I was born on 2 October, 1921, in Walton, a grimy suburb just a few miles from the Liverpool docks. That’s where I fell in love with ships and grew up with my brother George and sisters Florence, Dorothy and Enid. I was the second eldest. Our mother and father, Lillian and Benjamin, were kind, hard-working people who brought us up well in difficult times, in a city hit hard by unemployment during the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
We lived in a four-roomed terrace house in a dead-end street called Stepney Grove. It looked just like Coronation Street. A railway line ran past the back of our house and everything was forever covered in soot.
My father was in the merchant marine. He worked for the famous Cunard & White Star Line, as a first-class steward on the Atlantic run to New York. He wasn’t around that much. He would come home about once every three or four weeks, stay for a few days, and then go to sea again. My mother, brother and three sisters were therefore the centre of my life. But it was my father and his work on the ships that influenced me most profoundly. It stirred me deep inside when he told me about his experiences at sea. Before he joined Cunard he had been with the Canadian Pacific Line for a time, and did a voyage to Sydney in 1931.
‘They’re building a huge bridge there,’ he told me. ‘It’s like a big coat-hanger.’
‘How can a bridge be like a coat-hanger, then?’ I was fascinated by the idea that a bridge in far off Australia could resemble something as mundane as a coat-hanger in a cupboard in Liverpool.
‘It’s the same shape as a coat-hanger, a beautiful arch stretching out from opposite sides of the harbour. We sailed right under it,’ he said. ‘It’s not finished yet, so there was a gap in the middle.’
I hung on every word. I thought he had the most exciting job in the world.
My father loved the Cunard liners, which he called ‘his’ ships. They had wonderfully evocative names like Franconia, Laconia, Aquatania and Berengaria, and carried people who lived, as he put it, ‘on the other side’. He didn’t mean the other side of the Atlantic either, rather the other side of prosperity from the one we were on.
It was impossible to grow up in Liverpool without being acutely aware of the docks and ships. Liverpool was a city of ships back then, the second largest port in Britain after London. The docks were like a magnet forever tugging at me. I just wanted to muck about down there more than anything else. My parents couldn’t afford to buy us bikes, so I either walked or caught the tram, which cost one penny return. I can still remember the yellow ticket stub. The tram would take me down to Pier Head and the Landing Stage, a huge pontoon on the water, right in front of the famous Cunard Building. The liners used to come alongside it to disembark their passengers and I’d usually be there to watch the hustle. People who had been in New York only days ago would brush past me. It was absolutely marvellous.
There were always lots of cargo ships down at the docks too, loading and unloading. The docks ran for seven miles along the Liverpool waterfront. Staggering to think of it now. Everything was big, noisy and dirty. It smelt of the sea and rope tar and burnt sugar. It was a dangerous place for a child to be, but I didn’t notice. To me it was an intoxicating kind of pandemonium, with cranes swinging huge cargo nets overhead, often bulging with bales of wool all the way from Australia. There were horse-drawn carts, lorries and tractor engines swarming all over the place and an elevated railway ran the length of the docks. Electric passenger trains rattled along it, bringing people down to the ships and the dockside factories. It was pretty rough, and risky too, but I couldn’t get enough of it. It was a fantastic place for a boy to be.
One of the best things about the docks was that my mates and I could talk to the tough men who crewed the cargo ships. There were always blokes leaning over the railings, smoking cigarettes and watching the goings on below on the wharf. We’d call out to them and they’d reply in accents from all over the world.
‘Where you from, mister?’
‘South America.’
‘That’s a long way.’
‘Very long way.’
‘What’s your cargo?’
‘Sugar.’
‘Where you taking it?’
‘Maybe Canada, maybe Japan.’
‘You got anything to eat?’
We would often try our luck asking for food because stooging around there all day made us awfully hungry. Occasionally they’d toss half a sandwich for us to fight over. Sometimes, though, those hard, haggard men would simply tell us to bugger off.
On summer nights it would be light until nearly 10 o’clock. It must have worried my mother terribly when I’d come home well after dark.
‘Where have you been?’ she’d ask.
‘Down the docks.’
‘How many times have I told you not to go there?’
Countless times, of course, but I couldn’t help it. Those ships were in my blood, like a strange virus sailing through me.
Those innocent days on the docks with my tight-knit gang of mates were wonderfully happy. When we weren’t hanging around in the shadows of ships we’d be fighting with some other gang, throwing stones and getting into harmless mischief. It was just boisterous boyhood fun. One of our favourite tricks was to annoy the local shopkeepers by throwing stones at the goods they had on display in front of their stores. The most inviting target was always stacked boxes of Woodbine cigarettes. Urging each other on, we’d lob stones from the other side of the street until the stack went sprawling over the footpath. Then we’d hide and watch as the angry shop owner came running out.
Sometimes we’d go into a biscuit shop to ask our favourite question.
