A Bit Of A Life: From A Boy Sailor To Demobilisatio

By George Osborne and Dave Osborne

This book covers a 14-year period when the author progressed from being a boy sailor in the UK to become a chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. It offers a very interesting blend of life experiences of a growing young man through some frightening experiences and some happy times. Life as a boy sailor was exciting for him, but once the dark period of the WW2 emerged, things changed radically, and his knowledge and courage were tested in some dramatic experiences which are well described in his book. When he moved into the submarine service in late 1942, a very new experience awaited him and by then he was a married man entering fatherhood in the coming year and already wondering what to do when the war finally ended. The final chapter describes sadness and regrets as the author’s life radically changed with the pressures of finding a new profession and becoming a family member with three children and there was always a lingering regret at having taken the wrong pathway despite the emerging successes of his children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jul 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369492284

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Copyright © 2023 by George Osborne and Dave Osborne.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 10/27/2023

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CONTENTS

Dedications

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1 Early Days

Chapter 2 Big Decision

Chapter 3 The First Ship

Chapter 4 The China Station—Afloat

Chapter 5 The China Station—Ashore

Chapter 6 Prelude to War

Chapter 7 Northern Patrol

Chapter 8 Mediterranean—Afloat

Chapter 9 Axis Power Italy and the Parallel War

Chapter 10 Mediterranean—Ashore

Chapter 11 Interlude from the Sea

Chapter 12 Towards Life in a Cigar Tube

Chapter 13 HMS Adamant and Her Fourth Submarine Flotilla

Chapter 14 Submarine Service Almost Over

Chapter 15 Towards a Bowler Hat

Chapter 16 Family Life, Thereafter!

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Related Further Reading

You never enjoy the world aright.

Till the sea itself floweth in your veins

Till you are clothed with the heavens,

And crowned by the stars:

And perceive yourself to be the sole heir.

Of the whole world, and more than so,

Because men are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you . . .

—Thomas Traherne, Century of Meditations, 1665

Full quote source: ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.’

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Author: George Osborne taken in the 1982

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Son: David George Osborne

DEDICATIONS

Adeline Constance (Connie) Osborne—a mother who fell for a sailor

1915–2000

The Lord, gave me greatness of heart to see,

The difference between duty and his love for me.

Give me a task to do each day,

to help pass the time while he is away;

Give me the understanding, so that I may know,

That when duty calls he must go;

and, dear Lord, when he goes out to sea,

please bring him home safely to me.

I did all these things but when he returned.

I realised the sailor does never come home!

Navy Wife’s Prayer. Author unknown

Patricia Constance (Patti) Osborne—the daughter who left us far too soon

1947–2012

Forever loved and still very much missed.

FOREWORD

Michael White

I N 1932, A sixteen-year-old George Osborne joined the naval training establishment of Ganges and began a naval career in the Royal Navy that lasted for fourteen years. Over the course of those years, George served in destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and submarines in peace and in war. He served in European, African, Mediterranean, Indian, and Asian waters. He was sunk in the Mediterranean but was one of the few lucky survivors, and later, his submarine Tally-Ho was rammed by a Japanese destroyer but managed to make it back to the submarine base. He left the Royal Navy in 1946 and entered into an engineering employment until his retirement and eventual death in 1997. In the course of this time, George compiled the diaries of his life and career, and we are all the beneficiaries of his efforts by his leaving this outstanding book.

George married his beloved wife, Constance in Manchester, and they had three children. Their daughters, Carol and Pat, rescued the manuscript from their father’s belongings, and their brother, Dr David Osborne, the highly regarded engineer, has edited the manuscript into this book. While there are many books on naval careers, there are few that record so many hazardous naval adventures in so much detail or were written with such clarity. In my own Australian naval career, I served in surface ships and then for five years in submarines, four of which were in Royal Navy submarines, so I venture to suggest I have some inkling of this splendid man. In the service, George was a communicator, which was the branch into which the quickest and best were drafted; he was also a volunteer to join the navy and then for service in submarines, which indicates that, here, we have a man with a strong adventurous spirit, and he disciplined himself to write a long-detailed narrative of his life—a highly disciplined man.

