Blitz Kids (28 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
In many cases, parents were never offered an opportunity to decide on their sons’ career choice. In Portsmouth, fifteen-year-old Arthur Harvey, who had earlier helped fight fires and rescue younger children from a bombed cinema during the Blitz on the city, had become frustrated with working in a factory. In early 1941, eager to find adventure, he began to search for alternative employment. Working close to the docks, he soon discovered an opening:
I wasn’t happy at work. I found out there was a fleet tanker in the dockyard that wanted a cabin boy. So on the spot I decided to go for it and went down to the Board of Trade office for an interview. They offered me the job. But they asked me my age. He said, ‘You are over sixteen, aren’t you?’ I said yes even though I was only fifteen. Then they said that my parents had got to sign for me to go to sea. So I said, ‘OK,’ and took the papers. I went out of the office, round the corner and came back half an hour later with a signature. I hadn’t told me mum I was going to go to sea, so I just signed her name on the paper and handed that in.
Like so many parents, Mrs Harvey was less than keen for her young son to leave home. With a husband already away with the RAF, she didn’t want to risk losing someone else. Yet she didn’t reckon with her son’s spirit:
It was a Friday that I’ll never forget. I went home and said to my mother ‘Have we got a suitcase?’ She said, ‘Yeah. Why?’ So I told her I’d got a job and I was going away to sea. She said, ‘You can’t do that!’ I said, ‘I can!’ And I packed my one suit into the case. Then I went down to the docks the next morning and joined the ship. She was very upset but grew to accept it.
It was not even as if he had given any warning to his mother, never having shown any interest in going to sea. As he later admitted: ‘It was on a whim.’
For some, the Merchant Navy was an obvious place to go after leaving school. For sixteen-year-old Tony Sprigings it seemed the sea was the only place for him. His father worked for Cunard in Liverpool, and his bedroom looked out over the Mersey with its miles of docks
and never-ending procession of ships heading off to join convoys. Like so many youngsters of his generation, he had dreamed of joining the RAF. However, that required qualifications. He had joined Birkenhead public school in September 1939, just as war started. Not having attended prep school, he immediately struggled to keep up with his classmates. By 1944 he began to realize a career in the RAF was becoming increasingly unlikely:
A fighter pilot was the most glamorous thing to be. But you needed good qualifications. You needed your school certificate. But I took it and failed the bloody thing. That was July 1944. I was coming up to sixteen. There were no re-sits. So I couldn’t stay at school and I didn’t have qualifications to join the RAF.
Thus the sea seemed his only option. At first his father, whose work entailed helping organize the convoy system, tried to talk him out of it. He had heard enough about the horrors of the war at sea and didn’t want his son exposed to them, telling Tony: ‘Don’t go – you’ll be killed.’ But the youngster couldn’t be convinced: he had heard plenty of reports of the terrible experiences of merchant seamen and seen the battered ships limping back into Liverpool, but displayed the typical arrogance of youth: ‘I was excited by the prospect. Like any young boy of that age you think you are invincible: you are never going to die. It’s not going to be you. I wanted to see what it was like at sea. I’d always been attracted by adventure.’ Accepting his son’s decision, he found him an apprenticeship with Brocklebanks, a Liverpool-based shipping company. His father’s influence was important, as he later recalled: ‘I didn’t have the qualifications for an apprenticeship. But they were so short, they would take anyone.’
If the Merchant Navy was to successfully keep Britain supplied, these young volunteers, and the ships they crewed, needed the protection of the Royal Navy. Like the Merchant Navy, the Royal Navy had a long tradition of taking boys to sea, and whilst war ended the official recruitment of ‘Boy Soldiers’, the Navy continued to send under-eighteens to sea. With the Royal Navy offering a start in life to youngsters, boy service continued to be popular. It was a way for youngsters from impoverished backgrounds to break away from their
homes and make their own way in the world. Going to sea had always been a lure for boys in search of glamour and excitement. To them, the sea meant adventure, getting away from home and ‘a girl in every port’. In an era before the mass arrival of Americans in the UK, it seemed that there was nothing more attractive than the sight of a sailor in his bell-bottoms, Trafalgar collar and white cap worn at a jaunty angle. When HMS
Royal Oak
was torpedoed in 1939, costing the lives of some 125 boys, many of those who lost their lives came from similar backgrounds to survivor Ken Toop who had volunteered to escape the poverty of his home life.
