by Alan Bristow
In each port we took on or discharged general cargo – in all the time I was on her, I had very little idea what Matiana was carrying. Some two months out from Liverpool we were approaching Calcutta up the broad, mud-brown Hooghly River. My first disturbing impression of Calcutta was of dilapidated shacks fringing open sewers, and fragments of humanity picking through the filth. The network of docks in Calcutta was impressive enough once you got used to the smell, but it looked as though it had been dropped in the middle of a vast slum where skeletal people swarmed and holy cows had right of way. Downtown Calcutta was full of bars and restaurants catering for British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers, sailors and airmen. The British India Company was well respected in Calcutta and it was advisable to wear the company uniform when going ashore, although it didn’t prevent one from being besieged by professional beggars, many of whom were mothers who had their children deliberately deformed to improve their earnings potential.
Mr Bailey announced that he was going ashore to meet an Anglo-Indian lady friend, and under his parental guidance, I tagged along. It almost looked like Bailey had a second home in Calcutta because, after dinner at one of the best restaurants in town we ended up at his lady friend’s house for the night in the company of her extremely attractive eighteen-year-old daughter, who taught me many things I did not know. Nonetheless I was not sad to leave the awfulness of Calcutta as the Matiana retraced its outward route with stops at Madras, Colombo, Mombasa and Cape Town. There we picked up some of the British India Line’s senior management figures, and one of the managers’ wives was having an affair with the First Mate. I was detailed to loiter outside Mr Jones’s cabin keeping watch while he and this lady loitered within, and it was an onerous duty because they were at it every day, and for long periods. After Freetown we crossed the Atlantic to Trinidad and Bermuda before joining a convoy at Halifax and re-crossing the ocean to Avonmouth, whence I returned six months out from Liverpool a seasoned seafarer and a man of the world, seventeen years of age.
The Bristow home in Portsmouth had been broken up, with Dad in Malta running the Valetta docks, Mum evacuated to the country and Muriel away at boarding school. I thought I might be due some leave, but the British India Line thought differently. I was indeed sent to Portsmouth, but to Whale Island, where I joined a short gunnery course. We were put in a domed room with a gun and had to blast away at silhouettes of aeroplanes projected across the ceiling. We were taught how to lay off our aim, and I did quite well in practice. The Oerlikon we learned to fire was a lovely gun – it never used to jam. It would move pretty smartly left and right, but it was harder to change the elevation. Within weeks Matiana was once again at sea, but rather than having been equipped with Oerlikons, an old twelve-pounder anti-aircraft gun had been mounted on the for’ard deck in Newport. We assembled in convoy off the Scottish coast and once again ploughed westward, to disperse 1,000 miles out when the greatest danger from U-boats was said to have passed. Our destination was Halifax, and once released from the convoy Matiana ran unescorted through the fog towards the coast of Labrador. Perhaps 500 miles from Halifax Captain Patterson ordered slow ahead; damage to the ship from near-misses by bombs and other incidents and accidents was becoming critical, and the Chief Engineer opined that if we maintained full speed for much longer, we would drive her under the waves. Off the Canadian coast we were taken in tow by a powerful tug, and two more joined her in the evening. We were boarded by six men wearing yellow hard hats and dark blue boiler suits, who inspected the bow and held conferences with the ship’s engineers. It was decided that it was safe enough to continue the tow northwards and up the great St Lawrence River to Montreal, where they had the means to build Matiana a new bow. There, the apprentices, the carpenter, two quartermasters and all the officers were accommodated in great luxury in the five-star Hotel Montreal. Everything we needed was paid for with coupons provided by the shipping company. We were gathered together in one of the large lounges to be addressed by the Captain, who warned us that we’d better behave ourselves – if we let the company down we would be moved to much inferior accommodation. We were as good as gold, and passed from the perils of the sea into a cocoon of luxury.
