The Tattie Lads

by Ian Dear

  Several more of the Saint class were lost during the war. Caroline Moller was sunk by an E-boat off Cromer in October 1942; St Breock and St Just were sunk by Japanese aircraft in February 1942, the former off Sumatra, the latter off Singapore; as already mentioned, St Cyrus was mined off the Humber in January 1941; and St Issey was mined off Benghazi in December 1942 while supporting the seesaw battles in Libya. She sank with all hands, and in reporting the incident the C-in-C Mediterranean signalled that St Issey ‘had done noble work with Inshore Squadron throughout every Western Desert Campaign; her loss is much regretted’.7 Others were lost due to stress of weather: St Sampson foundered in the Red Sea in March 1942, and St Olaves was wrecked off north-east Scotland in September 1942.

  The loss of St Olaves made the newspaper headlines, not because such a misfortune was exactly good propaganda, but because the authorities must have decided that the bravery of one man definitely was. Headed ‘Drama of the Dark Sea’,8 the newspaper reported the courageous action of Chief Petty Officer Alfred Kennar, of Brixham, Devon, when the St Olaves was caught in a storm while towing a water barge around Duncansby Head, Scotland’s most north-easterly point. A vicious ebb tide had just set in, and it was pitch black and raining heavily, and wartime blackout meant there were no lights to show where the land was. At the height of the storm the tow parted, not once but twice. In a desperate effort to save the barge – and the men on it – the attention of the commanding officer, Lt AT Lewis RNR, must have been diverted, for just after the line had been reconnected for a third time the lookout shouted ‘breakers ahead’, and moments later the St Olaves hit submerged rocks and stuck fast.9

  Lewis ordered the barge, which drew a good deal less than the St Olaves, to be brought alongside, and her crew clambered aboard. The tow was then cut and the barge was blown ashore, some two hundred yards from the rescue tug. An attempt was now made to launch the St Olaves’ lifeboat, but this failed when the rescue tug’s violent motion smashed it against her superstructure. Four of the crew volunteered to take one of the two Carley floats and row ashore with a rope. But the rope parted and the Carley float disappeared into the darkness. Luckily, all four managed to get ashore.

  The ebb tide drove the tug deeper on to the rocks until they holed her and flooded her engine room. Everyone aboard was now in a very dangerous situation indeed, and Kennar, who was twenty-seven years old and a strong swimmer, suggested he swim to the barge with a rope. The other Carley float could then be used to ferry the crew, four at a time, by hauling themselves to the barge. This was agreed, and Kennar told his friend Jack Gardiner to stand by the line and be ready to haul him back if he got into trouble. Jack said he would.

  ‘I had full confidence that Jack would keep his promise,’ said the young Kennar, in an interview with the newspaper.8 ‘I was lowered over the starboard side of the St Olaves. It was the coldest sea dip I had ever had.’ But he made it to the barge and hauled himself on board. He then saw the lights of rescuers descending to the beach, but each time they fired a rocket over the rescue tug, the attached line broke. Eventually, the commanding officer ordered the second Carley float to be launched and the crew ferried themselves to the water barge, leaving just the commanding officer, a signaller and one able seaman on the stranded St Olaves.

  At first light the local lifeboat was seen approaching and took off the entire crew, including the ship’s dog. The weather was so bad that the newspaper reported the lifeboat coxswain was in line for a lifesaving medal, and Kennar received the British Empire Medal (BEM) for his bravery. But there was no saving St Olaves and she became a total loss.

  St Mellons had a more successful war. Although launched just before the 1918 Armistice, she wasn’t commissioned until 1939 and was the only Saint class still named as a rescue tug in a February 1944 CAFO, which named and categorised the rescue tugs then operating (see Appendix). In November 1939, she was stationed first at Kirkwall, the Orkney Islands’ capital, and later at Falmouth, and was almost constantly at sea. In January 1940, when the Pink List shows her to have already been armed,10 she rescued twenty-two members of the crew of the 3161-ton Greek cargo ship Tonis Chandris, which, after being chased by a U-boat, ran aground in fog near Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands.

