Well I was still 18 when the war began, and of course the first thing you had to make up your mind about, is did you really want to be part of this thing. Was it a war in which you felt your conscience allowed you and wanted you to take part. So for the first week of that war, I spent trying to decide whether or not it was right to be a conscientious objector or whether one ought to plunge straight into it.

And I thought finally that it was about battle between good and evil, that the German system was plainly wrong and that the way in which we lived our lives in this country, although perhaps inefficient and feeble, was at any rate an honest and good way of living, and that one must therefore fight one's battle.

That meant, on September 12th, I went down with a packet of about 20 ratings from the Clyde division of the RNR to Portsmouth. We all were ex-public school, we all had hoped to be officers, we all in fact were ordinary seamen at the good pay of 2 shillings a day and off we went to Portsmouth by night train. There, we met the old navy, the RNR ratings returning, called back. People who had never risen above the rank of ordinary seamen, and it is quite, no, able seamen, and it is quite difficult to do that if you're in the navy for twenty or thirty years. And we met a style of life where nobody had ever seen a pair of pyjamas, they always went to bed in their underclothes and, quite often, the hammocks were wet. And all this was the kind of life that we had not met before and they had never seen anything like us, in our pyjamas, all clean and tidy. They were amazed at what they saw and we were amazed by them.

However, that didn't last very long, we cleaned swimming baths, we distributed food. We became experts in cleaning lavatories, I was a great lavatory cleaner, and finally we were going to be drafted to South Africa in a thing called the Sterling Castle, and that was something that we decided, as a group, that we did not want to do. We were going to be sent straight outside the war, to South Africa, and it didn't appeal to us a bit. And the only person who knew anybody in the Admiralty was me, because my father was working there, so I rang him up and said pa, what can you do. He said probably nothing but I'll see. As a result of that, we went to the anti-submarine school, in Portland, HMS Osprey, and trained to be ASDIC operators, detectors of submarines. And I suppose we were quite good at it. But it was a waste of time really because we were taken straight from there to the officer training school, HMS King Alfred at Hove, where we lived in an underground garage and worked there, dust was inches thick everywhere and how we survived I don't know. But we were trained as officers, we were trained how to navigate, we were trained to fire guns, we were trained in seamanship, and emerged at the end of our time as I suppose quite efficient, well-trained officers.

I was then given my little purple patches, my midshipman's uniform which was always thought to be somebody in charge of the buffet car whenever I travelled on a train, I was always asked when the next service was to be, because it was a unique uniform, I think for three RNR midshipmen, and so naturally we were in charge of the next service. And I was drafted to northern patrol in HMS Letitia, an anchorline vessel of about seven thousand tons, and we were supposed to cruise up and down at about, ooh, seventy degrees north or something, to see if we could stop the armed cruiser Letitia, no, oh gosh I'm in a muddle, the Hippa coming out from Norway to raid the Atlantic. Had she come out, we might just have got out one quick signal before she blew us out of the water, because we had no guns that anybody knew where to point, there was no control system on the guns, we had one four-inch anti-aircraft gun and the whole thing was just a living target for such things as the Hippa, or submarines, and in fact all the ships on patrol, four of us on patrol and three of them were sunk, leaving us, after which that patrol was cancelled.

So, I was then withdrawn from that and sent to stand by, met a launch no.129 down in Devonport. Those motor launches were a design taken over really for - not I think originally designed as warships at all, but for private use - and they were equipped with anything that could be found for them. For instance, our main armour was a Victorian two-pounder saluting gun. When people, you told that to people they simply don't believe it. But that is true. We also had what was called a strip Lewis gun which was absolutely fatal to anybody, either operating it or in the neighbourhood, and was no use whatsoever against aircraft, which was what it was supposed to be used against. And an ASDIC machine that we couldn't turn and therefore it was very difficult to operate, you had to turn the ship to follow your target, which meant up that you had a stern chase invariably ending, submarines invariably escaped, so it was useless at that.