To illustrate some aspects of George Osborne’s adventurous life, I take the example of his time in the submarine Tally-Ho in 1944, based on Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) (p. 412). Their engagement with the Japanese destroyer in the Indian Ocean was extremely hazardous for them as they nearly sank, but, fortunately, when the Japanese destroyer tried to ram it, its propeller only slashed the outer parts, the port ballast tanks, but not enough for the boat to lose buoyancy and roll over (pp. 406–409). They were given a hero’s welcome by the fleet when escorted into Colombo, and the photo of Tally-Ho’s damage (on p. 414) tells a dramatic story. The RN Submarine Service operations had the highest British losses in WWII, except perhaps the RAAF bomber command,¹ but George Osborne survived.

The connection between George Osborne’s life and Australia is strong in this book. George’s son, David, lives in Brisbane and is an Australian. George’s old boat, Tally-Ho, came to serve in the Sixth Submarine Flotilla based in Sydney for several years after the war. However, the connections with George and Tally-Ho go much further.

The first lieutenant of Tally-Ho’s sister vessel, HMS Thorn, was the Australian lieutenant Chester Parker, RNVR, a Rhodes scholar lawyer, when Thorn was sunk with all hands in the Mediterranean in 1940,² not so very far from where George himself had been sunk in his destroyer. Finally, I could mention my own connection with George in Tally-Ho, as I was the first lieutenant of a sister submarine, HMS Tiptoe, in an earlier naval career when she entered her last commission in early 1967. Of course, my Tiptoe was modernised, but it still had that wretched low bridge, which meant we bridge watchkeepers were frequently wet and cold when the swell rolled over us. Tally-Ho’s ship emblem was a fast fox (its motto was ‘Swiftly’), but Tiptoe’s emblem was a ballerina on tiptoe, and we had some of the London Royal Ballet ballerinas as our guests at our commissioning ceremony. However, two years later, at the decommissioning, they had a ballerina dancing on tiptoe on the casing.

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HMS Tiptoe at decommissioning in 1969 showing the

low bridge and a ballerina on tiptoe on the casing

Another high risk of submarine service was tuberculosis, which George was diagnosed as having in Tally-Ho towards the end of the war (pp. 457–458). Because of the damp and cramped conditions on submarines, the passage of TB from one crewman to another in the boat was frequent. Fortunately, closer examination revealed the shadow on his lung was not TB, and he was released (p. 458) from the TB ward. The war was then over, and the submarine service had only limited billets for someone as highly skilled as the chief petty officer telegraphist, so George left on 16 August 1946 when his term of service came to an end (pp. 479). I will not recount the hard life George had in establishing himself in civilian life, but, as one expects from a man of such ability and determination, he achieved this and, as I have mentioned, was a section leader in an engineering manufacturing company for the rest of his working life.

We should all be grateful, therefore, to George Osborne and to his son, Dave Osborne, for bringing this book to fruition as it is a valuable addition to naval history and naval scholarship. I extend my gratitude to the author and the editor for a job well done—bravo, Zulu George and David Osborne.³

Michael White

Dr Michael White OAM KC

Adjunct Professor of Maritime Law

TC Beirne School of Law

University of Queensland, Brisbane

PREFACE

Dave Osborne (son of the author)

M ANY YEARS AFTER the end of the Second World War, my father, George, once echoed the words that I read many years later by admiral of the fleet, Lord Boyce, KG GCB KSTJ DL. ⁴

Submarines have been my life. Despite the fact that my seagoing days are some years behind me, and I have done many things since, ask me who I am, and I will reply ‘a submariner’. I know all too well the sacrifices made by our families and how hard it is for them during the long, silent periods when their partners, or parents, or children, are at sea.