  Then in February she was dispatched to bring in the 4996-ton British freighter Loch Maddy, a straggler from convoy HX-19, which had been torpedoed near Copinsay, one of the Orkney Islands, and abandoned by her crew. A few hours later, before St Mellons could reach her, the ship was torpedoed again, and broke in two. St Mellons towed the stern section to Inganess Bay, near Kirkwall, and beached it, saving more than 200 tons of her cargo.

  In March, she attempted to bring in an abandoned Norwegian merchant ship, the 1267-ton Svinta, damaged during an air attack while outward-bound from Kirkwall to join the Norway-bound convoy ON-21. As the rescue tug was towing the Svinta to Kirkwall, there was an explosion – probably a mine as there is no evidence she was torpedoed – and the Svinta sank a few miles off Orkney.

  After moving to Falmouth, St Mellons was damaged in an air raid. While under repair she acted as a depot ship, before moving to Sheerness in September 1940 where her armament was increased by the addition of a twelve-pounder gun and a two-pounder pom-pom, these being fitted for unspecified special duties. When the special duties did not materialise, the pom-pom was removed, as its position prevented her from towing normally. In November 1940 she made good use of her armament by shooting down one German bomber and damaging another. The same month she fought off an air attack while towing into Harwich the V class destroyer HMS Vega, which had been badly damaged by a mine.

  Perhaps it was this prowess at downing German aircraft that led to discussions in early 1941 for her to have her pom-pom refitted – in a position that would not restrict how she towed – and for her to be used as a decoy for the four-engined Focke-Wulf bombers that were harassing British shipping.11 This never materialised either, and she later became part of the Rescue Tug Convoy Escort Service on its formation at harwich in August 1942, and then towed parts of the prefabricated harbours to France after D-Day. By January 1945, she was commanded by Lt Arthur Godfrey Hawkins RNR of San Demetrio fame, and ended the war stationed in the Scheldt Estuary. For a vessel that had been launched in 1918, she gave a good account of herself.

  Hawkins was second officer of the tanker San Demetrio when, on 5 November 1940, the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer attacked her in mid-Atlantic and she was soon on fire. She was carrying 9000 tons of petrol and the crew abandoned ship, but when by some miracle she did not explode, Hawkins returned. He and the men from his lifeboat dowsed the flames and, without any navigational aids except the sun and the stars, managed to bring the tanker to the west coast of Ireland.

  By then her presence had been reported and Superman soon appeared with orders to take her to Londonderry or the Clyde. Hawkins, who was later reported as refusing a tow because it was too expensive, asked the rescue tug what speed she could make. ‘Nine knots,’ came the answer, to which Hawkins immediately replied that he could still make ten, and that he’d prefer to make the Clyde under his own steam. A destroyer then arrived which, with Superman standing by, escorted the tanker to Rothesay Bay.12

  Superman, as she was entitled to do, later made a claim for escorting the tanker from Clare Island to the Clyde,13 but the courts ruled that Hawkins and those with him had salvaged the ship themselves – and all but two hundred tons of her precious cargo – and were awarded substantial sums of money for doing so. In what must have been a unique case, the tanker’s owners, the Eagle Oil and Shipping Company, guaranteed the men’s Court costs and not only did not contest the court’s decision, but strongly supported it. A book was published about the incident, which was later made into a film called San Demetrio, London, one of the few wartime films featuring the courage of the wartime Merchant Navy. For his bravery and leadership, Hawkins was awarded the OBE and in a nice piece of irony joined the Rescue Tug Service shortly af
terwards.

  Buccaneer’s trials

  Realising the Saint class were getting rather long in the tooth, during the 1930s the Admiralty had ordered five 840-ton, 174 ft Brigand class tugs: Brigand (the first to be commissioned, in 1937), Buccaneer (1937), Bandit (1938), Marauder (1938) and Freebooter (1940). Their oil-fired triple expansion steam engines produced 3000 ihp, which gave them a speed of fifteen knots. They had twin screws, and were armed with a three-inch gun forward, two Lewis guns and an Oerlikon, and had a complement of forty-three. Primarily built as fleet tugs – towing targets and the larger warships where necessary – they all acted as rescue tugs during the war, though by 1941 Buccaneer and Bandit, based at Scapa, had reverted to their original use.

