Warspite

by Iain Ballantyne

  Warspite’s ability to sustain and survive damage was improved by sub division of engine rooms and boiler rooms – giving strength to the hull and watertight integrity, something else her crew would be grateful for during the forthcoming war. Proper repairs to the Jutland damage which had been merely plated over were now possible. One problem caused by First World War damage – her unreliable steering – would remain with Warspite for the rest of her fighting life.

  The most striking alteration to Warspite’s silhouette was the removal of her tripod mast and tiered command platforms to be replaced by a slab-sided tower block bridge. This was needed to provide protected accommodation for the new command and control equipment and make her better able to serve as a flagship.

  In October 1936 Warspite began sea trials under Admiralty supervision, but still in contractors hands, to see how well she had emerged from rebuild. The speed trial results looked promising. Warspite’s maximum deep load displacement had been raised to 36,096 tons yet she could still manage twenty-four knots – an incredible achievement, bearing in mind her original designed top speed was around twenty-five knots.

  In March 1937 Warspite was handed over to the Royal Navy and embarked on further sea trials, sailing out of both Portsmouth and Plymouth. During a hard turn to starboard on a high speed running trial, her steering jammed, despite a new steering engine having been recently fitted. However, it seemed to cure itself during more speed trials the following week off Cawsand, near Plymouth. Returning to Portsmouth in mid-March, Warspite embarked on test-firings for her 15-inch guns.

  By the end of June 1937 the Warspite had embarked her full 1,200 strong crew. The main draft of 1,000 men marched into Portsmouth Dockyard on 29 June, having arrived by special train at the nearby Harbour Station. One of those marching in that day remembered:

  My first view of the Warspite was of her being tied up at Middleslip Jetty and she looked great and special, being painted Med Fleet grey. By contrast the rest of the ships, like the carrier Courageous, were painted Home Fleet grey and looked rather drab.1

  The Warspite’s crew was now drawn from Chatham Division and her commanding officer was Captain V.A.C. Crutchley VC who won his medal during the Zeebrugge raid of the First World War. A fair but strict Commanding Officer, Captain Crutchley could be trusted to drive both ship and crew hard to get the best out of them. Everybody aboard the Warspite was keen to give their utmost, to ensure she would be fighting fit for her forthcoming deployment to the Mediterranean. She was destined to be the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet’s Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. The final trials were exhausting, particularly when things didn’t go smoothly and, by June 1937, with departure day fast approaching, the crew was starting to feel a little bit worn down. The sailors were really looking forward to their last weekend home leave, especially as they faced a couple of years away. However, when leave was posted, they were appalled to discover they would be due back aboard the Warspite at 7.00a.m. on the Monday.

  This meant sailors leaving their homes the night before to ensure they got back and therefore missing precious time with their families. The fact that they were assigned to a Portsmouth ship had already curtailed any possibility of the odd evening at home.

  In a pale echo of Invergordon, some of the ratings gathered to air their grievances on a messdeck. Seaman Gunner William Nichol was approached to see if he wanted to join the meeting:

  People were discontented about their weekend leave. I didn’t take part as I didn’t want to know. It wasn’t a mutiny, just some people moaning.

  News of it reached the Captain who promptly assembled those sailors not turned in for the night on the battleship’s quarterdeck. After listening calmly to their grumbles he told them they knew the correct way to represent them to the proper authorities. It was decided to do nothing about the gathering despite its ‘unlawful character’ under naval regulations. However, some of the people involved decided to air their complaints in public by contacting a newspaper, and so the Admiralty was forced to take action.

  An official inquiry was convened and it was decided blame lay on both sides. The decision to finish leave at 7.00a.m. on the Monday was unwise, but the sailors should have complained in a proper manner without offending naval regulations with their unauthorized gathering or going to the press. The Warspite’s Executive Officer and two divisional officers were taken off the ship while three ratings were dismissed from the Service. Nine others were dispersed to other ships. A rating aboard Warspite at the time gave his own assessment of how this minor situation could have been easily avoided:

  Looking back, the men concerned had been working the dogwatches to get the ship ready to sail for the Mediterranean by 5 July. After her three year special refit there was certainly a lot of cleaning up to do to get her fit for Flagship duty. I think a bit of give and take on the officers’ part was needed. Of course what made it a mountain out of a molehill was those men contacting the newspapers.

  One of Warspite’s sailors remembered that one enterprising matelot – a habitual offender, allegedly nicknamed ‘Ali Babar’ in reference to his wicked ways – was at the time of the so-called ‘mutiny’ trying to make a tidy profit out of bootleg railway tickets.

  Somehow or other he managed to steal some books of railway warrants. His price list was five shillings for Edinburgh, down to one or two shillings for places in the south-east of England. The lads were only too willing to take advantage of these cut price bootleg tickets. But ‘Ali’ slipped up. A married man, he went home every night, stealing a dockyard matey’s bike to do so. He always dumped the nicked bike back in the dockyard the following morning so no long-term harm, beyond temporary inconvenience for some poor dockyard worker, was done. One evening on his way home he stopped off to do some shoplifting and was caught trying to make off with a pound of sausages. Duly arrested he was taken before the magistrate the next morning. A Corporal and two Marines were sent to bring him back to the Warspite to collect his kit and then go off to jail. His locker was opened by a senior rating and lo and behold the missing railway warrants were revealed. That was the end of ‘Ali Babar’ for a good while.

