Chapter Two

Cornwall in the Thirties

After Robert and Catherine returned from their honeymoon Robert went back to work as an articled clerk in Reginald Rogers. Reginald Rogers had been established by a member of the Rogers’ family in the middle of the eighteenth century and was one of those firms of country solicitors, well known locally and of good repute further afield, which cover rural England with a network of sound legal advice. Robert had almost certainly started his articles, the process by which a solicitor gains practical experience before completing his professional qualifications, soon after coming down from Oxford. The process was one by which the articled clerk, or frequently his parents if they were putting up the money as was the case here, signed an agreement with an established firm and paid a premium, a small capital sum, to be instructed as a solicitor, so that he was ultimately prepared to sit the Law Society’s examination. For a country solicitor, part of that time was normally spent with a London firm, where a broader range of work would be met with. Constance Hichens had signed a contract with Percival Rogers which placed Robert under his tutelage for a period of three years, ending in 1933.

As Robert earned no income for that period he remained dependent upon his mother for an allowance on which to keep himself and Catherine. Catherine had a small income of her own. The young couple, rather surprisingly, seemed not able to afford even the most modest establishment in Cornwall and lived alternately at Bodrennick and Enys. This was not a happy period in my mother’s memory. She did not like her mother-in-law very much. Constance became bedridden shortly after her husband’s death, a mode of behaviour hardly known today but then common enough amongst late middle-aged and overweight women with servants to tend them, and this almost certainly contributed to her own early demise in 1933. Life at Bodrennick was made no easier by Robert’s sister, Loveday, her husband, and their son Robin coming to stay on long leave from Burma, before moving back to Guernsey for Len’s retirement. Enys would have been a good deal less crowded but was not a terribly welcoming house at that time. My maternal grandfather was an austere man, tight-fisted due to his lengthy apprenticeship in straightened circumstances as a clergyman before he inherited. My grandmother was a good deal better company and certainly more open handed, and she and Robert liked each other, but she was permanently at loggerheads with her husband, generally about spending decisions. Catherine’s older sister, Jane, had by then been allowed to escape and have her own establishment. However, young Betty still lived at Enys and no doubt took some pleasure in being a mischievous element in a household where a man she had once coveted was now married to her older sister.

Nevertheless, they got by somehow. The Lancia gave them a means of escape. Finally, the welcome moment came when Robert needed to spend a year with Reginald Rogers’ correspondent firm of London solicitors, which I deduce from references in his wartime diary was called Mackrell’s. It still has offices in Bedford Square. They rented a small house at Bourne End on the Thames, where Robert could renew his passion for rowing, and they could live in the decent privacy that man and wife naturally desire. Robert competed at Henley Regatta in double sculls, being able to train regularly at Bourne End, and worked at learning the law.

Then everything changed dramatically. Constance died in June 1933, leaving Robert Bodrennick and his half of his father’s capital, which provided what must have seemed a very welcome private income. He was master of his own financial affairs at last. At about the same time he completed his articles, starting paid employment at Reginald Rogers, and becoming the junior partner on 1 January 1934, so that their economic fortunes were transformed. They returned to live at Bodrennick and settled down to five years of very happy married life, professional consolidation and sporting achievement.

Bodrennick is a stone-built, two-storey house which stands little more than twenty feet above the level of high spring tide on the Penryn Creek, with the village of Flushing to the east and behind it and to the west the creek running up to Penryn, muddy and shallow at low tide, but capable of great beauty, particularly on a calm summer evening at high springs. Its garden is not extensive or sheltered and therefore grows little, but the house has its own beach and mooring and is as close to offering life on the water as can be arranged without moving to a houseboat. It was big enough for Robert and Catherine to employ a cook and a housemaid and, when I came along, a nanny, with a gardener coming in daily from the village. The other important member of the family was Komarakul, a large Siamese cat, named after the Siamese cox of the Magdalen Eight. Although only twenty minutes away from his office by car, driving round the Penryn Creek and into Falmouth, Robert preferred in half passable weather to row across to Falmouth every morning where he could tie up his ten foot wooden praam to the steps below his office. Marjorie Lang, then Marjorie Yeo, who worked for Robert and Catherine as their maid from 1934 until 1937 when she married, had previously been a housemaid at Enys. She remembers Robert complaining that his good shoes didn’t last very long because they tended to get wet in the boat on his way to work and the salt destroyed them faster than normal wear and tear.

