by John W Green
After the ship returned from Quebec, there was a short interval of leave before I had to return back on board. When I did go back to the ship, I was told that I had been replaced. I was told this by my replacement. He was sleeping in what had been my bunk. From then on, I have always sympathised with the three bears and not Goldilocks. I was instructed to go home and await my next ship.
It was during this period of leave that I had a bit of a ‘blast from the past’ encounter. I was walking along the High Street in Lee-on-the-Solent, when who should I see walking towards me, with a young lady on his arm? None other than the then Third Officer, now Second Mate, that I had last seen when we went to the cinema and elsewhere in Bombay. He introduced me to his wife and said that they were on their honeymoon, staying at a bed-and-breakfast in Portsmouth Road, which was just around the corner from where we lived. Then I (unthinking) said ‘I haven’t seen you since Bombay when we went to ...’ the look of horror that came over his face turned to one of relief when I completed the sentence ‘...the cinema.’ This encounter was, as in the name of the film, brief. I congratulated them both and told them that I had married my long-term girlfriend earlier that year. The conversation was soon cut short, after a few of those embarrassing silences that occur when those involved don’t know what to say next, in case they say the wrong thing. We wished each other the best and said cheerio. I often wondered after that, why they had chosen Lee-on-the-Solent for their honeymoon.
Finished With The Sea
Three weeks later I received a telegram telling me to go to Rotterdam to join a tanker. With memories of being ‘shanghaied’ in Hong Kong, I sent in my resignation, and decided to leave the Merchant Navy.
Three weeks after that, at the end of September, I got a job with Ultra, a radio and television manufacturing company that was setting up in Gosport. Initially Ultra had a pilot factory in the Hall, a large three-storey Victorian building in Trinity Green, Gosport. It was situated between Trinity Church and the harbour, roughly where the car park of Seaward Tower is now located. I was the third local male employee to be taken on. Being so close to the waterfront, it was possible to take lunchtime walks near the Gosport Ferry, and keep abreast of what was going on in the harbour.
As well as the changes that had been taking place in Lee-on-the-Solent and the local area, and in my life, this was also a time of greater changes in the wider world. After the end of World War II, the long-hoped-for time of peace seemed to be elusive. The demise of the British Empire had begun and the world had entered a phase of non-combatant mutual animosity with the ‘Cold War’. It had started just before I joined the RAF, and the Soviets had turned the temperature down a notch or two by trying to isolate Berlin, which had been thwarted by the Berlin Airlift. Here we were seven years later: relations between the West and the USSR, although still frosty, had stabilised and had possibly improved a little. Living in this period was a bit like living with the sword of Damocles continually hanging over us, and many people secretly worried about the future. The balance of mutual destruction between the two great powers meant that a home with a nuclear bunker was a sought-after des res, and it was claimed by someone known to Rob’s mum, that they had been involved in the construction of a deep nuclear bunker, for the Royal Family and some of the Government, near Devizes. Nevertheless, the underlying fear did have an impact on the ‘attitude to life’ of many.
In the April of 1956 there was a ‘goodwill visit’ paid by the Russian leaders Marshal Bulganin and Mr Krushchev. They were aboard the cruiser Ordzhonikdze which, for the duration of the visit, was anchored in Portsmouth Harbour. I saw it several times during my lunchtime walks. It was easy to tell that it was ‘a stranger in town’. Apart from the flag flying at the stern, the ship was painted a different grey to that of RN vessels, and it had different ‘lines’ with a sharper ‘fluted’ bow. There was an incident concerning this warship which came to light later that had some far-reaching consequences. A Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, who was a James Bond-like character, apparently, disappeared while this visit was taking place. It was believed that he had been carrying out some underwater spying mission. The only fact that appears to have any certainty is that, just over a year later, a headless, handless body in underwater clothing was discovered in Chichester Harbour. Which may, or may not, have been him. One account states that Buster Crabb entered the water at Forton to swim to the Soviet ship. As relations with the USSR went into the freezer big-time after this incident, with hindsight we may conclude that Gosport was a significant location, in the deterioration of relations in the Cold War at that time.
A couple of months before these mysterious ‘goings on’ in Portsmouth Harbour, Jean discovered she was pregnant. Most of the ladies in the church congregation came to the correct conclusion about her condition when she fainted in church. Only a few weeks before this, there had been an appeal on the radio for Jean Burtoo to urgently contact the police, as her mother was dangerously ill in hospital and had asked to see her. Actually we didn‘t hear the message ourselves - someone must have given our address to the police, because they came to the house to inform us. We went to St Richard’s Hospital at Chichester, where Jean saw her mother for the first time in five years. Her mother was dying. This was the first and only time that I saw my mother-in-law.
Over the next few years we did try to maintain some contact with Jean’s family, but it was not very successful. She, through no fault of her own, had become an outsider in that family. But she had become a treasured member of her new family, and she was soon to become the ‘heart’ of a new family within the family.
Best-Dressed in the Mess
With the prospect of starting a family, my thoughts became focused on how best to provide for them, and after comparing the money that I was earning with what I had earned when I was at sea, I decided to give the Merchant Navy another try. So in May 1956 I left Ultra and rejoined Marconi. It may have been the extra money, or it may have been that I was suffering from a bit of ‘nautical indigestion’. Maybe I hadn’t swallowed the anchor properly. So I donned the uniform again. This time no luxury liner, not even a cargo ship, and thankfully not a ‘tramp ship’. I ended up on a small tanker, the Saguaro, which had the big advantage that, at that time, she was based in Fawley.