Submariners operate in a hostile environment every time they go to sea, whether or not an enemy is present. A submarine has only a 10% reserve of buoyancy, so very little water needs to enter the boat before it is no longer able to surface. This single fact has led to submariners becoming something of a breed apart. They need absolute trust in each other, and all must have a thorough understanding of their boat’s complex systems, which any one of them might be called upon to operate in an emergency. So, no matter your rank, if you haven’t earned the coveted dolphin badge then your voice carries no weight.

But my father started his career as a boy sailor in 1932 with no conscious intention of ever working in warships or submarines. In fact, his initial fascination with naval life as a growing boy was sailing ships and the era of the adventurers who sailed into unknown seas, much the dream of many boys, but somehow my father always wanted to live that dream. So, after what appeared to be a frustrating time at school and an unhappy time at home, he joined the navy, intending to work hard and learn quickly so as to progress to become a good sailor. On joining the navy, my father had no specific desires or aspirations regarding which branch of the navy he wanted to join. When I was a young boy, l recall him saying that he originally liked the idea of being a drummer boy, but I don’t think he was ever sorry for the direction he ended up taking as a wireless telegrapher. So, perhaps, based on demonstrated above-average cognitive ability, he became a boy telegraphist and learned how to read the Morse code, how to write down signals, how to operate a Morse key, the composition of wireless messages, the colours and meanings of flags and their Morse code equivalents, wireless organisation of ships in company, or sailing, and, seemingly, this became the chosen pathway that took him to over twenty countries, assignments on various types of floating ships, and eventually into submarines, which proved to be a destiny. I remember when I was very small asking my dad on one of his stays at home what the difference was between boats, ships, and submarines, and his immediate answer seemed very logical even to a small boy—that is, a boat is a ship when it is so big that you can put a boat on it; Royal Navy submarines are an exception, and always termed boats despite the fact that they are unlikely to fit on a ship!

When my dad retired from the RN on his thirtieth birthday, 16 August 1946, and started to look for a job in Civvy Street.⁵ He was feeling a great deal of trepidation. How could he best use the skills and knowledge gained in twelve years in the navy? How would he cope with a job in a factory or an engineering works that required him to be there every weekday until retiring at age sixty? Would he have to start from scratch learning new skills, and what sort of role could he expect to be offered? And, most importantly, would he be a good husband to my mother and a good father to my sister and me? All these thoughts balanced against remaining in the service, carrying on with the only life he had known as an adult, and probably retiring at forty on a decent pension must have been buzzing around in his mind. In a letter sent to me much later in life, he wrote explaining how disruptive his homecoming was and how upset he was to find that during his absence I had ‘adopted’ my maternal grandfather as my father. He felt that ever since joining the navy he had lived a somewhat sheltered life where he had been what he called ‘mollycoddled’, wrapped up in a life of service discipline, but one in which every domestic need was catered for leaving them entirely free to cope with the requirements of the ship. This was particularly true in his case having almost run away from home to become a boy sailor and from then on being subjected to what he called ‘vigorous training’ in the ways of the service. He and his fellow sailors all had their dreams and fantasies about the outside world.

‘All of them’, Dad had said, ‘also had memories of home and wrote letters, had photographs, saved keepsakes, and dreamt about life when this war was finally over.’ But the reality of civilian life for him and a lot of his peers was a completely unknown entity. When the war was over and done with, he left the service and had struggled to find work with the pressure growing with every month that passed. Now with two young children, me and my sister Carol, and another soon due, a wife who no longer could work and was unwell, they were forced to live off his gratuity and final service payments, which quickly dwindled away. To make things worse, the winter after he was demobilised turned out to be one of the worst on record adding more pressure onto the ever-increasingly desperate search for a job. But they battled through it and eventually settled in a nice home in Longsight, where my new sister Patricia arrived in that cold winter of 1947, and, for a while, our life seemed to be on an even keel. This part of his life I shared, and I well recall those early times where as a family we realised life would be a real struggle, but he did eventually get a job in Trafford Park, Manchester, where he settled down and rose to being section leader in a company that made large electrical motors. He eventually worked there for twenty-one years and found that a lot of what he had learned whilst in service served him well in learning the new job, gaining in confidence as a civilian, getting promotions, and earning the respect of his fellow workmates just as he had done in the Royal Navy. However, when he eventually left, it was because the company was downsizing, and instead of the gold watch he had also anticipated getting, all he received was an inscribed but undated pewter mug, which drew some cynical thoughts at the time. He worked for a few more years continuing the equipment testing work in another company that made large diesel engines for ships, etc., and taking on a couple of part-time jobs to add to the pension, and it was during this time he started to write his memories on life at sea.

