By the early 1930s Bob had begun to wonder about his future in the Army. It was common, particularly in the Household and Line Cavalry Regiments, for young officers to join as subalterns, only to leave after a few years to manage their family estates.7 This happened in the case of a number of Bob’s contemporaries, notably Richard Cotterell and Harry Stavordale, to both of whom Bob had acted as best man at their weddings. Joe was dead set against his son resigning and could not understand why he was not more enthusiastic about the Army as a profession. In the peacetime army, however, promotion was exceptionally slow. Bob had been promoted to lieutenant in early 1930, but was unlikely to achieve his captaincy for several more years, and it might be another decade before he was a major. Moreover, he was getting bored. Like many others in the same situation he needed a fresh challenge, and in his case he chose to go to sea.
Chapter 4
Barque
In his love of boats and the sea Bob took after Joe. Indeed, his original career preference had been for the Royal Navy, but it seems that he was firmly overruled by his father. Although Joe himself no longer owned a vessel, he continued to sail and was a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron. In June 1930 he was a guest on the King’s yacht Britannia, which was competing in a big race in the Solent, when Bob passed in a very similar yacht, Brynhild, as a guest of the owner on a cruise from Southampton to Torquay and back. This was the first occasion on which Bob had been sailing, other than in small boats, since he had joined the Army.
Bob was clearly much taken with this pastime and that summer returned to sea on a number of other occasions, on either friends’ or chartered boats, usually from the Beaulieu River or the Hamble. His principal companion on most of these occasions was Antony Head, a subaltern in the Life Guards, whom Bob had known at both Eton and Sandhurst, albeit in a higher term in each case. Head was now to become one of his closest friends and one whose path he would frequently cross professionally as well as socially. He had been commissioned five months before Bob into the 15th/19th Hussars, but had transferred to the Life Guards in 1928. The two men had renewed their acquaintance several months before his transfer, whilst Bob was at Larkhill and Head was also there learning how to train horses. They got on very well and, once Head had joined the Household Cavalry, found many opportunities to socialise together.
Bob and Head had one particular leisure activity in common other than yachting, which was burglary! This sport, for so it was treated by the participants, was all the rage in the upper classes of the time, possibly inspired by the film ‘Raffles’, based on the books by E. W. Hornung, which was released in 1930 starring Ronald Colman as the ‘Amateur Cracksman’.1 The objective was to break into a house of a friend, remove a valuable item which would certainly be missed, and return it again two or three nights later. Bob, as it happened, already had form: his Old Etonian friend, Lord Feversham, when staying at Wiseton had boasted that he had made his house burglar-proof. Bob immediately bet him £50 that he would be burgled within the next three months, with Rosemary and Peter each weighing in for same amount. Six weeks later, there was a burglary!
The qualities required for success were stealth and nerve, which would certainly be useful to Bob in later years, and, for the most part, the perpetrators went undetected. Not always, however! On one occasion, whilst the Household Cavalry Composite Regiment was at Tidworth and Head was there on other business, the two men broke into Beaulieu Abbey, where a friend of theirs was staying, and purloined a statue, which was then put on display in the mess. Three nights later they returned to reinstate it, only to be disturbed as they were doing so. They fled, concealing their identities by the skin of their teeth, and drove to Southampton, only to find that all the hotels were full so they had to sleep on the floor of a rather dirty boarding house, a suitable punishment for their crime!
Most of their sailing was for a day at a time, but in early October 1930 Bob, Head and two others chartered the yacht Baroque for an expedition across the English Channel to Le Havre, from where they visited Amiens and Rouen. Over the winter months Bob’s reading list included Claud Worth’s Yacht Navigation and Voyaging, six volumes by Captain O. M. Watts on coastal navigation and, most tellingly, By Way of Cape Horn by A. J. Villiers, the account of a voyage in a fully rigged ship from Australia to Ireland in 1929.