At sea I had become friends with the chief radio operator and the ship’s electrical engineer, Sparks and Lofty. Sparks, the radio operator, was a Scot from somewhere near Inverness and he spoke with a lovely north Scottish accent. Lofty the electrician was from Glasgow, a six foot four giant of a man. It was said aboard ship that it was his skill alone that kept the ship working and the engines running. Sparks MacIntosh was keen to visit Ottawa, where he had heard there were many fine buildings, including the Canadian parliament. The best way to get there was to hire a car, but neither I nor Lofty had ever driven before. Never mind – how hard could it be? We bowled up at a car hire office in downtown Montreal and had no difficulty in obtaining temporary Canadian driving licences, despite having had no previous experience. And what fun it was learning to drive! MacIntosh announced that he couldn’t do all the work, and in a quiet piece of Canadian countryside Lofty and I learned the rudiments of driving an Oldsmobile with a manual gearchange. My first turn to drive came at night, on roads that were shiny, slippery and wet, but I was driving as though I’d been doing it all my life – or so MacIntosh said.
Ottawa was a flashback to England before the blackout, but with beautiful and imposing French-style buildings. Back in Montreal we made a trip to McGill University, where we joined a sightseeing tour on which I met a young lady whose name was Lesley. She was two or three years older than me and came from Kingston, Ontario, where her mother served in a cake shop and her father was the foreman of a garage. Lesley was the first in my sailor’s collection of girls in every port. A relationship developed, and all too soon the subject of marriage came up on the grounds that she believed herself to be pregnant! Shock and confusion reigned. In those days, marriage was the only acceptable way forward in such a situation, but it seemed far too soon for me to take on all the responsibilities that marriage entailed. I was torn about ‘doing the decent thing’, and it was with no little relief that we discovered in time that it was a false alarm.
Every day we watched the work on Matiana proceed. They had effectively cut off the entire bow of the ship and were welding on a new one. The day that Lesley gave me the glad tidings, the Captain called all the officers and cadets together to tell us that the new bow would be completed and tested in a few days time. He advised everyone to dispose of their commitments in Montreal and prepare to sail. We had filled in much of the time usefully by taking courses in astro-navigation and ship construction, and getting an introduction to engine room watch-keeping procedures in preparation for the day when the deck apprentices would start three-month stints as assistants to the Officer of the Watch down below.
With the ship preparing to sail back to the war, I would like to say that my thoughts were with those who had been suffering while we enjoyed the comforts of the Hotel Montreal, but it wouldn’t be true. My horizons stretched no further than I could see. My job was all the world to me. With the callousness of youth, I gave barely a thought to my parents and what they might be going through. It intrigues me now how little I knew, how little I cared, about life beyond the Matiana.
As a finishing touch to the new bow, the ship’s sides were painted in a glossy black with a three-inch white line just below the gunwale, and she got a new coat of red antifouling paint on all underwater surfaces at the same time. We were given a great send-off. Matiana floated out of dry dock and was towed by two tugs into the channel of the St Lawrence. Shipboard rumour had us heading for the Pacific, and indeed we were heading south, staying about 150 miles off the American coast. Every day it got warmer. By the time we were abeam Boston we had changed our blues for white tropical gear, looking and feeling clean and neat. We settled into a regular pattern of work, starting with a four-hour watch of which the last two hours were spent in lifeboat maintenance, changing the fresh water and emergency r
ations, chipping and scraping and applying red lead oxide to patches of corrosion. As we entered the Caribbean the apprentices were given a briefing on what to expect when the ship came under the control of the Panama Canal authorities. In fact, there was little or nothing for the apprentices to do except watch the big diesel engines on the dockside, the ‘mules’, pulling the ship through the locks. The rain teemed down incessantly, and somewhere on our passage through the canal we stopped in a lake where we were invaded by long boat traders selling everything from pet monkeys and parrots to their sisters’ telephone numbers in Panama City.