At about this time, he connected with a former RN sailor, Douglas Edward Reeman, writing novels under a pseudonym Alexander Kent.⁶ Reeman’s debut novel, A Prayer for the Ship, was published in 1958, but he is most famous for his series of Napoleonic naval stories, the main character of which is Richard Bolitho, and, later, his nephew, Adam Bolitho. These were the books that most inspired my dad, and he mentioned them many times when I was in my youth. Reeman also wrote a series of novels about several generations of the fictional Blackwood family, who served in the Royal Marines from the 1850s to the 1970s, and a non-fiction account of his own Second World War experiences, D-Day: A Personal Reminiscence (1984), which my dad referenced in his own notes. Douglas Reeman used the pseudonym Alexander Kent (the real name of a friend and naval officer who died during the Second World War) for his Bolitho novels and his own name for his other novels and non-fiction. Dad had all read his novels and most of his non-fiction books and, as they were a similar age, shared similar navy experiences. l think they may have met or at least been in communication by about the time Dad started to write this book. Dad told us that Douglas joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman at about the same age as himself, sixteen. He was on HMS Ganges when it was sunk, and he was injured and then more seriously injured again in the D-Day landings in 1940. He stayed in the navy after the war but never went to sea again because of his injuries, working in other capacities, and, of course, he wrote many novels, advised on war films, etc. I believe he joined the Metropolitan Police after completing his RN service. It may be a coincidence, but one of my dad’s favourite books was Torpedo Run, written in 1981, and there is a dedication to ‘George’ at the front of this book. There is little doubt these books kindled the flame that inspired dad to write his own story. l often think Dad could have gone back to work in a different capacity in the navy as Douglas did and eventually found work that would have allowed him to have his family with him, albeit not in Manchester. In hindsight, it would probably have been a better family life for all of us, but life is not like that, and A Bit of a Life is his legacy.

This book was to have been completed many years ago, originally handwritten and a labour of love without doubt, and it was always my dad’s hope that it would be published and become accessible to family, friends, and those interested in hearing about the exploits of a young lad who ran away from home to join the navy and see the world. My sisters rescued the handwritten draft in 1998 after our father had died in October 1997 and our mother needed to move into hospital offering palliative care for dementia, eventually passing away there in August 2000. My sisters eventually took it to the Imperial War Museum in London in 2002, where they very kindly accepted it along with some pictures and other paper items, and it was stored there in an archive for all to read. I collected a copy of it from Carol and first planned to produce this book in 2014 after visiting the IWM and meeting the most helpful and encouraging Mr Stephen Walton there. A couple of days later, I ran in and completed the London Marathon, and my mind was full of my dad’s book, driving my determination to complete both the run and the book.

When dad died, my sister Carol, who was living in Motueka, New Zealand, at the time, told us of a psychic experience relating to Dad the night after he died and only heard from our sister Pat the morning after because of the time difference. In Motueka, she often cycled to the wharf to watch the sun set over the sea, and on this night, the sun was setting as the fishing boats came in, and one seemed to stand out. It was the last one to leave the harbour, sailing slowly, and it shone with a luminescent glow. She saw its name clearly painted on the side . . . it was called Calypso, the same name of our dad’s ship that was sunk in June 1940. She likes to think that he was letting her know he was safely home. Carol could not travel to the UK to attend Dad’s funeral and sent a copy of Sting’s song (below) to Pat when asked for something to be read out at Dad’s funeral. The song was written to channel his grief after the death of his own father in 1989, and we all thought it was something that Dad would have enjoyed and appreciated.

