One Hundred Days Page 7
I have no doubt that both my friends and my detractors found this questioning aspect of my mind not to their liking. But I can recall, all these years later, that in matters of engineering, and indeed of naval philosophy, I had to pick things apart to find out exactly how they worked and why, until I had acquired the kind of personal peace of mind which comes with understanding. I was, in a word, curious. In one sense, until the gaps were filled, I suppose I had endless patience. On the other hand, I had little time for those who fobbed me off with platitudes.
Nonetheless, Dartmouth, over the years, largely won the battle for conformity. My instructors’ early advice, usually in the form of ‘Shut up, Woodward’, slowly mellowed into ‘Try to accept that we have been here rather longer than you have’ and ‘There really are more ways of killing a cat…’ and ‘But wouldn’t it sound more reasonable expressed this way?’ Thus they kicked that slightly indignant edge off me, teaching me to disagree rather more tactfully. This was the first stage of the Navy’s long-term, deep, inductive training, which teaches a man to fit in, which indoctrinates him, brainwashes him some would say, into the ways of the Senior Service, with lessons that will last a lifetime.
As a matter of formality, I should perhaps record that I joined the Navy on 5 January 1946 along with the rest of my term, bar two. One was delayed three weeks by the need for an operation and never really caught up. The other was my old friend George Vallings, who, being extremely ‘keen’, had arrived the day before the rest of us. Actually his grandmother had packed him off early by mistake, but it sounded good, and it certainly didn’t do him any harm as he ended up a vice admiral and a knight. I should also record that it wasn’t at Dartmouth that I joined, but at Eaton Hall, the great family seat of the dukes of Westminster, near Chester. The estate had been transformed into a vast camp, with even its own airstrip, to act as the home for the Royal Naval College, which had been evacuated from Dartmouth after a bomb hit in the early months of the war. A part of the main building of Eaton Hall was allocated for the accommodation of the new, thirteen-year-old cadets reporting to Drake house for their first two terms of instruction.
I travelled to Cheshire, all the way from the West Country, by train, a journey which required three changes, and each train, it seemed to me, was more crowded than the last. I had to find a space in the corridor, sitting by myself, perched on my green naval suitcase, self-conscious in my new uniform. Eaton Hall was like nothing I had ever seen. Though I didn’t know it, it was like nothing most people had ever seen. It was a gigantic private house, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, on very much the same scale of reckless grandeur as his other Gothic edifice, the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, only worse. It was, in truth, a massive palace, described by one of His Grace’s biographers as ‘looking like a cross between the Fleet Street Law Courts and St Pancras Station.’
Anyway, it was my home until the end of the summer term, and if I think hard and shut my eyes I can still hear the astounding music of the great campanile, approximately the size of Big Ben, which towered over the colossal mansion of England’s richest man. It also towered over me on my first morning on parade when I tripped and fell, while running on the gravel, around a frozen ornamental fountain with my term mates, trying to keep warm. I ripped the knee out of my brand new Number One uniform trousers, bled fairly gratifyingly and was taken away to be cleaned up and issued, four days before any of my fellows, with a pair of short trousers instead. This rendered me unique in the subsequent parades that week, causing me great embarrassment. I think it was the only time I did anything outstanding in my whole four years at the Naval College.
I was soon also at my lifetime peak of fitness. The place was such a never-ending sprawl. To get from class to class, books under arm, you needed the stamina of a middle-distance runner. I would find myself running, possibly in pouring rain, from my English Lit class in ‘D’ camp – Nissen huts half a mile down the road – all the way back to the main building, surrounded by a hundred acres of formal gardens, approached by five different drives, each two miles long. My maths class was held five floors up in some nasty garret, and was not at all easy to make from ‘D’ camp in the five minutes allotted. I had to cope with the added problem of not wanting to miss a moment of English literature, because my teacher was none other than the wryly humorous C. N. Parkinson (Parkinson’s Law and all that), who taught us very little about English Lit, but was fascinating on the subject of heraldry. And I was quite keen to get to maths which I still enjoyed. Fortunately, maths can still be done while breathing heavily for extended periods, I discovered.
It was, as you may imagine, an awful place in which to get lost. An absolute warren of corridors and staircases – none seeming to have any signposts. The Navy soon taught me a horror of being late, and Eaton Hall was where I started to learn it. One of my recurring nightmares for years was not about some sinking ship, or some maddened captain, but about being lost in an enormous, labyrinthine building, knowing I am getting later and later and later.
I duly left, in the summer, to face ten more terms at Dartmouth. I was moved to St Vincent House, one of the five senior houses, named of course in honour of Admiral Jervis. Nothing of great moment happened: the academic work gave no serious cause for alarm; the summers were spent building, then sailing my own dinghy; the winters were spent avoiding violent exercise, particularly rugby.
After completing my four years, I passed out at the end of 1949, eighth in my term of forty-four, three of whom would become admirals. I failed to win anything in that whole time – no academic prizes, no sporting colours, not even my house colours, normally awarded for being public-spirited in one’s last term. Zero. It all ranked as a truly exemplary piece of non-achievement, permitting me to keep wholly intact my formidable record of never having earned any prize whatsoever, for anything, between an award for Scripture (unlikely subject) at the age of seven, and a knighthood at the age of fifty.
At the conclusion of this cheerful, reasonably happy, and usually interesting time, my House Officer and Tutor were agreed on my performance. The report contained the phrases: ‘…he will never do himself full justice until he eradicates a certain intellectual laziness…his outlook is very parochial; too taken up with his own pursuits and for a boy of his intelligence, very ignorant of the world about him…inclined to be irresponsible; at present lacks drive, determination and team spirit…’ I don’t argue with any of that, indeed I have always thought it rather kinder than I deserved, but considering I was in the first twenty per cent of my term, I have occasionally wondered what they must have said about some of the chaps in the last twenty per cent.
Anyway, as a cadet under training, I was sent, in the opening week of the New Year, 1950, to join the 10,000-ton, three-funnelled training cruiser HMS Devonshire. The plan there was for cadets to spend one half of their time working the ship, mainly as not-very-able-seamen, scrubbing, washing, polishing, scraping, chipping and painting, all to the accompaniment of four letter words. And the other half was spent in a professional training programme, learning from direct experience on board all we could about how a ship worked. It wasn’t a very good time to be an able seaman, because the weather was freezing that January, and before breakfast every morning we had to scrub the wooden upper decks, in bare feet, with the water turning to shards of ice in the scuppers – made the toes tingle a bit, before all feeling faded. Still, learning your trade from the bottom up gets my vote, if there’s time, and it played a very important part in the make-up of a future officer. Remember that it was quite within an officer’s authority to tell a seaman to take off his boots and scrub the decks, whatever the weather. But once you have done it yourself a few times in mid-winter, you do think twice about telling anyone else to do it.
We sailed away from post-war Britain, still with its rationing and shortages of just about everything, in the middle of January, bound for the West Indies. We steamed south across the Bay of Biscay, then south-west down the trade winds to Trinid
ad. We slept in hammocks and worked in all the jobs in the ship – in the Boiler Room, the Engine Room, with the Navigating Officer, with the Officer of the Watch on the Bridge. We worked with the Boatswain’s Mate, running the basic routine of the ship; or with the Quartermaster, steering it; we acted as the Commander’s Runner or ‘Doggie’, tailing him all day. We manned seaboats, lowered them and hoisted them, practised on and fired the four-inch guns, made signals, stored ship, hurried back and forth, filling each day and most nights it seemed. It was not a bad life and a very considerable change from school. I can remember kneeling beside a large brass staghorn, a sort of cleat for very big ropes, polishing away happily enough in the yellow morning light in Kingston Bay, Jamaica, the sting of Brasso and salt water in my nose and looking forward to a breakfast with lots of fresh fruit, on a scale we hadn’t seen in six years.
We called at Barbados, Grenada and the Virgin Islands as well – and the only blot on my horizon was a near total inability to grasp the full significance of the Watch and Quarter Bill. This caused me several problems, because the Navy can seem to run almost entirely on notice boards and notices. I have always considered this to be so because it can take months – in my case years – before you start to understand the garbled noises that came out of the public address system, whistles, called ‘Pipes’, bugle calls, each telling you to do something different…distorted, spoken words all in nautical jargon, possibly further disguised in that north-eastern English vernacular known as ‘Geordie’. If you fail to comprehend the Watch and Quarter Bill, you have failed to find even the entrance to this nautical maze. Life is then apt to become confusing and uncomfortable as the management decides you will have to be taught to try harder.
The Watch and Quarter Bill tells everyone where and when they do everything. Well, just about everything. And there are even times set aside for that, though not specifically mentioned as such. It tells them where they eat, sleep and work, details what watches they are to keep, with whom and what they are to do on watch. It tells them their Harbour Duties, their Sea Duties, their Action Station, and even where, if not when, to Abandon Ship. Your whole life is laid out on that Bill. I don’t think I cared about it at the age of seventeen and a half, which was perhaps as well because I could not find it for some days. When I did find it, I really didn’t understand much of what it said; nor did I realize that the reading of the ‘Daily Orders’ was an essential prerequisite to such understanding. Otherwise I might have looked more carefully at Daily Orders too.
Thus for several weeks, the whole system was a complete mystery to me. We were, of course, working Tropical Routine, a change made about a week after we joined and which entirely escaped me until about the time we returned to home waters and reverted to Daily Winter Routine, which merely completed my confusion. Somehow, I muddled through, as much by the help of my friends as by the help of my Divisional Officer. I was, by any standards, utterly disorganized, a total grasshopper. It was fun though, of a sort.
We were given two weeks’ Easter leave before setting off for northern waters, round Jan Meyen Island, into Narvik, and Scapa Flow – what names for a budding naval officer to conjure with – and finally back to Devonport. By the end of that second cruise, I had discovered not just the workings of the ship, its people and its Watch and Quarter Bill, but also how to idle, look busy, avoid the dirty jobs, live safely and quite well: which I think was at least part of what we were sent there for. I passed out of the training cruiser without disgrace and knowing a lot more than I realized. In my report I was commended for my enthusiasm if not for my appearance or timeliness.
Thus I became a midshipman at the age of eighteen, having been in the Royal Navy for nearly five years. At least, I have always assumed that I had been in the Service for this long because I could not get out, should I have wished, without my father paying back the four years’ school fees, which wasn’t likely. We did not have to ‘sign on’, no contract was drawn up, nor were we required to take an oath of allegiance, as one must in the Army. I have always been told this was because the Army once mutinied and has never been entirely trusted since! Hence ‘Royal Navy’, but ‘British Army’.
Two white patches were sewn to my collar and I was ‘…directed to take up my appointment…’ in the submarine depot ship HMS Maidstone, then in refit at Portsmouth. The fact that I had been sent not to a cruiser, or a battleship, or an aircraft carrier, but to a depot ship, was a fairly clear indication that I was regarded as anything but a high-flyer. Submariners themselves were not quite the thing – smelt a bit, behaved not too well, drank too much. They were regarded as a sort of dirty habit in tins, and their depot ships were something even less professionally reputable. But Maidstone was impressive and big. She was a 10,000-ton accommodation, engineering support and maintenance ship, headquarters to a squadron of some eight submarines. She was nothing less than a floating head office, store, workshop and hotel to the boats that secured alongside her. She had workshops for everything: engine refits, torpedo maintenance and preparation, electrical and hydraulic repair, the list is almost endless. She was purpose-built for the job, and there were a dozen of us midshipmen learning the business of running a large ship and beginning to find ourselves in charge of real sailors for the first time.
After ten months, I was reappointed to HMS Sheffield, an 8000-ton cruiser, just coming out of refit and modernization. She was a fast, good design with nine six-inch guns, eight four-inch guns and clusters of 40mm Bofors almost everywhere. We took her out of Chatham Dockyard and up to the Moray Firth for her work-up in a sparkling northern spring and summer, by the end of which I had become Senior Midshipman. My pay was £10 a month, of which I saved £5, mostly for lack of opportunity to spend it. This was the old Royal Navy, where they worked you hard and expected you to count your blessings that they were bothering to teach you your trade.
There were also problems. The war, which by definition rendered life in a fighting ship nasty, brutish and short, had not been over for very long, and there were quite a few men around who were suffering from that very old affliction with the modern name of ‘stress’. ‘Shell-shock’, ‘twitch’, ‘lack of moral fibre’ were its other, less sympathetic titles. The truly ignorant even described it from time to time as ‘cowardice’, in a clear throw-back to the bad old days when there was so much courage surrounded by a quite astonishing level of stupidity on the subject of ‘stress’ in Britain’s armed forces. It is as well to remember that stress, with all the horrors it can inflict upon a well-meaning, brave man, was just as real then as it is today. In the immediate post-war Navy, the erratic behaviour of such men manifested itself in many ways, mostly in drastic personality changes. The quiet studious man who became aggressively argumentative. The hell-raiser who became introverted. Some never got over it, and most never let on that they were anything other than perfectly normal. There were also many who found life boring after the excitement of war. Their motivation dropped away and standards of personal and professional behaviour fell with it. In those days it was not impossible to find that the leadership given to young officers under training was nothing like as good as it needed to be, and many promising careers must consequently have been wrecked.
Thus it was always a matter of luck, for a young midshipman, to find himself in a ship with really high-quality officers. I, for example, was invariably allocated more than my share of good fortune. I worked under a succession of truly outstanding naval officers, all of whom went on to prove themselves capable of high command. They coached me, taught me, encouraged me, and occasionally booted me. I could never have got where I did without them and, at that time, things could so easily have gone the other way, particularly with a young officer as naturally unconfident and uncommitted as I then was.
In the autumn of 1951 I went from the Sheffield to HMS Zodiac, a lovely War Emergency Class destroyer, with four 4.7-inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and still able to do thirty-two knots flat out. She was based at Portland, with the Training Squadron
down there. I was nineteen now, but still pretty much a schoolboy. Everybody remarked how immature I was, and I can recall when I went on board that the chief petty officers looked as old as God, and the lieutenant-commander in command slightly older. He must have been about thirty-seven. His name was Geoff Wardle, a wonderful man who had already been uncomfortably close to death many times: his submarine had been sunk very early on in the war and he had been consigned to a POW camp for almost the entire duration – except that he escaped four times, was recaptured four times, and ended up in Colditz. He emerged from there entirely unbowed, but with a new trade under his belt – he had become an expert lock-picker. He could get through any door in a matter of seconds and no one in Zodiac ever had to worry about losing a key.
His second-in-command was a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant, Richard Clayton, who rarely went ashore and took his job, and his two glasses of Dry Sack sherry before dinner, very seriously. I enjoyed his sherry if not him, though he always had my respect. He was the son of a rear admiral, and a bit of a Tartar as regards work. And he really put me through it, making me work in every department of the ship and learn, really learn.