and in some cases there’d be a little bit of shore training going on for telegraphists etc. and there would be some sport because Lazaretto

22:00 is based on an island, virtually an island, on which there was some sports fields. We had almost instant access to hockey, soccer and cricket when we required it.

Who did you play with?

Ship’s company. We’d play against other ship’s companies or against army people.

What was the army presence around the area?

22:30 There was a garrison staff there in Malta at the time. I wouldn’t know how many were there or even what regiment was there. I suppose there must have been a thousand, fifteen hundred soldiers at any one time. Could have been more later on.

How was the siege evident? You mentioned you had trouble getting supplies.

Well convoys were very few and far between and by the time they got to Malta they’d usually

23:00 lost at least half of their population so eventually they resorted to sending submarines through with petrol or aviation spirits and the odd necessities etc. It came to a crisis about the middle of 1942 actually when a convoy eventually was

23:30 forced through. I think you’ve probably heard about Ohio, the ship that got badly bombed and damaged but still got into harbour with fuel of course, that was the main requirement. I suppose we were very fortunate in being submariners. We were looked after from whatever food was available. You couldn’t go ashore and buy clothing

24:00 or that sort of thing. There was virtually none available. Beer never seemed to be in short supply. Spirits, very little of it. What else? Can’t think of much else.

How were you off for ammunition for example?

24:30 We were running short of torpedoes at one stage so we that were forced into using older torpedoes than those that were in existence at the time but that corrected itself about the middle of 1942.

One thing we skipped over I’d like to go back and ask about was the process of degaussing the sub. Can you tell us in a bit more detail

25:00 what that was all about?

Well towards the beginning of the war the Germans introduced magnetic mines which simply sat on the bottom of the ocean and only exploded when a ship went over it and the magnetic force of the ship triggered the mine off. To counteract that, dependant on which part of the world one was in, the ship was

25:30 degaussed or had it’s magnetic field changed to prevent it from doing that sort of thing. Degaussing entailed in Malta, in my day, going alongside a particular wharf in Malta dockyard and hoisting very large electric cables right around the submarine on the outside and passing current through those cables to change the magnetism of the ship.

26:00 After that of course you’d have to go out in the stream and swing ship to get your own magnetic compass correct because that would have been effected.

What as the crew doing during this process?

Everyday duties apart from the people actually involved in humping the cables around etc.

Shortly after that you received your first dive-bombing in Malta.

26:30 Yes.

Can you tell us about that?

Well we arrived in Malta on 10th January 1941 and the first job we had to do was to go round to the dockyard to be degaussed to get our magnetic field changed and it just so happened that whilst we were there alongside a convoy came in with the aircraft carrier Illustrious and Illustrious

27:00 berthed about fifty feet ahead of where we were. That afternoon the Stukas and the JU-88’s came over and had a dive-bombing session that lasted for about six hours. The targets were mainly the ships that had come in in the convoy but also the Illustrious took a great deal of the attack. We were just sitting there fifty feet away. 27:30 Not very funny.

Where were you when that happened?

On the bridge with a Lewis gun and the first lieutenant. I don’t know what I was supposed to do with the Lewis gun.

Can you take us through what you saw at that time?

During the air attack? Just Stukas and JU-88’s coming down at an angle of about ninety degrees

28:00 to the earth and pulling out at the last minute and unloading two or three bombs when they got there. The first time it’s a little bit of a frightening experience.

How far away were you from the bombs that were landing?

The Illustrious took two hits I think it was, it might have been three,

28:30 so a hundred yards maybe. Certainly bombs were dropping in the basin, the harbour, not very far from Upholder or Illustrious.

So you’re holding a Lewis gun, what were you ordered to do during this attack?

Not ordered to do anything, just there to take whatever opportunity there was

29:00 to hit somebody with bullets from the Lewis gun but there was no hope of ever doing that.

What did the Stukas and the JU-88’s sound like?

What did the?

What did the dive-bombers sound like?

Express trains. The Stukas of course had screamers as well, sirens that they switched on when they were diving to upset the morale, not of the pilots,

29:30 of the people underneath.

And did they?

Not after a while, you might have been a little bit worried about it the first time you heard it but then you realized what was happening.

This was the first time you heard it, it was the first war action you that you’d been involved in.

Yes.

How did it change your view of what was going on and the seriousness of the situation?

It just made me realize we were at war

30:00 and we weren’t in the Canary Islands or somewhere like that.

Was it a shaking experience, a sobering experience?

Sobering would be a very good word, yes.

What about the rest of your company?

Same thing. Lots of talk and chatter about it afterwards but

30:30 I don’t think it seriously affected anybody. Just made you think a lot more deeply than you normally would.

When the attack finished what was the damage that they had wrought?

I think they sank two of the convoy vessels in harbour. They hit the Illustrious two or three times but none of the bombs exploded fortunately for Illustrious. Quite a few of the dockyard buildings

31:00 were smashed and a few small craft on the water were sunk.

Casualties?

I couldn’t tell you, I wouldn’t know. Obviously there must have been some because quite a few buildings were hit but on the other hand the majority of the people on shore went to rock shelters way out of it.

31:30 After that first one, how often was that to happen once you were in Malta?

Bombing? Night bombing particularly went on during the early part of 1941 and then it eased off a little bit for the second half of ’41 and then when the Germans weren’t doing very well in North Africa

32:00 starting about December ’41 it really increased to a very intense bombing, night and day. There would not be a day go by when you didn’t have three, four, five air raids and sometimes lots more.

What was the routine for an air raid?

If you weren’t actually required on board, down to the shelter. If you were required on board,

32:30 you just kept your nose down.

Would the submarines stay on the surface?

Initially yes but by the middle of March ’42 all submarines in harbour were required to sit on the bottom during daylight hours but even so some of them got badly shaken with bombs exploding in the water. Lazaretto base itself

33:00 was virtually flattened during 1942.

What can you hear of an air raid while you’re sitting at the bottom of the harbour?

Virtually nothing, you can hear the bombs exploding in the water of course and get the vibrations from the land on occasion but that’s about all. You’re not in very deep water there of course, you’re only just about submerged.

33:30 Were there submarines hit?

Yes. We lost one, two, three, four that I can think of off hand. The one that I eventually finished up in wasn’t hit but it was very badly damaged in one raid and then had its back broken in another raid

34:00 so that was virtually sunk.

This is the?

P39.

How did that constant bombing affect morale?

I think basically it certainly made the submariners intensely angry but I think most of us realized there was nothing you could do about it, you’d like to be

34:30 out of it but you couldn’t be so you just sit back and put up with it. What else can you do? I suppose the night bombing is the worst because you can’t see what’s coming. You don’t know what’s coming, you can only guess.

What about nervous exhaustion or shell shock, how common was that?

Not at all to my knowledge

35:00 but it could have happened.

What effect did the bombings have on nerves in your case?

Nothing to any extent that I can remember. Generally too busy doing other things to think about it.

We’ll talk about some of those other things. You went through the

35:30 routine while the submarine was in harbour, what about when it went out, can you take us through your routine there?

Yes. Because Malta is only about sixty miles from Sicily and the German air base was at Catania which is not very far from Sicily it meant to say that by the time the aircraft took off from there were about less than an hour away.

36:00 Submarines always sailed at night or just at dusk and arrived back, timed themselves to arrive back in harbour at dawn so they spent as little time on the surface moving in and out of the harbour as possible. Once you got out of harbour you would start on your, what we called patrol routine, which would be dived all day, surfaced all night and

36:30 you’d go into three watches until something unusual was sighted then you’d be called to your diving stations which in army terms is action stations. You’d spend something like ten to fourteen days doing this and return to harbour for maintenance, restoring and after about five to seven days be back at sea again.

37:00 What were the objects of your patrols?

To sink transports going to North Africa mainly but even coming back from North Africa empty if possible to get rid of the shipping.

Can you tell us about one occasion when you came across a transport and what happened then?

Yes. 37:30 I suppose the most publicized one happened on May 24th 1941 when we’d been patrolling close to Messina which is the strait between Italy and Sicily and at dusk on that night

38:00 we sighted three large ships putting out to sea escorted by I think it was four destroyers and at that stage we had no ASDIC so we couldn’t listen to the screw beat or anything of that nature, everything had to be done by eye through a periscope. Our captain decided he had to get very close to these ships to make sure of hitting one and he

38:30 edged himself through the escorting destroyers got to within about seven hundred yards before he fired his torpedoes and he only had torpedoes left because we’d already been sinking ships beforehand. Both torpedoes hit, sank the Conte Rosso, which was of nineteen thousand five hundred tons and had over three thousand Italian troops on board. Fortunately

39:00 the destroyers after they dropped their initial depth charges and there were about forty five of those, decided their main aim was to pick up the survivors so we managed to get out of it and our captain got the Victoria Cross for it.

Just go through a few sections of that action. What retaliation was there once you’d fired your torpedoes?

39:30 After the torpedoes had hit? We fired from seven hundred yards and nobody saw the tracks of the torpedoes and consequently the enemy action didn’t start ‘til the torpedoes had hit and then of course the destroyers started flying around dropping depth charges. Because they could work out the position in the ocean where the torpedoes had come from, that’s where

40:00 the depth charges were dropped and as I say, there were about forty five of them but then they had to start picking up survivors and left us alone from then onwards. We just crept away. There was nothing else we could do anyway, we had no more torpedoes left.

I’ve got some more questions about that but we are out of tape.

Tape 7

00:49 Can you take us back in time a little bit to just before the sinking of the Conte Rosso. You’d been out already, can you take us back to the beginning of that patrol?

01:00 No, I can’t really. I know that we sank a tanker, I know that we’d had one torpedo had a hot run in the tube and we had to dispose of it and we’d already damaged another ship as well so that by the time we sighted Conte Rosso

01:30 out of our initial eight torpedoes we only had two left.

What happened when there was a hot run? Can you describe that for us?

That’s when a torpedo starts running when it’s still in the tube. In this case it was an accidental thing. What you do is to get rid of the torpedo quickly. I think I told you with the Conte Rosso we didn’t have ASDICs. What had happened was we ditched the torpedo

02:00 but it went straight to the bottom and exploded and damaged the ASDIC equipment in the keel. That’s why he didn’t have ASDICs to help him with Conte Rosso.

How did you know that the hot run had occurred?

Vibration and noise of a torpedo running inside the tube.

When you dropped it. It exploded underneath you?

02:30 Hit the bottom and exploded, yes. It probably had run about a hundred yards or something like that before it hit the bottom.

Had there been any other depth charging when you sunk the tanker?

Not that I can remember, no. Had some return gun fire mind you from the tanker but I can’t remember any depth charging. I think the tanker was unescorted if my memory serves me right.

