Australians at War Film Archive Trevor Langford - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 17th June 2003 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/511 Tape 1 00:32 Where were you born? Hobart, Tas. Where did you spend your early childhood? The first part of it in Tasmania, then we moved over to Victoria and I done my schooling in Melbourne. Where did you do school? Where did you go to school? Rathdowne Street State School in Carlton. That’s still there, isn’t it? Oh I believe so. 01:00 Opposite the Exhibition Gardens. And how was school? Did you like school as a kid? Not until the last two years of it. I had a very good teacher in the last two years and I really enjoyed the last bit. Were you doing any particular subjects in the last bit that you enjoyed? I was rather fond of chemistry, but it was very basic sort of chemistry but I sort of got out of that a bit. 01:30 And what were your interests as a kid? Ooh, just general kid stuff I think, nothing in particular. Did you follow a footy team? Only at school level. Did you play any sport yourself? No, not really. How about the sea? Did you have a love for the sea as a kid? Well I developed it because I, it was about 1938 02:00 they had a very severe polio epidemic in Victoria here and it was, they didn’t call it polio then, they called it infantile paralysis. They closed the schools and they, my mother sent me across to Tasmania to my grandparents and I went with me grandfather. He was running a vessel, that one up there, the 02:30 May Queen, and I was with him for six months. I wasn’t big enough to do much work but I just made the tea and done a bit of cleaning up and stuff like that. I didn’t get paid for it. Whenever we were in port on a Saturday afternoon I got me picture money. But when the schools opened up, they was closed for six months, when they opened up I came back to Melbourne and when back to school again and 03:00 I was only about eleven then. But when I was fourteen, I turned fourteen at the end of 1940, and I went back to sea then. I went back to Hobart and went in the ketches. Did you want to leave school at fourteen or would you have liked to have stayed on for a bit? Well I did pass a scholarship examination to University High School, but I didn’t want to go, I wanted to go to sea 03:30 cause it was a family thing. My grandfather was a sea captain and me father and it was all the family. Did you always think then that you would end up at sea one day? Yes I thought so, cause even when I was very small, me father took me away and at Christmas holidays and that we went on the boat, went for a trip somewhere sort of thing. That was the 04:00 way it was, sort of thing, you know. Because it was the Depression and you couldn’t afford to take holidays overseas and all that type of thing. So at age fourteen off to Hobart on the ketches then? Yeah. What were you doing there? What sort of work was it? There was timber, always timber. We used to go into places where there was no roads and 04:30 there was a sawmill. They’d take a sawmill in there, the only way in was by water. Some of the stuff they could get in with the draught horses they had. We’d go up little creeks and that, up the Huon River and round the South coast of Tassie, you’d go in there, and we’d take a lot of their machinery in and they’d set up their mill and we’d take their tucker in, 05:00 all their stores and stuff like that, and we’d bring their timber out. The millers had put a little bit of a jetty on a creek somewhere, places like Stringer’s Creek, Seaburn’s Mill or Police Point, Kermandie Creek, they were all little creeks around the Huon River and we’d go in. They were shallow water vessels and we’d go in and we’d take their tucker in and bring their timber out and we’d bring it back to Hobart. 05:30 The trips would take oh anything round three or four days. We’d do all our own loading, and everything like that and unloading and all that and it was, as I say it was about three or four days. It used to work out, we’d do possibly, usually three trips a fortnight and that way, in the summer it was quicker, we could do two trips a week. 06:00 For that we got about three pound a trip. Was that good money or…? It would have been for a kid of fourteen. Yeah, it those days it would have been great. Yeah. You say they were shallow water vessels, what was the draught on those vessels, because those creeks aren’t that big? Oh, about six or seven inches when they was loaded. Wow. But they had a centre board, 06:30 there was no keel, more or less, there was only the centre board, but you used to load them down to the gunnels. So what would the draught be then when they were loaded up? Oh a couple of feet. It’s still pretty shallow isn’t it? Yeah, because you had as much timber on the deck as well as what was in the hatch. And what was the width across the beams? Oh it varies, ten, twelve foot. So you could get up really small creeks couldn’t you? 07:00 You could get up pretty small creeks? Yeah, yeah, well the bigger ships couldn’t up there cause a lot of them were silted up. Places like the Kermandie Creek, she was very shallow and we had to go a long way up there to. Did you enjoy the work on the ketches? Yes I did. It was very hard work for a kid, I mean, it was solid. You worked from daylight till dark. In the summertime you’d go in and load up 07:30 and you’d start at daylight and you’d work until dark, as I said, and if there was any daylight left you’d go down the river a bit and get closer to home. Well that meant you might get back to Hobart in half a day and you’d empty, you’d unload then and next morning you’d take off again and go back. And were you sleeping on the ship in Hobart as well? If you were sailing early in the morning you would, but normally you’d go home. 08:00 I used to stay at my father’s place. And the war’s on at this time wasn’t it? We’re talking 1940–41? Yeah. Are you getting much news about what’s happening in the war? Not really cause only being a kid you didn’t take that much interest in it. Only more or less, the only way you’d realise there was a war on was because the uniforms getting around the place. Didn’t have any temptation to run 08:30 away and join the navy? I wasn’t old enough and I wasn’t big enough. Right. Was there a height requirement to join the navy? Was there a height requirement or did you think you couldn’t pretend to be eighteen? Oh there was, I think it was sixteen and a half. My brother was in the navy because he was seven years older than me. I think I would have liked to have gone in with him, sort of thing, but as I said I was too young and I looked too young, sort of thing. 09:00 A fresh faced lad? Yes. Cause I always had bad eyes too, but it didn’t seem to affect me at sea. Well you don’t need to see that far, do you really? Well you had to look at a compass of a night, especially in the bigger ships, you stood on watch at the wheel looking at a compass and that was the only light. You’d be looking down like that for two hours at a time and it would play up with your eyes a bit, 09:30 but I think the salt air and the clear air seemed to make a big difference. Good. So how long were you on the ketches for, did you say, about? Well I was, the first one I was in, well as I said, I was in the May Queen with me grandfather for six months but that was when I was a kid, but when I went to sea when I was fourteen I was in the Enterprise and my uncle 10:00 was the skipper and I went with him. And I was about twelve months with him and he, he swapped over, he swapped over a smaller vessel and the Taynna, T A Y N N A, she was a much smaller thing.