Australians at War Film Archive

I was born in the suburb of Ripponlea in Melbourne, Victoria and we were there, I was a baby, for two years and then we moved, the family moved to Surrey Hills where I spent a lot of my early youth at Surrey Hills. While I was there it was beautiful, open country. Houses and blocks were large,

economical, and we had around us lots of orchards, violet farms, Wattle Park not far away, so as youngsters we had a wonderful life. We had our dogs and we used to go over to Wattle Park way and we went through a creek that had a lot of gullies and we used to call it “The Dardanelles”, and you must remember about this stage I’d be about eight years of age,

I’m talking about now and we pretended to be soldiers in the Dardanelles, in and out of this steep creek with all its crevices and we used to creep up the top and you know, as children would do. So obviously World War I had a bit of an effect on us there. While I was there I went to the Surrey Hills State School and did all my primary there and then I had a year at Mont Albert Central School

and then my father decided I should have some secondary education at a public school and I was sent to Melbourne Grammar School till I was about 16, 16 and a half and at that stage my father had formerly been a marine engineer with the Orient [Shipping] Company and then with, chief of Howard Smith’s on the coast

and he’d started up an engineering works in Burnley, so he said, “Now you’re not going on to tertiary.” He said, “You’re going to serve an apprenticeship”, because in those days often you didn’t get a choice. At least I wanted to be an engineer. So I went to Swinburne Technical College. In those you went at night

and it was usually two nights a week while I served my apprenticeship.

One sister, and she was, went straight into a private school right through her life. There was one up near us at Mont Albert and then she finished

at a school called St Margaret’s.

No, no, mother didn’t. In fact mothers in homes were very much the thing in those days. In fact she had both her babies, me and my sister at home.

Yes, I had grandparents. On the paternal side they were all over in England because my

father originally came out from England, all sea-faring. Actually, we’re originally, as far as I can tell from the Isles, well, we’re definitely from the Isles of Scilly off Cornwall where they were merchant seamen, ship builders and sailed barques out to Australia and Canada. They actually, there’s been seven

generations of Newmans, all of whom, every male member went to sea and, but they were all masters and mates. My father was first to break the nexus when he was an engineer and he came out as chief engineer and then I went to sea as an engineer and finally my son, Robert, he went into the navy for a short spell of time but he was lower deckman, a seaman

at that stage.

Well seven.

Seven with Robert, yes. Seven generations of us all went to sea. So we always had somebody coming in and out of our home. You know, coming off a ship from somewhere and it was quite interesting to us as young people listening to all the stories of where they’d been and what they’d done. It was all very romantic because

my grandfather was a master mariner. He was eventually warden of Trinity House in London and that’s a very senior appointment in the Mercantile Marine. He eventually became warden of Trinity House in Hull, which was virtually almost like the Harbour Master of today. He was in sail right up until the, from the 1860’s, 1850’s

to about the 1870’s and he realised that steam was the coming thing and he changed over to steam, and he finished up in steam. We had two or three ships belonging to the family. The last one was a beautiful ship called the St Leonards and she sailed out to Australia on regular visits, and my grandmother whom

he married, her family, the Franklins, they were sea-faring and it’s like a fraternity, you know. They get to know one another and the families get to know one another and the interesting thing here is that my grandmother was sailing with her father on the St Leonards, this lovely clipper ship I’ve just mentioned, when my grandfather who had met her and they’d become engaged, suddenly arrived in the same port in Adelaide. Not knowing

one another, he was on a barque called the Jane, and at any rate they decided to get married and she crossed from her father’s ship to her husband’s ship and she had her first four children at sea.

No. My father was the youngest. She went ashore and she had four more and my father was the youngest. Now on the maternal

side, my grandfather and grandmother, they came out from Cornwall and my grandfather was, the family name there was Proctor and they, he came out as a mining engineer and geologist with the big mines in Ballarat and Maryborough, Clunes, Talbot. After the alluvial gold had finished and they started with the surface gold, they started to dig down,

these men were brought out because they had the skills of driving deep shafts due to the fact that they had been working tin and lead mines in Cornwall. So he came out for five years on his own to see how things were, then he brought his wife out and they had their family and they lived up in that area and mother was born up near Maryborough and she went to school in Ballarat. So that’s what happened on the maternal side.

Yes, well particularly when my father met my mother. Would you like me to?

My father, my mother was a marvellous violinist and when she was 16, she was playing, or 17 she was playing, just still at school, she played second fiddle as they called it, second violinist to a young violinist who was the

senior one and his name was Bernard Hines, and he was the famous Bernard Hines of the future, and he was so thrilled about her skills that he implored on my grandfather and grandmother that she be sent abroad to be trained with some of the outstanding violinists of the day, and they thought “This was a great opportunity to go back to Cornwall” ‘cause they’d not been there for over 30 odd years and she was

the youngest, and the only one unmarried, of six and they went by Orient boat to England and she went to study in Paris under a famous man called Pepini. My grandmother said to her before she left, she said, “Now dear”, she said, “You know this is all a very different world you’re going to and we’re going to be on board ship and you mustn’t talk to sailors.” My mother didn’t really know any different and any rate who should be on this

ship but my father, Stanley Becket Newman, as a junior engineer and they all, the juniors dined down in the third class but when they had all the dancing up top on board, there was always a shortage of men, so they were all brought up with their white gloves and uniforms to come up and dance with the ladies up on the main deck, and he came up and he looked across and saw this very beautiful girl, she was, mother was a lovely looking girl, and he walked across and asked “If she’d dance?” And

she said, “No,” she said, “I don’t dance.” Well this went on for quite a while, so he said, “Well, do you mind if I sit and talk?” So he sat and talked to my mother and her parents and finally they got to England and that was that. 18 months later they were due to come back and they came back on another Orient ship called the Osterley but who should be on board but none other than my father again, only this time he was a fourth engineer. He’d risen up in the ranks and he was

dining first class. Well that was it, and he always told the story he thought, the great thing was to get the young ladies up on A deck, you see, near the life boats and through the tropic seas and say, “Well look, these are the stars”, and he said, “Do you know where the Southern Cross is?” She said, “I think so.” He said, “Come up and I’ll show you,” and this was a nice little ploy to get them up there. Any rate they got up and he said, “Now there it is over there.” She said, “No it’s not, that’s the Southern

Cross down here.” Well, he thought “My God, she knows something, I’ll have to marry her”, and finally she did. They were married and that’s the story of the two families.

Oh gorgeous. It was just a wonderful life and we had a marvellous family life. After we’d been in Surrey Hills my father wanted to be nearer his works, which he’d been expanding all this time. I’d left school, I’d served my apprenticeship

and we went moved into Hawthorn and we just, it was just a marvellous wonderful family life. Things were slower, things were easier, except for one thing, there was the Depression and that was very severe on, and particularly as our works were in Burnley, which was a working class suburb in those days, there was so many out of work.

I remember as a young apprentice seeing all these fellows going off to get Sustenance and work on the roads and the cuttings. The Boulevard was made by the Sustenance workers and I don’t know if you recall, there’s a road cutting through by the South Yarra tennis courts. There’s a cutting right through there and they cut right through this hill, which was solid rock and these fellows just did this on Sustenance pay, but they had their pride. They wanted

to do something. They didn’t want to stand in food queues and it was a wretched situation for them all. My father had great sympathy as a working man originally himself and myself as an apprentice coming up through the ranks but we couldn’t take on everybody. It was very disheartening to say, “Look, I’m sorry we can’t do it”, but whenever we could employ extra we did. In fact we had eight

apprentices right through the Depression years and the company then had about 45, 50 men. When the company finished and I left it after 45 years, and I’d been through the war as well, we had over 150 or 140 people operating and it was a very large company and a very successful company.

Oh yes, oh a lot, yes there were. They were pleasant fellows. You got a few roughies but they came around and I’m sorry, words are, I’m going to stumble here and I shouldn’t, Laurence, the man who came with his little bag of things, and he always had these boot

polishes and shoe polishes and knick-knacks for the kitchen and he used to come around regularly. The other things they did in those days, your insurance man used to come and visit you, and I remember mother taking out an insurance at a shilling a week I think it was in my name and my sister’s name and it was extraordinary, she did that when we were quite young and when I was 21

she presented me with a cheque of £500, all from these little savings from the insurance, but they used to come regularly, they knew you. The bank people were the same, the banks were marvellous. The managers lived on the top of the banks in those days and they came and we used to visit the bank manager and regularly discuss what we were doing with the company. He’d come and see, and these fellows knew what was happening with all the

businesses that they had to look after, the finance and recommend whether loans could be given and that sort of thing, and

Oh tremendous amount. It was all personal contact. Even your insurance companies, they’d have a man associated with your family or a group of families and they would be on the phone reminding you that it’s time for you renewals. They’d come out and see you and talk to you about it. The same with the bank managers.

They were marvellous and I think sadly that is something where we’ve got a problem today.

Very.

No. Yes, he did. When I say no, I’m too quick. He was with the Merchant Navy and he was with Howard Smith’s on the coast of Australia then running,

sailing as chief. When he finished and came ashore he was offered the job of superintendent engineer to install the turbines and boilers for Newport Power Station and that was a big job for a young engineer because it was the beginning of the use of brown coal from Yallourn and it was going to be the electrification of the railways, and once the,

Sir John Monash of course was the leading light there with the Yallourn and State Electricity Commission. When that was all done, he was then sought out by Charles Rewalt, was one of the big engineering firms of Australia in those days down in Victoria Street, and he went in as works manager. Then having done that he always wanted his

own company and there was one in the north end of Burnley Street and that’s where he bought this little tiny factory at the south end of Burnley Street and started his own business and it ran for just on 72 years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, we,

mainly because the militia was very strong in those days and the famous 24th Battalion had its headquarters at, the first AIF [Australian Imperial Force], in Surrey Hills. Friends of the family’s were associated with it. I had uncles, my mother’s brothers went away to World War 1 and so

we used to read all the books and magazines and things that came out depicting, you know, the heroism and the VC’s [Victoria Cross] and you’d get cigarette cards. They had them in cigarette packets in those days, all the VC winners and all the DSO [Distinguished Service Order] winners and all the uniforms. We loved all that you know. We saved all these cards.

Then, at that time?

It was fairly strong. We didn’t know anything much, nor did they talk about in a great deal because they all wanted to forget it and we had no idea what a debacle it was. As far as we knew it was a great success because the success was the

retreat, not winning the thing. We, my uncles talked about the Turks and said that “He felt the Turks didn’t want the fight any more than they did at that time”, but when they came back they were very proud, very proud indeed and there was always the Anzac commemorations because they were very fresh in people’s minds and we’d lost so, so many men. In the,

in each suburb you had your monument and in your parks and your gardens and it was from there that you engendered that there was this sort of feeling about mateship was very good, and also as a young apprentice and as a young engineer, we had some returned fellows in our works and they talked about it and their mates and what happened. They

didn’t tell us the horrors of it. They told us more about the fun and the mateship of it, yes. So we did have a, it was apparent to us as younger people in those days.

Yes, they did.

Not a great deal. You had to ask the questions.

Oh yes, yes, well we wanted to know everything, you know. “How many did you kill?” And all those

awful things that kids would ask and of course he’d dodge that and say, “Oh well, there was a lot killed but I couldn’t say how many, we all did, each of us”, or something like that and they’d sidestep the question, but they just said “It was an awful thing and they hoped it would never happen again”.

No. No, I don’t remember going to the Anzac Day marches. I just went to some of the

services but we also, in the state schools and the other schools around, secondary schools, they all had their Anzac Day commemoration, yes, and we all had our poppies.

Oh, I think it was because you see the uncles were all at sea, and incidentally they were on armed merchant

cruisers, the same as I finally went to. That’s an amazing thing. They were in the Merchant Navy. All my uncles were all in the Merchant Navy. My grandfather had gone ashore, he’d retired, he was an old man by then. I never saw my grandfather or grandmother in England at all, nor did they come to Australia ‘cause I think my grandfather died in 1915. My grandmother had died earlier than that and I was born in 1916 in

Australia, so it’s a long, long way away, but of course they were all in the war in these armed merchant cruisers and had lovely stories to tell, but therefore I was getting more from the naval side, the sea side, than I was from the land side of the war.

Well it does.

It does absolutely because it’s a case of you know, they were,

in the Isles of Scilly, they were merchant seaman when the wars weren’t on and navy when the wars were, you know, they were all reservists.

Yes.

Apprenticeship, yes, and then I studied with my Diploma for Mechanical Engineering at Swinburne Technical College. I was going there three nights a week, it’s all at night-time, we had to work all the daytime,

when war broke out and I hadn’t finished my course.

Oh, I just wanted to get on with becoming a good mechanical engineer. I loved the hands-on stuff of engineering. Also in the last year of our apprenticeship, each of us in our, we had a five year apprenticeship and in our

fifth year we were all given a run up in the drawing office, which wasn’t generally done and this was marvellous because we got in amongst the drawing and the design, so much so that the chief draftsman would have us working on new designs that they, new products that they were designing and then when they had to build the first test one we used to go down, and being apprentices we used to help to build it and run it and test it. It was the most wonderful training.

It was really great training, but all the time I wanted to go to sea and my father said “No”, and I thought “That was a bit tough, a bit hard”, because he had already been to sea and he told me “What a marvellous training it was”, but he felt that I’d be better knowing everything from the ground up right through to come into the business. I didn’t quite see it that way and

eventually I thought, “Well I’m going to do something about it”, so I joined the naval reserve and this was just as war was breaking out.

Well I wanted to get some form of marine engineering and I thought “If I joined the naval reserve”, you know, you, “We were Saturday afternoon sailors at Port Melbourne at HMAS Lonsdale and then three weeks a year,

you went away on one of the naval ships into the engine room side”, so I thought “I’d get a bit of it that way”. My father looked at me a bit sideways about and said, “Now what’s he up to?” but any rate as it turned out war broke out and of course I’m called up and he wasn’t a bit happy about this in the beginning, but I must say when he realised that you know, I was going to go, I was going and this would be it, he was just marvellous. He couldn’t tell me enough about what I’d expect and

what to do and all that, so that I wouldn’t be too green when I went away, but it was the best thing that I ever did because I thought “I knew a little bit about engineering when I left” but I realised until I got to sea I didn’t know anything and that training was just brilliant, just brilliant, and I wanted to go on one of the merchant ships before but I was happy to be in the navy but would you believe that when we were called up

they, it was a week, war was September the 3rd, we were called up late in September 1939 and in October, first week of October we were called up at the Drill Hall and told “To get our things ready and be prepared to go away and get our personal effects all sorted out at home”, which we did.

Yes.

Oh yes. Oh very much so, very much so.

Well the main thing we knew was the rise of Nazism in Germany. We could all see what Hitler was up to, there was no two ways about it and even though they had that famous

Munich affair when they went over to, who was it went over to, oh dear.

Chamberlain went across to Germany and came back and said, “No, everything’s going to be alright”. Very few people believed that. I had friends who were in the scouting group, by the way I was a cub at one stage amongst other things, and was a rover scout and he went on one of his jamborees and it was in Germany and they saw for

themselves the Hitler Youth Movement, and boy, they came back and said, “It’s on, there’s no two ways about it, it’s going to be on”, and so right away you felt, “Well, if it’s going to be we’re going to be in it”. The reason is not for glory, not for anything else, but if there’s going to be a bad, a big war we want to get over there and help there and hope it never came back to Australia. That was our main

idea about a war.

Well yes, I thought we most probably would. It wasn’t certain at that time, but the conflict, well it was almost started, so I think I should really correct myself there and say yes, the conflict was nigh and then as soon as the, Churchill [Chamberlain] came out with his famous statement on September the 3rd, well that was it

and away we went.

We had, what we used to have, called these picnics, all the young, they were called the young, 18’s, 19’s, 20, we used to go down to Mornington and to Sorrento and to Point Lonsdale and have chop

picnics, little open stove stuff, you know, but build a fire, sat around it, had a lot of fun, swam, surfed, we were all mad swimming and surfing. I haven’t come on to that side of my life at all, which I did a lot of, and we were mad keen surfers and it was a Sunday.

Hey? Oh, we were mainly we had surf boards but they were big, they were cumbersome but we were mainly body surfing. We used to love surfing just the waves and

it was just, oh it was marvellous and all the girls, all our friends, girlfriends they were good swimmers too and as it turned out. We were all pretty fit. So I, we had our chop picnic and I came up and I was very keen on this girl, she was a very pretty girl and we went to somebody’s house for a sort of a Sunday evening bit of a supper we called it in those days, and we sat

around when this booming voice came over. Well of course that put an absolute dampener on everything. The girls cried, the fellows said, “My God”. Well, all my mates, they were all in the army reserves, you know, the Footscray Regiment, the Melbourne Rifles, the University Regiments, the Scots, they were all in the army regiments, sort of AIF [Australian Imperial Force] doing training too, and of course it meant that we were all going to be

called up. Now I always remember one particular incidence. We used to love dancing and we always went to the Palais on Friday nights and they were the days of the big bands and the girls had these lovely floor length frocks and we were in either dinner jackets or white tie. We wore a white tie a lot, and we danced all night, we were hardly off the floor. We all just loved every minute and it was the days of

swing, you know, and it was the beautiful big bands and the music as you know, if you like that sort of thing, was just marvellous. So that made our, you know we had great early lives in this respect, and any rate we went to this the next Friday, we all went, 10 or 12 of us, and two or three of the fellows had got their call up to go to Broadmeadows it was in those days, it wasn’t Puckapunyal,

and I’m sitting back and I hadn’t got my call, you see, and I said, “Oh well, don’t worry, I’ll look after the girls for you.” They said, “You would Newman, wouldn’t you, you know, just the sort of thing you’d do, in your element”, and any rate the next week I got a call. The following week I’m in Sydney and on the following week I’m on the [HMS, recommissioned as HMAS, 1 June 1943] Kanimbla and I was the first away by months. They still rib me even these days, “You were the bloke who was going to look after our sheilas”.

Well now, I want to explain that, how quick it was. Got the call to Sydney, they lined us up, the engine room people, and they said, “Anybody with steam experience one pace forward”. I hadn’t had any steam experience, so I just sat there and three or four went forward. Anybody that had already been in powerhouses and power stations. Two or three forward more, two or three stepped forward and they were designated to ships or

wherever, and then there were only four of us and he said, “Righto, you four are going to the Kanimbla.” We had no idea what the Kanimbla was and then when we got there to Woolloomooloo there’s this gorgeous looking ship and she’s been converted into an armed merchant cruiser, and not only that I was hoping when I wanted to go to sea before the war I could go to McElreith & McEchrine’s, which was a lovely, one of our best shipping lines of the day

and the Kanimbla was one of those ships and here I am, I’m drafted to them on the navy. So I actually finished up with the sort of ship that I wanted to go to any rate, which was an extraordinary thing.

I was just so pleased it didn’t matter. Well we refitted her out. There’s some things about that, I’m wondering if time will permit to point out one or two

things about how an armed merchant cruiser becomes one.

Oh well, that was very quick. My mother and sister had gone, they were away at that time in England and my father was to follow and I was to stay back

and look after things and they had to try and get out of England and get home to Australia and in that they had an extraordinary experience because they had to go to Liverpool and then they found that the ship had already been over booked, so they went on to another one and came across to Canada and back to Australia that way, and the ship that they would’ve gone was the [SS] Athenia. It was the first passenger ship sunk by the Germans

and the luck of the draw, always these things happen. It did with me and us during the war. There was a lot of luck, being there, the right place or the wrong time or vice versa. So it was only my Dad and myself, so it was a very quick farewell just to, I said, “I’ve got to go the next day”, and he just saw me off at Spencer Street Station and didn’t see me for two and a quarter years.

Well the main thing he told me was technical things about the engine room, what to expect and what he had, his books and his illustrations, and we spent about three or four hours going through, showing me what boilers looked like and what turbines looked like and all that sort of thing and things that he used to do when he was at sea.

So that was the extent of it really.

Yes. He mainly warned me on two factors. One was looking after yourself ashore, “Don’t be weak and follow everybody what they want to do”, and

also to, as far as women were concerned “To keep away from prostitutes” and all sort of thing and gave me some ideas of how I’d be able to tell what was one and what wasn’t one, because in those days we didn’t, we never had, we weren’t, had any need to even go and be amongst this part of the world and that part of life. We knew what they were and we knew you paid money and that sort of thing but that was about as far

as it went. We were pretty naïve you know. So and that sort of advice and also “To be careful about drinking” and you know, how to look after yourself when you go ashore and try and avoid what they call the blood houses. That’s a strange name but they were awful pubs where it was full of fights all the time and that sort of thing and how to avoid it and don’t be a

spoiled sport. If they all said, “Well, look we’re going to go and see some of these girls”, he said, “Well, if you do, don’t say ‘you can’t go’, go there and sit and talk to her and give her some money or something like that and wait and come out.” That was his advice.

I don’t know. I had to on two occasions. They both got their money but they didn’t get me.

No. Only the photograph of my girl, yeah, a beautiful photograph. She was a very, very pretty girl and thereby hangs a tale. We thought “We might get engaged” and I said to her, look, and this is two nights before I was going, I said, “Look, I don’t think this is a good idea, let’s, it’s too quick. We’ll only be away six months.”

I said, “If we both feel the same when I get back, we’ll get married.” She said, “That’s great.” Well any rate, I was away two and a quarter years. After the first 12 months I got a “Dear Frank” letter and it was to tell me “That she’d found somebody else.” So she waited 12 months and that was it. So that was one little thing that happened.

I haven’t been too fidgety, have I?

