Authors: Sean Longden
Blitz Kids (35 page)
It was heavy, dirty, sweaty work but I got stuck into it. On one ship I had four boilers. You’d let one die down, so it could be cleaned out by the man at the start of next shift. I’d go off shift and get a couple of hours sleep at a time. You couldn’t sleep much. We were a dozen to a room and there were people coming and going all the time. My dad had said, ‘You’ve made your bed …’ He was right, but I didn’t really have time to lie in it.
For those unused to working below decks, the heat was a particular issue, especially in the tropics. When Tony Sprigings arrived in Calcutta at the end of his first trip to sea he was given a depressing task:
We had to paint the coal bunkers, which had been completely emptied on the way across. It was a job for the apprentices and we worked in stinking heat. It was 140°F. We were right in the bowels of the ship. It was hell. I thought, ‘It can’t get worse. I’ll never survive.’ They tell you that it’s character-building: if you can stand that you can stand anything.
Though the new boys found themselves carrying out all the menial tasks, many also found there were plenty of opportunities to learn. Whilst apprentices expected that they would have to learn all the jobs onboard, others were grateful of the opportunities to increase their knowledge and work towards becoming an ordinary seaman (OS) and then an able-bodied seaman (AB). Sixteen-year-old Bernard Ashton took his first steps towards advancement on his first voyage:
On Sunday afternoons, I had wheel practice with the bosun. I had learned the compass at sea school and knew the basic of steering. So when the ‘AB’ on the wheel wanted a smoke, I would take over. I soon learned that every ship was different and you had to compensate for the wind as it affected every ship differently. The sides of the ship acted as a sail. Also you learned that how you steered a ship depended on the type of engine it had.
At the end of this first voyage, Bernard was paid off in Liverpool and received his first wage packet: ‘I got a big white £5 note – I couldn’t believe it, I’d never seen one in my life.’ Having successfully survived almost eight months at sea, he was determined to progress. Working on the coastal trade he learned all the necessary skills to become an ordinary seaman. He could work the derricks on deck, loading and unloading cargo. He already knew how to steer a ship, could do deck work and had spent many long hours on lookout. Returning to Liverpool, he decided to leave the
Rochester Castle
and join a ship as an OS. Leaving his suitcase and sea bag at Lime Street station, he went to the shipping office to find work. He found there were large numbers of experienced men all crowding around the grille, behind which sat the representative of the Board of Trade and a ship’s captain, all looking for work. As a sixteen year old with just a few months of experience he knew he would need to be confident and stand firm, otherwise he knew he would be returning to sea as the ‘Peggy’: ‘I wasn’t afraid of anything.’ He pushed his way forward and when the call came for able-bodied seamen he shoved his seaman’s book forward, shouting out: ‘I’m an AB, I can steer and splice!’ Despite Bernard’s obvious youth, the captain took his book and told him he would take him as an ordinary seaman. He was then given a rail warrant to go to Hull and an advance on his wages. He had taken his first step forward towards a career at sea.
Going to sea was a shock for all boys, but for some the first trip was the worst they would ever make. Having attended a nautical school in Hull, Alan Simms went to sea as soon as he reached his sixteenth birthday. In March 1942, along with a former classmate, he joined a brand new ship, the
Empire Cowper
. As they set off on their first voyage they had little idea of what awaited them: ‘My first trip was my bad one: it was a real baptism of fire. We didn’t know we were going into the thick of things.’ Joining a convoy that formed up in Iceland, the
Empire Cowper
began the dangerous journey to the Russian port of Murmansk:
We got to Murmansk without really any bother – apart from the ice. The wire rope was about an inch thick, by the morning it was about three inches thick, with all the ice that formed. But at Murmansk we were
getting bombed every night. A warehouse fifty yards away on dockside was hit. We were sheltering in the cabin hoping everything would be all right, whilst stuff was hitting the ship. They knew we were in the port. It was an experience for us kids.
As both Merchant Navy and Royal Navy crews knew, Arctic convoys were the most dreaded assignment. If they thought the heat of the Middle East was unbearable, it was nothing compared to the freezing conditions in the Arctic seas. Preparing for his very first convoy, Anthony Longden recalled loading special equipment on to his ship: duffle coats, scarves, balaclavas, gloves, thick woollen socks and heavy leather boots. He soon realized they were headed to the Arctic. Ice formed on every surface, meaning the crews had to work tirelessly to clear it away: if they left the ice, the weight made the ship dangerously top-heavy. If they touched exposed steel, their hands froze to it, and tearing them free would pull off the skin. Frostbite was an ever-present fear and men discovered their eyelashes could freeze together when on lookout. They knew to enter the water meant they had just minutes to live. All these difficulties were bad enough on calm seas. When storms rose, their chances of the sea defeating them increased. As Ex-
Vindicatrix
boy Bill Ellis recalled: ‘One time we were on a Russian convoy and a huge wave hit us – sinking four ships in the convoy. The water came through the wheelhouse a foot high – we were all out of our bunks and it was freezing but we didn’t sink.’ On his first trip, Anthony Longden found an Arctic convoy was an ideal time to grow up: ‘I spent most of 26 December 1943 at action stations, in a full gale, on the bridge Oerlikon gun. In these northern latitudes, it was only light for about three hours a day, so it was a memorable seventeenth birthday.’
Having arrived safely in Murmansk, Alan Simms sheltered from the German bombing. However, other boys worked through the air raids. When the SS
New Westminster
City
was bombed, three of the ship’s apprentices carried the wounded from the ship, wrapped them up to keep them warm, placed them on ‘skids’ and pulled them to hospital. They then returned to their ship to help fight the fires.
Whilst it had been exciting – if dangerous – in port, sixteen-year old Alan soon discovered the journey home would be far worse than the outward trip. Leaving Murmansk in early April, the ship made the
return journey with an additional group of seamen onboard: ominously, these were all men who had been rescued when their ships had sunk on the outward journey. These shipwrecked seamen were soon back in the thick of the action: ‘Eight o’clock next morning a German plane appeared – a Focke-Wulf Condor – flying round and round just out of gun range.’ At midday Alan headed to the galley for lunch and then decided to have an afternoon nap:
Luckily I didn’t get undressed. At about quarter-past-one the alarm sounded and I went on to the deck to see what was happening. There were German aircraft coming in from all over the place. We were lagging behind the convoy, so we were a target. It all happened so suddenly, we had no time to be frightened. In the first attack, three bombs fell astern, doing no harm, but about twenty minutes later, two more planes attacked with machine-guns and bombs. I was standing aft, I didn’t hear a bang – I just saw all this muck flying about. The bombs caused the ship to catch fire. Strangely enough, I wasn’t frightened, I was excited. As the dust cleared I was looking at one of the aircraft, shouting, ‘We got it! We got it!’ as it dived down into the sea.
With the ship sinking, the lifeboats were swiftly lowered. In the haste to lower the boats, one tipped up, sending two men into the water, never to be seen again. Alan Simms was lucky to make his way safely off the ship. After an hour they were picked up by a trawler, HMS
Blackheath
, manned by a Royal Navy crew: ‘It didn’t bother me that we had been sunk. One of the crew took me and my friend and gave us jobs to do, so we were learning again. But we were soon getting attacked again. There were ships still getting sunk around us.’ Eventually Alan returned home on three weeks leave, his first voyage complete and his first ship lost: ‘We got home and everybody thought we were heroes. We had our pictures in the local paper. But I’d lost all my clothing and had to go out in my dad’s jacket. I was only sixteen and at that age you think it’s quite exciting.’
The experience of having a ship sunk from under them – or watching the horrors of men drowning in the seas around them – had a profound effect on most boys. Having survived sinking on his first voyage, Alan Simms moved from Arctic convoys to the Atlantic:
That’s when I started getting nervous. On Atlantic convoys you knew it was going to happen but didn’t know when. My heart used to bleed. You could hear ships going up. There were all the ships protecting the tankers in the middle. When one got attacked it was terrible – the sea was a mass of flame. You could hear people shouting and screaming. There was oil and fuel all over the water. They had no chance.