One boy who left home in search of adventure during 1939 was Albert Riddle. Born in the small Cornish village of Quethiock in 1924, the fifteen year old had always dreamed of escaping the village and going to sea. He did not live beside the sea, nor have seafaring ‘in his blood’ – he just felt drawn to the ocean and had no intention of joining his father on the farm: ‘From the age of seven or eight, when I was asked what I was going to do, I always said I was going to go into the Navy. There was lots poverty around – not much money in the village. So I was looking for a way out.’ His parents agreed: ‘They felt I’d got a chance to get somewhere in life.’
Eager to get to sea, he signed on with the Royal Navy aged fourteen, telling them he was fifteen. However, his true age was discovered and he was not called up until after his fifteenth birthday. On 15 January 1940, along with a group of twenty other boys, he arrived in Devonport to commence training at HMS
Impregnable
, a land-based training establishment. Ushered on to the parade ground, he was introduced to life as a boy in the Royal Navy:
There was a Chief Petty Officer parading up and down in front of us, like a turkey cock. I’ll never forget his words: ‘No matter how good a horse you think you are, you’ll find there are better jockeys in here.’ I lived to find out that was true. It was tough going.
Albert realized just how tough it was when they were called from their hammocks in the morning: ‘The Chief Petty Officer was a real bastard. He had a hat-pin and he’d stick the bugger in your arse as you were asleep. You soon got up. I thought, “What have I let myself in for?
What have I done?”’ As the boys also discovered, the Royal Navy had not yet abandoned corporal punishment: ‘The third offence of smoking was ten lashes with a whip – I didn’t get it though. I thought that isn’t for me. I’d seen too many with their arses red from being birched. When the poor buggers came back – my God.’
Remembering the words uttered by the Chief Petty Officer that first morning, Albert soon realized that, if he was going to make a career in the Royal Navy, he would have to play the game, keep out of trouble and not break the rules: ‘If you obeyed the rules it was OK. If you broke the rules, there was no way you could win. The instructors were old boys – petty officers – who’d done their time at sea. There were some bad buggers among them – like in any walk of life.’ For minor infractions, the boys were sent on to the parade ground with a sack containing a concrete block or carrying a .303 rifle above their heads. Albert recalled the punishment:
That’s not a light thing. In my day, they did things you couldn’t get away with now. I was a boy – not yet nine stone. I didn’t carry a lot of flesh. It was hour after hour, until you collapsed. So when you had to keep running around the parade ground carrying this rifle it made you realize, ‘I’m a mug doing this.’ Some tried to buck the system but you had to come in line at the end. You didn’t do anything wrong again!
The main feature of
Impregnable
was the impressive, if daunting, mast: ‘It was 175 feet high and on three levels. We went up through the rigging, through a trapdoor, on to the deck, then out on the beam. The boys went up the levels, right up until a tiny boy went out on to the button, at the top.’ Albert recalled the endless sessions of climbing the rigging: ‘Up at six in the morning, in heavy boots, going up and over the rigging. In any weather. And the last boy had to go over again. That was bloody stupid because someone had to be last. But you had to take your punishment.’ Another relic of the past was a row of cannons that the boys were paired up to polish each day.
Apart from endless sessions up in the rigging, the boys learned to tie knots, handle boats, and send Morse code and semaphore signals. They were also taught crafts, learning how to sew and make rugs. As Albert Riddle recalled, even mealtimes were regulated: ‘They were
meticulous about the way you held your cutlery.’ And they learned to clean, scrubbing the mess, their classrooms and under the hammocks in their sleeping quarters until they were spotless. More exciting was the gunnery training, learning to load, aim and fire the heavy guns. As Albert recalled, he soon realized he was learning far more than he had ever learned in the classroom of his village school. There was a good reason for this: ‘You learned more than at school because it was bloody beaten into you.’
