Out of the past
In 1953 I went with my father to see The Cruel Sea at the Odeon in High Wycombe, the same cinema where he’d got a job as assistant manager not too long after he’d been invalided out of the Merchant Navy in the latter part of the war.
The film, as you may know, concentrated on a small ship of the Royal Navy, the corvette Compass Rose, whose main role was to escort convoys of merchant ships crossing the Atlantic at the time when German submarines lay in wait to sink as many allied ships as possible.
As scene succeeded harrowing scene (notably where the captain orders a depth charge to be launched in an attempt to destroy a submarine, despite knowing that this will certainly kill the survivors bobbing around in the sea, hoping for rescue), I turned to my dad and asked him if it had really been as bad as that. He just said, “they wouldn’t dare show what it was really like.”
And then it came back to me, the times, as a young child, I’d been woken up by his shouts of “Row, you buggers! Row!”, night after night, as he relived the second time one of his ships had been torpedoed.
The first time had been on the 12th of April 1941, when he was sailing as chief officer - first mate - of the Saint Helena, a general cargo boat on a voyage from Montevideo and Bahia to Hull, on the east coast of England, with a cargo of grain, canned meat, cotton, rice and wet hides. The torpedo struck them off the coast of Sierra Leone, and all 38 of the crew had time to take to the boats before the ship went down. My dad told me that the U-boat surfaced, the captain appeared at the top of the conning tower, told them their exact position and asked if they were alright for provisions, compass and so on. Before disappearing back into the sub he added that they were lucky it was him since ‘many U-boats have shotted sailors in boats’. (It was this little mistake in English which had made the commander’s comment so memorable).
The reason why I know exactly when and where the Saint Helena went down is because there are full details of this incident in the report with which I was recently supplied by the Merchant Navy Officers Association. (Other details of my father’s service records are more scanty, since, as they said, ‘a large percentage [of such records] have been lost or destroyed over the years’).
It seems that he and the other 37 crew members all made their way from Sierra Leone, where the ship’s lifeboats landed safely after a few days, back to the UK, his records containing the laconic notation “DBS”, short for “Distressed British Seaman”, the usual way of describing a merchant seaman “who is left without a berth, ill or without funds in a foreign port”. (‘Distressed’ indeed! The pay of a merchant seaman was stopped once the vessel on which he was serving was sunk, an iniquitous state of affairs which lasted until 1942!).
The next firm date in his records is the 11th of May 1942, when he obtained his Master’s Certificate (number 48452), the Port of Examination being Cardiff, where we were living at the time. But it seems that, at some time earlier, he had joined the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), a civilian-manned fleet under the control of the Ministry of Defence, its main task being to supply the Royal Navy with fuel, ammunition and so on. From the snippets I had learned from my parents, I had gained the impression that his first posting with the RFA was a desk job at Scapa Flow, the main base of the Home Fleet, situated in the Orkney Islands, off the north-east coast of Scotland, and that he had been so bored that he asked to be sent back to sea. Whether this was true or not, the records show that his first posting was to RFA Bacchus, a support ship, later being transferred to RFA Elderol, a fleet oiler and then on to Empire Jet, a tanker owned by the Ministry of War Transport.
None of these appear to have been torpedoed. But I have no reason not to believe that he lost at least one other boat - a tanker - to a submarine attack. He and my mother both told me so; and he certainly didn’t need to urge the crew of the Saint Helena to row as fast as they could.
Most tankers, once torpedoed or mined, went down in seconds, with no survivors. Those who were lucky enough to have been able to take to their boats would have been dreading the moment that the fire spread to the main tanks and the ship would explode, setting fire to the sea around them, to the lifeboat and to them.
Whatever the circumstances - and there is no way I can know them now - my father
returned to the “Pool” at Cardiff on 14/05/1943 and then there followed a bout of illness leading to a declaration of “Unfit for Duty” and an award of “Accelerated Discharge” with the last entry on the card as “Discharged”.
My first consecutive memories date from that summer, when the three of us spent several happy weeks on a farm in Pembrokeshire, where I (at four years old) learned how to milk a cow, and would hide among the stubble pretending to be a rabbit, while my parents sang
Run rabbit - run rabbit - Run! Run! Run!
Run rabbit - run rabbit - Run! Run! Run!
Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run.
Run rabbit - run rabbit - Run! Run! Run!
Don't give the farmer his fun! Fun! Fun!
So run rabbit - run rabbit - Run! Run! Run!
A few months later we moved from Wales to Buckinghamshire, where my father started off by running the Chequers pub in Amersham, then got a job as assistant manager at the Odeon, High Wycombe, which is where we came in.
The Cruel Sea.
Monday, 14 November 2011