And we'd been found to be useless in our waters, I suppose they said well you might as go and be useless at Gibraltar, and out we went to Gibraltar. With enormous extra fuel tanks strapped on our decks to give us enough fuel to get there. These things were therefore full of petrol vapour, one spark would have set them off, and we'd have been goners. But we got to Gibraltar, escorted out by Lord Mountbatten in the K-Class Kelly, and that was our first, my first sight really of abroad, I'd been to Paris, but never to the Rock of Gibraltar with its apes and red wine and Spaniards and all the rest of it, very very very foreign indeed, and the Rock Hotel, splendid. And there we patrolled up and down the Straits of Gibraltar, reporting I suppose really on such submarines as we saw going through and we did see a few of those and they saw us and they tried to torpedo us, but they thought at night that we were big, bigger than we were and so the torpedoes were always set too low and we escaped.

But after about a year of that, I applied to go to do a gunnery control course in Britain and was sent home. My vessel NL129 went on to Malta and on the way was sunk, so that was nice for me and horrible for everybody else. As a result of the gunnery control officer course, I was appoined to HMS Bramham, but immediately got the most appalling appendicitis, was sent to be operated upon in a London hospital by a naval surgeon, who had never taken anybody's appendix out before and he made a hole big enough to take one's whole stomach out, let alone an appendicitis, and I was therefore quite ill for quite a long time.

But, when I got to Bramham, they said oh yes do stay, which was nice for me, not so nice for the man who was sent home. My gunnery control position had already gone to another person on my course, so I was in charge of the ASDICS, I was in charge of confidential books, I was a watch keeping officer etc etc. And we had a very busy time. Almost immediately I was off on an Atlantic convoy, then a Russian convoy, and then we had to escort the Fury to Malta to fly off planes to Malta. We came back from that and were sent again to Gibraltar and told there that we were going to be part of the great Pedestal convoy going off to Malta. That was the decision taken by Churchill that, whatever happened, Malta was not to fall. It by that time was down to two aeroplanes, no food, no oil, and therefore it was absolutely essential that this convoy should be got through. So the battle fleet was turned out, the Nelson and Rodney and Hood all appeared, the great names in the navy, and I think four more big cruisers, twenty-five destroyers, and nineteen merchant ships. The main battle fleet turned back before we got there because the Italian fleet obviously was not coming out, and they were there to stop the Italian fleet, and we went on. There was a ghastly night battle off Pantleria(?) where the E-boats were all waiting for us and the submarines. My ship, the Bramham, was astern of the rest of the convoy at that time because we'd been sent to escort the ship that had already been hit, the Ducalian, who was sunk earlier that evening with, by torpedo bombing and we were hard at work catching up. So we were picking up survivors most of that night, and there were plenty of those to pick up, because the convoy was reduced from eighteen down to I think six survivors that night, and two cruisers were sunk, so there were a lot of survivors to pick up. And as the youngest and the most idle of the officers, I was sent away in the whaler to pick them up. It was discovered that the whaler had not been, as is the regulation, filled with water regularly so as to keep it watertight, and it leaked like a sieve. So it was always a question as to whether one could get back to one's own ship before the whaler sank, particularly in the night or very early morning and you couldn't really see where your ship was, but I did pick up, oh something like a hundred people I would think during that convoy, and the Bramham as a whole picked up between two and three hundred, and we picked up perhaps ten times more than any ship which was a good thing to have done. One felt that was a good thing.

Finally, we had to escort HMS Ohio, the only tanker through to Malta. She was the only tanker, and she was the only tanker capable of 18 knots which was the speed of the convoy. And therefore unique and absolutely essential to the success of their convoy that she should be got in. The destroyer Penn clamped herself along one side and we clamped ourselves along the other, because there was a huge jagged piece of metal hanging out of the side of Ohio, so if you towed her from the front she simply went round in a circle like a vast rudder. So Penn had to push very hard on the starboard side and we had to push not nearly so hard on the port side, and we got her going at about 2½ knots. And we kept her going for 2½ days and got her to Malta. By that time none of us had really had much to eat and certainly none of us had had any sleep, and that was for six days. Coming in through the entrance, it's a great grand harbour of Malta was perhaps one of the most wonderful things that's ever happened to one. Safe we felt, God we're safe at last, it's wonderful.