When we steamed out of Panama I was under the impression that we were to pick up Australian infantry and nurses to take them to Papua New Guinea, so on my next watch I was surprised to see from the charts that we were heading north. As it turned out, we were making for Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, to refuel and provision. At that time America was not in the war, but their hospitality and generosity towards British merchant seamen was overwhelming. They couldn’t do enough to make us welcome. Several film stars invited the officers and cadets of the Matiana into their homes. One party went to the home of the actor Ralph Bellamy, and my group found themselves lounging beside Tyrone Power’s swimming pool in the Hollywood hills, cigar in one hand and cocktail in the other. Power, whose father was English, was an Anglophile who believed strongly that America should get into the war on Britain’s side, and he was happy to arrange some rest and recreation for weary British sailors at his mansion in his absence. He was then at the height of his powers as an actor, world-famous for swashbuckling romantic leads in films such as The Mark of Zorro and The Black Rose. Nor was he all show. A year after our visit, when America was indeed at war, he joined the US Marines and trained as a pilot, flying wounded Marines out of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His house had marble floors and enormous, opulently furnished living rooms where we could make ourselves comfortable. Everywhere there were beautiful cut-glass and porcelain ashtrays with handmade lighters inlaid with rubies and diamonds – Power was a heavy smoker who got through three or four packs of cigarettes a day and died at the age of forty-four from heart disease. Our buffet lunch was a Hollywood fantasy of food, and the impression it made on a teenager from the land of austerity can be gauged from the fact that I can see it before me now. There were six tables. One was devoted to a suckling pig, which had been spit-roasted and accorded the finishing flourish of a cooked apple in its mouth. Around the pig lay every sort of cooked vegetable. The centrepiece of the next table was a piece of beautifully dressed salmon surrounded by imaginatively arranged salads. The dessert tables were virtually collapsing under the weight of sweetmeats of every colour, and all this laid out for about twenty-four men of the Matiana.
Next day we upped anchor and left San Pedro harbour with wistful glances towards the Hollywood Hills, but we were to find that wherever we encountered Americans we were met with kindness and generosity. They seemed to know more about the war than I did, but then, I was always at sea. In the space of 250 days, we spent 192 days under way. Between November 1940 and December 1941 the Matiana seldom stayed in port for more than two or three days at a time. In fourteen months she covered 51,200 nautical miles and stopped in ten different ports, before arriving in Honolulu in November 1941 to refuel and provision en route for Australia. We were carrying troops destined to be transhipped to places like Papua and Singapore, and as had become our habit, we were making the voyage alone and without escort. In retrospect, this was a sound decision. The ship survived the war when half of British India’s 100-strong fleet did not. Sometimes I thought that long ocean voyages carried a high risk of submarine attack for a lone ship, but I was not in a position to make an issue of it. Working four hours on, four off did not give one time to think of much else but doing one’s laundry and trying to get enough sleep.
We arrived in Honolulu to find the port chock-a-block with big passenger ships. The Matiana was tied up alongside one of the great white Matteson liners, and on board her the word rationing had never been heard – cigarettes, cigars, chocolate, silk stockings, ladies’ underwear, shirts and tropical weight trousers were all available in abundance at unbelievably low prices, or in trade for hard liquor. The City of Honolulu did everything it could to make us feel welcome. Captain Patterson explained that the officers and cadets were to be guests of leading citizens of the town. Unfortunately, while the deck and engineering officers were collected by their hosts in cars and lavishly entertained in their homes, the Lascar crew were left to make their own arrangements for shore leave – a fair reflection of the demarcation practices of the time. The Lascars, Indian seamen who performed the most menial tasks, were a breed apart. They were bossed by their own bosun, the ‘serang’, and his deputy, who was usually his son, and they were ordered about casually by the officers and cadets. They did their work uncomplainingly and without shirking, and throughout my time in the merchant navy I don’t recall a Lascar ever letting me down. We took them for granted.
As a cadet in his second year, I was at the bottom of the hospitality list. My host was a young man, about my age, who was an ensign in the US submarine service. He took me on a fascinating tour of the island of Oahu, on which Honolulu and Pearl Harbor lie. We drove all over looking at the sprawling military bases, visiting the aquarium and seeing the latest radar station before ending up in the submarine pens in Pearl Harbor, where my host proudly announced that his father was the admiral commanding the whole submarine force in Honolulu. The entire island exuded a feeling of prosperity and friendliness, and I felt as far removed from the war as I could be.
Matiana was overdue some engine maintenance work, but to the regret of all of us on board it was decided to postpone the work to a later day. On the afternoon of 30 November 1941 she cast off from the Matteson liner and with tugs fussing about her made her way to blue water en route to Australia. Seven days later, 350 aircraft from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Carrier Strike Force rained devastation on Pearl Harbor, sinking five battleships, three destroyers and a minelayer, destroying 180 aircraft before they could get off the ground and killing more than 4,000 men. When the news reached the Matiana it didn’t take Captain Patterson long to work out that we may have sailed right past the Japanese battle fleet, and it was possible that the only reason we’d not been attacked was because they didn’t want to disclose their presence. Once again, speed was increased to the maximum and we rattled across the Pacific at twelve knots. We docked in Melbourne, where we picked up a contingent of Cameron Highlanders and some nurses. Christmas found us in Fremantle, where the ship’s cooks baked a huge Christmas cake as a present to the town, and we paraded it down the main street before it was taken off to be distributed to the children.
