by Mike Carlton
Britain, in the first months of 1939, had begun steadily if belatedly to re-arm. Winston Churchill persisted with his volcanic rumblings from his backbench seat in the House of Commons. But, despite the gathering evidence to the contrary, Chamberlain and the appeasers who advised him could not bring themselves to believe that Germany would risk an outright war with the Western democracies and possibly the Soviet Union as well.
British foreign policy lurched and dithered. At one stage, Chamberlain and his foreign secretary, the exquisitely superior Lord Halifax, visited Mussolini in Rome in the pious hope that Il Duce, vulgar upstart though he was, might be persuaded to exercise a restraining influence upon Hitler. Exactly nothing happened, but Chamberlain, ever the optimist, felt able to write to his sister Hilda that it had been ‘a very wonderful visit … I am satisfied that the journey has definitely strengthened the chances of peace’.1
Britain and France also flirted with the prospect of some sort of alliance with the Soviet Union – an idea that Stalin was keen enough to encourage as a bulwark against Nazi expansion. Churchill had been urging this course of action for months, and even so obtuse an arch-conservative as Halifax gradually began to think that a British agreement with the Russians might be to their mutual benefit in containing Berlin.
In August 1939, Britain and France sent a joint military mission to Moscow. Incredibly, given the urgency of the moment, it was despatched on a leisurely journey by ship. The chief British envoy, Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunket-Ernle-Erle-Drax, actually arrived without the customary written credentials – another piece of stupidity from the Foreign Office. The Russians, at first amused by this incompetence but then increasingly affronted as the talks meandered on, decided that the British and French were not serious and called the whole thing off. The Kremlin decided that a non-aggression pact with the Nazi regime might suffice, at least for a time, to keep the peace in Eastern Europe. Hitler and his foreign minister, the oily Ribbentrop, saw an opportunity. Secretly, Moscow and Berlin began to talk.
At the Admiralty in Whitehall, there were also misgivings about an agreement with the Russians, not for fear of wicked communism but rather from concern that it might stiffen Japanese hostility in the Far East. As tensions grew in Europe, with a rising threat in Britain’s home waters, so the naval planners felt growing doubts about the strategy of Main Fleet to Singapore. Periodic attempts were made to draw the United States into a commitment to the defence of the Malay Barrier, that chain of islands to Australia’s north, stretching from the Malayan Peninsula and Singapore in the west, across through the Netherlands East Indies to New Guinea in the east.
In May 1939, the Admiralty had quietly informed the United States Navy Department that if Britain was at war with Germany and Italy in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to send British naval reinforcements to Singapore. Perhaps the US Navy could fill the breach to forestall any hostile Japanese move. The Americans were not attracted to what they saw as a commitment to defend Britain’s colonial possessions, and politely declined to be drawn in.
The Royal Navy was beginning to realise that it could not fight two simultaneous naval wars on either side of the globe – in which case, the conflict closest to home would be paramount. By July, the Admiralty was estimating that it might take up to three months for the Main Fleet to be sent south. This intimation of a potential betrayal was not conveyed to the governments of Australia or New Zealand.
As the months of 1939 ticked by, the Cabinet in Canberra and the Naval Board in Melbourne looked north with increasing concern. It was accepted that war was most likely to break out in Europe, and that Australia would therefore automatically be involved as a loyal member of the Empire. This view was put succinctly enough by the new Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, in his first radio broadcast after taking office on 26 April:
The peace of Great Britain is precious to us, because her peace is ours; if she is at war, we are at war, even though that war finds us not in European battlefields but defending our own shores. Let me be clear on this: I cannot have a defence of Australia which depends upon British sea power as its first element; I cannot envisage a vital foreign trade on sea routes kept free by British sea power and at the same time refuse to Britain Australian cooperation at a time of common danger. The British countries of the world must stand or fall together.
Which was all very well, but how much Australian cooperation? And where? Back in 1914, these questions had not arisen. With Japan an ally, there had been no danger from that direction, and therefore there was every patriotic good reason for sending the flower of Australian manhood off to defend the Empire in Europe and the Middle East.
