by Mike Carlton
Curiously, the men sometimes referred to themselves as matelots, the French word for sailor – as in ‘I’m just a poor bloody matelot’. A midshipman, the youngest and most junior of all the officers – in fact, barely an officer at all, by some estimates – was a Snotty. That word, it was cruelly said, came from the midshipman’s habit of wiping his nose on the cuffs of his jacket. The captain was often the Old Man to the Lower Deck. The officers sometimes called him Father, although never to his face.
Another naval term that almost defies definition was pusser. Still used to this day, it is thought to be a corruption of purser, the man in charge of supplies and victualling in the old wooden navy. Pusser came to mean anything uniquely naval, or even the navy itself. There was pusser’s rum, a pusser’s dirk, which was a seaman’s clasp-knife, and the ship’s aircraft was often called the Pusser’s Duck. More curious still was the nickname you got if you came with a certain surname. Men called Clark were always Nobby. Millers were Dusty. Whites were either Knocker or Chalky. If your name was Murphy, you were stuck with Spud.
By long tradition, the officers lived well away from their men. At the time of her commissioning, Perth carried about 40 officers and warrant officers, from the captain to the most insignificant Snotty. Farncomb had two places where he could relax in privacy and lay his head: a small sea cabin in the for’ard superstructure close to the bridge, where he commanded the ship, and a more comfortable day cabin for use in harbour, aft of the mainmast and just below X-turret, the foremost of the two main gun turrets at the rear of the upper deck. The officers also berthed in the after part of the ship; the more senior men with a small cabin to themselves, the junior lieutenants sharing. It was four-star luxury compared with the sailors’ quarters. The officers’ wardroom offered a few lounge chairs, with books and magazines strewn about, and a central dining table for meals served by stewards. There was a bar for use in harbour, gin being the naval officer’s traditional tipple. The captain would generally eat alone in his cabin, served in lofty seclusion by his personal steward, sometimes inviting one or two officers to join him if and when he felt like it. Occasionally, he might dine in the wardroom but – and this was another of the oddities of naval etiquette – only if he was invited to do so.
Pay for officers was better than for sailors. A midshipman, lowest on the wardroom totem pole, made two shillings a day (20c). A sub-lieutenant earned 12 shillings ($1.20), which would rise to 19 shillings and sixpence ($1.95) when he gained his second stripe as a lieutenant. On promotion, a captain could expect three pounds and one shilling per day ($6.10), which, after a long nine years at that rank, would soar to three pounds and sixteen shillings ($7.60). There was a downside to these lavish incomes. While food was free, alcohol was not: an officer had to pay what was quaintly called his monthly ‘wine bill’.4
For working the ship, both officers and men had to be sorted into three watches, designated red, white and blue. In peacetime, this gave them four hours on duty and eight hours off. Within that framework, there were divisions, with the crew allocated to that part of the ship where they worked: upper deck, engine room, communications and so on. There would be another grouping for the upper deck seamen, yet again named from the days of wooden warships and towering masts: fo’c’sle, foretop, maintop and quarterdeck. Ray Parkin, as a petty officer, was the Captain of the Foretop, his immediate superior being a lieutenant, a seaman officer. The foretop men, for example, were responsible for cleaning and maintaining the bridge structure, the foremost funnel and B-turret – the second of the two for’ard pairs of guns – and, below that, B-deck. They would also be assigned as crew for some of the ship’s boats. It was a system that worked, but it required the patience of a saint for an Executive Officer and his assistants to draw it up and get it right from scratch.
The added difficulty for Commander Adams was that he knew none of the men, their abilities or their failings. In the early days of the commission, they could be graded only by rank and experience. That, however, was never an infallible guide to which were the good men of initiative who were like diamonds in a ship’s company, the mass of reliable men who would respond to leadership, and the few outright bludgers and no-hopers who had to be tolerated and somehow brought into line and kept there. Yet Adams had to distribute them throughout the ship so that trained hands would be available at any moment for tasks that could be anything: firing the guns, recovering a man overboard, fighting a fire or formally welcoming an admiral on board for cocktails.