  While thieving from the civilian population, including butchers and dockyard workers, and even hi-jacking naval travel warrants from those in authority, might have been sins which the Warspite’s sailors could live with, any sailor who stole from a shipmate would get into instant hot water. With everyone living so much on top of each other, dishonesty could have a corrosive effect unless it was stamped on immediately.

  A member of the battleship’s crew, Donald Auffret, who would see service during the Second World War observed:

  A sailor might be the biggest rogue outside his ship but aboard ship you can literally leave money lying around and it’ll be there when you come back. And it just has to be that way, not only with money but in possessions, clothing, even your particular sleeping space. You’d never dream of slinging a hammock in someone else’s sleeping space. And, besides slinging their hammocks on particular mess decks assigned depending on their working departments and ranks, the sailors also took their meals there. You all mostly sat at the same place at the mess table to eat your meal. Overall, you respected each other’s privacy, such as it was. If you were all writing letters, it was obvious you were all crowded together but you wouldn’t dream of looking to see what someone else was writing. There was a lot of unwritten laws and also some long – standing traditions. Rum was a great tradition in the navy. It wasn’t just an alcoholic drink – rum was currency. If you wanted the carpenter to do a little job for you, you wouldn’t offer him money, because money wasn’t acceptable. Offer him your tot of rum the next day and you’d get the job done.2

  It was a traditional system which worked well.

  Hammocks were as widely used in the Royal Navy of the late 1930s as they were in Nelson’s day and many of Warspite’s sailors thought them better than having a bunk. One of Warspite’s gunners explained the advantages: ‘In
my mess we all slept in hammocks. They were great because when the ship rolled you would stay central.’ Then, as today, sailors had limited space for personal property. ‘Each one of us had a locker into which went the contents of our kitbags but they were quite large.’

  Regardless of sleeping conditions and personal space, food was paramount when it came to the morale of the crew as one Warspite sailor made clear.

  Good wholesome traditional grub was very important to keeping our spirits up – even if it could get a bit samey – and meals were the social event of the day. Before the Second World War the menu was the same on all ships in the fleet – kippers for Monday breakfast, smoked haddock for Thursday...fried egg and rashers cooked at 4.00a.m...corn dog stew...an apple for duff on Saturdays or rice pudding. Mid-week could be you might get figgy duff and custard...the ward room was not immune from such repetition.

  D. Auffret said of Warspite’s living conditions:

  The living conditions were quite reasonable aboard the Warspite. The food was quite good. There was quite a bit of space. It was quite a nice ship...the idea of bunks and things like that didn’t occur to you. It was marvellous sleeping in a hammock especially in rough weather – the ship swung but the hammock didn’t.

  The same sailor believed personal hygiene was important to making life bearable:

  ...living in a confined space, the only way that life can be tolerable is for everybody to be clean; you get very short shrift in the Navy if you are dirty. In fact I’ve seen people taken to a bathroom and scrubbed with hand scrubbers... .

  With the beginning of July 1937, Warspite was due to carry out her acceptance trials – the final running in of the ship’s crew, machinery and weapons. They should have been a formality. However, niggling doubts remained about the Warspite’s steering and, as any defects discovered could still be swiftly put right by the dockyard, Captain Crutchley decided to put the battleship through a most severe test. During a series of violent manoeuvres the steering jammed yet again and, as the Warspite was re-entering Portsmouth, turbine gearing on one of the shafts gave out, forcing her to go up harbour on one propeller. Six months of additional sea trials and remedial work on the ship followed.

  The solution was to slow down the two outer propeller shafts and so reduce vibrations. While this action helped it would not prove to be the end of Warspite’s difficulties in that respect.

  The delays to Warspite’s arrival in the Mediterranean had not endeared the battleship to Admiral Pound. Mechanical problems were one thing, but hearing about trouble over leave enraged him – it was not the sort of conduct he expected from the crew of a vessel destined to be his flagship. Nine days after finally leaving the United Kingdom on 5 January 1938, Pound’s errant flagship entered Valetta Harbour in Malta, where the Mediterranean Fleet had its main base.

  In early February, when he went aboard the Spite for the first time, Admiral Pound decided to let the crew have a piece of his mind, using A turret as a platform to launch his reprimand. Seaman Gunner William Nichol said the crew became determined to show Pound he was wrong about the Warspite.

  The slagging off he gave the Warspite when we got to Malta so angered us that we worked ourselves up to be the top gunnery ship. We were determined after that to really make the grade and show him it wasn’t the entire crew, only one or two, who had been troublemakers.

  The Warspite was to come good at a time of increasing international tension, when it was becoming clear that Hitler was on the path to war.

