Authors: Sean Longden
Having been ‘less than brilliant’ at school, and already having an interest in ships, Bromley-born Derek Tolfree trained at the
Worcester
between 1940 and 1942: ‘My father said I needed to do something about my education since I was just digging holes for air raid shelters and filling sandbags.’ His father pointed out the obvious advantages of the training: ‘If you wanted to be a ship’s officer you had to do four years before you could sit for your first mate’s certificate. If you’d got the leaving certificate from the college, that knocked the apprenticeship down to three years.’ He was further convinced by the head of the local ARP, whom he had met whilst working as an ARP messenger. Her husband had been a ship’s captain and her stories of his experience helped to inspire the teenager.
Discipline at the college was strict and the training was of a high standard. There was the usual routine of learning to climb the masts and rigging of sailing ships. As Derek Tolfree explained, the boys were trained to a high standard:
It was old-style training. No radar or electronics. We did a basic wireless course, but I learned most of that when I was at sea. We did school classes in maths, trigonometry, science, ship stability, meteorology and
marine engineering. We learned seamanship by boat work on the river: knots and splices, rigging. The seamanship was basic but the navigation was deep: astronomical navigation, reading the stars. It was up to the standard needed to be a Master Mariner. When you became an officer, you didn’t need to know any more navigation to get your Master’s ticket.
Worcester
boys could have navigated ships in Nelson’s fleet.
The boys also learned that life at sea was regulated with ranks, something that was enjoyed by some of the cadets:
Discipline was very strict. The greatest crime was smoking, it was forbidden on a wooden ship. The first move was for senior boys to become a badge cadet, their recreation was at the fo’c’sle. The ‘heads’ – or toilets – were in the fo’c’sle deck. So you would have to ask for permission to go to the heads. If you weren’t walking smartly or dressed right, they’d find some reason not to let you. Or they’d get a stick out and give you a whack. And the chief cadet was like a head prefect. He used to administer corporal punishment if your sea chest was untidy or you were late.
This hierarchy extended to mealtimes:
We ate lots of rabbit stew – I think it was caught in the grounds. We sat at long mess tables, twelve boys to a table. It was seated on seniority. When grub turned up, the senior boys got the best pickings. They took their share then passed it down, and so on, till the junior boys had what was left.
Although such conditions were an annoyance to the junior boys, they also served to encourage them to keep working and advance until they moved up the table.
The wartime evacuation of training ships took the TS
Vindicatrix
from Gravesend to Sharpness on the Gloucester and Avon Canal. Between 1939, when she arrived at Sharpness, and 1966, when the school closed, some 70,000 ‘Vindi-Boys’ trained there. The ship had been launched in 1893 as the
Arranmore
, sailing around the world on an eighteen-month maiden voyage. After being sold to a German
shipping company and renamed the
Waltraube
, she spent the Great War as a depot ship for the U-boats. In 1920 she returned to England as reparation for wartime shipping losses, was renamed the
Vindicatrix
and became the training ship for the Gravesend Sea School.
Having been rejected by both the Army and the Royal Navy, Bill Ellis decided the merchant service was the place for him – after all, they did not discriminate against small youths. A friend named McNair suggested he join since there were plenty of opportunities for youngsters to replace men being recalled to the Royal Navy. He chose to train on the
Vindicatrix
:
We were housed onboard the ship – and I didn’t mind it. As I had no mum or dad, I already had a sense of independence. You’d learn knots, sailing, lifeboats and basic sailing in little boats there. You had the choice to go as a steward or a deck boy – and I wanted deck.
With money short, Bill had to find ingenious ways of earning extra:
The pay was 6/6 a week but they charged you for everything – haircuts, shoes, shoe repairs – so there was hardly anything left. You had to try and make some extra money. Some of the boys would get their mums to send them cakes, which they’d cut up and sell for 1d a slice. Others would sell single cigarettes out of a packet of Woodbines. There was this girl I’d been going out with – I wrote to her and asked her if there was any chance her mum would bake me a cake – and she did, so I had something to sell.
