Joining the Navy
Well, my next brother to me, upwards, was in the Navy. Just a rating. And my father wouldn't let me go in the Navy.
I was still too young to be called up, but he let me go to sea as an apprentice. That's the main reason for it.
And I thought afterwards it was the best idea. Because it gave me a future.
An apprentice officer
Well, I mean an apprentice officer is just starting, he's really only cheap labour. Because you do exactly the same as the seamen do.
You learn how to keep a watch properly, how to do the work on deck, placing ropes and various things, keeping a watch. It's very hard to explain. Really, you're just another A.B. Or you're another deckhand.
If somebody was wanted on watch, on the bridge, you'd be sent there.
Life on the ship
I was as sick as a dog. Very seasick. And it wasn't until after we'd been to America, that I started to get over it.
The ship I was on was an ex-American built ship that was taken over during the war. The accommodation was nothing very much. There was bunks, four bunks in a room. About the size of this. We ate and slept and did everything in that room.
Excuse me.
The bathroom consisted of a metal room at the end of the alleyway leading on to the deck. There was no shower in it. We had to get a bucket of water, warm water, and just stand in the middle of the tiles, the floor was tiled, and we had to wash ourselves there.
Go down and get hot water. There was a steam pipe in the bathroom to heat the water a little bit more if you wanted. But it wasn't luxury, believe me.
You'd have cereal for breakfast, and maybe eggs and bacon. Maybe. Every Sunday and every Thursday, I think we got eggs and bacon for breakfast. But the other meals were just the same. Cooked beef, potatoes, we carried a store of potatoes on board the ship. And all the other, carrots and all the rest of it. Coffee was shocking. It was horrible coffee. Tea, we got so much. The Board of Trade in England, they made out a supply, and that's what we stood to. We got eggs on Sundays and Thursdays. Things like that. We got so much butter allowed to us, and we got milk, condensed milk. Tins of condensed milk, that was the best way of carrying it. You couldn't carry fresh. Only when you crossed to port. So they've done condensed milk. The potatoes usually went bad halfway across the Atlantic.
I can't… We had steam heat because she was a steamboat. We just had radiators, the engine room supplied the steam to keep us warm. And the bunks were just metal bunks with metal springs and a thin mattress. Didn't matter too much to me, because I was dead tired by the time I got to bed. My father had to supply me with a uniform. And waterproof gear, sea boots, bedding. Some of our bedding was not supplied by the ship. As I said before that, you used to supply the purchasing, used to supply themselves with a bed, bedding and all the clothing. And we were on the same, virtually, except that we slept in a separate room. Crew slept in the accommodation down aft, the aft end of the ship. And we slept amidship.
German air attack
Different ships would come out of London or depending on which way they thought the convoy should go, to the north of Scotland, dodging through the islands of Scotland to get across to the other side, using all sorts of different channels.
And we were attacked by the German aircraft. We were in columns, maybe five columns of ships with say five ships in each column.Yes, we were just going along doing our business, and some German aircraft came down the centre of the columns and attacked us that way.
So, we had to man the guns, and the guns were mainly there for aircraft flying above us, not on the same level. But we didn't lose anybody, thank goodness. It was pretty frightening. I think once you're in it, you forget the fright, you're determined on keeping them away.
Convoy dangers
Well, to tell you the truth, the first night I got dressed in all my clothes and went to sleep like that. The second convoy I went in, I was in normal sleeping gear. If you get hit, the odds of getting away from it were very small. So, it was no good going to sleep in gear. And don't forget, it's very cold up there in Iceland. So, you used to dress for the cold. But luckily, I was spared that.
But I met people who had been, I met one cadet, and he'd been in a small boat after his ship had been sunk. He'd been in that for about 30 days. He wasn't all that good. But lights, if you showed a light anywhere, there'd be yells and screams to black it out. Jerry used to come with the subs and sit on the outside of the convoys. Used to be five or six lanes of ships. And at first, Jerry used to stay on the outside. And then they started coming inside the channels of the ships, to get closer.
Ship converted for TNT storage
Just to give you an idea, one ship I was in, they converted the tween decks, that's the hatch, there's the main deck, and there's a tween deck, and then the bottom of the ship. Not the bottom of the ship, but the lower deck of the hold.
They converted all our tween decks into storage for T.N.T. They lined the walls, I'll call them walls, bulkheads, with plywood or plain wood, and copper nails, so they wouldn't rub on anything, on steel. All our tween decks on this particular ship were converted into places for T.N.T.
