About the Book

A Bit Of A Life

From A Boy Sailor To Demobilisation

My father started his career as a boy sailor in 1932 with no conscious intention of ever working in warships or submarines. In fact, his initial fascination with naval life as a growing boy was sailing ships and the era of the adventurers who sailed into unknown seas, much the dream of many boys, but somehow my father always wanted to live that dream. So, after what appeared to be a frustrating time at school and an unhappy time at home, he joined the navy, intending to work hard and learn quickly so as to progress to become a good sailor. On joining the navy, my father had no specific desires or aspirations regarding which branch of the navy he wanted to join. When I was a young boy, l recall him saying that he originally liked the idea of being a drummer boy, but I don’t think he was ever sorry for the direction he ended up taking as a wireless telegrapher. So, perhaps, based on demonstrated above-average cognitive ability, he became a boy telegraphist and learned how to read the Morse code, how to write down signals, how to operate a Morse key, the composition of wireless messages, the colours and meanings of flags and their Morse code equivalents, wireless organisation of ships in company, or sailing, and, seemingly, this became the chosen pathway that took him to over twenty countries, assignments on various types of floating ships, and eventually into submarines, which proved to be a destiny. I remember when I was very small asking my dad on one of his stays at home what the difference was between boats, ships, and submarines, and his immediate answer seemed very logical even to a small boy—that is, a boat is a ship when it is so big that you can put a boat on it; Royal Navy submarines are an exception, and always termed boats despite the fact that they are unlikely to fit on a ship!

When my dad retired from the RN on his thirtieth birthday, 16 August 1946, and started to look for a job in Civvy Street, he was feeling a great deal of trepidation. How could he best use the skills and knowledge gained in twelve years in the navy? How would he cope with a job in a factory or an engineering works that required him to be there every weekday until retiring at age sixty? Would he have to start from scratch learning new skills, and what sort of role could he expect to be offered? And, most importantly, would he be a good husband to my mother and a good father to my sister and me? All these thoughts balanced against remaining in the service, carrying on with the only life he had known as an adult, and probably retiring at forty on a decent pension must have been buzzing around in his mind. In a letter sent to me much later in life, he wrote explaining how disruptive his homecoming was and how upset he was to find that during his absence I had ‘adopted’ my maternal grandfather as my father. He felt that ever since joining the navy he had lived a somewhat sheltered life where he had been what he called ‘mollycoddled’, wrapped up in a life of service discipline, but one in which every domestic need was catered for leaving them entirely free to cope with the requirements of the ship. This was particularly true in his case having almost run away from home to become a boy sailor and from then on being subjected to what he called ‘vigorous training’ in the ways of the service. He and his fellow sailors all had their dreams and fantasies about the outside world.