When his friend joined the training ship, the two boys found other ways to make their lives easier:
We all had to do our own weekly washing. McNair had an idea – we passed our washing on to somebody else. Everyone had a pile of stuff to wash and we dropped a bit on to each person’s pile. It would then all get hung out on the line together – and we would say we’d lost something and get it back. It worked until the officers realized that instead of washing we were standing around smoking – after that we were given the officers’ shirts to do too as well as our own.
Another ruse the two boys used was when they rowed upriver to collect bread for the kitchens. As they unloaded the loaves, they threw a couple into the bushes and collected them later.
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They also attempted to get extra food by stealing swans’ eggs from nests on the banks of the canal: they were chased by the swans and broke the eggs in the rush to get away.
Bill and McNair were not the only boys who used ruses to make their lives more comfortable:
There was a bloke who wanted a fag off me but I wouldn’t give it to him. So he said, ‘If you don’t I’m going to throw the ship’s cat in the water!’ I felt sorry for the cat and gave him a fag. He did this all the time – it turned out the cat was a pretty good swimmer!
Life onboard
Vindicatrix
was less than comfortable as Ron Singleton, who joined as a sixteen year old in 1944, recalled: ‘It was rough. It was terrible. They told us the food was the worst you would get on any British merchant ship. If you could stick it on the training ship they said you could stick it at sea – on any ship. It was designed to make you tough.’ The basic conditions were also a fitting introduction to life on some of the Merchant Navy’s older vessels, as Tony Sprigings recalled of the first ship he joined as an apprentice: ‘It was an old ship, with no new instruments. We just had sextants, a barometer and a chronometer. Nelson would have been happy with it.’
With war looming, the Royal Navy took over the premises of the Prince of Wales Sea Training Hostel to train gunners to serve on merchant ships. The school was then evacuated to the Ingham Old Hall in Norfolk, where training continued. With the outbreak of war many parents decided to take their sons out of the school, fearing for their safety at sea. When Bernard Ashton’s parents asked whether he wanted to return home he refused the offer: regardless of the dangers, he wanted to finish the course and go to sea.
Despite the change in location, training continued as normal. As Edward Ford, who arrived in late 1939 aged fourteen, later recalled, the school was a complete culture shock: ‘Life at the school was something new to me, I had never lived away from home and here I was with other boys from all over the country all with a different way
of talking, one lad from Glasgow I could not understand.’ He later recalled being taken to Ingham Old Hall by his mother and then crying himself to sleep that night. Six months later this self-confessed naive and unworldly boy had his first leave. His friends soon realized how much the sea-training had done for him, telling him he had gone away a boy and returned home as a man.
Having left their mothers, and the protection of home, the boys needed discipline. Edward Ford remembered the routine:
The sleeping was in bunk beds in dormitories twelve to a room. All the cleaning was done by the boys and one spent a week at a time on each job. If your job was not done to the satisfaction of the officer of the watch then you did a second week, this seemed only to apply to jobs nobody wanted to do. Laundry, you had to do your own and time was set aside for the purpose. The day was governed by the ship’s bell and was divided into watches.
It was good practice for living in the cramped conditions of a merchant vessel.
Of course, the boys were more interested in learning the rudiments of seafaring than making beds and mopping floors: seamanship,
sail-making
,
rope work, Morse code and semaphore were what they had volunteered for. Bernard Ashton felt proud to have gained his signallers badge, having become competent in sending Morse code with an Aldis lamp and learning all the international signalling flags. Having come straight from school, most of the boys enjoyed the fact that this was a different type of schooling: there were no more spelling tests or pointless geography lessons, whilst maths was put to a practical use.
As boys approached the end of their six-months’ training, they were given new duties, working in the office, being sent out to collect new boys from railway stations and holding the rank of petty officer. In the final days before departing they had to make their own sea bag. Under instruction from a retired Royal Navy sailmaker, they cut the canvas to the required size and shape, then stitched it together. It was a rite of passage that showed they were ready to join their first ship.