After twelve months of training, sixteen-year-old Albert and his mates were sent to their first ship. Going north by train, they arrived in Scotland. Carrying their kitbags and struggling with the weight of their heavy canvas hammocks, they reached the dockside where their new home was revealed. Out of all the possible ships, they had been sent to the newest battleship in the entire fleet, the pride of the Royal Navy: HMS
Prince of Wales
. She was more than 227 metres long, with a top speed of 29 knots and was armed with ten 14-inch guns, sixteen 5-inch guns and fifty-six 20 mm and 40 mm anti-aircraft guns. Albert was immediately struck by the sight of the as yet unfinished warship: ‘It was an impressive sight – a wonderful ship. We were thrilled to be going onboard.’ He was just one of more than 150 boys who joined the ship ready for its sea trials.
Conditions on the ship were good, especially compared to some of the ageing, cramped ships in service at the time. The ratings slept in hammocks rather than bunks but this did not worry them. After all, they had grown used to hammocks whilst training and most found them warm and comfortable. For Albert Riddle, the biggest shock was how the boys seemed to spend most of their time: ‘We were always scrubbing the decks. In the Navy you scrub everything – even if it has just been scrubbed.’
There was a shock in store for the sixteen year old when they first left port and headed out to sea: ‘I soon discovered I was the world’s worst sailor. I had terrible seasickness. I never got my “sea legs”. I was always sick.’ He spent long hours stretched out, wishing he could die: ‘People made fun of me. I’d be stretched out in a locker room, sick as anything. They’d kick me – I couldn’t do anything. I was useless.’ Although he did not yet realize it, his seasickness would have a significant effect on his life at sea.
Some of the boys who left Merchant Navy training ships did not join merchant ships. Whilst training at the
Worcester
all boys were enrolled in the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR), the force composed of professional seamen who augmented the Royal Navy in time of war. It was very different from the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR), as
Worcester
boy Derek Tolfree explained: ‘In the RNR we were sailors trying to be gentlemen. In the RNVR they were gentlemen trying to be sailors.’ Upon completion of training at the college, the boys had the choice of resigning from the RNR and finding a merchant ship or remaining in the reserve and awaiting call-up by the Royal Navy. There was another option: leaving the RNR, taking a civilian job and awaiting conscription. Very few of the boys choose that route.
In 1942 Derek Tolfree left the
Worcester
and chose to remain in the reserve: ‘I got mobilized straightaway as a midshipman, Royal Navy Reserve, and was sent to a battleship, HMS
Nelson
. I was sent to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich for a couple of months. I had to learn boat handling – turning and berthing motor yachts.’
At the start of the war, the Royal Navy still relied on bugle calls to relay orders onboard its ships. On smaller ships, the bugler would simply blow the required notes to change watches, call the crew to action stations or abandon ship. On large ships, tannoy systems were used, with a bugler playing beside a microphone. History decreed that the bugler should not be a sailor but a member of the Royal Marines. Boys could join the marines aged fourteen, signing on for twelve years. The twelve years only started when boys reached the age of eighteen, meaning young recruits signed up until they were at least thirty years old. At the age of eighteen, boys could choose to remain as a bugler or join the ranks as a marine.
The continued use of boy buglers meant that throughout the war the Royal Marines recruited a stream of teenage boys who were trained at Eastney Barracks in Portsmouth. If the youngest boys ‘passed out’ as buglers, within months they could be sent to a ship almost immediately, meaning fourteen-year-old boys joined the crews of warships. Being able to join at such a young age produced a great sense of excitement – and no little trepidation – as the boys left home and began their training. Fourteen-year-old volunteer Len Chester recalled arriving to commence training: ‘Up to then I’d lived with other children. I had a
child’s mentality. Suddenly I’d entered a world of men, which was another traumatic experience. I’d never been amongst men before.’
Another youngster who volunteered as a ‘Boy Bugler’ was
thirteen-year-old
Robin Rowe. He was asked by his father if he would like to follow his elder brother into the Royal Marines after running away from home in an attempt to reach Plymouth, ‘whence embarked all great English seafarers’. When asked, he did not take long to make up his mind: ‘I thought about it for at least thirty seconds. There was a war on and I could be part of it at sea. Not everyone got killed and the Royal Marine uniform looked great.’
6
It was a curious choice of career: his elder brother had volunteered as a marine and had been lost at sea just months before. Robin went through the process of medical tests and, just like Len Chester back in 1939, was embarrassed by his nudity. Completely unclothed, he was told to jump up and grab an overhead bar, he then had to pull himself up till his chin reached the bar. At that point a doctor grabbed his testicles and told him to cough.