I went below and was immediately lost. HMS Valiant was vast, with multiple decks and a dizzying network of companionways and stairs that all looked the same to me. I couldn’t tell whether I was facing the bow or stern, port or starboard. I only started to get my bearings when we were allocated quarters according to our trades. Seamen here, stokers over there, wireless operators/telegraphers, shipwrights, cooks and clerks each to their separate mess decks in various parts of the ship. Those for the ordinary seamen were two decks down, deep in the bow of the ship.
Johnny, Charlie and Freddie went starboard, while I was sent to the port mess. It certainly wasn’t designed for comfort: four or five big tables, storage racks for hammocks, some stools, a few crockery shelves, and not much else. After the routine of life ashore at HMS Drake, I felt confused and alone in my new mess as I watched a parade of strange faces and heard the bedlam of unfamiliar voices. What was what? Who was who? It felt unreal starting a new job in what was also my new home. And I wasn’t exactly thrilled when I learnt that John Tennant, our hard-nosed leading seaman from HMS Drake was in charge of my mess. I’d have to keep my wits about me if I was going to stay out of trouble. That first night I went to sleep in my hammock with mixed feelings. I was excited to be on my first ship, yet fearful that I’d make an idiot of myself in front of the sea-hardened members of the crew.
Next day we were each shown to the part of the ship we would be working in. My station was on the quarterdeck, where all the officers were.
‘You’ll be a lookout up on the bridge,’ I was told.
God, just my luck, surrounded by officers and nowhere to hide.
Later, the ranks of the Royal Navy would swell with officers who signed on only for the duration of hostilities. Until then, though, Valiant was commanded by long-serving career officers. From the captain down to the petty officers, they were seasoned hard-liners, intent on doing everything by the book. The captain was H B Rawlings, a very tall, gaunt man with a sunburnt face who had that stern, superior look of command about him.
We were taken to our action stations. Mine was in the third 4.5-inch gun turret on the port side.
Now, this is more like it.
I couldn’t have been happier. There was one small problem, though. Hicks, the bloke I’d fought with over the tin of marmalade, was assigned to the same gun crew. Still, there were more important things to think about than the chilly tension that lingered between us.
With our stations sorted out, we were given our first shipboard duty: painting Valiant’s entire top deck grey. Under war conditions there was no longer a place for the traditional white decks and polished brass fittings so loved by the navy in peacetime. The duller we could make it, the safer the ship would be, apparently. So I spent my first couple of days aboard Valiant on my knees, paintbrush in hand, applying lashings of grey paint to the deck. It wasn’t quite the glamorous start I’d imagined.
Three days later the ship slipped away from Devonport without fanfare and crept into Plymouth Sound, where she anchored and made final preparations. No one told us where we were going. All we knew was that we would soon be commencing Valiant’s working-up trials, when everything on the ship, including the crew, would be repeatedly tested with ever-increasing intensity to ensure her readiness for war. But there was someone who seemed to know a great deal more than us. His name was William Joyce, the notorious British fascist who, when war broke out in September, had fled to Germany and started broadcasting propaganda programs back to Britain. Spouting information provided by German spies in Britain, he was loathed by his listeners, who nicknamed him Lord Haw Haw for his high-pitched, upper-class English accent.
Remarkably, our captain allowed Lord Haw Haw’s weekly ravings to be played over Valiant’s loudspeaker system, known as the tannoy. We’d hear a sharp click as the tannoy came alive, there’d be a brief hiss of static, and then an exaggerated plum-in-the-mouth voice would try to put the wind up us.
‘Oh, I see that HMS Valiant is making ready to go to sea now,’ Lord Haw Haw would say. ‘Well, we’ll be waiting for you when you get out to sea, boys.’
‘Bullshit!’ we would yell in unison, and follow up with cheers, whistles and crude insults.
‘We’ll be watching everything you do. Absolutely everything,’ the traitor said.
‘Bullshit! Turn the bastard off!’
We thought it was hilarious. No way was he going to frighten a bunch of 18-year-olds about to sail off on their first great adventure. We dismissed Joyce as a fool who’d chosen the wrong side. Apprehension lurked in each of us, though. But it was just butterflies in the stomach. There wasn’t any fear.