I feel sure you will agree once you have read and hopefully enjoyed this book that it is a very interesting story taking place in a time of enormous global strife that is now a distant but still frightening period.

Sting’s song

The Wild Wild Sea⁷

Sting (1990)

I saw it again this evening

Black sail in a pale yellow sky

And just as before in a moment

It was gone where the grey gulls fly.

If it happens again I shall worry

That only a strange ship could fly

And my sanity scans the horizon

In the light of the darkening sky.

That night as I walked in my slumber

I waded into the sea strand

And I swam with the moon and her lover

Until I lost sight of the land

I swam till the night became morning

Black sail in a reddening sky

Found myself on the deck of a rolling ship

So far where no grey gulls fly

All around me was silence

As if mocking my frail human hopes

And a question mark hung in the canvas

For the wind that had died in the ropes

I may have slept for an hour

I may have slept for a day

For I woke in a bed of white linen

And the sky was the colour of clay.

At first just a rustle of canvas

And the gentlest breath on my face

But a galloping line of white horses

Said that soon we were in for a race

The gentle sigh turned to a howling

And the grey sky she angered to black

And my anxious eyes searched the horizon

With the gathering sea at my back

Did I see the shade of a sailor

On the bridge through the wheelhouse pane

Held fast to the wheel of the rocking ship

As I squinted my eyes in the rain

For the ship had turned into the wind

Against the storm to brace

And underneath the sailor’s hat

I saw my father’s face

If a prayer today is spoken

Please offer it for me

When the bridge to heaven is broken

And you’re lost on the wild wild sea

Lost on the wild wild sea . . .

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HM Submarine Tally-Ho—my dad’s last ship—a ‘cigar tube’ full of memories

CHAPTER 1

Early Days

I T WAS 16 August 1916, obviously not a day that I can recall because it was the day I was born, but by all accounts, it was also a memorable day for others too because many brave men were wounded and killed on the continent and elsewhere, fighting in the so-called Kaiser’s War. My own father was in the merchant navy and had been reported missing after his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, so I never ever saw him.

My mother already had two other children, both to different fathers. The eldest, William, was adopted by a Scottish family, and I only ever got to meet him once. I was only about three at the time and he was about fourteen, and he had just enlisted as a boy bandsman in the Royal Scots. I have only the vague recollection of this slight figure in a khaki tunic, tartan trews, and a glengarry, but, sadly, I never saw him again. The other child was Arthur, and we grew up together. He was five years older than me, and it seems he was jealous of my arrival, a hurdle we never overcame with the result that as we grew older, we regularly fought and were never close.

We lived in Ancoats, a Manchester suburb in a small terraced house with no bath and an outside toilet. There was a lamp post almost outside the front door, a gas lamp, of which I have some very painful memories. I split my head open playing blind man’s bluff, and I can vividly recall my mother carrying me at a run along Gray Street and Every Street to Ancoats Hospital with blood pouring out onto her white blouse. I still bear the scar as a reminder. We had a cat, a ginger female, which regularly caught mice just for fun. We never saw her eat one, but she used to bite the heads off and leave the remainder under the rug for us to find. As a child, I found this curiously interesting! There was a man living with us, Jim Mason was his name, and, for years, I was led to believe he was my father, and I loved him dearly. I loved him more than any other person in the world until I met my dear wife, Connie, over twenty years later.

