Alongside the quay at Keppel Harbour bobbed the off-white hull of HMT Devonshire, a relic of war-time days yet, as a ship, an improvement on the Lancashire. Unlike most of His Majesty’s rag-tag transport fleet, Devonshire was a dedicated troop carrier, having been built specifically for this role. We were not entirely aware of her ancestry and rumour had it, incorrectly as it transpired, that she had been a Baltic liner in a previous life, acquired as reparations from a vanquished foe. We did not have long to admire her graceful lines before we were being herded aboard to stow our gear on the troop deck.

She was larger than Lancashire, with a capacity of about 1150 military passengers, I believe, Our masters had still not managed to get their arithmetic right: more bodies were assigned to this space than there were places to sling the hammocks! I didn’t mind. Sleeping below decks, jammed amongst one’s snoring, flatulent comrades, could be rather claustrophobic, to say the least, so I was quite happy to lay my hammock on the planks, topside.

Below decks without forced air on a stationary ship in a tropical port is not a place in which to linger, so we were soon back on deck, sweating profusely and taking our last looks at Singapore Roads, one of the busiest harbours in the world. I can’t really claim it was nostalgia but some of us, mainly those who had not been engaged in the bloody jungle war, began to realise, belatedly, that Malaya hadn’t been such a bad billet after all. Many aspects of our lives there might be sadly missed, especially on wet, wintry days in Bradford or Birmingham!

We were up-anchored and away by mid-day, nosing through the maze of palm-capped cays and islets that guard the Colony’s southern approaches, and out into the Straits of Malacca. Having been ‘ticked off’ on the clipboards of our officers or senior NCOs and assigned our lifeboat stations, we were henceforth left pretty much alone by these worthies. Once we had located the ablution areas, the canteen store, the sick bay and the recreation saloon, we stripped down to our shorts and the cards came out!

The voyage home was fundamentally a reverse run of the outward trip except that we were now hardened troops rather than wide-eyed military tourists. We could claim to have ‘got our knees brown’ and this time we were not beguiled by the sights, sounds and smells of an unfamiliar orient. At our first port of call, Colombo, we carefully avoided our previous watering hole with its abandoned beer. Pineapples and mangoes were no longer novelties and a ride in a ricksha was definitely naff! I recall taking a look at the impressive parliament buildings and I visited the main post office to buy a set of Ceylonese stamps but otherwise, the visit was unremarkable and largely unremembered.

Aboard Devonshire – and the cards come out!

At sea again, our ship’s sharp end pointing steadfastly westwards, we spared little time for the flying fish that had once entranced us: gambling ruled supreme. There was precious little else in that enormous expanse of water to hold our attention until the barren island of Socotra, a notorious haunt of pirates, came into view, heralding our approach to the Red Sea. We gave Aden as miss this time and our first landfall, apart from distant glimpses of the Saudi and Sudanese coastlines were the pancake formations called The Brothers, whose lighthouse signaled the entry to the Gulf of Suez. The purple smears of land to port and starboard gradually converged to become mountains and shoreline as the approach to the southern end of the Canal hove into view and almost everyone was on deck to witness this important landfall. It was at this point that our voyage nearly became a maritime disaster. The ship was gliding between two long breakwaters marking the dredged channel when someone spotted female figures in bathing suits sunning themselves on one of the gigantic boulders that formed the walls and a shout went up!

A powered vessel, properly trimmed and with a little help from the helmsman, will proceed in a relatively straight line. However, induce a twenty degree list, caused by the rush of several hundred sex-starved soldiery to the ship’s port-side rail and it rapidly begins to describe a left-hand circle. In an instant, we were heading determinedly towards one of the aforementioned breakwaters. Panic must have ensued on the bridge as the Tannoy burst into life and a high-pitched screech ordered everyone away from the rails, PDQ! Disaster was narrowly averted as the wheel was turned hard to starboard and the engines thrown rapidly into reverse. The ship quickly lost way and wallowed, shuddering, athwart the main channel.* We all considered this to be highly amusing, of course, until a wise counsel sobered us by pointing out that had Devonshire gone to the bottom, we might have been marooned in fly-infested Suez until a replacement vessel was dispatched, a truly frightening prospect!

Calm and order having been restored and with a Canal Company pilot aboard, we proceeded northwards in distinctly better weather than we had experience the last time we traversed this strategic waterway. I managed to get ashore for an hour or two at Port Said, strolling through leafy avenues more reminiscent of a French provincial city than an Egyptian soukh, a legacy of its Gallic founders. The ‘native’ town was out of bounds to us, anyway but this did not prevent small boys pestering us with their siren cries of “You want my seester, effendi……?”

We sailed before nightfall and our last glimpse of the Land of the Pharos was the stone figure of Ferdinand de Lesseps*, his outstretched arm, seemingly waving us farewell! Our next encounter with land was at the Straits of Gibraltar, which we entered at midday, giving us a superb view of the majestic ‘Rock’ bathed in brilliant sunshine.

This was almost our last glimpse of the sun on that voyage. The Atlantic was cold and uninviting from the start and it got worse. I continued to sleep on deck despite the falling temperatures. I spent the last night, fully dressed including boots and greatcoat, wrapped in a blanket and, in turn, shrouded in my hammock, which was lashed to a bench. Had a deck piquet not brought me a mug of scalding hot tea in the wee hours, I might well have disembarked feet first in a box!

Our final day aboard was partly spent in replacing the shoulder flashes on our battledress blouses. The Far East Land Forces (FARELF) flash, the one bestowed on us, was a rather nondescript device bearing a red crusader cross on a blue shield and was in no way indicative of our having served in exotic foreign outposts. The Singapore Garrison flash, on the other hand, featured a palm tree and a lion, unmistakably proclaiming that the wearer had not spent his entire service sweeping the parade ground at Aldershot! A few minutes with needle and thread rectified this deficiency and, sensing that we had almost slipped the clutches of military authority, we dared to appear publicly in our illicit finery.