It was made known that when we reached our next port, Calcutta, we would be transferred to other ships while Matiana was laid up for major engineering work. Heavily armed German raiders disguised as merchantmen were sinking ships all over the Indian Ocean. One of them, the Kormoran, had sunk the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney just ninety miles off Fremantle a few weeks earlier, and there were known to be at least half a dozen others operating in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. The Japanese had just sunk the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off Singapore, and everywhere the war was going badly. It was with relief that we sighted land at the mouth of the Hooghly River off Calcutta just after New Year 1942, and once again we steamed into the foul-smelling Kidderpore Docks.
I signed off Matiana on 5 January 1942 and was instructed to report to SS Ellenga, which was due to dock later that week. She was a disappointing comedown from Matiana. She was a 5,000-ton coaster built in 1911 and now seriously down-at-heel. She had a majority Indian crew and was engaged on the Calcutta – Rangoon mail run, and was busily shipping troops into Burma to stem the advance of the Japanese. The chaotic evacuation of civilians from Rangoon had been going on for three weeks. Ellenga was taking Indian troops in the opposite direction and returning with the last of the evacuees. The Captain was
a dour old Scotsman who hardly spoke a word to anyone. Ellenga was supposed to have been able to make sixteen knots in her heyday but ten was about all she could manage by 1942. We steamed down through the Bay of Bengal with perhaps 1,000 troops on board, the ’tween decks rigged up with mattresses and hammocks and portaloos all over. The Rangoon trip took two or three days, and we turned up the wide Irrawaddy River towards the Burmese capital with every eye peeled for the Japanese fighters and bombers that were attacking daily. Ellenga was just about the biggest ship that could berth in the dock in Rangoon – there were larger ships there but they had anchored in the river and were loaded by lighter. The city itself was a mess. Just about the only civilians left were looters, and everywhere the fires started by Japanese planes were burning with no one to fight them. We took on board some Indian wounded and a few hundred refugees, including a handful of Europeans, and slipped back into the river. The evacuees had suffered mostly at the hands of their own countrymen; the jails and lunatic asylums had been thrown open and Rangoon was in a state of complete anarchy.
We put them off at Madras and returned to Calcutta, but ten days later we were back in Rangoon, again carrying native soldiers. The dockside was heaving with British and Australian troops who’d been shipped in from the western desert, and there was a pervading sense of disorganisation and near-panic. As we were disembarking our passengers the whistles of ships up and down the river began blowing a warning and Japanese planes came in low over the rooftops, but they passed by us without firing a shot. Within two hours we had turned around and headed out to sea, making the sixteen knots the ship was designed for thanks to the strong ebb tide. As we arrived back in Calcutta the news came that Singapore had fallen, and the talk was all of evacuating Rangoon and even having to abandon Calcutta. Nonetheless Ellenga continued to ferry troops into Burma. I was getting used to the drill after the third trip, recognising the landmarks along the Irrawaddy and feeling slightly more secure for it, although rumour had the Japanese Army already making inroads into the flat jungle country along the riverbank. On the fourth trip, at the end of February, there was no more pretence – the official order had been given for all troops to evacuate and we went down virtually empty to help take them off. We docked at the deserted loading berth. The troops we had come to take off had yet to arrive, and there was a heavy silence over the city. We could hear distant gunfire inland. There was a collection of army vehicles along the quay. Orders had been given to destroy everything that might be useful to the Japanese, and I was instructed to drive some personnel carriers and Bedford 15 cwt lorries off the quayside into the dock. It seemed like vandalism. I thought at first these vehicles had been driven north through Burma ahead of the Japanese, but it turned out they had only recently been landed from ships coming from North Africa. What a waste. None too soon, our passengers turned up, some of them quite seriously wounded, all of them dishevelled and dead on their feet. Ellenga was one of the last ships to leave Rangoon, and two days later the Japanese overran the city.