“Blighty and Beyond“
by ‘Roussillon’ VI
Early in 1953 we received news that the Battalion was going home. This was the final disappointment for Group 51/05, which was to serve an almost logistically impossible twenty-one months in transit and the Canal Zone. Instead of the glory and status of the long awaited towel at the foot of the bed, the early morning call, the kitbags piled by the guard tent, and the envious glances cast by those who were remaining, our moment of triumph was to be shared with the very latest arrivals in our ranks. We had all heard stories about such National Service men being unfeelingly passed on to an incoming battalion. The East Surreys leaving Eritrea in ’50 being the most quoted example because those unfortunates had gone to Akaba with the Battalion. But this was not to happen here. So we all boarded the troopship and sailed home.
Our one moment of payback came when the Lord Lieutenant of the County inspected the guard of honour on arrival at Southampton. By some statistical quirk the men were carefully chosen company-by-company as their tallest and smartest on parade, and had fallen in so that the front rank was virtually all Cockneys, Woodcock from the MT section, and I amongst them. After the Lord Lieutenant had received yet another ‘London, Sir’ to his increasingly desperate question of "And where are you from?" he finally expostulated, "Are none of you from the County?’" And finished the inspection, visibly glowering, a wonderful heartening sight, which boded no good for the Adjutant and the RSM our eternal foes.
Sir Peter Ustinov, who served in the Regiment, has written "that for some temperaments, a bad education is the best. The army was deplorable as a finishing school and therefore I will ever be grateful for all it taught me". I too would not have missed it for worlds. For it give me the happiest day of my life - the day I got out. But on the Empire Ken, homeward bound, sitting on what I later learnt to call ‘number three hatch’ a chance remark by Corporal Gwynn-Jones, who had introduced me to the writings of George Orwell, about going to sea as a Radio Officer, changed things forever.
Things had changed back in Blighty too. Perhaps I should mention that from our childhood, my mother had never approved of our mixing with the local boys. Naturally this had made my brother and I even keener on such proscribed contact and consequent recognition. But now I saw them with different eyes. I stood there inches taller and a couple of stone heavier, deeply sun burnt, shivering in the cold though wearing every item of army clothing I had been issued and wondered how I had ever let these home-based, weekend passed, ex-RAF clerks and storemen (one had even failed the medical examination) be the arbiters of my dress and conduct. To Stan Rackett from a rival push over at Norbury who had passed ‘P’ Company and become a Para I always gave a nod. And to Sid Gilbert, private soldier, late of the East Surreys who had served in the Zone always a wave and a greeting when I saw him digging up the roads. Otherwise it was true regimental ‘nil secundus’. I went down to the ‘Horse and Groom’ at Mitcham and had a few beers with Eric Hartshorn after he got out of military prison, but overall my return to 'civvy street' was not going well.
Eric and Somers had had a delayed release because on the Wednesday night before our de-mob we all got drunk in Chicester and they had jump-started a jeep belonging to some MP’s and gone for a joy ride. A true desert style exploit, which drew the inevitable twenty-eight days inside. Actually they had started their high jinks the evening we arrived at Tidworth. Fresh off the boat train we had lined up for a meal when a depot lance corporal had walked straight to the head of the queue. Now in the Battalion corporals lined up with their sections but could eat separately at a reserved table if they wished. Somers therefore grabbed the unfortunate with a bear-like growl of ‘Behind me Jack!’ Hartshorn did the same, a chain reaction started and the depot lance-jack went backwards past some six hundred of us finishing up behind the baggage party itself. Our regimental corporals in the queue laughed and joinied in the joke.
By now even for an English spring the weather was bitterly cold and wet. My father had suffered a business reversal and was trying to get a new partnership with a mysterious grower ‘The Major’ up and running in the black. He and I sat on a bench in St James’s Park one afternoon and he explained that he had got me a job with a friend of his as a junior cashier. The wage was about three times the then adult basic wage, some seven pounds ten shillings a week after deductions. The unwritten rule of the market cashiers was that on cashing up anything over the necessary balance was theirs, but anything short was the firm’s worry. There was so much fiddling, and they never counted the bottom note. It was hard to find a poor cashier, and given my total lack of qualifications, it was in fact an offer of a good situation.
It was immediately post lunch, say 2.30pm, I looked at the freezing sludge on the pavement, at the still frozen fag ends in the gutter, at some miserable looking waterfowl who couldn’t possibly have lasted the night without veterinary attention and said there had to be something else. When pressed I remembered the thought of Gwynn-Jones and seagoing and my father, perhaps glad that I was at last not wholly dependant on his patronage, suggested I look into it.
It wasn’t like the old days of easily running away to sea at all. Though I should have been part prepared, for my brother Michael had gone to sea in late 1950. He had once phoned me in the Canal Zone offering rather naively, bearing in mind what happened to some of our deserters, to help me stowaway to Oz. For a fortnight or so I constantly toured the ‘pool’ and various shipping offices. The only job consistently on offer was Fireman and Trimmer, which said it all.
But all unknowingly I had crossed over and been accepted into the seaman’s world. Barely recognised faces would challenge, "How’d you do at NZ Shipping Company yesterday then?'" and I’d have to shamefacedly reply in the negative. I was an oddity, a freak, and a sport of nature. With outward bound British merchant ships down by the head with people hating the life but all busily sailing away to avoid conscription, I who was quit of the army and had seen National Service in one of its more unpleasant forms, couldn’t get to sea. To the worst of the column dodgers, the uncertificated junior engineers, recently fitter’s mates, who having just completed an apprenticeship in an ‘approved industry’ now claimed officer status together with the unmentionable dregs of the catering staff, I was merely contemptible. But to the deck department, the watch keepers, the mates and the sailors of the ‘crowd’, James Cook’s ‘the people’, who actually worked the ships, I was hailed as a kindred spirit. A Homeric hero, bent on regaining his Penelope by reversing the flow of time, returning to the sea to once again wet the oar on his shoulder, a little mad, a nutcase perhaps, but these were only their terms of commendation and affection. For undoubtedly I was a true and worthy candidate for entry into the freemasonry of the sea and to learn of her mysteries. And so I was.
My newfound friends referred me to Bosuns and Lamp Trimmers who would ‘find me a berth’ if I ‘saw them right’. To Chief Officers and Masters of ships who were ‘hard-pressed’ finding a crew, they initiated me into the intricacies and backdoor entry possibilities of the oxymoronic Efficient Deck Hand (EDH) rating left over from the heavy war time convoy casualties.
The breakthrough, however, came one morning in a Lyon’s teashop near the Aldwych, when a chance acquaintance who in true MN fashion immediately conferred total acceptance of my plight and me observed,." If you were in radio in the army why don’t you try for the same thing at sea?'" he told me most Radio Officers were from the Marconi Company and even knew the whereabouts of their head office. He might have been a 'Sparks' himself, though I never thought to ask. I finished my tea and set forth.
By dinnertime that evening I had seen an unremembered benefactor at Marconi House and been referred to Norwood Technical College which was starting a course that September. I travelled down to Tooting Bec ‘tube station, caught a No 49 bus to Norwood, been interviewed by a Dr Danielson the Head of Department, and been accepted onto the course. In later life the thought crossed my mind that canny old Danielson wanted some token ex-servicemen on the course to counter possible charges from his colleagues of sheltering draft dodgers. But that was after I had been exposed to the academic mind. Certainly when the course formed up about 10% were ex-national servicemen. On arrival home mother seemed somewhat under whelmed by the news and in the way of the seagoing life I never saw my saviour again.*
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