At last the great moment came. Shepherded by a reassuring group of destroyers, we steamed out of Plymouth Sound one night into the English Channel, heading west into the unknown. I was on duty with five other lookouts on the bridge as we went out. I couldn’t believe it. Only a few months before I’d been at home in Liverpool, living an ordinary life with my family. Then I was off to war on the bridge of one of the Royal Navy’s most powerful ships, rugged up in a seaman’s duffle coat with a pair of binoculars glued to my eye sockets. And goodness, was I keyed up! As the ship’s lookouts we had to report absolutely everything we saw, and woe betide us if the officers on the bridge spied something before we did. So there was an endless stream of calls from the lookouts.
‘Bearing red two zero five, a light,’ someone reported. That was probably a buoy in the channel.
‘Bearing green zero nine zero, a headland.’
‘Bearing green one seven five, a fishing smack.’ Although the war had started, the fishermen were still out there working in their little boats, braving the Channel at night.
And so it went on.
‘Bearing red two seven zero. A fun fair.’ Stunned silence followed that report from a young seaman called Glover. He was about my age.
‘A what?’ an incredulous officer demanded at last.
‘One very big fun fair, sir. Bearing red two seven zero, sir,’ Glover repeated. A stifled snigger or two rippled around the bridge.
‘I think you’ll find, seaman, that it’s a neutral ship with all its lights on,’ came the officer’s exasperated reply.
‘Aye aye, sir. A ship with lights, sir.’ I was relieved it was Glover who’d made a fool of himself and not me. Still, it was early days. Before long we became accomplished observers, our confidence rising as we settled into life on board our great battleship.
As we left the Channel and steamed into the Atlantic, the tempo of ship life grew faster. We were busy all the time, with every station on high alert, especially for submarines. They were the big worry, it seemed to me, and even as Valiant made her way westwards, our destroyer escort would occasionally drop a brace of depth charges. There’d be huge explosions as they detonated below the surface, sending up massive spouts of water. All false alarms. We took all this in our stride after a while as we slipped into the routine of our four-hour watches.
I was always dog tired when I stumbled off my watch, too tired even to unroll my hammock and hang it in the mess. I didn’t bother. I got into the habit of sleeping on a stool in the corner, tin helmet on my head and gas mask at the ready on my lap. I found it quite comfortable and far more convenient. It saved time because I didn’t have to worry about stowing and unstowing my hammock all the time. Besides, if we came under attack, I wanted to get to my action station fast.
There was still no word over the tannoy about where we were going. The tannoy’s click, hiss and crackle began to make us nervous. We never knew what was coming. Often it was a bugle call, with different calls for action stations, air raids, colours and so on. Sometimes it was just a routine announcement of some kind. But eventually the words we’d been waiting for were broadcast throughout the ship.
‘Captain speaking,’ came the voice of command. ‘We are proceeding for our working-up trials and our destination is Bermuda.’
The captain then told us what needed to be improved aboard Valiant. Our general preparedness was good, but we would have to be much faster getting to action stations. He reminded us that we were at war, which seemed to be stating the obvious. But at least we knew where we were going.
This is all right. My first ship in the Royal Navy and I’m off to sunny Bermuda. Sounds pretty nice to me.
But the work on board grew even more demanding as the ship and her crew went through their paces. Exercises went on, day and night. Calls to fire stations. Calls to action stations. Everything was done under the stopwatch and the officers were never satisfied. We had to do it faster, they said. Always faster, always better, always reminding us that there was a war on.
When they called ‘Action stations!’ I would have to bolt from the bridge and fly down a series of steep stairs to reach my turret on the port side. But while I was going down, hordes of other seamen were going up to their action stations, so everyone was jostling and bumping into everyone else in this mad scramble to beat the clock and please the captain.
With all the drills, we had precious little time to ourselves. But there were moments when I could just stand out on deck and watch the sea. It was incredibly beautiful, no matter what the weather was like, and I was awed by the power of the waves and the spectacular sunsets. Seen from the deck of a ship many hundreds of miles from the nearest land, those fiery sunsets were an unforgettable sight. I loved being out there with the sea all around me. I loved every moment of it.
On one occasion as part of our ongoing training, we were allowed what was called ‘a trick on the wheel’, the naval term for steering a ship. Valiant wasn’t steered from the bridge, but from a small room directly below it that was lit only by dim red lights. It took a while for the eyes to adjust to their eerie glow. A group of us were given our trick on the wheel under the critical eyes of the chief quartermaster and the chief petty officer, and my goodness it was a delicate business. The wheel was about the size of a car steering wheel and we had to steer the ship on the exact heading called down from the bridge by the officer of the watch. I was all over the place like a mad woman’s custard. I couldn’t keep Valiant on the required heading for more than a few seconds. The trick, it seemed, was to start the ship turning onto the required heading, then bring the wheel in the opposite direction almost straight away. This anticipated the long delay between turning the wheel and the ship actually changing course. I went back to my watch on the bridge to an earful of sarcasm from the other young seamen.
‘Was that you doing your trick just then, Mac?’
‘Yes,’ I said proudly.
‘Well, we were pretty safe while you were down there.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘You had us bloody zigzagging so much a submarine couldn’t possibly have hit us.’
I just grinned and ignored them. I’d been steering one of the world’s most powerful, complex machines. Not very well, but I’d steered it. Life was pretty damned good as far as I was concerned.
As we continued southwest across the Atlantic toward Bermuda, we sailed through the Saragossa Sea, an expanse of thick brown seaweed stretching from horizon to horizon. There seemed no end it. It flattened the sea so much it gave the impression that the ship was cleaving its way through solid land. Valiant took two days and nights to steam through this vast, gently heaving brown carpet.
We’d just put the eerie calm of the Saragossa behind us when a hurricane ripped the sea into a savage frenzy. I’ll never forget it. We knew it was coming well enough, but that didn’t prepare us for its ferocity. Valiant might have been a battleship of more than 30,000 tons but the waves treated her with contempt. She heaved, pitched, twisted and heeled over with unimaginable violence. I was hanging on for dear life on the bridge, and I had to stay up there after my watch had finished because it was too dangerous to move.
The view from the bridge fascinated and terrified me at the same time. Those waves were easily 70 or 80 feet high, perhaps even higher. Absolute monsters. Valiant’s bow would explode out of the water as she came shuddering off the top of a wave, then go careering down the other side into a seething trough. When we reached the bottom we’d look up and see the next wave looming and rushing toward us. It would crash on the bow, submerging the foredeck and the 15-inch guns, then come thundering directly at the bridge, a fearsome battering ram of grey-green water that seemed to stop the ship dead in her tracks. The noise was horrific, a nerve-piercing, relentless shriek like the world had gone mad. On the bridge we had to yell to each other to be heard. I was frightened out of my wits and wasn’t alone in that.
Our escort of destroyers, all much smaller than Valiant, got pounded far worse than us and I’ve always been amazed that some of them didn’t go down. With the towering waves breaking over them, if sea water had flooded in through their funnels they would have gone straight to the bottom. Eventually the destroyers had to leave us to our own devices and staggered off to safer waters. They eventually found refuge in New York. So there we were, totally unprotected in that awful hurricane, but its fury was probably our protector. A submarine would never have been able to attack us in those conditions. A sub would have to run deep beneath the turmoil while any German surface ships would find it impossible to bring their guns to bear on us. Eventually, after more than 24 hours of constant battering, we came out of the worst of it. The ship was chaotic inside. We found the crockery in pieces across the mess deck and it took ages to get everything ship-shape again because the sea remained rough for a number of days.
During this rough spell I was taking my turn as cook. Just before lunch one day, I was carrying a tray full of prunes and custard down the stairs between the galley and the mess deck. The stairs were wet and so were the sea boots I was wearing, so I was a disaster waiting to happen. I had mastered the naval tradition of scurrying down the ship’s steep and narrow stairs frontward, without hanging on to the side rails. This left the hands free for carrying trays of prunes and custard. However, this time my boots slipped from under me and I crashed to the mess deck, launching the prunes and custard on a horizontal trajectory that coincided perfectly with the arrival of the officer of the day as he passed the stairs. In an instant I was lying in an unprofessional heap on the deck, and the prunes and custard were decorating one side of the officer of the day’s neatly pressed uniform. I was mortified, but he was a quiet, gentlemanly type, so he passed it off as an unfortunate rough-weather incident.
We were relieved to reach the tranquillity of Bermuda. As we steamed into Hamilton Harbour in brilliant sunshine, Valiant looked bedraggled with her superstructure damaged and her grey paint encrusted with salt. It looked like patches of snow had been dumped on her. An American cruise liner, the President Roosevelt, was berthed in the harbour. A cruise ship seemed strange to us in wartime, but of course America wasn’t in the war yet. As we steamed by, her passengers lined the railings and cheered us. It gave us a good feeling, that did.
We lay up in Hamilton Harbour for a couple of days in mid-December while we licked our wounds and got Valiant ready for sea again, straightening damaged structures and tidying up the paintwork. I went ashore with my shipmates, too. In addition to Johnny, Charlie and Freddie, my mates from HMS Drake, I’d also teamed up with two other young sailors, a tall, skinny chap called Peter Rimmer and another lad truly called Davey Jones. Davey Jones was an ironical name for a seaman if ever I heard one, because of the age-old nautical reference to Davy Jones’s Locker, the mythical place at the bottom of the ocean where all drowned sailors reside! The six of us went ashore together in Bermuda. There was something odd about the place.
‘Notice anything?’ I asked.
‘I notice there are no beautiful girls rushing out to meet us,’ Peter complained.
‘Yeah, I noticed that as well,’ Davey said.
‘No, not that. Listen. There are no cars,’ I remarked. The others listened and everyone agreed Bermuda was very quiet.
‘No cars and no girls,’ Johnny moaned.
That’s the main thing I remember about Bermuda, apart from it being warm. There didn’t seem to be any cars, only bicycles, which were everywhere. But it was quiet and peaceful, and the grim war mood of England seemed remote. Even though we’d had a few submarine alerts and heard the occasional Boom! Boom! of depth charges, the war hadn’t touched us yet.
While we were in Bermuda, news came through that a German raider, the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, was lurking in the South Atlantic off South America. We weren’t an awfully long way from that ship, and I’ve often wondered since if the reason Valiant got sent in that general direction was in case the Graf Spee became a threat. As it turned out, the German ship was badly damaged in a fierce action against three British cruisers, which saw her withdraw to the harbour of Montevideo in Uruguay, where her crew scuttled her. We weren’t called on to help our cruisers in that skirmish, so we left Bermuda and sailed up the east coast of America to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Canada. We continued our working-up trials along the way, practicing our shipboard drills day and night, especially our gunnery. There was no let-up.
It was freezing in Halifax, snow and ice everywhere. Hard to take after balmy Bermuda. But the weather was calm, so we went ashore and walked about carefully on the icy streets. There were groups of pretty young girls skating on the roads, skylarking about. They called out to us cheekily, as young girls do when they see sailors. I went to a dance hall and saw people doing the jitterbug. I’d never seen or heard anything like it in England. It was terrific fun, so fast and full of life and utterly carefree.
From Halifax we joined a Canadian convoy as part of its escort to Britain. It was carrying food and other war supplies, I believe, and there were Canadian corvettes sailing with us in the escort group, too. We were on high-alert during that trip, crossing the Atlantic on the way back to England. The closer we got to home, the greater the threat from German submarines and aircraft. We weren’t attacked and, even though we thought of ourselves as ready for war, I wasn’t disappointed by the lack of action.
After we’d seen the Canadian ships safely to their ports, we continued on to Orkney in Scotland, joining the Home Fleet in Scapa Flow, where the poor old Royal Oak was lying on the bottom. We stayed there for what seemed like an eternity. It was a dismal place, Scapa Flow, cold, windswept and surrounded by bare hills. Valiant’s crew got bored up there with nothing to do except routine duties, painting and general maintenance. Sailors from other ships gave us a fair bit of mouth while we were lying idle. ‘Big-ship sailors doing precious little,’ they’d sneer at us, trying to start a fight.
There was always strong rivalry between the crews of big ships and small ships, but the Royal Navy wasn’t about to risk a big battleship like Valiant unless there was serious work for her to do. So we sat there, ignoring the remarks, biding our time until, in February 1940 we became involved in the Norwegian Campaign, on escort duty mainly, coming and going from Scapa Flow in support of British operations off the Norwegian coast. We’d leave Scapa, sail past Shetland and continue to the Norwegian Sea, where life began to hot up.
The German ship Altmark, which had once been the Graf Spee’s supply ship, was known to be transporting 300 British merchant navy prisoners through neutral Norwegian waters to Germany. The prisoners were battened down below decks and Winston Churchill, who was still First Lord of the Admiralty at that early stage of the war, was having none of it. He ordered that the Altmark be boarded by force and the prisoners released, even though she was in neutral waters. So a raiding party was cobbled together from sailors of the various Royal Navy ships in the area, including Valiant.
There were many unforgettable characters on Valiant, believe me, but probably the most outrageous was a bloke in the mess next to mine. His name was Tom Cox, a huge, dark-complexioned man who’d been in the Royal Navy forever. He had a black beard and a moustache that curled up at both ends. He looked like a Spanish pirate and was without doubt Valiant’s most outstanding seaman. Whenever we had an air raid, Tom would go out on deck to scream abuse at the Germans flying overhead. ‘Bugger off, you bastards!’ he’d yell, shaking his fists at the enemy aircraft. He’d once been a petty officer but had been repeatedly demoted for various misdemeanours and was back to the rank of able seaman. But with his strength and ferocious appearance, he was a natural choice to represent our ship in the raiding party.
Tom, to our utter amazement, set off for this dangerous task armed only with a cutlass. After much violence on board the Altmark, the British prisoners were freed and the buzz went around that he’d played the leading role. We gaped as he climbed back on board our ship with his cutlass clenched between his teeth, swaggering a bit. He did it as a lark, to stir the officers up, but this extraordinary sight left a lasting impression on the teenage seamen like me. We thought he was larger than life, and more than a little frightening come to think of it. The officers despaired at Tom’s undisciplined behaviour, but they were reluctant to get rid of him because he was so good at all he did.
In April, after the Germans had invaded Norway, we were part of an escort for three liners carrying Britain’s Guards Brigade to the little port of Harstad in Andifiord, the northern approach to Narvik above the Arctic Circle. The German battleship Tirpitz was known to be lurking in the fiords of Norway and it was our job to shield the troop-carrying liners.
I’ll never forget the beauty of that fiord. We steamed into it in perfectly clear weather, blue skies, mirror-calm sea, snow shining on the tops of the mountains on either side. It was wonderful. We were in the land of the midnight sun, but even as I admired the beauty around me I was aware of the danger. What were we doing bringing a huge battleship into a fiord like this with land towering on either side, and only about an hour of twilight before it was day again?
This is crazy. Just plain crazy.
We had destroyers with us, which was reassuring, and also the aircraft carrier Ark Royal with its squadron of Skua dive-bombers. But the Germans had established air bases in Norway and if the Luftwaffe got to us we’d be hopelessly trapped. Like sitting ducks, we were, and I didn’t much fancy being sunk. We’d been told if we ever ended up in the drink in the Arctic we’d be dead within three minutes.
Nothing came of it in the end. With the ship on high-alert, we went into the harbour at Harstad, the troops disembarked safely from the liners, and we came straight out again. But the possibility of air raids put us on edge, and gave us a taste of the tension we could expect as the war pushed on. After another stint at Scapa Flow, where it was still cold and boring, it was a great relief when we were ordered to join H Force at Gibraltar.
‘There are monkeys in Gibraltar,’ Charlie announced.
‘Bollocks. You only get monkeys in Africa,’ scoffed Freddie.
‘You’ll see I’m right soon enough,’ Charlie countered. He was a cocky lad.
‘One thing’s for certain, there’ll be a bunch of bloody ugly monkeys in Gibraltar when we get there,’ Johnny decided.
‘It’ll be nice and warm, that’s all I know,’ I said.
‘Yeah, a Mediterranean holiday, that’s what we’ll be having.’
We steamed south toward warmer waters and once the bitter cold of Scotland was well behind us we were issued with white uniforms and pith helmets. Mad dogs and Englishmen, out in the midday sun! Each day it got warmer and soon they put us on shorter watches, so we had more spare time than usual. We’d lie about on the deck near the big guns, stripped to the waist, soaking up the unfamiliar warmth of the sun. This is okay, Gibraltar will be like Bermuda.
Having time to lie about in the sun had its disadvantages, and they weren’t confined to sunburn. There was too much time to think. The action in Norway showed me that war was a dangerous business and that I was well and truly in it, like it or not. I began to worry about my future as I realised that being in the Royal Navy meant more than adventure. This could easily get me killed. The anxiety was building and I’m sure my shipmates were having the same thoughts. But it wasn’t the sort of thing we talked about as we steamed down the coast of Portugal and through the Straits of Gibraltar to the legendary British stronghold at the bottom of Spain.
Being in Gibraltar’s harbour, in the shadow of that awesome rock, made us feel strangely secure. Soon after we arrived, the buzz around the mess deck was all about the Italian aircraft that were often seen flying high overhead.
‘Those Italians, they can’t bomb us while we’re here, you know,’ someone said. It was such an outlandish claim that it got everyone talking at once.
‘How’s that, then?’
‘It’s because of the updrafts.’
‘What the hell are you on about? Bloody updrafts!’
‘The rock causes these massive updrafts, what with the wind and everything. And it throws the bombs off course. It’s a well-known fact, I’m telling you.’
‘It’s a well-known fact that you talk a load of bollocks.’
There was always nonsense talk like that in the ship’s mess decks. Someone would air an opinion on something they knew nothing about and suddenly it’d be around the ship as if it had come from the captain himself.
I liked Gibraltar. We went ashore and, of course, Charlie was proved right, just like he said he would be. There were indeed monkeys living on the Rock of Gibraltar. Someone told us the old myth that says if the monkeys ever leave, British reign over Gibraltar will end. We took folklore like that seriously back then. It was reassuring I suppose.
Our first big job in the Mediterranean came early in July, just a few days after the fall of France. We were ordered to attack the French battle fleet tied up in the harbour at Oran, in Algeria. Britain couldn’t afford to have those ships escape because it was a certainty that the newly installed pro-German Vichy French government would hand them over to the German Navy for use against us. Oran was only about 250 miles away on the North African coast, so we steamed urgently eastwards.
Oran had a harbour with a massive protective sea wall and the French ships were tucked away behind it. I was on the bridge watching through binoculars when they started getting up steam, ready to make a break. I could see the upper structures of the French ships quite clearly. Valiant’s 15-inch gun crews were called to action stations and they began to lob shells over the sea wall onto the trapped ships. The noise was stunning: violent booms followed by breathtaking screeches. Then smoke billowed from behind the sea wall.
I was amazed at what we were doing. One day the French were our allies, the next we were pumping 15-inch shells at their ships. We hit them terribly hard and I knew a lot of French sailors were dying, but all I felt was relief that there was no danger to Valiant in any of this.
This relief was swept aside almost immediately on our next job escorting a convoy carrying Hurricane fighters from Gibraltar to Malta. As we passed through the Straits of Pantelleria at night, our radar picked up ships approaching Valiant. Travelling at the speed they were, they had to be Italian motor torpedo boats. The Italians had a fine navy and those torpedo boats, their smallest, fastest craft, were potentially deadly. The call to action stations sounded through the ship and I rushed to my station inside the cramped compartment below the third 4.5 gun turret. As the Italian boats approached unseen in the darkness, the order was given.
‘Fire!’
Inside the turret the warning bell sounded and a split second later our gun fired. Then I heard a massive explosion directly above me. As the gun next to us had turned onto its target, its inbuilt stopping mechanism had failed, causing it to swing right around and fire an armour piercing shell directly into our turret. There was utter chaos. Our turret filled with dense, choking smoke, and one chap tumbled off the pedestal above me. Another sailor was blasted backwards into our space below the gun, right at my feet. One of his arms was half blown away. Blood spurted from a gruesome, gaping hole in his side. Strangely, he didn’t make a sound, but the rest of us were screaming. The urge to get out through the hatch behind us and abandon our post was overpowering, but just as pandemonium threatened, our petty officer ‘Bugs’ Roman saved the day. Bugs was a man whose many years in the navy had taught him the value of discipline when hell starts breaking loose.
‘Misfire, misfire!’ he yelled. ‘Stand! Nobody move!’
At that, our training took over. We stayed, but my goodness, we needed the steadying influence of our petty officer. If it hadn’t been for his presence of mind our action stations would have become panic stations.
The wounded sailor died right before our eyes. It was ghastly. And then it dawned on me that this was poor Hicks of the ridiculous marmalade jam argument. He lay dead at my feet and I was sick with regret.
I was never the same again.