The landscape in 1939 was very different. The Japanese threat was apparent and real. Much fret and worry went into assessing where Australia’s defence forces could best be deployed if war erupted, and in what shape and strength. In July, HMAS Perth sailed into the frame. The Australian Cabinet loyally decided that, if the shooting started, she should become, for all intents and purposes, a British warship for as long as might be needed. The Governor General signed an Order-in-Council in which Perth, effective from that date, could be ‘attached to the said Naval forces of the King’ in the event of war. This would place her under the direct orders of the Admiralty in London, to be deployed as their Lordships saw fit. This was eventually expressed in a telegram to Whitehall:
In the present international situation the Commonwealth Government desire to place the ships of the Royal Australian Navy and their personnel at the disposal of the United Kingdom Government but find it necessary to stipulate that no ships (other than HMAS Perth) should be taken from Australian waters without prior concurrence of the Australian Government.2
The telegram was a qualified offer: you can have our ships, but – please – only if we say so. Even before war broke out, and in a Cabinet as devoted to the concept of Empire as were the Menzies conservatives of 1939, there was a concern that Britain might seek to employ Australian forces without Australian consent. It had happened often enough in the Great War. In this coming conflict, it was a theme that would every so often send a chill through relations between London and Canberra, as Menzies and his eventual successor, Labor’s John Curtin, would discover soon enough.
Clear of the English Channel, Perth dipped to the long Atlantic swell, Farncomb driving her westwards along the world’s busiest shipping lanes at a steady 14 knots. This long leg would be another test of her sea-keeping abilities. The older cruisers in the Australian fleet, Australia and Canberra, were bigger ships, but, with their high freeboard – their tall, steep sides, in lay terms – they were notorious for their ability to roll on anything wetter than a damp blanket. Perth was a very different kettle of fish, infinitely more sea kindly. But, as George Hatfield noted, the crew was struggling. ‘The chaos on board among the ordinary seamen has doubled now that we are at sea,’ he wrote. ‘As the greater percentage of ship’s company are young in the Navy, no one knows what they are doing.’3
Rowland Roberts, standing his watches as a signalman on the flag deck, diligently recorded in his diary the wireless traffic that crowded the commercial-shipping frequencies. On several days, they found themselves shrouded by the low sea fogs typical of the Atlantic in summer:
27 July. At 8.25 am received following radio from Land’s End: ‘SS Dartford in position 49° 55’ North 4° 30’ west blazing tanker gutted dangerous to navigation also disabled steamer Grangesburg following slowly to Falmouth when fog clears.’
It is strange to relate there had been no mention as to loss of life, which is to be hoped there wasn’t. We were too far away to render any assistance. Earlier in the morning we narrowly averted a collision ourselves in the heavy fog. A huge liner just slipped past us bound west. The fog made it impossible to discern her identity but it was presumed it was the Normandie…
…Received a radio from the International Ice Patrol ship Champlain that ice was ahead of us and we expec
ted to reach the ice zone that evening. Increased speed to reach the ice zone before encountering the fog we were expecting. Fog and ice do not mix.
1 August. We had been in a dense fog since 11 pm the night before and with ice in the vicinity it was a very nerve wracking time for the Captain. All throughout the night he remained on the bridge and in the morning he looked a very tired man. The siren had been screaming all night and made sleep impossible …4
Without radar, Farncomb and his watchkeepers had their work cut out. One sunny day in the middle of the passage, he took the opportunity to drill the crew at action stations. On a foggier day with a calm sea, the Commander had the hands on bosun’s chairs over the ship’s side, to give her another lick of paint before her arrival in the United States. This was not popular, provoking a rumble of complaint on the mess decks, which held to an opinion that all this tiddlying-up could be taken too far.