When he inherited Bodrennick, Robert had brought down a sculling boat, designed for the Thames. One would have supposed that it was out of place or even dangerous on the Penryn Creek, by no means habitually calm. Nevertheless, at least for some years, he used to carry it down the steps to our beach and row on still evenings when the tide was up. Marjorie would be summoned to help him put it into the water and get it out again. However, gradually he moved away from rowing to other sporting pursuits. Perhaps the most dominant was dinghy sailing. No longer satisfied with the lug-sailed Arethusa, he started to race in International Fourteen dinghies, then a major dinghy class in competitive sailing. Robert had had an International Fourteen called Venture in Guernsey which he brought to Cornwall and in 1936 he commissioned a friend to build him a new boat which he named Venture II. He used to sail most commonly with a cousin, Jane Cree, resident in St Mawes and we have a fine press photograph of them competing in the Fowey Regatta. He competed in the Prince of Wales’s Cup, a very well known event for International Fourteen dinghies, on the Clyde in 1936, Lowestoft in 1937 and at Falmouth in 1938. I still have the replica trophy for the 1936 race in which he was placed fifth. In 1938 he was beaten in his home waters by Peter Scott who, with considerable imagination, adapted the concept of the trapeze which allows the crew to stand up and hang outwards on the windward side of the dinghy when beating, stiffening the boat and so permitting it to point higher. The Committee disallowed the trapeze the day after the race, but it brought Scott victory on that occasion. It is clear that Robert was in the top flight of International Fourteen dinghy sailors and Scott in his autobiography, The Eye of the Wind, recalls the number of times that they competed against each other ‘in the piping days of peace’.

More occasionally, Robert went ocean racing or cruising. He competed in several ocean races, three times in the Fastnet race. In June 1939, on the eve of war, he crewed in the Channel Race. He joined the Royal Ocean Racing Club. He probably had more fun and satisfaction out of cruising where he was the captain. In 1936, he and John Burnett, an old Marlborough friend, together with Frank Barmby, a member of the 1930 Magdalen crew, chartered a boat called Thyra and cruised to the Isles of Scilly. The same crew had sailed to France in 1934 and there are some good photographs of another boat with the three young men cruising off the west coast of Scotland some time in the late 1930s. It is clear that he had quite extensive experience of sailing offshore.

He had an equal passion for fast cars. This is not uncommon in young men and the uncluttered roads of the 1930s made it far more fun than it ever could be today. With his new-found economic freedom, he bought a 1.4 litre Aston Martin touring car in which, in 1935, he took Catherine, Bob and Marjorie on a tour of the Continent. They drove to Austria, staying in both Innsbruck and Vienna before driving over the Brenner Pass, still dangerous with snow, into Italy to visit Venice and then back into Switzerland by the equally snow-choked Stelvio. Marjorie remembers day after day of fast driving but with great confidence in her employer’s skill. At some point, there was a Riley which he took hill-climbing, competing at Beggar’s Roost in Somerset and Blue Hills in Cornwall. There was a Norton 500 cc motorbike. Robert had had a smaller machine in Guernsey when still a schoolboy. According to Marjorie, he once persuaded Catherine to don breeches and ride pillion behind him. As we never heard her speak of this during our childhood, my brother and I concluded that she must have been so frightened by the experience that she never wanted to think about it again.