03:00 How much of a danger is gun fire?

In a submarine? Well if they hit you of course you’ve had it. That’s not quite true but it is extremely dangerous from the point of view of even getting one hit on a submarine. The hit will probably put a hole in the pressure hull so you can’t dive any more. That has happened on a couple of occasions to my knowledge.

03:30 Can you plug a leak? Yes you can but you can’t plug it sufficiently to withstand sea pressure when you dive. Not for any length of time anyway.

Depth charges, can you explain what happens inside a submarine when you are attacked by depth charges?

Yes. You will have already gone to what we classify

04:00 quiet routine where every piece of unnecessary equipment is switched off so you don’t have any ventilation. You run your motors at the slowest possible speed. You don’t run pumps so you’ve got to make sure, always be sure that you’ve got the best possible

04:30 trim because you can’t pump water around, the noise of the pumps would be transmitted to the attacking destroyer. Everybody remains at diving stations. Somebody is deputed to count the number of depth charges being dropped and the captain is involved completely in taking

05:00 whatever evasive action he can.

How do you know where they are?

ASDICs. Just follow the screw beat on ASDICs.

On this occasion with the Conte Rosso you didn’t have an ASDIC operating.

Had to use ordinary hydrophones so it was very dicey indeed.

What’s the

05:30 explosion of a depth charge like underwater in a submarine?

Well it’s very similar to a bomb explosion but in a submarine of course it’s like, it depends how close they are, if you get a really close one it’s like a four inch gun going off in your ear and of course if you can hear it then the submarine is going to be shaken anyway,

06:00 so you can even feel it as well. Quite often you can hear the click of the hydrostatic trigger setting the depth charge off before it actually goes off because you’re so quiet yourself.

Tell us a bit more about silent routine.

Silent routine is where you shut down every piece

06:30 of unnecessary equipment. You do not use pumps unless you were forced to in an emergency. You run at the slowest possible speed so that your propellers make as little noise as possible. You don’t drop spanners on the deck, everybody stays as still as possible. You can’t stay completely still, people still have their jobs to do but you certainly don’t make any noise. You don’t walk through on engine room steel plates clanking

07:00 along with hob nail boots on and that sort of thing. You just do as little as possible.

How do you communicate with each other?

By voice. You don’t use the telephone.

In the action you just described where your submarine snuck in, your captain guided it in,

07:30 shot the torpedoes, what were you doing during all this as the second coxswain?

The second coxswain’s job in those days was to operate the forward hydroplanes which was to maintain depth.

What did you know of what was going on at that time?

Everything because hydroplanes are controlled from the control room which is where the captain is which is where the action is going on so you know exactly what is going on

08:00 and what is likely to be going on up top provided he wants to tell anybody.

What was the atmosphere like in the control room on that occasion?

Tense. Like it is during any attack. No different this time of course.

What was Wanklyn’s control style like?

Very quiet. Never lifted his voice.

08:30 Gave people the utmost confidence that he knew what he was doing and he was doing the right thing. What else can I say? You had every confidence in him.

What happened on the submarine when the torpedoes hit? I think everybody was happy. I don’t say they

09:00 shouted up happy but very pleased that it happened. You get very disappointed when the torpedoes are fired but don’t hit and start wondering why.

That’s the moment your cover is blown.

That’s right.

What happens in that respect?

You start working out how to get away quietly to get away from the, well, you don’t have

09:30 torpedo tracks with electric torpedoes these days but with an ordinary engine torpedo the torpedo leaves a track and it’s very easy for the escorting vessels, in daylight anyway, to track it down to its starting point and that’s where they start searching for you. That’s why while they’re searching you’re in quiet routine so they can’t hear you. Doesn’t always work mind you but that’s the way it’s

10:00 supposed to work.

The urge I imagine is to run away and yet you’re not able to run directly away what did the captain do on that occasion?

I suppose what the captain would do, I’m not really the person to ask that because I’ve never been the captain but I assume that what he does is to estimate in his own mind what the escort vessels are going to do and to

10:30 take action prior to that happening to get away from that particular point where he expects them to go. So he’s following the tracks of the escort vessels on ASDICs. The ASDIC operator is reporting the bearings of the various attacking vessels to the captain and he in turn is ordering course alterations and depth alterations accordingly.

I’ll take you back again to that one

11:00 incidence we were talking about with the Conte Rosso, again the ASDIC is out so that didn’t.

So we had to use hydrophones which in those days were not particularly effective. They gave you some idea but not a detailed idea and just used his knowledge or his estimation of what the surface ships would be doing.

Same question again,

11:30 during a depth charge attack of that magnitude, what was the atmosphere like in the submarine?

Just very tense. I can only remember one occasion when anybody went haywire and that was only the once. He didn’t last in submarines after that.

Which boat was that on?

Upholder.

Was that in this instance or on another

12:00 occasion?

No, on another occasion.

Just to travel back slightly, you’ve arrived at Malta, what was your first patrol?

What was the patrol

12:30 or what was the patrol like or what were my feelings on the patrol?

We’ll get to what it was like but?

I suppose it was exciting because it was the first patrol. It was exciting because we knew it was in fairly close by enemy waters. It was exciting because it was the first time the crew had been in action together. I think that everybody was, in the back of their mind

13:00 was wondering how they would react in the course of an attack or a depth charge attack back on your and whether things would work as they were supposed to and as they had during the trials period we’d just been through. We didn’t know the captain or what his reactions would be and he didn’t know the crew. It was still all part of a learning curve.

13:30 When did this learning curve begin?

I suppose the learning curve began whilst we were on trials. The final part of the learning curve finished at the end of the first patrol. What happened on this particular patrol?

We sank one ship and missed another. Right on our very first patrol we were in action twice, once successfully and once

14:00 unsuccessfully. We got depth charged on both occasions.

So the first time you got depth charged, could you just lead me through the events of what happened and how the crew reacted under their first?

I can only tell you what I thought, I wondered what the bloody hell was happening and if we were ever going to get out of it. Over a period of time you gradually get used to the experience. It’s like people becoming what we used to call

14:30 bomb happy. I’ve seen people walking around during an air raid, a fierce air raid too, it’s because they’re bomb happy. You get so used to it, I think it’s like you’re driving a car, it’s never going to happen to you.

How does the submarine itself respond under a depth charge attack?

Generally

15:00 speaking it will, it depends where the depth charge is exploded. If it explodes alongside you, I don’t mean right alongside, I mean to the side of you, virtually no effect apart from the noise and the shaking up that you get. If it explodes directly above you or directly below you then you can expect that your bows will be pushed up

15:30 or down accordingly. That can be a little be worrying, not frightening but worrying. Other than that, no. I suppose you’re asking the wrong person. I’ve had so many depth charge attacks I’ve forgotten really.

Where don’t you want the depth charge to drop? Where is the dangerous point if it explodes in respect of the submarine?

16:00 The worst part in my opinion would be underneath the submarine but it would never get there. It’d get close to it. It could break the submarine’s back. The other bad part would be right on top of the submarine.

In respect of the German or Italian dropping patterns of depth charges, did they just drop one at a time?

No. Sometimes one, sometimes

16:30 it might be five or six, a whole pattern at the one time and of course most of their convoys had aircraft escorts as well so you’d get a bomb now and again as well from the air. But depth charging really, apart from the fact that you’re underwater, the effect of it

17:00 is not much different from ordinary bombing on land. Not in my opinion anyway.

You mentioned one fellow found it difficult under the stress of depth charging. Was that the first time it happened?

It’s the only time I’ve ever known it happen. It happened in the control room. His diving station was in the control room

17:30 and he tried frantically to open the conning tower lower hatch and of course he was stopped straight away and removed and then as soon as we got back to harbour that’s the last we ever saw of him in the submarine service.

Removed and then what would happen to a fellow under that?

I assume he would be put straight back into what we classify as general service

18:00 and then if his mental situation was such that he’d be discharged from the navy.

So at the very beginning of the day you mentioned that a submarine crew was quite close and cliquey.

Yes

How does that therefore affect the morale of the other fellas when this happens to one?

It makes you think a little bit but it also makes you more determined that that’s not going to be you. That’s the way it affected me.

18:30 What was said in later days about it?

I don’t think we realized what had happened to him until probably a couple of months later, we knew he had gone back to general service and was no longer going to be a submariner and I think that people thought, well, that’s exactly what should have happened. 19:00 Is there much changeover or turnover in respect to crew?

There is changeover. You mean replacement of crew? Yes there is. I would think that if we speak in terms of Upholder, of the people who commissioned her something

19:30 like sixty per cent would be lost in the eighteen months later. The remainder would all have been replaced for whatever reason, promotion or need to go to another boat.

Given how close a crew is, is it easy for the new fella to break in?

20:00 Not particularly, no. I’ve never had the experience myself but you’ve got to get used to a) a new routine, a new captain’s ideas and the everyday running of the ship, how’s it’s run and who does this and who does what which can vary quite considerably from one submarine to another. If you’re a seaman or a stoker

20:30 you could have quite different jobs. I mean a chap who was a torpedo man in one submarine, he might be a torpedo tube operator in another submarine he might be in the motor room operating the electric motors so it depends on circumstances.

If you could just talk me through going on these patrols. Starting off in harbour,

21:00 when would you find out about the patrols and what would you know about where you were going?

Nothing. That’s not absolutely true but generally speaking nothing. Naturally the chart table is in the control room and if you happen to be the control room messenger or passing by there’s nothing to stop you glancing at the chart and seeing where you are but to be told where you were going and what you were likely to be doing,

21:30 very little. It would have to be exceptional to know.

Exceptional meaning higher in rank?

No, I don’t mean that. You’d have to be expecting to be doing something exceptional to be told beforehand what it was but normally I have read since the war where Upholder did her patrols but whilst I was serving in Upholder I wouldn’t have

22:00 had a clue where we were at any particular time. We could have been off Tripoli, we could have been off Messina, we could be off Sfax, we could be off Benghazi, could be anywhere, it’s all water to me.

What was scarier for you? Being depth charged or being bombed in the harbour of Malta?

I suppose

22:30 bombing was more scary for me. I think to be factual about it, the scariest part for me was night bombing when you couldn’t see what was happening. You can’t see what’s happening in depth charging but you get a good idea from what’s happening with the captain and his orders in the control room but night bombing you’re laying in your bunk and you think, “Oh god, I wonder where it’s going to happen next.”

23:00 Okay. You have already shared with us the Conte Rosso and what happened there. Were there any other interesting patrols you went on?