At five o’clock in the morning of Friday 4 August, with the dawn still an hour away, Perth’s lookouts spotted first the flashing white light and then the rust-red hull of the Lightship Ambrose marking the entrance to the channel into New York harbour. Soon enough, she had picked up the pilot to take her gliding through The Narrows that separate Staten Island from the Brooklyn shore. A heavy sea mist slowly lifted to unveil the towers of Manhattan gleaming in the sun rising astern.
New York. Skyscrapers. Film stars. Broadway. Nightclubs. Cocktails. Girls in tight sweaters and nylon stockings. Dancing the Jitterbug. Cadillacs, Fords and Chevrolets. Hot dogs and Coca-Cola. Baseball. In an age before jet airliners and cheap package holidays, travel overseas was only a dream for all but the most wealthy Australians. New York City was a place you got to see at the pictures or not at all, its on-screen inhabitants invariably glamorous, enviably urbane, rich beyond belief and, above all, modern.
And yet here they were, a young ship’s company, most of them not yet 21, many of them Depression kids and country boys, about to step ashore into the midst of it all. The excitement on board that morning was electric. Hammocks were lashed up and stowed in record time. Breakfast was bolted down. A bugle call had the hands racing on deck to line the rails in their best white uniforms for a ceremonial arrival. At 7.30, with the Statue of Liberty looming through the mist ahead to port, the two small three-pounder saluting guns mounted near Perth’s After Control Position thundered out a 21-round salute of formal greeting that rolled and echoed around the harbour. This was answered, in turn, by a US Army battery at the historic Fort Jay on Governor’s Island away to starboard. The cruiser eased into the Hudson River, tied up at Pier 53 at the foot of West 13th Street on Manhattan’s Lower West Side and broke out a forest of coloured signal flags from stem to stern in honour of the Queen,5 whose birthday it happened to be.
And then it all came unstuck. Simmering discontent in the mess decks boiled over. Within hours of their arrival, the crew went on strike, in direct defiance of an order. It happened in the most public way in a foreign port, on a visit that was no mere routine refuelling stop but a flag-waving exercise to represent Australia and the RAN itself. Disaster beckoned.
A lot of how and why it came to that flashpoint is lost in the fog of time. There are differing versions of what went wrong and when, but the basic facts are clear enough. Captain Farncomb had decreed that liberty men going ashore before 6 pm should wear white summer uniforms. If they wanted to stay ashore after that time, they would first have to return to the ship to change to blue uniforms to be worn at night. The order was in line with the practice on the Royal Navy’s America and West Indies Station, which was technically where Perth found herself at this particular moment, and Farncomb no doubt assumed he was doing the right thing.
It was not the right thing. It was a petty and unimaginative piece of naval red tape. As an Australian ship, Perth was not under Royal Navy control on matters of uniform or anything else, and both Farncomb and his Executive Officer, Adams, had been around long enough to know that the order would inconvenience and irritate the men. It meant cutting into their valuable hours of liberty. They would have to interrupt whatever they might be doing – seeing a movie, chatting up a girl, having a drink – to go back on board. And if they’d already got a few beers down, as thirsty sailors will, there was every chance the Officer of the Watch might spot it and not let them go back ashore again, blue uniform or not.
A few of the men had asked through their divisional officers for the order to be withdrawn, as it was their right to do, but they were told it would not be. Coming on top of the discontent provoked by the repainting of the ship in the mid-Atlantic, and by what seems to have been an increasing dislike towards some of the officers, including Adams and the First Lieutenant, Reid, the spark ignited.
Rowland Roberts made a brief note of the blow-up in his diary. Later, he amplified that note in another longer and much more detailed account of Perth’s world cruise – a book that now rests in the archives of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. This was his entry for that first day in New York:
The discontent seems to be worse this morning and if something is not done it may turn out to be serious. During the dinner hour it was apparently decided to cease work until some satisfaction was obtained. When the bugle sounded off for the hands to fall in at 1.15 pm not a man fell in.
They all went forward to the fo’c’sle to discuss the turn of affairs. When the Commander and other ships’ officers came forward to see what the trouble was, the ship’s company were not backward in speaking their grievances. Another besides the white uniform and leave was that the First Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Reid, be removed from the ship.
The men were promised matters would be dealt with and they quietly resumed their work.6
There were about 50 or 60 men gathered on the fo’c’sle, rumbling with discontent. Farncomb was already ashore on the first of a punishing round of official calls. Adams – Flip the Frog – decided that he had a full-blown naval mutiny on his hands and, in an astonishing over-reaction, ordered that pistols be issued to the officers. Stoker Norm King claimed in his diary that the New York Police Department was called out, which would have been a diplomatic nightmare.
It was the Gunnery Officer, the popular Lieutenant Bracegirdle, who hosed things down. Jock Lawrance, one of the strikers, recalled later that ‘he was excellent. He saved the day with a bit of diplomacy.’7 Judy Patching remembers him as ‘a wonderful bloke’.8
Bracegirdle assured the hands their concerns would be investigated and asked them to return to their jobs, which they did. Back on board the next morning, Farncomb gave the order to ‘clear lower deck’, which mustered the ship’s company on the quarterdeck before him, and there he sensibly defused the time bomb with a face-saving compromise. He would not withdraw the order to wear whites. But men who applied to wear blues ashore would be given permission to do so. Leave would also be extended by half an hour. The demand for the First Lieutenant, Pricky Reid, to be removed from the ship was so patently over the top that it was ignored.
The face-saver worked. No punishments were meted out, although the officers and the senior petty officers would undoubtedly have made a note of the men thought to have led the trouble. And there the matter would have ended. Except that someone talked to the newspapers. One of the city’s racy tabloids, The Sunday News, came out with a headline: ‘AUSSIE MUTINY HERE – OFFICERS TOO BRITISH’, complete with a quote from an anonymous sailor that undoubtedly owed a great deal to the reporter’s creativity:
‘Our officers are being too bloody Limey. They are trying to enforce the kind of discipline they do on British ships. They seem to forget we’re Australians, not Britishers.’9
The more staid New York Times, under the headline ‘PERTH CREW WINS PLEA AGAINST WHITE UNIFORMS’, reported that:
The men objected to carrying out the order on the ground that white uniforms would get soiled quickly and would be hard to wash as there is no space on the cruiser to hang the uniforms out to dry. Having the clothes washed ashore was d
eclared too expensive.
A delegation from the crew waited upon Capt. H. B. Farncomb, commanding the Perth, and asked if the order could be changed to wear blue uniforms and white caps. This was agreed to, and the liberty men went ashore.10
Farncomb’s heart must have sunk, but, in fact, the publicity provoked a curious reaction in the crew. As ever, Roberts summed up the mood:
It wasn’t a very nice article to star and make screaming headlines of, even had it been true in any way at all. The fact of our being visitors should have kept the Press down to a certain extent. It was founded on a lot of lies and loose talk and we did our best to live it down. Most of the article was grossly exaggerated. It seemed that it was impossible to muzzle the press in this country and they printed what they like[d] and got away with it at that.11
Enough was enough. It was one thing to have a domestic row in the ship. It was very much another thing, and furiously embarrassing at that, to have it splashed all over the Yank papers for the world to read.
So the Australians hit the town. New York had plunged the world into the Depression in 1929. Now, ten years later, the buck was back. The New Deal promised by a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had restored the economy. The Big Apple was driving ahead again, neon lit, top down and chrome-plated on whitewall tyres, to a jazz and swing soundtrack brought to you by CBS network radio. At first, the Perth men just drank it all in. They wandered the sidewalks in the summer heat, marvelling at the sights, drawn by the art-deco splendour of the Empire State Building built to beat the Chrysler skyscraper as the world’s tallest and opened just nine years earlier. They rode the elevated railroad lines, gaped at the advertising blimps flying overhead and tried their first-ever drink of rum ’n’ Coke. As night fell on the Manhattan canyons, they discovered the bars and nightclubs, Radio City Music Hall and the famous Rockettes, and the dazzling theatres on Broadway, the Great White Way, where the lights had never gone out.