Bob and Head returned to the water in the early summer of 1931, spending a number of weekends yachting and also looking at boats, including a Bristol cutter, with a possible view to purchase. By this time, however, Bob was planning a far more ambitious project, in which he hoped to emulate the exploits of his father in sailing to Australia in the Pericles in 1894. It was unlikely that he would be allowed enough time to undertake such a long voyage and return again to England, but he applied for six months leave, which would at least enable him to cover a considerable part of the route. There was no objection from his regiment, but the War Office proved to be very difficult. After considerable wrangling, Bob was eventually granted permission for up to six months leave, on condition that only the first two months would be paid leave and that the rest of the time spent away would count for neither pay nor increase of pay nor time towards promotion. It was pointed out to him that the lost months might make a big difference to his military career in a peacetime army in which the promotion of junior officers was awarded strictly by seniority; but he remained determined to go ahead.
The next step was to choose the ship. Bob’s enquiries revealed that a number of shipping companies accepted passengers on sailing vessels. He approached some agencies in the City of London and had a reply in early May from Clarksons, advising him that they had chartered the Herzogin Cecilie to carry a cargo of timber from South Finland to Lourenço Marques and Beira in Portuguese East Africa and expected it to sail from Kotka in Finland in the second week of August. Clarksons estimated the length of the voyage at 80 to 90 days, which would allow Bob to sail out and return comfortably within the period allowed for his leave. A few days later he was able to look over the Archibald Russell, a very similar barque owned by the same company, which was berthed at the Victoria Docks, and he liked what he saw. He asked Clarksons to contact the owner of the Herzogin Cecilie and received a reply in early July to say that the passenger accommodation had recently been renovated and that there were now four cabins available, three of which had already been reserved. The fourth was still free, the terms being ten shillings per day, £45 being payable in advance for a 90-day voyage, any difference either way to be adjusted prior to disembarking. He immediately cabled Clarksons with instructions to reserve the last cabin.
The Herzogin Cecilie was a four-masted barque, with no auxiliary propulsion, built specifically for the Norddeutsche Lloyd Bremen line and launched in 1902. She operated in both the Chilean nitrate and Australian wheat trades and was one of the fastest of her type, on one occasion achieving a time of 106 days from Portland, Oregon to the Lizard around Cape Horn. Interned by Chile during the Great War, she was handed over to France as part of the post-war reparations and sold to Gustaf Erikson, a ship owner based in Mariehamn in the Åland Islands off the south-east of Finland. At over 3,000 tons, with a length of 334ft and a sail area of 30,000 square feet, she nevertheless only required a permanent crew of thirty-one. She had no licence to carry passengers and Bob thus had to sign on as a temporary crew member.
The timing of the voyage was far from precise, but Clarksons recommended that Bob should join the vessel at Copenhagen, where she would have to call in order to take on stores and where Bob could obtain precise details of signing on and boarding from the local agents. Having obtained a letter of credit from his bank and armed with two bottles of champagne from his brother Peter and a bottle of vintage brandy from Antony Head, on the evening of 4 August he took a train from Liverpool Street to Harwich, boarded an overnight ferry to Esbjerg and travelled on by train to Copenhagen, where he stayed in the Hotel Angleterre.
The initial news from the agents was that the Herzogin Cecilie was unlikely to arr
ive for a few days, but walking around the city on the following day, Bob spotted her entering the roads and dropping anchor. He immediately hired a launch out to the ship to look around and later met the captain, Sven Erikson, who was only twenty-eight years old and spoke good English. On the following day he signed on as a member of the crew, bought a case of whisky for the voyage and took some of his luggage out to the ship, in which he had been allocated a spacious double cabin. However, due to the wind being contrary, she did not sail until 14 August, so Bob spent much of the time in the company of Peter Kasberg, a young Dane working in London whom he had met on the journey to Copenhagen and who showed him the city and introduced him to his family.
Once under way, Bob was able to take stock of the crew and his fellow passengers. Of the former he would be closest during the voyage to the captain and the three mates, as they would all eat together in the saloon. There were three other passengers, two of whom were a German called Selle, a man of about thirty-five, and a very fat Dane called Knudsen. The third was an American heiress and divorcee, Miss Rickson, who had met the captain and the second mate ashore and decided to come on the voyage, much to their delight.
