Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  In Calcutta I was instructed to join the SS Malda, sister ship to Matiana, built on the Clyde in the same year and similar in most respects, and heading home to Liverpool. The ship’s layout was known to me, but there were no familiar faces on board – my Matiana comrades had been dispersed to other vessels. The single exception was Vernon Hussey Cooper, a quite extraordinary man who had the plummiest accent I’ve ever heard. He spoke like a caricature of the chinless wonder, the upper class twit, but he was a damned good navigator, and a good bloke too.

  There had been a conference of ships’ captains at the company’s offices where the bad news from Burma had been picked over. British, Australian and Indian troops had fallen back to Chittagong and Akyab. General Slim had been sent in to take charge, but there were no guarantees that the Japs could be kept out of India. The decision was made to evacuate as many ships as possible. On 5 April 1942 the Malda set sail from Calcutta in a convoy of seven ships, and that afternoon we cleared the mouth of the Hooghly and dropped the pilot. At 9,000 tons Malda was the biggest vessel in the convoy; we were commodore ship, and on board we had a gung-ho naval commander called Hudson, whom we called ‘Polar Bear’. Alongside us was an American freighter, the Exmoor, and the British contingent included the Autoclycus and the Shinkuang.

  The Captain put all the cadets to checking the lifeboats, making sure they were provisioned with fresh water, biscuit and biltong, the dried meat strips that comprised our survival rations. We set course south-west at nine knots, and we hadn’t got a dozen miles when over the horizon came the Japanese, and a fine sight they made with their bows cleaving the water at twenty-five knots. There were two heavy cruisers, Kumano and Suzuya, and a destroyer, Shirakumo, and they were bristling with enormous, accurate guns. I thought a good scheme at this point would be to surrender, but Polar Bear had other ideas. Malda was ordered to engage the enemy and everyone else would run for it.

  Engage the enemy? What with? We had on the bow a piece of artillery – I don’t know what calibre it was, but on a platform on the stern was a twelve-pounder. My job was to oversee the firing of the stern gun, and I think we got a couple of shells away as the Malda went ploughing towards the middle of the Japanese group. The Japs contemptuously fired two heavy shells, boom, boom, and blew the ship to bits. The first shot took off the superstructure and the bridge with it, the second hit the bow and silenced the front gun. I ran forward with the idea of giving the order to abandon ship – I thought there couldn’t have been any senior officers left alive – and hadn’t quite got level with the wreckage of the bridge when the ammunition locker went up aft. They’d had a direct hit. Around us these enormous Japanese ships were slicing through the convoy having gunnery practice, chasing down merchantmen as they tried to flee at twelve knots. There’s never been such a turkey shoot. They sank every ship and set fire to the oil that was spreading across the waves.

  Then out of the wreckage of the forepeak appeared Vernon Hussey Cooper, blackened but seemingly unhurt. ‘Pip pip, Bristow,’ he said in his excruciating accent. ‘I’m just going below for a minute . . .’

  ‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get off.’

  ‘I need the telescope Mummy gave me. It’s in my cabin.’

  And he disappeared. Fortunately for him, his cabin was just abaft the bridge and had been cut open by the shellfire. He emerged moments later with his precious cargo. I was trying to do something for one of the engineers who’d had both his legs blown off and was lying in a chair on deck. He’d been a Welsh rugby international before the war. All I could do was fill him full of morphine.

  ‘Better float the poor bugger orf,’ said Vernon. So we put him on a hatchboard and pushed him away, with his mangled legs, and his glazed smile.

  ‘Come on, Cooper,’ I said. ‘Swim for it.’

  Hussey Cooper looked disconcerted. ‘I can’t swim,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t fucking swim!’

  ‘Never learned, old chap.’

  ‘Christ almighty!’ I had on an inflatable money belt, Navy issue, so I put it around him. I took off my kapok lifejacket and threw it away because the burning oil was lapping close to the sinking ship, and I knew we’d have to go under it. The oil seemed to spread out for ever but there were big open leads between oil patches and I intended to get to one. I got Hussey Cooper into the water. ‘Here’s what we do,’ I said. ‘I’m a strong swimmer, so you hang onto my ankles and we’ll swim under this fire. Kick like mad with your legs, hold your breath and don’t let go.’ The oil wasn’t very wide, perhaps ten or fifteen feet across. Hussey Cooper wasn’t keen, but he didn’t have a better plan. The first time we tried we mucked it up; Hussey Cooper let go my legs and surfaced, panicking, before I’d even started striking out. I shouted at him to calm down, and we tried again. I dived down quite deep – I must have been ten feet under the water, swimming like crazy, with this poor sod hanging on like grim death. We came up in a lead of clear water on the edge of the fire and I struck out away from it, Hussey Cooper spluttering in tow. We were filthy, covered in oil, and Hussey Cooper was having difficulty staying afloat. I looked around for some flotsam to support him, and within a few minutes an empty lifeboat came drifting within range. The paint was blistered and blackened, but the loops of rope below the gunwales were still intact. I swam after it and grabbed a rope. With great difficulty I helped him get aboard, heaving him up on my shoulders, then he pulled me in.

  At first the boat was almost too hot to touch. It was made of galvanised steel and had metal benches, and while it had clearly been through the flames, the water casks hadn’t been punctured and the food lockers were intact. It wasn’t like any lifeboat I’d ever seen. There were no oars. Hussey Cooper pointed out the levers by the centre bench; if you pushed them back and forward, they turned a propeller shaft, and ever so slowly, the boat moved.

  It was too hot to sit on the bench, so we stood up to push the levers and went around picking up people who were still alive. Some weren’t too badly burned, others were in a terrible state. We had every nationality, British, French, Dutch, Lascars. After two or three hours there was no one left alive to pick up. The Japs, having sunk every ship, had disappeared. One of the survivors had some medical knowledge and got hold of the first aid kit, putting saline solution on burns and administering morphine to people who were crying and moaning with pain. Hussey Cooper was working things out.

  ‘You realise, Alan, we’re only five or six miles from shore?’

  He was absolutely right. After leaving the Hooghly River we had turned west down the coast. We pointed the boat north-west, and that evening we dragged her up on a beach where the locals came out to help us. Not all our passengers had survived the trip. All along the beach, survivors from the convoy had come ashore in groups. Fires were lit, and the night was spent on the beach, with the cries of the injured mixing with the sound of the waves breaking on shore. At first light Hussey Cooper and I joined a crowd of men working their way through swamp and jungle towards the railway between Cuttack and Calcutta to get help. Eventually we were able to commandeer a donkey and cart and reached the railway, although we’d had to spend a second night in the open. By the afternoon of the next day we were back in Calcutta. Apart from having had our hair burned, neither of us had suffered injury. Mackinnon’s, the British India agents, were very good; they sent us to hospital, cleaned us up, got us new uniforms. Bad news filtered down through British India; this man was dead, that man was dead. Few of them were known to me personally because all my friends were Matiana men, scattered to the four winds.

  We were now due survivors’ leave, and British India put Hussey Cooper and me on another ship, the SS Hatarana. She was an old coal burner of 7,500 tons, but she was going to England and that was good enough for me. It was a jolly nice, peaceful cruise right up to the moment she got sunk.

  CHAPTER 4

  Home and Dry

  Hatarana was a fine enough ship but she had no refrigeration. We only had ice
boxes, six feet long and tied down on both sides of the boat deck. The ship had been in the Indian trade and would never have been expected to stay at sea for more than ten days at a time. The ice lasted about a fortnight; after that the butter went rancid, the milk went sour, the vegetables rotted and the food got pretty grim. Still, I thought – if that’s the worst that can happen, we’re laughing.

  We spent a week in Cape Town while she bunkered and a convoy was mustered, and went shopping for tinned fruit, tinned vegetables and powdered milk. Hatarana was of First World War vintage, built in Japan, and couldn’t have had much life left in her even if there had been no war. The Captain was a nice old stick, Percival Arthur Clifton James by name, and the voyage up through the Atlantic as one of thirty-four ships in convoy SL-118 was almost like a peacetime cruise. Making our maximum nine knots, we were one of the slowest ships in the convoy. On 18 August 1942 I was sitting on the edge of my bunk, getting ready to go on watch at four o’ clock, when a torpedo from submarine U-214 smashed into our port bow.

  I was prepared for this emergency. I had made up a ditty bag containing everything that was dear to me. My passport and my money – quite a bit in savings – some letters, photographs, a small two-way radio, some food concentrate, all of it wrapped up watertight and sealed. I had attached it to a small blue and white fender, in case I dropped it overboard. Congratulating myself on my foresight, I grabbed the ditty bag and raced to my station.

  I was by then an acting Fourth Officer and was in charge of the number one starboard lifeboat. I got up there, threw in my ditty bag and started getting the boat away. It had an old-fashioned release system which meant two men had to hand-lower it in the davits. Just as she was swinging free, a second tin fish hit us on the starboard side and the ship listed sharply. The lifeboat struck the side of the ship and tipped over, and my ditty bag went sailing into the sea. With desperate people rushing to stations all around me and the ship listing in its death throes, I watched the little blue and white fender bob away at about one knot. It was the most important thing in my life at the time, and I felt utterly bereft.

  The boat had heeled over and remained listing, engines stopped. Only two lifeboats on the port side were useable, so I took charge of the lifeboat further down on the port side. Suddenly the Captain shouted at me.

  ‘Go down and get the Chief Engineer, for god’s sake.’

  ‘Where should I go, sir?’

  ‘He’s in his bathroom. He’s just telephoned me, he can’t get out.’

  I staggered below to find the Chief Engineer’s bathroom door jammed solid. Grabbing a fire axe, I hacked my way through. Inside, wild-eyed, the entombed chief engineer stood stark naked. With no thought to propriety we rushed back along tilting passages onto the deck, and the Chief Engineer remained unclothed until somebody took pity on him in the lifeboat and gave him a shirt.

  I got my lifeboat away, and the captain and senior officers all climbed into the other boat. People started jumping overboard from the ship and we went around collecting them. The sea was calm and warm; it was August off the Azores. We soon filled up both lifeboats. The maximum for my boat was twenty-eight; we certainly had more than forty on board. Floating nearby was the old carpenter, a man in his fifties, maybe even older, who had been with us on the Matiana and who was obviously badly hurt. Bones were sticking out of the back of his hand, and he was going under. Some people in the lifeboat seemed shocked into immobility, or perhaps they were poor swimmers. I was young and strong and could have swum the Channel; I dived over the side and pulled the old chippy to the boat. They lifted him in and gave him morphine. It was his last voyage; he retired when we got home.

  As darkness fell we drifted out of sight of the Hatarana, which turned turtle but stubbornly refused to sink. I heard later she’d had to be sunk by gunfire from the Royal Navy corvette HMS Pentstemon. We were in the lifeboat all night; she had a dipping lug sail and we set course north-east, making for England. It was difficult to calculate the drift – I think the boat went one forward and two sideways. We couldn’t put side boards out because it would have meant taking out seats, and we were desperate for somewhere to sit. I set ‘overboard watches’ where crew members would take one-hour turns in the water, holding onto the sides, so that others could get some sleep. We used the oars to counteract drift, but gauging drift was purely a matter of seamanship. We had no sextant but knew our latitude and longitude. I set about working out a plot, drawing a Mercator grid on the back of some telegram forms we found in the boat.

  Next morning there was a cloud of black smoke on the horizon and a dreadful old tub hove into view. She was clearly having trouble with her engines, and making about six knots. He name was Corabella. She was on her way from Takoradi to Liverpool, and any submarine within a hundred miles couldn’t fail to spot her. She came alongside and put down her scrambling nets. We helped up the injured and cleared out the lifeboat. I was just about to pull the plug to sink her when an Australian voice boomed down from above.

  ‘You sure you wanna do that, mate?’

  I looked up quizzically. It was the Corabella’s Captain.

  ‘This is an iron ore ship,’ the Captain said. ‘If we get the hammer, we’re going down like a rock. You might be better off staying in the lifeboat.’

  There was general laughter. I pulled out the plug – you didn’t want to leave lifeboats around to tell the Germans what they’d sunk. The oars floated away as I clambered up the scrambling nets.

  ‘You forgot to bring the oars,’ said the captain laconically.

  Rough though she was, the Corabella was a good enough ride home. Vernon Hussey Cooper, like me an acting Fourth Officer, had been in the other lifeboat. He looked subdued. ‘What-ho, old chum,’ he said. ‘Glad you’re alive.’

  ‘Why so glum, Vernon?’

  ‘Afraid I’ve lost my telescope, old chum. Mummy gave me that.’

  The Second Mate of the Corabella came up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but we haven’t any cabins for you chaps. You’ll have to sleep in the officers’ mess.’

  It was tiny, with room for one on the settee and one on the table. Having been sunk twice, Hussey Cooper and I were pretty keyed up. We intended to sleep in our lifejackets.

  ‘Come on, Vernon,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and check out the lifeboats.’

  Just outside the mess was a big raft lashed to four forty-gallon oil drums. It had provisions on board, and fresh water, and there was a well in the centre with places to sit. It was held in the shrouds by two big wooden chocks, alongside which was tied a heavy hammer. Knock the chocks out with the hammer, cut a lanyard and away she’d go. Vernon and I went back to the officers’ mess, had a bite to eat and went to sleep.

  At around two o’ clock in the morning there was the most almighty clap and we awoke with a start. ‘Torpedo!’ I said. ‘We’ve got one right up for’ard.’

  In pitch blackness we groped our way to the float. Vernon picked up the hammer and was about to knock out the first chock when I stopped him. ‘Hang on ... are we sinking?’

  The ship clattered on. Not a soul appeared. All seemed normal. We found our way to the bridge. The Second Mate was on watch. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘where did that torpedo hit us?’

  ‘What torpedo?’ he asked.

  ‘Didn’t you hear that bloody great thump?’

  ‘Oh, that? That happens every morning at two o’ clock. It’s the coal trimmer down in the bunkers, dropping his barrow on the ’tween decks.’

  The sound had resonated up through the ship, and in our jittery state we had presumed the worst. We were the butt of humour, but everybody understood.

  As we steamed towards Liverpool at seven knots, making smoke that could be seen for two degrees of latitude, I witnessed an extraordinary piece of medical improvisation by the Second Mate. The engineer on watch had been doing his ablutions at a washbasin next to the metal shield around reciprocating shafts from the engine. With soap in his eyes he groped around for a towel, and someho
w got his arm behind the shield. The shaft came down and skinned him, ripping his arm open to the bone.

  He didn’t pass out, surprisingly. Somebody shot some morphine into him and they carried him into the wardroom. The Second Mate got out the Captain’s medical guide, organised water and chloroform and proceeded to operate on the engineer with the book open on the table beside him. They had a pretty good set of instruments for cutting, sewing and tying. As I watched, he’d pull a finger to tell him which tendon was which, then refer to the book. Tying the tendons seemed very much like tying a fishing line. After a couple of hours, he’d joined up everything, sewn back what skin the engineer had left, and bandaged the whole mess up. They filled the engineer up with sedatives so he didn’t go raving mad with pain when he woke up, and he was taken to his cabin and continued the voyage as a passenger.