Yes. They were all interesting. The next most interesting one was in September, one weekend

23:30 in September. There were four submarines in harbour and they were all required to sail in company, that’s together, at the same time, and from memory that would have been on a Saturday and we went to an area off Tripoli and we spread out into, the submarine was allocated a particular area

24:00 so you don’t torpedo one another and there on the very first morning, early in the morning the submarine on the outer thing sent out a signal there was a convoy approaching Tripoli. We received the signal at about five o’clock in the morning and it was still quite dark and the sea was running fairly heavily.

24:30 Our gyrocompass was out of action so we were steering by magnetic and that’s not an easy job in a submarine to try and steer a straight course in fact it’s virtually impossible. You can steer in the general direction but not directly. This convoy came in sight and it was three large ships escorted by, I think

25:00 six destroyers and the captain stayed on the surface because it was dark, fired his torpedoes by eye because the ship was weaving backwards and forwards, spread his torpedoes by eye and we hit two ships one of which sank almost immediately, the other one was badly damaged and stopped.

25:30 The third one took off for Tripoli and eventually arrived there. We’d fired all four torpedoes to do this so we went deep and reloaded our torpedo tubes and then the captain decided he would go underneath the track of the hit but not sunk ship, come up the other side and fire again which we did and the second salvo 26:00 sank it and the escorting destroyers were so busy getting one back to Tripoli and picking up survivors from the others that we didn’t get one depth charge at all. The two ships we sank were both twenty thousand tons, both loaded with troops and equipment.

26:30 I’m still in touch with one of the survivors.

How come you’re in touch with one of the survivors?

He made it his business to find out where I was when the war finished. We’ve visited him quite frequently. He now lives in England.

Not to plot revenge obviously.

He became a granddad last Saturday.

Where is a submarine aiming

27:00 for in respect to destroying a ship?

Do you shoot?

No, I don’t.

Well, if you’re aiming at a moving target you don’t aim at the target, you aim ahead of it where you expect the target to be. What the captain is really doing is solving a triangle when he fires his torpedoes, a) he needs to know the target speed, in other words where it’s going to be in five, ten, fifteen minutes time and

27:30 b) he needs to know in which direction it’s going to go, so he wants to know it’s track and then he puts himself into position so he can fire his torpedoes ahead of the target so by the time the torpedoes take to get to the target the ship will have arrived there as well and that’s it. There’s a lot of by guess and by God in it.

The torpedoes you were using, was there only one type of torpedo?

No. There were two types.

28:00 The main type of torpedo the RN used during the war was known as a mark eight two star torpedo which would do up to forty five knots but in Malta we ran so short of torpedoes we had to bring in mark five torpedoes, which was an older version, would do a lesser speed, something like thirty five to forty knots. So although you could fire both torpedoes in the same salvo

28:30 you had to make adjustments for the speed of one being different from the speed of the other.

Was there a particular part of the ship that you’d want to?

The normal aiming point would be under the bridge.

And try and get the ship to break in two?

Well. What a captain would normally do is to spread his torpedoes.

29:00 To spread them he didn’t change course, he fired them all along the same line but allowed the movement of the target ship to cause the torpedoes to spread so the first one might be aimed at the bow, the second one in the middle and the third one at the stern. So any variation in his estimated speed of target would not matter because one or other would hit.

What then was physically done to the torpedo

29:30 to influence, to create the spread?

Nothing it was what was called hose pipe firing. It’s done by timing your firing, in other words you don’t fire all four torpedoes at once, you fire them at seconds intervals, might be five seconds, might be ten seconds and the captain would normally be watching the target through the periscope and

30:00 the periscope would be set at a particular angle which we called the Director Angle, (the DA) and as soon as the bow touched the DA he fired the first torpedo. When the bridge of the target showed up across the centre line of the periscope he’d fire the second one and when the stern came there he’d fire the third one so the movement of the target itself caused the spread

30:30 of torpedoes. When you talk about spread you’re talking about spread along the target’s length.

So a torpedo would always travel straight.

Not necessarily but that was what was done in the RN during the war, straight. They’d experimented with angled torpedoes. You could fire a torpedo and set it to angle to sixty degrees left or right or whatever but most submarine COs [Commanding Officers]

31:00 didn’t like it at all so they all fired straight shots. Excellent. In respect of the torpedo. Did it hit at any depth?

You set a depth on the torpedo. It has a hydrostatic depth control to it. So you set the depth on the torpedo. Normally what would happen is that it may be whilst you’re still in harbour. The captain would have some idea

31:30 as to where he was going to go and what sort of ship he was likely to see and have a depth set accordingly but he can change that depth while the torpedo is still in the tube.

Could you just explain for the archive in respect to setting the depth? What was actually physically done to the torpedo to change it?

Just a matter of putting a spanner in and twisting but that’s just effecting the hydrostatic valve which in turn controls

32:00 the depth. The hydrostatic valve itself controls a horizontal rudder at the stern end of the torpedo, just like a submarine. A torpedo is very much like a submarine. It’s got, we don’t call them hydroplanes but that’s what it really is, right above the screw of the torpedo.

I still don’t understand why a torpedo therefore would remain at a certain depth.

Because

32:30 the pressure of the water increases as you go deeper and it increases roughly by a pound per square inch for every two feet you go down. So if you want to set a torpedo to shall we say forty feet you adjust the hydrostatic valve to twenty pounds so the pressure of the water itself

33:00 controls the hydrostatic valve which in turn controls the hydroplane which controls the depth of the torpedo.

Okay, excellent. You were awarded the DSM. [Distinguished Service Medal] What was that actually for?

Being a good bloke.

Can I say you’re a top bloke and if I had a DSM I’d give you one.

33:30 I suppose for doing my job well. The captain in this particular case, it was his first aboard, he was awarded a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] and he was told that because he had a DSO he could also recommend one other officer and

34:00 in my particular case four ratings, sorry, one officer for the Distinguished Service Cross, four ratings for the Distinguished Service Medal and another four ratings to be mentioned in dispatches. So in fact with the one award from captain downwards there were twelve people received awards.

34:30 Those awards were not necessarily for any specific action but for, in the captain’s eyes, doing your job well or beyond well. That doesn’t mean to say you’ve got to be the coxswain or the second coxswain or the oil rag as long as you do your job well, you’re in line. Obviously

35:00 the people who are most likely to receive an award are the people who are doing what are felt to be the important jobs during the submarine attack.

So if I understand you correctly, the captain got awarded the DSO not for a particular patrol but rather?

For a serious of excellent results up to date.

35:30 He got the VC [Victoria Cross] for doing a particular job during a patrol but the DSO was for over a period of time.

When he got awarded the VC does that also mean that he gets to?

He can recommend other people to be awarded.

Did he in that particular case?

I can’t remember, I think so.

36:00 If you have time after you finish with the tape I’ll show you the actually awards that were given and I’ll show you the recommendations that were made for them.

What was the recommendation?

I’m not supposed to know so I’m not going tell you. I’ll show you, but I won’t tell you.

But you obviously know. I understand on one occasion you picked up three Italian

36:30 survivors, what happened there? We sighted an Italian submarine at night, we were both on the surface at night and we sighted him. He’d already sighted us unfortunately but I don’t know why he intended to go for us with his gun. Our captain decided to dive and fire a torpedo. We only had one torpedo and we hit it with the one torpedo. There were three

37:00 survivors all of whom had been on the bridge when the submarine was hit.

Could you just go through the scenario with me? It’s night time and you’re up, what’s happened, is he coming at you side on?

From stern on. Our stern lookout obviously wasn’t doing his job properly, he approached, he could see us and was going to go to gun action.

37:30 Why, I wouldn’t have a clue but by the time the lookout sighted him he was within a mile of us and our captain immediately dived and turned away, lined himself and fired his one torpedo which hit. The three blokes were blown off the bridge and into the water.

38:00 We heard them in the water, shouting and picked them up, took them back to Malta.

Once you dived the Italian submarine remained on the surface?

No, the Italian submarine went straight down. Sorry, when we dived yes, he stayed on the surface long enough for our captain to set up a torpedo hit and that was it. You’re now talking a matter of minutes,

38:30 not hours.

Okay, so you’ve come to the surface and heard survivors, what was the crew response at that point in time, what happens?

Pick them up. Well, we were all excited because we’d hit a submarine. That was the important bit during the war because the country had suffered so much from submarine action but

39:00 sinking a submarine was a very important factor so we were quite happy about that and quite excited about it. When I say happy, I don’t mean happy, I mean excited and were even more excited to pick up survivors and find out what they were like, what they looked like.

Given you don’t know how many survivors there are, who goes up to be lookouts to look for survivors?

39:30 That’s right. Your lookout looks for whatever’s in his particular arc of looking out.

How many fellas go to have a look?

Officer of the watch, in this case two lookouts, sometimes there’d be three and the captain would probably go up as well.

What happened when the survivors came aboard?

They were dragged aboard, sent down below and split up, dispersed

40:00 around the various messes. One went into the ERA’s mess, one would go into the PO’s mess and can’t remember what happened to the third one but they were all kept on board for the last two or three days of the patrol. Later on in the war we even took a Japanese soldier on board, took him back to Trincomalee, that was an interesting trip.

40:30 Wondering whether he was going to commit Hari Kiri or something.

We’ll just stop there.

Tape 8

00:41 We’ll continue to move forward, just having a brief look at the log section it mentions that you sunk a boat by gunfire. What happened there?

That was on the patrol after I left the boat. Whilst I was in Upholder

01:00 we only used the gun once and that was to fire a star shell over a convoy. We didn’t have any torpedoes so we couldn’t attack the convoy so our captain, it was at night and we stayed on the surface, fired star shell over the top of the convoy. He thought that they were aircraft flares and so they scattered and we of course sent an enemy sighting report back to Malta and the aircraft

01:30 and a force of destroyers came out and got stuck into the convoy.

I guess because you don’t have many torpedoes aboard you have to be quite conservative in the use of them. Yes, you don’t waste them. They’re expensive too. Which is always a consideration.

So distance away from a convoy, how close or far away do you want to be for optimum?

02:00 Well ideally your firing range should be something like a thousand to twelve hundred yards. Now that gives you the opportunity to eliminate damage to yourself from the explosion of the torpedo and at the same time gets you close enough to be as sure you possibly can of hitting the target.

02:30 But that doesn’t mean to say that all attacks were carried out at twelve hundred yards, they certainly weren’t. I think in Conte Rosso, where we sank Conte Rosso we were about seven hundred yards if my memory serves me right and at other times we have actually fired torpedoes at four thousand yards but you don’t expect to hit at four thousand yards, you’d be very, very lucky if you did.

Okay.

03:00 You shared with me at the beginning of the day the opportunity of promotion but leaving the Upholder. When did you first hear about this opportunity?

