The entrance gateway to HMS St. Vincent in Gosport looked exactly like a smaller version of Holloway prison. I knocked on the gate and a sailor with a bo’sun’s whistle around his neck emerged and said: “Yes sir?”
Definitely the correct approach I thought, so far. “Well, I’ve come to join Number 21 Course. Can I take my car inside?” Having established that I was not an officer, his wary deference gave way to kindly co-operation. He replied: “Park your car over there, mate — by the air raid shelter. Come back and sign in.”
As I walked back from the car across the five acre parade-ground, I glanced back over my shoulder at the four great barrack blocks with their regular line of windows. They looked more like Holloway than ever, and seeing sailors running hither and thither, reminded me of the training ship Mercury, in the river Hamble. Placed centrally in front of the buildings I saw a huge mast from some 18th century battleship, complete with ratlines and crow’s nest. I assumed the catch-net all round its base was for us when we fell off. Looking aloft, I saw the clouds scudding past its shining gold truck, and the largest and whitest White Ensign blowing out proudly above all. I hoped that Number 21 Pilots Course would not be required to ‘man the yards’ or anything silly. Flying was one thing, but that sort of thing was asking for trouble.
I signed a large book in the Quartermaster’s office. The Petty Officer told me to report to the Officer of the Watch. “Hut five,” he said. “Take your gear to Block D, first deck. You’ll draw blankets at 1800 after supper. Shore leave tonight’s from 1830 to 2230.” He continued with the Southern Daily Echo.
Seeing that I was still there he said: “Carry on, son. That’s all.”
“Yes sir,” I said. I had nearly said “Aye Aye sir,” but thought that might only be for officers.
“Not ‘Sir’ at all. It’s PO. That’s what these cross-anchors mean.”
So far, so good. The PO sounded quite human too. Nothing like a parade-ground Sergeant at all.
As there was a queue outside hut number five, I took my gear up to the ‘dormitory’ in D Block. It was a high, bare room about 70 feet long. The floor was covered with highly polished lino of a uniform brown colour. It had green glazed tiles halfway up the walls and ‘hospital’ lights hanging at regular intervals from the ceiling, their dim light shining through the cigarette smoke of the 20 or so new arrivals. I selected an empty bed near the far end. The windows were half shuttered with blackout screens. The window glass was covered with thick, varnished tape like 82 Charing Cross Road, as a guard against bomb blast.
Men were either stretched out on their beds taking stock of the situation or standing around talking, smiling and laughing. I joined the nearest lot and listened. Apparently a chap called Bruce Dunfield and another called ‘Clunk’ Watson (later of 880 Squadron, CFB Summerside, Prince Edward Island) were telling the others that they had, that very morning, come off a merchant ship at Liverpool. These two Canadians had stowed away at Halifax, Nova Scotia and made their passage free. They had been caught after a few hours on board and had been put to work cleaning out oil tanks and doing other dirty jobs. But directly the British crew had seen that they were genuine volunteers — and for the Fleet Air Arm at that — they had taken them to the captain. He ‘signed them on’ as temporary crew and paid them the going rate for Able Seamen in the Merchant Service. This was slightly more than a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
When I eventually saw the Officer of the Watch in hut five, he told me that I was required for interview at the Commander’s Office at 1800 the next day. Gawd! Not another interview. The main anxiety was that I should convice them that I was not only pilot material, but fighter-pilot material. I had to make it quite clear that I would be no use whatever as an Observer. As I had heard that they tended to choose the intelligent-looking ones for that job, I would have to try to be fairly useless, not too knowledgeable or wise. A bit “Whizzo chaps — whattabout a car race round the parade-ground”. That sort of thing. The very prospect of having to cope with compasses and dividers in the freezing back of a Swordfish and unable to see where you were going, reduced me to a frightened wreck in no time. Fancy not being master of your own destiny and with only a single Lewis gun pointing the wrong way to beat off the Hun coming up your jacksie at a high rate of knots.
Kit issue was scheduled for 0830 next day, so we had another 12 hours of civilian life, after which the Commander would be addressing us. It seemed we would have about five minutes to get used to being sailors before he arrived. Pretty swift organisation so far and no haircuts either.
After blanket issue, I and John DuCane, my next door neighbour in the dormitory, got into the Morris Minor and went to see my father at Sarisbury Green. The main reason for the visit was to load up with a bit more petrol. After this we all had a couple of beers at the ‘Swan’ at Bursledon and another couple at the ‘Bugle’ at Hamble. We eventually repaired back on board our stone frigate at Gosport at 2230 — just in time.
We awoke to a frightful noise. Bells, loudspeakers, bugles, lights, whistles and a man shouting: “Wakey-wakey-wakey. Rise-and-shine. The-morning’s-fine, you’ve-had-your time. C’mon, on-socks, you-lot. Show-a-leg-show-a-leg-show-a-leg!” Then, in a voice of patient exasperation: “Cummon, son. Mother’s brought you a cuppa, darling.”
The man took a brief gasp for breath and started off again, even louder. This time he ended up with: “I-don’t-want-to-see-hanynone-’ere-by-ho-seven-double-ho. All-bunks-made-up. Tables-clear-and-boots-in-order-of-size-underbeds. . .” The rest trailed off, as he went to the dormitory next along the passage, and repeated the whole thing there.
After we had had our porridge, kippers, doorsteps-of-bread, marmalade-out-of-a-tin and a mug of bubbly NAAFI ‘bromide’ tea, it was cleared away in 30 seconds by the ‘Duty Part’ of the Watch. We ‘new boys’ watched spellbound as the Duty Part from the Course ahead of ours performed.
“D’you mean to say we’ll be doing that shortly?” said a chap called Brian Madden. “I was just about to ask for more, like O. Twist,” he said. “They whipped it away when I wasn’t looking!”
We were now looking forward to seeing ourselves dressed-up as sailors. J. B. Madden, who was called ‘Tich’, was telling us stories of life in Liverpool. He was wondering whether the Navy would have a uniform small enough to fit him. So were we. Then, with a mound of brown paper parcels, green suitcases, kitbags and black tin hatboxes, gas masks, oilskins, boots and ‘HMS’ hat ribbons, we went to the dormitory to try to put them on. In addition, we had two sets of Number 3s, spare sailors’ collars, lanyards, penknives, tooth brushes, clothes brushes, boot brushes, nailbrushes, soap and a ‘hussif’. The latter was a clothes mending kit, a ‘housewife’, which I still use to this day. All the gear, especially the towels and sheets, could be guaranteed to wear out any modern-day washing machine before showing signs of wear itself. It was top quality at a time of severe wartime rationing, and without coupons too.
We strained and heaved at the jumpers. We straightened each other’s collars as we had been shown in the store issue room and went down to the mess-deck for the Commander’s address. A Petty Officer formed us up into lines.
At 1030, all eyes were on the doorway. We could hear important footsteps. “Rodney . . . Rodney-HOW!” demanded the loudest voice I have ever heard. This order was followed by the shuffling of 232 feet for a few seconds. Then by giggles. Then by dead silence.
Chief Petty Officer Willmot — for it was he — raised his eye in supplication to God to give him strength, and marched up to the Commander and reported: “Rodney, Number 21 Course, mustered and correct, sir”.
The Commander, in brass hat and telescope, muttered something back. CPO Willmot turned round to us, fixed us with a sceptical eye and ordered: “RODney . . . STANNAT . . . HIZE!”
We did our best, but moving 232 feet apart does take a considerable time. The dim light from the Scutari-type lighting system fell upon the Commander’s face. It was weatherbeaten, grim-jawed, a chip off the Earl St. Vincent block. It would be no good asking the time of day from him. Just “Yessir, no sir, three bags full, sir”.
“You there,” said the Commander, opening his speech of welcome. “Yes, you. Near the window,” pointing down at Tich Madden who was looking out of it at a time. “Read out what it says over Hut Four.”
Tich read it out to us: “. . . something, something, something”, he mumbled, then, suddenly getting the gist, he shouted out loud and clear “. . . but be a sailor first”. He could barely keep a straight face when he turned back to resume his normal place in the room. We could not meet his eye, for to do so would ruin everything. Once he started to giggle, he lost all control.
The Commander obviously detected a certain irreverence and he swivelled a gimlet eye momentarily in Tich’s direction as if to say: “Watch it, sailor!” The inscription was, after all, the text for the Commander’s peroration for those about to die, and heaven help anyone who found it a laughing matter.
We were told that we had now joined the Royal Navy and not the Fleet Air Arm. “It doesn’t matter a fish’s tit”, shouted the Commander, “whether you can fly like Alan Cobham if you are not, first, a bloody good seaman and fit material to become a bloody good officer. I can see that some of you have a long way to go,” he added, looking in Tich’s direction. That night we asked each other: “What’s good officer material?” The matter obviously needed further study.
The interview turned out to be a great deal easier than I had expected. It was nowhere near as high-powered as the one at the Admiralty in 1939. There wasn’t a picture of an Admiral to be seen anywhere, just the odd cruiser with two or three long, thin funnels in a sepia-coloured photograph, and a few signatures underneath.
Lt/Cdr Sykes was on the Board at the interview. I had already had an interview with him when I first came to see the recruiting board at Gosport. He must have told them that I was keen, for he knew that I had taken the ‘Spec-En’ exam. I had no difficult questions and I seemed to have judged everything about right. There was no talk of Observers. If I kept my nose clean I could be flying fighters in a few months time.
That same afternoon we had our first go at the parade ground. I had been one of those detailed for the ‘First Part of Port Watch’. There were about 25 of us. We shuffled out onto the parade ground, holding our backs towards the piercing wind. Petty Officer Oliver lined us up in order of size and told us to watch him. We were told that he was a ‘Gunner’s Mate’ from Whale Island, a ‘Prussian-army’ type of Naval gunnery rating, all of whom were noted for their guardsmanlike approach. His: “’ats will be ’ung on the ’ooks provided, leavin’ no ’olidays,” still sticks in my memory.
He gave us one or two incredible demonstrations of how to march, how to stan-at-HIZE and how to HOW! He put some sort of suppressed vigour into all his movements, so much so that you could hear sinews crack and muscles twang. Yet, in the Navy, there was no sign of needless stamping or crashing around and none of the facial contortions of the Army Sergeant Major.
We tried to do likewise, but our brains and our muscles fought with each other, each pulling different ways like a short-circuiting robot. All was not lost, however. Some had already done a little time in the Navy, so we tried to follow them, sheltering in their shadow whenever possible and not daring to do anything off our own bat unless it was absolutely essential. It was a fine test of quick reactions; so essential, we thought, for fighter pilots.
The one man at St. Vincent whose personality and presence ruled out Michael-taking altogether was Chief Petty Officer Willmot. He was a unique example of the human Naval Gunnery Petty Officer. He probably did more than Cunningham’s tradition, Earl St. Vincent’s disciplinary code, Kempenfelt’s divisional system and Nelson’s example to turn us towards the Navy. “Gosh,” we thought, “if they can spare men like him for training, what must they be like in actual ships?” In addition to Willmot and Oliver, there was Chief Yeoman Saxby, our Signals Instructor, and Gunner’s Mate Crowley whose favourite expression was “For Christ’s sake if not mine”.
Next day at ‘stand easy’ in the canteen, as if to set us a standard of heroism to which we should now aspire, we read in the papers that the Italian Fleet had been attacked at night in Taranto harbour by Swordfish aircraft flying from ‘one of our aircraft-carriers in the Mediterranean’.
We thought flying at night was clever stuff in itself, but flying at night from carriers was beyond anything that we had ever imagined. I spoke to John DuCane about it. (His brother, Peter, had ‘done’ Dartmouth, retired in 1931 as a Commander, and was now Managing Director of Vospers in Portsmouth.) “John,” I said, “Surely the Navy won’t expect us to do that sort of thing straight off, will it?”
“No one’s going to ask us to do the impossible ‘straight off’,” he replied. “They’ll give us a bit of time in the squadron first, I’d reckon.”
Next day we saw photographs taken by our aircraft of Taranto harbour. They showed two battleships sunk and a third half-submerged with oil seeping out. There was another picture of the inner harbour at Taranto, showing two destroyers wrecked, oil tanks gutted and a wrecked seaplane base. If just a few Swordfish could do this, what a marvellous job to be in. It was twice as much as we had done to the Germans at Jutland and for the loss of only Swordfish.
One night a little later, when I was ‘Duty Part’ once more and watching some cockroaches walking round the galley stove where I and they were keeping warm, we heard a bos’un’s pipe: “Duty Part o’ the Watch muster outside D Block. Rig — oilskins.”
We all rushed out into the blackness. There was a glow in the sky by Portsmouth, but that wasn’t anything new. The Germans had turned their main attention away from London and had recently struck Portsmouth, Southampton and Coventry. We wondered what was up.
The Duty PO checked his list of names to see that we were all there. He told us that we were going on ‘Damage Control’ duty at the Royal Naval Victualling Yard, Gosport, as it was on fire. It sounded fraught with interest.
“Damage Control party HOW,” said the PO quietly so as not to attract the Commander. “Right turn, quick march,” and we all shambled off with our oilskins like cold, clammy, straightjackets, hanging down to our ankles.
As we made our way down the road towards the ferry at Gosport, we were overtaken by an empty Army lorry. We thumbed a lift as it went by, and it took us to the gates of the Victualling Yard. We marched as smartly as we could down the cobbled road between the tall lines of warehouses. Many of these had been built in Pepys’s time and were ‘listed buildings’. We kept going downhill towards the glow. Coming round a corner at the bottom, we saw a brilliant bonfire. It turned out to be the rum store. Rum was pouring down the walls and windows, and, being already mixed with the right amount of water from the fire hoses, made a nice drink. So we settled down to a few grogs, our Petty Officer having gone off to find us some damage to control. We enjoyed ourselves, warmed by the friendly fire, and watching the sparks fly skywards as the grog slid smoothly down our throats.
After about six doubles and when the Gosport fire brigade had put out the fire, we wound our way back to St. Vincent, the happiest bunch of neo-sailors that had ever been on Damage Control and only just in control of ourselves, too, as we came through the gates under the suspicious eye of the Duty Chief Petty Officer.
It is, of course, impossible to make sailors in two or three months, but St. Vincent had a very good try. It certainly gave us some idea of life aboard ship and a few wrinkles on Navy customs. But there was no time to learn the black arts of mooring a battleship, fixing a position by sextant, launching a ship’s cutter or firing a gun. All we could manage was eight-words-a-minute morse, some semaphore and a few flags — although how it could be done in the back of a Swordfish we could not imagine. The Petty Officer TAG, Tubby Credland, told us that it could. Everything except playing a grand piano could be done there, he said.
The Course just senior to us was composed entirely of New Zealanders. They had not travelled across the world to be told how to behave by a lot of ‘pommies’. So they preserved their Kiwi way of life with ‘Haka’s’ in the canteen each night and some exceptionally comprehensive ‘runs ashore’ in Pompey. The early morning muster, where we all lined up in our separate courses for ‘Colours’, was always enlivened by some Kiwi sky-larking. CPO Willmot was the only man in Gosport who could get their attention for more than two minutes at a time.
One of the more memorable ‘japes’ by the Kiwis occurred at Colours on Christmas Day. The Duty Part was, as usual, required to provide the Guard, fallen-in with rifles, bayonets, gaiters, webbing, caps square on heads, and chin-stays down. Luckily, CPO Willmot was not on duty, otherwise the Kiwi’s ploy for ruining the ceremony on this day would have been rumbled.
However, when the Colours were bent-on to the halyard ready for hoisting, a pair of WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service or ‘Wrens’) blackouts (knickers) flying at the masthead on the same halyard and unobserved in the grey morning light, changed places with the White Ensign as it was hauled up. They crossed by the Crow’s Nest and made a pretty picture to anyone watching at the time. Of course the Kiwis were watching in marked contrast to everyone else.
As the last notes of the bugle squeezed out, the blackouts descended into the view of the Officer of the Watch. the Kiwis’ bayonets wavered in the cold air. What would the Officer of the Watch do? Would he, in the prescribed manner, preserve monentous calm with masterly inactivity and pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened, or what?
True to his training, he carried on as if the WRNS’ blackouts, now being reverently unhitched from the halyard, formed part of the ceremony. After the ‘Carry On’ had sounded, they were carefully folded and handed by the the rating in charge of the flags to the section leader in charge of the Kiwi guard, as if they were some priceless battle honour — which indeed they were.
This parting gesture was voted a ‘fair cracker’ and a ‘beaut’ both in its planning and execution.
There was never a chance that it would be punished. ‘Collingwood’ Term, the Kiwis’, was due to leave immediately for Elementary Flying Training School and the Commander did nothing to retard this process. Like Nelson, he turned a blind eye.
After passing the simple examinations, the 116 men on our Course also left for flying training. Most went to the United States. The remainder were shared between two Elementary Flying Training Schools for Fleet Air Arm pilots, at Birmingham and Luton. The Birmingham (Elmdon) lot, used Tiger Moths. I was sent to Luton, Number 24 EFTS, and we flew monoplanes — Miles Magisters. I hoped that flying monoplanes was a sign that I had been considered for fighters rather than Swordfish. My thoughts kept returning to that morning in the summer of the Battle of Britain when I had watched the RAF Hurricanes shoot down the Dornier over Shaftesbury Avenue. I could hardly wait to do battle with the Hun myself.
My father and Granny, however, gave me a good talking-to at about this time. Although my father was more resigned to the dangers of my chosen wartime job, my Granny was not. She told me, bless her, to: “Always fly low and slow and not take risks by going too high and too fast.” I told her that ‘it’ couldn’t happen to me. It always happened to the other chap who did silly things. My father knew only too well that it depended upon luck as well as a fair amount of skill. He and I kept our fingers crossed, but Granny prayed each night.