It was an expensive night, too, by all accounts. Three Wardroom officers went out to what apparently amounted to an up-market chippy for a light meal, and came back £96 the poorer – quite a large bill, by London standards, even, for fairly average food. They thought it would have been rather dear at half the price. Again, fairly typical – clearly the Portuguese have welcomed us with open arms and open wallets. The Wardroom is now quietly licking its financial wounds and preparing for the cocktail party this evening.
We went into tropical rig (horrid little – no, large – white shorts and a host of knobbly knees) at 1200 today, but I didn’t play, as I had decided, along with a small but select team (Peter Glew – Baby Doc/The Gasman/Sticky or, unkindly, Bostik; Paul Harvey – ATCO2 and my deputy; and Mike Bullock, the Captain’s Assistant Secretary, sometimes known as the Bald Eagle, due to a receding hairline and a generally harassed appearance), to go off ashore on a Postcard Run.
We ate in the Wardroom in civvies, then walked to the local railway station, where we paid 30 escudos (henceforth to be abbreviated to E, to avoid likely future spelling mistakes) each for a ticket to the centre of Lisbon. This sum approximates to about 20p in real money, and is for a return ticket, though to take advantage of this unusual generosity you have to return within two hours. The train was very much like the London Underground trains, though with an interesting variation that the doors don’t all open when it stops – you have to push a button, which only works infrequently, so you have to frequently sprint up and down the platform looking for a door which will open before you can gain entrance to the carriage. Makes life interesting, I suppose, as the average time for each stop is around thirty seconds.
The centre of the city was much as I remembered it – dull, drab and dirty, with few, if any redeeming features. We tramped around for about three hours, I suppose, looking in various stores and shops, and finding nothing that you couldn’t buy cheaper and probably better in Britain, apart from Cokes, which led me to the extravagance of buying and drinking two – it was quite hot – at E20 (15p) each. I also ran a few postcards to earth and purchased a handful, which was, after all, the object of the exercise.
Lisbon really does seem to be a bit of a hole, by almost any standards, and despite the fact that we were, quite literally, in the centre of the capital city of Portugal, it had all the aesthetic appeal of Catford. And if you’ve ever driven through Catford, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
A similar train to the first returned us to the ship just after four thirty, conveniently in time for the high tea before the cocktail party.
This extravaganza was not too bad, at all, in fact, for those of us who were astute enough to avoid getting lumbered with some of the official guests who spoke not a word of English and were clearly borne for drinking duties only. Actually, to digress briefly, my old boss at RNAS Culdrose taught me the infallible technique for Cocktail Parties – you place yourself firmly at the front of the hangar (or wherever it’s being held), and accept any old boiler (of either sex) that you get lumbered with. You supply the drinks, and chat away, but keep your eyes moving rapidly, looking for anyone interesting. (And the precise meaning of ‘interesting’ clearly depends on your intentions.) Then, you seize the first passing officer by the lapel, say ‘Ah, John, I’d like you to meet Mr Scrote’ or whatever is appropriate. Introductions over, you guide the conversation for a shade under ten seconds, then you excuse yourself and go off to find someone interesting.
In this precise case, it wasn’t necessary to resort to quite such drastic measures, as there were quite a lot of English speaking guests there, including a group of girls from the Portuguese Ballet (all of whom, almost without exception, are English) and some secretaries from the British Embassy. In the event, I ended up in a very small group, talking to three of the ballerinas, along with a young Midshipman (Officer Under Training) and H, who has, it seems, a considerable interest in ballet, and, I suspect, a certain amount of interest in one of the ballerinas.
We chatted for some time, watched the usual Sunset ceremony, then invited the girls down to the Wardroom for the informal party which almost invariably follows such events. At that stage of the evening, having delivered the girls into the Wardroom and into the tender care (?) of Prince Andrew, I reckoned I’d done my bit, and retired to bed. Or, to be exact, to my cabin, where I am presently typing this.
Actually, H told us one or two interesting stories about his past experiences with ballerinas, none of which I am prepared to divulge at this stage, but at least one was not exactly the kind of tale which I would relate in polite company. Suffice it to say that it involves the very supple (and very powerful) legs of a certain young lady in a close physical contact situation. Tut, tut, and I always thought that princes were different…
When I left the Wardroom, things were just starting to get warmed up, and I suspect that the ‘boys’ will have quite a good time, one way or another. I wish them luck.
Thursday 2nd June 1983
A very quiet day, both on board and ashore – ashore because today was some sort of public holiday, and on board because we were working a Sunday harbour routine, as we call it, which meant that we started at nine and finished at ten, which is the kind of day’s work that I would prefer doing on a daily basis, all year long. I’m not so sure that the Navy would be agreeable.
The Wardroom is very quiet, with most of the officers elsewhere, doing their things, and to liven things up I put on my video of The Italian Job this afternoon, which was watched by a small and select crowd of equally bored people. A good film, though now rather dated in many ways.
We did the same in the evening, as I borrowed the video of Attack on Precinct 13 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I put on after dinner. A quiet, quiet day.