You’re talking about the sinking of the submarine, the Admiral Saint Bond just now, that happened in a patrol during January and we came in then and we went out again for a second patrol at the end of January,

03:30 towards the end of January and on that occasion our captain was given a rest period so we went out with the spare crew captain in command, didn’t see anything, arrived back in harbour during the first week in February and when we arrived back our own captain sent for me and said would I be interested in joining the submarine P39 as it’s coxswain.

04:00 I thought to myself, “Well, I don’t know, Upholder has now done twenty three patrols. She can only do perhaps one, maybe two more before she goes back to the UK. What’s the balance between that and a quick promotion” and I took the quick promotion. That’s how I came to leave.

Was there also sort of an emotion of remorse given how much you respected the captain and what you’d been through?

Yes. You don’t leave a ship

04:30 like that, a very successful ship, and a very happy ship too without some sort of feelings and of course the biggest feeling was that I was going to miss the trip back to the UK after about fifteen months in Malta.

So moving now towards the new submarine. What happened there?

The coxswain of the new submarine,

05:00 I don’t know the background to it but he obviously was not acceptable to the CO. The submarine had only just arrived in Malta so whatever happened happened on the passage out from the UK and they must’ve, like officers do, talk over a gin in the ward room, they must have been talking it over with Wanklyn and the captain asked if he knew of anyone with experience of the

05:30 Mediterranean conditions at that time. My captain volunteered my name and then he didn’t tell me to go, he came and asked me if I’d be prepared to go. So I went and that was it. We did one patrol in February, left harbour about 15th February, arrived back towards the end of February. When we arrived back we were about to refuel and we got a dive bombing attack

06:00 which hit the oil fuel lighter which in turn was so close to the boat that we had very serious damage. A ‘U’ class submarine has two hundred and forty battery cells. It smashed a hundred and sixty eight of them. The side of the submarine was dented in just like a concertina all the way along and a lot of equipment

06:30 was knocked of it’s bed plate, pumps and things, fans and things like that. So the submarine had to be towed around to the dockyard for, the idea was to tow it round there and carry out what emergency repairs could be carried out to make it sufficiently seaworthy to be taken back to the UK for a complete refit.

I’ll just ask a few questions about all that. Firstly, you were replacing

07:00 a fella, coming aboard this boat, how were you received by the rest of the crew?

Well, they looked at me a little bit sideways because I was about the youngest bloke on board then.

And you were coxswain as well.

And I was the coxswain.

Did you have any problems with personalities?

No. I think they were all a little bit chary 07:30 of what I was like, what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. It settled down very quickly indeed.

The fact that you’d won the DSM, were you aware of that at that point?

Yes.

Did that have any bearing on how the captain and the rest of the crew treated you?

I don’t think so, no. I doubt if half of them knew anyway.

The patrol that you went on, where did you go and what happened?

I really don’t know where we went but nothing happened

08:00 which is why we don’t know where we went, or partly the reason why. So after we went round to the dockyard we started to carry out whatever maintenance we could to get the ship back to a seaworthy state and then on 26th March we got bombed again and this time the bomb exploded

08:30 right underneath the boat and broke it in half so it was a complete wreck. It stayed afloat for a while and during that period of time we stripped out what equipment we could to use as spare gear for other submarines in the flotilla and then the boat was towed round to one of the creeks and beached round there out of the way.

Just looking at these two air raids. The first one where the batteries were damaged and the

09:00 hull was dented, was the hull pierced at all?

No.

So where did the bomb land in respect to?

It landed on the port bow, I suppose about forty feet away.

Hitting water or?

No, hitting the diesel lighter. A diesel fuelling lighter I mean.

Where were you during this particular air raid?

All on board, all except the CO were on board.

09:30 We only had one casualty from broken, flying glass, a stoker got a bad cut to an artery in his arm, that’s all.

You say you were on board but are you at action?

Carrying out normal daily duties on board, getting ready to go back to sea again.

So you go then after the damage to see if you can repair the submarine.

No,

10:00 to get it sufficiently seaworthy to go back to the UK for a complete repair.

What things were being done to get it seaworthy?

Had to strip out all the broken cells and pump out the acid that was floating around in the bottom of the battery tanks and we’d got about that far when the second bombing happened.

Again, where were you during this bombing?

During the second

10:30 bombing, fortunately in an air raid shelter right alongside.

Was there a reason that you were put there instead of?

You mean alongside the air raid shelter or in the air raid shelter?

In the air raid shelter opposed to being in the submarine.

Well the bombing was so incessant that it was standing orders right throughout Malta that service personnel should go to the shelter as soon as an air raid warning was sounded. So we had to evacuate the submarine completely.

11:00 This was done the second raid, why wasn’t it done for the first raid?

Because the submarine wasn’t damaged, it wasn’t in the dockyard for the first raid. You’ve got me a little bit confused now.

Okay so the submarine was damaged. 11:30 Yes.

What was the feeling amongst the captain and crew?

I don’t know what the captain was feeling, I expect he was very disappointed because he was obviously looking forward to carrying out some attacks on the enemy but the majority of the crew were fairly happy about going back to the UK.

OK. Had you heard about the sinking of the Upholder at this point in time?

No. Upholder wasn’t sunk until 14th April.

12:00 P39 was finished off on 26th March, Upholder was sunk on 1st April. In between whiles, let me think now, get my dates straight. On April 1st the bombing raid on the dockyard sank the submarine Pandora and the Greek submarine Popadopoulos

12:30 I think it was, a Greek submarine anyway and also sank the submarine P36 which was alongside Lazaretto, tied up actually alongside the base so it couldn’t dive, so that was sunk. After the bombing of P39, my submarine, we stripped what we could

13:00 out of the submarine, which wasn’t a great deal and then we and the crew of P36 and what was left of the crew of Pandora were all joined together to man the other submarines of the flotilla whilst they were in harbour while their crews were sent off to rest camp.

So what was your particular role in respect to operating the submarines while they were in harbour?

13:30 Carrying out all maintenance and restoring, getting them ready for sea again. At the same time being dived all day and doing all the work at night under cover of darkness.

Before you found out any news about the Upholder, what were you feeling about your situation given that you’re now not aboard a submarine?

I suppose I wasn’t unduly unhappy because

14:00 nobody had been hurt in P39 and it was an opportunity to go home. I had already been made an acting chief petty officer which they wouldn’t be taking away from me so quick promotion and a trip home at the same time so I suppose I was quite content rather than happy.

In many respects you were just waiting for a ship to take you home?

Yes. Well P39 would have been

14:30 the ship had we been able to make it sufficiently seaworthy.

Okay. So when you heard the news that the Upholder had sunk, when did you hear that?

I suppose about three days after she was overdue. Certainly before I left Malta at the end of April.

How many friends did you have aboard?

Thirty.

15:00 All except the bloke that relieved me, I didn’t know him.

So the captain was aboard?

Yes, the whole of the crew of Upholder were lost.

Did that news affect your outlook upon the war?

Yes, it was a very saddening thing for me. At the same time things were happening

15:30 all around me at that particular time so it really didn’t hit me until later on, a month or so later on, what had happened.

How did you cope at that time?

Well, by that time I was home, I was on leave and I suppose it was just a question of thinking to myself what might have happened. Nobody really knew at the time

16:00 how she was sunk, why she was sunk, where she was sunk. It wasn’t until some time after the war I learnt that. A very sad state of affairs as she was, I believe the most successful allied submarine during World War II. Upholder sank

16:30 three submarines, one destroyer, damaged one destroyer, damaged a cruiser and a hundred and nineteen thousand tons of merchant shipping in fifteen months.

Just summing up your time now 17:00 at Malta and I guess after P39 had finally, the second bombing attack. What are your lasting memories during that time, taking over the submarines while they were in?

Well they were hectic of course. It’s a question of working all night and sleeping during the day. Air raids were continuous and when I say continuous,

17:30 I mean continuous, there were no lulls between raids. What else can I say about it? It was a matter of working and sleeping. We very seldom had time enough to go ashore and have a beer.

When did you receive news that you were being relieved or departing?

That would be about the

18:00 third week in April. It was certainly after Upholder had been sunk. I would say about the third week in April. Upholder was sunk on 14th April 1942. Yes, about the third week and by then it had already been decided that the bombing was so incessant that the whole

18:30 submarine flotilla would be moved from Malta to the eastern end of the Mediterranean but that the crew of P39 would be kept to help unload the submarine Olympus which was coming in from Gibraltar with stores. Then we were going to take passage in Olympus back to the UK to commission another new boat.

So that time before you went aboard

19:00 Olympus were you feeling relieved? What emotions were you feeling about leaving Malta?

Very chuffed actually, going back home, been out there a long time. It was long to me anyway.

Did you have a particular role on board Olympus?

No, I was just a passenger, I was in charge of the P39 crew helping to unload it and getting it ready to go back to sea again, but that was all.

19:30 Once we really embarked I had no role to play at all.

So how many fellas were aboard the Olympus?

When she sailed? Ninety eight.

So in a sense you had two crews aboard?

Well there was Olympus’s crew itself, there was P39’s crew entirely and then there were some people from Pandora,

20:00 there were some people from P36 and one or two general service people who were being sent back to the UK from the cruiser Penelope.

Can you describe for me the interior of the sub, it must have been?

It was stacked out, yes. What happened in Olympus was, not only in Olympus, there were three or four submarines like it. They had three battery sections and a battery section would be the

20:30 size of this room I suppose. What they’d done was to take out one battery section entirely and they stacked that with stores to take to Malta and then that became the mess deck for the people, the ratings going back to Gibraltar with the boat so that all the crew of P39 apart from the chief POs and the officers were in the battery section.

So departing,

21:00 when did you depart to leave for Gibraltar?

We left Malta, we sailed at about, I suppose four o’clock, four thirty in the morning on Friday 8th May 1942 and we got about seven miles out of Malta and then hit a mine in the swept channel.

Just on the issue of departing. Were you still following

21:30 the same rules before departing in the evening?

Yes, but still departing in the dark.

And where were you positioned, in respect to, situated in the submarine?

Sitting in the chief’s mess waiting for breakfast.

What gear did you have with you at the time?

Virtually none because it had all been bombed in Lazaretto, in the base. I had what I was standing

22:00 up in. I had no other kit at all. I had some toilet gear and that was about it. And at Lazaretto, the sleeping quarters had been bombed had they?

Everything was flattened by that time.

And all your gear was there at the time?

Yeah. Whatever other gear I did have and they were basically personal effects you could fit into a very small attaché case.

22:30 Okay so you’re waiting for breakfast?

