Blitz Kids, page 32
There was little room for privacy onboard ships and the boys had to get used to the sights, sounds and smells of living in crowded conditions. With washing often limited to stripping off and using a bucket of water, there was no time for modesty. For fourteen-year-old Tony Sprigings, life was basic and sometimes unpleasant. If he wanted a wash, he took a bucket of cold water and heated it with steam. The bucket was wedged into the rim of the toilet seat, allowing him to strip off and wash. Three apprentices shared a cabin, sleeping in bunks. There was no running water, just a washbasin with a bucket underneath to catch the water. One night, someone was sick into the basin. Rather than emptying the sink and washing it down, he left the vomit. Later that night, the senior apprentice rose for his shift on watch. Seeing that the basin was full, he reached in and bathed his face in vomit. He went mad, shouting for Tony and blaming him for what had happened. As he later recalled, that was the way of life at sea: Tony was the most junior, so he took the blame and had to clean up someone else’s mess.
Like all first-timers, Tony found himself given the most menial tasks. Long hours were spent on watch; the rest of his time was spent polishing brass, painting and sweeping up. Whilst undertaking a twenty-one-day journey from Liverpool to Port Said, he made a serious error that might have undermined his career as a potential officer:
I was in charge of sweeping up the wheelhouse and chartroom. Swinging in front of me was a barometer. Only a young fool would have done what I did. At the bottom was a screw-cap. So I turned it and thirty-two inches of mercury poured out on to the chartroom floor. I nearly died of fright. I tried to get it back in with a dustpan and brush, but it was useless. I thought this was the end of my career. The captain went mad and screamed at me and chased me out of the chart room.
For most boys, there were far greater concerns than the wrath of an irate captain. Life at sea in wartime offered a swift, and often vicious, introduction to the horrors of modern warfare. One seventeen year old joined his first ship in June 1940 and his first voyage took him through the English Channel. Passing through the Dover Straits he was shocked to see corpses floating in the water, victims of the desperate evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. As Raymond Hopkins recalled of going to sea after just two weeks at a training school: ‘We were on the front line as soon as we left port.’
Throughout the war, the U-boat menace was ever-present and there was always the danger of the sudden, unheralded arrival of a torpedo. Setting off on his first voyage, sixteen-year-old Ron Singleton experienced the emotions shared by so many: ‘I thought I’d never see home again. Especially when I heard the first depth-charge explode. The escort was dropping them about three miles away but you could feel it. That unnerves you. You know there are U-boats about.’ Later on that first trip across the Atlantic he spent his nights on the deck, sheltering beneath a lifeboat: ‘I was so frightened, I couldn’t sleep. It’s difficult, especially if you are a youngster like I was.’
Tony Sprigings, on his first voyage and already unpopular with the ship’s captain, found a chance to redeem himself when his ship faced danger. Whilst on lookout, he spotted a mine ahead, caught on a wave coming towards them on the starboard bow. He rushed into the saloon to see the captain as he was eating breakfast. In a moment that seemed straight out of a farce, the captain simply looked up and said, ‘Take your hat off when you are in the saloon.’ Despite the captain’s indifference, he soon arrived on deck to watch the mine. The situation descended further into farce as a gunner on another ship opened fire on the mine. He couldn’t depress the guns far enough and sent high-calibre anti-aircraft rounds over the heads of Tony and his captain, piercing the ship’s funnel. Calm was restored when one of the Royal Navy escort ships safely detonated the mine. As Tony later recalled, it was the most exciting moment of his life.
Of course, war did not interrupt the normal routines of life at sea. Instead, it just added to the burden endured by the crews. For much of the time the young sailors were too preoccupied with work to worry about the realities of mines and enemy submarines. ‘The war wasn’t something constantly on my mind, there was always plenty of work to keep me busy,’ recalled Christian Immelman.
It was work, with the crew on ship maintenance, chipping, scraping and washing paintwork; sewing canvas awnings, splicing ropes and wires, learning to steer. On the bridge, keeping lookout in freezing rain, envying the mate on watch – cosy in the wheelhouse with the doors shut.
As apprentice Alan Shard recalled of his first voyage: ‘The first day we hit heavy weather in the Atlantic we were on our hands and knees scraping the poop-deck planks smooth with an iron. Normally this would already have been done by the shipyard, but in wartime they were in a hurry to get the ships out.’ Nor was there any time for queasy first-time sailors to be indulged:
The ship was prancing about like a racehorse and we were feeling the results. Hancock, the other apprentice, threw in the sponge and took to his bunk followed minutes later by an irate bosun. After threatening to make him eat some greasy bacon on a string (a favourite tactic for first trippers feeling seasick), the bosun gave him an hour to get back to work. Strangely enough, on practically every trip I made until I quit, I was slightly seasick for a couple of hours. I tried my first cigarette and immediately got queasy and could not turn up for work. The bosun was irate and gave me a severe bollocking that put me off smoking forever, for which I am truthfully thankful.