Oh well, it took me a long time to get over it. I had to wait until I came back to Australia, you know. It was a funny thing but I’ve spoken to a lot of chaps who were away in the services and we’ve talked about, we met some lovely people while

we were away particularly in South Africa. We, up in Ceylon, India, Singapore, wonderful people and some very nice girls. We went out to these balls they had, you know, for servicemen and danced and met some very pretty girls, very nice girls, but we always, we talked about this amongst ourselves many times, “Would you marry

somebody from there?” We said, “No, we’re going to marry an Australian girl”. Why? Because they are so far ahead, they’re so practical, they’re so laid back, you know, it was just the fact that all these other girls were in countries too by the way where they had many servants and I don’t think half of them could boil an egg, ‘cause I remember we went out for supper at one place and we got the supper

‘cause there weren’t any staff there, any servants there. But we just felt that the Australian girls were just tremendous, you know, they were, I usually have a good flow of language on this one. You’re not recording, are you?

Oh sorry, oh well, I’ll try and see what I said, but we just felt that they

were, well it would be better to be married to home makers, they were able to, they were more practical and they as far as we were concerned, and nearly, and it did turn out every one of us when we came back, we married Australian girls.

Yes.

Beg your pardon?

It was like I’d been punched in the tummy. I was just sick inside, I just couldn’t believe, just couldn’t believe it. I heard afterwards all about why and how and I don’t propose to say much about that. I don’t think you’d want to, but when I did get back to Australia, my sister who’d been a marvellous support of mine and always has been right through my life

and she’s been extremely successful in her married life and what she did. She was married to a chap was on the land at the time and they were up in the Riverina area and I of course wasn’t home for the wedding but when I did get home she arranged to have a dinner party at one of the nice places

in town in those days, the Embassy, where you dined and danced and she said, “Look, I’m going to get the three bridesmaids to come along and they’re going to wear their bridesmaids frock”, which were made, so they could use them for evening wear, and you know, and “We’ll get what boys are around, they’re might be one or two on leave”. So I think there was about eight or ten of us went there and two of them I knew very well but one I hadn’t met before

and, Betty, and she was a lovely looking girl, quiet and that sort of thing and it turned out that she went to one of these Emily McPherson type places for training, cooking and all that sort of thing and then a place called Invergowrie which is in Coppins Street in Hawthorn, which was there for a similar purpose, and any rate we chummed up and

in those days they sent off war parcels, you know, and they’d send you all sorts of socks and jumpers and everything, knitwear and Christmas cakes and cakes. We had one, two, three Christmases at sea before we came home and they’d make these lovely Christmas cakes and sew them up in calico and post them off and

I got this Christmas cake and it was magnificent and I thought, “Gee, she’s not a bad cook”. Another attribute I hadn’t thought about earlier, and I wrote a letter and thanked her and everything. So when we, I eventually came back to Australia, I met up with her again and eventually, and this goes on much further on in my story, we eventually married and we had a very, very happy

marriage, wonderful marriage except that she died when she was 50. So I think perhaps that can come at another stage.

Well I think at one stage I didn’t

give a damn what happened to me, just, but that was for a short stage, but you know, I thought “Oh well, you know, if I cop it, I cop it and that’s it, but it wasn’t bravado”, it was just the fact “Well, what have I got to go back to?” It affected to that for a while but not for very, very long.

Because you work on the ship and your responsibilities on the ship and the many things that we did, we’ll talk about shortly,

all the ships we captured and the ones, you didn’t have time to think any more about it and that helped a lot.

Yes.

Yes, well they had all the dockyard people there to do this refit but we had to do, we had to familiarise ourselves with the engine room. Now when I joined the navy, my rating

was known as an engine room artificer fourth class, that’s the lowest you had: four, three, two, one, and you had the rank of a petty officer because you were already partially trained. I’d served an apprenticeship, I was doing a diploma course, so you were rated above seaman, leading seaman or stoker, leading stoker in the engine room. You were rated as an engine room artificer, a very old term, a British term.

An artificer was an artisan. He was someone who did things with his hands, whether he be engineering, electrical or any other technical sort of thing, you’re an artisan. So I joined as a very lowly fourth class ERA [Engine Room Artificer] as we were known and we noticed that there were thousands and thousands and thousands of 44 empty, 44 gallon drums were coming on to the dock and going on and down below and they,

and the reason for this was they’d put in 30,000 44 gallon drums inside the Kanimbla, battened them down with timber and cork, so they wouldn’t rattle, wouldn’t make a noise and the whole reason for that was for buoyancy. The whole reason was if you struck the enemy and you got hit and you were getting hit the ship wouldn’t sink so quickly, that you

could possibly fire back in time or you’ll go down fighting like the Jervis Bay did and a convoy got away from the Germans when that fellow got a posthumous VC [Victoria Cross], he turned his ship in towards the enemy and took them on, but the reason he took them on was the delay. He took a long time to sink him. The other thing about it was that they had road metal at the very bottom because they needed ballast,

so big chunks of road metal all were in the bay at the bottom of that, then they mounted the seven six inch guns, then we had anti-aircraft fire, anti-aircraft guns up on the top deck and we even had mines, which we had on a rack on the stern of the ship, so we could roll off a mine if we were in a submarine area. So we spent all our time

familiarising ourselves. Now the engineers’ officers were the original engineers on the ship. They were the merchant service fellows and stayed with the ship and they were absolutely marvellous. What they did and how they trained is extraordinary. Engineers have this I think great ability that they wanted to be able to let you know the benefit of their experience. There was none of this looking over the shoulder and hiding and playing

your cards close to the chest because they realised that the more you learnt the better it’s going to be for the running of the engine room. If anything happens somebody else could take over, and it did happen eventually, and so we had this wonderful training. The chief engineers, if they had an extra chief’s certificate, that’s like having a bachelor of engineering and then the masters, the extra chief’s, not quite the same level but these days now all the engineers go

to university first any rate, and get their bachelor’s degree before they ever go, but any rate they were given the authority to examine you at sea, so after we’d been there for a certain period of time we sat for our watchkeeping tickets and our watchkeeping examinations by the chief engineer and so as we progressed we went from an ERA 3 [Engine Room Artificer – class 3] to an ERA 4 to an ERA 3

and then you took a watch with one of the senior engineers and virtually you did almost what he did on the watch, you were his right hand but you were non-commissioned and he was the commissioned officer. I always remember one exam and this is quite, taught me the lesson of my life, one paper we had three hours’ written paper and three hours’ orals and after you’d done your written paper you sat up before the old chief and they’re pretty tough old boys,

and he would grill you on the paper or ask you questions about engineering and on the paper, was not mandatory but there were questions of refrigeration, and I had been looking after the refrigerators, so I thought “I knew a bit about it”, so I thought “I’d have a crack at this”. So any rate I did so and when he got the paper, he said, “Newman, I see you’ve answered this question about the Hall compressor on the refrigerator”. I said, “Yes sir.” He said, “That

packing gland,” he said, “It’s shaped a certain way. Any idea what that’s for?” And I said, “Yes sir,” I said, “That’s because of high pressure,” I said, “We’re running at about 1,000 pounds, 2,000 pounds per square inch.” “Oh yes, but”, he said, “That’s, yeah, that’s correct but why is it absolutely, why has it got that shape, why can’t you put an ordinary one around, why is it like a diamond?” Well I tried to answer and I didn’t. He said, “You don’t know, do you?” I said, “No, I said, I don’t.” “Oh”, he said, “Alright.”

So any rate he passed and he looked at me at the finish and he said, “I’m very sorry, you know, you disappointed me,” he said, “You looked as though you had the makings of a good engineer.” He said, “I’m going to tell you one thing, right from the word go - if you don’t know say so. Ask questions,” he said, “One day you’re going to have the responsibility of an engine room yourself, something’s going to happen and because you flummed through it you don’t realise the basics of what that meant,” and he said, “You’ve got

the lives of everybody on this ship while you’re in that engine room.” I’d never thought of it that way. He said, “I’m bitterly disappointed,” he said, “You can go back down below. You’ve been walking around my engine room with your mouth open and your eyes shut for 18 months, you can start again.” Well I thought “My God, what am I going to do?” I just went to my bunk and I thought “I could’ve howled”. I didn’t, but I could’ve howled. Any rate three days later I got called up to get the results and you know what the old B did,

he’d given me 95 for practical and 91 for theory, and I said, he said, “You’re a bit surprised, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes sir, I am.” Well he said, “I just wanted you to learn one solitary lesson”, and I never forgot that lesson, never ever did I forget and I passed that on to many students and many young engineers that I had in my hands later on in life. Now that’s what they were like, they were brilliant. They just wanted you to do it,

and I’ll never forget the day when I was called up on deck after we’d come out of the Persian Gulf and two or three of us had been recommended. I had no idea for what. By this time I’m still an ERA third class and he said, the captain said, “Newman”, I stepped forward, saluted and he turned to the chief engineer and he said, “Do you recommend this rating for a promotion?” He said, “Yes sir, I do.” He said, “Right,

thank you, you are now an ERA first class and you will hear more about it later.” So I was made a first class ERA, which was more senior than the fellow that was there at the time, and I’m really jumping things but I was mentioned in dispatches which I didn’t know about and when I tell you how all that happened, and then later on I found that I’d been recommended for

commission in the field. I didn’t even to go and do a course or anything. That’s what they were like, I thought “I’d tell that part of the story just to illustrate”. I owed so much to those men, those engineers that taught us so very, very well. Right now, we finished our refit December the 13th, we went out with a gunnery trial.

No, no, I hadn’t.

Well, we didn’t have to do that training in the engine room. We did training but only as a exercise.

Yes, we were. I’ll show, I’d prefer to leave that until I, when we do the boardings.

But we were issued with weapons, yes, mainly pistols and hand grenades and things like that we had. Where was I?

Oh yes, we went out to do a gunnery shoot to try out our guns. They had a plane pulling a drogue, so the anti-aircraft boys could have a go at the drogue and the, a funny little story there. They were firing their anti-aircraft guns at this drogue supposedly and all of a sudden the fellow in the plane

noticed bullets coming all around his aircraft and he signalled back to the ship, he said, “Hey you so and so’s”, he said, “I’m pulling this drogue, not pushing it.”

That’s just an aside. However, we finished our, and then we had a big target that we banged our six inch guns off at. Alright, we turned around to go back into Sydney Harbour.

He started steaming north of Sydney Harbour and two hours later he called the whole ship’s company together and he said, “Gentleman, we are at war”, and we went on our way. Now that was our going away, none of this you know,

We’ll meet again and all the farewells and everything like that. You know, guys that lived in the city, their wives were expecting them home that night but they suddenly realised but fortunately people, they rang them all up to say “The ship had now left

Sydney for unknown parts”. So we went straight up to Hong Kong. We joined the Far Eastern Fleet there of the Royal Navy and that’s when we were, by the way, we were commissioned as HMS because we were on loan to the Admiralty. Now going back to the part of being an armed merchant cruiser we, the Kanimbla, as I mentioned earlier was selected by arrangement with the Admiralty, the British government and the Australian government,

that in the event of war she would be an auxiliary cruiser and we were and that’s why, there were others, the [HMAS] Westralia and the [HMAS] Manoora but they stayed HMAS in the Australian, with the Australian Navy but we actually went over. So went, so we went up to join the Far Eastern Fleet and that’s when we realised what a fleet was really. We saw cruisers, aircraft carriers, submarines, motor torpedo boats, things we’d never ever seen before. It was thrilling. Our first job was to go up and blockade

the ports.

In Hong Kong, yeah.

Yeah. Well, it wasn’t very good. The Japanese were in and the war was on, the Sino Japanese War was on and the people in Hong Kong were preparing to start and close up. We went to, and our job was to blockade the ports and stop all the action

ships trying to make for international ports to stay there during the war and in that time we picked up 15 of these ships, boarded them with our boarding parties and at one stage we had 370 people on the Kanimbla when we left Australia. It’s quite a big ship’s company and at one stage we had 108 of our crew away on ships steaming them all back to Hong Kong, which we had boarded

and taken.

Well, first of all you tell her “To stop”. If she doesn’t stop, you say “You’re going to fire” and if she doesn’t stop then you put one over the port bow. No. One over the stern and then finally one in the middle if she doesn’t stop. Well they all stopped. I’ve got a lovely photo for you to see of the gun, an explosion right by the middle of a ship, didn’t hit them.

These

mainly were merchant ships in the main, but they were all carrying war material. Most of them were carrying war materials going to Russia. Now at that time Russian was neutral and they were by arrangement with Russia, Vladivostok, the Germans were able to use the port of Vladivostok and then whatever goods, the war materials, were taken across Russia through to Germany

because of the blockading that was going on on the North Atlantic side. We

Yeah, yeah, we went

Yeah, we went up every, we were away for six weeks and down for four days and up for six weeks and down for four days.

Oh yes, oh yes. We had, always we had at least one night ashore, 24 hour leave.

Hong Kong was beautiful. It was just

gorgeous. It was a much smaller place, there were no high rises. The largest building was the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. The people there were mainly British and the Chinese were marvellous, they just couldn’t do enough and we had very, very happy times at Hong Kong. We used to go up to the Peak and all around and of course it was all open country in those days. Cricket

matches in the big pavilions, you know, mad dogs and Englishmen, they, wherever they went they had their cricket and their football and everything else, and we had swimming. We had our swimming team on board of which I was captain at one stage. I didn’t tell you about my swimming days but that was something else.

Oh yes, very much so, very much so. Actually what we did, we used to

go to, I told you we loved dancing, we used to go to the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association] where they had these very pretty Chinese girls as dancing partners but they were dancers, nothing else. They weren’t for any other purpose, and we used to talk to them and sit with them and have tea or coffee or a coke or maybe a beer or something like that, and they were in their chong sams [Chinese dress], you know, they were very graceful, they loved their dancing and they

always wanted us to keep talking because they were learning English all the time. So they, but we saw a lot of YMCA’s because that’s where we were able to play matches, cricket and football and when we could get ashore we could meet the local teams. So yes, Hong Kong was great but it was getting close to shutting down. We were given an extraordinary job, I’ll try and be as quick as I can on this because it’s a long story.

It shows about British intelligence. Apparently, it was found that through the banks in America the British learned that a large sum of money had been placed in a bank for purchase of copper, I think in Chile. I’m not sure, but I think it was Chile or Peru. See this is where I’m not sure now, I mean we could correct this one,

and they traced it right back to where the ship was that’s loading this copper and the copper was going to Germany via Vladivostok. Now it’s an amazing piece of work on the British intelligence for a start, but our job was that they knew the size of the ship, they knew approximately his speed and they knew the tonnage of copper they had on board and we were told that

“She was heading for Vladivostok, go and find her”. Well now imagine that, you know from Peru, Chile up to Vladivostok. I might add it was winter. We had our ship covered in ice and snow. None of us had ever seen ice and snow properly. I’d hardly ever been up to the mountains in Australia let alone, and we’d never, and it was cold, my God it was cold and rough. It was the roughest seas we’d had for a long long time. Well we went up and they did what they call a box search.

So we went that length, that length, that length and that length and the idea was that somewhere she’ll come in through this box and we were there for three weeks and we were starting to run out of food fuel and the skipper said, “Look, I’ll give it two more days and we’ll see if we can, but she should be around here somewhere.” See the captain, the navigator and the chief engineer worked it all out if they were skipper of that ship, what they’d do, which way they’d go, which

route they’d take. You do a devil’s advocate in wartime a lot and so they worked it all out. Any rate we suddenly, just the next day in flurry of a snow storm cleared and there she was a mile away, the Vladimir Mayakovsky [?] and that was our first real war prize, so we got her to stop eventually. They were quite pleasant about it, the Russians.

By firing.

She wasn’t going to, she tried to run the gauntlet but when she saw we were intending, we’d sink her they stopped. Now we boarded on and our engineers, I didn’t go because they had the more experienced engineers go over, they had to go and run it. A fellow on the bridge had to drive it. The Russians were quite pleasant in this, that, they just said, “Ok, she’s yours, you take her, we’re not going to do anything.”

In a whaling boat, rowed, yeah, you know the whaling boats they had, two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, twelve sailors rowing and they rowed across and yeah, up the ladders and then on board. See they didn’t, they surrendered the ship, so there was no worry about being fired upon or anything like

that.

No, no, no, we kept steaming. We just kept steaming around. She had slowed to a stop and we just steamed around her all the time until we then got them on board, we got provisions on board. I’ve got photographs of all of this, and then finally we steamed her down and we escorted her all the way back to

Hong Kong. Here’s a twist in the story. That copper was due to go to Germany via the western door, through the back door as we called it. When we got down to Hong Kong there’s a French cruiser called the La Motte-Picquet waiting, a light cruiser with her crew ready to board the Vladimir Mayakovsky and we said, “Hey, wait a minute, this is our ship, what’s going on?” Well it turned out that by a quirk she was a merchant ship

and under maritime law it turned out that, under British maritime law you were not guilty until you were found guilty. Under French law, it was the reverse way, you were guilty and had to prove yourself innocent, and the Brits [British] and the French decided it would be easier for them to try and prove under the French law than what it was under the British law. So they changed crews and we lost our ship, but at least we got

reparations for it. We got our payment for taking a prize. So away went this La Motte-Picquet.

This was just, it was before the fall of France and down she went and she then transhipped her cargo into, no, I think

she stayed, the cargo stayed on board but she had some sort of an escort for a while and she set sail when the French had the copper, so she set sail for France. They get around to France, they unload the copper and a month later the Germans come in and they get their copper again, any rate after all of this story. You couldn’t read about it.

Yeah. The end part of that one was while we were there, when we left the station we had the admiral of the Far Eastern station where this Admiral, Sir Percy Noble on board and he was going home to be Fourth Sea Lord and we had him and we were Admiral’s Ship of the fleet for the Eastern Fleet. We were pretty proud about that flying the admiral’s flag on the old, dear old Kanimbla.

“McHale’s Navy” we used to call ourselves. So any rate we came down to Saigon and that was the day France fell, to see what the French were going to do, whether they were going to be pro-Vichy, anti-Vichy, whatever they were going to do. Well they hadn’t made up their mind, so we had to leave it at that until they did, but we felt, told them “They’d be very wise to stay with the Allies”. Well, any rate they didn’t stay with the Allies, they went the other way and when they came out of port, the whole lot

got shot up including the La Motte-Picquet. The Americans were up there by then. This is another time in the part of the war.

Yes, yes, out of Saigon. They were steaming out to do something or other and they just cleaned them up as they came out.

No, we’d gone.

So, we went on our way to Singapore. We did a convoy down to Australia and back. We didn’t even see Australia, we just went there and back. By this time we’d been away about six or eight months.

From Singapore we went to Trincomalee, Ceylon where we joined the British fleet in the East Indies Station and from there started a very long patrol, time of over 18 months and we were based a lot off Durban and we used to go out on patrol and I don’t know, we did many many, many convoys, but in the meantime in between the convoys

we’d go out looking for the German armed raiders which were our opposite number. We didn’t strike any, we used to paint our funnel different colours with stripes with different colours. We flew neutral flags. We did all those sorts of things to sort of disguise ourselves if you like and with our guns we had canvas sheets along

the deck, the edge of the deck both sides that could be pulled aside quickly and a gun would swing out, so we looked like a flush deck ship rather than a ship with guns sprouting all over her. In that time we were going near Madagascar and Mauritius at one stage and we heard that the Von Sheer [Admiral Scheer] had come around in the Indian Ocean. We thought “Oh, this is lovely, and she’d knocked off a few

ships on her way”. She was picked up by an RN [Royal Navy] cruiser, the [HMS] Glasgow who worked a lot with us and another, we had two or three cruisers working with us. We were really working with them, I should put it that way, seniority wise, and they had an aircraft on Glasgow and they picked the Von Sheer [Admiral Scheer] up and they were able to pinpoint where she was, so the word got around to all the ships to come in, you know,

around. There was the Caledon, the Columbo, the Glasgow, the Hermes, Kanimbla and [HMAS] Australia, [HMAS] Canberra. Australia was over near the eastern side of the Indian Ocean, Canberra was somewhere down south, they were a long way away but they were sort of advised about it being in the Indian Ocean and they all, the whole idea is to try and get them all around and

have a go at her. Well it turned out that at one stage there was a severe tropical rainstorm and it was a big one. It lasted for four and a half hours, blotted out everything, and we just got into port. We just had time to refuel, provision and we were sent straight out south of, north of Mauritius, yes, and north of Mauritius and Madagascar and there we just were

patrolling around and we patrolled around and patrolled around and finally after three or four days we went back into port again, and so the only people who knew what was about was again the captain, the navigator and the chief engineer. Nobody was told what was going on but obviously we were the decoy and when the tropical rainstorm stopped the Glasgow, whether,

plane got up and didn’t see anything, couldn’t find her at all. Now whether she had radar or whether she had spotted the plane and decided to turn away, we don’t know, but having checked with German records of what her movements were at that time I believe she was only hours away from where we were, so there’s the luck of the game again.

Yes.

Well, we were watch keeping all the time in the engine room. Four on, eight off, sometimes four on and four off if things were, you know, they felt there was enemy action nearby or something like that, but it was four hours on, eight hours off and then you’d have a spell.

Well that meant that you went around, you were

in the main engine room and you were responsible with your engineer officer to look after the running of the engines. They had another section in the forward side, which we went through watertight doors and that was the generator room, three, four generators, so you had one standby and three generators running for your power right through your ship during the, while you were steaming.

Also there were refrigeration rooms. We had big refrigeration rooms, which was unlike any other because she was a merchant ship and carried meat and all sorts of other commodities when she was on the Australian coast, so they came in handy. You were responsible for the fire, the hydraulic fire systems, the hydraulic systems, the heating systems, all of that.

Well, you had two enormous engines only about this far apart, maybe a bit more, and they were three storeys high and they were eight, there were Burmeister and Wain diesels. They were solid injection which meant it was compressed in fuel into the cylinder tops.

There were eight big cylinders in each, 5,000 horsepower in each engine and there were big big pistons going up and down, no steam, it’s all diesel. We, the pistons were three feet or a meter in diameter, the piston rod was about nine inches, the connecting rod was 11 inches and the shaft and everything else, the journals on the crank shaft were

14 inches in diameter. So big heavy stuff, the nuts were four inches in diameter, four inch Whitworth nuts holding everything down. Now these big engines ran around about, average about, they weren’t fast, about 120 revs normal cruising speed. Our cruising speed was 15 knots, our fast speed was 19 knots and if we were really scared and running like hell or going fast we could get 19 out of, 21 out of her. So there were

twin engines. So our job was to keep going around and there was all the auxiliary engines, your water pumps, your fresh water pumps, your cooling water pumps, your fire pumps, your, all the auxiliary stuff, your refrigeration right through the ship. So you not only had the engine room to look after but you were also responsible for all this auxiliary equipment as well.

Yeah, yes, and drive them, you know, when you’re coming into port, you’re there manoeuvring the engines, you know, head to stern and, with a bridge ringing

from the bridge and you’d be ringing, answering and then putting half ahead, half astern and doing all the manoeuvring when you’re coming in and you’re manoeuvring, you know, you hear how ships come in and they come in this way with the bow and they bring the stern in and then they, the ring, the one we always loved was finished with engines. I always remember a great friend of mine, George Hume, wonderful fellow. He and I were both two senior ERA’s on this particular watch when we always came into port with the engineer

officer standing by. We did the manoeuvring and they just stood by with us in case of any problem, and we had a fellow up, a new skipper and any rate, oh I’m sorry, I’m on the wrong ship, was the Westralia, but the Westralia was the same, this fellow George and I, just to give you an idea, they were the same engines all, they were blast injection, which is compressed air into the engine, same big

engines and this fellow came up the Brisbane River and the tide is one way and the wind was another and he was trying to get in between two ships and he was pretty new to it and he was ringing all down it, all the time, you could hardly get time to put half ahead, you’d get full astern and you’d get stop, you’d hardly get your engine over and then back. All of a sudden here’s George, and I can’t do it, walked across and he’s leaning against my engine. I said, “George, what the hell are you doing?” He said, “I’m just waiting for the so and so to make up his bloody mind.”

If anybody had seen that he’d have lost his tick and his rating and everything and he only did it for a short moment, but they were some of the funny things that happened.

Yes, that’s right. When you were manoeuvring or whenever you had any rings coming from the bridge, yes.

They, it’s a bell. It’s a communication system from the bridge. They had, they’ve got the levers with the movements like

slow, half ahead, full ahead on one side and exactly the same, stop, and stern on the other side. So they either rang whether they want half astern, half ahead. Half ahead they go forward, half astern they come back. That pointer appears on ours down in the engine room and that pointer goes to half astern when the bell’s ringing to notify you because you mightn’t be right around at that point at

sea, sometimes when you’re steaming along, you might have to suddenly do it, and then you see the arrow, so what you do, you bring your lever over to it and that tells the bridge you’ve received the message. “I’m on message, no, leave that go, don’t worry”.

And they, you just do that and eventually go and change the engine over whatever speed or whatever they want done. So it’s a communication too. Also you’ve got a voice pipe, it comes from the bridge down to the engine

room as well.

They can speak to us as well, yeah.

Yes, we can. We had a lot of fun with that.

Just telling them “Do they know where they’re going?”, you know, things like that.

My action station was on the stern of the ship where the,

the, we changed over to manual steering. Now the whole idea of that is that if the bridge got blown away in action and they can’t steer the ship, they can put her down into a manual steering mode. Now my job was to sit way down in there with the stoker and where we would have to change the

gearing over immediately and put it into gear, if it was out of gear you put it into gear, so that they’ll have somebody up top, will be there and they can steer her manually. That’s why you see that wheel, steering while often on the stern of ships. You mightn’t have thought about it before but if you’ve got some time, it’s not on the modern ships now but in the old days they had the wheel on the stern and they steered her manually and they would do that by

audio. In other words we didn’t have the walkie talkies like you had in those days, it was passing voice along the deck, orders along the deck to, and they’d be issuing the orders still from the bridge or somewhere where they were in safety back to the coxswain who was on the manual steering, and I’m down, we’ve got it in gear. Now every day we practised action stations, and they’d say, “Right, we’ve been torpedoed on the port

side, the bridge had gone, we want manual steering” and they used to time us. Used to take us about three minutes. In the end we did it in about, oh a little over under a minute, 30 seconds, 50 seconds, and we would change her over and they’d steer her manually just to try her all out all the time. So this was constantly going on all the time on every ship I was on, we did that.

Well, I don’t know whether it was because I don’t think there’s

ever any good action station but I suppose it’s better than most. On my way down there on my own, there’s watertight doors, I can’t get back into the main engine room, I can only go up. If the ship got hit and propellers got hit and I’m still there, I went up a vertical ladder and out a hatch which was about 50 feet climb up, you know, with this guy. The

only fright I got was that I told you they had these mines and they had them on the stern and they rolled them off and they had a practise and they didn’t tell us that they were having the practise, and they rolled this one off and she went up, and of course I’m in the stern of the ship and we got this awful vibration and terrible banging, you know. I thought “We’d been hit, had no idea”. So the face went white for a

moment or two on that one until I, fortunately I had a phone, I could get through to the engine room and you can imagine what the language was like, and said, “What’s going on?” And they said, “Weren’t you advised?” I said, “No”, I said, “They’re having a practice run with the depth charges.” I said, “Mines, they’re depth charges.” “Sorry about that.” So yeah, that was, we’ll let that go because it’s on message.

Right. My other action station was an interesting one when we get to the [HMAS] Adelaide.

Well no, I think we’ll do it in its sequence if you wouldn’t mind because there’s not going to be so much. There’s going to be more on Kanimbla, then a little bit Adelaide, a little bit [HMAS] Patricia Cam and a little bit Westralia.

They were good. Because she was a merchant ship,

a lot of it wasn’t knocked to pieces. All the timber, all the panelling, everything like that went, you know, it was all steel decks, everything was steel, but we still had cabins at petty officers, which was amazing. I mean I had worse accommodation than that as a young officer on the Adelaide where I slung a hammock, but normally you’d sling hammocks but we did have the big mess decks, that they were wide, they were a lot of room, they weren’t as cramped

as the normal destroyer, cruiser, corvette type of ship.

We had one each. They were little ones, little mibby cabins they call them, then you went in, you had a porthole. One cabin, there’s three cabins, you had one cabin that had a porthole direct and the next one came in and went down a little alley and there’s your hole, and the third one went along and that was that. They were known as mibby cabins. No, we were pretty comfortable, very comfortable.

We were on RN [Royal Navy] rations, that means we were victualled by the Royal Navy. I can’t say they were marvellous. They, the Royal Navy played it a bit harder than I think the Australian Navy did when it came to those things, but the food was you could say alright. The only problem was they had all our good Australian butter that went ashore in Hong Kong.

We got Redfeather brand tinned butter and it was all rancid and every time you punched the thing the butter shot up to the deckhand. So there’s a trail of Redfeather brand butter from Bombay to Durban to this day, ‘cause it all went out the porthole.

Yeah, very, yeah. He’s

a very senior rank. I mean he’s the same as a sergeant with his platoons and things like that.

Oh good, excellent, excellent, yep. Australians weren’t as, what will I say, so conscious of, I won’t say authority. There was great discipline, marvellous discipline. The discipline on

the ship was, guys that came on who were pretty rough types they left that, the left the navy as men, real men. It did, it’s a wonderful thing naval discipline, really. You try and buck it you’re just asking for trouble.

Oh yes. I mean a couple of fellows in the mess, there were three or four of us that were inseparable, you know. We went everywhere together, we went

ashore together. That’s if we were all on the same watch or something like that, and we

Well there’s Alan Telford, George Hume, Cyril Waters. Cyril’s still alive, I’m still alive, the others have gone. Another one, Billy Smith in Sydney. There were 10 of us and there are now three of us left. Don’t forget we’re getting on a bit. I’m 86 now.

We did have it, but we didn’t have much of it in the engine room. The stokers would play up ashore, a few of them, you know, have too much to drink but the navy was very good in this way. When these guys went ashore it was amazing to see, particularly in places like Durban and that, they looked immaculate when they went ashore. They were very fussy about how they looked, their uniforms looked, and really the Aussies looked good.

If they had 24 hour leave which meant they wouldn’t be back until the following morning, many of them would come back to the ship and change again and put some clean gear on for the evening. They were really good the Aussies, you’d be surprised, and they, we were warned “Be careful of trouble makers”, and also if some of our guys got into trouble their own mates would soon pull them

out of it or if it got too big the naval police would come along. If they got the naval police taken along, well they’d bung them in somewhere in a truck and take them back to the ship, but most of the time they brought their fellows back. If they were too full and rather than get them in trouble they’d bring them back to the ship. They were marvellous, they really looked after one another on foreign ports.

I think it would have to be, I think Durban would have to be

the favourite one and Singapore later was the other one, then Singapore fell. Singapore was just so beautiful, you know. Durban, the people were marvellous. They were British, ex-patriots from Natal, a lot of people retired from Johannesburg lived in Durban and they were just wonderful, you know, we were invited to their homes, we went to dances, but look, they were just,

you could’ve been in Melbourne. They were very like the Melbourne people, the people in Durban, very much so, and the countryside was beautiful and generally speaking South Africa I think is a lovely place to be in, but we then, even then in those days, could see problems coming because of the coloured problem which turned out with apartheid and everything else and so that was the only thing which we haven’t got, thank goodness, in this

country to the degree they’ve had it.

Yes, but somehow we got on alright with them all. You know, the Australian attitude was that “Well, we’re all people”, you know. We didn’t, we didn’t get anywhere where there were bad elements. We weren’t up in the areas where these poor beggars were in these mines and in these squalid areas, we didn’t see that.

I think we just saw the best part of it, so I’m not in a position to be able to say, yeah we, they did this and they did that, but generally speaking they were very good.

Oh yes. Singapore was still very colonial, it was terribly British old boy,

you know. They were living a wonderful life, all the ex-patriots there whether they be in the civil service or they be in the forces or people who had their business things there, professionals. They had their homes and their servants and they lived pretty well, but they were marvellous, they were just so nice. We had a lovely time there, but it was just the tropical, we loved the tropics

there and we used to go off for drives when we could into all parts of Singapore and into Malaysia a bit, Johore.

No, no, we, the 8th Division came on after we had gone. We were in the Indian Ocean and the bottom of South Africa, we did the Middle East, we

did Burma, I haven’t been on touch with that. We were convoying up the Middle East and it was only after the Persian Gulf episode that we were going to be sent home because it was imminent, we didn’t know then, but it was imminent that the Japs [Japanese] were going to declare war and we came around to Penang and while we were in Penang, I think it was the 8th of December when Pearl Harbour went up, and of course things changed

dramatically. By that time the 8th Division had all come in, so they were all deployed way up, so we never really met the 8th Division at all. We had a lot to do to help to bring a lot of people out before it fell, but that was a disaster because as we came into Singapore, these two enormous battle ships came out and it was the [HMS] Prince of Wales and [HMS] Repulse. I think we might’ve been one of the last of a few people to see

it, and we stood aside and dropped our flag and they dropped theirs. That’s how you salute with a ship, salute each other, acknowledge each other, and we looked and we said, “Oh God, wouldn’t it be marvellous to be on those”, and we looked like a tug alongside them, and away they went and gosh, two days later they’d gone and that was a shock. That was a real shock and they went out with very little or no air cover. It was very badly managed but I mustn’t talk about that. I mean it’s all been written up but

at that time we didn’t realise.

Yeah. Well, we saw the survivors when they came into the Seletar Naval Base and they just were so in shock and we just said, look, “How was it?” And they said, “Well we didn’t have any cover, we didn’t have anything, and these torpedo bombers came in.” I’ve forgotten how many on each side of one ship and just

belted with torpedoes and did exactly the same, there was about 80 of them I think, 40 of them, 20 aside came in on each side of the Prince of Wales and on each side of the Repulse. Look, I’m going to say that can be queried, but what I’m telling you, the method is correct what they did, and they sank the two of them.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we were, we were in Singapore in, we first went into Singapore in December ’41 and then we went back again. When we came back out we did a convoy and then we turned around. We did two or three convoys getting the ships, getting the people out and getting the soldiers out, but we didn’t have any

physical contact with any of the 8th Divvy [Division] boys at all. They’d be on some of the ships where they could get away.

Mainly they were a mixed lot of civilians and soldiers and nurses and all sorts of people scrambling out of Singapore and they were going around, a lot of them were going around to Java with, that’s why we were on the Dutch East Indies Station, and there were two or three

Dutch ships there, a cruiser and some destroyers.

Oh well, they were taken into, some of them were taken to Java and

Oh, I don’t know, I’d think it would be Batavia.

Oh no, we didn’t go near Java, we stood off. See what happened, when you went in convoy, you convoy in the ships and when you’re due to come closer inshore they bring in smaller ships like destroyers and things like that. We

stood off and went away and went off and did another job.

No.

No, the only time we did anything like that was when I was on the Westralia in the Pacific, when we brought all the Dutch women and children out of Sandakan. Sandakan, that’s another little story later.

Alright. Well, we’d done all this convoy work and at

that time Britain and the Allies were on their back feet. They’d been beaten everywhere, we’d lost Crete, we’d lost Greece. They were having a hell of a time up around the Murmansk trying to get supplies into Russia. The famous Eastern Front was on, you know, with the Germans on the doorstep and Russian was really having a bad time, and of course by this time instead of being neutral

they’re our allies. So we saw them in two modes, and it was deemed that they had to find another way of getting supplies into Russia and they thought “Well, what about up through the Persian Gulf?” There’s a place called Bandar Shahpur, where there’s a rail link, it was on the top right hand corner of the Gulf. It’s extraordinary that we did this job in the Persian Gulf and now Kanimbla II is doing the same thing

only in this war. And there is a rail link through to Tehran into the Caspian, by the Caspian Sea and on into Russia. We didn’t know much about this ourselves, the politics of it, but it was arranged that British troops would come in half way up through Iran and then also through northern, and Russia was coming in through the northern end and the whole

thing was that they were going to use Persia as the pathway through to get these things. The Shah of Persia refused to cooperate, he was trying to play the Brits against the Germans to see who could do him the best deal ‘cause the Germans were keen. They were coming through, they wanted to get through to Persia and you know, they were on their way to India. That’s where they were going to be next, which is interesting. Right, so we were told that “We had to go up and take

the port, the shipping and the railhead and supply troops to Abadan, the big refinery to safeguard the Abadan oil refinery”. So we had Ghurkhas on board with us, oh, they were marvellous fellows these Ghurkhas, thank God they were on our side, and Rambutan Rifles, the Balik [?] Regiment. We carried them with us ‘cause after we’d taken the port we had to put them ashore and then they took the town,

the railhead and went on to Abadan and did that part of it. So we practised down the Gulf for three weeks. I’ve told you we’re all Saturday afternoon sailors, none of us had ever been commandos or anything like that and our job was to go up and take the ships and not let them sink, and not sink them either because Britain had lost so much shipping they wanted every ship they could get, because at that stage, I don’t know whether you’ll appreciate it, but about this

time they’d lost 33,000 seamen and 3,000 ships in the North Atlantic and all around the world in that war at that time, and we were desperate for ships. So our job was to practise, so we practised on the Kanimbla and we did the devil’s advocate job. We imagined that we were the Germans, if we were going to sink our ship, what was the best way we’d go about it. Well it would have to be in the engine room because we were engine room people. So we all sat

around, this is the great part, it wasn’t just two or three high powered officers saying, “Well you do this, do that”. We were divided into eight boarding parties, 16 in each boarding party. Each boarding party had an engineer officer, a petty officer, some stokers for the engine room and some seamen, a leading seaman to go up and take the bridge and an officer for the bridge. So we practised and we were given five

minutes to get onto our ship and get down in the engine room. Now they locked it, barred it, did everything and we had little red blocks and we placed those, they placed those red blocks in strategic places as if they were actual charges that had to be detonated. So we took a long time but eventually we got down in five minutes, and finally we did it even in three, I remember one night. We used to

come up at night and didn’t tell them when we were coming. We came up in little boats and we’d go over the stern and down. So when that was perfected, in the meantime these guys in the dhow had gone up to where the ships were and fished all around them, marking out where they were anchored, their positions, all the boys in the core mews, there was a long row, narrow narrows of water that wound, it was rocky, shoaly, sandy, not very good

navigable water. The Persians had, they’re Iran now, but the Persians had dowsed all the buoy lights when war started. So they then had lanterns that were marked and their job was when we went up was to put these lighted lanterns on each, and each was given a code number, so we knew exactly where we were going on the way up.

Oh, they were picked, they were just a crew of seamen,

signallers, stokers and gunners, you know, and they were just picked up as boarding party, just pushed on. They were sent off into the, somewhere off Karachi for a bit of jungle training I believe, and they had their, their skins were tanned and they were dressed up as you saw in that photograph.

Oh, they just made up the kaftans and they made up all

their head gear as Arabs. They dressed up as Arabs, Persians, you know. They made a note of what all the Persians wore and they were able to get, somehow they got the stuff on board. It’s amazing what people did during the war and they were able to get good stuff to make them look pretty good, and I think when you see that photograph it’s not a bad illustration of a motley Persian crew, but they were Australian seamen and

our own boys. So they did all that and then when the time came to go up

Oh, they were in the dhow all the time, and they pretended to be an Arab fishing crew. See just like the Arabs, fished in one of these dhows so they got hold a dhow that was a fishing dhow and they put our crew on instead of the Arabs or the Persians.

They didn’t but they learned how. There’s a lovely story about it. Apparently when they found out how, they said “She was a terrible thing to sail”. She went everywhere but the right way but then in the end they said “When they got her in the eye of the wind she sailed as true as anything ‘cause these dhows travel for thousands of miles”. You used to see them down at Mombassa and Durban and those places. They’d come all the way out of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. They were marvellous sea ships and it had a little tiny diesel engine in it.

So that’s what their job was. So when it was time to go up she led us all up and before I tell you that, it was extraordinary. The week before we left, and this again where British intelligence is brilliant, and I can’t tell you how good the Brits are at intelligence. I still think they’re the world’s best personally and that’s only a humble engineer saying this.

We got drawings of the layout of the engine rooms of all of the ships we were going to land, so we knew exactly where their pumps were and where their engines were. Don’t ask us how we got them but they came out of the shipping yards in Germany someway, somehow. Now that’ll be another story for the guys, how did they get those? Any rate this fellow arrived with all these drawings, flew out with all these drawings, bit of a boffin, under his arm and he said, “Look, here’s some drawings”, and we got the one

of the Hohenfels which was the ship I was on and she was the mother ship and she was the biggest one and she was the one converting into a raider and we were able to see where everything was. So we then worked out where would we put the detonators, where would we put the explosive charges. Right, we go up, we had a church service at four

o’clock that afternoon. All the crews came off their little boats and dhows and pinnaces and they were all on small boats, a RAF [Royal Air Force] pinnace and many other types, anything they could scrounge for the job, and we had our church service and I’ll tell you the hymn, “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” I’ve never heard a sailor sing it with so much meaning in all my life.

Oh yes.

I don’t think I could now, “For Those in Peril on the Sea.”

“For those in Peril on the Sea”, oh come on Frank. If I can get it at the end I’ll try it. It’s gone. It was a great hymn. Then we went up and we had to be there just before dawn. We were the leading ship ‘cause our Hohenfels was away up in a big open

basin. It was like if you came up the top end of Port Phillip Bay into Hobson’s Bay, but you came up a narrow thing a bit wider than the Yarra to get to it, you know, it was an inland type bay or sea, and we got in and away we went and everybody went off to their various ships. Well of course

No. Good question. No, Kanimbla followed us up. She was behind us, the reason being she stood out

like a block of flats and she’d be giving the whole show away if she’d have gone up first, so she hovered behind us with the troops on board and was covering us in case there was any unexpected fire from ships or whatever, we didn’t know what to expect, and she had a big job to do, I’ll tell you in a minute. Any rate we got up and by the time we were on the Hohenfels the balloon had gone up because the fellows

had already boarded the ships that were close by and we were just under the stern when we heard the tooter of the Hohenfels go. So we, they fired this grappling iron over the stern. We were right underneath the stern, and the seamen gunners went up on knotted rope, you know, ‘cause it was only a rope that they could have tied up there and they stood up top

with sub-machine guns etcetera, a couple of them to cover us. As we came up they threw down Jacob’s ladders and we came up the Jacob’s ladders and we had jemmies, pistols, hand grenades. I had a cookery knife, a beautiful, big, curved cookery knife one of the Ghurkha sergeants gave me. He said, “Lad,” he said, “You might need this my friend.” He said, you know, he shakes his head, it’s gone. Any rate, then I’ve got this damn cookery with me because I’m the senior

petty officer on number 1 boarding party with my engineer officer, Colin Clark, and he was superb bloke. So he took the port side and I took the starboard side, we divided our team in half. We were running down and I just, an open door and I saw this diesel engine clanking, clanking, clanking, clanking like a tractor engine, and then I suddenly looked and I could see it was

an emergency generator, and out of it, like these wires here, was a huge amount of wires, about 15 or 20 wires all coming out and going on down into the darkness down the alley way, and I thought, and I don’t, this is where you are not brave, you are not cleaver, it’s instinct, something tells you, and I looked at these and I thought, “Gee, this must be the emergency lighting for the ship” and got the cookery and I went whoosh. I cut

right through the whole lot and thought “Well, at least we’ll be, they won’t be able to catch us in the light ‘cause we had darkened faces as well”, and we went down. We finally got into the engine room not before two German engineers had got down there, opened the sea cox, opened some fuel valves to let fuel out, to let diesel fuel on to the top of the water and then set fire to it. Now about this time the water would only be about that deep I suppose.

When we got down there, where we didn’t yet, we came in this doorway and here’s the fire coming up. We’ve got to go all down these ladders, you know, three stories to get to the bottom. She was about the same size as our own ship, and I saw a huge fire extinguisher and it was conical, conical fire extinguisher, typically German one, and I grabbed it and started spraying this fire and all of a sudden I saw the flame coming back along the

fuel, and I just dropped. I just threw it like that and it went boom. They were all dummied. They’d got all their fire extinguishers dummied with petrol and kerosene and diesel fuel and everything like that. Any rate we finally put the fire out and went down.

We got some other extinguishers that hadn’t been dummied. This one was right at the main where obviously you’d pick it up. The others raced around and found two or three more and we put the fire and we went down.

Put the fire out and when we got down there here is one of our stokers, Bluey Backus. Bluey was the toughest kid I’ve ever seen in my life, a Collingwood boy and he was really a tough lad, but he was one of those fellows that you’d love to have when there was a problem. He might’ve been a troublesome fellow, sure, at times but he was a great guy and he was on our watch and he was really good. I loved old Bluey.

And so here he is, he’s bailed up the two engineers and saying, “Where are the valves? I’ll blow your bloody brains out.” How he got down there before any of us don’t ask me, to this day I don’t know. He finished up, he must’ve pinched the Nazi flag because at a reunion two years ago his wife and her daughter came to our reunion and presented us with this Nazi flag, and I said, “Where did you get that?” And she said, “Bluey always had that” and I said, “…and I know

where he got it from.” I said, “It was off the Hohenfels.” She said, “Yes, that’s right.” So any rate, we got down there and we were able to shut a lot of valves but the water was coming up because the sea water inlet’s about 14 inches in diameter, imagine that, we’re trying to shut that valve, we just couldn’t and in my photographs here you’ll see where we just closed them enough that the tug took us and we just rested on the mud just enough to save the

ship. Any rate, when we did that.

Oh yes, they were trying to scuttle it. That was their job and our job was to stop them. That was why we did all that training. When it was pumped out would you believe, you know all the wires I cut, they all led to the scuttling charges. How’s that for a bit of luck. I mean it was, wasn’t clever, but shows you, you know, just one of those things that happen. So any rate, we pumped her out and we saved her. She was eventually salvaged. We

had a diver on board and he went down this engine room, was then we duck dived until we, about 30 feet of water and this is where our swimming came in, our swimming training. We took off most of our gear and we just went down and shut valves, held our breath, went up again and shut a valve, go down, up and down, and I came up and I missed the, going straight through there was a bit of a shelf came out and I came up and hit that and I thought, “Uh oh, you know, don’t

panic Frankie, don’t panic, you know, you hit yourself” and all of a sudden I moved my leg and I shot passed and I went up like a cork and I came out about two feet in the air up on the top and I was covered in, we were covered in oil and salt water. In fact I couldn’t see for a couple of days or a day and half till it all cleared. Well, we took the ships and

No. Yes, on one ship, not on ours. The

element of surprise, and that is the secret of any of these operations, the element of surprise is the one that wins. We caught them still in their beds, you know. They had, I mean that’s the secret of being able to do a job like this successfully.

No, no idea at all, and then they thought “We were British soldiers” because we were wearing round tin hats and all British khaki gear and khaki bloomers, you know, they wear these

great long things over their knees. Ours come up here somewhere and no, we got them all and I think there were only two lives lost on another ship where they were still trying to fire the ship and they were called upon to stop the fire and they wouldn’t and they had a couple of shots and these poor blokes went, but they were the only casualties, which was pretty good out of the whole operation. They got a proper burial. They

got a British Naval burial in Persia. ‘Cause after all seamen are fraternity, you know, they come from all parts of the world and it’s politics and other things that direct all these things that happen to you, but you all have a common bond and a common interest really deep down, whether you were enemy or not enemy.

Yeah, yeah, and these guys had been away from Germany for years. They were never impregnated with the problems of Nazism and that sort of thing. So

that was the Persian Gulf episode and as I mentioned a few of us were promoted and recommended and recognised about that and

Oh, I guess for the whole thing. Yeah, I guess that, you know, I was surprised, I didn’t expect it. The engineer officer got one as well.

I think when the story was told they said, “Oh well, it’s not a huge thing, a “Mention in Dispatches”, but I think they decided promotion was more important for me than a medal or a gong or something like that. Later up there on the wall there is the mention. It’s got on the back what it’s for. I can’t remember.

Very, it was a brilliant ship. We were the one ship’s company right through till just before the Persian Gulf. We went into dry dock there and there was a first change of crews, but not many. There would be about 50 or 60 I suppose went and 50 or 60 came on, but she was the happiest ship. We had

a lot of fun, we had concerts, we had deck hockey, we even had, we played golf. It turned our that NAAFI [Navy, Army and Air Force Institute], which was the naval stores base in Bombay, sent over to us two drums, 44 gallon drums of golf balls, old golf balls

and so he said, “Well, what the hell are we going to do with this?” He said, “Well, we’re going to hit them into the sea”, and I didn’t tell you but back in Hong Kong when things were going crook, George and I, George Hume and I saw a sports store open and they had a sale, fire sale sort of thing, and we saw these wonderful golf clubs, Tommy Armers and, I’ve forgotten the other one, for about £50. In our

day that would’ve been about, Australian pounds would’ve been about £80, something like that. Full set of clubs, we thought, “Jeez, we can’t take these on board, I mean we’re supposed to be at war”. So any rate we thought when we got back the next day on to the ship we said to the, asked “Permission from the officer of the watch to speak to the commander”. We told the commander “If it’s permissible we would like to bring these golf club on board”. He said, “Certainly but where did you get

them?” We told him. Well, half the ship’s company left to get golf clubs I think. So any rate we got, and it turned out that our master, the assistant master at arms was also an assistant pro of Gale’s Golf Course in Brisbane, which was the Royal Melbourne of Queensland and see, we came from all walks of life in the reserves. Everybody was amazing. The Royal Navy could never get over this

with the Australians. We were from everywhere. Any rate he said, “Oh, we’ll set up a clinic.” We said, “This is good.” So any rate also when we were in Saigon, George my real mate, he found this in a, saw shop, a most magnificent snow leopard. A snow leopard is a creamy colour with brown spots, the most beautiful thing. He had this on his deck, there’s his bunk, there’s his deck,

here’s his golf clubs. He also had a silk of half nude Chinese girl, beautifully all hand done in silk. From the waist up she was nude and then her Chinese dress and clothes just hanging quietly on the side here. I’ll never forget this commander of our who was an RN [Royal Navy] man, had come out to Australia and he’d retired and they brought him back in as second Jimmy, or they call them the “Jimmies”,

the first officer under the captain, and he couldn’t understand us Aussies. In fact he let it be known, he didn’t have much time for us at times, and he had every right.

Because we were too independent. Independent, not in discipline but independent in the fact that we’d come from all different walks of life. Some of them had been bank officers, some had been

managers of companies and they were, you know, people who were doing quite well in civilian but had joined the naval reserve because they wanted to do navy work. That’s the term “Saturday afternoon sailor”, and we were a very wide cross section of people with all sorts of skills.

Well because with them they never had that. The Royal Navy, their discipline was very strict and with respect they

still hankered onto the old British idea of upstairs downstairs. I’ll leave it at that, you know. There wasn’t the, shall I say free interchange of talk and work that there would be with an Australian officer and an Australian rating. I mean down below in the engine room we were all one, you know. Ok,

he’s the officer, I’m the chief petty officer and he’s the leading stoker and all the stokers, we were a team, you know. We respected one another for their position and also we were responsible for issuing the orders that had to be done, but we worked and so it was a different, it’s the same in the army, same in the air force and it permeated in the navy.

Well yes, we did up to a point particularly when we got talking to a lot of the British

guys, you know, that they just seemed to have, they treat them all like a, I want to be careful about this. It was just the same as you see in the old plays, the plays where there’s the stately home and there’s the butler who’s in charge of the head

housekeeper and then they all go down and they’re all put in their positions. Well in that, the ones who were lowly down were tougher on the lower ones than we’d ever be or even the officers or the people that the stately home.

Very, yeah, yeah.

No. The officers were very good. The permanent officers, our permanent officers were great, they were superb and I was on a few

ships and I never struck a bad one.

Yes, it was a lucky ship and it was a happy ship, very happy ship. Don’t forget by the time we’d got back to Australia we’d been away two and a quarter years.

Yes, we did, and there’s a record in mileage which we’ll refer to in our next and I can be more specific and give it to you ‘cause I can’t reel it

off right now but it’s something like 270,000 miles we steamed in the two years we were on it and it was 480,000 odd for the rest of the war, the whole of the war. It was more than any other naval ship that we know of.

That’s right.

Ok, that’s right.

That’s a lot of steaming. I mean you take that into weeks and months you can see we were at sea most of the time.

Yes. I knew nothing about that until I, this next episode which I’m going to tell you now. We got back to Australia, we were given a week’s leave. It was the first week’s leave we’d had in two years. The others were just short bursts. Oh, we

had nearly a week in Bombay when the ship was in dry dock. It was in dry dock for three weeks, so each watch got a week’s leave but that was after 18 months and this other one was when we got to Melbourne. Then the ship had to proceed back towards Singapore, we did more convoying. I caught up with the family of course and we had a marvellous reunion. We could tell them until we got to

Melbourne that we were back in Australia even, and rang them, they all raced down to Port Melbourne where we birthed. Would you believe it, we birthed on Christmas morning 1941. So we went then on a couple of voyages, came back into Sydney and I’m up there minding my own business and some of the boys were ashore. We used to help one another, if you were in Sydney you’d let

the Sydney boys take your leave and if you were in Melbourne they’d let you take their leave and so on, so we could get a bit of extra time. They’d say, “Look, you go ashore, we don’t have to go ashore, there’s nothing for it”. This is where we worked so well together, and I was called up to the chief engineer’s office. “Newman”, he said, “You have to go to Garden Island”, he said, “Here’s your orders,” and here’s this lovely naval

instruction, Chief ERA First Class SF Newman will repair to HMAS Patricia Cam in charge of machinery. I thought “God, I felt I was the chief engineer of the Queen Mary by the sound of this”. Any rate, he said, “Do you know what it is?” I said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” He said, “Got a bit of an idea it might be a trawler.” “Oh,” I said, “God no, is it?” He said, “I’m not too sure.” Any rate I got my bag and hammock and I

had a stoker to carry my bag and hammock for me. That’s quite something by the way to have someone to do that for you in those days. Any rate we went up and down and we saw all these ships and the Canberra was there and I said to somebody on the wharf, I said, “Look, do you know anything called the Patricia Cam?” He said, “Oh yes”. I said, “Where is it?” He said, “Look, just beside, underneath the Canberra”. Well, I walked to the wharf and I looked down and here’s this

400 tons of fighting fury, a trawler owned by the Camareri family of Sydney, Italian trawler fishermen who netted shrimps and prawns and all that, and they had a number of ships. There was the Patricia Cam, the Mary Cam, the Alfie Cam and one other named after their children. Anyway I’m going up to this, we get down to this thing just as a whole lot of fellows are coming off with a lot of gear and I thought “This is like rats leaving a sinking ship”.

I said, “Where are you guys going?” They said, “Wrong ship.” I said, “What do you mean wrong ship?” “Oh”, they said, “They told us it was steam, it’s diesel.” I thought, “Oh, now I know why I’m going, it’s diesel, and they had all their gear to do boilers and things”. So they left and I came on this little thing. There was a bridge and engine room aft and a long fore hold, one master and one great big movement, swung around like a davit, and so I get down there and I meet the engineer,

I meet the guys that are there and I’m chief of this thing. We’re all petty officers, ERA’s or petty officers. I’m a chief petty officer, a couple of them were chiefs, and some stokers. We had a crew of six in the engine room and they had a crew of about six or eight up top, and this fellow said, “Look, we’re heading for Brisbane”, he said, “In 48 hours”. So I had to get down into the engine room and

it was in a shocking state. They hadn’t done any maintenance on it all.

Oh yes, very sad, very sad to lose her, and then you get this little tiny thing. You know, I thought, “What am I going to do now?” This is where the training came in. Any rate, I got about it, it was Fairbanks Moore diesels. They were little diesels about this high but there was a lot of them from there back to there. They were about 10, 10 cylinders

and twinned engines. Any rate we did a little bit of trial and away we went. We had to tow an ammunition barge up to Brisbane and we got out into the worst seas I’ve ever been in. The first time I was really sick and then all of a sudden the electric light plant went on me and I had to get in and it was right by the bilge and I’m leaning in the bilge trying to fix this thing with the thing rolling and I’m being sick one minute and getting back to the engine the next minute. Any rate finally got it going

‘cause they didn’t have any lights for the pinnacle on the bridge or anything. The skipper’s going butcher’s hooks [rhyming slang: crook] about this. Any rate we got it going, finally got up a day out in this shocking weather and we realised we won’t be able to tow the barge all the way because we weren’t getting anywhere with it. In fact I came on watch one evening at 8.00 o’clock and there was a light there and I said, “What’s that light skipper?” And he said, “That’s Evans Head,” and I said, “Right”, and I went down below.

Then I finished my watch, got to sleep, came up in the morning at 8.00 o’clock and I reported to him on the bridge and I said, “What’s that light?” He said, “Evans Head.” We’d been there all night going backwards and forwards, we didn’t get anywhere. Any rate I’ll keep this story short. I got up to Brisbane and I got so much coke, the pistons were so coked up they were coked tight. They weren’t working on the cylinders at all, they were just great gaps, they’d come

in close tight knit like that and with the carbon they were solid. There’d been no maintenance on her, and I’m throwing not, lubricating oil straight out of the, up the funnel on his deck and he wasn’t too pleased about that. I couldn’t keep the oil from squirting up the top because it was a scavenge crank case that picked the oil up and threw it on to the crank shafts, threw it up that way and so

finally we got to Brisbane and it was Sunday and I looked around for somebody and they said, “Oh no, we can’t do anything for you here. You’ll have to wait until you get to Townsville.” I said, “Oh, I’m going to Townsville?” He said, “I think you’re going further than that”, he said, “You’re heading for Darwin,” and Darwin had just been bombed. So I said, “Righto.” So we get up to Townsville and I said to the engineer up there, “I want to get these pistons fixed up”, and I told him the trouble and, oh,

at night this carbon was red hot and it was throwing sparks out and of course the skipper’s saying, “Look, you’ve got fireworks coming out of here telling every Jap sub in the Pacific where you are”. So I put chicken wire over that to stop it but all I did was gum up the chicken wire, that didn’t work. So we finally got into Townsville and nobody could help me. I said to the boys, “Well come on, we’re going to strip these two engines down”. I saw the skipper and I said, “How long have we got?” He said, “Oh, not much but you can go”, and here I am with all

my pistons on the jetty, 20 of them, 10 on each engine, walking amongst all the guys fishing. See Sunday morning they’re all fishing at Townsville and here I am with all my pistons laid out while we decoke the whole lot and put the whole lot back again and made our way up to Thursday Island. We got to Thursday Island and the engines are going beautifully by now and I’ve solved the oil problem and

they put a machine gun on the forecastle and they issued us all with rifles and with 10 rounds of ammunition and I said to the fellow, “The army chap who was doing, brought the stuff on board, what’s the 10 rounds of ammunition? We won’t get far with that with the Japs.” He said, “Japs be damned,” he said, “If you see any Japs you make straight for the mangroves, straight for Adelaide River and these are for the crocodiles”, and it’s a true story. I said, “Well, that’s

a nice navy we’re in, isn’t it?” So finally we got to Darwin and I was able to tell them the story and they were horrified to think we’d been sent up like this, but who should be the engineer in charge of the port but our senior engineer off the Kanimbla, a fellow called James Brown, wonderful man. He said, “Newman, whatever have you got here?” I said, “Come and have a look”, and I said, “Thanks for your training, I’m here”,

and he had a look, and he said, “I’m going to send a stinker to navy office on this one.” Ok, well we patrolled, we unloaded all the ships that had been sunk and were sitting in the mud.

They were bombed by the Japanese.

Oh with this big boom. It was able to go over and we were lifting out tanks and trucks and all sorts of things. That’s why it was the only ship that could do the job, this great big telegraph pole it was, used to

come right over the side down into their hold, pick the stuff up, we’d dump it on us and then we’d go in, rum them off and then we’d come back. We did all that, we went down the east coast taking fuel for

No, we didn’t thank God. Did about three or four months work up and down taking oil fuel, no, aviation fuel for the air force for their emergency

strip dromes. They’d been going over bombing and fighting in Timor and some came in shot up and they could land quickly and they could refuel if they run out of fuel.

At these little emergency strips, they were only roads. They used them as roads but they camouflaged them and they took the camouflage away and they used the roads as their air strips to take off and they had them all over the place. The Japs could never find

out where the air force were coming from because they had all this, under all these trees they had the mesh and netting and so they were able to disguise them and then when they wanted to come out they’d roll them out onto the road and take the road, ‘cause the roads were just flat red dirt and take off and get to their main base. So the Japs never really found where the hell they were coming from, which was a very good ploy in those days. They did a marvellous

job the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force], they really did. So we got back to Darwin and I got a signal to go back to Melbourne, Sydney. So I went to Sydney overland and I went by train to the end of the line and then we went road transport all the way, army transport to Alice Springs and from Alice Springs I went to Adelaide and from Adelaide I went around to Sydney. Because I was not an officer I was not permitted to have air travel in those days.

So one funny story was, I was, while we were in Adelaide, Alice Springs waiting for the troop train to go I was with the sergeant, so I was in their sergeants’ mess and I was the only sailor in Alice Springs, so you can imagine what everybody must’ve thought, “I’d jumped ship”, and I felt a bit awkward about this. Any rate a chap came up and gave me £20 and he said, “I want a seat on your

aircraft”, and I said, “Hey, wait a minute,” and then one of the bigger near, he said, “You know what he thinks, he thinks you’re a pilot.” He said, “He’s never seen a petty officer ever, Alice Springs?” He said, “He thinks you’re on the next plane.” “Oh”, I said, “Let’s have a bit of fun with this.” So we kidded them on and said “No, it’s going to cost them 50”, and then a dear old lady said, “Look, I must get on this plane.” I said, “Well, just a minute madam”, and I could see the pilots were in the dining room, so I whizzed in and I said, “Look, this dear old thing wants to get on the plane. She thinks I’m the pilot and I’ve told her she can have a seat, now what

about it?” They said, “She’s right mate.” So we got the little old lady out. Any rate we were coming home and it’s midnight and as we were coming home there was an old drunk leaning against a lamp post against a pub. He’s obviously spent all his cheque, he’s as full as a boot and he looked up as we came along and had another look and he said, “Gee mate, you’re a bloody long way from a ship, aren’t you?” The only man in the whole of Alice Springs is a miner, he’d been an

ex-navy guy. Anyhow, we got around to Melbourne, to Sydney and the master at arms said, “Where have you been Newman?” I said, “Come on chief,” ‘cause he was chief petty officer but a senior. He said, “Well, you were supposed to be here a week ago.” He said, “What happened?” I said, “Well, I didn’t tell him the full story, I said, “I’d just come around from Darwin.” He said, “Alight”, he said, “And by the way,” he said, “You’re not in the rig of the day,” and I said, “Why am I not?” And that means you’re not correctly dressed, you know.

Well being chief petty officers like sergeants and so, you have to be immaculate you know, because you’re setting an example for the troops any rate. And I said, “But I’m alright.” “Oh”, he said, “Haven’t you heard?” And I said, “No.” “Oh”, he said, “I better get the officer of the day”, so he calls the officer of the day and he says, “Hello Newman”, he said, “Welcome aboard.” Said, “Hello sir”. He said, “Well, what happened?” I said, “I told him”. He said, “Good God.” He said, “You’re not kitted out.” I said, “I don’t know what you mean sir.” He said, “Haven’t you

heard?” I said, “No, I haven’t.” “Oh”, he said, “I’ll ask the master at arms to read it out for you”, and the master at arms said, “Sir, you are now an acting temporary engineer sub-lieutenant on probation”, which was about the lowest form of life that could ever go into a naval ship’s boardroom. I couldn’t be any lower, and so much so, I finally went, they said, “Alright, you better take 10

days’ leave, go to Melbourne, have some leave, get yourself a uniform and go to Flinders”, which I did, and the sad part about it was the fellow that relieved me two trips later on the Patricia Cam, a Japanese float plane who was a sighter, dropped a bomb straight through poor old Patricia Cam and she was sunk and these boys were lost. So there again is the luck of the war. I want to illustrate you just have to be lucky.

Oh, I felt awful. You know, this fellow had come on and I handed the thing over to him and said, “Look, you’ll, this that and the other”, and you sort of think “There but the grace of God goes I”.

No, I didn’t know about it because we, at this stage they didn’t let people know when ships were sunk and I didn’t know for many many months later and by that time I was at Flinders and then I went on to the Adelaide.

So I was to go to Flinders and I went to Flinders. I told you I’d met Betty, we decided to get married and we lived at Somers for a while for the four months that I was there and I had to set up an internal combustion engine course.

Married in 1943.

We had the wedding at the School Chapel, Melbourne Grammar Chapel and I had a guy who was with

me at Grammar, another navy type and Betty had a bridesmaid. It was very simple, we only had 10 or 15, 20. We went to the, one of the hotels, the famous one in Melbourne. See I’m starting to forget things.

No.

No.

Menzies. We went to Menzies. That’s where we had the big night out, that was Menzies, and we went the following day

down to Flinders and we found a house at Somers and that was our honeymoon really, was down at Flinders while I was working in the Flinders Naval Depot for four months and then after having set up this course the engineer commander said to me, “Look Newman”, he said, “You’re not going to get anywhere unless you get a steam endorsement”, he said, the navy’s steam, “You’ll have to have steam some time.” So he said, “I’m going to send you off to a cruiser”, and he said, “It’s as

old as ever a cruiser’s been.” He said, “It was built in 1921, it’s called the Adelaide” and he said, he said, “It’s got every piece of machinery on it since James Watt.” I said, “Oh, that’s nice, thank you very much.” So any rate I then went off to the Adelaide and our honeymoon was over. The, I was given, as soon as I came on board the senior

engineer looked at me and he said, I must use the term, “What the bloody hell are you?” And he looked at my wavy stripes, you know, because they were all straight stripes, ‘cause they were all sea-going guys who had been merchant seamen, they’d never seen a navy reserve officer. In fact apparently I had created a precedence, which I didn’t know anything about which I was told about later.

Well the wavy stripe is that you were a reserve and they’d not had a reserve engineer

promoted out of the ranks before and the reason being I found later from a fellow who was my best man who was in navy office, apparently the signal came from admiralty stating that “I’d been promoted”. It was an admiralty decoration and an admiralty promotion, it wasn’t, ‘cause we were still HMS, and apparently the navy right said, “But he hasn’t got the right qualifications”. First of all

he hasn’t got a university degree, he hasn’t done any sea-going chief’s tickets at that stage. He, I’ve got a blank.

No, I certainly didn’t have the right qualifications according to the naval requisites for a naval officer. Oh, I hadn’t been to the Royal Navy to

HMS Seaham which is the naval engineering college that they all went to even from the Australian navy for their officer training. I hadn’t done that either, and they just said, “Well, we cannot make this rating.” Well, apparently it went backwards and forwards until finally admiralty sent a signal and said, “You will make this rating”, and through their weight over the Royal Navy they had to make me. So that was a bit of a, ‘cause when I went up there later to the navy office I saw one of the,

paymaster captain and he said, “Oh you’re Newman are you? God”, he said, “Have you given us some problems.” He said, “You know you’ve created a precedence, don’t you?” I said, “Well, I didn’t know I was doing anything sir.” I said, “I had no idea about it.” So that was that.

Six months on the Patricia Cam.

Oh yes, oh

yes it was because we, it was hard going on Patricia Cam and you were really very close together. I mean the six of us were in a cabin, bunks half the size of this and you live and you ate and it wasn’t marvellous, but the navy was desperate and they had to grab anything they could get and it proved it was their worth. Yes, so I went

back to the, I went to the Adelaide and he just looked and said, “Well, what the bloody hell are you?” Because they’d never seen a wavy engineer ever, and “How did you do it?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, I really don’t know”. “Oh”, he said, “They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.” That was a nice one, wasn’t it? So I thought “Well, thank you for that”. I didn’t say that to him of course. Any rate, to finish that up, later my papers arrived and I must say he called me in and he apologised profusely. He said, “Newman”, he said, “I feel dreadful.”

He said, “It was very wrong of me, very stupid of me”, and he said, “I do beg your pardon on this.” He said, “I had no idea of your record”, he said, “It’s just come in what you did on the Kanimbla and of course the Patricia Cam.” He said, “Alright”, he said, “Now you’ve got six weeks to learn the ship and take a watch.” Now I had to learn about all the reticulation, all the wires, all the pumps, all the, everything right through that cruiser including two engine rooms which had three boiler rooms with

ten boilers and two turbines. I’d never seen them in my life before. So I had to start afresh ‘cause this would give me my steam endorsement and give me my full qualifications as a marine engineer.

Well, we didn’t really from that point of view on board ship. It was, we were fortunate that

the ship was such a large ship. There was a lot of great, a lot of spaces of course, but at the same time the discipline was the same, it was a war ship and we were fortunate enough to make the best of the facilities that were available to us. In most ships lower deck ratings all slung hammocks. In fact in many ships even officers slung hammocks because

of the lack of room depending on the type of ship, particularly in the smaller ships, the destroyers and corvettes and things like that. Not everybody had cabins, but because this had been a merchant ship they’d left this cabin space for the time being as it were, and there was sufficient for not only the officers but also for petty officers and chief petty officers. I have vivid

recollections of my friend George Hume that I mentioned a moment ago about. George was a great guy but he wasn’t the best with discipline. I mean he didn’t flout it or anything like that but he just sort of was a bit Walter Mitty [rhyming slang: shitty] about things and we had a ritual which is on most ships that the chief officer or the first officer of the ship every night did rounds of all the messes around 20.00 hours, that’s 8.00

pm and he’d go to each of the messes which were divisions, the forecastle division, the topman, the quarter deckman and so on and then he came to the chief petty officers and petty officers area and there was an officer of each division who stood by the division and walked through him in that section and then he’d go on to the next section with a bugler in front going da da to announce that they’re coming through, and our routine was

in the cabin that we didn’t have doors, they were all taken away. We just had curtains because of war damage, you know, the least amount of things flying around the better, and the routine was that you just pulled the curtain aside and stood to attention when you heard the bugle coming. Well George was reading as usual on his bunk and the da da went and nothing was happening as far as he was concerned and all of a sudden he hadn’t, by the way he hadn’t pulled

his curtain aside and he was still lying on the bed, and all of a sudden this curtain was ripped aside and there fuming as black as the ace of spades was this first officer, this RN [Royal Navy] fellow, and he looked at George, he said, hmm, and George got up all of a sudden. He said, “Attention”, and he said, “Sir.” He said, “It’s a mighty fine war, isn’t it Hume? Mighty fine war”, he said, “Tits and golf clubs, that’s all it’s been so far,

hasn’t it?” Well you know, it was, it really was a little bit of tits and golf clubs I must say at that stage of the war. We hadn’t got into it properly. We’d only got 15 ships so far at that stage, but any rate that was George Hume. And the other point I wanted to make talking about, going back to the golf clubs, I did make a comment about two drums of golf balls that were brought onto the ship from NAAFI, and I also mentioned I think that one

of the master at arms was assistant pro of the Gale’s Golf Course in Queensland. Now he decided we’ll set up a net in one of the forward saloons which was really an assembly room, a major mess deck room, and he put up this net and padding and everything else and he started giving us a bit of a clinic on golf lessons. Not only his own fellow ratings but the officers

too decided it would be a good opportunity to sharpen their game, but then in the end we decided it was time to get out into the open and hit a few golf balls into the sea to see the result of our, and we had a big mat on the upper deck and we were hitting these golf balls, we were going to hit these golf balls out to sea. Well at this particular time we were doing a convoy from Bombay to Aden and up the Red Sea with a lot of Australian airmen

and troops going on into the Middle East and it was a big convoy, a lot of troops, so not only were we the escort but we also had two RN, that’s Royal Naval Destroyers with us on the outskirts of the convoy. Any rate it was one these gorgeous days in the Indian Ocean when it was absolutely flat calm, it was like a sheet of glass, and you could even see the flying fish running along with their little tails, they were

everywhere. So we decided we’d get out and hit a few golf balls. So there we were hitting these golf balls away, you see, having a great old time off watch and all of a sudden one of the destroyers broke its routine and came up alongside, over the megaphone said, “Don’t you Aussies [Australians] know there’s a war on?” And, “What have you been up to?” And we said, “Well actually not too good, but we’re 15 down at the moment, how are you going?”

And the answer came back, “Yes, we’re doing fine.” He said, “The only ups and downs we’ve got is the bow going up and down”, and they went off again because the reference to 15 down was a golf term, you know, you’re 15 down out of 19 holes or something, but it also meant that we’d got 15 ships, so that quietened the RNers up. Typically Australians do something like that of course.

No, not any, not a full attack at all. There were a couple of enemy aircraft that came across but I think our disguises must have thrown them because

they swooped around and they went away again and that’s really no, we weren’t literally ever attacked.

We were extremely lucky from that point of view, yeah. Particularly when we were going up the Red Sea and getting towards the Mediterranean in those parts. So

We had everything. We’d been through typhoons, the worst seas I think were in two areas, were up around Vladivostok when we were getting the north of Japan, north of Hokkaido, shocking seas, that was snow, ice.

For Australians it was the worst conditions we’ve ever had because we weren’t used to that sort of thing. I mean we’d come from sunny Australia and we’d never seen ice on the riggings and the decks and snow and everything else like that. In fact I can tell you a strange story about that. When they were complaining on the bridge that

the water had run off and they’d lost their water up there, and this is fresh water, where there was fresh water pipes around the ship, and I was sent up with another, a stoker to check out the pipelines and see where the problem might be you see. We found the water was fine down below and we checked it all the way up and got to the bridge, and any rate couldn’t find anything. We were about to go back down to the engine room to have another check

when one of the fellows said to us, “You wouldn’t think the pipes would be frozen, would you?” Well, we didn’t realise it, being, never being in snowy parts even in Australia, you know, not being skiing or anything like that, it never occurred to us. We felt absolutely embarrassed. They were frozen pipes, we had no idea. Any rate, that’s just by the way. Getting down we had the most glorious weather, we went through beautiful tropical areas.

Well that, they were the toughest for all of us. Not for we in the engine room, we were fine. Our heat came when we were in the tropics down in the engine room but they were all dressed up in winter duffle coats and muffed right up, but it was hazardous and it was dangerous

and how those fellows up on the bridge and up on the forecastle had to keep look outs, I’ll never know. It was just amazing how they, but they quickly got accustomed to it. They just, can I say they were very adaptable, the average Australian. I’m giving the Aussies a bit of a build up but this I think was our flexibility and our adaptability helped an awful lot in areas that we were never used to, as it was for the army and as it was for the air force, the same way.

The other, we went through some typhoons, a couple up in the China Sea. It wasn’t the eye of the typhoon, it’s when you’re out on the edge of the typhoon that you really got the short of whiplash of it. The Kanimbla was a magnificent sea boat, she just was so good in the sea. She rolled a bit. I mean I remember down in the engine room I’d be standing

with another crew member talking and she’d be rolling then way and then rolling that way and we had an indicator because we used to have an indicator to check we always had to keep the ship level all the time and if it wasn’t you could transfer fuel from one side to the other or water from one side to the other to get a balance, and we were standing talking and we’d finished talking and we were down on the other side of the engine room.

We never moved, we just actually slid, you know, that full distance with the roll, but up on the top of course the roll was even worse and they were getting it over the bow and that sort of thing so, but they battened down ship, yes, and they got used to it. The other bad part

No, we didn’t. And the other part where we struck really terrible weather was away down in the, not the roaring forties, but the screaming

sixties. We were way down below the Cape of Good Hope below South Africa and a little bit towards Australia and we were down there looking for the German ships because that’s where they used to meet, the ones that had come all the way from Germany and they’d have supply ships down there and they used to do crew changes, get food and all that sort of thing and replenishment and then they’d go on again. So we never

found them though. They were, because it was always squally, it was always snowing, but that was awful weather too, but the ship was so good she was really a comfortable ride. Not like the Adelaide, which we referred to a little while ago. I mean the Adelaide was a light cruiser, she was built in 1921. She was supposed to be for World War I and missed that and when came around World War II as I mentioned earlier,

she was a pretty old ship, and she was so narrow she’d roll on your front lawn when it was wet. She was a shocker, and also they used to call her the “Three funnel submarine” because we had three funnels and she used to go through the waves instead of over them, and the other thing they used to call her was the “AIF ship”, always in Fremantle, or BEF, back every Friday, and the

reason for that, that was the crew nick-naming, the reason was she could only steam for a certain time, a week or more and then she’d have to come into port for replenishments and particularly with the boiler tubes, they got all twisted and bent and like a Wurlitzer organ gone mad. So we’d have to come in and do maintenance before they went out. So there was a big difference between the Adelaide and the Kanimbla for instance. The little Patricia Cam, I was always up

in tropical waters with her, so we, I would hate to have been in a big sea in that one, but she wasn’t so bad.

Yes. Now she was attacked off Wessel Island and sunk by a Japanese float plane, dropped a bomb through her and it went straight through her and of course she was a wooden ship and she went down pretty quickly. The,

I saw a lot of the Patricia Cam in the respect of meaning I saw her out of the water as well as in the water. A very unusual happening, we were taking the 44 gallons drums of fuel that I had earlier referred to these secret RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] airstrips and we used to

roll them in at night and we used to see the Japanese float planes following us trying to track us where we were going. They didn’t interfere with us, they were just watching. So what we used to do, we used to stay out at sea well at night, in the day time, and then we’d come back at night and we’d put big nets over the drums and float them in on the ingoing tides, and then the Aboriginals living in the area would roll them in under the swamps

and the trees and mangroves and then the RAAF people would come and pick them up. Any rate as I mentioned this was also the use of emergency, was in case any of the planes were in trouble they could do a crash landing or a quick landing on the mainland as soon as they got back from Timor. Well, one fellow came in very low, spluttering, and obviously he had been hit somewhere near the engine and he just made it and then there was a bang and we weren’t

sure whether he crashed or whether he was firing a gun to say “He was alright”. So we were just coming out near the Derby Mission to see and everybody was up top looking to see where this plane was and the next thing I was down in the engine room and a felt bump, bump, bump, bump and we were flat on a reef. They’d forgotten in their anxiety to look for the plane that there were some low reefs there. So any rate I had to stop, well one main engine stopped, and I had to stop the

other fellow, and then we had to wait for low tide to see what the damage was and I was able to get out and go over the side and walk along the reef and go to where my two propellers and rudder was and I found that one of the shafts had been twisted and one of the clover leaves of the propeller itself was bent right over. So that meant unless we

could get that straightened up we’d ruin our engines trying to get home. So for about a week we worked on it in between the tides, hack-sawing the piece off. Took us an awful long time because it was thick bronze to take the curl off the, and then to get the A bracket that carried the propeller shaft straightened up, and we managed in a fashion to get her right, but it was sufficient after

we tried the engine that I wasn’t getting too much vibration.

Yeah. We were stuck there on it for a week, and you know, we were open to anything that was going to come along. Fortunately the enemy around gave us a break. We didn’t even see the float plane that used to follow us.

We had to stay on board, so we couldn’t go ashore. We were right out the edge of a reef.

So we just stayed on board. I then, the next thing was to get her off, so we started and we had a marvellous skipper. He was an old sea captain who’d been brought back for the war and he’d been given this trawler to take up because he’d sail anything, and we couldn’t get her to move at all. We went full ahead on one, full astern on the other. We tried everything.

We just couldn’t get her to move. We thought “Oh oh, we’ve got problems”, and then he said to me, he said, “Chief”, he said, “I’m going to swing this boom.” Do you remember I mentioned it had a boom with a big telegraph pole? He said, “Now, I’m going to swing it from side to side and see if I can get a bit of a rock on”, and he said, “As I go port, you go port and starboard in synchronisation with the roll that I put up”, and we did that and look,

we broke the suction, it went zzzz and we came right off. Now I doubt that anybody else would’ve got that thing off that ship, and that was great seamanship from an old merchant seaman. So you know, these are the things that you’re not trained for, that your experience comes back to you that you still have to use the same principles of troubleshooting and getting over the problem, and that’s what I loved about the engineering side was the

diagnostic side, that you’ve got a problem that you had to sit there and work out what it was, why it was, but quickly, and you couldn’t run down to a shop to get a spare part. You had to improvise, and again the Aussies weren’t bad at improvising.

Yes, yes.

Oh yes.

After we’d finished our duck diving and I mention that the water was about 25 feet deep, it was muddy, your visibility would be one meter and we had a diver, petty officer diver, permanent navy on board, and incidentally I must mention just to give you an idea, I mentioned about we were all reservists,

there was at least 10 per cent of the ships company that were permanent navy particularly the senior officers, senior chief petty officers and those to whip us all into shape, you know, navy style in whatever the disciplines that we were in, and this fellow was assigned to the ship as a diver and also a seaman petty officer but he was fairly, he’d been in the navy for about 25 odd years

and he had this old, or the ship had this old diving suit that had the big metallic head gear, lumps of lead on your shoulder and around your waist and in your boots and you went down with air being pumped into the suit from a big air pump. Now normally they had

a lead line, which I’ll explain why that was needed in a minute. They had the, we didn’t have a telephone and the air line. Now the air, lead line was a way of sending messages down by tugging it and the fellow up top had very sensitive fingers. He’d feel two tugs or three tugs or four

tugs depending on what was the method that they used and the sign language they used for this. So he went down. Now just imagine going down between these two main engines, steep ladders all the way down, a metre of sight and in a big old diving suit. He, it meant that he had to go

down the engine room. We were able to tell him where all the valves were because we’d see them and we had the plan of them originally and it was his job to close the ones off on the inside which lead to all the various holds, because they opened them up, so the whole ship flooded quickly, and then we had this big sea inlet, cooling water inlet and this big, I think it was about 14 inch diameter but it had a big grill on the

outside about two feet by one foot to stop seaweed and stuff getting sucked in and that was used for our cooling water for our main engines. He had to go down there and then around the engines and then all through all the mass of machinery that you had along side, all your pumps and your various gear that were ancillary to the running of the main engines. Now he went down

there and it only meant he’d have one kink in his air line or caught up and he was gone, and he did, I think it’s, I know he did ten dives, I think, I’m not sure he did 12, but he did that and he shut all of those valves off. Then he came out, he went down on the outside of the ship and he found this grating and by this time the ship’s sitting in the mud and

part of it was in the mud, not a lot, but he had to lie down in the mud in this heavy big diving suit and fashion, we had to fashion a cover for it, so he had to make a bit of a template for the shape of the size of the hull and then he came up with his template and gave us the measurements and we got some mild steel plate, cut it, bent it, drilled it. It was about a quarter of an

inch, three eighths of an inch thick steel, and we made a lot of what they call J bolts, that’s just shaped like a hook, like a tent peg, and it was, had a threaded nut on one end and a hook on the other. Then we got the seamen to make a washer but we called it packing between the steel plate and the ship’s hull. That’s to seal it, and they

made that out of tallow and canvas and it was like a big rectangular sausage about two inches in diameter, so he had to put that in first, then bring his plate up, then put his hooks in and then tighten the plate against the grommet, is the proper name for it, until he pulled it up tight and once they did that she was sealed off and they were able to pump her out, and he was awarded for that job

the George Medal, and it’s the highest decoration ever given to an Australian rating through the whole of World War II. His name was Petty Officer Jack Humphries from Queensland, he did a brilliant job.

Yes.

Oh yes, inside the engine room. He had to go down the engine room every time to shut off all those valves because those valves

led to all the other parts of the ship, you know.

Yes, it was already full of water. That’s right. I was about, when I did my last duck dive I think we were down about 20, 25 feet of water.

The Adelaide

Oh,

yes. We were in Bombay and we were in dry dock. Now it’s the first time we had dry docked since we left Australia. By this time we’d been away over 18 months from Australia and it needed a hull scrape, a bottom scrape, ‘cause you know, after all that sea time and particularly in the tropics the barnacles and everything else grow profusely on the ships’ hulls, and apart from checking her all over and doing it,

so we went into dry dock in Bombay and we still stayed on board but then the facilities had to change a bit because we didn’t have any salt water and our fresh water, we had to, we couldn’t make fresh water the way we normally did, so we had to use auxiliary

tanks.

Oh, with a compressor. Can I, can I go on?

No. We converted salt water into fresh water by heating and evaporating. It was called an evaporator and it

was driven off the main engines, so therefore it was useless in dry dock. So we used our auxiliary fresh water tanks. So the chief, the senior engineer went down with me and we, all the pipelines are coloured. You have red for fire fighting water, you had green for salt water, blue for fresh water. We had

cream for hydraulic oils and brown for fuel oils and you knew by the pipelines in your engine room what they all were, but once you got out of your engine room and you went forward or aft to the other part, bowels of the ship, everything was painted red lead. So he had to, he was the only one who’d been on the ship before when it had been dry docked, when in the merchant service days. So he took me with a torch and we went along and he said,

“Yes, we’ll open this valve and you’ll shut that valve and we’ll do this and we’ll do that” and we went along and he double checked. He said, “Well now, we’ll go to the gravity water tank up in the funnel”, and there was two. The funnel of course was big but it only had a small area for the exhaust pipes and engines to go up, so there was quite a large area. So they had two tanks there, they had an emergency water tank and an emergency fuel tank. So

he said, “Righto”, so we went from all the way at the bottom of the ship way up into the funnel. We checked around and we opened what they call a cross connection valve and he said, “I think that’s right but we’ll go down and test it.” So we went back down to the engine room where there was a fresh water pipe, a drain pipe and we opened it up and tasted it, fresh water, right. “She’s right”, he said. Away we go. He said, “Close it off”, he said, “I’m going for a cup of coffee.” He said, “You stand by.”

So I stood by down on watch while this happened. About quarter of an hour later there’s a message from the top of the engine room, “Who’s the engineer officer of the watch?” “He’s not here sir, he’s up in the engineer’s quarters.” “Well, who’s in charge?” I said, “I am sir.” “Who are you?” I said, “Newman, sir.” “Right”, he said, “Come up and bring your cap and repair [report] to the bridge immediately.” So I went up there and

I didn’t know what the problem was, it was a steward who had given me the message to come down. So I get up there and the steward said, “You better come in here first chief”, he said, “And have a look.” So I went in and here’s this bath full of fuel oil. What had happened was he had to go ashore on an official occasion and he was getting out of the old khakis and he was in his white uniform and everything. I think he was calling on the governor or somebody there, and he told the steward “To

draw his bath”. So the steward came in and turned on the taps and went off about his various duties around there, and when he came back, to his horror here’s all this fuel oil in the bath. Well of course, I can only laugh because I saw the funny thing about it. Of course the skipper didn’t laugh at all. He was furious and he said, and how “You are responsible for this Newman?” I said, “Well sir,

I was down there when we did, opened all these valves.” He said, “Well”, he said, “I’ll see to it what will happen here, but I’ll tell you right now, you’re going to get three weeks’ stoppage of leave, that’s for a start.” So I thought, “Oh my God”, ‘cause I didn’t mention the officer engineer, then he found out the engineer officer was with me. But what had happened was he’d inadvertently, we’d opened the wrong valve in the cross connection and it took a

while for the, the pipes were full of fresh water but it took a bit of while before the fuel oil came through. See by that time we’d shut it off and thought “Everything was alright”. So that was an unusual happening for somebody, so I got my stoppage of leave for that one.

Just imagine, we had to clean all those fresh water pipes from the bridge down through to the engine room and that was our punishment as well.

So there you go, the funny little quirks that can happen on a big ship.

In what way?

Not that I know of. We never ever knew anything. If there was, there was never a hint of it. I, I suppose it did but no, nothing obvious at all, not in their

manner or their bearing. There were whispers but it was not, whether we were all a bit naïve to these things, you’ve got to remember this is back in 1940, ’41, it’s going back a long time and those things were very much under the carpet. We didn’t know anything about that type of thing. I’d never even heard the word lesbian, didn’t know what a lesbian

was, and as for, they used to call them “poofters” in those days, we’d heard about them but I wouldn’t have known one if he was talking to me. I wouldn’t have even known if he was trying to make a pass. We were very innocent, I’ll tell you, but I think the type of person, yes, they must’ve been there but it was not obvious at all.

Yes. I think it is, yeah.

No, but I tell you what, we had a stokers’ ballet, and they were gorgeous, you know. I’ve got a wonderful photograph here for you to see, a big one of the stokers’ ballet and they were our concerts and the stokers’ ballet were just riotous, but even then I mean all the sailors would say wow, you know, and go on like that, but I don’t think any of them were rushed off to the bowels of the ship or something like that.

Oh, they just performed as a ballet for a whole concert. They’d come on and do their turn and they were absolutely marvellous.

Oh, all the girls gear, you know, frocks and little dresses and bows in their hair and lipstick and high heel shoes. See they got all that stuff out of NAAFI ‘cause we did have, they formed a theatre company on the ship. Most ships

did that, and when we got to ports the guys who were in the, running these little plays and concerts used to go ashore to all these places to get gear, which you could buy normally, you know, from theatres, theatrical places and all that sort of thing. They had all that on board. They were great.

Oh, absolutely gorgeous. I left it as the last thing to show you on the Kanimbla’s story. You’ll see that photograph.

Yes, we did. You see, it was born mainly out of the merchant seaman that were on the ship. The merchant seaman of all the various countries, the merchant navies I’ll call them, of all the various countries of the world got to know, met

one another in these ports, they talked sea-faring. As somebody said, “Sailors were funny, when they got ashore they talking nothing but the sea and when they went to sea they talked nothing about women, everything about women. They seemed to have it all in the reverse side, but yes, and they were away from their countries and the influences of the politics, it was vague for them.” They were away months at

a time on merchant ships. I mean they’d leave a country and not come back for 12 months or 18 months on tramps, on, it’d be different on the big passenger ships where they called in regularly into ports and maybe saw more of the political side of life in Europe and Britain and America and South America and other countries. So there was a fraternity of the sea. They all had a common fear,

they all believed in one person who would get them through it. They were God-fearing men, they were humble. They wouldn’t like you to think they were soft, but deep down they had a very, very religious feeling about it even if they weren’t believing in religion itself. It was the elements that they fought, the shocking weather.

You get very close to God when you get into those situations and this was common, and we found when we took the prisoners of war out of the Persian Gulf we found that they’d been sent to a POW [Prisoner of War] camp in South Australia and when we came back to Australia, two or three of our engineers went to the camp to see, and told the camp people “Who they were and why they,

off the ships we’d taken, and wanted to know how they were, were they being cared, were they alright, could they talk to them and so on”. So you know, they went to see what their welfare was like and that they’d been alright, that they’d been looked after alright.

Yeah. Very much so, yeah.

Yes, because of the elements, you know, they were, it’s just, it’s like somebody saying to you “In the garden you get very close to God”. Do you know what I mean? That sort of thing only apply it to the sea.

We had great respect

for it, but we loved it. Well I did, personally I loved every minute of it and had I not been married in 1943 I would’ve, let me put it a better way, had I still been single when war had completed I’m sure I would’ve stayed at sea for a bit more. I just loved every minute of it.

First of all the professional side that I was interested in as an engineer. I loved the ships, I loved the different types of ships. As an engineer we weren’t specialised in our day, you had to be able to go on to any sort of a ship and be able to operate it, not perhaps immediately but eventually you’d be operating it. So consequently, I was on diesel ships.

Then I went to little ships, from big ones to little ones in diesel. When I was sent to Flinders to start an internal combustion engine course, the reason they needed that because the navy at that time was all steam, every vessel was steam and diesel was new to them, and that’s why they asked me to set up this course because they were getting all these new type coastal vessels, the fairmiles

and other high speed internal combustion engine type.

Well I just loved its changing moods. I just loved it in all its aspects. Scary though it might be, we, I thought it was the solitude of it, you’re away from everything in your own world

and you watch bird life, you watch the fish, you watch the flying fish in the Indian Ocean. You watch these marvellous albatross follow your ship all the way from way down in the Roaring Forties, and the weather patterns, the sunsets, the sunrises because we had to go to action stations twice a day, just before sunrise and just before sunset because that was the most

dangerous time when your ship was silhouetted against the background, and from the point of view it’s the best time for submarines and the worst time for us, and it had its beauty, you know, it was just so wonderful to watch it all. You never tired watching it, like looking at a fire. You get the dolphins coming along playing along on the bows of the ship, you know,

diving and swimming along in the break of the wave. You saw whales, you saw all sorts of types that go floating past at times.

I think I might need notice of motion on that one for the moment. Nothing quickly comes to mind, anything strange

or unusual. I mean the typhoon was the, but that’s, everybody knows what typhoons are and what they do.

Well they, you’re just on the end of the edge of it, it’s a whiplash and you’re getting up to your 140 miles an hour and the waters can be calm one minute and it’s a boiling sea in the next

minute. That’s frightening.

Yes, yes, it does. It picks it up as well as dropping it. You see the water spouts, they’re strange. They, the elements are such that with a typhoon it creates a vacuum and it draws water up as well as pouring water down and you get this spiral coming

along. I can’t think of anything.

Too far away and too big to really see it. No, I wouldn’t, it could be but I wouldn’t know about that.

No. No, not at all.

They were quite foreign, quite different and they were brutal. I mean ok, the Germans weren’t good but they had a certain ethic. They did in their POW [prisoner of war] camps and things play it by the book. There were cruelties with the extreme elements of Nazism but I’m talking about the average sailor, soldier,

airman of the German regime, the, they did have respect for laws of the sea if you like. Now, the Japs had none, none whatever.

Well the first one was the sinking of the [HMAS] Centaur when they sank a hospital ship. That really, you know, this was before we knew there was any brutality going on.

This was before we knew what was happening. See, you’ve got to remember communications were very tight. We had no idea what our soldiers and airmen were going through up there until we got into the Pacific ourselves and then saw the result of the brutality, but one can never forgive them for the way they treated the prisoners of war. I’ll talk about that a bit more if I may when we get on to the

Westralia, but it was their sheer brutality. No time for them, it took us a long long time to come to terms with that one. See, one of my, a fellow I knew very well was beheaded, an airman and, because he was caught on Timor or one of those

islands I think, and shot down, and he wouldn’t, Bill Newton, he got a posthumous VC and he wouldn’t let, I think he got a VC, I hope I’m right there, but he wouldn’t let on a thing, so they just got him to kneel down and they just chopped his head off. So how can you like that?

Yes, that was, that was, the Pacific was a different thing altogether. I won’t say it’s war games over the other side, after all I mentioned we lost 3,000 men and 33,000, we lost 33,000 men and 3,000 ships as a result of all the warfare

in the North Atlantic, which we didn’t get. We were more further south to that, and that was one of the worst features and that was because there were ships, enemy ships in action and submarines everywhere, submarine packs running everywhere.

Oh yes. We were hoping, we used stand in the middle between the two engines if we were at action stations and things weren’t too good ‘cause we reckoned we might

be safer between the two engines than out near the edge of the hull of the ship, but we were scared but apprehensive, but it was soon pushed away with what you had the job on hand. It didn’t go with you all the time. I had one instance when we went up in our

little boat to our ship in the Persian Gulf, the Hohenfels, I mentioned that and there was a stoker there and he was absolutely white and shivering just before we got alongside the thing and I said, “What’s wrong Will?” And he said, “Chief”, he said, “I’m frightened”, he said, “I’m really frightened.” “Well”, I said, “We’re all frightened”, I said, “Don’t worry, we’re not but I’ll tell you what we’ll do, you stay down here

and we’ll get up and once we take the ship you be, get ready to pass up all the gear for us”, and I said, “We need somebody to do that”, so we did. I mean I didn’t, I felt sorry because I was shaky but he just couldn’t, he was only young, he was 18, 19. I was a great 21 or 22, I might add, I was an old guy at that stage because when I went away I was 22 years of age. My birthday was in September,

that’s when war broke out, and I was 28 years and 6 months when I came home, six and a half years.

And we didn’t need professional, what is it they give you these days when you come out of these?

In the debriefing and the counselling. There was no counselling in our day. You just got off a ship and went to another one, got home and went somewhere else and started as

though war had never happened. They didn’t do anything like that in those days.

Well I don’t know. Today’s conditions are so different. I think that they’re more at a higher pitch of learning and ability. They’re like, you know, they say the difference between

madness and sanity is a very thin line. I’m not suggesting that, but what I’m saying is the line was much thinner today between the, able to manage a situation and not manage a situation or be affected by the reaction of a situation because so much of it is shown to them even though they’re not involved in it. Now with us it was a closed book. We only had our

ship and the rest of the world wasn’t there. We never had television, we didn’t have the horrors of war shown to us at all. So I think that we came away in a far better frame of mind than what I think the modern day person that’s serving in the forces or for that amount anyway, whether there’s a disaster, even the people, the public, I can understand them because they weren’t

trained for it any rate, particularly the people in the cities and towns and you know, where there’s horrendous bombing and everything like that, and bodies being blown to bits in front of them. I mean no wonder, I think they must need counselling. See, we didn’t have any of that. So it was a good thing in one way, we were much shielded about it, and another one been better had we known

a little more about what was going on as far as the other people and the other hostilities. It wasn’t until we came back after the war, and it was years later, nobody ever talked about it, we’d been away that long we wanted to forget about it, we didn’t want to think about any more of it, and we got about. We were young, still raising our families, getting them to school. So, and we were going back to jobs where we had to start all over again or get new

employment. We were pretty busy and so nobody ever talked about it and it was virtually the biggest time that it really came was when the 50th anniversary came around, when they had “Australians At War” and they had all these documentaries and I even, my best friends, there were four of us. I was navy, two were army and one was air force. We were very close friends with our wives for

25 years at least and more, and one just died the other day. We didn’t know what each other had done. Now I didn’t know that my friend John Whicking had been in the Middle East. I knew he was in the Middle East and he was with the 6th Division, went over very early. His number was V60. That’s how early he was, and he went over and then they brought them into Greece and Crete and they were caught in

Crete because there were only about 4 or 5,000 against 30,000 Germans. They were, and he went in a prisoner of war camp. He tried to escape three times, he didn’t, he got caught each time and then he was in confined quarters for you know, long lengths of time. I had no idea what he went through or what, he didn’t even mention it. And the other one was Teddy Best who was a great athlete and Teddy was in the

8th Division and he was up in New Guinea and he was caught up by the Japs eventually and he was sent to Japan and they had Tokyo Rose those days, who used to try and get allies on there and tell everybody how good they were and how they’re being looked after, and they were to say, “Yes, we’re fine, don’t worry about us, the Japs are awfully nice”, and he wouldn’t play ball at all, and they got to know that he was an outstanding athlete. They wanted to get people who were known well in Australia,

and he wouldn’t go, and in the end they sent him up. He got beaten every day with a rubber truncheon for a quarter of an hour or more every day. He wouldn’t, and he never gave in and he finished up, they sent him up into the coal mines in Hokkaido in shorts and boots or some sort of footwear and Hokkaido in the winter was what I described when we were getting the Vladimir Mayakovsky. They’re the

harshest of winters and they were working in the coal mines, and then you say, “Do you like them?” And he never mentioned a word of this for years later.

Yes. And the others, the air force, you know, they had their story to tell. One was in Singapore right through the whole trouble there. So yes, it was interesting, we used to call ourselves the “Combined Operation”

but that was mainly for drinking beer or having a bit of fun where it was.

Well I think it’s mainly been brought about by the media and yourselves and other who suddenly realised that the, those facets of the war have never really been documented.

All that we got was the top level reports that came out from the headquarters of the army, navy or air force and they were very restricted. They never brought in the human nature of things and of course during the war, as you know, you couldn’t speak about anything even in your letters or anything like that. They were all, everything was censored

but I think that suddenly we got interested in one another and then they had the reunions and they were starting to get guys getting up and talking about what they did and so on and so forth, and that’s why we’ll mention the Adelaide in that respect in a moment and we, it was just I think suddenly everybody wanted to know more about this, and

well we felt we could talk about it.

Hmm?

Oh yes, very much so, yeah. I, another thing too, I was a bit apprehensive about this interview we’re doing because I didn’t want to feel it was and I am bragging sort of, I won the war. That was another very big

thing. There was a lot of reticence about that because it wasn’t, it was marvellous teamwork and what I’m describing to you is what we did as a team. I was part of a team all the time and so were the soldiers and so were the airmen and mateship, you know, that was so strong, so strong. It was wonderful, wonderful to see that.

Well, it meant a bonding of,

of all the fellows and girls with a common interest. They’d been through some very trying times, some horrific and it was a case of make the most of it and help one another out, and as you saw those wonderful New Guinea documentaries of the Fuzzy Wuzzies [native Papua New Guineans] bringing the Australian

soldiers out and how they helped one another down on the Burma Railway. It was that, it was human nature, you know really, and it’s a lovely feeling.

On every ship I was on, yeah.

Oh yes. I mentioned my

first sojourn on the Adelaide when I, as a sub-lieutenant. I’d lost my Acting Temporary and on Probation and I was given six weeks I think, I recall to get to know the ship and then I had to take a watch. Now this was quite a lot because it had two big engine rooms, a port and starboard turbine rooms, twin screw. She had ten boilers, four, four and two in three boiler rooms

and you’re responsible for the whole of the running of the hydraulics and everything else that went to the guns, it went to the bridge and heating and cooling and refrigeration and everything else as engineers. So he just said to me, the chief engineer said, “Well look, here’s a notebook, here’s a torch, go around and learn the ship. Go to every part of the ship, make notes.” So I made notes, I made drawings for six weeks and then he

examined me on that and he said, “Ok, well now I’m going to put you on the watch with a senior.” So I was with a senior engineer until such time I was able to take my own watch, so in three months I was taking my own watch on a cruiser and I’d never been on a steamer in my life before so rigorous was the training. My damage control position was the most interesting at all and I was very thrilled to be given it, I was damage control officer and I sat in a very small room about a

quarter of the size of the room we’re sitting here now, and on in front of me I had boards with all the pipelines, all the machinery positions, the whole of the reticulation of the ship, water, sewerage, the lot, and my job was if we were hit by a bomb or hit by a torpedo in one part of the ship I had to be able to isolate that by direction. I had to look at it and say,

“Right, we’ve got to isolate that, that boiler room’s been hit, the water’s coming in, we’ve got to take our lines, our steam lines, our water cooling lines, our fuel lines around that part and go back and join up again”. Now this was done with flexible gear and the flexible gear was lying there ready for it. Everything had flexible, all the electrics, everything. So all we had to do was to take it from there, around there but then you had to remember which valve to close

here and what valve to close there and what valve to open there and so on, and all this you had to do and assess very quickly as soon as you looked at it. So to be able to do this effectively, we did it every time we went to action stations twice a day for twelve months, we had a new action station Damage Control Unit to have to look after. “So righto, the bridge is shot

away, now what do you do now?” “Right, I’ve got to put the manual gear down on the stern for the steering of the ship.” You had to get all the hydraulics stopped, steam pipes stopped, everything else there and take it away and then you had to be able to improvise other methods of communication and operation of the ship.

No, we didn’t, not while I was on.

Mainly the Indian Ocean on convoys, but when we weren’t doing that we had a most interesting job and that job was we were lying at Garden Island, now not Garden Island in Sydney but there’s a Garden Island near Rottnest Island off Fremantle and we were there when the Z

Force were training, the famous Z Force that went up to Singapore and they were training to go and put limpet mines on the hulls of enemy ships up in the harbours of Singapore, and these guys used to come along in their little kayaks and we would shut the ship down at night, so there wasn’t a word. Nobody could speak for this hour. We didn’t know when they were coming

and we were partitioned down in the engine room right alongside the hull, so we’re right, there’s us and the water and these guys used to come in, dive down, put the limpet mines on and then come back away. Normally, we’d have a shipside ladder up and they’d just walk up and say, “By the way you guys, you’ve been blown up”, and we’d find they’d put five or six limpet mines on. We never ever heard them put

one on that ship’s hull and these guys trained wonderfully. We were very thrilled about watching them do this, and then they went up, some of them in mine laying submarines and they paddled their little kayaks out and went on and did these marvellous jobs in Singapore. So that was a bit of a thrill for the old Adelaide, and while I was there I think the greatest thrill of all was to get a signal from navy office to tell me “That I had a new little daughter”. Yeah, they did that. They don’t, they

didn’t normally do these things, but I did get a signal to say, of course it cost me an arm and a leg in the bar when we got into port. They called it “Pushing out the boat”, I had to push out the boat and shout for everybody for Elizabeth. Elizabeth had arrived in 1944. So that happened while I was on the Adelaide.

Oh no. No. Oh no, that wasn’t on. You’d have the navy and air force back home I think,

if they all got leave for their babies, wanted or unwanted.

Yeah, it was a great thrill for that to happen. So when I’d finished with the Adelaide they’d brought her around to Williamstown and we refitted her completely and then they paid her off in Sydney and she became an engine room straining ship for stokers and ERA and motor mechanics and all those sorts of people and

it was while I was there that I was due to go to a destroyer. I thought “This is marvellous” because to anybody to get a destroyer in the war was like getting a spitfire when you’re in the air force. They were, they called them the boats, give me the boats. They were the it. If you could get a destroyer, 33,000 horsepower, about 30 knots, thrilling stuff to be on and it turned out that an engineer

on the Westralia, HMAS Westralia up in Brisbane had been put ashore urgently with peritonitis and they were scouring the ports to find somebody who’d had diesel experience and they found me in Sydney and I got what was known in the navy then as a pier head jump. That’s a very quick move from one place overnight to the next, and I got a pier head jump to the Westralia as an engineer officer. By

this time, by the way I’d been promoted to engineer lieutenant so, and I was a watch keeping engineer and I went on the Westralia and I kept a watch straight away on the Westralia. Now the Westralia had been an armed merchant cruiser the same as the Kanimbla but she had been HMAS and had worked in Australian waters under Australian Navy. Then she was converted as the Kanimbla and Manoora were to

what they call LSI’s, Landing Ships Infantry where you carried about 2,000 troops, landing barges and did all the landings in the Pacific. So here is my sojourn now into the Pacific. So that was my seventh and last theatre of war that I had and I joined just after Lingayen in the Philippines and I was on board when we did all the landings for Borneo. That

was Tarakan, Labuan, Balikpapan. We worked closely with the Americans. We were part of the American 7th Amphibian Forces and I saw their might at work which was just amazing, the number of ships, the logistics to run it. When I got to Morotai, which was the first time I’d been there, Morotai was a main base for the United States Forces and I just couldn’t believe my eyes what I saw. Here were right

around the island lit up like a city in the middle of the Pacific with three lanes of traffic, four lanes of traffic going both ways, that’s eight lanes, bumper to bumper, truck after truck after truck after truck with supplies and everything. Not rows and rows but a mile of refrigerated cabinets and all the supply equipment

for a, the 7th Amphibian Forces were only a part of the 7th Fleet and then there was the 3rd and the 5th Fleet. This is the might of the Americans and I’m going to pay tribute to them. I know we can be critical at times but God, thank God we had them, they, we wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, you wouldn’t be here had the Japs made Australia, and they were very largely responsible for their sheer logistics in helping us out of that problem

and I’m not taking anything away from the Australian troops because the Australian troops were so magnificent, so was the air force, all through the Pacific. It was amazing to be there when you had a landing and you’d have all your big cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers behind you bombarding the place with all the stuff whistling over your head to the shore, and they were softening up,

ready for the landing, and then the air force would come in. It was interesting, I don’t know whether the Australians were daredevil or what, but they used to come in at about 5,000 feet and the Americans used to come in about 10,000 feet, but the Aussies would be spot on and they’d drop exactly as though they’d dropped it on a pocket handkerchief. None of the stuff was wasted and they were so accurate and they came in, you know, bombing the place. Well then, when it was time to go in, the barrage lifted

and then by this time all the soldiers had gone down into the scrambling nets and the waves of invasion boats all came into the beaches and landed on the beaches and we watched this from afar. There was an engineer officer in charge of maintenance of those and I had a very close friend who was a beach master. He was only a sub lieutenant, he was 21.

I think he eventually became a lieutenant, and he was a beach master on seven major landings. He was first ashore on seven of these major landings and had to set up a base, an operational base and even if they found there were problems coming in on the coral where they found that the intelligence wasn’t right and they were going to have half their gear landing up on coral reefs and things, he’d have to advise the command

ship out standing off what the position was, and often they would say to him, “Well, what’s your recommendation?” He was only a subby, you know, and he would say, “Well sir, I suggest we go to beach so and so”, or do something like that. A chap called Arch Lapage, he’s still alive, I see him regularly, and he got a DSC [Distinguished Service Cross] for that, for that job.

Well the first one was Tarakan for me.

I didn’t do, I didn’t get there for the Philippines landings, but Tarakan was the first one in northern Borneo, and then Labuan followed and then Balikpapan followed. The whole idea of taking Borneo was to be a stepping stone to get back and retake Singapore. The biggest problem we had was that we took these places before the Japs could do anything about shooting our POWs or doing whatever they would want to do under those

circumstances. No, I, that was, to me it was an amazing spectacle, just an amazing spectacle.

Yes.

Yes, I think they were the 9th at Tarakan, you’re quite right. They’d come out of the Middle East.

Marvellous.

Marvellous. We had, the troops on board were amazing,

absolutely amazing. They were just the same as they always were. They were looking forward to it. They just were looking forward to it. They couldn’t get to them to give them a stoush, you know, and there was nothing bravado about it. They were just so dead keen to get there and get it going and get the war over, get it finished, and unfortunately intelligence there was not good and a lot of the big

landing craft full of tanks and trucks and things landed up on the coral and oh, they were shooting ducks. They were just shot down like that by the Japanese. That was a bad one and we lost a lot of wonderful men in the 9th through bad intelligence coming from local sources, wherever and that was, they took it alright and we also

had the 1st TAF, that’s the 1st Tactical Air Force on board to establish the first flying base, air force base on Tarakan, so they didn’t have to fly all the way over the sea to get going, and I’ll always remember a fellow, a friend of mine Bruce Rose, he finished up, he was noted because he started a big dry-cleaning places and did very well and went to Sydney eventually. He got shot down

overseas in Europe and lost part of his leg and so he couldn’t fly any more, so they made him officer in charge of this 1st TAF [Tactical Air Force] at Tarakan and I remember I came off watch just before the landing at dawn and I saw this fellow come out from under the life boat and pull on a prosthesis. I said, “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” And he said, “Ashore, where the bloody hell do you think I’m going?” I

said, “Down the landing nets and all?” He said, “Yes”, and then I looked, I said, “Good God, it’s Bruce Rose.” He said, “Frank Newman, what are you doing here?” I said, “I’m trying to get you blokes ashore, you better hurry up”, and he went down those landing nets and he went ashore and he took charge of the 1st TAF.

Yes, it was.

Well, it was just

astounding. It’s hard to explain to you. It just was like a continual roar and then you’d see all the tracers, not only tracers from small guns but tracers from big guns, you know, going zzz and you’d see these orange lights and red lights and green lights or whatever they were. They used tracers even in the high velocity armoury on those ships

and then eventually it started gradually die down a bit and then you’d see, they’d obviously lifted, so they stopped theirs and the moment they’d stop, the timing was marvellous, here was the air force coming in dropping bombs and you’d just see whoomf and whoomf and whoomf. See don’t forget we would be about a mile offshore, so we weren’t right up, but

it was like looking at a nice film of a war film, you know, of a war film. It was so spectacular in one respect but devastating, absolutely devastating. You wonder that anybody would stay alive or be found alive when they got there but the Japs were cunning, they were in their fox holes and there they were the little so and so’s, and so they had to, I think it was a lovely story that Arch Lapage told me

that in Milne Bay when they were there taking Milne Bay, this was earlier, the Aussies were, got ashore but they were getting cut to pieces by a couple of machine gun crews that were in a fox hole and they, just by that time the heavy equipment was coming down, bulldozers and stuff to put, ready to run a strip. See the first thing they ever did was to get an airstrip down if they could, and this great big

Queenslander on this enormous bulldozer came up said, “What’s wrong with you blokes, what’s holding you up?” And they said, “They’re over there, they’re this, that and the other.” He said, “Tell me where are they?” So they showed him. He said, “Alright, well”, he said, “You get behind me and follow me”, so they followed him and he had this great big bulldozer shield, enormous thing, and he said, “Tell me when to drop.” They said, “About now.” He said, “Righto”, and he dropped it and he just ploughed straight through

and bulldozed them all in. That fixed the fox hole.

Ah, no. I think we felt that we had such a huge force there that

it would, we felt that, we doubted if any Jap ships would try and come in if they were, if they had there, but by that time the Japanese Fleet had just about been finished off, so we knew we were alright safe by the sea. The only other thing was by air and there was very little enemy fire from the air at all. So you rather felt, you felt pretty

safe in a way.

Yeah.

No, no, no, they were excited and keen and you know, like going to a footy match, you know, ready to, like a team going, they were like a team going on to a football field ready to go. They’d been training and training and training. All we wanted to do was get this thing over and finished as soon as we could and get hold of all those people that

were in the Japanese war camps. On the Westralia, I was on her when all this was happening. After Balikpapan our job then was to go around all the islands and pick up troops that had been left after they’d taken all the islands, mainly Americans.

Oh yes. After we’d finished all the picking up of the troops we were taking them up to Samar in the Philippines getting ready for Okinawa, was the next big step for the American Fleet and war machine to go to.

Well these were all Americans, American marines mainly. Some

British troops but mainly all Americans all around Guadalcanal and all the places that they had been in and been left there as looking after things after they’d been taken, and acting as supply and other jobs they had to do.

Well I liked them. We got on so well with them. They got on tremendously well with the Aussies.

For some reason they didn’t have quite the same affinity with the British. They used to call them “Limeys”. I remember I went ashore in Morotai, we had this cooling water I told you about that we used, sea water for cooling the main engines. When the pipe work from the side of the ship up to the engines had a great big elbow, a big, that diameter, big

elbow and it had corroded because it was made of cast iron and by this time, the ship was built in 1935, so we’re up to 1945, so it had 10 years and had worn through. So I was told by the chief engineer “To go ashore with this thing and see if we could get a replacement”. So when I went ashore here’s this hive of activity and I found a

big workshop and I had a couple of stokers with me and we got hold of a jeep and we put this thing on the jeep and we drove around and I said “I wanted to go to a workshop where we could get some, one of these made” and he said, “Oh”, he said, “I don’t know if we can fix this for you.” He said, “By the way where are you from?” We said, “Australia.” He said, “You’re Aussies?” He said, “Oh, no problem, no problem at all.” He said, “I’ve just come back from R&R [rest and recreation]

and it’s the greatest place and those girls of yours are brilliant”, and this and that and that. He couldn’t say enough about the Australians. So he said, “Now what is it you want done?” I said, “Well I want one of these, it’s going to take a while to cast it.” I thought “They’d be casting it in a foundry” ‘cause they had big foundries there as well. “Oh no”, he said, “We’ll fabricate this for you.” He said, “When do you want to pick it up?” I said, “Well when,” I said, “We’ve got to be away, ready for sea in 48 hours.” “Oh heck”, he said,

“We can fix that”, he said, “Come over at 4.00 o’clock.” This is 11.00 o’clock in the morning, this is how the Americans worked, they were brilliant and they made what we call a lobster back, there’s a flange there and a flange there. To get the curve they did it in bits like that, you see, just like a lobster tail, and they fabricated it all. We put it back in the engine room and it fitted like a glove, it was just beautiful, and he was a big Texan and he was the, this wonderful corps of

people that built their bridges and built their roads and built their airstrips. They would do it in days when we’re talking years. They just were so good at this big operation and that’s what they were terribly good at. Now when it came down to fighting units, other than their marines they were not up to the standard of the Australians or the British

in that respect, but when it comes to, their logic was “We will pummel the place to such a degree that we’ll walk in”. I mean they didn’t believe in losing lots of lives and have pick and shovel jobs to do it, you know, whereas we still all had to do it the hard way, the British and Australian Allied Forces, and their theory was absolutely right. I mean they looked after their

people, they fed them marvellously. Gosh the food we got when we were victualled by the Americans compared to what we had in the days of the Royal Navy was just amazing. I mean we were getting ham and ice creams and you know, asparagus and all these wonderful delicacies which we’d never seen since the beginning of the war. But I’ve got to say their cooperation and with us they couldn’t do enough,

and so they were getting ready then for Okinawa and we, our, we would obviously the British Forces, Australians were ready, we were going to get ready for Singapore. Any rate they took Okinawa and the, we were still up there carting their troops around for the time being.

To the Philippines yes, around the Philippines, through the Philippines and up there and then up towards Okinawa and it was then that the atom bomb came, exploded, they dropped the two atom bombs. Now a lot of people have been critical about this but I was given to understand that had we gone on to do a landing in Japan they would’ve committed something like a million

and a half troops for the whole thing, and most probably would be prepared to lose about a third of those. Now I think, I know it was cruel but there was only one way, that would’ve been an awful slaughter that would’ve gone on. They talk about civilians, civilians would’ve been involved in the most horrific ways and I thought “It was a blessing in disguise because it stopped the war”, that fixed it

and so VP [Victory in the Pacific] Day came and we were at a little island called Treasury Island and we celebrated it with a picnic on the beach and a cricket match. So that was our VP Day celebrations. We were immediately sent off to Ambon where the Australians had been given such an horrific time.

Oh yes and so were the Australians, so were the South Africans when we were in South Africa, same sort of thing.

Not exaggerated but we were taking out what would’ve been

their girlfriends, yeah. Yeah, there was always that little bit of a feeling definitely, yeah.

No, no, I wasn’t.

No. I got back, hang on, yes, I, Betty came to Brisbane when we had a problem with

refrigeration. We knew we’d be there 10 days and we sort of somehow got a message to say “We’re going to be in Brisbane”. We didn’t say where or how but we just said “We were going to be with Uncle Jack for a fortnight” and she knew exactly where Uncle Jack was and came up. I saw Elizabeth, oh no, I saw Elizabeth first when I came to Flinders, not up to Flinders, when I came back off the Adelaide when we did the refit. I saw her

then and she’d be about, oh, about three or four or five months old I suppose, yeah.

Oh yes, you were more apprehensive and hopeful that you were going to make it, you know. Before it wouldn’t have mattered, you were single and ok, that’s it. If the number’s on, up and you cop it, alright. Yes, it did make a big

difference, you know. We couldn’t get the war over fast enough and fortunately it was going the right way for us then.

Oh well, it was there all the time, all the time. The moment we left a port we were vulnerable, every time. All those six weeks at sea we, convoys all through the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic

there.

Yeah. We had each time you left port, well you realised you’d be a sitting duck and you were always apprehensive. You weren’t frightened but you were apprehensive in the hope that it just didn’t happen, and it’s like hope is eternal, you know. You go about your job in as much as to say “Well, I don’t think we’ll get hit” but deep deep down there’s a little bit of apprehension

all the time.

Being torpedoed, particularly being in the engine room.

Well it’s the most, you’re the most vulnerable part because you’re down below the water line, you see, and as soon as the torpedo came in you were all flooded and gone before anything else happened. So yeah, that was the only one

we had any apprehension.

No, we didn’t talk about it very much at all. No, I think we all kept it to ourselves. We used to laugh and joke about being down between the two main engines, you know, and taking shelter and all that, making a bit of fun out of it. But yeah, you felt safer when you were between the two main engines than you were when you were out looking at pumps on the side of the ship or down,

when I had to go down the propeller shaft. You see, you went down the propeller shaft three or four times a watch and that’s a long walk down a tunnel, you know, and one thing you can’t be is claustrophobic in these places, and fortunately I wasn’t, it didn’t worry me at all.

No, no, it wouldn’t.

Oh yes, we were 120 degrees average in the steam ships. They’re not so bad in the

diesels although we had big coolers, but when you’re in the tropics, you’re only shooting hot air down into what already was hot. I got very used to it, lost a lot of weight, I mean I was like a drover’s dog, very skinny really. I mean I didn’t have any fat on me at all, never did all my life really. I mean I’ve never had a weight problem. Doesn’t matter what I eat, doesn’t make any difference to me.

Not on our convoys, no. I saw some go down as a result of landings and things like that, small ones but no.

Yeah, I think it was Balik.

Mmm.

Well they were just, I think they were, what do you call them, coastal reconnaissance.

They were only little fellows and, but I think they were American, they got in a bit close.

Oh no, I think there was a lot of return fire.

Oh no, not to us. You mean out to the fleet?

Yes, from the shore. No, none. The

bombing fixed that.

No, same thing. We didn’t get any that I am aware of, any rate nothing came near the Westralia, although the Westralia had a Kamikaze plane hit their deck in a landing before I joined the ship and that was shot down and it shot down, it was trying to avoid and then it decided to ram the Westralia but it hit the stern and went over. Did a

bit of damage but there were no casualties but I wasn’t on her then, but they saw a lot more in the Philippines, Lingayen, Leyte landings but I hadn’t arrived there at that stage, but they just told me.

Yes I did. No, sorry, no I didn’t. It was Ambon that we went ashore.

Well, as I mentioned war had finished and they raced us straight over to Ambon. Already a destroyer and corvettes had been there and taken off the very worst of the wounded and sick and dying, raced them to AGH [Australian General Hospital], 9th AGH which is at Morotai, which was roughly a day and a half’s run with the fastest ships. We were due to ship on

Balikpapan and we had to bring the worst of the wounded off after the first day and about 38 of the Aussies came on board badly machine gunned and we got them to 9th AGH and we had a doctor do a brilliant job on them.

Yes, yes it was.

Oh, it was nasty. I didn’t like the look of it at all but they were mainly covered up a lot

but the surgeon, commander, surgeon commander James Guest was a brilliant man and he and an army surgeon operated on these guys all the way to Morotai and I don’t think they lost a bod. They did a brilliant job, he got an OBE [Order of the British Empire] Military for that, ‘cause he decided he wasn’t going to be coughs, colds and VD [Venereal Disease] like most doctors were in the navy. He’s going, “I’m a surgeon, I’m going to operate” and he begged, stole

all sorts of things. Americans gave him beautiful instruments and that sort of thing. We made him a couple of instruments in the engine room, retractor for opening tummies that he showed me in a book and we made them for him down there. He’s still got them, he’s going to put them in the medical museum, I believe. We hand made those on machine a bit on our lathes in the workshop and this all contributed to the great success there. So that was the nearest I ever got to see anybody really badly wounded. So

coming back to Ambon he said to me, he said, “Frank, would you like to come with me, I’ve got to do a quick appreciation of the whole situation as a doctor”, and that was the most appalling ride I’ve ever had in my life. When we got to the POW camp to see the desolation, to see how dreadful the POWs had gone, but you went to the cemetery and up on the hill was a cross with a fellow’s name, his battalion number and so on and date

of death, and then as you went down the hill the crosses became not so well made until they were two bits of stick with a name tag on it, full name, regimental number and so on, till you got right down near the end and there they were just little sticks in the ground off a tree with a tiny little tag on it made out of metal, that you’d put on a rose tree and with a nail they’d

just, just well enough to be able to punch in the guy’s initials. That’s how ill they were trying to bury their dead and we just looked at that and we just could not believe our eyes what these poor blokes had been through. It was shocking. We went past stores and here were the stores loaded with Red Cross equipment that had never been distributed to them and you ask me what do I feel about the Japs?

So, well I’ll talk about the Jap war machine. I can’t talk about the modern side, I mean they’ve got to lead their lives now and it’s a different world, but there was a feeling of hate I didn’t think we could ever have, but we did have it when we saw this.

No, all those men had been picked up by the ships that got there a bit quicker than us and they’d raced them off to 9th AGH. Some died on the way, some made it,

most of them made that were there, but they were a pitiful force. I mean after some thousands they were down to a few hundred. They’d been, had death marches, you know, to get to different places and I think there was 1,200 in one and 200 arrived after two weeks of a death march in one part of Ambon. We then were sent to Sandakan and this was a lovely story. We had to pick up all the

Dutch women and children who’d been in camp there right throughout the war and this is something that I can tell you with pride about our Australian sailors, could’ve been soldiers too. We waited for all these busses to come with these people pathetically dressed just in little drapes of something. The little children just had little briefs on and so on and they were all due to malnutrition.

In thinking we were doing the right thing we decided after they came on board that we’d give the children a party, a children’s party. Well when the sailors get going for a children’s party it’s like when they’re getting going for your own parties. They had everything. Now the first thing was we couldn’t stop the children from going up and down stairs. They’d never seen stairs in the life before, they had a little step. When they were fed

they were so hungry, their little tummies were so contracted that they couldn’t eat very much. We didn’t realise this, we just didn’t realise this. In fact when they used to cry for hunger in the camps their mother’s told me they used to give them half a cigarette to smoke just to quell the pain in their little tummies, and so what did our fellows do? We had boat rides of course, didn’t we? We had the winches,

we put arms out and made them merry-go-rounds, the steps and stairs we made into slides and the cooks went bad with food, cream cakes and lamingtons and sponge cakes and the poor little buggers they couldn’t eat it. It was too much for them, but I’ve never ever before seen grown up sailors stand there and cry and they did. Tears just rolled, it’s almost coming out of my eyes now as I tell you this story, to see how pathetic

it all had been, what they’d been through and the fact that they realised we tried to do it but it was almost too much. We just thought “We were doing the right thing”, but that was a wonderful wonderful moment and these little children had the sailors carrying them around with them all the time on watch and showing them everything around the ship, and we only took them across to Morotai and we wished we could’ve taken them all the way to Australia or perhaps to Java. But they had been left

by their husbands, there were some very sad stories about that and they were at the mercy of the Japanese, so we had a very close association with that and these Dutch women were very proud. They were very tough ladies, the Dutch women, they were very strong. So after that we, war is over so our job then was to start bringing troops home.

Some had yes,

oh yes, quite a number of children born. I suppose there may have been out of about 100 children, be about 20 or 30 had been born in captivity, yes. We went convoying back, not convoying but taking troops back. Now you had a points system. Now we had the most number of points that anybody could have because we were the first away and the last home. I think we had over 350 or 80, which was very high.

200 would let you get home, but because we were a troop ship we had to bring all the troops home, so we poddled on from September ’45 to March ’46 before we could get a relief, and of course when somebody, we were going to get a relief you’d have to wait for him to come and of course down below they’d find they had to go to the Westralia and they’d damn

this. They’d do everything, you know, to try and get out of it and not go. Any rate one Sunday morning we were sitting in Sydney Harbour after we brought back a whole lot of troops. We brought thousands of troops back in those three, in those six months.

Oh, they loved it. They chatted away and when I was in the engine room, at the top end of the engine room I’d open one of the doors, a door about half the size of this to let a bit of fresh air and I’d sit there for a moment and they’d all be there lined up with their tin mugs and plates

and things lining up for mess or for showers. Oh, let me tell you about showers in a moment, and they’d chat away and say, “Come on Chief, keep her going”, you know and, “How long is it now, and when will we be home, and so on and so forth?” So they were very excited and of course they got back to all their old tricks, you know. They were playing crown and anchor and two-up and gambling all what money they had away already before they even got to Brisbane, which was the main

port of disembarkation, but now,

Oh yes. I told you we had evaporators on board and the evaporators were converting salt water into fresh water and we made 60 tons of water a day. Now when we had the British troops on board if we had them, or we had Americans troops on board which we had, we had no trouble keeping up the water. The Brits hardly, I don’t say hardly showered but they

didn’t shower as often as we did. The Americans had all the powder puff and all the bits and pieces, you know, under the arms and under everything else, so they didn’t have as many showers but the Aussies, they’d have three showers a day if you’d let them. You couldn’t keep them out of the showers and we couldn’t keep the water up to them. We had to ration them, you know. I mean even twice a day they still wanted more so finally, but it was just an interesting point that

while we had Australian on board we were flat out keeping fresh water up to them. They were very clean in their habits, the Aussies.

Not much. We talked to them, yeah. I mean when you’re on deck, yes, we used to chat to them.

Never, it’s too much happening.

Never a problem, no.

Yeah, you were too busy, yeah, and you were trying to catch up with as much sleep as possible. So you’ve got to remember you were four on and eight off for six weeks at a time. Sometimes four on and four off if it was in dangerous waters, so the action stations were coming up faster. We’d be six weeks at sea and four days in port as an average. Now that was just an average convoy. Some convoys eight weeks, two

months away and back in to port again. So, and then as soon as we got into port we had to do maintenance on the ship because we couldn’t go into dockyards or anything like that, so we did all our own maintenance, pulling pistons out, doing big refits on a routine basis. No, we just didn’t have time to scratch ourselves really and when you weren’t you were trying to

get as much sleep as you could. See, your action stations were over an hour and if you’d been on the 12.00 to 4.00, that’s the middle watch, you’d go to action stations at 5.00 or half past 5.00, you’d break action stations at half past 7.00 and then it was breakfast 8.00 and nobody was allowed to sleep at all before noon, and then you’d be on your 12.00 to 4.00 again. Then you had to, dog watch is 4.00 to 6.00, 6.00 to 8.00 and then the only break you had was between 8.00 and

12.00, so your sleep was minimal really but you got used to it. It was amazing how you got used to it.

Oh yes, a cat. She had kittens and she used to take them ashore and bring them back on board again.

Well she came on board pregnant. Somebody befriended, did you see the hammock? Well they made a hammock for her

and he’s got her hammock, which is the photograph you’ve got there, it’s brilliant, and this is where the sailors are great, so they made her a proper hammock, you know, exactly the same as a model, a miniature of theirs and then five little hammocks, one for each kitten and here was the mother cat sound asleep and the little ones each in their own hammocks. It was an absolute riot. Oh, she was on with for a long time and she went ashore one day and didn’t come back, so I don’t know what happened there.

We came back into Brisbane I think it was, oh no, that was on the Kanimbla when we had the cat, yeah.

She went ashore at Durban, she was AWOL [Absent Without Leave].

Oh well, the kittens were given away to people ashore, yes, when they got back there.

Everybody was concerned, you know. There was an SOS [distress call] sent out all around the port itself but nobody had seen it, but

I don’t know, she might’ve been picked up by somebody and we hope was befriended in the finish.

No, it’s when the rats leave the ship is the superstition.

No, that was the only one. See we’re in own little world there for two years, so we were very domesticated with everything we did. I remember we were allowed to

bring birds on board, and my friend George Hume again, saw this magnificent African, West African parrot, the grey one that is so marvellous at talking and he thought “All sailors have got parrots” and he had a few drinks that night and he bought this parrot and I said, “You’re not going to get this on board”, and he said, “Yes, I am.” Any rate he got up there and he saluted as he came to the officer of the day and he said, “Permission to bring poultry on board, sir.” He just called it

“Poultry”. He said, “Poultry? Where are they?” And here had this West African parrot tucked in here and he brought out the parrot, and the parrot said some awful thing to him and he said, “Get below”, he said, “Hume, and make sure you properly look after it.” So we looked after the West Indian parrot but it fluttered out of the porthole one day in port somewhere, but it, gee, what we taught it to say was shocking, and just as well, it should never have come back into civilian life ever.

Oh well, you know, all nice rude terms, all the words and all the other words and every other sort of thing, you know. “Skipper’s a bastard, Skipper’s a bastard”, and so any rate

Only Cocky, I think. I think I called it “Cocky”. It was a terrible name for a West African parrot which is one of the greatest birds of all time for its knowledge

of being able to talk. It’s like a lyre bird. But getting back to Sydney, I’m sitting minding my own business and it was in the March and I thought “I’d never get home” and by this time it was five, six and a half years and suddenly a fellow came on board and he said, “Are you Frank Newman?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’m your relief.” I thought “Thank God for that”.

It was a Sunday, there was nobody about, so I saw the officer of the watch. Skipper was off, the first officer was off, the chief engineer was off ‘cause they all lived in Sydney or had families in Sydney. So I just packed my gear, bade who was ever around farewell, caught the train at Central Station, arrived in Melbourne, able to get a phone call through to Betty and Betty was waiting for me at Spencer Street Station. I came back on a

troop train and that was the end of my war, that was it.

Oh, just wonderful, yeah. It’s like all those lovely war films you see, like Waterloo Bridge and all those, you know, it was just gorgeous, because the girl, there was an RTO [Railway Transport Officer] there and in the air force, a girl I knew before the war, and she said, “Frank, how are you?” And I said, “I’m great,” I said, “What are you doing?” And she said, “I’ve got this RTO’s job,”

that’s Railway something [Transport] Officer, forgotten what the T is, and for the air force, but she was looking after Spencer Street Station. She said, “Betty’s right over there”, and there behind the barrier through all the smoke from the train, by the way they were engines, it was steam, and through the smoke I saw Bet, and away we went and of course she’d left Liz home and then we came home and oh, you know, it was just unreal. I couldn’t believe it was over.

Well I had to go down the following day to be demobbed and this is the greatest let down of all time. I didn’t think much of it them because I was so thrilled to get out, just wanted to get out. I’d already received this letter asking me “If I’d rejoin to join the Intelligence Branch of the Navy”, which I thought “Was rather marvellous”. For them to ask me meant that I’d be a permanent navy officer with a straight stripe but I had a family to come home, I had a business my father

had run waiting almost seven years for me to get back, and I had to decline. Had I been single it would’ve been a marvellous thing to accept and go on. I could’ve got promotion and done all sorts of things most probably if I’d behaved myself. I went down to Royal Park and here were all these Nissen type huts in a row with duck boards leading up into one and out the other, and you went through this

debriefing demobbing process and it was the coldest unreal thing that I’ve ever had in my life. You know, “What’s your name, had any illnesses?” Like an idiot I said, “No.” Like now, I wished I had’ve ‘cause I’d have got a pension. I’m only 10 per cent. I should’ve been on a lot more, ‘cause I wanted to go out classified A ‘cause I didn’t want to get called up again, and right through the medical, right through everything else, right through to the pay bob, they said,

“Right, you’re finished, best of luck”, and I walked out onto the grass and I thought, “It’s over, I’m finished, I’ll take my uniform off” and that was it, and I just plunged back into civilian life.

Oh good lord, no, no.

No parade, no.

No, no, no, none.

It was an anti-climax in a way. I didn’t feel it very much. I was so excited to be

home, but I thought later in the light of day I thought “Gee, that was pretty rough”, but any rate you didn’t want, you didn’t look for those sorts of things. So there we are, so that was the end of the war and I went back to the company and started with the company.

Oh, it’s huge, huge. In fact my father said to me when I get back to the company and I was works manager for a while then manager

while he was managing director, he said, “Now Frank, I want to say one thing, forget naval discipline, now you’re in charge of the works.” He said, “It doesn’t go”, he said, “Just hold yourself back.” He said, “I know what it’s like,” he said, “I’d been”, he’d been to see himself, and in war time on ships, cargo ships at that time in Australian waters, but that was the one little warning he said,

“Just be a bit careful, you might be used to being, the discipline and if a fellow doesn’t do it the right way you might let fly or something.” I said, “I don’t think so”, but any rate that was that. So then I got involved in the Chamber of Manufacturers because I’d served an apprenticeship I joined them. My Dad had been a chairman of the engineering section of the Chamber of Manufacturers and I joined the engineering allied trades division and then I eventually was

asked and appointed by the Chamber to represent the employers, metal trades employers on the Apprenticeship Commission and I was on the Apprenticeship Commission for 16 years and I loved that because I’d been a former apprentice myself and also the members of the Apprenticeship Commission were all former apprentices, be they trade unions or be they be employers or whatever. So from there I was asked to go on to a couple of college, technical college

councils and then I was approached, I went to Rotary and I was in Rotary for 40 years, became president of the Rotary Club of Melbourne and eventually a district governor of Rotary, district 280 with 40, 60 clubs in the area and it was while there that one of them approached me and said, “Look, we were wondering whether you would take on a job? We would like to put you up for it”, and I said, “What’s that?” And they said, “We want you to be Chairman of the State Council of Technical Education,” and I drew a big breath and I said, “Look, I’m

not really an academic.” They said, “That’s why we want you. We want somebody’s who away from it all and can see and think clearly and not be biased.” So I took on the job of Chairman of the State Council of Education and then went on to the Partridge committee which they formed as an investigation into going, forming up a new TAFE [Technical and Further Education] Board and I became Chairman of the TAFE Board of the Victoria, and I had some many, many

happy days and on various other things like Post Secretary Education Commission and so on, and for that and my Rotary work I was awarded an OBE in 1980 which I knew nothing about. I’ve got to emphasise that everything that happened to me right through my life came as a surprise. I had no idea, none whatever.

Yes, yes, it was.

Yes, from apprenticeship up into the, yeah, it was great. I loved it though because we were looking, my, we covered everything up to diploma standard and as I said earlier when we were talking about this when we had a break, I was looking after the Indians not the chiefs. The universities looked

after the chiefs and we looked after the Indians, and I loved it.

Oh yes. I didn’t think anything more than getting back to Betty and Liz and my family, mother and father, and also getting back to work again, getting into civvies. So no, it was all that I wanted.

We lived a very good middle-class life. Our home life was wonderful. My father worked awfully had to build the business up and all the things that he did and achieved, and they were many, he was a brilliant engineer, were ploughed back into the company, so we didn’t have lots and lots of millions of dollars because being

a family proprietary company you always had to keep up with the new stuff that was coming on to be able to be at the front of it all, all the time to be efficient, and we did all our own drawing and design and everything else like that.

No. No, I didn’t really.

No, I didn’t. Oh, there were moments I

suppose when you wondered where everybody was and what they were all up to, where they’d gone. We tried to keep in touch with one another, so much so that I had a meeting of four or five of my guys, mates of the engine room, the engine room artificers in our office at the works in Burnley and we formed a little association which eventually became the HMS, HMAS Kanimbla Association, and that was then taken over by a lot of

others, you know, but we got it going, and that, we kept up with another in that respect and

It was very important really because we were anxious to know if everybody had settled down alright and were there any with real problems and anything that we could do. That sort of mateship, that wanting to help type of thing, but they were so spread about. I mean they were from Brisbane, Sydney,

Western Australia. It was not easy to, do but I didn’t have any of my close friends, but I know a couple of fellows that went home and of course wives had just shot through on them and things like that. Some of them went home to some terrible places and positions, and yet when we talk about the Royal Navy those poor beggars, they really had something to go home. London was bombed, Coventry was bombed, all the main cities were bombed. They had no idea

whether their families were alive or dead. I mean their thoughts, at least when we were on the run on the Indian Ocean I remember we were talking about something and this fellow just said, “Listen, it’s alright for you fellows.” We were taking some Royal Naval ratings up to pick up a ship in Aden. They were on board and we were chatting to them and they said, “Well, it’s ok with you,” but he said, “I’ve just heard that Liverpool’s been bombed and that’s where I come from.” I turned around to the

guys when they were in the mess afterwards and said, “We’ve got nothing to worry about. We know ours are safe, what about these guys when they get home? They don’t know whether they’ve got a home, a family, anything, and that must’ve been ghastly for them.” So in a way the homecoming in Australia was not a dramatic thing. It was just a change back of, way of life, but we were so grateful to have got through it that we just wanted to be civvies and lap it all up as quick as we could and enjoy

it all with the families.

I sometimes dreamt about the Persian Gulf episode but it was a happy event. When I say a happy event it went according to the planning, and because the planning was so good and the execution was even better it was

not a terrible thing to look back on. It wouldn’t be like my friend, John Whicking thinking back to the days when he was getting beaten or Teddy Best up in Japan. They were the ones that have the nightmares. We didn’t have enough horrific things happening to us, but I did a bit on the Persian Gulf. Yes, it was just that I’d dreamt I was drowning in the engine room and things like that but not very specific as

being something that worried you for months on end.

Yes, definitely, definitely. That’s a great question. We were lucky,

navy, until you’re in action you led a very, very good life. It was nothing compared to the army for a start, lesser for the air force but for us, no. I still get chipped by friends about, you know, “Go and get sheets at night and have plum pudding and apple pie on Sundays”, you know, in a mess, clean and everything else. No, the environment and everything

else, unless, it wasn’t until you really got into battle you got belted about but then you would have some comprehension and it might be slightly comparable to what the terrible things the boys did in the desert and in the islands and everything else. No, it was definitely a much easier life from that point of view.

Oh yes. I mean

if one in, all in there. I mean if we got torpedoed or whatever. Now that was on from the moment you left. As I said, the moment you left port, I hate to repeat myself, until you got back into port again you never felt safe. From the moment you went out you were at war, from the moment you left the port and at the mercy of whatever may happen, the elements, the enemy or whatever might happen inside the ship.

No, it was

Yeah. We made our fun on board. We had hockey, deck hockey a lot and we had all our various division teams, you know, the engine room team, the stokers’ team, the cooks and stewards team, the supply department, the forecastlemen, the topmen, the quarter deckman and that was like Australian Rules football. It was pretty big and

it was pretty tough stuff too. We played a lot of deck hockey. There was a big space between the, it was right in the middle of the ship between the accommodation on port and starboard ends of the ship and where normally in peace time they used to have their dances there. You know, where they danced right across the ship from one side to the other and that was our recreation field as it were, and we had shooting practise. We used to have rifle practise and pistol

practise and I blew my copy book on one occasion there. We all had to do a compulsory. They had targets right on the poop deck and we had to have pistol drill because we could carry pistols when we, no good carrying rifles when you’re trying to board ships, and hand grenades, and they used to have these big old Smith & Wesson pistols and you had to do like this and you’d go click one, two, three, four and you face six and then

you just drop your arm down and then you go click, click, click, click just to make sure, oh you had to do that before you dropped your arm down. On one occasion I thought “I’d fire the six”. I fired the five and I went click, click, click, click, bang and I put a bullet straight through the quarter deck and furrowed this nice bit of quarter deck. Well, did I cop it from the officer of the watch. So I was sent below, “Get down Newman below, where you belong and don’t you surface on my

deck again. Bloody engine room”, he said as I walked away.

Oh, it was pretty big. I was scared. I didn’t think I had the

capacity or the ability or the knowledge to be able to be a full blown officer. That was silly of me but that was me. I mean after all when you’re a petty officer and a chief petty officer you’re fairly well, technically you’re pretty confident, and from a disciplinary point of view you were pretty confident because you were senior to all the other members, leading stokers and all the stokers and those people. I

even looked after the RANs in Flinders Depot when I was there. That was good too, but the RAN drivers. The, it was good in a way but I was very apprehensive about my ability to fulfil the capacity of an officer, an engineer officer. I didn’t feel in myself, I stupidly you know, I was really qualified

like all these guys ‘cause they’d had years of experience. The one thing that I didn’t realise was that I got a hell of a lot of respect from the guys in the lower deck because I had been in the lower deck and consequently on watch and everything else I had a great rapport with the guys, and I had to still remember I was an officer at the same time, I can still remember I’m

part of the team. So every time I had any tough job to do, I’d select these guys and I’d bring them together as a team because I knew a lot of that was never done in some areas, not on our ship but in lots of ships. They were told “To do this and told to do that”, and we used to work as a team and I showed them why because an engineer officer told me to know, you know, “Not to take things for granted”. You remember the lesson I got there? And I’ve never forgotten

that and that held me in marvellous stead. So I can say that yes, I finished up, when I went to the cruiser where they were all permanent navy officers and I was a reserve, well that was like, you know, you come from another planet and it took them a while to, they accepted me as a fellow, you know, but the engineers were great because they knew I was there and I had to get my qualifications.

Engineers, I said earlier and I repeat it again, they couldn’t help but impart the knowledge and help you along the way. They were great, and that happened on every ship that I was on and every engineering area that I came in, and even out in civvy life, the same thing. They never sort of looked over their shoulder and, in case somebody was breathing down their neck and they might take over your job or that attitude.

But as an officer, yeah, I fell into it quite comfortably in the finish. I liked it as a matter of fact, but there was that difference but the fact that I’d had two years of experience overseas and had been recognised for it, I suppose that helped a bit too ‘cause I remember taking classes at Flinders with the motor mechanics and all the time they were asking me questions about “What I

did overseas and how did I get my mention and what was it like and everything else?”, you know, anything to divert what we were supposed to be talking about ‘cause you know, you didn’t like to talk about it very much but I used to give them some idea. They wanted to get some idea of what’s it going to be like, you know, what are we going to see, and they were going into smaller fast fairmile craft and coastal craft and that sort of thing that all came in long after we went away. So we came back as pretty old

hands by 1942.

Not much, no, not very much.

Well, a lot of it, I don’t think I felt they would understand really, what it was like to

do all this. I certainly told them about the funny things that happened on the ship. I told them about the places we saw, people we met, like going to Colombo and going up to the tea plantations and seeing the big show they have with 100 elephants all dressed up in Kandy and things that happened on board, but not very

much about the day to day life or what we spent and what we did. Perhaps a bit of the Persian Gulf, yes, but never talked about the landings at Balik[papan] or Tarakan or anything like. Any rate we were so interested in their growing up and what they were achieving I think, but no, Bet and I talked about it a bit but not a great deal.

No, no, none at all. I just knew she was there and waiting, and she was there and hoping I’d get back. So, and that’s why she flew up to Brisbane and when we had this problem with the refrigeration and I was there to look, as part of the repair work that was going on, and I’ll

tell you extraordinary how she managed to get there. She’d heard from somebody who’d come down and he said, “By the way Frank sends his love and all his kind regards”, and she said, “Well, where is he?” And he said, “Well, he’s going to be where he is for 10 days.” She said, “Oh great”, she said, “Have you any idea where it is?” And he said, “Well haven’t you got a cousin in Brisbane?” She said, “Yes, we have.” Well he said, “He’s going”, he didn’t say Brisbane, “Have you got a cousin up there somewhere?” She said, “Yes.”

He said, “I think he’s going to visit them”, ‘cause it was Brisbane. So what does she do? Somehow got a plane when you couldn’t get planes, she hopped a plane, up she came. I’m on watch, I get a phone call from one of the hotels in, big hotel in Brisbane to say, “Hi, I’m here, when can you come ashore?” So that was fun when we did that. The other one was when we were coming home and we had the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service]

on board on the Westralia and we came from Morotai with them on board. No, we picked them up in Darwin and there were 350 of them and we were lectured by the skipper and everybody else that if we went anywhere near B deck, we’d be keel-hauled, slaughtered and emptied out of the navy. “Do not dare go near where these girls were”. So you can imagine all these

sailors with 300 girls there. Any rate away we go and we’re coming down the top of Australia and we’re coming down Cairns and these balmy tropical nights. Well it was too much for the girls, they got fed up and started singing “Don’t Fence Us In” on the way down. So I don’t know whether love laughed at locksmiths there and was there any little romances, but that was funny with all these girls, but the sailors were so scared they never went near. They didn’t go near the place.

So that was an interesting one too.

Well first of all the obvious one, I came back a better qualified engineer than I ever went back. I came back a better qualified person, very much a better qualified person. I had grown up immeasurably from 22 years of age to 28 years of

age or more. I had a great appreciation of working closely with people, getting to know them, getting to hear all about their personal problems, having to deal with them with their personal problems, particularly as an officer. They’d come to see you about all sorts of things, their marital problems you know. They just had somebody they had to talk to.

All this broadens your outlook, you’re thrown these challenges which you had to deal with, with the best of your ability, and I feel that the navy made me from a point of view as a person. I came away very fortunate because I’d had a career that aided and abetted all this to give me the opportunities. I mean there are so many of my friends who never got the opportunities that I got

and that sort of thing, and the ships and that, just was the luck of the draw where you went and where you were sent and finally I think “I felt better equipped and better an all round person to deal with the problems of what I might face in civvy life”.

Well originally they weren’t, but now they are, yes. Right in the early days, you know as I said when I walked out of Royal Park, that just hit me and I thought “I can’t believe this”. One minute I’m here, thanks

very much, have a good time, best of luck in your civvy [civilian] life. That was it. The impact of that was very strong for a while, but fortunately the family life was so good that it made up for all those sorts of little things that ran through your mind at the time, and I felt too it helped me to become a better peoples’ person, dealing with people. That became no problem

to me in my civilian life, none at all, and no worries whether they were unions, whether they were what, I just felt I could handle it and I think all of my background that I told you did that, ‘cause we were able to talk to the unions in their language and we knew how to, we weren’t quite Boltes, but we understood because in those days when we were dealing with big union problems, most of them had come up the hard way and we’d come up the hard way and we were on common ground

but today it’s different. They’re all coming through at a middle level, trade union officials, management officials, none of them know what’s going on down on the shop floor and that’s one of the greatest problems of today. They don’t even know what’s going on in their own businesses.

Every day, I would go through into our works, into the boiler shop or the store and have a walk right around, talk to the guys, see how things were going long before I ever got up to the office, and one of my great friends,

John Whicking, who died recently, the one who was the POW in Germany, he became Chairman and Managing Director the Nicholas Kiwi Group, now that’s a very big job and he saved both companies from going under when they became public. A wonderful guy, tremendous guy, but he never went into the Nicholas or Kiwi buildings before he’d been right through the shop floor, talked to the girls in the canteen, had a word with Charlie, “By the way Mary,

how’s your children, how are they going? Oh, how’s your mother, is she alright?” Little chats like that before he ever got to the top. We often talked about that and we reckon that was one of the great failings of modern management today. They come in through with their MBA’s [Master of Business Administration] and all these Mickey Mouse things. None of them have had the opportunity and I think when my father said “I had to become an apprentice”, I thought “It was a bit hard”. It was the greatest privilege he did for me and my life ever. He

knew what he was about.

Yes, we did because there was a lot more going for it in those days because of the fact that we had another man,

different to the ones we’re seeing in the Middle East today, who was going to be a dominant personality throughout the world. He had this Aryan commitment that their people were going to be the finest and the strongest people in the world and he was going to conquer the world. Now in this instance when he started and he first went to Poland, Austria, Poland and then finally set for, started bombing

Britain and France was getting involved, we don’t forget we’re part of the old British Empire. So what was happening to England was happening to us virtually and your loyalty, your royalty, royal feelings for the royal family and your loyalties were good and strong. I mean every Monday at your state school your flag went up, the Australian flag and you sang God save the King or the Queen or whatever it

was and then you’d have a little talk about the Empire and what it was, and I can tell you that flag, that Australian flag of ours became a very strong part and it did right through the war. It was marvellous that we had this Aussie flag. When we were with the, on loan to the Brits we had the White Ensign, which we were very proud of because that meant

we were with the finest navy in the world any rate, and we had the, we flew our Australian flag on the stern at times, but not often. We, oh no, I’m sorry, we had it on the, not on the stern, we had it on the bow and when we came into port we put up our flag and were pretty damn pleased to put the Australian flag up. We thought it, we loved it, you know.

Caps they wore were HMS, no name of the ship or anything like that. In Australia they wore the HMAS tallies, so there was a certain amount of pride and there wasn’t a second thought that we hadn’t to help Britain out, not a second thought because we felt “If she went under, Europe went under, where are we going to finish up?” Because the Germans were pretty strong all through the islands in the Pacific

and like the Persian Gulf, I didn’t mention that an operation countenance, the Germans had 5,000 tourists in Persia, tourists, but they were a Panzer Division, you know. So they were all spread everywhere ready to go. So it was a total war that we had everybody’s backing. It was just total, so it made a hell of a difference to what we’re talking about today. Today is just such

a mess and it’s got so involved that loyalties can be distorted and flung about all over the place because of this. And also we didn’t have the media who didn’t want to virtually American-wise try and run the war. You know, want to be in with the troops and all that sort of thing, showing everything that happens, so that every little thing they did was analysed by the media, whether it was right or wrong. None of that happened because nobody said anything and if any newspaper

or any person or any reporter reported even any fact of the war he was gone, out. So that was the difference.

Yes.

No. I think we’ve covered it very

well. I hope I’ve covered it very well. I just can’t thank you enough for the way you’ve done it for me and the way you’re doing it for me. It’s been an absolute joy. I thought, I was very apprehensive, very apprehensive but I finished, I came back pretty relaxed out of it and I think you so much.

Thank you too.