There was a great big thump forward where we hit the mine and the next thing I can remember that the chef was in the accommodation space, the chef was cooking breakfast. The next thing I saw was the galley range flying across the corridor and then the order was passed to abandon ship. So we all,

23:00 those of us that could, go out onto the casing of the submarine and I suppose from memory, we numbered up there and I think I’m right in saying that there were eighty eight people on the casing and bridge which meant to say that ten people had been trapped down below and after, I suppose the

23:30 submarine actually subsided and sank about ten minutes after the explosion so everybody was left swimming. And I certainly tried to keep a big group of P39 people who I knew in a group because I thought that was the safest way to go but you know, people dropped off here or there, gave up the ghost and just drowned

24:00 and eventually seven of us arrived back on the beach and that’s the only survivors there were from Olympus.

So just so we can understand, you got out with around eighty or so others. Were there any floating materials to be passed out from the submarine?

Submarines didn’t carry anything in their casing that floated for obvious reasons, depth charges would have loosened it.

24:30 Could you see Malta?

Just. A very dim outline in the distance.

You said you gathered some of the fellas from the P39 submarine. Did you say anything to them?

Yeah. “Get into a group and stick together”, which most of them did but eventually they just drifted off.

25:00 The only one that nearly made it to the beach but didn’t quite was the captain of P39. He drowned, I suppose he couldn’t have been more than four hundred yards from the beach when he drowned.

When you say drifted off, do you mean some kept swimming forward and others stopped?

No. I would expect that in his mind he was trying to get to the beach in a hurry

25:30 to alert people on the beach of what was happening, that there were people in the water outside but he didn’t make it. I imagine he had a heart attack from the exertion of trying to get there too fast. If he’d stayed with the group he would still be, well I don’t know if he’d be still alive but he would have survived that one anyway. There were ten officers on board Olympus at the time and none of them survived.

What I find amazing

26:00 is that so many people got out of the submarine but so few were able to make it to the shore.

Well seven miles is a long way.

Could you see fellas giving up the ghost and drifting away.

Yes. I had them swim up close to me and say “I’m giving up now” and just going under. You can encourage them so far and you can help them so far

26:30 but eventually you’ve got to let them go and try to help somebody else and they just drowned.

What help could you offer a man?

Only to hold him up out of the water, normal life saving business.

So these eighty fellas or so that got out of the submarine were they spread out over a large distance or in small groups?

Obviously they did spread out

27:00 otherwise the group that I’d got together would have been bigger than it was but why or how I wouldn’t have a clue. How were you coping with the swim?

Quite well. I told you earlier in the interview that I took part in a lot of sport in my younger life. Even that doesn’t prepare you for

27:30 being deposited in the ocean fully dressed.

You were mentioned in dispatches concerning…

Yeah.

What was said there?

Well I was on the bridge and two of the P39 crew, one elderly bloke and one younger chap came up to me and said “We’re not swimmers

28:00 so what do we do” so I said, “Well hang on there” and I went down below, I went down twice and got DSEA equipment from the lockers in the control room, brought them back up and gave them on each and inflated the buoyancy bags and just had to leave them to it but obviously something went wrong with their

28:30 DSEA gear and they drowned. In fact, none of the survivors had any life saving equipment at all, they were all swimmers.

What’s DSEA gear?

Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus. It’s really a rubber lung that you carried on your chest with a hose pipe into your mouth. You’re breathing

29:00 mainly oxygen from the bag and then back into the bag.

That’s what you did for those two fellas. What was the second mention in dispatches?

That was on each. The second?

You were mentioned in dispatches for that particular?

For going back twice and doing it, yes.

So some fellas did have things that you could blow up and lie on.

29:30 Not lie on but certainly some of them had lifesaving vests you know, they used to issue belts that you strapped around your waist and you could blow it up through a tube. Something like the life jackets that you get on an aircraft but none of those survived for whatever reason, I don’t know.

Was there a point where you thought you weren’t going to survive?

No. You’ve got to have confidence haven’t you.

30:00 I wanted to get back to the UK.

So when you finally did make it ashore what was said? What did the personnel on the shore do?

They were soldiers actually, they actually sighted us when we were two or three hundred yards away from the beach and they stayed there but they also raised

30:30 the alarm at the same time so eventually and I didn’t see them, there were quite a few soldiers down on the beach looking for other people and we were bundled in to a truck I think it was, I don’t think it was an ambulance, I think it was a truck from memory and taken off to the military hospital where we stayed for a few hours under observation and then sent back to what was left of Lazaretto

31:00 where we spent Friday night. We were allowed to go ashore, they gave us some money and a few bits and pieces of clothing so that we could go ashore on Saturday afternoon and back to Lazaretto to sleep that night in the air raid shelter. On Sunday morning they got us up nice and early and said right, you’re going to join the crews

31:30 of Welshman for passage home. Welshman had just bought a convoy in on the Saturday under smoke screen. The smoke screen was still there when Welshman sailed on Sunday. That’s how we got home, on Welshman. We arrived in Dolphin, the submarine base on the following Sunday morning dressed in

32:00 all sorts of garb. One bloke had an overall suit. I had a pair of shorts and a shirt of some description. We looked less unlike navy ratings than anyone I’ve ever seen.

During these early days, the trauma of

32:30 the events, of what had happened to both yourself but also to the submarine Upholder, when did that actually start to hit you? I suppose it hit to some extent when the loss of Upholder was announced to the general public and that wasn’t done until August. The reason that hit a little bit was because my wife

33:00 went home to her family whilst I was away in Hertfordshire and it just so happened that one of the leading stoker’s wives lived fairly close by. They met on the railway station when they were saying goodbye to us around about the beginning of December and became quite friendly afterwards. Then of course when I came home I already knew that Upholder had been lost

33:30 but the dependants hadn’t been told so I had to keep quiet about it but of course when it was announced to the dependants the girl didn’t want to talk to my wife anymore, that was it, it was the last we’ve ever seen of her.

So for three, four months nothing was said?

It wasn’t made public. The dependants

34:00 of the people lost were told about six weeks afterwards.

So once you arrived back in the UK had you in a sense lost confidence in respect to?

No, I don’t think it affected me very much at all. Naturally you think about things but

34:30 from the point of view of being confident of going back to sea in a submarine, no.

So where were you next posted?

To Scotland, to Clyde, the Isle of Bute, to be coxswain of L26.

What happened during that time?

That was one of the World War I boats being used for training purposes in the Clyde area and that meant to say we had

35:00 a basic skeleton crew and the rest of the crew were made up of the trainees coming straight out of the classroom and we taught them what we could about life on board a submarine before they were sent off to join their own submarines

Did you talk about your experience at all?

No.

What was your training role?

I was coxswain of the boat. It was my job to see that they were

35:30 given the opportunity to learn whatever they could learn in L26. Of course nearly all those people were hostilities only, not very many permanent navy people at all. I think P39’s crew was almost entirely hostilities only but they would have been the first of the, what’s the word I’m looking for,

36:00 can’t think of it, the people called up, forcibly called up, you had it here for Vietnam?

Conscription.

Conscription. P39’s crew was seventy five per cent conscripted but they were part of what I saw of the first batch but the people we got in L26 for training were nearly all conscripts.

Was there a difference between

36:30 the men that volunteered and the conscripts?

Yes. Well the volunteers were mainly long term naval people who had done all sorts of navy training before they even joined the submarine service.

Was there a difference in attitude?

Initially yes but that very soon disappeared.

37:00 In fact by the time we got to 1943, ’44 I couldn’t tell the difference between a conscript and a volunteer.

How did you beat out the attitude from the conscript?

We just made them knuckle down to things. A lot of them had never been used to being given orders. That’s very easy to put right. The coxswain of a submarine

37:30 is not allowed to award punishment but my God he can make life bloody difficult.

What sort of things did you do to make life difficult?

Well there’s always bilges to be cleaned out, always times that you can require a bloke to be on board when he might like to be on shore drinking a pint. All sorts of ways. I’m not going to let you in to a coxswain’s secrets.

Not even the

38:00 archives to let them know what went on? You’re not holding back from me Gordon are you?

No but you know, you can make life very awful.

You made a big point earlier on in the day when we talked about shirkers. Firstly you wanted to make the point that if they didn’t want to be there they wouldn’t have been selected because it was a pretty harsh sort of trial to go through and secondly they were got rid of but with

38:30 those who were conscripted they might not necessarily want to be there and you don’t have that option so how does that actually change your role in dealing with men who have been conscripted?

Well you had to change your thinking about them some times. At one later stage of the war I even had a bloke on board who turned over to become a Jehovah’s Witness just to get out of the armed forces, not just the submarines but out of the armed forces. He was a very good chap

39:00 at his job. He was a very good submariner, a very good telegraphist it so happened to be but he just decided he didn’t want to go to war so he joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Any other strange circumstances like that?

I can’t think of any, that’s the one that sticks out in my mind.

Okay, we might stop there.

Tape 9

00:44 On tape I’ll just ask you that again, can you just take us through the Olympus sinking from the moment the mine hit.

Olympus sailed at about four thirty in the morning on Friday 8th May 1942

01:00 and on board at that time she had ninety eight people in total including three submarine commanding officers, the whole of Olympus’s ships company, the whole of P39 ship’s company, some survivors from Pandora, some survivor’s from P36 and some general service people from Penelope. We sailed, we went out through the

01:30 harbour entrance and along the swept channel. At about five o’clock in the morning we hit a mine forward. At the time I was sitting in the petty officer’s mess waiting for breakfast, which was being cooked in the galley at the other end of the accommodation space. First thing that happened was there was a big thump forward so we obviously knew something had happened,

02:00 didn’t know what. The next thing I remember seeing was the galley on which the chef was preparing breakfast going across the gangway and then the order came to abandon ship so we got everybody or as many as we could up onto the casing or the bridge, mostly on the casing and there we carried out a count of heads in the usual

02:30 parade ground manner. There were eighty eight people counted out of a total of ninety eight on board. I suppose we would have been on the casing and on the bridge for maybe ten minutes and the submarine was gradually subsiding, there was nothing we could do about it. We tried to

03:00 arouse attention on the shore. Dawn was just beginning to break. We tried to arouse attention by radio but of course the radio had been put out of action by the explosion. We tried firing the four inch gun but the shell jammed in the breach so that couldn’t be fired and we had no other means, the ordinary four inch alders lamp to try and that of course was not particularly realistic at a distance

03:30 of about seven miles. So whilst we were still on the casing we got people to take off their shoes and things and strip off whatever outer clothing they didn’t need and we were left eventually swimming in the water. For my part I tried to group a lot of the P39 survivors around me and told them to keep in the group and within that

04:00 group I had the captain of P39 and the first lieutenant of P39 that I can remember and we started swimming towards Malta. Eventually one or two people would come close to me and say, “I can’t make it, I’m giving up, it’s no good” and they would just drift away and drown. This group, there was a

04:30 nucleus of a group kept together, others kept getting out to the edge and drifting away on their own. One or two people tried to swim well ahead fast and just exhausted themselves and gave up. Eventually our CO, our commanding officer was one of the group left and he got within about five or six hundred yards of the beach and he suddenly disappeared so we assumed that he’d 05:00 exhausted himself and finally seven of us arrived on the beach. Of the seven that arrived on the beach four of us were ex-P39 and the other three, really and truly I can’t tell you where they came from. I think one was from P36 and I think there was one general service rating

05:30 and one Olympus. As we were nearing the beach a couple of soldiers on the beach sighted us in the water and they raised the alarm. They helped us out of the water by which time a truck or an ambulance had arrived on the beach and picked us up and took us off to the military hospital close by where we were kept for

06:00 a few hours under observation and eventually transported back to the Lazaretto submarine base or what was left of it where we were given bunks in the air raid shelter and left to relax for the rest of the day. We were allowed to pick whatever items of clothing that could be found to suit us, that meant to say we were entirely rigged with overall suits

06:30 or shorts and a shirt or something anyway and we were allowed ashore. We were given some money to be able to go ashore that night. The following day, Saturday, we were allowed to go ashore again but had to be back on board for the night in the air raid shelter and on Sunday morning we were aroused quite early and told to get ourselves ready and were transported down to the harbour, the main Grand Harbour

07:00 where a convoy had arrived on the Saturday with the crews of Welshman as one of its escorts. There was a very big smoke screen all round the harbour because the ships were being attacked by dive bombing. We boarded Welshman and Welshman gave us passage all the way home to Milford Haven.