This sense that one’s ship had to get hit at some point generated a sense of fatalism among even the most optimistic youngsters. It also served to change their behaviour, meaning they remained unable to relax for days on end, as Alan – who preferred sailing in rough seas because the waves deterred U-boat attacks – recalled:
One ship I was on had been fitted with ASDIC for detecting submarines. When they got a ‘ping’ on the machine we didn’t dare go to bed, ’cause we knew there were U-boats about. We took those ‘Purple Heart’ pills and we’d be awake all night. But we tried to keep life going normally – getting attacked was just a part of life.
Despite this acceptance that U-boat attacks on convoys were inevitable, it was always a shock when it happened: ‘One night I went to have a wee overboard and was looking out at the next ship immediately to one side. All of a sudden, bang: she was hit. Her bow came up and she sank in about five minutes.’ At the time Alan thought little of what had happened, it was only later he was struck by a sobering thought: ‘I realized if that ship hadn’t been in position, that torpedo would have hit us.’
Similarly, Arthur Harvey recalled how all seamen needed good fortune if they hoped to survive: ‘We didn’t have time to think about the dangers. I saw tankers get hit and the ruddy sea caught fire! It’s not very pleasant but at least it was in the distance, you can just see the lads jumping over the side. I was lucky – it was just the luck of the draw.’ The mental turmoil of life at sea in wartime put pressure on all crew members – regardless of age. As Tony Sprigings remembered, on his first voyage the fresh food soon ran out, leaving them eating hard-tack biscuits. He recalled looking into the huge ice-box that had carried their rations as they left Liverpool. After twenty-one days there were
just a few soggy lettuce leaves and some sorry-looking tomatoes floating in the tepid water: ‘I thought, “What have I let myself in for?” It was horrifying.’ However, for some onboard, the pressure became too much:
As the voyage progressed the temperatures went up and up. I went on watch one night, and as I headed towards the bridge I heard a blood-curdling howl coming from the boiler room. This Indian ran up and jumped over the side. He was one of the firemen. I shouted out that a man had gone over the side, but they said that we would never find him. So we didn’t stop, we didn’t go back. We couldn’t – we were in convoy. It was the heat. There was no relief for the men working down below, it was unbelievably hot. They were shovelling 77 tons of coal into the boilers each day to keep the engines going. Seeing that happen makes a real impression on you at that age.
However, he was able to put the experience into context: ‘It was just another person dying. We’d come from the UK where people were dying every day.’
Though Britain’s merchant fleet sailed the world, defied the enemy and saved the nation from starvation, there was one element of the sailors’ lives that could not be erased from the minds of many people on shore: homosexuality. The endurance of long weeks at sea meant sailors had long faced a reputation for homosexual behaviour, regardless of whether the reputation was deserved. For most, it was a subject that was hardly ever spoken about. Some received timely warnings when joining a ship. Twelve-year-old John Chinnery, who had joined his first ship just before the outbreak of war was lucky to be warned about the dangers a boy could face onboard a merchant ship. He was lucky to be treated like a son by his first captain, whilst the bosun offered him some good advice: ‘Johnny, you’ve got nice legs. Just be careful of so-and-so and so-and-so. Keep clear of them.’ As John later noted: ‘The homosexuals sorted themselves out, they knew “who was there just for the ride”.’
For teenage apprentice Alan Shard, his encounter with a crewmate’s penis was a comical, rather than threatening, moment which occurred as he stood on deck with his hands behind his back:
Suddenly to my complete and utter surprise an engineer came up from behind and placed his private member into my hand, hoping no doubt to get a good laugh out of the audience, but I turned the tables in a flash, kept a grip and towed him along the deck with the crowd laughing at him. He ran in step screaming blue murder. It reminded me of the tiger’s tail. How was I going to get free without being thumped? As I neared the mast-house I let go and ran swiftly to the ladder with him in hot pursuit. Without much thought, I shinned up the vertical ladder aft the mainmast, praying to God he would not follow me. Discretion proved to be the better part of valour and he did not. When his temper cooled he realized his foolishness and nothing further was said.
In the fury of war, the boys did not only crew the ships: they saved them. They manned lookouts, sent vital signals, fought fires and manned anti-aircraft guns. Christian Immelman was on the bridge of the
Dolabella
when she came under air attack. Crewing a fully loaded tanker, he knew he had to do all he could to protect the ship:
