by James Philip
It was while he was serving in the Royal Navy that he had met yachtsmen and businessmen Owen Aisher and David Wickens. Aisher, who with his father had pioneered the manufacturing of concrete roofing tiles had set up Marley Ltd in the 1930s. During the war Marley had been heavily involved in the building of the Mulberry harbours for the Normandy Landings and after the war had become a major supplier to the building industry. Wickens had set up British Car Auctions in 1946. With such connections it was hard to know how du Cann could fail in business.
However, rather than being handed – as the only surviving Treasury minister – the Chancellor’s brief, the Prime Minister had included it in his own portfolio, and retained du Cann in the capacity of an ex officio ‘advisor’. Inevitably, du Cann’s nose had been somewhat put out of joint by this – the very notion that he was anybody’s errand boy, even the Prime Minister’s, was to say the least, disappointing - but in typical fashion he was making the best of a bad deal.
For example, for the purposes of this morning’s meeting he had styled himself ‘Economic Advisor to the First Lord of the Treasury’, ignoring the fact that no such post presently existed in the UKIEA.
It was perishingly cold in the ground floor room despite the fire spitting and glowing in the hearth at its southern end, and not for the first time Edward du Cann wondered if leaving his country seat Cothay Manor – a fifteenth century house in several acres of gardens at Stawley in Somerset – had been such a good idea. It had been a thorny decision; in the end he had decided that he and his new wife, Sallie, were probably safer behind the barbed wire of the Government compound at Cheltenham, protected by several hundred soldiers than they were in the wilds of Somerset. The way things were at the moment the lord of any manor in England rightly lived in fear of the mob coming for him with pitchforks...
The door creaked open and the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office entered the gloomily lit room.
Edward du Cann had never met the dapper, professorial civil servant until he arrived at Cheltenham eight days after the war. The man reminded him of nothing so much as one of his elderly tutors at St John’s College, or perhaps a wise old bank manager. Oddly, he always felt a little uncomfortable in the other man’s company. It was as if the old fox could see straight through him...
‘Hello, Edward. I didn’t expect to see you here today?’ Although the greeting question was spoken affably, without prejudice it still put du Cann on his guard.
‘Margaret asked me to sit in and report back to her,’ he retorted quickly. ‘She felt my business insights might be helpful...’
Strictly speaking de Cann’s day by day secondment to the Ministry of Supply was as Airey Neave’s ‘occasional’ peripatetic ‘assistant’. Unfortunately, the two men did not really get on so he had become – when the Prime Minister forgot he existed – the Angry Widow’s ‘enforcer’ and ‘facilitator’ at Cheltenham.
Du Cann had been chatting – the conversation had been somewhat forced – about the UKIEA’s ongoing difficulties communicating with the ‘colonies’; a slip of the tongue which had gone down like a lead balloon with both his interlocutors without him noticing. Fortunately, the other men in the room, much older men who had spent careers dealing with the products - like de Cann - of the English public school system knew that they were not dealing with an important figure in Edward Heath’s regime.
The man they had come to Government House to meet had just walked into the room and he was in every respect a very senior player in the tragic drama all around them.
Neither Howard Green, the Canadian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, or Sir Eric Harrison, the unshakably anglophile Australian High Commissioner, had – other than for flying over the margins – seen with their own eyes the enormity of the destruction wrought on the British Isles but they had seen the thousand yards stares of the survivors, heard enough dreadful stories of the fight for life in the days after the attack, and lived locked down as one fallout alarm followed another. As if the evidence of their eyes and their conversations, their reading of the mood of the men, women and children huddled around them here in unbombed Cheltenham was not enough, living cheek by jowl with the desolation and despair, they had been half-sucked into a well of grief that was so infinite that it threatened to drown them all in its fathomless depths. In official briefings their British hosts had spared nothing in the brutal frankness of their descriptions of the nightmare conditions elsewhere in the land.