Not a bit. There was immediately a heavy aircraft raid on Malta, of which we were the centre. But they didn't hit us and we got ourselves alongside and started unloading. Again I was the youngest officer present, had to be the officer of the day, in charge of anything that went on that day. To the end of the day, we were to go down to the ward room and there were 32 hard-boiled eggs on a plate, and I think I ate nearly all of them, and slept for 32 hours afterwards. And it was great fun seeing one's old flotilla from the MLs there and we had two days in Malta and then we came back home.

And after that, we escorted the first army out to the Algiers invasion, the 8th, oh the first army coming to relieve the 8th army and the whole of the North African campaign was off. As a result really of Malta not being captured or giving in. So it was undoubtedly a turning point of the war.

After the landing in Algiers which was an absolutely easy thing, no opposition at all, we were towed off to be the escorting ship in a patrol for merchant ships passing up and down the coast. That was far from an easy thing, because we were bombed continually in Bouji harbour, we were bombed in Algiers, we were bombed all the way along the coast, and I think practically everybody who was any part of that inner patrol, was sunk. But we were lucky.

But on one night, coming back from Boulne, the whole flotilla, the whole squadron of Yonkers 88s were sent out to get us. We were escorting three merchant ships, but they wanted us. And the very last bomb from the very last 88 went straight through our X-gun magazine. It didn't explode in the magazine because it had been set for a cruiser or something, so it exploded below the ship, but it set off some twenty shells in that magazine and there was an absolute appalling holocaust of flame coming out of the ship. Nothing could have saved us, except the hole in the bottom of the ship, which at 26 knots got in enough water to put out the fire. And we got home, and the jury rig with the hole bunged up as best we could. We had to decommission and we went back in a ship called the Batoria, a Polish ship. Mostly engaged in stopping the Poles destroying the whole lot of German prisoners on board because the Poles would love to have done that.

So from that I - I'm going too long. From that I was asked for by the, Eddie Bains, my commanding officer in the Bramham, to come to him with his next trip. Two of us went on, Peter Mitchell and myself, to Talibont. She was being built at Sammy Smith's yard in the Isle of Wight and our first lieutenant was Tony Griffin who went on to be Second Sea Lord, so he was quite a smart number. And our main things there were first of all a absolutely appalling battle against Elbin destroyers in the channel off Les Sept Iles. The Elbins were trying to get through a merchant ship, which was obviously carrying something quite vital, because they were prepared to risk a very great deal to get her through. We'd had several runs up and down the coast when nothing happened, and then finally, the word, buzz I suppose, had been received via Jane’s apparatus [his wife Jane worked at Bletchley Park on the Enigma machines] that this was the night, and our force was reinforced by cruisers and destroyers were from Portsmouth. We were operating from Lynmouth. Unfortunately, there was no tuning of the WT sets because we were not supposed to do so in harbour, so we couldn't speak to each other properly. Nobody was properly trained in night warfare, our commanding officer in the Charybdis had very little idea of how to control his destroyers, and although in our ship we picked up the presence of the convoy, at a considerable range, something like 17,000 yards, nobody else seemed to do so and also the Charybdis was not fitted with the equipment which would listen to the German signals, what was called the headache machine, so she didn't know what was going on, we didn't know she didn't know what was going on. And the Elbins, although we could in our ship hear quite clearly all their remarks as they fired, five of them, fired torpedoes at us, nobody took any action. Charybdis I believe turned 15 degrees to starboard and said she was doing so but nobody else received the signal. The result was, Caribdis was hit three times and sunk in about 3½ minutes and the destroyers’ leader, Limborne, was also hit and sunk, and everybody was left in total chaos. It was a disaster, an appalling action, and was a great lesson to everybody that you must train people in night fighting before you commit them to it.

