by Mike Carlton
They had sailed 21,000 kilometres in seven weeks, cheerfully enduring discomforts casually inflicted upon them by a penny-pinching Australian Government and the Naval Board. Years later, many of them would look back with nostalgia at this landmark in their lives.
As a gangplank was laid across from the deck of the Autolycus to Amphion, the Australians marvelled at the scene around them. In the watery summer sunlight, all the naval might of England seemed to be on display. The pride of the Royal Navy, the great battlecruiser HMS Hood, lay in the next dock, and beyond her was the formidable grey bulk of the newly rebuilt First World War battleship Queen Elizabeth. A forest of masts and funnels revealed a line of destroyers berthed side by side. Launches, barges and picket boats scuttered across the harbour waters. A red and white admiral’s flag flew from the white semaphore tower atop the Georgian brick of the base headquarters building. His Majesty’s Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth, throbbed with purpose.
HMS Amphion, however, did not. Her new crew saw, to their dismay, that she was filthy and, at first glance, deserted. She looked like a ghost ship. Her paintwork was scarred where rust had been scraped away and replaced with blotches of red lead preservative, and her upper decks were strewn with stores and spares and just plain rubbish. After the rigours of the long trip from Sydney, it was a disheartening sight, but there was nothing for it. Gathering their kitbags, the men left the Autolycus and trooped aboard their new home, to be met by their new captain.
Harold Bruce Farncomb was born in 1899, if not with a silver spoon in his mouth at least within fairly easy reach of one. The second child of a comfortably middle-class timber surveyor, he grew up on Sydney’s North Shore, where his first school was Gordon Public, an elegant pile of colonial sandstone. After that, he went briefly to Sydney Boys High, but in 1913 he changed course. Young Harold, barely a teenager, and certainly not old enough to shave, joined the first intake of boys to be trained as officers in the temporary Royal Australian Naval College (RANC) at Osborne House overlooking Corio Bay near Geelong in Victoria.
The RANC was modelled, in almost every way, on the Royal Navy’s officer college in Britain. This was very deliberately done. The Royal Navy had ruled the waves for a century, and the Australian Navy had been designed, nut and bolt, rope and wire, hull and funnel, to the British template. It flew the same ensign: the red cross of St George on a white background, with the Union flag in the top-left corner. The ranks and uniforms were identical. Young Australian officers would be in no way inferior to their Royal Navy counterparts. They would absorb the skills, knowledge, customs and traditions of the senior service. They would hold the King’s commission as officers and, trained as such, they could be posted to any of His Majesty’s Ships, British or Australian, as the Empire required. There was, however, one specific difference. The Australian Government had made it clear that social class, or lack of it, was not to be a barrier to entry for would-be officers. In Britain, good breeding was not infrequently regarded as an adequate substitute for ability in young midshipmen, but this was not to happen in a more egalitarian Australia. Talent was all that counted. British naval cadets were still required to pay for their training as if they were at an exclusive public school. In Australia, it would be free.9
Farncomb had talent to burn. First at Osborne, and then at the newly completed naval college on the shores of Jervis Bay in New South Wales, he threw himself into three years of study that even today seems dizzying. Arithmetic and algebra, plane and spherical trigonometry, electromagnetics, navigation and pilotage with nautical astronomy, engineering, geography, history, English literature and composition, French and German, chemistry and religious instruction filled those waking hours when he was not learning the intricacies of parade-ground drill, boat handling and wardroom etiquette. He obtained his colours at cricket and in 1916 he topped his class in his final year.
A dazzling career duly soared. As a newly minted midshipman in 1917 in the final years of the Great War, his first ship was the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign in the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet, followed by a series of high-flying postings at sea and ashore in both navies. Recommended by his superiors for accelerated promotion, he was picked for staff colleges and specialist courses, where he shone again. He completed a short course at the Royal Navy’s terror of terrors, the gunnery school HMS Excellent at Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour – a punishing ordeal that could make or break an officer’s career.
He survived the purge of officers brought on by the financial cutbacks of the Depression years, served in what few remaining ships the RAN had to offer in those straitened times and also as a junior officer in two of the grandest British capital ships afloat, the battleship Barham and battlecruiser Repulse. In 1935, with the brass hat of a commander, he was assigned to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty in London, and in 1937 he became the first graduate of the RANC to wear a captain’s four gold rings on his sleeve. His first command afloat was the Australian sloop Yarra. HMAS Perth would be yet another step up, a challenge for which he was supremely well trained.
Now at the age of 40, the task ahead of him was formidable. Farncomb had been in Britain since the beginning of 1939 for a senior officers’ technical course, another brief spell in Intelligence at the Admiralty and, finally, another tactical course in Portsmouth. As he watched his new crew come on board Amphion, he was acutely aware that it was made up largely of youngsters who had never been to sea in a ship of war. He would have to turn them into fighting seamen in months, if not weeks, with only a small backbone of experienced officers and senior ratings to help him. And this in a ship he barely knew himself and which, as he surveyed it on that summer’s day in Pompey, was patently not ready to go to sea. Undaunted, he set to the job.
When the new arrivals had dumped their kit below in the for’ard messes, he gave the order to ‘clear lower deck’. This brought the men topsides to Amphion’s quarterdeck, and there he addressed them. Briskly, he read to them a formal document commissioning the new ship into the RAN and appointing himself as her commanding officer. He reminded them of the good news, that their return home would include a visit to the United States to officially represent Australia at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, with a trip through the Panama Canal and then stopovers in Los Angeles and San Diego on the American west coast before the long leg south-west across the Pacific. There was also another duty. Here in Portsmouth, there would be a naming ceremony for the new Perth, attended by royalty, no less. Her Royal Highness Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, would do the honours on board, on 10 July. They had ten days to get the ship gleaming like a new pin.
There was one matter that Farncomb did not share with his ship’s company. His time at the Admiralty had given him a window on great and grave events, a perspective rare for an Australian naval officer. It had convinced him that war with Germany was inevitable and that war with Italy would very likely follow. At the end of June 1939, he knew that dismal certainty was closer than ever. There was also the growing might and menace of Japan. If Germany, Italy and Japan were ever to join in another world war against Britain and her Empire in a fight to the death against Western democracy, the future for Australia would be dark indeed. It was entirely possible that the lights of civilisation might flicker and die, extinguished by a new dark age.
Farncomb allowed the crew a weekend’s shore leave two days after they arrived. After that uncomfortable voyage, they deserved it. Excited, they set foot on the soil – or, in His Majesty’s Dockyard, the cobblestones – of the Mother Country for the first time. It was a welcome chance to get away from authority for a bit, to stretch their legs, to relax before the hard work began, to discover the dubious delights of warm, flat English beer in the sailors’ pubs of Pompey beyond the dockyard gates along that venerable stretch of waterfront road known as The Hard. Portsmouth had hailed and farewelled sailors for centuries, but these Australians were a bit out of the ordinary. Suntanned from their voyage, taller and more athletic than their English cousins, they were a
n exotic species. They found the Portsmouth women warm and welcoming.
George Hatfield, a leading seaman, had been in the navy since 1932, joining up when he was just 19. Like so many of Perth’s crew, he had grown up as a Depression kid, the family battling along in the Melbourne suburb of East Brunswick, where his parents and three younger brothers still lived. His sweetheart, Alma Parkin, was with her family in Glebe in Sydney. George kept a diary from the day they sailed in the Autolycus. Portsmouth and England were an eye-opener:
I had a look around the town, and its outstanding features were the fresh complexions of girls, the narrow nine-feet frontages of most of the houses, the variety of accents, and the cheapness of bus fares, about 2 miles for one penny. I had tea at a quiet little café, ordering tea, bread and butter as extras, also a bottle of beer (small) cost 2/2. Wandering into the ‘Coach and Horses’ I tasted some more ale at fourpence per pint, but it was thumbs down, thick like syrup, and no spark. The girls walk into the public bar with their boyfriends and have their pint like a man. Women smoke everywhere in the street, trams, etc. Each pub has its piano and player and there is a sing song going all the time …I got pretty full for about 3/-and despite the fact that there must be 5100 beds for sale, they were all booked. Eventually I wandered into a doss house and fell into a bed tired out. After twenty days at sea, and two days extra hard work I felt like a beer-up, so I had it and felt better for it.10
On the Monday, the holiday was over. Since her return from African waters, Amphion had been lying idle for six months while dockyard workers put her through a thorough refit. Her engines were overhauled, her boilers cleaned, and new refrigeration was installed for her galleys. Most useful of all, she had acquired a new high-angle armament: eight brand-new 4-inch anti-aircraft guns in twin mountings. The dockyard mateys, though, were notoriously uncaring of a ship’s appearance. They had left her even filthier below decks than above; the stink of foul bilges was everywhere. Slowly at first, then more quickly, the ship began her return to life, from dawn to dusk. And dusk came late, because this was high summer in southern England and the twilight lingered long after the evening watch had begun at 8 pm. The men laboured mightily to wash off the grime. They painted her from stem to stern, scraped her decks and woodwork clean, and polished her brightwork. It was a hard slog, but slowly she was returned to a proper state of naval cleanliness and efficiency. To the old salts on board, she was beginning to look, sound and feel like a ship of war again, ready to do a warrior’s work if the call came.
CHAPTER 4
PORTSMOUTH
In the navy, a captain in his ship is a godlike figure, with sweeping powers of command and of punishment and reward. Within wide limits, it is his duty and privilege to decide how he wants the ship to be run. Some captains issue whole volumes of standing orders to cover every possible eventuality, from air attack to a burned fried egg at breakfast, insisting that every order be followed to the letter. Others prefer a light touch, keeping their instructions to a bare minimum, trusting in the competence and common sense of the officers and men.
Harold Farncomb stood about halfway between these two extremes. He was strict and demanding, as it was his right to be, but not excessively so. He had laid his plans and prepared his orders for the new cruiser well before the Autolycus arrived in Portsmouth. It was now his Executive Officer’s job to put them into action.
Centuries of naval practice require the Executive Officer, as the second-in-command, to present his captain with a clean and efficient ship ready for sea in all respects, as the official phrase has it. The other officers are there to make the process happen in all of the ship’s departments: from Engineering, Gunnery, Torpedoes and Electrical, Communications and Navigation and the like, to the less salty but equally important business of feeding three meals a day to a ship’s company of more than 600 men.
Next down the chain of authority are the senior ratings, the chief petty officers and petty officers, some of them with jobs or nicknames dating from the days of sail. The Executive Officer’s right-hand man is the Chief Bosun’s Mate, invariably known as the Buffer, because he is seen as the figure who stands as a buffer between officers and crew. The Master-at-Arms is in charge of the ship’s police and referred to, for reasons long forgotten, as the Jaunty. Others are Coxswains, Quartermasters and Yeomen of Signals. Below them, in descending order, come the leading hands, sometimes known as killicks, from the anchor badge that indicates their rate, and then the able seamen and, bottom of the pile, the ordinary seamen. To care for their bodies, the new ship’s company would have two doctors and a dentist, all officers and known in the navy as surgeons, assisted by their Sick Bay attendants. For the good of their souls, there was a chaplain.
Farncomb’s new Executive Officer was Commander William Adams – not an Australian but an officer on loan from the Royal Navy. Before this job, he had commanded three destroyers, and he would end his career as a rear-admiral. But the new crew would find him stiff and humourless, an Englishman who had been educated at a prestigious public school, Christ’s Hospital, and uncomfortable with more easy-going Australian ways. The Commander, as they called him, was obeyed, because both the Naval Discipline Act and the navy bible, King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions, required that it be so, but eventually the ship’s company gave him a nickname: Flip the Frog – because he looked like a frog, according to the PT bloke, Judy Patching.
Commander Adams’s task began with lists. And then more lists. And more lists after that. And books, too – everything from the gangway wine book to the cipher logs. Sometimes, it seemed, the navy floated on seas of paper. There was the Quarter Bill to be juggled and the Watch and Station Bill as well – complex documents that would assign accommodation and jobs to every soul on board. First, the men had to be settled in their living quarters – messes below decks in the for’ard half of the ship. The crew – excluding the officers – were known, collectively, as the Lower Deck.
In 1939, the navy’s living arrangements had barely changed since the days of rum, sodomy and the lash, as Winston Churchill once allegedly put it,1 and Amphion, soon to be Perth, was no different. The mess decks were divided into open but crowded compartments where the men were thrown together, cheek by jowl, to sling their hammocks, eat their meals and pass what leisure hours they had. There was nothing a civilian would recognise as privacy, although you could generally find yourself a quiet corner to write a letter or read a book. Cleanliness and tidiness came even before godliness in the navy; it was rigidly enforced and, in a well-run ship, happily accepted as an essential way of life.
Each mess was a jam-packed but ordered clutter of collapsible wooden meal tables, benches, kit lockers, and food and utensil stowage. Well before the days of air conditioning, fresh air was blown through the lower spaces by the fans of the ship’s ventilation system, but this was never very effective. In hot weather, the mess decks would reek with the sweat and odour of male bodies, which became infinitely worse if scuttles, or portholes, had to be closed in a seaway or in action. In cold weather, the bulkheads were clammy with condensation. Hammocks were slung from hooks in the deckhead beams by night, so close that they often touched each other, then stowed again each morning, which meant that men coming off watch and needing to sleep by day had to snatch whatever horizontal space they could find.
Eating was almost equally primitive. The United States Navy had modernised itself, with the enlisted men taking their meals at a central ship’s cafeteria, but in the British and Australian navies messing remained as it had been for centuries – hopelessly old-fashioned and inefficient. The ship’s cooks prepared meals in a central galley, from a weekly menu put together by the supply officer and the chief petty officer cook. The food was carried back to the living spaces by a rating known as the Cook of the Mess, to be eaten there. The navy, in its wisdom, calculated that a man required elbow room of about 21 inches, slightly more than half a metre, to seat himself with his mates at a mess table. Nelson’s Jack Tars wou
ld have found nothing to surprise them in that, although the food had passed beyond the stage of salt beef and weevilly hard-tack biscuit.
Then there were the social divisions in the ship’s company, hallowed by tradition that no captain or Executive Officer would dare change. Stokers did not mess with seamen for, as the saying went, oil and water did not mix, and the separation had to be carefully made. Stokers here, seamen there. There were other messes for the petty officers and chiefs, divided port and starboard.
For their labours, an ordinary seaman 2nd class, a boy of 17 or younger, earned the grand sum of one shilling and ninepence (20c) per day and an able seaman seven shillings (70c). A chief petty officer luxuriated in 11 shillings ($1.10). Skilled sailors, such as a chief engine room artificer, made 14/6d ($1.50). There was a marriage allowance of four shillings and sixpence (45c), and a few shillings extra for each child.2
The RAN enjoyed a unique jargon,3 much of it borrowed from the Royal Navy, where a rich vocabulary had built up through the ages. Food was scran, and garbage was gash. Bacon and tinned tomatoes, regular breakfast fare, were colourfully known as train smash. Cornish pasties, always a favourite, were invariably called tiddy oggies, which was British West Country dialect. Soft drinks were goffers and alcohol was a wet. Every so often, the ship’s company would be granted a make and mend – an afternoon off work to relax. That phrase derived from the days of sail, when sailors stitched their own clothes. Toilets were unknown; you used the head. England’s Jack Tars had once squatted at the very front or head of the ship to empty their bowels directly overboard.