For the men, it was the same in reverse. By trial and error, and sometimes bitter experience, they would discover the officers who knew their job and who would provide the leadership they were entitled to. A weak or a bullying officer was bad for morale and therefore the ship’s efficiency. A downright incompetent officer could cause immense harm in the close and often dangerous confines of a ship at sea, provoking sullen resentment and perhaps even full disobedience, sometimes to the point where no amount of gold braid and crisp orders could save the situation.
Another man the crew would come to know soon enough was the First Lieutenant – a seaman officer one rung down the ladder from the commander. Charles Reid was an Australian, born in 1904 at Hinnomunjie – a hamlet barely a speck on the map near Omeo, in Victoria’s Gippsland district. He entered the naval college as a cadet midshipman in 1918, survived the Depression years of savage spending cuts and served in two grand but elderly British battleships, HMS Emperor of India and HMS Marlborough. His last ship had been the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious. Invalided out of her with a poisoned leg, he had been packed off to the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar near Portsmouth and fixed up in good time to be available for the new Australian ship. Now with the rank of lieutenant-commander, with two and a half stripes of gold braid on his sleeves, Reid was also a force for the crew to reckon with, another unbending man who would make gears grind and sparks fly. Like all First Lieutenants, he was Jimmy the One, or just the Jimmy. His nickname was Pricky. Patching found him ‘haughty, a man who didn’t know how to say “good work, well done”’.5
As the last of the civilian dockyard workers gathered their tools and left, Amphion was starting to look, sound and feel as a ship should, with the low rumble of dynamos and the hum of ventilation fans, and that pleasingly familiar odour of oil, steam and cooking from the galleys percolating through the flats and spaces. Here there would be the radio playing in the mess decks, there the clomp of heavy boots on a metal ladder and the tick-tack of typing from the Signals Distributing Office. Life had returned.
In the early days, there was the confusion of just finding your way around. To the newcomers, especially the youngsters, everything was big and bewildering, a maze of decks, passageways, lobbies, flats, ladders and dead ends. Where was the Torpedo Head Magazine, the port-side Gunner’s Store, the main ladder to A-boiler room, the High Angle Control Position, the Blacksmith’s Shop, the starboard 27-foot whaler, the stokers’ mess? But from the very first, the familiar naval harbour routine began to take shape. The hands were out of their hammocks and fallen in at six o’clock each morning to hose down the decks, barefooted. Every so often – which meant whenever the Commander felt like it – there would be what they called bible class: sailors on their knees with the sandstone blocks known as holystones, scrubbing the teak planking of the upper deck to a spotless white.
Breakfast was piped at 7.40 am, but the naval day would not properly begin until the ceremony of colours at 8 am, marking the end of the morning watch and the start of the forenoon watch until midday. In Portsmouth Harbour, the effect was tremendous – a ritual tableau of naval swank. On the quarterdecks of the British battleships, bandsmen of the Royal Marines would parade to the strains of familiar naval marches such as ‘Heart of Oak’. Smaller ships might sometimes have a band, sometimes not. Precisely at eight, there would be the blare of bugles or the whistle of bosun’s pipes and absolute stillness, the hands at attention and the officers saluting as the navy’s White Ensign was run up at the
stern of every ship in the dockyard. For another hour, the ship would subside into inactivity again, or so it might seem to an onlooker ashore. The men were below decks showering, shaving or cleaning their messes, but there would be no peace. At 9 am, the bugle would blare again for divisions, and the entire ship’s company would parade once more on the quarterdeck for inspection by their officers, possibly a pep talk from the Commander or the Captain, sometimes prayers, and the assignment of jobs for the day.
The specialist officers and men set themselves to learning their way around their tasks and their new equipment, from the signalmen on the flag deck to the artificers in the engine room to the Captain’s secretary and the writers whose job it was to churn out the Commander’s endless paperwork. The Buffer, the Coxswain, the Chief Yeoman of Signals, the Chief Gunner’s Mate and the Chief Petty Officer Cook bent to their tasks. The electrical experts, such as Reg Whiting, began to master the communications switchboards, the circuits to the guns and torpedoes, the intricacies of the Low Power Room and, Reg’s particular charge, the ship’s gyro compass deep below the waterline.