Although some youngsters clamoured to get to sea in wartime, for other teenagers war was far from their minds when they had signed on
for service. Among them were boys whose decision to go to sea was made by chance. In July 1939, fifteen-year-old Christian Immelman was asked by his father what he intended to with himself after leaving school:
I only knew I did not want to work in an office. At the time my dad was taking a cigarette from a packet of Players with a picture of a seaman on the cover. I said, ‘I’ll be a sailor.’ My dad was a commercial traveller, he returned from his next trip to the north of England with all the details about apprenticeships.
He was soon granted an interview with the marine superintendent of the Anglo Saxon Petroleum Company (part of Shell). Christian was told he was to follow the orders of the deck officers and that he would learn all that was needed to become an officer upon completion of a four-year apprenticeship. To the fifteen year old, this all seemed very serious but he was relieved to hear the wages were to be sixty pounds for four years service: ‘It didn’t sound too bad for someone who’d been on a few pennies a week pocket money. And, I would get a shilling each month washing allowance.’ However, apprentices were not, he was told, permitted to ‘frequent ale houses or taverns’.
With the interview concluded, and his indenture signed and witnessed, Christian and his father left the office and went to nearby Dock Street where they went on a shopping spree to buy the gear he needed for the sea. He was also given the titles of two books,
Nicholls’s Seamanship
and
Principles for Second Mates
, and told he should read them before joining the ship. It was all the instruction he would receive before going to sea: ‘The closest I’d been to the sea before were daytrips to Southend, summer holidays at Porthcawl, south Wales, and one trip to Scout camp in Guernsey.’ He was fifteen years old, about to join his first ship, when the news came that Britain was at war with Germany.
Within a few weeks Christian Immelman received instructions to join his first ship, the
Dolabella
. He knew nothing practical about seafaring and was about to have a crash course on life in the Merchant Navy. He travelled from London to Newcastle on a train filled with service personnel. The sight of so many men in uniform made him feel
like an imposter. Upon arriving, he asked directions to the platform to take him to the shipyard at Hepburn:
The porter directed me to go along the platform for the local train and turn to port at the end, I went ahead and turned right but received a shout from behind saying, ‘I said port not starboard.’ I gave him a wave and did a 180-degree turn and learned my first nautical terms.
In January 1940, aged barely sixteen, Bernard Ashton travelled by train to Southampton to join his first ship as a deck boy: ‘As a deck boy, I was known as the “Peggy”. It comes from a sailor with a peg leg – he can’t go aloft, he can’t do most of the jobs. So he becomes the general dogsbody.’ With war underway, there was no time for the boys to go home first. Instead, Bernard telephoned his parents, telling them to meet him in Southampton before he shipped out. As his mother cried, he carried his sea bag and small suitcase on to the
Rochester Castle
.
With the coming of war, a career in the Merchant Navy was no longer seen by many parents as what they wanted for their teenage sons. The resistance displayed by some parents was fully justified. Ron Singleton’s mother had no desire to see a second son go to sea:
I hadn’t been planning to go to sea. I lost my brother Gordon in the Merchant Navy. He was killed on his second trip. Like a sixteen year old I thought, ‘Right I’ll go away to sea and kill a few Germans!’ My mother didn’t agree with it. She wouldn’t sign the papers at first. She wasn’t very happy. But I told her that if I didn’t go to sea they’d send me down the mines. It wasn’t true, but it worked.
This fear of being conscripted into coal mining was shared by many youngsters. When Bert Taylor made the decision to join the Merchant Navy in advance of conscription, his mates told him: ‘You could end up in the Navy, Air Force, Army or down the mines. Better the Merchant Navy than take your chances in the mine ballot.’ He had another reason for deciding to sign on for service at sea: ‘Chaps I knew were starting to get the call-up for the military – they could be sent anywhere and I wasn’t too keen on the military. The option of the Merchant Navy gave you a bit more freedom.’