Transcript
We departed on a ship, small ship, as civilians we had to be signed on, twenty three of us signed on, and we were sent then on the way through the Pacific to the Panama Canal, then to New York for ten days because we'd hit a whale on the way, for repairs and then we went from there, we went in a convoy of about forty small and big ships all the way up the coast past Newfoundland to Iceland then back down to Glasgow. But we'd lose a ship nearly every night.
Usually the subs would, there used to be a line of seven of us. The last ship usually got picked off at night, not every night but we lost many on the way.
We had to go only as fast as the slowest, about ten knots and hour which is pretty slow. We only had two little corvettes as escorts and that was pretty hard.
If one ship was sunk nobody stopped. They kept going and you were left at the mercy because if they stopped then the submarines would have got into the rest of the things so the corvettes just went up and down each row all the time supporting us.
Going up the coast of America, America then had lights on the cities, of course the submarines used to pick off ships and you'd see just the masts of them as you were going along the coast until you got wide away.
Yes, we always wondered whether we'd get copped but, of course, we were lucky we didn't. We got to Glasgow in the end safely. Going over, of course, there was 23 of us. We all manned the guns. They had Oerlikons and a 4" gun at the rear an about five of them were trained to work on that and the rest of us would take duty on the Oerlikons day and night, whenever our turn was, not that we would have been much good because Oerlikons were from the First World War.