Thank you, that was very good indeed. What injuries

07:30 or how did you look and feel after that ordeal?

Tired but no injuries. I think that my sporting activities in the earlier days had stood me in good stead. I was physically very well.

Was there any service or any kind of way to mark the deaths of those that didn’t get to the shore?

08:00 I’m fairly sure but not certain that there were one or two bodies picked up and are buried in the naval cemetery at Bighi in Malta but as regards a memorial service, no.

What special resonance does that date 8th May still hold for you?

Nothing except that it’s a

08:30 date that sticks at the back of my mind. I’m one of those peculiar people who have a very good memory for dates and car registration numbers and telephone numbers.

I ask that because it’s coming around again, it’ll be only a couple of days ‘til that anniversary, what will you be thinking about the day after tomorrow?

I shall just think about that. Not a great deal, I don’t get depressed about it

09:00 but I remember it and that’s about it.

Alright, we’ll pick that up them from where we were after that, the L26. You were on that boat for a year. What were the major events that occurred in your service there?

Everyday training. We’d do five or six days

09:30 not at sea but out in the Clyde in the training areas on day running, we didn’t stay out all night and just giving the newcomers the opportunity to learn a little bit about submarines before they went off to their own submarine.

You were a petty officer by this stage?

No, acting chief petty officer.

You were married?

10:00 Yes.

With a son?

Yes.

Where were you living at that time?

You mean where was my wife living?

You weren’t living together?

Yes we were. She came up to Rosyth and we took rooms in Rosyth and lived at a place called Ardbeg which is a suburb I suppose you’d call it of Rosyth. So we had the best part of a year together.

What was your lifestyle like?

10:30 Were you still very much in active naval service or were you able to relax a lot more?

Able to relax quite a bit more, yes. Away from the war scene, there was no bombing in Rosyth. No surprises of any merit. Yes, it was a very relaxing period which was probably why I was sent there.

Before

11:00 you were sent there you had some special leave which they give to all survivors. What did you do during that leave?

Went home. The three of us got called back to attend an investigation into the loss of Olympus by flag officer submarines who at the time was Vice Admiral Sir Max Horton who was a well known World War I submariner.

11:30 Then sent back on leave after that. That lasted a day. Nothing else I suppose. We certainly didn’t travel anywhere. I stayed in my wife’s home town with her parents. Didn’t have enough money to go anywhere or do anything.

How much had you become exhausted

12:00 from the period of time you’d spent in Malta and the events of the Olympus?

What a difficult question to answer. I don’t really know but on the other hand I don’t really remember being exhausted at all. I don’t feel that it was any different from any other part of the war. It was more of a relaxing

12:30 nature there. I can’t answer the question other than that.

There were no physical reminders, no nervous tension?

No. I still jump when somebody drops a saucepan behind me.

Was that something that started from when you first came back?

I don’t know when it started but it’s happened all through the part of life that I can remember.

13:00 Given that your time in Scotland was, as you say, quite relaxing, reasonably happy, how did you feel about getting another posting on to an active submarine?

Well I wasn’t particularly pleased about it because I’d settled in quite well thank you very much and I think my wife enjoyed life up there as well. It wasn’t too bad. What I didn’t like was being sent out

13:30 as spare crew. I’d much rather have gone out in a submarine. I was spare crew. I took out a batch of relief cook stewards and supply assistants on general service who were replacing people on the submarine depot ship Maidstone in Algiers and I was

14:00 in charge of that draft. Of course that stood me in very good stead when I later became a coxswain of a submarine within that flotilla because I didn’t have to ask the cooks and the stewards of the depot ship for assistance they came forward and volunteered with it because we got on very well on the trip out there. I don’t think there’s anything more startling than that.

How long were you on the depot ship for?

14:30 Arrived out there in July and I was in Sickle in August. I stayed in Sickle until the end of September, beginning of October and I was brought back into the depot ship as spare crew again because the depot ship was then due to be sailed out to Ceylon and I’d only just arrived on the station in the Mediterranean so they didn’t want me

15:00 to go home with Sickle. So we sailed from Algiers I should think towards the end of November. We spent Christmas 1943 in Alexandria and we arrived in Ceylon at Trincomalee, I would think about the

15:30 beginning of March 1944.

Just a couple of questions around that time. Can you explain what the depot ship is all about; is that the same as a mother ship?

Yes

Can you explain what it does?

Well a depot ship is simply a maintenance base for submarines operating as a flotilla from it. They’re the people that supply the food. They’re the people that supply

16:00 the engineering assistance, electrical assistance. It’s where the captain of the whole flotilla is and he has an operations room, operations staff who instruct the captains of the submarines on where they’re going, what they have to do, what they can expect to do there. It really is a submarine base afloat.

How did you pass your time,

16:30 what work did you do while you were on that depot ship?

Not very much. There wasn’t very much for me to do. I was one of only three spare crew coxswain’s on board so whatever work there was we shared out between three people.

What did you do in the mean time?

Avoided it as much as possible. Nothing very much. I only went ashore in Algiers on

17:00 two occasions. I was actually ashore in Algiers when the Italians gave up the war and I woke up the following morning in an aerodrome at Blida which is well outside Algiers in an American airman’s mess. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know how I got back either.

It must have been quite an occasion in and around the Med when Italy gave up?

Yes it was.

17:30 There was a lot of relief and satisfaction and hope I suppose is another good term for it at that particular time.

Was there a moment before that or around that time that you were confident you were winning the war?

That’s when we started to think that we might win the war, not that we were winning it, that we might win it. I think that that also coincided with the Americans really taking an active part

18:00 by landing in North Africa.

What dealings did you personally have with Americans, social or otherwise?

Dealings with them? Not very many. I’ve met more Americans since the war than I ever met during the war. There were certainly no American submarines attached to the submarine flotilla that I was in.

18:30 I can only remember ever being aboard one American ship which was one of the cruisers, Chicago actually and the only reason I went aboard was I was invited aboard for a meal. I had the best meal I ever had during the war there. That’s about all. I really had no opinion about Americans. I started to get an opinion

19:00 about them when I eventually arrived in Fremantle where there was an American submarine squadron doing a very good job.

I was going to ask you that. In Australia at various times in the war there was distinct tension between Australian servicemen and the Americans, what was the case like in the British services from your point of view?

If you’re talking particularly about the British services in the UK, a lot

19:30 of antagonism I think because generally speaking it was seen that the Americans were too well paid, had too many advantages and creature comforts that the English serviceman didn’t get. I think that was the main reason.

Tell us about the Sickle.

The Sickle.

20:00 ‘S’ class submarine of about seven hundred tons. A bit more than that, nine hundred tons. Six torpedo tubes forward, one aft. The captain had been the first lieutenant of Upholder at one stage with me so I knew him and he knew me which was the reason why I joined Sickle and she did her patrols from

20:30 Algiers around the Tulon area in the Mediterranean. I only did two patrols in there before I was bought back in for spare crew.

Your first lieutenant in Upholder, was that a reunion for you or had you been in contact?

No that was a reunion, I hadn’t seen him since he left the boat and he left the boat to go back to the UK to do his commanding officers course

21:00 so the next time I saw him he was in command of his own submarine.

Given the events in the interim what did you have to talk about with him?

We talked about Upholder, naturally. There was a lot of people we both knew went down with Upholder and we talked about one or two of the events that we’d both participated in but that’s about all. So,

21:30 Sickle went back to England and you went to Trincomalee?

No Sickle didn’t go back to England, it stayed there. The submarines of the squadron, when Maidstone moved on the submarines went to a place in Sardinia called Madelina. Only the Maidstone moved on but Maidstone when it arrived in Trincomalee was joined by other ‘S’ class submarines to form a new flotilla.

22:00 The war had changed, obviously this was part of the reason you were moving out, what did you know about the war in the Pacific?

Not very much. Mentally we were more concentrated on what was going on in Europe because Italy had just given up. You know, we were all conjecturing how long Germany would last out and what was happening in Russia etc. so I don’t think we gave a great deal

22:30 of thought to what was happening in the Pacific until we got to Trincomalee.

Were you given any formal education about the Japanese?

No, nothing at all. Our job in Trincomalee was to patrol the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean from Burma down to Penang I suppose.

23:00 This was in the Storm?

Yes.

What was your role within Storm?

I was coxswain of Storm. As soon as we arrived in Trincomalee in Maidstone I did one patrol in Storm as a passenger or supernumery and it so happened that the coxswain of Storm at that time had been a second coxswain in L26 with me so we knew

23:30 one another well enough. He was something like fifteen years older than I was and he didn’t want to go to sea again in submarines so I simply offered to exchange with him and we exchanged. So he went inboard spare crew and I became coxswain of Storm from the second patrol onwards.

Can you explain how the Storm operated?