I was new to tankers. When I went to the mess for my first meal, as it was summer, I had on a pair of white shorts, a white shirt with epaulettes, white socks and shoes. When I entered the mess, all heads turned. Being a ‘head turner’ was not a good thing. They say that first impressions count. I think the impression of those sat around the table would have been ... ‘What a prat’. I looked around; the way that I could best describe their attire was that they looked as if they had just come from a building site - another case of ‘one of life’s Ooops!’ It did mean that I had a bit of a problem, because nearly all of my gear was that type of uniform. I certainly didn‘t have any jeans or check shirts. When I returned to my cabin I took off my epaulettes and changed the white shoes for black ones, and that was about the best that I could do.
The voyage out was uneventful: straight to the end of the ‘Med’ to Banias in Syria, where I became aware of why the dress code on board was so relaxed - the crew never went anywhere, the ship was a little closed world. We anchored about four miles off Banias, adjacent to a cylindrical buoy, which was a bit like an oversized oil-drum, attached to which was a flexible oil pipeline. This pipeline was duly hauled aboard and connected to one of the ship’s tanks. Shortly after, we started having our cargo pumped on board. Loading only took a matter of hours. It seemed as if in no time at all we were finished with our self- service filling station, the pipeline was disconnected, we weighed anchor, and set off on our return journey. When the Saguaro arrived back in the Solent, she was anchored off Cowes. The Captain, knowing that I was soon to become a father, allowed me to go ashore with the Customs men in their boat into Cowes. He knew that the tanker would only be at Fawley for
two days before she would be off again.
Although the Saguaro was at anchor less than four miles from Lee Tower, it took me nearly three hours to get home. After I left the Customs boat, I had to get a bus from Cowes to Newport, then a bus to Ryde, a ferry to Portsmouth, a ferry to Gosport and finally a bus to Lee. The Customs officers in the launch had helped me with my small holdall that contained my dirty washing, at least that is what I had told them. Actually it had in it twice the cigarette allowance, which was for my Dad, padded out with a little dirty washing.
When I arrived home and saw Jean at the top of the stairs waiting for me, heavily pregnant, smiling with the radiance that only pregnant women have, the tortuous journey home had all been worthwhile. I can still picture the green maternity wrap-round skirt that she was wearing. At that moment I dreaded the thought of going back to the ship; I wanted to be here with her.
The next trip was to Ras Tanura in the Persian Gulf (its name means Oven Cape and is well named). This run finally confirmed my feelings that a life at sea was not for me, so when we arrived back at Fawley just over three weeks later, as it could possibly my last chance of signing off for some while (because it had to be done in a British home port) I signed off.
Less than four weeks later our daughter Susan was born, and I resigned from Marconi’s a week after that. This time I had been at sea for less than three months, but being with Jean and our new baby was far more important to me than the extra money. Nevertheless in those days it was important to have a job; it was almost a case of no job, no money. The day after resigning from Marconi, I went to the Labour Exchange and got a job as a labourer on one of the machines in the Ashley Wallpaper factory in Gosport. As I had become a father, with all of the ensuing financial responsibilities, I never had to be asked twice if I wanted to do overtime, but as it happened, I had to work as a labourer only for three weeks. I was fortunate enough to be able to rejoin Ultra, at their new factory on Fareham Road, Gosport.
I HAD SWALLOWED THE ANCHOR FOR GOOD.
No more lonely sea and the sky for me.
Now we are a family
A Tit-Bit
My birth certificate shows that I was born on 17 November 1931 at RAF Hospital Cranwell, in Cranwell and Byard’s Leap in Lincolnshire, and that my Dad was an LAC (leading aircraftsman) in the RAF.
Who was Byard, you may ask? It was not a who but a what; it was in fact a blind horse in local folklore (though Byard appears in a number of continental medieval legends too). According to the legend, sometime in the past there was an evil witch who lived in the area in a cave or hut. I think a cave might be somewhat unlikely in an area that is as flat as a pancake. Nevertheless, in the true tradition of witch stories, she was responsible for most of the misfortunes that befell the local inhabitants including withering crops. The locals enlisted the help of a retired soldier who stated that he would kill the witch by driving his sword through the heart of ‘old Meg’ as she was known. For some reason he decided that he needed a horse with fast reactions, possibly so that he could beat a hasty retreat before she could turn him into a frog or something similar if things got out of hand. To select a suitable horse, he went to a pond where some horses were drinking and threw a stone into the pond and the horse that reacted quickest was a blind horse known as ’Blind Byard’ which was the one he chose.
Mounting Byard, he set out for old Meg’s lair and called her out, but somehow she managed to outwit him and managed to creep up behind his horse and jabbed her long nails into its rear, scaring the living daylights out of the animal. Byard leapt over 60 feet (that is more than twice the men’s world long-jump record) and ran off with the ex-soldier astride and the old witch in pursuit. However, when they reached the pond the hero of the story regained control of the horse, turned round and thrust his sword through the heart of old Meg. She fell into the pond and drowned. The spot where Byard is supposed to have landed in his remarkable leap is marked (for tourists?) by a small bordered patch in the ground with four horseshoe imprints. (They look rather close together).
Map of Elmore during the 1940s
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my thanks to Amanda Field of Chaplin Books for her guiding hand in the gestation period and delivery of this book.
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