Other men would be drilling on the after searchlight platform, getting to know their gear high up in the Gunnery Director Control Tower, stacking stores in the galleys, exercising with the damage control parties. A team of specially chosen ratings rehearsed their drill as a royal guard of honour for the ship’s naming ceremony only days away. The ship’s bandsmen, a dozen of them, drummers and trumpeters, practised their salutes and marches and buffed their red and blue dress uniforms.
There was the occasional time for liberty, for the men to take a run ashore. Bill Bracht, a young petty officer gunner’s mate and coal miner’s son from Kurri Kurri in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, danced at the local Hippodrome ‘to Harry Roy and his band, and Jack Hilton and his Orchestra’.6 Norm King and his mates hit the pubs:
Portsmouth, with its huge dockyards and barracks, was purely a navy town. As I remember, the main street was about a mile long and, with the exception of the Town Hall on one side and a brothel on the other, both sides of the street were lined with pubs. The usual evening’s entertainment for the visiting sailors was a pub crawl up one side and down the other.
The pubs were much more pleasant and friendly places than the pubs at home, with none of the six o’clock swill. The wives of sailors away on the China or Mediterranean Stations helped as well. The beer was dark and flat, but at tuppence a ‘scupper’, half a pint, there were not too many complaints.
With complete disregard for the state of health or lack of sleep at 0600 the bugle sounded ‘Wakey, wakey, lash up and stow hammocks’. The piercing notes reverberated through the mess decks and the heads of the befuddled and bemused sailors.
The wonderful ladies of the Royal Portsmouth Temperance Society were there offering solace in the form of ice cold bottles of milk. All that was required was to sign the pledge. The same converts to temperance signed up every day. These Christian ladies showed no surprise as the converts dropped from their hammocks, some in pyjamas, some in their underpants and some in neither. Most, however, with obvious signs of unrequited lust.7
Around them was the ceaseless activity of a great dockyard preparing for war. Elderly destroyers were being brought back into service, and the day echoed to the clang of metal hammered, the hiss of welding and the grind of the towering dockyard crane that had been taken from the Germans after the last war. Sometimes, a battleship would glide past, provoking yet another flourish of bugle calls, salutes and dipped ensigns. Pinnaces and workboats scuttled across the harbour. Almost every day, fighters of the RAF would wheel above them in the blue skies over Hampshire. Jock Lawrance noticed that the march to war was quickening, that anti-aircraft guns were being installed on the chalk cliffs that surrounded the city:
A dockyard bloke said to us, ‘I think a war will break out before you get back to Australia, so we’re rushing you a bit. But we can’t help it.’ It was exciting to be in Portsmouth. The Hood was there, and Nelson’s Victory, and we could see and admire the Hood and the ships in mothballs. But we could see they were getting ready for the war, because all above they were putting in ack-ack guns, over the top. And they were dog fighting over the Channel all the time. We knew there was going to be a war for sure. Chamberlain said ‘peace in our time’, but none of us believed him. All the reserves were coming in, destroyers in mothballs were getting ready. You couldn’t get on a train for all the soldiers on the trains.8
Dinner – which was actually lunch – was sounded at noon. Work resumed again in the early afternoon, jobs taken up where they had been left off. On a normal day, there would be an evening’s shore leave granted for part of the crew from the start of the first dog watch at 4 pm. Adams beavered away at his paperwork. Bills, lists, the Captain’s standing orders, daily orders, the confidential books that contained the various secret codes and signals grew and multiplied. The paymaster officers, the men in charge of the ship’s supplies and stores, generated their own piles of paper as well. Everything on board had to be acquired and accounted for, from torpedoes to typewriter ribbons. In the machinery spaces below the waterline, the engineers and stokers were finding their way around the great steam turbines and boilers, feed pumps and engine throttle valves, condensers and steering gear, the brassy array of dials, gauges and levers that would rule their working lives.