Yes. As I said the

24:00 main patrol areas were anywhere from Burma down to Penang which mean to say that at any time when you went on patrol you had a few thousand miles to cover which meant to say that you couldn’t just travel at night on the surface and dive by day, so you travelled on the surface all the time. It took you about four to five days to reach your patrol area

24:30 but you were assisted of course by the fact that submarines by that time had radar fitted for spotting aircraft purposes so surface running was not all that dangerous, not like it had been in the Mediterranean. We did sink in Storm a couple of merchant ships but most of our work was done attacking

25:00 coastal shipping. The Japanese were running small convoys of small ships from Penang or further south up to Burma, supplying the Japanese Army in Burma and returning with cargos of rice etc. We’re talking about really small vessels now. So a lot of the patrols in Storm required gunfire rather than

25:30 torpedo work. As I say we did sink a couple of merchant ships initially but I think virtually for the rest of our time there we were using the gun.

Can you tell us about an engagement where the gun was used?

Yes there was one occasion, I think almost the first patrol that I went on, we went into the harbour at Port Blair, we were outside the harbour and the

26:00 captain thought he saw something in the harbour that was interesting to him as a target. We went into the harbour and we shot up three escort vessels with the gun and then got out. Going to gun action like that, it was really the first time I’d ever been in a real gun action in a submarine where somebody was likely to be firing back at you.

26:30 That was quite an experience but eventually we did so much of it that it just became second nature.

What happens in the control room during a gun action like that?

Nothing very much except passing of orders. The main activity is in the gun tower which is forward of the conning tower and the main work down below is being done in the

27:00 motor room increasing and decreasing speed as required, by the helmsman in passing orders as required and by the ammunition party getting ammunition out of the magazine and passing it up through the gun tower hatch. Whose responsibility was it to man the gun?

Carry a gun layer and another gunnery rating to be the trainer. The rest of the gun’s crew are made up of

27:30 cooks, stewards, stokers, telegraphists, anybody that happens to be handy.

Obviously during this you had a similar role to what you’d done before in the control room?

Yes.

Why was it more frightening to be using the gun?

Not frightening, it was more of an experience rather than anything else. One of the things is you get a lot of noise when you’re using the gun of course, noise from your own gun.

28:00 And you really don’t know what’s happening up top, you’re wondering all the time what is happening up top. A submarine is very prone to disaster in a gun action if it gets hit. We only had one submarine that was hit, the Shakespeare out there, and that had a charmed life, it couldn’t die, a charmed life fighting off aircraft.

Did Storm

28:30 operate alone always?

Yes. Never operated in wolf packs.

Given the distance from the home port, what sort of new pressures does that put on you?

Time at sea, it meant to say that instead of doing ten days or a fortnight on patrol you were doing five weeks, maybe six which is a long time.

29:00 It also meant that in order to do that time at sea you had to carry an excessive amount of stores, provisions. When you went to sea your messes, the gangways were all cluttered up with boxes of foodstuff. You’d run out of bread after about a week at sea. What else? You run out of fresh vegetables after about a fortnight with no potatoes

29:30 so you’re living off tinned stuff and started to use dehydrated stuff in the navy at about that time. And of course there’s the problem of personal hygiene. You’re very restricted on water in fact we used to have to use the distillate from the air conditioning system for washing purposes.

30:00 Drinking water was only allowed for drinking or for cooking.

What about disciplinary problems?

None that I ever came across. You get people that get a little bit upset now and again, it happens in the best of circumstances but nothing serious at all.

Anything on a slightly less serious level, the relationship between the crew members better or worse with such long times at sea?

30:30 I can’t say they were any better or any worse. The difference was of course that in Storm the ship’s company were mainly hostilities only people. I would think that in Upholder we only had one crew member out of thirty one who was a hostilities only man and in Storm we would have had over fifty per cent and of course

31:00 that creates a difference in attitudes and what have you but not a serious difference.

What plan or training was there in that sort of patrol if you were hit or damaged and couldn’t make it back to Ceylon?

There, if it ever happened, you’d be making a signal and

31:30 you’d get a, probably aircraft escort and a destroyer or similar vessel would be sent out to pick you up and take you in tow. Which is what happened in Shakespeare’s case.

Any instructions given to you on what to do if you were taken prisoner?

Not instructions. There were certainly, we were given on one occasion handkerchiefs that had a map of Burma on them

32:00 so it gave you some idea if you were stranded on shore you could perhaps find your way to friendly territory but I can’t remember anything else.

You came across a Japanese soldier?

Yes, we picked him up out of the water after we had sunk a small convoy.

Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yes. As I said a little earlier most of our operations were

32:30 using the gun and against small coastal convoys and on this particular and on various occasions we sank shipping or vessels that carried Japanese infantry people. Generally speaking none of them would come near the submarine, they just stayed on in the water and we wouldn’t stop to pick them up

33:00 anyway but on this particular occasion this Japanese corporal actually swam to the submarine so we did pick him up along with others and took him prisoner and took back him to Trincomalee when we went. So we had him on board for about a fortnight, maybe three weeks.

What did he do while he was on board?

All the scrubbing out. Literally I think.

33:30 How did you communicate with him?

By sign language, he didn’t speak English and we had nobody on board that spoke Japanese so it was a question of sign language. We had one, two, three of our petty officers delegated to keep guard over him all the time we were at sea with him

34:00 and if he wanted to go to the toilet etc. it had to be by sign language and he was escorted everywhere he went. If we wanted him to do something exactly the same happened. So really and truly he did all the little jobs around the ship that our own crew would prefer not to do.

How did he fit with your preconceived image

34:30 of a Japanese soldier?

Quite different. Certainly there was no question of him being aggressive or anything like that. I think he was more frightened of us than we were of him.

One great rumour at the time was that the Japanese just didn’t give themselves up, didn’t let themselves be taken.

Well, that was our experience prior to him. They would just swim away and drown. They wouldn’t be picked up.

35:00 What did you do with him when you arrived back at Trincomalee?

Handed him over at the depot ship and they took him away for interrogation or whatever they do with them.

You’ve mentioned a couple of gun battles, is there any other events or particular sinkings that you could give us a little bit of information on while you were in Storm?

No, they were all much of a muchness.

35:30 We did land an agent in Subal which is on the northern tip of Sumatra and we were ambushed there while we were trying to pick him up. The Japanese had obviously captured him and gotten some information about his picking up point and time and they were ready for the submarine when it went into the bay but we got away with that.

36:00 They had a fairly heavy gun up on the headland which was firing at us but we fired back and put it out of action, then got out of it as quickly as we could. That was the only landing mission we ever carried out in Storm.

How does a submarine land someone?

With a folding canoe. We keep

36:30 the canoe down below, you can fold it up so it will go through the torpedo loading hatch. When you’re ready, it has to be fairly calm water, take it up through on to the upper deck, put it together and set them off from there.

What did you know about this person you were landing?

Nothing. He was a native and we were carrying a major and a corporal from

37:00 special services who were actually with him and they manned the fold boat and took him ashore and they manned the fold boat to bring him back and they almost got caught by the Japanese. We had to wait for them to get back to the submarine.

How did you feel about that sort of SSO [Special Security Office] work?

No submariner likes that sort of in shore work at all because usually you’re doing it in water which is

37:30 not necessarily too shallow to dive but not comfortable.

Was that a particularly panicky situation when the gun fired on you, what happened in the submarine then?

Not panicky at all just a bit tense, a tense situation but we were not in any particular danger.

At any time during your submariner career did you come across

38:00 enemy submarines?

Yes. Sank three in Upholder.

What was the difference there as opposed to coming across a ship?

Well a submarine was a prize target during the war. From the CO’s point of view, the sinking of a submarine was a DSO, nothing less. I think I’m right in saying that British submarines sank something like

38:30 eighty enemy submarines during the war and now of course it’s a prime target for submarine work, anti-submarine exercises. Does that answer your question?

Was it more difficult? Was that why it was a prize?

Because they’re so dangerous to our own shipping. The battle of the Atlantic nearly killed Britain.

39:00 Was the procedure the same for sizing up a submarine? Sneaking up on it or how did you work that out?

Well very often you would just hear a submarine over your ASDIC system or maybe a submarine would be silly enough to surface during daylight and you’d find it sitting there. In the case of Storm we actually sighted a Japanese submarine on the surface returning to Penang and fired and missed because it was too far away.

39:30 Getting fired at by torpedoes?

I don’t remember ever being fired at but then I wouldn’t know anyway.

You obviously weren’t hit because that would be the one you’d know.

Well if anyone had been close enough to see the tracks he wouldn’t be here to tell you the tale.

How many submarines did you sink in Upholder?

Three.

And that was a DSO

40:00 for the commander?

Yes.

Alright we have to stop there. We’re running out of time so if it’s all right with you we’ll change the tape and wrap it up. We got a few general questions we want to ask.

Tape 10

00:43 You were in Ceylon when the victory in Europe was declared, is that correct, you might have been in Australia?

Victory in Europe, that would be 8th May

01:00 1945, no, I was in England.

In England, great, can you tell us events there?

Well the submarine flotilla in which Storm was involved was transferred from Trincomalee to Fremantle in September 1944 and we went on patrol from Trincomalee and when we finished our patrol we went on

01:30 to Fremantle and joined back up with the squadron there and we did two patrols from Fremantle up through into the Celebes and Flores Sea area and at the end of January we had done so many miles on our main engines that they decided it was time for us to be sent back to the UK

02:00 for a long refit.

I’ll just ask a couple of questions about Fremantle then if that was beforehand, what were your impressions of Western Australia?

I thought we’d arrived in heaven. There was rationing in Fremantle but we never saw any of it. The first time we arrived in Fremantle we were tied up alongside the depot ship, we came up on to the well deck of the depot ship and there was a pallet full of

02:30 churns of milk which we hadn’t seen for years let along months or weeks. The food was excellent, the people of Fremantle looked after us. About three or four days before we arrived at Fremantle we received a signal asking us for the names of the first leave party because we were going to get ten days leave each when we got there, we were going in two different parties

03:00 and when we arrived in Fremantle we found that Western Australian families had all volunteered to take one in and that’s how I spent my leave periods in Western Australia. What else about it? There was an American squadron, submarines in at the same time. We all came under

03:30 the American admiral whose name was Fyfe and funnily enough before the Americans came into the war he had done one patrol with the Upholder in the Mediterranean so I’d already met him. I can’t think of anything else connected with submarine life there other than of course it was a long way to our patrol areas

04:00 from there and we used to call in at Exmouth Gulf on the way out to patrol and top up our fuel and call in to Exmouth Gulf on the way back to top up again with fuel so that we could spend an adequate time in the patrol area. We were diverted into Onslow on one occasion when they’d had a cyclone and lost all their power and communications

04:30 and we were told to go in alongside. There was a rickety wharf there to my memory and did whatever we could to help which wasn’t much and we did on one occasion call in to Darwin on the way back from patrol. I didn’t see anything of Darwin because it started raining a day before we got there and finished about a day after we left. That was Fremantle apart from the people. The West Australians

05:00 were magnificent, they really were.