Even here in Cheltenham men and women starving and foraging for food for their children had been shot as looters. In the dark of the winter night there were often gunshots as the town garrison, its numbers reduced by sickness, frostbite and trench foot by the unending savagery of the deep freeze locking down the whole of England, struggled to enforce the dusk to dawn curfew. Every day more refugees shuffled into the town; starving, disease-ridden with some literally dying on their feet. Tragically, there was little the over-stretched local civil and military authorities could do to alleviate their suffering. Yesterday, the food ration within the Government compound had been cut again – this time from the standard mid-World War Two calorie level – by a quarter. Wherever one looked a drawn, hungry face and tired, resigned eyes peered back.
Unlike practically everybody else Edward du Cann had about him a moderately well fed, cheerful mien and the inbred smugness of a man who honestly believed he still belonged to the ruling class.
Tom Harding-Grayson, having spoken to Margaret Thatcher’s errand boy, ignored him as he shook hands with his two Commonwealth guests.
‘I’ve asked for a pot of tea to be brought in,’ he explained wanly. ‘I’ve no idea if it will actually turn up or if the contents will taste remotely like tea. But it is the thought that counts, what!’
The four men took chairs in a half-circle near the hearth.
The Permanent Secretary to the Foreign Office – only the Foreign Secretary and people like du Cann still added the appendage ‘and Colonial Office’ to his department’s title – had not taken off his coat. Had it not been for the nearby fire his breath might have frosted in the frigid air.
‘Lord Home sends his apologies. His trip down from Scotland yesterday practically finished him off.’
The civil servant explained this with dutiful, meticulous bland neutrality as if he did not think his minister’s recent ‘jaunt’, involving a scandalous waste of very scarce transport resources, manpower and fuel, back up to Scotland to spend a few days on his estates north of the border, was in the circumstances anything less than contemptible. Yes, the Foreign Secretary had not been himself since the night of the war; so what? What did he think it was like for everybody else?
‘I trust that Edward has been looking after you?’
Howard Green guessed the Englishman must be seething inwardly. He had been astonished to discover that the British Foreign Secretary was absent from Cheltenham when the Queen Mary had finally docked at Southampton.
The giant liner had been tossed about like a cork on its six-day crossing from New York and then forced to wait in the English Channel another three days before the storms relented, allowing her to safely steam inshore. For much of his time onboard the liner he had been out of communication with Ottawa, and with Cheltenham, the Queen Mary’s radio antenna having been torn down by one particularly damaging hurricane gust.
Sixty-eight year old Howard Green was feeling every day of his age, knowing now that nothing in his long career had prepared him for this moment. Twenty years ago he had vied for his Party’s – the Conservatives – leadership, since then he had built up his reputation in government as a safe and principled pair of hands. In the 1950s he had railed against the administration of Prime Minister Louis St Laurent over the Suez Crisis:
‘By its actions [it] has made this month of November 1956, the most disgraceful period for Canada in the history of this nation...[it is] high time Canada had a government which will not knife Canada's best friends in the back.’
Later he
had become St Laurent’s successor, and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s staunchest ally in rejecting plans to base US nuclear-armed Bomarc missiles on Canadian soil, and in his country’s campaign for nuclear disarmament. In October 1962 there had been few greater supporters of the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ in Canada than Howard Green.
‘I’m sure we shall survive, come what may,’ he observed wryly.
Seventy year old Sir Eric Harrison felt, and suspected, that he looked like death warmed up. It was no accident that the vastly experienced and travelled anglophile who had been Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party for a dozen years prior to taking up his post in London in 1956 was Australia’s, and Robert Menzies’s man in England. Harrison had left school at the age of thirteen, served with the Anzacs[71] in the Great War, managed a textile factory in the 1920s, entered politics and been in and out of government ever since 1934.
Howard Green and his small ‘inquiry team’ had come to England to access the ‘needs’ of the British Government; and he and Eric Harrison had quickly agreed that what the British people needed right now was ‘everything’ that anybody, anywhere could spare them.
Margaret Thatcher – goodness, what a remarkable woman – had told the Canadian that ‘not all is lost’, that the great powerhouse of the industrial Midlands is undamaged, that ‘we have a thousand years of coal supplies beneath the ground’ and ‘that we still have the Royal Navy and our other marvellous armed services’.
The trouble was that London was gone.
London had been the nation, the Empire, and latterly the Commonwealth’s beating financial heart; the World’s banker and the custodian of the greatest treasure trove of culture, history and...records in Christendom. This last was the most crucial; there might be untold billions of pounds, or dollars worth of precious stones and metal, bonds and proofs of ownership, licences and patents buried under the sea of rubble but without ‘records’ none of that mattered a single jot. Similarly, notwithstanding the wealth of the nation might one day be the potential of its undamaged factories and mines, its fleets and its loyal soldiery, right now the United Kingdom – or rather, England, where all the bombs had gone off – was no more than a bloody, impoverished stump of its former self.
Edward Heath had spoken of issuing new ‘financial instruments’ to pay for aid from the Commonwealth yet the UKIEA had no way of establishing what its existing debts were, let alone paying off new ones. In fact, everybody in the room tacitly accepted that sooner or later the British Government would have no choice but to default on all pre-war ‘obligations’ and ‘undertakings’, if only because there was virtually no foolproof way of establishing the nature, terms or the amounts of those commitments, or to whom it – the UKIEA, by definition not the British Government which had preceded it - was legally beholden.
Margaret Thatcher had talked about ‘exporting skilled workers and academics to the Commonwealth’, and ‘technology exchanges’. However, all this was pie in the sky. None of this was relevant until the immediate crisis was in some way, ‘under control’.
Out in the wind and drifting snow thousands were dying every day for want of shelter, food and the most basic medical care. Many of the oldest and the youngest, and anybody suffering from a serious illness before the war had already ‘died off’, now the fittest of the survivors were fighting for their lives and there was nothing either Howard Green or Eric Harrison could do about it.
Not now, or even soon but perhaps, in a few months time...
‘The Australian and New Zealand governments will underwrite the shipment of stocks of surplus foodstuffs and essential minerals to the United Kingdom,’ Harrison said gruffly, his teeth chattering with the cold. He shrugged. ‘Pending subsequent financial arrangements; we cannot sit back and do nothing while our people are starving.’
‘Canada will do likewise,’ Green added grimly. ‘Although shipping is going to be a problem and large areas of Alberta and elsewhere may have been radioactively contaminated – honestly we still have no idea how badly – during the recent war by crashed Soviet bombers and missiles.’
There was also the fallout from the big bombs in the American Northwest and east of Vancouver, not to mention the Chicago strikes and the huge bomb which had destroyed Buffalo; the fallout plumes from practically all of those strikes had blown across Canadian, rather than US territory in the days following the war.
‘The St Lawrence Seaway,’ the Canadian continued, ‘is now open again but the US authorities have failed to prioritise reopening the Welland Ship canal and therefore the Great Lakes are still isolated from the rest of the World[72]. Then there is also the US Navy’s illegal stop and search operation in the North Atlantic...’
Tom Harding-Grayson nodded thoughtfully.
‘One wonders what those fellows are playing at,’ he mused.[73] ‘The Soviets must know – if there are any of them still alive – that any attempt to attack a US port would result in an annihilating response.’
Edward du Cann was feeling a little left out.
‘Do we know what the South Africans are going to do yet?’
Tom Harding-Grayson scowled momentarily.
‘No. They’ve offered full naval support; otherwise I think the jury is still out.’
The younger man thought about it.
‘I happen to know a few businessmen down there.’
The civil servant raised an eyebrow.
‘Oh?’
‘Look, I’m not doing an awful lot of good here in Gloucestershire. But if somebody gave us a chit my wife and I could be on the next Comet shuttle to Cape Town. We could be ‘in country’ in forty-eight hours. I’m sure the Ambassador is a marvellous fellow, but I’ve got several handy contacts down in that part of the World and well, sometimes one has to approach these things on a twin-track, as it were.’
Chapter 19 | Saint Paul Incident
Saturday 16th February 1963
Coral Sea, West of New Caledonia
Four days ago the frigate HMNZS Otago had been on passage home to Auckland after exercising with the Hermes Battle Group in the Timor Sea. Topping off her bunkers at Brisbane she had taken onboard two doctors and several nurses, and a consignment of medical supplies at Moreton Bay where the ship was scheduled to pay a courtesy call on the French Governor of New Caledonia – who had been given ‘security guarantees’ by both the Australian and New Zealand governments at the end of January – and to land her passengers and their supplies at Nouméa. While traversing the Coral Sea, Otago had received a garbled SOS call from a supposedly US registered freighter, the Galveston Ranger, reportedly in difficulty some one hundred and ten nautical miles approximately west-north-west of its destination.
Another allied vessel the old converted Bay class frigate, now operating in an unarmed ‘survey role’, HMS Dampier, returning from Fiji to rejoin the Fleet at Sydney, had also picked up the SOS and altered course so as to come upon the Galveston Ranger shortly after daybreak the next morning, some three hours after Otago, steaming at her best sea speed – some twenty-three or four knots in the prevailing sea conditions – had reached the position reported by the merchantman.
The weather was distinctly ‘filthy’, everybody recollected.
‘A very odd, long-duration summer storm,’ noted one officer. ‘More like the North Atlantic than the Coral Sea, especially at that time of year.’
The Otago’s captain was initially pleasantly surprised that when he approached the last reported chart co-ordinates of the SS Galveston Ranger that there were already several other ships present, and that they were obviously – from the evidence of his radar plot as Otago approached from the west – systematically quartering the area.
However, he was less pleased to be asked, and then ordered, by the commanding officer of the US Navy heavy cruiser Saint Paul (CA-73) to quote: ‘Stand off immediately and retire to a range of twenty nautical miles’ because his ship was in some way unknown to him ‘hampering US Navy search and rescue operations!’
Approaching from the north east Dampier soon received the same treatment. Neither the Otago nor the survey vessel respected the ‘twenty mile’ order as they manoeuvred to within a few hundred yards of each other, although both ships were mindful not to actually ‘get in the way’ of the American squadron.
The commanders of the two ships exchanged observations about how ‘this is a bit of a rum do’. Nonetheless, they agreed that the ‘Yanks seemed to know what they are doing, whatever it was,’ and determined that as the Dampier’s bunkers were already ‘somewhat depleted’ little was to be gained by her remaining in the area. Shortly thereafter, the Dampier continued her passage at her most economical speed giving the American ships a wide berth.
In the meantime the captain of the Otago, whose CIC had been monitoring the US Navy’s ‘search and rescue operation’ – which had moved some miles south as the New Zealand frigate and the survey ship cruised to the north-east so as to best ride out the foul weather – had taken the opportunity to keep his crew alert, ordering his ship to air defence stations and exercising his sonar team.
‘Once we started operating regularly with the British Pacific Fleet we exercised and practiced in all conditions,’ is a common refrain from the dwindling number of living survivors of the then small Royal New Zealand Navy.
Up until that point - shortly after fourteen hundred hours on 13th February all that had happened was that one captain (of the USS Saint Paul) had put another captain’s (of the HMNZS Otago) nose minutely out of joint by failing to extend him a minor professional courtesy. Specifically, he had ‘ordered’ not ‘requested’ that he give his ships sea room in what might be a life or death operation.
In retrospect it is bizarre that this minor incident – most likely it now seems a cack-handed attempt to cover up a botched spying mission by one ‘friend’ upon the activities of ‘other friends’ – should have become such a cause celebre down the years.