  The Brigands were powerful but far from perfect, and their faults showed that the Admiralty still had some way to go in understanding what was needed in a rescue tug. When Jack Philip-Nicholson and his commanding officer went aboard Buccaneer for her commissioning trials in 1937, they both agreed she was well built but left a lot to be desired. Jack later put it this way:

  The trouble with the new class was that it had been designed by a committee. So by the time the designers had tried to satisfy the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, Lloyd’s, and a few other authorities, the result was a camel, a camel of course being the direct result of a committee trying to design a superior horse.14

  It seemed the stipulations made by one authority had negated those of another, so they set about altering the tug to suit purely Royal Navy requirements.

  The faults were numerous, some of them seemingly insurmountable. Firing the gun at a target was pure guesswork. It had been designed about 1914 and was supposed to be able to fire at eighty-knot aircraft, or slow cumbersome Zeppelins, as well as enemy ships, but actually did neither very well. An old-fashioned log was towed astern, and the officer of the watch had to take the helm while the helmsman ran aft to read it. The depth sounding was equally dated, and the tug’s boats looked useless. ‘I think that in any real emergency, they would have gone down with the ship,’ Jack noted. ‘The design of the davits was pure Harry Tate at its worst.’15

  It was impossible to use a chart on the bridge as the bridge was open, and was continually washed by walls of spray ‘that poured from a bow apparently specially constructed to throw water vertically’.15 The chart house was directly below the bridge, and the only means of communication between the two was for the helmsman to stamp his feet. The twin screws, ‘by a mistake of the first magnitude’, would unexpectedly move the tug off course.

  George Corke, who served as first officer on the Buccaneer, added that the class ‘were poor ships for ocean work because of [the] twin screws which, having only a single rudder, could not hold the course required in a strong wind on the bow and were designed with the towing winch right aft for target towing’.16 With rescue tugs having to go out into the Atlantic as far west as 25 degrees to pick up a torpedoed ship, another drawback was that the class could not always carry sufficient fuel to complete the task.

  ‘The rudder was of the same shape as the rudder on the old paddle tugs of the time of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire,’ Jack wrote. ‘There were times when, at certain speeds, and certain helm angles, it made you believe you were riding a roundabout.’14

  By far the most dangerous fault was the obsolete system of chain and rod steering. According to Jack, this method had been condemned by every navy in the world and by most shipping companies as well. On one occasion, during rough weather in the Bay of Biscay, the chain came off the rudder cross-head:

  Steering became impossible. Great waves struck the rudder and the rudder brake proved useless. We looked to the boats, recalling that a Saint class tug [St Genny] had gone down a few years before in this area due to stress of weather.14

  By a mixture of courage and skill, the chief engine room artificer (ERA)17 reattached the chain and the tug was brought back on course, but it sounds as if it had been a close call.

  But it wasn’t all bad news. The engines worked beautifully, and the boilers, under the expert eye of the chief ERA, were excellent. The wireless, too, worked well; the coxswain was a good sailor, and a good seaman, and though one of the crew was a drunk, he remained sober at sea. ‘The ship,’ Jack concluded, ‘was reasonably happy. No-one went sick, no-one deserted in my two years’, and some good work was done which included keeping ‘a bright eye on Franco’s large cruisers off Gibraltar with our pop-gun loaded’.

  When the trials were over Jack composed a long report on the ship’s shortcomings and sent it to the Admiralty. As a mark of appreciation, or perhaps not, it sent him to the naval training establishment at Shotley as a teacher.

  Imperial Transport

  Presumably, the Buccaneer’s faults had been ironed out by the time the war started, for she was soon in action when, on 11 February 1940, the 8022-ton tanker Imperial Transport, sailing alone and outward-bound in ballast for Trinidad, was torpedoed two hundred miles north-west of the Butt of Lewis. Her captain later related:

  We were struck by a torpedo about nine o’clock at night. It got us on the port side just underneath the bridge. A terrific explosion was followed by a mountain of spray, which enveloped the whole ship. In less than five minutes the tanker broke in two. The bridge on which I was standing crumbled beneath my feet as it was carried away by the bow half. I managed to scramble on to the stern half just in time.18