  In contravention of the Versailles Treaty, in March 1936 Hitler sent German troops to occupy the de-militarized Rhineland and Britain and France did nothing to stop him. A year earlier the Germans had discarded the Versailles restrictions on their armed forces and started a process of rearmament which included construction of battleships and increasing numbers of submarines. In March 1938 Austria was subsumed into the Greater Reich, again with no substantial action from foreign powers. As Hitler’s troops were annexing Austria, Warspite took part in a huge exercise off Gibraltar, involving both the Mediterranean Fleet and ships of the Atlantic Fleet. Following this her crew was given some leave on the French Riviera and then the battleship returned to Malta.

  Mediterranean Fleet Flagship HMS Warspite returns to Malta, with HMS Hood following her into harbour, after intensive gunnery exercises in August 1938. Sutherland Collection.

  The Italians and Germans were also fanning the flames of conflict by becoming heavily involved in supporting the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. When she sailed to the Mediterranean Warspite carried red, white and blue identification stripes on her turrets to make sure both sides in the civil war were aware she was a British ship and should not be attacked.

  In late August 1938, amid the continuing international tension, Warspite led the Mediterranean Fleet, including HMS Hood, to sea for more intensive exercises. The Warspite’s improved 15-inch guns were fired continuously under simulated battle conditions, maintaining incredible accuracy. This performance went some considerable way towards redeeming Warspite in Admiral Pound’s eyes.

  Within a few weeks the threat of war for which the exercise had prepared the fleet seemed about to become reality as Hitler threatened to seize Czechoslovakia.

  Back in Britain ‘weekend sailor’ H. Banks had been sent by the Tyne Division of the Royal Naval Reserve on a gunnery course at Chatham where he was caught up in the crisis. ‘On the second to last day of the course, we were told that the Royal Navy was to be mobilized and we could be drafted to warships.’

  In the Mediterranean the autumn cruise programme was abandoned and the Mediterranean Fleet headed for its war base in Egypt. In 1936 the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty had given Britain the right to station troops in Egypt and also have a naval base at Alexandria. This was needed because it was likely any war with Germany would also be against its close ally, Italy and Malta was thought too vulnerable to the depredations of Italian air power for capital ships.

  As British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler at Munich in late September, prepared to agree to anything to avoid war, the Mediterranean Fleet’s shells were fused and plans for a bombardment of Tobruk – one of Italy’s main ports in North Africa – were finalized. It was then however, that Chamberlain’s misguided Munich Agreement which gave Germany the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland for ‘peace for our time’, temporarily pulled Europe back from the brink. The Mediterranean Fleet’s shells were de-fused...for now.

  Souvenir postcard made up for a member of HMS Warspite’s crew to mark the Summer 1938 cruise. Sutherland Collection.

  H. Banks was sent home from Chatham: ‘Back home we came, having profited by the princely sum of £5 for having been mobilized.’ Another mobilization was not far away; and it would send him to sea aboard the Warspite.

  Warspite as viewed from an American warship in harbour at Villefranche during the earlier Spring 1938 cruise. Note the markings on her turret to warn participants in the Spanish Civil War that she is a British warship and should not be attacked. US Naval Historical Center.

  Souvenir postcard made up for a member of HMS Warspite’s crew to mark the Autumn 1938 cruise. Sutherland Collection.

  HMS Warspite at sea with the Mediterranean Fleet in late 1938. Foster Collection.

  The Warspite at Malta in late 1938. Foster Collection.

  Christmas Dinner menu for 1938, the last Festive Season the battleship would spend at Malta. A. Jones Collection.

  With the threat of war temporarily diminishing, Warspite was to spend Christmas at Malta rather than Alexandria. She would never spend another Christmas there, as the island would be unsafe by the time the Festive Season of 1939 came around.

  A Legendary Partnership Begins ... and is Interrupted

  In June 1939 Dudley Pound went home to Britain to become First Sea Lord and was succeeded by Vice Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. The hand-over between Pound and Cunningham took place on Warspite in Alexandria when the rest of the fleet was at sea. Following the change
of command Warspite joined the fleet for exercises which were again taking place against a background of high tension. Hitler’s troops had occupied the whole of Czechoslovakia in early March 1939 and Germany had also annexed the port of Memel in Lithuania.

  Souvenir postcard made up for members of HMS Warspite’s crew to mark the Spring 1939 cruise. Sutherland Collection.

  The Führer was now determined to take the Polish port of Danzig which, like Memel, had been taken away from Germany as part of the peace settlement following the First World War. In late March an attempt was made by German troops to seize Danzig, but they were withdrawn after Britain and France finally found some backbone and told Hitler it would mean war. The Germans decided they would go back when their military was stronger. Emboldened by the way in which a fascist alliance had achieved victory in the Spanish Civil War that spring, in late May 1939 Germany and Italy signed their so-called Pact of Steel which promised military cooperation for ten years.

  HMS Warspite at Malta, with Rodney or Nelson in the background. Wyles Collection

  HMS Hotspur transfers mail to HMS Warspite in the Mediterranean shortly before the outbreak of war. In April 1940 HMS Hotspur would take part in the First Battle of Narvik, while Warspite distinguished herself in the Second Battle of Narvik a few days later. Topham/Keystone.