Friday 3rd June 1983
Again quiet from my point of view, though again the Officers of the Day have been spending sleepless nights, with a whole host of troubles to keep them from their beds. In fact, we have had a lot of injuries on the ship, the vast majority caused by the fun-loving Portuguese police force.
They tend to break up any riot (their definition of a riot seems to be any group of more than three people gathered in a public place) by using night-sticks and brute force, and the more people resist, the more violent they get. We have had several head injuries and a few fractures, and one lad returned to the ship in a very sorry state, having been sprayed in the eyes with MACE (CN gas – a step or two nastier than CS gas, and which is banned in Britain). He will be OK, but he is in considerable pain, and will be for some time yet.
One of our Officers Under Training was smashed to the ground by the police last night, and he wasn’t even in a bar – he was by himself in the street outside. The other thing about the police here is that if they knock you down, the idea is that you stay on the ground, and chance the odd boot or two in the kidneys, because if you get up, they will keep on knocking you down until you can’t get up again. They have shot and killed one sailor already – granted he was French, off the Foch – but even so, it is a rather unhealthy sort of place to stay if you are interested in hanging on to your health and wealth.
There are all sorts of financial hazards as well, one of which I have already mentioned, and various people have found Portugal very expensive indeed, either by getting ripped-off in restaurants by being charged grossly inflated prices for mediocre food, or by getting short-changed – with this Mickey Mouse money, it’s very difficult to tell what the right change looks like. The smallest denomination note is worth just 12p, so an impressive wad in your pocket may well be worth more or less sod all, to lapse into the vernacular.
The latest score in the French Sailors v Portuguese Police match seems to be Portuguese Police 2, French Sailors 0, as there are now two shot sailors, though only one is dead, so far. Apparently the one killed was involved in a brawl in a bar, and was unwise enough to pull out a knife, and got a 9mm messenger under his chin from a Browning for his trouble. It made a small
hole going in, but took the back of his head off as it came out. There are no details about the other shooting.
There have also been a couple of stabbings, again with no supporting details. The word on the streets, on our Foch v Illustrious match, is that our men are giving rather better than they are getting. However, Foch will be in at Brest when we get there later this month, so the return bout might produce a rather different result, as the Frogs will be playing at home.
The worst news of the day, without a doubt, was that the wife of our Ops 3 (Operations Officer number 3) has just died of a heart attack. It was totally unexpected, and he has obviously had to fly home in a hurry. To make things even worse, he was just on the point of retirement, and so he will be leaving the service, and all his friends, and going into retirement alone. It does seem so terribly unfair.
As a result, we had to get another Ops Officer out from Britain at some speed, to keep the briefing team’s complement up to strength, so I ended the day cooling my heels at Lisbon Airport (and that was just as bad as it sounds – the facilities are about what you’d expect in a run-down motorway cafe, only dirtier) waiting for the new man to fly in. His flight was delayed from 2225 until 2315, and he didn’t finally emerge from the Customs and Immigration Section until about 2345, so it was not quite the most interesting evening of my life. I had to go there in a Land Rover, too, and on the Portuguese roads, which are cobbles with potholes at no extra charge, it really was a quite diabolical ride. I was glad to get into bed at last.
Saturday 4th June 1983
We sailed (I think gratefully) from Lisbon at about 1000 this morning, and headed out to the south-west to commence a period of private flying before the start of the exercise next Tuesday. We started a period of fairly intensive flying in the early part of the afternoon, which was programmed to continue until about midnight, mainly with the helicopters, doing a series of radar approaches and deck landings.
The Captain went on the CCTV system this evening (I had no show programmed, due to our imminent involvement in the exercise, and there will in fact be no shows, as far as I am aware, until the end of the exercise at the earliest) to explain to us a bit about the nature of the coming exercise.
It is rather complex, but briefly, and very basically, we are part of a NATO maritime force, tasked with providing ASW and anti-air protection to a convoy making its way towards Europe, and taking part in a series of odd evolutions on the way. We will be working with a number of British vessels, including the Hermes; with the French carrier Foch and other smaller vessels, and finally with the USS John F Kennedy, all 89,000 tons of her, carrying more aircraft than the rest of us put together. I hope we get to see her at some stage.
In passing, I have now discovered the correct name for the Russian Kiev-class carrier: it’s NOVOROSSIYSK, but it’s still pronounced NOBROSSIS. Almost.
We had a session with the 801 Sea Harriers firing at the splash target this afternoon, which was quite interesting. The target, which is a large structure like a sled, made of wood and steel and designed to throw up a spray of water when towed behind the ship, was streamed for about four hours while hundreds of rounds of 30mm ammunition were fired at it from the diving Harriers. Now I know that the 801 pilots are a bit out of practice, but I still think that the comment made by the petty officer who winched the target back aboard is worth recording. Speaking on the direct telephone line to the Bridge, he said triumphantly ‘Just as I thought, sir. All that ammo, and there’s not a fucking mark on it.’ Perhaps it’s just as well that it was the splash target they were firing at, and not the NOVOROSSIYSK…
I spent the greater part of the evening up in Flyco, controlling the three helicopters we had airborne until midnight, which made it rather a long day, as we also put our clocks back an hour this evening.
