Blitz Kids, page 46
Not all of the senior officers were as attentive as John’s Dutch captain, meaning most youngsters were free to enjoy whatever the ports might offer. The young seamen, growing ever-more confident, slipped easily into the lifestyle enjoyed by sailors the world over. Arthur Harvey recalled his first visit to Buenos Aries as a sixteen year old. The port was full of beautiful girls, there were German seamen in many of the bars and there was no blackout. It was a far cry from the ruins of Portsmouth. Most memorably: ‘The older men took us into one or two naughty bars. They showed us the world.’
After four years of war, in which he had spent his time in barracks in Portsmouth, moored at Scapa Flow or on Arctic convoys, Len Chester finally got to ‘see the world’. During 1943 his ship docked in a number of North African ports:
We weren’t popular in Oran. The people there preferred the Germans, because they were never drunk. With the ‘jolly jacks’, there were drunks in town every night. In Algiers the Casbah was out of bounds but we went there anyway. If it wasn’t out of bounds, we probably wouldn’t have bothered to go there! At the time I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to see these places. As for the brothels: I only ever went into them for research.
Boy Bugler Robin Rowe was also in the Mediterranean ports during 1943. In Algiers one of his shipmates insisted he accompany him to a brothel. The fifteen year old didn’t want to appear an innocent and went along. They chose a nearby establishment, the Sphinx, and joined the queues of sailors and soldiers. As he observed, whilst most people referred to the manageress as the ‘Madam’, sailors had a more down to earth name for her: ‘Mother Judge of Pricks’. The bugler was on such low wages he had to borrow money to pay for the experience. After choosing a girl, he went back to pay the cashier but decided against it. When his mate came out, Robin did not admit he had not gone through with it. He asked the sailor what it had been like. He replied: ‘Bit like throwing a banana up an alley.’3 The innocent bugler had no idea what he was talking about.
Arriving in Calcutta in late 1943, Arthur Harvey received a rapid introduction to India life. He had already seen gangs of women loading coal on to ships from baskets carried on their heads. But that was mild compared to what followed. As they sailed up the River Hooghly he was shocked to see corpses floating past. Bengal was enduring a famine that cost the lives of three million people. If he thought the bombing of British ports was bad, nothing could have prepared the seventeen year old for this. People lay in the streets, dying of malnutrition, the scenes becoming so commonplace that people simply walked by. Arthur recalled: ‘Wagons used to come round during the day to collect the dead and take them for burning. A horrible smell of death hung over the city for many weeks.’
The situation was compounded by Japanese air raids forcing Arthur to man the ship’s guns and supplement the city’s meagre defences: ‘So we became part of the air defence. We had a 12-pounder and 4.7-inch guns. We were firing away with the Oerlikons. I don’t know if I hit anything – I didn’t see any of their planes get shot down. But at least we kept them up at altitude.’ The only light relief was that a nearby ship was loaded with beer destined for the Army. Each time the Japanese attacked, the ship’s crew left the ship unguarded. Arthur and his mates unloaded the beer, carrying the bottles back to their ship. Eventually the local CID was sent to investigate. By a stroke of fortune one of the policemen was from Arthur’s home city of Portsmouth. Even more incredibly, he was the former boyfriend of Arthur’s mother. He left the ship on good terms with the crew and the matter was dropped.
For seventeen-year-old Stan Scott, there was a certain frustration about being alone in Bombay after having been thrown out of his unit for being underage. With weeks to kill before a ship was due to take him home, he had little to fill his hours:
I was naive. I had no idea what to do. I had a breakfast, had a shower, would go swimming, sunbathe, then lunch, go to the cinema. I didn’t know what to do with myself. One day, I got in a gharry to go down town. Sitting in the corner was this bint. All of a sudden she was pointing at her crotch and looking at me. When I got to where I was going I got out and the driver asked me, ‘You no want her?’ I said no. I told the others in the camp and they all laughed at me. But I’d seen the film and lecture on VD when I was training. It was horrible. I didn’t want that!
Tattoo parlours became a frequent haunt of youngsters wanting to appear more grown up. Apprentice Alan Shard recalled a stopover in India:
Sighted a tattoo parlour and boldly went in. After flipping a coin Jimmy Pearce went under the needle for a heart with a dagger through it. He did not look very comfortable and Drakley and myself looked at our watches and decided we had better not miss the evening meal, much to the disgust of our shipmate. He was the only one that got a tattoo the whole time we were together.
The trio also displayed a taste for boisterous antics:
On the way to the dock, which was a fair distance, we hailed a gharry – an open carriage drawn by horses. About a hundred yards from the gate we suddenly decided to drop off whilst the gharry was underway and the driver got to the gate before realizing that he had lost his fares. We thought it was a great until he saw us and turned on a dime and chased us up a dead end street whilst cracking a fourteen-foot horsewhip. We capitulated and forked out more than we would normally have paid.
Wanting to be like their crewmates, most boys were drawn to pubs and bars where they received their first introduction to drinking. As a seventeen-year-old apprentice from a non-drinking family, Norval Young had a career-threatening introduction to alcohol whilst in port in Italy. He was supposed to be keeping an eye on the MV Athelvictor but was invited onboard a nearby ship for lunch. The crew told him they would warn him when his captain was returning so he could get back to his post. However, during the meal he was given a drink that took his breath away: it was his first taste of rum, meaning he was less than steady when he returned to the ship. ‘When I got out in the fresh air it hit me. I was a stupid young boy. The captain said my career was over.’ Telling the captain he would take any punishment given, Norval was told he was to be sent home:
I told him if he sent me home, I wouldn’t go. I’d run away. I said, ‘I dare not go home, my father will give me more punishment. I’d made so much trouble to go to sea, now I’m here, that’s it, I’ve got to stay.’ So the captain said for the next six months I was not to leave the ship. Every time we were in port I was to go over the side, strip the hull and paint it with red lead. I had the cheek to say, ‘Thank you very much, sir.’
The captain kept to his word, but as Norval later admitted, it was worthwhile: ‘It was a steep punishment but if I had been kicked off I would never have got another apprenticeship.’
For the boys, many of whom had joined out of a genuine enthusiasm to ‘do their bit’ for the war effort, there were many strange encounters. Once in neutral ports they faced the curious experience of coming face-to-face with their German counterparts. Alan Shard recalled his first encounter with the ‘enemy’ whilst in neutral Goa:
A half-dozen of us called in at the only ‘pub’ in the area and spent a really nice evening. About 2000hrs our group started to sing sea shanties and to our surprise at a table at the far end a bunch of white men also started their own sing-song, but in German. Consternation reigned as we weighed our chances, but the second mate stood up and waved them over to our table. I was completely flabbergasted, they all came over except one man who raised his arm in a salute, said, ‘Heil Hitler,’ and marched out. Whereupon his shipmates all waved their hands at his back as if to say good riddance. What a night: by throwing-out time we were all good buddies.
The many and varied ports of the Caribbean were a constant source of wonder to the boys. Bernard Ashton enjoyed trips to Georgetown in British Guyana, where he was fascinated by the street scenes. The streets thronged with people of all nationalities and he watched barbers with their chairs out in the streets, cutting hair with open razors. The cafes were packed, with music wafting out from their open fronts. Bernard watched as the older seamen filled the bars, spending their wages before their sober crewmates, such as Bernard, had to drag them back to the ship. In Trinidad, he visited the Chinese cafes, watching the hard-working Chinese waitresses as they served beer, curry and rice to gangs of hungry seamen. Another young seaman, arriving in Guyana on his first trip, was told that rum was cheaper than Coca-Cola: ‘So I drank rum.’
The West Indies was a source of rum, spices, fruit and cane sugar. As they sailed from port to port, the sailors faced a barrage of locals trying to sell goods to them, and they were soon gorging themselves on bananas. Bernard Ashton joined the routine of trading old jam jars and tins for fresh produce. He learned how the sailors would buy cuts of sugar cane, leaving it to ferment onboard. The old hands showed him how to make toffee using sugar, sucking on it as they worked on deck on their way back across the Atlantic. He also felt a twinge of nostalgia when he noticed his ship’s cargo included barrels of pitch from the same company that supplied the Kent coal mine where his father worked.
