Australia Here We Come. ( Part 7)

At the end of the “course” at HMS Demetrius we had to sit exams. If you passed you qualified as a Supply Assistant, known in the Navy as a “Jack Dusty”. You had to sow a star shaped badge on the right sleeve of your unifom with a small “s” in the middle. If you passed with high enough marks, it meant that in a year’s time you could automatically apply for promotion to a “Leading Hand”. This meant more pay and you sowed an anchor (known as a hook) onto your right sleeve. I had no idea what happened if you didn’t pass the exams. I passed with high enough marks to apply for promotion in due course.

The Royal Navy had three main barracks. Chatham, Devonport and Portsmouth. I was going to Chatham so my Service Number began with a “C”. I had become CMX 741377.

At the end of July 1945, I was given a week’s leave. It was good to be home for a while but the week soon came and went. I had to return to Chatham Barracks, also known as HMS Pembroke. I was told by some of the more experienced lads that it was the worst of the three choices. The conditions were cramped and the food and supplies were poor. Overall it was a pretty grim place to be. But once again luck was on my side. Chatham was full, so I was sent just up the road to St Mary’s Barracks at Gravesend. It was the Naval Gunnery School. The great thing about Gravesend was that it was easy to get to Dagenham by train. Some evenings if I got “shore leave” I could slide off and go and see my girlfriend Evelyn in Dagenham for the evening and still get back before curfew.

After just a few weeks at Gravesend, I was given “Embarkation Leave”. Once you were given this you knew that when your short leave was over you would be sent to an embarkation camp to await further orders. Normally you were being sent somewhere overseas. On returning from leave I was sent to a camp in Cosham, Wiltshire. It was the most peculiar place. No one seemed to have any work to do. There were hundreds of us just wandering around. It was here that I met up with an old school friend from Highbury. Eric Warner.

The weekends were a real joke. There was a train that went from Cosham station to Paddington. Ratings would slide down the embankments and board the train on the wrong side. The reason being that they had no leave pass and no train ticket!

The first time I travelled on the train I was in one of the end coaches. By the time I got to the ticket barrier it had gone. Knocked down by hoards of marauding naval ratings and the ticket collector just swept aside. Coming back, when the train pulled into Cosham station dozens of ratings would get off the wrong side of the train, jump the tracks and scramble up the embankment and back to camp.

Eventually Eric Warner and I were told we were being sent to Australia. We were just two of hundreds of naval ratings being sent there. It was early in October 1945 and we all boarded a train for Southampton. Waiting for us there was the S.S. Aquitania. It was the biggest thing I had ever seen. I think at that time she was the largest ship afloat at 45,000 tonnes. She needed to be because apart from 2000 Naval ratings of all ranks there were also 2000 Australians going home to be demobbed.

Although the war was now over and we didn’t have to worry about U-Boats or air attacks, the seas was pretty rough. We were crammed into “troop decks”, hundreds to each deck sleeping in columns of three. One man slept at the bottom of the column, one in the middle and one at the top. I was lucky, I got a top bunk. It was no good being “shy” as you were living and sleeping in close proximity to the next bloke.

We were issued with salt water soap as the showers were fed from the sea. You can imagine how cold that was!

We learnt that we were going first to Freetown in Sierra Leone. This was known as the “white man’s grave” due to the fact that malaria was rife there at the time. From there we would go to Capetown and then across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to Australia. The whole journey taking four weeks.

Within a few days of setting sail we ran into serious trouble. In the Bay of Biscay we hit an almighty storm with winds gusting up to 100mph. The waves were huge, even higher than the upper deck of the Aquitania. She was 45,000 tons and once a ship of that size starts to toss and pitch it is impossible to walk without being thrown all over the place. The decks were strewn with people being sea-sick. My mate Eric Warner was very sick. He had to force himself to eat just so that he had something to throw up. Fortunately it had no effect on me at all. My biggest problem was trying to stay in my bunk without falling out!

After two days the storm passed and it started to get very hot, especially on the troop deck. The smell of thousands of men all sweating together in confined spaces will live with me forever.

Life on a troop ship is not for the faint hearted or those with a delicate disposition.

By the time we arrived at Freetown we were getting used to the heat. But we were not allowed ashore as we hadn’t been given any tablets for malaria. Only a handful went ashore to get supplies from their Naval barracks but were soon back on board.

While we were anchored we were surrounded by “Gum-boats”. These are boats with natives on board trying to sell there wares. In exchange for a packet of fags I got Evelyn a small wicker basket. Some of the lads would throw coins overboard into the sea and watch in amazement as the locals would dive hundreds of feet to retrieve them.

Soon after leaving Freetown I was approached by a petty officer. He asked if me and Eric Warner would like to earn a few shilling just for a few hour’s work a day. We agreed. He took us down to a small storeroom so deep in the ship that if we’d gone any further we’d have been in the sea. In the store room were boxes and boxes of navy scrap. Old shirts, shorts, trousers, belts, all sorts of bits and bobs. He told us that if anyone came down with a “ticket” signed by him we were to give them whatever was on their ticket. All sorts of servicemen came down to our little store room and we gave them whatever was listed on their ticket. We soon realised that this Petty Officer had somehow managed to purloin these stores and was selling them and making a nice little profit. Give him his due he paid us every day and we didn’t ask any questions…

Our next port of call was Capetown. The bay of Capetown is huge and in a beautiful setting. We were anchored in the centre of the bay. Our view was the whole of Capetown dominated by Table Mountain behind it. At night with lights from the town and clear skies it was a truly wonderful sight.

It was in Capetown that a very strange thing happened, contrary to all the rules and regulations of the Navy. All day, small boats had been circling the Aquitania full of girls shouting “When are you coming ashore.” The Troop Commander had decreed that there would be no shore leave. Thinking about it now I can see his point, but back then the news went down very badly.

But, someone cut one of the scrambling nets free and shoved it over the side. Men started to scramble down and get into the boats with the girls. Within a few minutes more and more scramble nets were cut free and hundreds of men were now going over the side.

I looked at my mate Eric Warner and he shrugged his shoulders. We both figured that the officers would have a hard time disciplining hundreds of men, so we joined in, scrambled down the nets, got into one of the boats and headed into Capetown. We had a great day, eating exotic fruit and fresh grub and being very “civil” to the local girls. I couldn’t believe how segregated it was.I knew nothing about apartheid, I'd never even heard the word before. It was like there were two towns in one. One for Black people and one for White people. I found it extremely odd.

Of course getting there was the easy bit. Now we had to get back to the ship. There were small boats everywhere eager to take us back. We boarded one and to our horror a Naval officer got on with us. I was sure that he was going to ask to see our shore leave papers and we would end up in clink. But it turned out that he had also “escaped” for the day and said nothing. We got back to the ship, scrambled back up the nets and went to our bunks. There were no repercussions. I have no idea if we all got back okay or whether we left some men back in Capetown. No one seemed to care.