Alan Bristow Read online

  A few days later I received a letter from Cambridge University telling me I had won a place at Clare College and explaining that applicants had to be eighteen years of age or over before they could join the colleges, so I could start in the autumn of 1941. I was at once pleased and disappointed; while welcoming the offer, I was aggrieved that the intensive private tuition I’d been put through in my last two summer holidays had been premature, to say the least.

  At Christchurch our classrooms were scattered all over the place, sometimes a mile or more apart. War seemed far away. The Phoney War ran its course; we thrilled to tales of daring at Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain preceded the blitz on London and the devastation of Coventry. Portsmouth had been bombed earlier, in broad daylight, a small taste of what was in store for the town. Colonel Willis was called up and became CO of the anti-aircraft batteries defending Portsmouth, but for us life continued as it had in peacetime. We had carpentry classes in a disused barn on a beautiful estate outside Winchester, where the American owner bred Suffolk Punch horses for ploughing. These animals were a delight to me, and I spent a lot of time in their company. One of their distinguishing features was that they didn’t have any feathers on their legs, and they were sometimes disrespectfully referred to as the Suffolk Carthorse. Their tiny Irish groom warned me that the Punches had a tendency to squash the chap mucking out their stable, and indeed one of the stallions took a dislike to me and jammed me hard against the wall. The groom responded quickly to my calls for help, appearing leprechaun-like over the stable door and instructing me to stick my pitchfork into the belly of the horse. I did as I was told, with the gratifying result that the stallion pulled away, giving me enough space to leap over the stable door and into the courtyard, winded but undamaged.

  At the time of the evacuation I had been studying Latin, Greek, Ancient History, Mathematics and English, which marked me down as a student of classics destined to transfer to School House at Winchester College, and that is indeed where I was sent. Later in life, when I was pinned in a corner by some bore in an old school tie who demanded to know which school I had gone to, I said cheerfully ‘I’m a Wykehamist’ – a statement that carries weight in the snobbish recesses of the academic world. In fact, I got along quite well with the natives at Winchester, partly because of my sporting abilities. We played soccer against older boys, some of them taking for the second time subjects they had failed in the Higher School Certificate. I became aware of gaps opening up in the soccer team and in the classroom as these young men disappeared to join the armed forces. Like them, I was fed up with studying. My mind would wander from lessons that seemed trite when history was being made. Mum was particularly keen that I stick at my schooling, but somehow I managed to persuade my parents that I should take an apprenticeship with one of the merchant shipping companies. They consoled themselves with the fact that at least I wasn’t going into the armed services, and it was envisaged that I would terminate my apprenticeship at the end of two years and take up my place at Cambridge. That was the plan, anyway.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the Navy

  Joining the merchant navy slammed shut the door to my childhood. I went from boy to man overnight, with no adolescence in between. What the hell was I thinking of, deserting a cosy billet for a sea full of submarines? Far from being a safer alternative to the armed forces, the merchant navy suffered crucifying casualties. More than 24,000 merchant seamen were killed, one in three of those who served. My life became a litany of dive-bomber attacks, torpedoes and sinkings, rough-house foreign dockyards, mind-numbingly boring passages and occasional quiet stretches of leave, spent watching Somerset play cricket. But I enjoyed the war! People are surprised when I say that, but say it I do, and with relish. Every emotion is exaggerated in war, every experience and feeling is more vivid and extreme. I forged exalted friendships with comrades who stood together with me in peril. I saw terrible things, did terrible things, and I was bloody glad when it was over, but no one appreciates the joys of everyday humdrum life more than the man for whom life, when the shooting stops, is a welcome bonus.

  Late in 1940 I travelled to London, having been accepted for interview at the St Mary Axe offices of the Clan Line, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Union-Castle Shipping Company, which was in turn owned by the Cayzer family. The interview has not lodged in my memory, but obviously the cut of my jib did not suit the marine superintendent of the Clan Line as in due course I received a formal letter saying my application had been unsuccessful. The next shipping line on my list was the British India Steam Navigation Company, who had impressive offices in Leadenhall Street. The interview went well and I signed a four-year indenture as a cadet for training to be a Deck Officer. I was handed a list of uniform items I was to wear and told to report, properly kitted out, to the marine superintendent in Liverpool.

  British India had a link with a firm of tailors in London called Miller Rayner, from whom I purchased my uniform and a shiny black trunk with a big brass padlock. After a bare minimum of classroom formalities I found myself in Liverpool Docks, going aboard the passenger cargo ship Matiana, commanded by Captain L.D. Patterson. At the top of the gangway I was met by a smartly dressed Quartermaster in a uniform like that of a Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. Briskly he told me to make arrangements with the Duty Deck Officer to have my trunk lifted on board by the ship’s derricks. The Duty Deck Officer fobbed me off onto the Senior Cadet, Wade Smith, who had recently passed his Second Mate’s exam and was fulfilling the duties of a Fourth Officer. Smith was an unfriendly, common, ill-spoken lout, but my boxing training had taught me how to deal with such people and he didn’t cause me trouble for long.

  I was shown to my cabin, which I shared with five other cadets in three double-decker bunks. Being the youngest and newest recruit I was allocated the top bunk on the fore-and-aft bulkhead. At least it was nearest to the washroom and toilet. I lay down on my bunk and fell asleep, to be awakened by the stirring sound of the bagpipes. I thought I must be dreaming of bucolic days in Scotland, but the bunk was real enough, and so was the music. I went on deck to find the King’s Own Scottish Borderers embarking in full field kit.

  Late in the evening the Second Mate, Mr Bailey, came round. ‘I’m going ashore for a beer. Any of you boys want to join me?’ That seems a grown-up thing to do, I thought. We strolled a mile to a pub and ordered our beers in the bustle of last orders. After one pint the pub closed and we headed back through the blackout to the ship. The beer had made me slightly light-headed, and as I walked the cobbled streets with my shipmates in my brand new bridge coat from Miller Rayner, I felt I had found my métier. Suddenly there was a distant explosion, then another, then a third.

  ‘Air raid,’ said the Second Mate. ‘Run for it.’

  We stumbled across the cobbles in the dark, the buildings silhouetted against the flash of distant bombs, then with a whistle and a clatter a hail of shrapnel fell around us. It was from our own anti-aircraft guns; jagged pieces of metal shell casing screaming down from 10,000 feet, and if one caught you it could kill you. Suddenly the door of a terraced house was torn open and a voice shouted ‘Come on in!’ We ducked to safety, and while the bombs and the shrapnel rained down, the lady of the house made us tea.

  It was four o’ clock before the all-clear sounded and we continued our interrupted journey. At the dockside, all was confusion. The ship next to the Matiana had been hit by a bomb that had started a fire down below, and Captain Patterson, a red-faced Welshman with a hair-trigger temper, was loudly fretting that she might drift onto the Matiana. Officers had been sent to assess the damage; with fires burning all over Liverpool, the chances of getting serious fire-fighting equipment aboard were slim. It was decided the Matiana must be moved. Our hawsers were intertwined with those of the stricken ship, and men were sent out with axes to cut them. We rigged temporary lines to moor her further up and saw out the night in safety. The bomb blasts had made some serious dents in Matiana’s bow, but the Chief Engineer pronounce
d her fit to sail.

  At first light the apprentices were called to the bridge and assigned watch-keeping schedules with various Deck Officers. I was teamed up with Mr Bailey, who I came to know as a delightful character, always pleased to help the apprentices. By 6.30 am the engines were running, sending a ripple of vibration through the ship. An hour later Matiana was pulled off the dock by a tug, through the lock gates and into the River Mersey, where she took her place as the fifth ship in a line of about fifty merchant vessels of all shapes and sizes. The convoy was to be escorted westwards into the Atlantic through the worst of the submarine hunting grounds before dispersing. My first job on my maiden voyage was to stand on the fo’c’sle with the First Officer, binoculars glued to my eyes, scanning the river ahead for German mines. The First Mate was a small, stubby Welshman called Mr Jones, whom I addressed as ‘Sir’. It was bitterly cold, with a north-easterly wind blowing specks of snow across my face, and I was wrapped up in a thick woollen polo-neck sweater under my heavy bridge coat, with the band on my cap proudly bearing the crest of the British India line.