One similarly seasick apprentice recalled carrying a bucket around his neck on a rope, ready to collect his vomit. As many found, cleaning up their own mess helped them control their sickness.
Whilst most boys were thrown straight into the ‘front line’ of the war at sea, fifteen-year-old Arthur Harvey spent his first four months on a tanker, refuelling ships in the waters around Portsmouth. One month before his sixteenth birthday he was paid off and joined one of the more glamorous ships in the merchant fleet. In October 1941 he joined the Highland Princess, a ship belonging to the Royal Mail line, whose pre-war run had taken passengers between England and Buenos Aries, carrying Argentinian meat on the return journey. Arthur joined the ship as a pantry boy, one of six lads on the ship. On the first morning they reported to the saloon where the steward gave them six buckets, six cloths and six scrubbing brushes so they could scrub the whole of the saloon until the floors and all the furniture were gleaming.
With the ship cleaned and ready for service, nearly 3,000 troops were loaded on, including 500 officers who were housed in cabins. Arthur was shocked to discover that, even in wartime, the officers received the same standards in the dining room as pre-war passengers. Each day they sat down to breakfast, lunch and dinner, sometimes receiving a seven-course meal. While the officers relished their good fortune, the ship’s boys were less enamoured with the situation: ‘My job was to wash up all the pots and pans. We were down there from seven in the morning till eight at night just washing up.’
The drudgery of kitchen work soon gave Arthur Harvey an incentive to seek alternative employment: ‘I soon realized what I wanted to do – and it wasn’t kitchen work. So I got to know the bosun. He was a good lad. I went before the first mate and I was able to switch over to the deck crew. That was the start of my career.’ The change in employment also meant he moved from the overcrowded boys’ cabin, complete with straw mattresses, into a deck with more space to relax. Not that he had much opportunity to relax: working four hours on and four hours off, he never got more than three-and-a-half hours sleep at a time. There was no time to do anything apart from work, eat and sleep.
Once, returning from South Africa, Arthur was given an unexpected duty:
We took 100 high-ranking German officers – including some generals – who’d been captured in North Africa. We took them to New York. They were guarded by sailors from the Royal Navy. There was one guard on deck with me. I was a seventeen-year-old seaman and I had four or five of these German officers with buckets. I showed them what to do and then watched as they scrubbed the decks. That was a good job.
The experience of war soon changed the boys and, as most later admitted, it turned them into men. Onboard the Highland Princess, Arthur Harvey found that his duties took him to the most exposed positions, undertaking tasks that would have been unthinkable a few months earlier:
She had a permanent lookout post on the mast, halfway up. Further up was an apple barrel and we had to go up a rope ladder to the top one. We did two-hour shifts up there, lashed to the mast. There was no telephone so we had to shout and wave. It was nice in the tropics, but not so nice in winter. The rolling of the ship didn’t bother me, although I was 80 to 100 feet above the water. You could certainly see a long way.
On one trip to South Africa, Arthur was given an introduction to the bitter realities of life onboard a troopship. Carrying thousands of troops, it was almost inevitable there would be a number of casualties during the journey, with accident or sickness taking their toll on the passengers. One day, Arthur received a call from the bosun:
The bosun said to me, ‘Come on, you’ve got to learn your trade.’ I went to do my first one. He was an RAF officer who had committed suicide. It wasn’t a very pleasant job, but it had to be done. I had to sew him into canvas with a few fire-bars to weigh him down.
The youngster helped place the corpse into the canvas sack, then listened to the bosun’s instructions, sewing the sack shut. The officer was then taken to the deck, covered in a Union Jack and, after a short service, was buried at sea.
However, Arthur’s worst job came on his return to the UK from Argentina. Unbeknown to the crew, during the Atlantic crossing the refrigerators had failed:
We went into Swansea and, when the dockers opened the hatch, they refused to discharge it. So we had to sail out into the Bristol Channel. We were out there for about two days unloading all this rotten meat and throwing it into the water. The stench was unbelievable. We had to go down and open the hatches for them. 1,000 tons of meat went into water. Afterwards we had to clear up, and scrub down the hold – there was no one else to do it!
Whilst most of the youngsters who signed up for service at sea started at the bottom of the ladder as cabin boys or deck boys, others started at the bottom of the ship. When Raymond Hopkins signed on he gave his age as eighteen, rather than his real age of sixteen. It meant he got a man’s wage – with the additional £10 a month ‘War Risk Payment’, rather than the £5 paid to boys. He was also given a man’s work. He started service below the decks. It was a hot and dirty introduction to work: ‘I didn’t know anything about firing boilers, so I started off feeding coal down a shaft to the stokers. I had to make sure the lumps weren’t too big. Then I moved on to the boilers. I was looking after three of them, making sure they were all burning.’
The sixteen-year-old stoker – part of what was known onboard as ‘the black gang’ because of the coal dust that encrusted them – soon got used to the routine of throwing shovelful after shovelful into the boilers, dripping with sweat but all the time building up his strength:
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:
