There was no immediate response to our appeal, nor did we expect one. We diligently steered our papers in the right directions and the only excitement to break the monotony was the discovery of two orders bearing the same number. It was probably an isolated printing error but it threatened the whole system and the reverberations travelled all the way back to Whitehall!

Christmas arrived and the English (and Welsh) were given leave over the holiday period while the Scots remained to man the barricades, preferring to be home for Hogmanay, which is more widely celebrated in Scotland. We had only been back for a week or so when I and several others were summoned to the Company Office and informed that we would be proceeding on embarkation leave forthwith, prior to departing for the Far East.

After an issue of tropical gear and a battery of injections, I returned home for the second time in less than a month to inform my parents that I was bound for foreign climes. Britain, as usual, was engaged in a number of skirmishes around the world and my mother’s chief concern, quite naturally, was that her son was likely to be shot at and possibly come to an untimely end. My father saw it as an opportunity to see the world and, as his foreign experience up to that time was a half-day excursion to Boulogne, voiced his envy. I just welcomed my deliverance from Chilwell!

After fourteen days of visiting friends and relatives and stocking up on home cooking, I took the tube to the RAOC depot at Feltham, Middlesex, and joined my fellow members of the draft. In the early hours of a bleak February morning, we boarded a train that took a circuitous route to Liverpool, picking up other contingents on the way, and by late afternoon we were aboard HMT Lancashire, our ferry to the Orient. Very soon, she was nosing her way down the Mersey headed, if not for the wide blue yonder, then the smoky purple haze of a wintry Irish Sea.

The Lancashire was one of a fleet of transports operated by the Bibby Line, moving troops around the world. She was hardly a cruise liner, having been converted to a troop transport while still on the slipway in 1917. This particular voyage was to extend to Shanghai and as the popular song of the hour was ‘Slow Boat to China’ it naturally became our signature tune. Not only did it transport us to the East, it also transported us back to pre-war times when we re-discovered white bread, white sugar and cigarettes packed in foil and cellophane, items not seen on British shelves since 1939.

The top deck cabins were allocated to officers, a few wives joining their husbands and a handful of Army nurses, the latter being kept in strict purdah. Troop accommodation was below decks, even below the waterline in some cases. The hull was divided into compartments, each holding a hundred or so personnel, where we ate and slept. Each compartment was sub-divided, Navy fashion, into messes of fifteen or sixteen men. The furniture consisted of long wooden tables, one for each mess, flanked by benches, and a rack of hammocks, where we also stashed our kit-bags.

HMT Lancashire

Meals for each mess were collected from the galley by whoever was designated for that duty and arrived, in bulk, in heavy iron vessels called ‘dixies’, accompanied by a huge aluminium jug full of sweet, milky tea. The food was good and plentiful and we had no complaints on that score. We washed our plates and cutlery in the ablutions area and mopped out our living space after each meal. Apart from a few other housekeeping chores, we had the rest of our time to ourselves and most of us wallowed in sloth and idleness, which, as I have said, is the preferred ambience of the British Tommy!

At night, the hammocks were slung from beams above the table and it was here that we were supposed to sleep, swaying gently to the roll of the vessel. I say ‘supposed’ because painted in large black letters on the bulkhead was the legend, ‘Troop Deck D - Messing 120, Hammocks 90’. For the arithmetically erudite, this meant that thirty of us had to find somewhere else to lay our weary heads each night. Fortunately, there were many unoccupied nooks and crannies, such as on and under the mess tables, and to anyone who had difficulty sleeping on his back in the banana position, these places were welcome alternatives. The unrolled hammock simply became a painfully thin mattress! When we entered tropical waters, almost everyone deserted the sweltering holds and slept on the topside decks, anyway.

By morning on our first day at sea, we were clear of British coastal waters and heading southward for the Bay of Biscay. For the next ten days, the weather was tranquil and our only sight of land was a black smudge against a dark sky to the east, which, we were informed, was the coast of Portugal. In fact, other than a brief glimpse of the Italian island of Pantelaria, that was the only land we were to encounter before our arrival in Egypt. We passed through the Straits of Gibraltar at night, missing the Rock and the Moroccan coastline, and steamed on for what was supposed to have been our first port of call, Malta.

As we drew near to the island, a violent storm blew up, making entry into Valetta harbour extremely hazardous. That advice was conveyed to our captain via Aldis lamp signals from a patrolling Navy destroyer, which appeared to be in greater danger than we were, to judge from its antics, so we sailed on. The tempest sent most of my shipmates to commune with Poseidon via the toilet bowls. I was one of only two members of our mess who appeared at breakfast that morning and we had the pleasure of polishing off a pile of crispy bacon intended for fifteen people! Opportunities like that rarely occur in the Army! When the storm finally subsided, we emerged into the daylight to discover that much of our deck furniture – benches, rafts and many of the life-belts which had hung from the rails – had been carried away.

As I have said, we were largely left to our own devices on board. Officers and senior NCOs only made their appearances at lifeboat drill or pay parade and seldom made any demands of us. Once we had explored the ship and the novelty of watching the whitecaps had waned, out came the cards. A few days into the voyage and the ship resembled a floating Las Vegas, with gamblers plying the pasteboards in every available corner. We did have a recreation saloon, so called, equipped with tables and chairs and a few tattered magazines, but it was woefully inadequate for the thousand-or-so cardsharpers wanting to use it.

Gambling is very much frowned upon in the services, in fact it is a punishable offence. The only game of chance sanctioned is Bingo, more commonly known to the troops as Tombola, and then only when conducted by a responsible authority, for a worthy cause. One game, Crown and Anchor, is anathema, especially in the Navy. This is a board game, played with special dice bearing an array of nautical symbols, two of which give the game its name. Although the card games were given the blind eye, provided no money was in evidence, Crown and Anchor had to be conducted very surreptitiously!

The banker was a civilian member of the ship’s crew – the butcher, in fact – and he held court at dead of night. The ‘board’ was printed on a square of silk which could be snatched up with the bets and dice inside it and stuffed quickly into the operator’s pocket, should the need arise. I only visited this den of vice once, descending, in near total darkness, into the bowels of the ship to reach the venue. I emerged with pockets considerably lightened. Crown and Anchor is not a game for the novice punter!

The majority of my shipmates were ‘brown jobs’, i.e. Army types, with just about every corps and regiment being represented. I don’t remember seeing any airmen, known to us as ‘Brylcreem boys’. Perhaps the RAF managed to fly all its personnel between stations. There was, however, a contingent of Navy personnel, with whom I became friendly. They were crew replacements for a gunboat operating on the Yangtze river, then regarded as international waters. Within a few months, their ship, HMS Amethyst, had become world famous.

In 1949, the People’s Liberation Army was sweeping southwards across China, the Communists rejecting the ‘unequal treaties’ which had bestowed territorial rights on some western powers. They attempted to trap Amethyst in the upper reaches of the river but the ship ‘crashed’ the booms, opening fire on Chinese shore batteries and drawing fire on itself. She managed to make her way down to Shanghai, not without damage and casualties, and thence to Britain, passing through Singapore en route, where she was berthed for a short period at the Naval Base. I later learned that a couple of the fellows that I had known were killed in that engagement which, subsequently, became the subject of a major feature film.

HMS Amethyst at Singapore en route to UK