Operation Manna (Timeline 10/27/62 - Australia)

by James Philip

  Lord Harris

  Anthologies

  Volume 1: Notes & Articles

  Volume 2: Monographs No. 1 to 8

  Monographs

  No. 1 - William Brockwell

  No. 2 - German Cricket

  No. 3 - Devon Cricket

  No. 4 - R.S. Holmes

  No. 5 - Collectors & Collecting

  No. 6 - Early Cricket Reporters

  No. 7 – Northamptonshire

  No. 8 - Cricket & Authors

  ________

  Details of all James Philip’s published books and

  forthcoming publications can be found on his website

  www.jamesphilip.co.uk

  ________

  Cover artwork concepts by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  Notes

  ________

  * * *

  [1] Operational Pedestal to military buffs.

  [2] This author’s great grandmother.

  [3] Vice Admiral Sir Hugh Staveley-Pope, DSO (1900-1962).

  [4] Stanton was the man who bankrolled both of Julian Christopher’s dazzling but ultimately gallant failures to win back the America’s Cup in the 1920s and 1930s. Stanton’s son, Eric, was later to bequeath to my father ‘Aysha II’, the magnificent yacht he had had specially designed and built in Cowes on the Isle of Wight to contest the 1964 America’s Cup.

  [5] Exiled to the other side of the World, it seemed, allegedly for sleeping with the wrong senior officer’s wife in 1938 while at the Admiralty in London, serving as an aide to the Second Sea Lord.

  [6] Later King Edward VIII of Abdication and Wallis Simpson fame.

  [7] Without the protection of ‘the Prince’ Julian Christopher was not the only man whose past caught up with him!

  [8] Then Lieutenant Nicholas Winterton Davey, RNR, another former member of the Prince of Wales’s circle, who had crewed and caroused away most of the late twenties and early thirties with Christopher in their America’s Cup ‘yachting days’; later Rear Admiral, VC (awarded posthumously), for his part in the Battle of the Shatt al-Arab, 4th July 1964.

  [9] In the event David Luce’s first decision when he was appointed acting Chief of the Defence Staff on 2nd November 1962 by the leader of the (Provisional) UKIEA was to formally ‘alter the command arrangements in the Far East’, installing Christopher as C-in-C of ‘all British forces east of Suez’.

  [10] Sir Eric Stanton, the son of his benefactor back in the thirties, and Christopher had discussed the possibility of his skippering the then building Aysha II in a campaign for the 1964 or 1966-67 America’s Cup. Stanton always maintained ‘1964 would be a trial run for 1966-67’.

  [11] Neither of which due to post-war exigencies took place as planned! Although Julian Christopher was knighted in December 1963, he took up command in the Mediterranean initially with the substantive rank of Vice Admiral.

  [12] Courtesy of international datelines et al the October War actually happened in the Far East on the morning of Sunday 28th October 1962.

  [13] This is quoted from the First Interim Report of the Cabinet Committee into the Cuban Missiles War and the mid- and long-term implications for policy of that conflict presented to Her Majesty’s Government on Friday 5th March 1965.

  [14] AMDA was put into effect on 19th September 1957 but not formally ratified by the British and the Malayan governments until 12th October 1957.

  [15] A fifth ‘C’ class destroyer, HMS Carysfort had recently departed Singapore for Gibraltar where she was due to be refitted and was to be called back to the Far East within days of the October War).

  [16] National Service in the United Kingdom had gradually been phased out starting in 1957. The last men had entered service in November 1960 with call-ups formally ending on 31st December 1960. The last National Servicemen were due to be de-mobbed in May 1963.

  [17] Many people forget that despite the October War no renewed form of national conscription into the British Armed Forces was introduced again until early 1967, and then only to address specific gaps in technical expertise and experience in specific sections of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.

  [18] My Aunt Elspeth had become wholly estranged from my grandfather in the fifties during my grandmother’s final illness. She and my father – separated by several years in age – and by childhoods spent in separate boarding schools had never been close. Oddly, it was only after my mother and father came to Australia in 1966 that relations were re-established and brother and sister eventually became lifelong friends (much of which, I suspect was initially my mother’s doing!).

  [19] My father was destined to be the 16th and last non-native born Governor General of Australia (1966-68).

  [20] This was the ANZUS (Australian, New Zealand, and United States) Treaty.

  [21] John Smith Murdoch (1862-1945) who had been born at Cassieford Farm at Forres in Scotland in 1862.

  [22] Admiral Sir David Luce; selected personal papers quoted by courtesy of the National Archives, Oxford.

  [23] Lieutenant-Commander Victor Winston Tremayne (1928-62). A gifted officer destined for great things in the service, his wife and three sons were at the family home in Gravesend on the night of the October War. Although, like many others he seemed to take the news from home phlegmatically, he was one of many who simply could not live with his grief. Tragically, he committed suicide in his cabin – employing a service revolver – while Ark Royal was anchored at Brisbane, in Moreton Bay in December 1962.

  [24] At that time so soon after the attack it was not understood even at Cheltenham that practically all the devastation was restricted to England; and that therefore in addition to untouched areas within the borders of England, the resources of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were potentially available to alleviate, at least around the periphery of the bombed areas, the worst of the after effects of the war.

  [25] General Hull was CIGS – Chief of the Imperial General Staff – the Head of the British Army. On Friday 26th October he had left London in favour of his designated ‘war post’ at Winchester in Hampshire at the Headquarters of the Rifle Brigade.

  [26] This was at the height of the Great Depression when the US Navy was subject to such Draconian cutbacks that only a small number of Annapolis graduates lacking influential sponsors were actually accepted into the service.

  [27] The Seventh Fleet had interpreted President Kennedy’s ‘ceasefire announcement’ of the morning of Sunday 28th October as applying only to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Otherwise, it remained on a war footing until 00:01 Hours on 1st January 1963.

  [28] An A-4 Skyhawk and a Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King flying off the Midway were lost in separate ‘incidents’ with the loss of six lives and classified as ‘operational accidents in November 1962.

  [29] In December 1962 Captain F.J. Maltravers.

  [30] Lieutenant General Sir William Pasfield Oliver.

  [31] He was in his seventies when this author first met him.

  [32] Over 5,000 British and Commonwealth troops had been killed and over 80,000 captured by a Japanese force less than half the size of the island’s badly led and demoralised garrison.

  [33] Author of the three volume work The War at Sea (the Official History of the Royal Navy in the 1939-45 War) published between 1954 and 1961.

  [34] It was at this conference that the C-in-C had announced that the Far East Fleet would be re-designated ‘British Pacific Fleet’ at 00:01 Hours on 1st December 1962.

  [35] The author discovered this cable in a dusty file box which had been sealed and stored at the Governor of Malta’s official residence, the Verdala Palace, in 1964 and had apparently lain undisturbed for the best part of thirty years.

  [36] Julian Christopher had requested the Supply – formally the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Tide Austral (A99) which had been transferred to the Australian Navy only that July – be pre-positioned in the Indian Ocean so as to support ‘Commonwealth Operations in the theatre before he had taken Ar
k Royal and Hermes north.

  [37] Letter to the author in 1998.

  [38] Confusingly, when he joined the UKIEA the Foreign Secretary, the 14th Earl of Home, elected to style himself as ‘Sir Alexander Douglas Home’, even though the possibility of his renouncing his earldom and standing anew for the Commons had never arisen.

  [39] On Nottingham Hill.

  [40] In those days the Gold Cup was a 3-mile Flat Race.

  [41] Oxford academic, wartime civil servant and post-war Ambassador to the United States, Franks had been raised to the peerage in May 1962.

  [42] Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Western Samoa and Uganda had become independent members of the Commonwealth earlier in 1962; Uganda’s ‘independence’ was still less than three weeks old at the time of the October War.

  [43] The author does not say this entirely frivolously. What was, and was not a fully independent entity within the Commonwealth of Nations was a moot point at the time with different nations moving at different speeds towards full independence, or towards some altered form of ‘dependency’. For example, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had been created in 1953, but its three constituent parts – Southern and Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland – were not ‘independent’ states so for this reason the author elects to treat them as ‘dependencies’. Others might disagree and the author happily agrees to disagree with them.

  [44] Modern day Belize.

  [45] The Kingdom of Lesotho.

  [46] Modern Botswana.

  [47] The Kingdom of Eswatini.

  [48] Then Rear-Admiral Nigel Terence Grenville (later Admiral Sir Nigel Grenville C-in-C Home Fleet, 1967-69).

  [49] It is one of those oddities of circumstance that this quote, as with the majority of his more private – and revealing musings – were communicated to that doyen of English cricket writers E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton, and recounted many years later in his book ‘Trapped in Australia’, his fond reflective memoir of the England tour of Australia and New Zealand in the winter of 1962-63.

  [50] Like millions of other victims of the October War nothing was ever known of the fate of Sheppard’s wife and daughter in England.

  [51] Cricket On The Beach; the story of the England tour of Australia in the winter of 1962-63.

  [52] Anecdotally the suicide rate in the Home Fleet and on other overseas stations was approximately twice this ‘level’. Likewise, desertion rates in ‘home ports’ were 5 to 10 times higher than in the British Far East/Pacific Fleet in the twelve months after the war.

  [53] After being dry docked at Freemantle Cavendish had steamed around the south shores of the continent visiting Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne before rendezvousing with the Ark Royal off the east coast of Australia.

  [54] Thereafter one of the Royal Australian Navy’s three ‘Darings’, its last gunboat destroyers, escorted Ark Royal wherever she went in Australasian waters; with the British Pacific Fleet and the RAN beginning an ‘exchange program’ under which officers and men from both navies ‘rotated’ between RN and RAN ships.

  [55] These ‘open days’ became routine set pieces whenever a ship entered a port or an anchorage for a stay of more than seventy-two hours. No count was ever made but it is likely that well over a million-and-a-half people visited the ships of the British Pacific Fleet between December 1962 and August 1963.

  [56] It was the first time my grandfather had met his grandchildren.

  [57] Effectively these were modified versions of the Type 41 Leopard class air defence frigates built for the Royal Navy between 1953 and 1960. Eventually the third and fourth vessels laid down in 1963 were completed as more modern Type 12M Leander class general purpose frigates.

  [58] Ark Royal was the biggest carrier in the Fleet. HMS Eagle a near sister was in dockyard hands at Portsmouth undergoing a major refit at the time of the October War.

  [59] The Defence portfolio passed to James Callaghan when, in May-1963 Edward Heath brought more ‘Labour’ men into the UKIEA in the interests of ‘broadening the governmental church’.

  [60] Patricia Harding-Grayson née Seldon, whose opening avowed socialist leanings and friendships with leading members of the Labour Party had cause her then husband no little ‘career embarrassment’ in the 1950s (even though everybody knew his circle of friends included many leading figures in the Labour Party).

  [61] The New Zealand Rugby Union XV was then, as it remains now, the proudest and most definitive expression of national identity for the peoples of New Zealand. New Zealand was the first of the major ‘white’ sporting nations to moot the idea of a sporting boycott of Apartheid South Africa.

  [62] For four months in 1941.

  [63] ‘Voyage of a Lifetime’, the personal memoir of Rear-Admiral F.J. Maltravers, RN, DSO (published 1987); remarks and reminiscences attributed to Maltravers arise from this book and two interviews with the author conducted in 1996.

  [64] The equivalent of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom.

  [65] The Reserve Bank of Australia is analogous to the former Bank of England; the government’s banker and arbiter of financial regulation in that era.

  [66] Equivalent to the British (Home) Civil Service Permanent Secretary of the Exchequer; although under the Australian system not automatically the second-ranking professional civil servant in the land.

  [67] Also known as the ‘Australian Statistician’, the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics and responsible for organising ten-yearly national censuses.

  [68] The Type-12 frigate HMNZS Otago.

  [69] The fifth most senior ministerial – at any given time according to the composition of the Cabinet two or three ranks removed from it – position in the United Kingdom Treasury.

  [70] The author of ‘Lucky Jim’ (1954); ‘That Uncertain Feeling (1955); ‘I Like It here (1958) and ‘Take a Girl Like You (1960).

  [71] First Australian Imperial Force and served from December 1917 on the Western Front in the 5th Field Artillery Brigade and was promoted to sergeant in May 1918.

  [72] The pre-war freedom of navigation of the Great Lakes from the North Atlantic was not fully re-established until January 1964. The delays, mostly due to the Kennedy Administration’s clumsy attempts to ensure Canada towed the US line vis-a-vis the United Kingdom and Europe resulted in decades of bad feeling between the two countries.

  [73] A US Navy destroyer had attempted to shadow the Queen Mary part of the way across the Atlantic on Green’s tempestuous passage only to have to slow down, dropping astern in the storm unable to keep pace with the leviathan.

  [74] McKenzie was the Otago’s second captain, taking over from Commander Max McDowell on 8th February 1962. McKenzie in turn surrendered command of the frigate in August 1963 to Commander Edward Thorne, DSO (awarded posthumously) who perished in the First Battle of the Persian Gulf in early July 1964 along with 214 of his ship’s crew of 227.

  [75] Fitzgerald had taken command of the Saint Paul only on 3rd January 1963.

  [76] Later Vice Admiral Sir Alan Wedel Ramsay McNicoll, KCB in the new year’s Honours List of January 1965.

  [77] Captain Morgan Morgan-Giles, DSO, GM (later Rear Admiral and knighted in the 1967 Queen’s Birthday Honours list).

  [78] When Torpedo office onboard HMS Medway in Alexandria in 1940, like Morgan-Giles, he was engaged on ‘clearance’ work – often under enemy air attack - including disarming and making safe the captured Italian submarine Galileo Gallilei during which he had personally removed the inertia fuses from several badly corroded torpedoes.

  [79] Actually, J.D.F. Larter, who played his country cricket for Northamptonshire, was born in Inverness, Scotland.

  [80] In that period all touring England teams went abroad under the auspices of ‘the Club’, that is, the Marylebone Cricket Club.

  [81] The initial operational phase of that agreement became Operation Manna under the command of C-in-C British Pacific Fleet, Vice Admiral Julian Christopher. This agreement later became the basis of the Commonwealth
Mutual Assistance and Free Trade Agreement of 1965 which provides the framework for Commonwealth trade and security arrangements to this day.

  [82] Herbert Hans Woodward, appointed Ambassador in 1961.

  [83] South Africa had been expelled by the Commonwealth in 1961 because of its policy of Apartheid; its High Commissioner was therefore an ‘Ambassador’ during this period.

  [84] Strictly speaking it was the Federation of Rhodesia from 1953 onwards.

  [85] Salisbury was renamed Harare after the election of the first ‘African’ government of the independent Republic of Zimbabwe in 1999.

  [86] Detached from the Hermes battle group as the carrier was due to go into dockyard hands for the next fourteen days at Brisbane.

  [87] The disease damaged his spine. After an operation to replace the diseased bone with a piece of his shin he spent most of the middle years of the war immobilised in a plaster cast and then a spinal brace.