  The convoy speed was six knots, with a separation between each ship of about 100 yards. I searched as though my life depended on it, but saw no sign of mines. Suddenly, just at the point where the estuary gets wider, there was an explosion as the ship behind us hit a submerged magnetic mine. The explosion seemed surprisingly quiet; I felt the blast coming up through the deck, rather than being carried on the wind. The victim pulled off the channel to settle onto a mud bank and we kept going; with fifty ships behind us there was no thought of stopping to give assistance. The mine had been dropped by parachute during the night’s air raid. I asked Mr Jones how Matiana and other ships had been so lucky to have missed the mines. ‘We’ve been degaussed,’ he said. Degaussing was a complex job in which electrical cable was wound around ships to de-magnetise them, but at that time a lot of the merchant fleet remained to be treated and casualties were high.

  Steaming north at the speed of the slowest ship, the convoy spread out in five lines of nine ships. The centre line was headed by a converted Bibby passenger liner acting as an armed escort. Our destination was a mystery. Africa, the Mediterranean, the Far East; no doubt Captain Patterson and senior officers knew, but the Ministry of War Transport had not instructed anyone to inform Cadet Bristow, who had to be content to go wherever the Matiana took him. Convoys proceeded on a zig-zag course set down in papers handed to each captain before the voyage, but observing the timing of the course changes proved difficult and several ships bumped into each other over the next five nights. The weather did nothing to help, with winter storms churning the slate-grey seas into moving mountains that often hid ships just a few cable lengths off. Once clear of Northern Ireland, we were joined by two Canadian corvettes, which went dashing from side to side and all around us. One of them dropped three depth charges half a mile from the port side of the convoy, and the start of a new zig-zag pattern was signalled. From that moment we were on Red Alert, meaning that there was definitely more than one U-boat in the area.

  The storm slowly abated and in the evening of the sixth day, just before sunset, a U-boat surfaced briefly in the middle of the convoy just astern of the armed merchant cruiser, but no ship could fire at her for fear of hitting another. The submarine crash-dived. Captain Patterson explained over the tannoy that this was an extremely unusual occurrence, probably a result of the U-boat captain becoming disorientated. Whatever the reason, it made a mockery of our avoidance manoeuvres. We could zig and zag until we got dizzy, they’d sink us all the same.

  Watches on board Matiana were doubled up and changed every four hours, greatly reducing the amount of sleep you could get. Four hours on, four hours off around the clock was a schedule that could have been designed to induce maximum fatigue; exhausted though you were, you could lie in your bunk unable to sleep, grey waves rolling in front of you as you closed your eyes.

  Matiana was a ship of 9,000 tons, 485 feet long and 58 feet in the beam, and she’d been built at the Barclay Curle shipyard on the Clyde in 1922, a year before I was born. In the 1920s and ’30s she had carried passengers in some style between England, Africa and India. Her two steam turbines developed 4,300 horsepower and gave her a theoretical maximum speed of thirteen knots, and even twenty years after her launch the chief engineer could squeeze twelve knots out of her whenever the time came to run away. Had I known at the time that she would survive to be scrapped in 1952 I might have felt a lot more sanguine about our war service together. I served longer in Matiana than any other ship, but whenever I was sunk, it was aboard another vessel.

  Just as darkness was falling, the armed merchant cruiser got up steam and disappeared over the horizon, never to be seen again, leaving a convoy pattern of four lines. It seems strange that she should abandon us, but my unquestioning mind accepted that she had some more pressing imperative somewhere else. As dawn came the convoy was 400 miles south of Cape Farewell on the southern tip of Greenland with Matiana the third ship in the second column. Occasionally we heard aircraft noise overhead, and I was grateful for the heavy cloud cover that rendered us invisible from the air. We knew by the sort of osmosis that carries messages through a ship faster than any telegraph that we were being shadowed by a U-boat pack between four and six strong, and they were biding their time and positioning themselves for a concerted attack.

  It was late afternoon, but darkness fell early in those northern latitudes. On the bridge, Captain Patterson was making plans of his own. That night he asked permission of the convoy commander for Matiana to make her own way. His request was granted. Unleashed from the convoy, Matiana turned south. Captain Patterson ordered the Chief Engineer to lay the whip to those twenty-year-old turbines, and it seemed as though the Matiana would shake herself to pieces. It wasn’t long before the Chief Engineer was pleading with the Captain to reduce speed. The Chief Engineer was a Scotsman who was well regarded at British India, and Captain Patterson in particular had a high opinion of him.

  ‘God, you bloody plumbers are all the same,’ the Captain grumbled. But he ordered a reduction to ten knots; still the ship shivered in protest.

  Matiana had a First World War vintage 4.7-inch gun mounted on the stern and I was put in nominal charge of a crew of ‘DEMS’ – Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships – gunners, who were Army personnel put aboard to give the ship some small capability to defend herself. On the presumption that some or all of the DEMS gunners would quickly be killed in action I was required to understudy every part of the gun’s operation: as a trainer to range the gun, a gunlayer, a hand to shove the shell into the breech, another to follow up with the charge, and a third to fire the gun by pulling the lanyard. During our firing exercises it was decreed that one hand after another had been killed, leaving the last man standing to do everything, and I was eventually able to maintain a decent rate of fire as a one-man gun crew.

  As the days passed the atmosphere of trepidation aboard Matiana began to dissipate, the weather improved and even the passengers who’d been prostrated by seasickness during the storms began to enjoy the voyage. Two weeks out we sighted the rocky volcanic peaks of the Cape Verde Islands and dropped anchor to bunker before making for the British naval base at Freetown in Sierra Leone. We sailed on southwards towards the Cape of Good Hope with the sun shining, the sea calm and the war a fading memory. When not on watch, our time was spent learning the rudiments of our craft. Sometimes we were formally tutored in aspects of seamanship, in such arcana as Aldis lamp operations and sail signals, but for the most part it was on-the-job training. We would be required to take noon sightings, with a senior officer hovering at our shoulders to make sure we used the sextant properly. Sometimes it could be interesting, but often it was downright tedious, day after day. As the most junior cadet I was on the twelve to four watch, and there’s nothing worse than being called at 11:30 pm for the midnight to 4 am watch when you’ve got to get dressed and go out into the humidity and dampness, and much of the time
it’s pouring with rain.

  The First Mate, Mr Jones, was a bit of a sadist who, I think, might have enjoyed a cockfight. One day, in order to break the monotony, he suggested:

  ‘Why don’t you cadets have a little boxing session?’

  We agreed. Boxing gloves were produced.

  ‘Just to make it interesting .. .’ said Mr Jones – and he tied our ankles together, with about six inches of slack. This was just going to be a slogging match, and I might have objected but for the fact that they tied me to Wade Smith, whom I had grown to heartily dislike. There wasn’t much manoeuvring space, but if you move your body around quickly enough you can do quite well at close quarters. Much depended on getting an early punch in. I hit him really hard, down he went, and I managed to get another one in before he’d stood up properly. And that was the end of my bout. Such fights were to become common aboard ship, and with my compact shape and aggressive style, I was never beaten.

  We bunkered in Cape Town and sailed on into the Indian Ocean. Once again the tenseness returned, and I scanned the sea relentlessly while on gun watch. German surface raiders – armed merchant cruisers – were on the loose, and shipboard rumour said there were dozens of them and they were everywhere. Luckily, we never sighted one. We put into Mombasa, and for a young man who had just left home, everything was fresh, exciting and new. We steamed across the Indian Ocean to Colombo, where once again I had the opportunity to get rolling drunk in a series of waterfront bars; a group of us hired a rickshaw to get back to Matiana, anchored out in Colombo Bay, and we so harried the poor rickshaw wallah that he ran straight off the wharf and dumped us spluttering in the sea. Captain Patterson was choleric with rage and forced each of us to part with five shillings to pay for the rickshaw, which probably lies at the bottom of Colombo Harbour to this day. I protested that I was the most junior and least culpable man aboard the vehicle, and that five shillings was a lot of money, but the Captain was immovable.