‘Got any broken biscuits, mister?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well why don’t you mend ’em then?’
With that we’d run out of the shop laughing hysterically. We were the funniest people we knew.
Mum had a pretty good idea of what was going on, as mothers do, and occasionally she’d give me a stern reminder of exactly how far I could go.
‘Don’t you ever do anything that will bring a policeman to my door,’ she warned.
But those pranks were only a minor distraction. Ships were what really mattered to me. Two in particular left a lasting impression on me, and helped shape my desire to go to sea. The first was Cunard’s Laconia, my father’s last ship before he came home from the sea forever. I treasured the thought that he worked and lived aboard this beautiful passenger liner for weeks at a time. She was an elegant ship and when I think of her now it is still with strong feelings of nostalgia.
Laconia was built in Scotland, at Wallsend-on-Tyne, in 1922, the year after I was born. She was 624 feet long, displaced nearly 20,000 tons, and steamed at 17 knots. She could accommodate 2000 passengers, which was only 500 fewer than the Titanic, which had been more than twice Laconia’s tonnage. Liverpool was her home port, so she mainly worked the Liverpool to New York route, although she also made a number of voyages from Hamburg to New York.
Because she was considered a ship of great luxury, Laconia was also in demand as a cruise ship, especially during the mid-1930s when the world had begun to crawl out from beneath the Depression. She cruised often to the West Indies and Madeira. Apart from her reputation as a fine cruise ship, she also claimed her place in nautical history by being the first passenger liner to circumnavigate the globe with the aid of a brand new invention called a gyrocompass. That was an astonishing achievement back then.
Laconia was built for the pleasure of those prepared to pay for comfort. When Dad took me aboard I was overawed by the luxury I saw. It was a far cry from the way we all lived in Liverpool. There were glassed-in garden lounges with potted palms and exotic cane furniture, a verandah cafe, a library and writing room, a fashionable salon, a huge first-class dining room with marble pillars and, most oddly of all, a first-class smoking room which was a full-size replica of an old English inn, complete with its own massive open fireplace. Those luxuries stuck in my mind, but I can’t say I took much notice of the lifeboats.
Even after my father left the sea for good in 1935 he still retained a strong connection to his last ship. One of our neighbours, a chap called Fred Eyres, was her chief pantry-man. When he and my father got together, their conversation was always about Laconia.
The other ship that inspired me was HMS Royal Oak, one of the Royal Navy’s great Royal Sovereign Class battleships. A truly massive ship it was. Utterly huge. When I was 16, in the summer of 1938, Royal Oak paid a goodwill visit to Liverpool. I suspect now that the real aim was to recruit naive young chaps like me because Hitler was making loud noises over in Germany at that time.
The day Royal Oak was opened to the public in Liverpool is still vivid in my mind. It seems impossible that it was more than 65 years ago. She was tied up at Gladstone Dock on a glorious summer’s day, which was rare in Liverpool. A navy band was playing. Thousands of people were queuing and clamouring to get aboard her. Royal Navy sailors in crisp white uniforms were showing people around, pointing out the features of the ship, including the 15-inch guns on her foredeck. I was mesmerised. She was a magnificent ship, but dark and somehow sinister, built for war at sea. She had a beam of almost 90 feet and a vast superstructure that towered over her. It took a crew of 1200 men to sail her.
I was gone for all money. If the Royal Navy had tapped me on the shoulder I would have stayed aboard and set off that very day. It suddenly occurred to me, right there on the deck of Royal Oak with her flags fluttering in the breeze, that the best way to go to sea would be with the Royal Navy. My course was set.
To help contribute to the family finances, I had left school at 14 and found work. I delivered groceries on a bicycle for a time, and later worked on a horse-drawn laundry van, picking up and delivering washing. I loathed every second of those jobs because all I wanted was to go to sea. The idea of joining the navy grew bigger in my mind, right through to the end of 1938 and into 1939. By then I’d turned 17, and from time to time I would run into a lad I knew called Johnny McCormack. He had already joined the navy and whenever he came home on leave I was fascinated by his uniform and his jaunty, devil-may-care attitude. I wanted to be just like Johnny, so in March 1939 I went to the Royal Navy recruiting office near the Liverpool Docks and got the enlistment papers. I took them home for my parents to sign because I was too young to sign them myself.
‘What’s all this?’ my mother asked.
‘Papers for joining the Royal Navy.’
‘That’s no life, you know, being in the navy.’ I made Mum very unhappy when I brought those papers home, but I think she knew it was inevitable. Going to sea was all I’d talked about.
‘I’ll see the world,’ I said. ‘It’ll be fun.’
‘You make your bed, you lie in it,’ she said.
Dad, on the other hand, understood. He didn’t try to talk me out of it. ‘Is this what you really want?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ I was very firm about it.
‘All right then.’ And without saying anything more he signed the papers. So I joined the Royal Navy, signing on for seven years of service. Simple as that.