Another good memory of the time was ‘wash day’ (always a Monday), when out would come the dolly tub, rubbing board, along with the smaller of our two tin baths. The copper would be filled and its fire lit, and there the process would begin along with much rubbing and scrubbing and manipulation of the dolly. The first object to be washed was me, often whilst standing up in the tin bath. Then all the clothes would follow. As this all occurred out in the yard, the neighbours were often treated to a raucous show of shouting and screaming. The washing line, as for all along the street, was strung across the street, so on washday, the whole street showed off its billowing washing lines. I don’t recall it raining very often, but when it did, there was a mad rush to collect everything and take it indoors. However, for some reason, it didn’t seem to rain very often in those days, even in Manchester!

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Picture of a washing dolly and tub

Another fond memory was our move to another house when I was about three. This was a much bigger house with two big rooms, a kitchen and scullery on the ground floor, two large cellars below, three bedrooms above on the first floor, and two attics at the top, in one of which lived a Mr Plum, a one-legged ex-soldier. He would sometimes sit picking out pieces of shrapnel from his stump, which I found quite fascinating. He was a cheerful and very humorous man who made me laugh a lot, but one day he was gone when I got home, and I never found out why he left. My father ‘Jim’ had two jobs—his main job being at the tram shed on Princes Road, where he was a chargehand handyman and worked permanent night shift. His other job was an auctioneer’s assistant, which meant that some days he didn’t get much sleep, a factor that in no small part led to his early death.

My father’s second job was a source of much fun and pleasure for my brother and me because the house we were living in belonged to the auctioneer and the two rooms downstairs were used as a showroom area. As a result, there were always some very interesting articles for us to play with (when no one was looking, of course)—for example, rocking horses, ride-on engines, and carts. During that period, there was also a model helter-skelter, which was assembled in our very long backyard on which we spent many happy hours. Sometimes, Father had to go to a house or shop to catalogue the contents after the Inventory had been carried out. I always used to be happiest on the occasions when he took me along with him. Somehow, there was always something that became my own, so I was never short of toys, books, etc. My brother also benefitted, but he had started at school, so he was never able to join in these ‘voyages of discovery’—another bone of contention between us. I recall once when we were playing in the front room, we found two revolvers in a drawer of some article of furniture, and we were having a great time riding the range on the two real pony-skin rocking horses when we were discovered by my father. He really laid into us, seizing first the two guns, which it turned out were real guns, and not only that, both were loaded, but, fortunately, the safety catches were on and very stiff, so they hadn’t been released. We would not be allowed in the showrooms for a long, long time after this incident.

It was at about this time that we moved to a new house again, but in the same street, moving from 163 to 145, where we stayed until shortly after the death of my stepfather. The auction rooms were re-established, and life for me continued to be full of fun and a very happy period of my life. I was very much a loner at that time, but I cannot remember it being of concern to me. There seemed almost so much for me to do. Shortly after our move, a certain toy shop went bankrupt, and it fell into our auctioneer’s hands. I ‘inherited’ a whole fleet of clockwork motor cars and trucks, and my brother got a complete Meccano set (no. 1 to 7), which meant you could make anything mechanical with them including ships and planes.

At this time, the upstairs front room was empty, and my brother and I could use it as a playroom. I took great delight in lining up all my cars and trucks, all wound up and ready to go, placed behind a broom handle and releasing them so they would race across the room. This, of course, involved monopolising most of the room, which my brother didn’t like, resulting in disputes and then occasionally fights. In frustration, one day, he picked up the broom handle and laid into my fleet, and this led to an almighty fight until Mother intervened, and that was the end of that privilege! Amongst the other treasures we had from the demise of the toyshop were some mechanical animals, one of which was a quite realistic clockwork mouse, which led to more trouble. My parents had ‘company’ one evening, and about six or seven mixed guests had arrived for supper. Way past our bedtime, I crept downstairs and released the mouse, waiting only long enough to hear the ladies start to scream. I fled back upstairs to bed and leapt into bed, feigning sleep. Nobody was fooled by this, least of all my mother, and retribution was swift and effective.