So, that was that. And after that we went and did the invasion landings in June. That looked to everybody in our ship as if that was goodbye, because we were supposed to bombard the 15 inch guns on the top of a thing called Point du Roq, which was the keystone to the key position for the American landings. They really couldn't take place if those 15" guns were in action and so they had to be put out, and we were put in to a range of about 4,000 yards to bombard. In fact, naval guns can't bombard, they have very flat trajectories and what you want is a lovely mortar with a trajectory that goes up and down and falls like that. We just go whoosh, skimmed across the top and was useless. But, but, these 15" guns that we had been so frightened of and always all thought this is our last moment, were dummies. The actual guns had been shipped off to some other part of the war about a month previously, and all that was sticking out was wooden dummies, and that is how we survived and that is how those particular beaches were okay.

So, that was a bit of luck, and after that we cruised up and down the coast again, defending, backing up the landings, keeping down the submarines etc etc. Unfortunately, we had a bad collision on the North Sea while escorting the King George, and we were out of action. And I went on to another destroyer called the Cavendish, which had a much gentler life than the previous two, we worked up, we went out to Malta, finish our working up. By that time the European war was over and we were sent off to the Far East. And we arrived in Australia, Fremantle, two days after the end of the Jap war, so all we had to do out there was to ferry troops around and do whatever odd jobs were required. But after the kind of life that one had been leading in a destroyer, that was all absolute holiday.

In December 46, we were in Aden and a signal arrived for me to go home, end the war. And I thought, "how nice, that here we are, I'm alongside this Durham Castle, which is the thing we were tied up alongside, who's going back in ten days' time, wouldn't it be nice simply just to transfer one's baggage into Durham Castle and be home". It was a great hotel, nothing, you know, it was going to be an easy passage, I was to have nothing to do except keep the odd watch. Perfect. In fact, the navigator from Durham Castle was drafted to Aden and I was appointed as the navigator because I suppose to be a trained officer who would take over in the RN. I hadn't navigated for 2½ years, so it was back to my notebooks, no parties before leaving the navy, and I found that in the chart room there were no charts outside Aden harbour at all, the sextant that you use for measuring the height of the sun was rusted up, there were no tide tables and I spent the rest of my time in the chart depot at Aden correcting charts and getting equipment and then we were off. I found that our captain, who would have been retired, shall we say, from the navy as a lieutenant, breakfasted off a mug of whisky and ate nothing again until sunset, when he took another mug of whisky. So the control of the ship seemed to be rather in my hands, which I hadn't expected.

But we did get home. There were funny moments, because I had no idea what the windage for instance on that ship was, and crossing the Bay of Biscay we had fog for five days and we only did six knots, you could be almost anywhere. But I had told the captain that we were going to be alongside the Isle of Ushant at 9.15 on the Wednesday morning or whatever it was, and when I got back onto the bridge that morning and I looked over the side, I thought the water was a very peculiar colour, seemed an awful lot of seagulls about, and the only bearing I could get from anything was from a dilapidated direction finder whose indications could be as much as 80, 90 degrees out, but it seemed to me that we might just be going up the channel to Brest so we turned rather violently to port, 60 degrees to port, and at 9.15 precisely we were abeam of the light at Ushant. That's what's called good luck.

And we had good luck through the rest of the channel, mostly very bad conditions, bad sea, bad fog, bad everything. But we arrived at Rosyth, which was where we were supposed to get, unscathed and I thought, "well you're a bit of a bloody hero, you've got this old wreck up here, with no help from anybody. I hope they're grateful". I met that captain that morning, perhaps he hadn't had his breakfast, and all he said was, "Oh right, you off? Well, goodbye". And that was the end of that.