From the start Bob was determined to join the crew in their work and spent much of the first few days climbing the masts and familiarizing himself with the rigging: by ten days out he was able to go aloft with some confidence to help setting and taking sail. He did not have to stand watch, but he frequently volunteered to help in any task. He also began to take lessons in navigation from the captain, finding before long that he was able to work out the ship’s position by himself. Initially the weather was fair, indeed the ship was becalmed for a time off Fair Isle, but six days out the wind freshened from the northeast, driving her into the North Atlantic. However, as Bob soon realized, it was highly capricious as to both strength and direction, one moment too light, the next blowing a gale; indeed, by twelve days out from Copenhagen the weather was the worst that the captain had seen in that part of the Atlantic, and several sails were shredded before they could be taken in. The captain blamed the crew, of whose members he held a low opinion except for the donkeyman2 and the sailmaker, who was now kept very busy converting canvas into new sails. Both Selle and Knudsen retired to their bunks for the duration of the storm, but Miss Rickson was in her element, as was Bob.
The officers turned out to be most hospitable, and large quantities of alcohol were consumed in the saloon, the most popular form being schnapps, although other drinks were available, including Bob’s own supply of Scotch. Miss Rickson, unfortunately, was incapable of realizing when she had had enough and had frequently to be carried off to bed. When not working with the crew or learning how to navigate, Bob spent a lot of time reading, having brought with him a plentiful supply of books, including several on sailing themes. In calm weather he discovered that the place where he stood the greatest chance of being undisturbed was up on the mizzen top.
By 5 September, twenty-two days out, the ship was off the Cape Verde Islands and making satisfactory progress. When the wind was light, especially in the Doldrums, it became intolerably hot in Bob’s cabin and he took to carrying some of his bedding on deck and sleeping on the after hatch.
On 18 September, thirty-five days out, the Herzogin Cecilie crossed the Equator, and on the following day the traditional ceremonies were conducted, which Bob considered somewhat barbarous. All those who had not previously crossed the line were compelled to undergo ritual humiliation by members of the crew playing the Doctor, the Barber, the Policeman and Neptune. Much of their hair was cut or shaved off and they were daubed alternately with soft soap worked up into a lather, tar and red paint, before being dunked in a tarpaulin bath full of sea water. Most, including Bob, took it in good heart, but the cook objected and tried to escape, only to be recaptured and subjected to even more drastic treatment.
This was, however, as nothing to the events which took place later. It was traditional to entertain the crew to drinks and cakes after the ceremony, but, unbeknown to the captain, Miss Rickson became very drunk and insisted on taking even more alcohol to the fo’c’sle, where the crew’s quarters were located. Knudsen in the meantime obtained the captain’s permission to do the same thing. The result was a high state of inebriation for all, during which Miss Rickson claimed that the first mate had accused her of sleeping with one of the crew, became hysterical and had to be forcibly removed. Selle tried to defend her, attacked the captain and was knocked down for his pains, then handcuffed and locked in his cabin. Miss Rickson, in the meantime, threw the key of her cabin through the porthole in anticipation of being locked in herself. It was 1.30 the next morning before things had quietened down sufficiently for Bob to retire to bed, leaving the first mate to finish mopping up the blood.
Relations between some of the occupants of the saloon were understandably somewhat frosty the next day, but gradually improved thereafter. The ship was now far closer to Brazil than to Africa, her course determined by the northeasterly trade winds, and it was not until 4 October, fifty-one days out of Copenhagen, that she picked up the westerlies, which were followed a few days later by a northerly gale. This enabled her to re-cross the Atlantic, passing 80 miles south of Tristan da Cunha. Bob, to his dismay, was bitten by the captain’s Alsatian dog, leaving a large wound in his hand which should really have been stitched and made it impossible for him to carry out some of the seamen’s jobs, especially those aloft.