What was the family who took you in, do you remember much about them?

Yes, I do. I’ve met them since the war, since I’ve been out this side of the world to live. Unfortunately they’re both dead now. The husband owned a bakery business in Shenton Park in Perth

05:30 and his wife was English originally. They had two daughters and a son. The son was in the Australian Army and when we arrived had recently been sent out to New Guinea so I sort of took over where the son left off. I had his room and all the conveniences of his place. They taught me

06:00 to drive their car. They arranged with the police that I got a driving license. I did a driving test but I don’t know how I did in the test itself but I got a licence. Still have it as a matter of fact. In fact we had a whale of a time whilst we were ashore in Fremantle. We used to get ten days leave in Fremantle every time we came in from patrol. Our normal patrol would take anything from five to seven weeks.

06:30 I think the longest we ever did at sea in Storm would be thirty eight days.

I remember you saying when you were a fifteen year old and joined the navy you wanted to go and see the world and the West Indies, had this sort of come true did you feel when you were in Fremantle?

I’d seen about half the world. I’d seen a lot of the Mediterranean. I’d seen Ceylon. In Maidstone on our way to Ceylon we called in at

07:00 Mombassa so I’d seen a little bit of East Africa and I’ve seen a lot of Australia, not necessarily in the service but since the service. I’ve been to Norway. I’ve never been anywhere else in Europe in the service, I’ve been there since on holiday and I certainly never got to the Americas. So I didn’t see as much of the world as I would have liked.

Despite the

07:30 good conditions in Fremantle were you sick and tired of the war? How were you feeling?

I wasn’t sick and tired of the war, I was sick and tired of being away from home. I’d already been away eighteen months in the Mediterranean in ’41, ’42. I’d already by the time we got to Fremantle been away another twenty one months and that’s a long time out of six years so it was quite a relief to be

08:00 told we were going home.

How regular was mail?

What a good question. We never mentioned that in Malta did we? My wife sent me a Christmas present for Christmas 1940 and I received it in July 1941. Our letters, correspondence would take anything from

08:30 three months upwards to get to Malta and eventually the mail situation got so bad that we were given little green labels to send to our relatives and wives that they could put on their envelopes to speed up the delivery service. Mail at that time was then being delivered to Malta via South Africa.

09:00 Mail in Australia wasn’t too bad. Probably take about a fortnight but we did get mail in Australia. That was one problem, what was the worst thing about being a submariner in the navy during the war?

09:30 Not quite knowing where you were going to be next week. I mean that in harbour time, at sea you knew jolly well where you were going to be next week. I suppose that was the worst. My worst period was funnily enough whilst I was in the depot ship when I wanted to be in a submarine and couldn’t be in a submarine and I hated

10:00 the big ship life in the depot ship.

What do you mean it was your worst period, what were you doing at the time?

Virtually nothing. Bored stiff. Everybody else was going to sea and sinking ships and doing this and doing that and I was there whiling away the hours.

How much of a factor is boredom

10:30 in service life and wartime service life?

A little. It comes forward a little but not to a very big extent. You see if you’re working in a submarine working watches of two hours on and four hours off there is no time at which you’ve got three hours in which to sleep or rest so you don’t have the time to sit around. Whilst

11:00 you are off watch you’ve still got the normal duties of a boat to carry out so you don’t really get a great deal of time off.

I asked you what the worst thing was, what’s the best thing that you can remember of being a submariner during the war?

11:30 I suppose there would be two answers to that. One is my year in Scotland training and my two or three months based in Fremantle which was a very pleasant place to spend leave in.

During your time

12:00 in your very active service can you point to one particular example where you think you witnessed bravery during the war?

No. The most likely place for that would have been in Malta

12:30 but I don’t really remember any, what I would classify as heroic events there. No I can’t, sorry.

Anything, you mentioned one seaman which may answer this question, cowardice, did you think you saw that?

No, I’ve not seen cowardice.

13:00 I’ve seen what I would classify as a temporary mental collapse, but that’s all.

Getting back then to England, can you tell us about VE day, what happened?

We arrived back in England in April and I was on leave when VE

13:30 day was declared. I went back off leave very shortly after that. I was ear marked for training duties but before I got to the training duties the German submarine fleet had given up the fight and I was sent to Norway to pick up a German submarine there and took over a

14:00 scratch crew and took that German submarine back to Londonderry or Lishally which is quite close to Londonderry. That would be in May and I was in U2529 until August and I was

14:30 back in Dolphin for VJ [Victory over Japan] day as we called it, VP [Victory in the Pacific] day here but VJ day there. I was back in Dolphin there and then I went on to the instruction duties I was supposed to have done beforehand.

How did the German sub differ, what was impressive about it?

It was brand new. If the Germans had had that type of submarine for the Atlantic war the war would have lasted at least another couple of years, I think.

What was impressive about it?

15:00 Well the submarine I served in was at least four years ahead of anything we had in the RN. It had a high underwater speed. It was very quiet. In fact it was quite impressive all round.

Comfort?

Comfort, excellent.

15:30 Any Germany idiosyncrasies that you thought were strange or interesting? No, I don’t think so. We didn’t take many of the Germans back with us. We took one or two of the specialists back, the engineer etc. The rest of them we sort of lived alongside in a shore establishment. We were not supposed to but we used to mingle

16:00 at night time and they were all a very social sort of a group. It wasn’t like two enemies being together. We were all submariners and that’s all that really mattered. That’s still the same now in the international submarine association.

What was the atmosphere in England like then, at the end of the war?

Relief. But of course we still had rationing in England

16:30 at the end of the war. We didn’t really start getting out of rationing until after the Suez Crisis. Petrol was still rationed at Suez time. Everybody had been going short of things. The housing construction to replace the bombed stuff didn’t really start ‘til about the end of 1946

17:00 and I suppose England didn’t really start coming back together until 1950.

When you look back at your service during the war as you have been today and thinking about it, what are the strongest images that remain in your mind?

Camaraderie is one.

17:30 Apart from my time in Ramillies I can’t ever remember being unhappy in the service. That doesn’t mean to say that I haven’t been upset at any time but I haven’t been really unhappy and depressed in the service. I’ve been very fortunate of course that I got promoted at a very early age. So for many years of my service time have been in a position where nobody

18:00 could tell me my job. I think generally speaking I enjoyed by service life.

The camaraderie of a submariner, how does that differ from other bonds?

You get to know people much more closely than you do in a big ship or in civilian life.

18:30 I’ve worked in a big company here in Australia but apart from the half dozen people or so that I really dealt with every day I didn’t really know anybody. It’s exactly the same in a big ship. In fact, in an aircraft carrier there are people in that carrier might be there three years, you never meet them. So there can’t be any bonds built up. Naturally

19:00 if a fight starts ashore and you’re wearing the right cap ribbon you know which side you’re on.

One issue that I haven’t asked about but one that comes up in relation to the modern navy now and certainly has in other conversations with naval recruits is homosexuality. Was that something you came across during your naval career?

Yes, I certainly came across it but not very often. Most of my naval career of course it was

19:30 a criminal offence and so if it ever occurred, it occurred very much underground and certainly wasn’t talked about very much.

Could it have occurred on a sub?

I wouldn’t like to say it couldn’t have done but I don’t know of any instance where it did.

Again, now

20:00 we’ll just have to wrap up because we’re very near the end so just a couple of general questions. How did the war experience change you as a person?

Made me much more confident because I came out of the war a fairly senior naval rating with a lot of experience behind me that a lot of other people hadn’t got.

20:30 That builds confidence in itself. I think I finished up to be a much more mature person than I had been before the war, very much more mature. When the war finished I would have been twenty five, I think I’d learnt a lot about life

21:00 and learned a lot about people. I’d learnt toleration. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anybody if they could have the sort of life I had.

The Second World War was supposed to bring peace for all time as all wars are but it hasn’t,

21:30 how do you feel about war today?

I think it’s technically unnecessary. I think your problem is not war but the people that cause it and the reasons why they cause it. I think there’s not sufficient tolerance in people generally speaking.

22:00 I think that very few people and certainly very few nations are satisfied with what they’ve got, they always want a little bit more, a little bit extra that somebody else has got and a very good example of that is the Falklands. Other than that I think that

22:30 there’s no reason why all of us can’t live happily together if we consider each other’s culture.

Was the war that we talked about today, the Second World War, worth it?

Yes, in the long run. I hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t won it. I hate to think what

23:00 would have happened if the Russians hadn’t come into it and I hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t engaged the Russians in the Cold War afterwards. There still are some maniacs in the world. Why on earth they can’t just live in peace, I don’t know. It’s a power syndrome.

What is the legacy of that war for you? Have you had any

23:30 problems or trauma associated with it?

No. The whole of my navy life I look on as being a very happy period really even though a war was on for six years of it.

Did you ever dream about the war?

No. I don’t even think about it very much.

The next question then is,

24:00 have you talked about it and who to?

Not so much about the war. I talk about service life when I meet other submariners and there are plenty of them around Sydney but the submariners who knew the sort of submarine service that I knew are very few and far between these days.

24:30 With respect, I don’t think the Australian submariners really know what it’s all about from that point of view. That is not to say they wouldn’t learn very quickly. I go to meetings of the Australian Submarine Association which is made up these days very largely of Australian people and I find that we’re talking on a quite different wavelength

25:00 altogether. I understand some of the things they’re talking about but not others. I understand some of the attitudes but not others because life and discipline in the services whether it’s Australian or British has changed very considerably in the last few years.

You haven’t talked much about the war in your own life, why have you decided to share your experiences with the archive today?

25:30 Only because you asked me. I haven’t really thought about it a lot. My wife and my daughter in law have been on at me for ages now to put something down in writing for the benefit of my grandson. It just so happened that about three years ago

26:00 the naval historical society here in Sydney asked if I would talk to them for an hour on my experiences in submarines so it seemed to me to be a very good opportunity to combine the two things which is how you’ve come to get that pamphlet you’ve got which was published by them afterwards. That’s about it.

Why is it important for your grandchildren or

26:30 future generations through this to hear about these stories?

I don’t see that it is but I’m not the only member of the family unfortunately.

Alright well on that note we will wind up. Is there anything you’d like to add to your contribution today?

I can’t think of anything. You’ve covered everything fairly thoroughly, as thoroughly as you can expect and at this distance in time

27:00 it’s very difficult to go back to detail. I can remember dates etc., I can remember periods. I can remember certain boats and certain people. I’m sure there’s quite a lot of things that I can’t remember at all because to me they’d be everyday things.

Indeed they are but I’m sure they’ll be very interesting to people watching this in the future and thank you for sharing them with us.

It’s a pleasure.

And thank you for letting us keep you so late.

That’s alright.

INTERVIEW ENDS