However, the great love of his motoring life was a two litre Aston Martin that he bought secondhand in 1936. It was one of a batch of six built for the Ulster TT (Tourist Trophy) race and then entered as a works car by Aston Martin in the Le Mans twenty-four hour race of 1936, cancelled due to the French general strike of that year. This was an altogether different creature from anything he had owned before. It was a car of great distinction and beauty and had the power to compete in serious racing and he took up the challenge. With Aston’s help, he made a private entry to the Le Mans race of 1937 and, quite extraordinarily, won one of the major trophies, the Rudge Whitworth Cup. The Rudge Cup is a biennial race, which means that a car has to compete the year before to qualify for a win in the second year. The winner is the car with the maximum number of miles driven in twenty-four hours on the aggregate of the two years, with a handicap allowance based on engine size. As the 1936 race had not been run, the authorities decided that all those cars which had been entered for it would qualify for the Rudge Cup in 1937. Thus Robert inherited his Aston’s 1936 qualification and, together with a co-driver who was employed by Aston, Mort Morris Goodall, he found himself competing in 1937 with an ever-decreasing field as cars fell out amongst those qualified for the Rudge Cup. In the end he was competing only with an MG. When that also fell out, it only remained for Robert and Mort to finish the race to win the Rudge Cup. In the early afternoon of a race which ends at four p.m., a valve dropped, damaging one of the Aston’s pistons and Robert naturally stopped. Mort, when Robert failed to appear, ran round the track to find him and plead with him to finish the race, so the Aston limped into the pits, waited until shortly before four o’clock, and then set off on a final lap so that it crossed the line as soon after four o’clock as possible, making the most terrible noises. It was a very unusual way of winning the Rudge Cup but win it he did and my brother still has it. It is an object of extraordinary ugliness in the art deco style, made of some form of green stone, with bronze plaques all round it depicting the various dangerous corners of the Le Mans track. I was brought up to regard it as second only in importance to the Holy Grail.

Robert raced again at Le Mans in 1938. They drove out in convoy, Catherine at the wheel of the family’s Rover and Robert’s Cornish mechanic, Bill Barbary, riding the Norton, with the future managing clerk of Reginald Rogers, Brian Stephens, on the pillion. Regrettably, at four o’clock in the morning the Aston lost all valve clearance on an exhaust rocker. Robert and Barbary worked feverishly to clear the obstruction. At nine o’clock in the morning the Aston had trouble with its exhaust valve which burnt out. The cylinder head was removed and the offending valve was replaced but some quick footwork was required to get the right tools into the pit, possibly in breach of regulations. Finally, after a three hour delay, the Aston’s engine started again but it was not to be for long because a timing chain had been left loose and jumped its teeth and the car never finished the race. Robert raced again in 1939 and this time the Aston performed like clockwork until midnight when valve trouble occurred again. Robert was determined to qualify the car for the subsequent year’s race so continued on three cylinders to finish twelfth. Although Robert naturally never competed again, the car was entered in the first post-war Le Mans race in 1949 under my mother’s name because it was one of the few cars qualified for the Rudge Cup.

There is little doubt that Robert loved the two litre Aston more than any other car that he ever owned. He continued to drive it until his death in 1943, reputedly utilizing 100-octane petrol, on which it ran beautifully, from the plentiful supply available for his motor gunboats. Since the day he owned it he had looked after it personally, in spite of Bill Barbary’s skilled attentions available to him at any time. To my mother’s despair, every winter the engine was taken apart and laid out on sheets in the drawing room, to be inspected, mended, oiled and replaced. Robert’s knowledge of the internal combustion engine was considerable and he had the natural mechanic’s love of taking apart and re-assembling all the moving parts of his beloved car. Shortly after the war, my mother sold the vehicle, a totally unsuitable means of transport for herself and her two small boys. I can still remember its smell, dominantly warm castor oil, when sitting snugly in the front seat with my legs warmed by the engine, faced by an array of little switches and other controls that I did not understand and probably still would not today, as the great car roared down a road somewhere in Suffolk, no doubt fired by purloined MGB fuel, my father’s comforting presence beside me. It was a car to die for.

Robert started to invest in houses and land during the Thirties. Perhaps the great crash of 1929 had reduced the attractions of investing in the stock market for that generation. He owned several houses in Falmouth and then in about 1938 bought a farm near Constantine called Treworval. Whether he bought this because he felt that war was coming and he ought to own somewhere safer than Bodrennick, just across the water from the strategic Falmouth Docks, we do not know, but it is where his family moved to at Christmas 1939. From his wartime diaries, it is clear that he greatly loved the farm. Indeed, rather surprisingly, he wondered aloud in his diary whether he would ever return to Bodrennick because of a preference for living at Treworval. I can remember the deep mud and rural squalor of that farm in 1940 as clearly as though it were yesterday, but perhaps he had plans to clear the place up before it became our permanent home.

Robert’s greatest love was for simple family life. He had two sons. My elder brother Bob was born in 1932 and I in 1936. He clearly adored both his boys and his love for his wife comes out with rather startling clarity from his diary. There is nothing like separation to make the heart grow fonder, but there can be little doubt that he and Catherine, in spite of the disparity of age and outlook, were a very happy and united couple. There are endless photographs of his children playing in the garden at Bodrennick, sitting in one fast car or another or playing at picnics on one of the many beaches to which we would frequently go in the summer months after Robert had finished work. He also liked to take us as a family to London, normally driving up in the Aston and invariably staying at Browns Hotel. My brother remembers matinees at the circus and J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan. Beach parties were the dominant memory for me. Durgan beach on the Helford with my father frustratingly sunbathing when I wished to swim comes clearly to mind, though I think that memory must date from 1940 and not from 1939 and was probably when he came back on leave from Dunkirk. Nevertheless, it typifies our family life in Cornwall in those days, a pattern which my mother faithfully continued after the war when we were growing up.

I have tried to paint as best I can, a picture of what Robert Hichens was like by the age of thirty when war broke out in September 1939. To understand what happened next, his formative years have to be outlined to see what aspects of his character had developed which enabled him to mutate so rapidly into the assured naval commanding officer, fighting successfully in the front line of Britain’s maritime defence in the Channel and the North Sea. I think the dominant characteristic was the seriousness with which he took every job that came his way. I don’t think he was obsessive about his work but it came first. When it was done, and for a country solicitor in those days with competent clerks that didn’t necessarily mean a very long day, he could free himself cheerfully to do the things he enjoyed most, sailing dinghies, driving fast cars and seeing as much of his family as he possibly could.

He believed very strongly in the importance of physical fitness. He had started a regular regime of body strengthening exercises when still a school boy. He was not a fitness fanatic but he wished to maintain his strength and endurance to deal with whatever challenges came his way. Douglas Dodds Parker’s comment that at Oxford he wanted hard exercise every day, couldn’t get it from hockey and hence turned to rowing, is evidence of this, as is his record of continued sporting activity on the river, on the sea and on the road. Was it a conscious preparation for war? Until well into the 1930s, his generation didn’t expect a second world war and he is unlikely to have had any view different from the majority. I think he just felt that it was an essential part of manhood to be capable of enduring and of putting oneself in the way of activities which tested that endurance. Dabbling with ocean racing and the challenge of the twenty-four hour race at Le Mans are good examples of where he thought his physical toughness would give him an edge. Rowing is essentially an endurance sport and he kept up his rowing right up to the war, even if it reduced ultimately to crossing from Flushing to Falmouth and back most weekdays.

He had one belief which singled him out from the generality of young men. It was that to appreciate life fully one needed to face danger from time to time. Only after regular exposure to serious risks could one comprehend how sweet life was and recognize one’s good fortune in continuing to experience it. He sets this view out in his wartime diary but my mother recalled it to mind many times when she looked back on her life with Robert. It may explain part of the attraction of the challenge of Le Mans. He must have expounded this personal philosophy on occasions, such as post operation gin sessions in the wardrooms of his flotilla, because a brother officer, who had borrowed his Norton and found it to be virtually without brakes, expostulated on returning the machine after a close shave: ‘I suppose not bothering with brakes is part of your philosophy of seeking danger.’

Nevil Shute, the novelist, in his autobiography Slide Rule, quoted his own headmaster at the Dragon School, a keen offshore sailor, as saying:

If I have learned one thing in my fifty-four years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a soundness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.

This quotation precisely describes my father’s philosophy.

Probably his father’s early death and his own early marriage and parenthood induced a stronger sense of responsibility at a younger age than most of his contemporaries. He certainly was a highly responsible person, even if his friends wondered quite how that showed itself in dangerous activities such as motor racing. His answer was to take out substantial life insurance to protect his family should the worst occur. It was perhaps that sense of responsibility which made him a particularly popular and successful young solicitor because he felt so responsible for his clients and they in turn sensed this. Later, it would come out in the care he took of his motor gunboat crews to which they also responded with fierce loyalty and affection.

He was a very careful man. That is also a solicitor’s trait and one does not know whether a habit of carefulness came from his experiences as a solicitor or whether it was just the way he naturally was. Perhaps the best example of the degree of care he took to prepare himself for challenges was his disassembly of the Aston Martin’s engine before the annual pilgrimage to race at Le Mans.

I do not think anyone would have described him as an intellectual but he thought very clearly. This was commented on by quite a number of men who knew him during the war and it can scarcely have started on his entry into the Navy. He had that capacity, which doesn’t have a great deal to do with high IQ, to worry away at a problem until he came to a clear, common-sense answer. It was in some measure a reflection of his determined character, of his carefulness and of his sense of responsibility that he wanted to be satisfied that the answer to a problem was correct, so that he thought things through from first principles before accepting that the conventional way of doing things was the correct way or the best way. This undoubtedly contributed to that aspect of his naval career that concentrated on the development of tactics and the design of motor gunboats and their armament.

Perhaps the most powerful or obvious characteristic Robert had developed by 1939, and probably had always had, was impatience. Impatience is a characteristic that is often deplored because it is said to lead to impulsive and ill-considered actions, or indeed in failure to tolerate dissent, tardiness or other minor sins which society expects one to accept with reasonably good humour. Yet the other result of impatience is that it often causes the impatient person to do something about the problem that creates this emotion in him. My father was impatient with everything that didn’t work perfectly and, rather than kicking the offending object as I would, he took it apart to work out how it could be made to do its job better. It was a characteristic which he brought to bear on everything for which he found himself responsible in the Navy. It explains a great deal of the success he had in changing the Navy’s conceptions about how the war should be fought by motor gunboats.

Where does impatience end and determination start? Determination perhaps implies a steady application of one’s skills to the resolution of a problem or the achievement of a goal. Robert certainly had that characteristic just as much as impatience. His pursuit of success in dinghy sailing and in racing his Aston Martin at Le Mans are good examples. Another was his approach to entry into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. At Oxford he joined the Officers Training Corps and gained a commission in the Territorial Army. In the summer of 1930, returning from Oxford to Cornwall, he diverted the Lancia to Bristol to call in at HMS Flying Fox, the RNVR divisional headquarters there, because he wished to join, preferring the Navy to the Army in the event of war. He was told that he would be more than welcome but that there was a requirement for an evening a week training in Bristol, and even for Robert the three hours it would take to get him there and three hours back were beyond his capacity. Most young men would have accepted this situation. Robert did not. He applied to the Admiralty, explaining his position and saying that there must be hundreds of other young men keen to be part of the Volunteer Naval Reserve but frustrated by the distance that they lived from an RNVR division. It appears that the Admiralty took what he had to say seriously and, in the end, the RNV(S)R, the Supplementary Reserve, was formed as a list of yachtsmen sufficiently knowledgeable about the sea to be considered suitable for a commission in the Navy in the event of hostilities. He had at least one period of training at sea, serving in the destroyer HMS Thanet in the late 1930s, based in Plymouth. After the declaration of war, he expected a call up telegram within a matter of hours. When after a week he had only received a holding letter saying that call up would take time he wrote back to say that if the Navy didn’t want him he could always rejoin the Territorials. The result was an order to join HMS King Alfred on 27 October 1939, two months after war was declared.

What did my mother make of these characteristics in her husband? She was sensible enough to see them for what they were and that she was unlikely to change them. If as a result there were many aspects of the life she would have preferred to live that were denied to her, she could clearly see that a man who adored his family, worked hard for their future, looked at no other woman and steadily gained the respect of his friends and neighbours as a young solicitor, was not a husband to complain about. When he said he wanted to go into the Navy if the war came, she can hardly have supposed that it was a more foolhardy course of action than remaining as a Territorial Army Officer, particularly with memories of the last war and its slaughter of the infantry. Nor could she possibly have supposed that he could be persuaded that he didn’t need to go off to war when war came when every ablebodied man of his age, and indeed a good deal older, amongst their friends and neighbours was doing the same. She probably hoped that the war would not be like the war before, wouldn’t last very long and that the Navy would be as safe a place to be as anywhere.

My father departed for his first seagoing appointment from Penryn station in December 1939 after the completion of his training at HMS King Alfred. My mother must have expected that he would do pretty well, thinking him well-suited to what he was about to face and that he had as good a chance of returning to her and the family as anyone, bar perhaps the lurking suspicion that he might seek out danger more assiduously than the average volunteer. She could hardly have foreseen how quickly she would find herself as a naval wife, leaving Cornwall, neighbours and the life they had led together behind her, and following her husband into the spotlight which the need for good news in wartime was so quickly to direct on those who shone in action and survived the experience long enough to become recognized heroes.