Whilst many parts of the word seemed exotic, it was the modern luxuries of the United States that most appealed. When Christian Immelman first arrived in the United States in late 1939, he was pleasantly surprised to see a well-stocked store near the oil refinery in Galveston, Texas, where they were collecting fuel:
Went ashore with a crowd after the evening meal to a general store, in the middle of nowhere, about half a mile up the road from the oil refinery. The store sold everything including boots, saddles, knives, guns, clothing, cooking utensils, milkshakes and beer. It had a juke box. We stayed there till late having a musical drinking evening, and sailing early next morning.
Enjoying the opportunities available in the United States became a regular feature of his visits: ‘My first call on going ashore in any US port, before hitting the nearest bar with the boys, would be to a drugstore for a fried egg sandwich on beautiful white bread together with a vanilla milkshake.’
His trips to American ports were in direct contrast to his time back in the UK. Between his sixteenth and eighteenth birthdays he received no leave in the UK and thus, despite having sailed around the world, had no contact with his family. In those two years he snatched just a few hours with his mother in Cardiff after she had discovered his ship was due to dock there. Another boy recalled being in Galveston in 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. He watched as his openly delighted British crewmates celebrated the United States’ declaration of war, telling them, ‘You’re in now!’ and berating them for how long they had taken to enter the war.
The United States was home to one city they wanted to visit above all others: New York. For Christian Immelman, it fast became his favourite:
Whenever we loaded in one of the refineries in the New York vicinity, after our day’s work, we’d head for Manhattan and the bright lights. First stop would often be the British Apprentices’ Club in the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. There’d be plenty of snacks, a fruit punch bowl and nice girls to dance with. First-time visitors would be given a gift bag holding a torch, a balaclava and a plug of tobacco. It was a good place to chat with apprentices from other companies. After the club we’d drift up to Broadway. I had a couple of favourite bars: the Wigwam on 44th Street, the Crossroads in Times Square, Jack Dempsey’s restaurant for the biggest, toughest T-bone steak you’d ever find. Then there was the Paramount cinema on Broadway, where for a few cents one could see a movie then an hour of one of the big bands. Also, one was given a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes free on admission.
On one trip to New York the crew of his ship took two cases of Scotch whisky. They swapped the whisky for two Thompson sub-machine-guns which were taken onboard as additional protection
Yet for most of their time in New York, such martial thoughts were far from everybody’s mind. As seventeen-year-old Ron Singleton later recalled: ‘It opened my eyes. Went to see the bright lights of Times Square and everything. It was unbelievable. We could get candy bars out of chocolate machines.’ He also found the local population shocked to see him and his mates – three teenage British boys – on the streets of their city. They were amazed how boys so young had braved the Atlantic to reach their city. For Ron it was a strange experience: ‘They thought we were real heroes – we weren’t.’
At the heart of the gangs of British seamen and boys who experienced life in New York was one particularly lucky group: the ‘Distressed British Seamen’, those who had been fortunate enough to survive the sinking of their ships and had been sent to the city ready to await another to take them home. By early 1940, the Seaman’s Church Institute at 25 South Street had already housed, fed, reclothed and cared for the crews of thirty-eight merchant ships lost in the Atlantic. In late 1940 the staff recognized two of the new arrivals, Towers and Hardie, two eighteen-year-olds who had survived the sinking of the Blairangus. Over a year earlier, at the age of seventeen, they had both been among the survivors of the sinking of the Blairlogie. Despite their youth, they were true veterans of the Battle of the Atlantic.
The ranks of the ‘Distressed British Seamen’ in New York were joined by ex-Prince of Wales Sea Training Hostel boy Bernard Ashton after his ship was torpedoed by an Italian submarine in March 1942. Before reaching New York he had an enjoyable few weeks in Puerto Rico. Having been landed in San Juan, Bernard, his mate Peter Pickett and the rest of the crew were sent to a hotel. To the youngsters it seemed like something from a film. The hotel was built around a courtyard to provide shade, with large open windows, ceiling fans and slatted saloon doors. Sitting out on the veranda, sipping iced drinks, it seemed a world away from the coalfields of Kent or the dirty, bombed slumscapes of British ports.
The first thing the teenagers needed to do was to buy some new clothes – after all, Bernard couldn’t go out dancing in his vest, football shorts and boots:
We went into a store and bought a straw panama hat, and a heavy cotton ‘beach suit’ – you could wear the jacket as a shirt or wear a shirt underneath it. It was blue with a white stripe and had turn-ups. For underwear, we bought boxer shorts – they were unheard of in England, much better than the baggy old English pants. And we had two-tone shoes. I thought I was Jack the Lad.
They spent their days in a Red Cross canteen, drinking coffee or milkshakes and eating cake. Or they went swimming at local beaches, where they could admire the girls and enjoy the protection of shark nets. At night they would go down the waterfront, sitting outside bars, watching the local girls parading in their finest dresses. After wartime England, everything seemed so alive. In the bars, the jukebox would be playing all night, and Bernard’s mate – handsome, six foot tall and an accomplished dancer – was an immediate hit with the local girls. Peter would be dancing, jukebox playing all night. By day they could drink Coca-Cola and, by night, they preferred Cuba Libre cocktails of rum, lime and Coca-Cola. Then after dancing till 1 a.m., the boys would go for coffee and a steak. It was a far cry from the home ports with their beer shortages and bomb shelters.
Through Peter’s dancing skills, the boys met some local women who took them out to dances, bars and restaurants. Peter’s girl, Christina, had to take a chaperone, so took along her friend, a twenty-eight-year-old married woman. The teenage Bernard felt uncertain in the company of one so mature: ‘She was all over me. I was dragged up to the bedroom.’ What might have been fun was tempered by the sight of a photograph of her husband: he was in a police uniform and receiving an award for pistol shooting.
After four weeks, the boys had to leave Puerto Rico and head to New York. Having spent all their money in bars and clothes shops, they could not afford suitcases and were forced to carry their possessions in wooden boxes marked ‘Heinz Beans’, with improvised string handles. In his box, Bernard even carried a white tuxedo jacket that had been given to him by a man who thought it might be useful in New York.
Arriving in New York by liner from San Juan, the seamen were met by taxis which took them to hotels for their first night. Bernard and Peter arrived outside the Times Square Hotel. As they stepped out and looked up in amazement at their accommodation, a uniformed bell boy approached, took their wooden bean-boxes from their hands and led them into the hotel. Once more, the two teenagers had entered an unfamiliar world. From the lift they were taken to their accommodation, an unexpectedly comfortable room with a telephone and a writing desk. Once again, it was a pleasant surprise after the missions and hostels they routinely resided in. As nice as it might have been, there was a whole city awaiting them, and they immediately hit the town: ‘We went straight to a dime-a-dance joint. We had our photos taken in a photo-booth, which we had never seen in England. I was wearing my white tuxedo.’ In their tropical outfits, the English teenagers were the focus of attention: ‘As usual everyone in the joint wanted to dance with Peter.’ Walking the streets, they were continually amazed at the contrast to home: ‘There were all the lights on in Times Square. The cinemas were lit up.’ Of course, it was too good to be true. After just one night in the Times Square Hotel, they moved to the mission in South Street, where they ate their meals at the Merchant Navy club.
At the mission, the staff were struck by the Puerto Rican outfits worn by the boys: ‘beach suits’ and straw hats were hardly appropriate for New York. When one of the staff asked, ‘Is that all the clothes you have?’ the boys were taken to a room filled with suits, shoes and hats. Again the boys were in a wonderland. Coming from the land of clothing coupons, New York was stunning. Picking out a brown woollen suit and suitable shoes, Bernard felt correctly dressed for the city. They quickly fell into a routine of going out to dances and restaurants, and once again teamed up with local girls.