  That night the captain decided to abandon ship in case the after part sank. In doing so, two of the crew were drowned, but when the ship remained afloat, the crew returned. They managed to start the engines and began steering her to the nearest land, but they had no means of sending out a distress signal, though they painted an SOS on the deck:

  All my navigation instruments went with the bridge, and I had to set a course with the aid of a school atlas. I reckon we steamed about 110 miles before we were picked up by a British destroyer [other reports said there were four of them]. We were asked if we wished to abandon the ship, but I said I thought we could carry on.18

  The destroyers signalled for assistance and one was detached to escort the remains of the tanker, but on 15 February the weather began to deteriorate. The forward bulkhead was also showing signs of stress, and when an attempt to sail stern first failed, as did the destroyer’s attempt at towing, the crew decided to transfer to the destroyer until the weather improved. At daylight on 16 February, the Buccaneer arrived with a destroyer escort, and towed the remains of the tanker to Kilchattan Bay on the Isle of Bute, and beached them.19 This was another sheltered area used by rescue tugs to leave damaged ships to be dealt with by the Liverpool & Glasgow Salvage Association, which was based on the island during the war. The bow was never recovered, but the after part was later taken to the Clyde, where a new bow was fitted, and the tanker returned to service the following year. She was torpedoed again in 1942 but again survived. A remarkable story.

  After she was commissioned, the Brigand was based in the Mediterranean to tow targets, but when war broke out she was recalled from Malta and stationed at Kirkwall where she was kept busy salvaging the casualties of U-boat attacks on Atlantic convoys. As so often happened, she sometimes arrived too late to be of assistance, or the damaged ship was beyond saving. For instance, in July 1940 a U-boat attacked an outbound convoy, OB-188, and torpedoed the 10,364-ton tanker Thiara. The Brigand found her and took her in tow, but the Thiara sank south-south-west of Rockall with heavy loss of life.

  The Brigand was more successful when the 8016-ton British tanker Alexia, part of Convoy OB-191, was shelled and then torpedoed in the Moray Firth on 2 August 1940, and the Brigand was able to tow her into Greenock despite her stern being almost submerged.

  Salvage co-operation

  The Rescue Tug Service often co-operated with the Admiralty’s Salvage Department, just as it had in the previous war. One such operation, in which Brigand was involved, showed how much money could be saved from salvaging a ship that would otherwise have been lost. On 23
August 1940, German aircraft attacked the 10,119-ton British freighter Beacon Grange off the Scottish coast. At the time she was carrying 2500 tons of general cargo and was en route from London to Rio de Janeiro. She burst into flames and twenty-six of the crew lost their lives. The Brigand and two salvage vessels doused the fire, but after the freighter was towed to Kirkwall, fire broke out again and she had to be beached well away from the town. It took another two days to control the blaze, but she was eventually refloated and towed to Dundee, where her cargo was unloaded.20 According to the chief salvage officer, the ship was only two years old, cost £750,000 to build, and had a general cargo worth about £450,000. The total damage to the ship and cargo probably did not exceed £150,000, representing a saving of over £1 million.21

  Another of the Brigand class, Marauder, was officially classed as defective for the first few months of the war, though it may in fact have been her crew who were faulty, as a note in one of the Rescue Tug files by a baffled naval officer reveals – and it also reveals another of the differences between the two services:

  The position is a rather curious one. It seems that an officer or man T.124T can commit quite serious offences against Naval Discipline, without offending under the Merchant Service Act. It is not a technical offence, as I understand, for a M.S. (Merchant Service) officer to be drunk and disorderly out of his ship, or in fact at anytime when he is not on duty, as far as being drunk goes. The standard discharges are ‘V.G.’, which in effect does not mean ‘V.G.’ in our sense. It means merely satisfactory; ‘g’ has the implication of unsatisfactoriness [sic]; and ‘D.R.’ (decline to report) means damned bad and will prevent a man getting further employment [as did ‘g’ normally]. There is a strong feeling among M.S. Officers against doing this [with good reason, considering the terms of employment under which merchant seamen worked], and some of the original scoundrels in Marauder’s crew, who were discharged at Plymouth in Jan ’40, got ‘V.G.s’.22