Polar Voyages

by Gray, Gordon

  There then followed twelve months of rigorous naval shore training. Discipline was strict and the minor punishment for failure to follow College rules was normally an early morning run at 0600. The worst crime was being late. Or ‘Adrift’ as the Navy called it. ‘Always be there five minute early’ – Unless you want an 0600 run! As the divisional chief petty officer said ‘Thems’ wots keen gets fell in previous!’ The training was thorough and covered everything from personal fitness to navigation, from parade-ground marching drills, to rifle shooting and swimming tests. We were taken on special fire-fighting training courses and taught how to deal with major shipboard fires and oil fires in all conditions, including the dark. We experienced CS gas for riot-control training and were taught to row and sail down on the river Dart. The subject list seemed endless and the classroom subjects included mechanical and electrical marine engineering, meteorology, naval supply, administration and management, communications and the principles of Action Information Organisation, or Command and Control as it is now known, and the theory of radar, radio and sonar. We learned seamanship from the three volumes of Admiralty books, including anchor-handling using fantastic working models of a battleship fo’c’sle with all the anchor cables, windlasses and slips. We learned coastal navigation and struggled to grasp the principles of circular geometry that applied to astro-navigation. On top of that they found time to send us out onto Dartmoor for expeditions that involved rigging timber A-frames to get across rivers, camping out and navigating ourselves across the moor. We were sent up the river Dart in 30-foot motor whalers on night exercises. These were a form of treasure hunt in the dark; where the clues were hidden at various land-based locations near the river. Each crew had its own leader who determined which clues to pursue and then the rest of the crew were dispatched ashore to find the clues, then work out the correct answers that would lead on to the next location. In the process, we had to avoid the many mud banks and shallows that lurk beneath the tidal Dart just waiting to catch a cadet on a falling tide. The night rang out with the calls of cadets who had lost their boat or a crew trying to drag someone back on board from the river, as well as calls for assistance or a tow from those who had run aground.

  Sleep was a treasured commodity at Dartmouth. For the first six weeks we were not allowed out of the college at all; so we had to wait until we could savour the delights of Dartmouth town. Our days started at 0630 with physical exercise of some sort, PT or a run. There were also regular early morning Morse code reading sessions using a signal lantern. Then it was breakfast, where kindly ladies provided all the food that you could eat. One lady, trying to ensure her charges did not fade away from under nourishment, told a cadet ‘Now you be sure to drink all your milk, young man!’ ‘That’s what I tell my three-year-old son’ growled the twenty-three-year-old ex-rating who was now an officer cadet. The mornings were filled with classroom studies while the afternoons tended to be for boat training on the river or sport. Further classroom studies took place in the evenings. The classroom studies and homework were important as at the end of the year we all had to pass our final exams to enable us to ‘Pass Out’ of the college. The lecturers were either civilians, like Derek, or naval officers and all were helpful and competent. As most had been through Dartmouth themselves, they knew the struggle we were facing and were eager to help us all they could. At 1600, it was rugby training or maybe a home match. And so it continued through to dinner. After dinner you had to get the cabin ready for rounds by the duty sub-lieutenant at 1930. This meant your beds had to be correctly made, clothes had to be folded and stowed correctly, shoes clean, parade boots bulled and no dust anywhere; even on top of the door or under the bunks. If any was found or there were other faults, maybe your parade boots were not up to standard, you were given a ‘Rescrub’ at 2100. As long as the cabin had passed rounds homework could be fitted in after that.

  In addition to the new cadets there were also a similar number of sub-lieutenants on their third year courses at the college. These were officers who had just completed their midshipman’s year at sea and had returned to college for further naval training and higher education courses. They provided the college staff with an extra set of monitors to hound and chase the worthless cadets. As cadets we had to run, or double, everywhere in the college. Run to meals, run between classes, etc. This was all part of getting us fit. The fun side of this was that in our smooth-soled shoes or hob-nailed parade boots you could slide enormous distances on the wood block floors! If any sub-lieutenant caught you not running, or indeed doing anything that you should not be doing (being caught with your hands in your pocket was always a favourite), then they could and often did, impose punishments then and there. The yell of ‘Double that cadet’ was often heard echoing round the red brick walls and the sound lives on in the heads of all those who were its target.

  One of these allowed punishments was ‘Quick Changes’. The sub-lieutenant would order you to attend his cabin at say 2100 in your daily battle dress rig and parade boots and then he would tell you to report back in three minutes wearing your gym kit. Then when you got there he would say ‘Right, now be back here in three minutes in full mess undress.’ Panic would set in (this rig was a real bummer as you had to have your bowtie tied correctly as well!). All the while the sub-lieutenant would be standing with his watch in his hand. Then he would order you to appear in, say, your sailing rig complete with seaman’s knife, clean shoes, etc. Each new rig change was designed to ensure maximum clothing being removed and maximum chaos caused in the cabin. This would go on for as long as the sub-lieutenant wanted but often for at least half an hour. By this time, and given the number of different sets of clothing you had, your cabin looked like a Chinese laundry after a typhoon had hit it. The sub-lieutenant would then say ‘That’s all, don’t do it again. Oh, by the way, I will do rounds on your cabin in ten minutes.’ Even greater panic! Failure to have all your gear re-stowed and in the correct locations could result in another Rescrub thirty minutes later when all you really wanted to do was go to bed. With any luck your cabin mate would have been there all the time helping get the right rig and putting others away as you tore them off. In hindsight, it was all great fun and mattered little in the great scheme of life, but at the time it seemed that your whole life depended on it.

  Sport was a big part of college life and I was fortunate enough to get into the rugby 1st XV, which gave me a lot of extra physical training most days as well as two matches a week. It also allowed us to get out of the college to play away matches against local colleges, such as Millfield College, and local rugby clubs such as Exeter. These away games normally involved a stop for fish and chips or beer on the way back. I also discovered that being in the 1st XV enabled you to escape duty parades, like rounds, if there was a college match on. Representing the college at a major sport also counted highly in your final assessments. Bit by bit I was learning how to survive and enjoy life in a navy blue suit.

  HMS Tenby – Sea Training

  Following two terms at Dartmouth we were sent to join our first ship, HMS Tenby, which was one of the ships in the Dartmouth Training Squadron. This squadron consisted of three frigates each converted to take a large mess deck full of cadets. The other two ships were HMS Scarborough and HMS Torquay.

  HMS Tenby was a Whitby-Class, or a Type 12, frigate. She had been built at Cammell Laird in 1953 and commissioned in 1955. She was 360-feet-long, was 2,600 tons and had twin screws. This class of ship was designed to be a fast escort with an ASW (Anti-Submarine-Warfare) capability. A feature of the class was the hull design, which gave the ships a high fo’c’sle with a sharp, flared bow to throw the seas up and away from the ship and to enable it to continue at high speed in bad weather. It was also designed to minimise the amount of water getting onto the deck that could then freeze and cause icing problems in the Arctic.

  HMS Tenby, a Whitby-Class frigate and part of the Dartmouth training squadron in 1970. (J&C McCutcheon Collection)

  Life in the
mess deck was not a great deal of fun, but then it was not meant to be. As they say in the Navy, ‘If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.’ There were no portholes or natural light and no air conditioning. As in the days of Nelson and HMS Victory, we slept, ate, read, got dressed, did our studying, and wrote letters home; all in the small same cramped space as fifty other cadets. We slept in hammocks slung directly above the fixed mess tables and benches. Each hammock touched the ones next to it with four or five to a row. The rope lashings at each end overlapped the lashings of the next row so that your head was only a couple of feet away from the feet of the guy in the next row. We each were allocated a steel locker, roughly 1 metre by 1/2 metre by 1 metre high, which was exactly the same as those used by the ratings, in which we had to keep everything we possessed. From our best uniform and working rigs, sports clothes, parade boots and working shoes to our civilian clothes, training books and midshipman’s journal, as well as any personal items we might have.

  There was a leading seaman living in the mess with us to oversee us and make sure we did things properly, especially cleaning and washing up the mess tins after meals. The first thing he showed us was how to rig and then stow our hammocks. If done properly they were as safe as houses. If not, then you could crash down in the night onto the mess table below. I had found hammocks to be good for sleeping in when I was on the Sir Winston Churchill, and found the same in HMS Tenby. Once you had mastered rigging the hammock and getting into it and sleeping on your back, they were very comfortable. Most nights the non-stop routine of cadet life in HMS Tenby was such that we fell asleep instantly as soon as we were in our hammocks. My immediate hammock neighbour was Graeme. Graeme and I had become friends over the months at the college and, once we were allowed to have shore leave, Graeme and I were often to be found testing the different whiskies in the Dartmouth hostelries. Graeme was a quiet guy, but bright and cheery with a very dry sense of humour. He was from Worcester Park in Surrey and had joined the Navy straight from school as a career, or general list, officer.

  We all kept watches throughout the twenty-fout hours so we had to learn where everyone else slept so you could give anyone a shake in the night for their watch. It was not a popular move to wake the wrong guy. If you did and the right guy did not get his shake it was still his fault if he was late on watch.

  On board we formed a part of the ship’s crew and carried out the duties that the junior rates, who we replaced, would have done as well as having to carry out our practical officer’s training. We were treated, as the lowest of the low. We were junior to the most junior seaman on board and regularly reminded of it.

  Mortar Bombs

  We sailed from Devonport for our training Cruise to the Baltic. We were all fairly excited to be at sea as naval officers, albeit very junior ones, on our way out into the big wide world and our minds were full of gorgeous Swedish blondes that we were bound to meet! On the very first full day at sea we were all sent to our action stations while the ship carried out ASW (Anti Submarine Warfare) exercises off the South coast.

  My action station was in the Port Mortar Handling Room and I shared this with Bas, a fellow cadet. This was a compartment where the ASW mortars were stowed. These were large torpedo shaped items about 5 foot long and 19 inches in diameter. They were fired in a pattern of three from launchers up on the deck so that they landed in a triangular pattern round the enemy submarine and exploded to cause maximum damage. They were all painted to a colour code; some mortars were red, some green and some black, depending upon their usage. They were stored in horizontal racks that ran fore and aft along the compartment in such a way that they could be rolled onto the special lift at the after end that took them up to the Mortar Launcher compartment. The TAS (Torpedo & Anti Submarine) Petty Officer (PO) had briefed us that three of the mortars, also painted black, were set aside on the lower of two racks by the hoist. These mortars contained special calibration, test and tuning systems and they were inserted into the launch barrels and used to test and tune all the firing circuitry of the system but were never actually fired.

  The job Bas and I had was to load onto the lift whatever mortars the petty officer up in the Handling Room called for. The PO simply called down the chute from the mortar bay itself, telling us which ones he wanted for the next shoot and to send them up on the lift. We were using ‘Black Inert’ or practice mortars on this exercise and all went well as both Bas and I were, by now, highly trained naval officers and could tell black from green and red.

  After about an hour or so, and having sent up all the black ones allocated for the exercise on the main rack, the call came down the chute from the PO to ‘Send up the other three’. Bas and I looked at each other. ‘Which three is that?’ Bas called back as we did not have any more of the black inert ones ready to send up. ‘The three on the other rack’ called the PO. We sent them up and heard them successfully fired in to the sea. After the exercise was concluded the PO called down for the Test Mortars to be sent up. ‘Which ones are those?’ we called back, both of us a little puzzled. ‘The black ones on the bottom rack’ he called. Bas and I looked at each other again as alarm began to strike home. Bas called back ‘But we have already sent them up when you asked for them last time!’ Bas has not finished his sentence when the PO burst into the Handling Room. He was, I must say, very good about it and apart from some understandable naval swearing he did not chew us out too badly. He was more concerned about going to see the Torpedo Officer to report that the only test mortars the ship had, and which were worth a considerable sum, were now on the seabed.

  The torpedo officer was not so good about it. He was called Charles and was in fact the same Charles who had been the stand-offish watch officer on Sir Winston Churchill. Bas and I were summoned to the ops room. In front of the captain and a full ops room he openly accused Bas and I of lying and demanded that we be severely dealt with. The captain maintained a calm exterior and sent us away. A board of Enquiry was called on board ship that afternoon and both Bas and I spent the rest of our first full day at sea in the RN as subjects of the enquiry and explaining to the first lieutenant and the Engineer Officer exactly what had happened. Our stories tallied and the petty officer was good enough to admit to us and the Enquiry that perhaps we could have been confused and that his instructions could perhaps have been clearer. In the end he got the blame for not supervising us more closely as how could we, on the first visit to the mortar room, be expected to tell the difference between a black inert and a black test mortar let alone to question a direct order ‘to send up the three on the other rack’ from the petty officer torpedoes.

  Our relationship with ‘Charles’ never recovered but we learned later that no one got on with him anyway, but our relations with the petty officer torpedoes did and we got on well with him for the rest of the three months we were on board and stationed down in his mortar handling room. Bas incidentally did very well, as he was a bright lad, becoming a full captain (air engineer).

  Foreign Expedition

  The training Squadron that term went to the Baltic, stopping at such places as Stockholm, Copenhagen and Kotka, in Finland. As part of our training we were expected to go on expeds (expeditions) during the ship’s periods in port. These were just really camping trips aimed at sharpening up our initiative skills and get us out of the ship for a while. Graeme and I had planned to do one but Graeme went down with a bad sinus infection so a fellow cadet, Keith, and I decided that we would go camping in Denmark’s sunny pastoral landscape for two nights during the ship’s stay in Copenhagen. We submitted our proposal, which was accepted, got all the camping gear loaned to us from the ship’s stores and set off with a map and wise words from our divisional officer, ‘OK, off you go, you have the ship’s phone number to ring if you need help don’t you?’ ‘Yes, Sir’ we replied. This was unlikely as we had no intention of going any further than the nearest half decent cheap hotel and enjoying a proper bath and a proper bed for two nights after putting up with the
mess deck and hammocks for over two months. We soon found a pleasant small hotel in a back street near Copenhagen’s old harbour. The hotel was very clean and friendly and we were shown to a bright, sunlit, twin-bedded room. It was ideal. We celebrated our freedom with a steak meal and probably more than a few lagers. We considered that we were not skiving, but actually on an ‘Escape and Evasion’ exercise as we certainly did not want to bump into any of the ship’s officers over the next couple of days! On the second morning Keith had gone out for an early walk along the quay and I went along the corridor to the bathroom for a bath. As I tried to open the room door to get back in I realised with horror that I had left the key by the bed. I then spent a damp and chilly fifteen minutes in the Hotel Reception, standing patiently in a queue of guests who were checking out while dripping water all over the polished floor, and clutching a small, wet towel round my waist, so I could ask for a spare key. There was much Danish chuckling going on.

  Once back on board we sat down together and wrote our reports of how friendly the farmer was to let us sleep in his field and how attractive his sheep were (well, we had been at sea for a while).

  Seaboats

  ‘Pull! Pull! damn you. Pull! you lazy shower!’ These friendly words still haunt me. Every day at sea at 1600 we had Seaboat Pulling drills. The sea boat was a heavy 27-foot Monatague whaler; this was a wooden boat that took a crew of five oarsmen, a coxswain and a bowman to propel it. It was secured fore and aft to the ship’s davits by two heavy manila ropes, called falls, which needed a good team of men on each one to lower and raise the boat with any degree of control. There were no winches, hydraulics or electric motors here. The exercise commenced with one part of the watch manning the boat and the other part manning the falls. The gunnery officer was in charge. He would stand one deck above us and became a fierce and friendless demon who clearly hated each and every one of us and who we all hated back with a vengeance. The falls were released from their cleats and lowering began. Each team on each fall had to lower away and make sure that the boat was lowered evenly or else they risked tipping the boat’s crew twenty feet into the sea. Any mistakes by any individual resulted in the instant command ‘That cadet, twenty press ups, now!’ Then, as the sea boat reached the water, ideally as the top of a wave lifted the boat, the coxswain yelled ‘Slip’ and one of the boat’s crew pulled the slip that released the falls from the boat. If the coxswain got the timing wrong and we missed the top of the wave, then the boat dropped a number of feet and hit the water with a crash that inspired the gunnery officer to even more inventive use of the English language. It also gave cadets in the boat very bruised backsides and rattled a few teeth; but no one ever seemed to worry about that. The boat swung out away from the ship’s side and the boat rope was released by the bowman. The boat rope, that was attached to the sea boat’s bow, was secured on board the ship well forward of the sea boat. It ensured that the sea boat moved off at the same speed as the ship, when it hit the water. At the same time, the ships engines were stopped then run slowly astern. We now had to get the oars out smartly and row round the ship, which towered above us and was still going faster than we were able to pull. All the time the ship was slowly, slowing down and as we rowed for the bow we just hoped that they had enough astern power running so that we did not get cut in two by the ship as we went round the bow. The grey, sharp-edged bows loomed over us as the coxswain tried to judge the turn. It was always a finely judged manoeuvre; either to give the bow a wide berth and use up precious time by pulling further, or try and save time and then risk getting the oars tangled up in the bow. That only brought on a tirade of abuse from above about scratching the ships paintwork; so it was best avoided. As we rowed our little hearts out the gunnery officer was following us round the fo’c’sle giving us lots of encouragement from high above. ‘Pull you lazy lot! My four-year-old daughter could pull better than that’ ‘I bet she can, just to get away from you!’ muttered the bowman! Many other such motivating words of advice were offered down to us from on high. Once safely round the bow we had to race down the other side. We all tried to pull together and look professional but we never quite seemed to succeed. By now though, the ship could even be going astern giving us further to row. In all sorts of seas we struggled through this daily hell. Hands and fingers aching as we hung onto the heavy wooden oars, backs sore, crabs being caught as we missed the water with the oar and much muttered cursing in the boat about the gunnery officer’s parents and other general fun filled our late afternoons. Once round the stern it was back to the falls and the task of getting the oars in, not hitting the ship and hooking up to the falls. Each fall had a large, heavy, wooden block at the end. In the boat were two metal releasing mechanisms called the ‘Robinson’s Disengaging Gear’. As we approached, the two great wooden blocks swung menacingly at head level challenging us to catch them. We had to grab these things, drag them into the boat and hook each one onto the hooks on the releasing gear in the boat. Then we had to wait while the other part of the watch started to haul us and the boat back up to the top of the falls. Once we were back at the top and all was secure the gunnery officer told us how long we had taken and what a useless shower of girls we were and reassured us that we would never get a job on the Gosport Ferry. Then it was someone else’s go! Every day we gleefully looked forward to this wonderful form of sado-masochism, which undoubtedly made men of us. Electric or hydraulic davits indeed! How soft are sailors today? ‘Come on lads; time for a brew of tea on the mess deck’.