The Herzogin Cecilie was now well to the south of the Cape of Good Hope and on a poor course for her destination, hampered by encountering the worst storm of the voyage, with all canvas taken in other than three storm-sails. The captain brought the ship up into the wind so that she was almost stationary. Moreover, it was very cold, and Bob resorted to spending a lot of time in the galley, the warmest part of the ship. A pig which the cook had been feeding up died in mysterious circumstances and had to be buried at sea; as the ship had by now also run out of potatoes, the cook was reduced to serving salt meat and stockfish, which Bob found distinctly unpleasant, whereas previously the food had been good.
At last the wind turned into the south, driving the vessel towards her destination. Two days later it changed direction, blowing the vessel on absolutely the opposite course. Shortly afterwards, however, the wind swung round yet again and three days later land was sighted for the first time since the vessel had lain off Fair Isle. The landfall was excellent, just off the mouth of the Limpopo River and not far north of Lourenço Marques. After going aground briefly in Delagoa Bay, the Herzogin Cecilie was taken in tow by the pilot boat and dropped anchor at 17.42 on 1 November, seventy-nine days out of Copenhagen.
The next two and a half weeks were spent at Lourenço Marques, where Bob bought a sun helmet and two cotton suits and generally amused himself, either alone, with his fellow passengers or some of the officers or, on a few occasions, with an attractive German girl. A number of letters from England were waiting for him there, including from his father, who was in a nursing home suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, his mother, his sisters, Head and Cotterell; he was able to cable news of his arrival and send off his replies. There was a good hotel and some reasonable cafés, and on one occasion he, the captain and the first mate went to a bull fight.
On 19 November the Herzogin Cecilie weighed anchor bound for Beira, a mere four days sailing. There Bob was taken in hand by a British expatriate, a Mr Golding, and given temporary membership of the club. On 30 November he bade his farewells to Captain Erikson and his officers and crew and boarded the SS Calgary, a relatively modern small cargo ship of the Elder Dempster Line with accommodation for a number of passengers, although on this occasion Bob was the only one. It was clean and comfortable, the officers were very agreeable and the food was good. Bob took lessons in navigation from the third mate, which made him realize that what he had been taught aboard the Herzogin Cecilie had been somewhat rough and ready. The ship arrived in Durban on 3 December.
Bob’s stay in Durban was di
srupted by a bout of food poisoning, but he was well enough to arrange a passage back to England on the SS Guildford Castle, an 8,000 ton passenger ship of the Union Castle Line, on which he was allocated a very small cabin, about half the size of the one he had occupied on the Herzogin Cecilie. She sailed early on the morning of 6 December and by lunchtime he was thoroughly bored. The other passengers were dull, and he felt idle and unfit after all the activity he had been used to. He received the permission of the captain to go up to the bridge and indulge his new enthusiasm for navigation, but other than a brief call at Tenerife, there was nothing much else to amuse him and he was very pleased when the ship docked at Southampton very early on the last day of 1931.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the voyage was the making of Bob, but he had clearly derived a great deal of benefit from the experience. He understood the sea very much better, he had acquired a new skill in navigation, he had learnt to work as part of a team under pressure in extreme conditions and he had obtained a new qualification, that of registered Finnish able seaman, which might have seemed at the time unlikely to advance his chosen career, but which was to do so in circumstances which he could never have foreseen. As far as his character was concerned, he had demonstrated qualities of courage, determination and tolerance and learned how to fit in with people whose background was far removed from his own.
He was not yet quite done with the Herzogin Cecilie. In June 1932 the ship put in to Liverpool for dry docking on her return voyage to the Baltic and Bob went up to see her, entertaining Erikson and the first mate to dinner at the Adelphi, before returning with them to stay the night in his old cabin. He had arranged for his father, now recovered from his illness, two brothers and sister Rosemary, together with some other friends, to take passage on the barque for the short voyage to Copenhagen, so that they could get some idea of what he had experienced. Moreover, later that summer Antony Head embarked in the ship to undertake the same voyage as Bob.
Commando General Page 5