Sunday 5th June 1983
Today was a Sunday – for the first two hours. Then we went into a full day’s flying operation as usual, flying Sea Harriers to the splash target and with the Sea Kings doing Jumpex serials (hovering at dunking height, lowering their sonar body and listening for any acoustic signal, then ‘jumping’ to a different location and doing it again) and DLP (Deck Landing Practice).
There was a bit of excitement for a while during the afternoon, when it was thought that the Sea Kings had found a submarine, but after a bit of further investigation it was classified ‘non-sub’ and normality was restored. The thought was that it could have been one of the ‘Orange’ (our enemy for the coming exercise – we are ‘Blue’) submarines doing a bit of surreptitious shadowing.
Probably setting the pattern for the next few days on exercise, I spent about three hours in Flyco controlling Sea Kings until well after midnight. With only John Lamb and I able to work in Flyco, and with a more or less twenty-four-hour-a-day flying programme planned, I can see that sleep may well be a luxury I have to learn to do without…
Monday 6th June 1983
This was not a good day. We had a break from flying in the morning and early afternoon, and then started running-up to the exercise, which officially starts tomorrow, by launching Sea Harriers on surface search probes and flying Sea Kings in ASW screens. The first probe, looking for the French group, led by the Foch, found nothing and returned. The second pair of Sea Harriers took off at 1800, but only one came back.
As I write this, at 2100, we have no news of the fate of the other aircraft or its pilot – the only thing we are certain of is that he is not still flying, as his tanks would have run dry by 1930 absolute latest (he was only programmed for a one hour sortie). The real difficulty we face in trying to find him is that we have very little idea of where to look. The total possible area is 4,000 square miles of sea (a Harrier can cover quite a distance in an hour at 500 mph, doing a more or less circular search). All we can really do is start at the search datum he was given, but he could have crashed ten minutes after take-off, or fifty minutes after take-off, and we would be none the wiser. The Sod’s Law factor is that as we were hoping to detect the Foch before she detected us, we were entirely silent on all radars and radios, so once the aircraft was out of visual range, we had no idea where it went or what it did.
So, we have, we hoped, done all the right things. 820 NAS, who had stopped flying for the day, were summoned en masse to their briefing room, and four Sea King crews hastily briefed, while in the other briefing room four Sea Harrier pilots were getting the same treatment. We launched the Harriers first, as they could obviously cover the largest area, while it was still daylight, and then the Sea Kings, which have a much greater endurance, and the ship is steaming at its best speed towards the search area. We have also sent a ‘real world’ message to the Foch, requesting assistance from her and her group in the search. And that, as I write, is the situation. I will probably end up in Flyco for most of the night, once the Harriers get back on board, so I’m just waiting on the end of a telephone for instructions.
A strange, strange end to the day. The search by the Sea Harriers revealed no trace of the aircraft or any signs of wreckage (the only good thing was that the sea was almost flat calm, thus greatly increasing the chances of seeing a life-raft, and also, of course, greatly increasing the pilot’s chances of staying alive for a reasonable time-span). The search by the Sea Kings was continuing, but with hope fading as darkness surrounded us, when completely out of the blue we received a Flash signal from the Naval Attaché Madrid, via MoD in London, advising us that the aircraft and pilot were both safe, having landed on a small (2,500 ton) freighter called the Alraigo, of Spanish registry.
This was absolutely the last result anyone could have imagined, as we were all more or less convinced that he was in the water somewhere, and probably dead or dying. In fact, I was actually drafting the Incident signal when the news was released by the Commander of this bizarre turn of events, and I was very pleased, very pleased indeed, to be able to stop doing that. An Incident signal will still have to be raised, but at least when that is done I won’t have to put ‘Missing, belie
ved dead’ in the section relating to the aircrew.
The mood of the whole ship lifted; the Wardroom bar stayed open until the very early hours of the morning, full of pilots, and the Sea Kings came back home, when their crews joined in the festivities. It is, just by the by, an old naval tradition that everyone drinks on the Mess number of any officer who dies, as the final day’s mess bill is always written off and paid for by the Mess as a whole, so it was in some ways predictable that there would be a rather heavy evening at the bar, but as you can imagine, the mood was very different to that expected.
Tuesday 7th June 1983
Rather more information has now become available about the events of last evening, but we still have more questions than answers, which is to be expected.
First, the information we have is that the ship which undertook the slightly unexpected role of aircraft carrier is not heading in our direction, but is sailing direct to Tenerife. Any hopes we had of following it were scratched overnight, and we are staying in the exercise, which is a pity, because Tenerife attracts a rather higher rate of LOA (Local Overseas Allowance), quite apart from any thoughts of sun-kissed beaches and that kind of thing. The second point is that, after a radio conversation with the pilot (Sub Lt Ian Watson), it seems that he was short of fuel, which we had expected, and the aircraft is not badly damaged, but is not flyable, as to keep in on the deck of the ship (we don’t know where exactly he put it down, but there are no big flat areas on a ship of that size), he had to retract the undercarriage, so it is obviously now resting on its belly. And that’s about it on the positive side. The questions are rather more extensive.
H.M.S. Illustrious Page 5