The Chief Engineer, Robert Gray, also wore the three gold rings of a commander. He was known formally as the Commander (E), informally as Chief, and to his stokers, although never to his face, as Dolly. He was 37 years old, born in 1902. From Scotch College in Melbourne, he went to the naval college at Jervis Bay in 1915 and from there to various ships of the Australian fleet and an advanced course at the Royal Navy’s Engineering College at Devonport. He, too, had been in Britain from the beginning of the year. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as ‘strongly built … an accomplished athlete who played Rugby Union football. He was a sociable person and a good messmate, but a stern disciplinarian who earned, and kept, the respect of his men.’9 In the late nineteenth century, when sail was giving way to steam, the seaman officers would regard engineer officers as mere grubby mechanics, a lower form of life altogether. The joke persists to this day. But men such as Gray kept the whole show on the road. They were indispensable, and they knew it.
Early on 10 July, a cool but sunny Monday, the ship shifted to a pier close to the Portsmouth Harbour railway station, the South Railway Jetty. Her Royal Highness Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent and a leader of London fashion, was arriving by train for the naming ceremony. Rolls of red carpet were unreeled on the dock and there was a flurry of last-minute rehearsals for the 14 men of the ship’s band and the guard of honour. John ‘Tubby’ Grant, a cornet player, had spent days ensuring that his bandsman’s uniform was in perfect order. It was almost identical to the Royal Marines uniform, a splendid scarlet and blue affair with a white pith helmet. Tubby had also been a boy trainee in the Tingira, or the Tinny, as they all called her. His mother had died when he was five, and desperate relatives had packed him off to a Catholic orphanage in Melbourne, where he was beaten by a succession of sadistic Christian Brothers with leather straps and shillelaghs. Joining the navy at 16 had been a breeze after that. But at least the Brothers had taught him to play a musical instrument, and Tubby was no stranger to royalty. He had been in the RAN band when the Duke of York, the future George VI, opened the new Parliament House in Canberra in 1927.
The Perth men were proudly Australian and would have happily started a fight in any Portsmouth pub if anyone suggested otherwise. But, in 1939, Australians also unaffectedly thought of themselves as people of the British race. They were loyal subjects of an empire united beneath the British Crown. It was, after all, the Royal Australian Navy, and therefore only natural that a duchess should do the honours. The crew, every man jack, knew that on this day British eyes would be watching to pass judgement on the new arrivals from down under. They were d
etermined to do it well, for the honour of their country and their own self-respect.
And they did. It went off perfectly, with all the pomp and flair of naval ceremony. Captain Farncomb, dress sword slung at the side of the knee-length frock coat that was formal uniform for officers at the time, met his guests as they were piped aboard beneath a white canvas awning hung tautly over the quarterdeck: Stanley Melbourne Bruce, the former prime minister and now Australia’s High Commissioner in London; the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, Admiral Sir William James, a grey-haired and infinitely distinguished officer known throughout the navy as Bubbles.10 And then Princess Marina herself, willowy and elegant in a spotted dress and long white gloves, with a rakishly angled hat and a luxuriant fur stole.
The band played ‘God Save the King’. The guard of honour – caps, belts and gaiters blancoed to a dazzling white – snapped to the present arms with the stamp of boots and the satisfying thwunck of the taut webbing slings of Lee Enfield .303 rifles being smacked against metal magazines.
Perth’s rearmost gun turret had been trained slightly outwards to face the jetty. Between the two long gun barrels, a Union Jack and the White Ensign concealed the ship’s new name and the coat of arms of the city of Perth. Bruce made a speech, described by Signalman Rowley Roberts as ‘a rather lengthy address in which was embodied the part Australia was playing in this great National Defence Rally of our great Empire’.11 The duchess pulled on a silken bell rope, the flags fell away and His Majesty’s Australian Ship Perth was born. Her motto would be ‘Floreat’ – ‘I flourish’ – the same as the city. There was a rattle of applause from the watchers on the dock, a bouquet of roses for HRH, and a call from Farncomb for three cheers from the crew. As Roberts recorded it: