How did it all start...?

Hitler has a lot to answer for. I was quite happy to have been born in Ilford, Essex, and had I stayed there I’m sure that I would have had a fairly dull life. The Second World War started a big change. First it was the blackout then, because our house was on the Luftwaffe route to the London Docks, an Anti – Aircraft battery was installed in the playing field behind our house, complete with guns and searchlights. I went and inspected it – magnificent. The problem only emerged when the guns opened up – all the windows in our road fell out. This happened every time.  The bureaucrats answer? Move the people out of the road of course.  My family went to Esher in Surrey - they took me with them, I was put in the front cab of a lorry. The war was fun for a growing boy – I had a bike and explored Surrey, its mostly sand, with some nice rivers for fishing. 

We had more bombs and Doodle bugs in Surrey than in Essex, because, just up the road, was the United States Army Air force base at Bushy Park, it was huge. One day was very special, in June 1954, I was picked up with a load of other kids in a large lorry and taken to a party at the U.S. base. It was amazing, we had a proper tea, with ice cream, yes ice cream during the war! Then a really big bloke called Joe Louise, heavy weight champion of the world, had an exhibition fight with Jersey Joe Walcott, he wasn’t small either. Then we watched cartoons, Mickey Mouse of course, and we were given a bag of goodies and taken home, amazingly by the same lorry, to where we had been picked up – how did they do that? 

The next day lorries from the base, thousands of them, started to roll past our house. All day, all night these lorries kept rolling by the vast convoy was controlled by soldiers on motor bikes and in Jeeps. I couldn’t cross the road, so I didn’t go to school – great. A few days later the invasion of France started.

After the war, when I was ten my father packed me off to boarding school. I think that this was I kept waking my parents up in the afternoon. 

The building that is Barnard Castle School stands proud. On gently rising ground, looking out across the River Tees valley just outside the town of the same name. The famous Bowes Museum is next door. You might be forgiven for thinking that the school would make a great improvement, but to a ten-year-old boy, close to tears, but not daring to cry, because he knew that it would set his mother off as well. No, to this boy Barnard Castle School looked very like H.M.P Dartmoor and twice as bleak. I was very homesick, I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t support a football team, the food was awful, and I was 250 miles from home and a total shit was bullying me.

My first discovery was that the locals spoke a form of English. ‘Why a ye nowt like it lad, by gum wherest nearest bog?’ I was also firmly told that only ‘poofter southerners had an inside bog.’ I didn’t dare tell them that we had two. Arsenal soon benefited from my support. If, as often happened, Arsenal beat a northern team, I got beaten up. If they lost, I was beaten up anyway. I did learn a few things, for example, how to deal with the school bully. There is only one way really. We, a few of his other victims and I, had a quiet chat with him…. in a quiet corner … problem solved. It was simple really, all we did was return what he given us; and, like him, we didn’t touch his face.

The school, incredibly, finally got round to educating me and this helped me on my way to sea.  H.H.S. Worcester, the famous training ship, moored in the Thames at Greenhithe, was where my father wanted me to go for pre-sea training. The Worcester required three good school reports. This was a problem. My school reports were lousy. I had to pull my finger out and get working. I was soon caught.

Working away, trying to solve quadratic equations, in a classroom on sunny summer afternoon the school padre, a blown away Portuguese gent, called Francis Xavier, stuck his nose into my hidey hole, and asked what I was doing inside on such a nice day. I explained my situation and said that maths would be important at sea and mentioned the three good school reports required by the Worcester. He offered to show me how quadratics worked, and he gave me lessons, in his own time, for which I am still grateful. I’m pretty sure that Francis Xavier, albeit a Priest, grassed me up and told all my teachers my story. Soon I was being hounded in Class, singled out, asked embarrassing questions, being laughed at. It worked! I started to work on all my subjects. It was odd, as I improved, I got to like the school better and better. I played rugby and bit of cricket. I swam and dived for the school. Now, of course, I am proud of my time as a Barney boy.

With the war over my Fathers work, as a Waterman and Dock Pilot on the Thames, resumed and the family moved to Gravesend to make his life easier, and I became a Man of Kent. I remained at Barnard Castle School and managed to learn enough to qualify for entry to the Thames Nautical Training College, H.M.S. Worcester In 1952. I was a little nervous about entry into the Worcester. Every person with a shipping background that I knew, and I knew plenty in Gravesend, warned me that the Worcester was really tough. You had to sleep in hammocks, just like the sailors in Nelsons Navy. Cadets had to run everywhere, boxing was mandatory, and horrors, you were expected to learn to dance, all the while wearing a naval uniform.

It turned out that almost everything I was told about H.M.S. Worcester was true. True you had to run everywhere, but it was, in reality, a small ship, and the running was simply to give us more exercise. Hammocks, properly set up and rigged, are great for sleeping. The only drawback with rows of boys, snug in their hammocks, was the occasional incidence of nocturnal misbehaviour. Because the hammocks were hoisted on to stout steel bars, lowered from the deckhead, any unusual vibrations were transmitted to every hammock made fast to that bar. The problem was soon solved by dropping that boy’s hammock – none too gently to the deck. He could do what he liked down there and disturb no one. 

Dancing – well P&O was a very popular shipping company for Worcester cadets, their liners carried female passengers and dancing was a social asset – so we learnt to dance. Yes, with other boys!  It was a great asset to me – on occasion – read the book!

I served my three years apprenticeship, qualified as an officer and continued at sea for a further 7 years. Got the itch. My original intention was to get my Masters Certificate and then work towards becoming a Trinity House Pilot in London. I was beginning to dawn on me that I did not really want to be a Pilot. The law had become an interest, but it all looked too difficult. Anyway, I left the sea and joined a firm a shipping solicitors in London, qualified as a solicitor and finally ended up as the Senior Partner – but that is another story.