When I was about four years old, we acquired another lodger, successor to Mr Plum, but this time it was a lady with a small daughter. The lady was well known in the neighbourhood being a hairdresser of some repute, with an establishment in a then fashionable area of All Saints, known as Maison Carter. The hairdresser stayed with us for some years, and her young daughter Peggy became my playmate and childhood sweetheart. Consequently, wherever Peggy went, so went I.

One very impressive occasion we attended together was a society wedding at which Peggy and I were small attendants. It happened in 1923 and was a very grand affair, although I remember little of the main characters. However, I do recall a tall military officer in full colourful regimental uniform complete with, to my great joy, a proper sword. The ceremony took place at the fashionable All Saints church, which is now sadly long gone following the Manchester Blitz and was later replaced by a public garden. The church gave its name to a suburb in Manchester. We went to the church in a horse-drawn carriage, and the bridal coach was drawn by two white horses each with decorated mains and tails blowing out in the breeze. After the ceremony, we returned to the bride’s erstwhile home, a large semi-detached house in Oxford Road, almost facing the main entrance to Owen’s College (founding institution of the University of Manchester). There was a large front lawn at the front of the house where all the photographs were taken. It must have been a dull day as the pictures were taken using a flashlight and a huge plate camera. It all seemed to take hours until finally we went in for breakfast and a ceremonial cake cutting for which, of course, the groom’s sword was employed.

In retrospect, I must sincerely thank Mrs Carter for many good memories of my childhood, but perhaps the most vivid of all memories was my first pantomime, a visit I will never forget. The visit happened when I was about six, and the pantomime was Cinderella at the old Manchester Hippodrome on Oxford Street (later moved to Ardwick). I had never imagined anything could be so grand, and I was truly impressed, and this cultivated a great interest, and I enjoyed many more shows through following years including variety and circuses and, of course, other pantomimes. My first real holiday to Blackpool was with Mrs Carter, and, perhaps typically, it rained most of the time, so we didn’t venture out much from the guest house near the famous South Pier that we were staying in.

Peggy was always dancing as little girls tend to do, and in later years, she went on to win many awards for dancing and became a fully certificated dancing instructor somewhere near Edinburgh. She was a very pretty girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, always lively and affectionate. When she and her mother left Manchester, I was desolate, and we kept in touch, but it was a few years before we met again when her mother returned to Manchester and set up home in nearby Rusholme. By that time, I had also left home and joined the navy, so only a couple of fleeting visits occurred.

My father’s auctioneering job occasioned many trips out and about the Manchester area to mark up house contents into lots for the auction. This occurred before I embarked on regular schooling, and I enjoyed the journeys by horse and cart and then foraging around looking at all the interesting things in people’s houses. One house in Cheadle, I remember, was especially interesting. It belonged to an obviously much-travelled gentleman, who it seemed had spent a lot of time in Africa, which was full of all sorts of things to delight a small boy, including spears, shields, masks, guns, and wonderful, interesting curios obviously accumulated from many years of travel by a now long dead man. What a day I had, but not without a few cuffs around the ear from my dad.

Another joy of childhood was the frequent visits we paid to Belle Vue Zoological Gardens, which was not a cock’s stride away for my home. To get there necessitated a halfpenny tram ride on my very favourite Manchester tram, an old single-decker high-speed open-ended number 53 from Old Trafford to Belle Vue. Years later, the service was replaced by a double-decker bus, which was not less interesting and a lot more comfortable, especially in wet, cold winter mornings. Many years later, my son used to jump on the number 53 bus to go to Bradford colliery underground mine via Belle Vue, which brought back memories of my joy of travelling on the tram.

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Photographs of Belle Vue Zoo in 1930

Courtesy: Manchester Evening News

When I was about eight, I used to visit Belle Vue very often mostly on my own to go fishing on the boating lake. I had grown to call this the fireworks lake where fireworks display and open-air plays were also carried out. Many great battles were fought at Belle Vue such as ‘Storming of the Heights at Quebec’, in which hundreds of dead and wounded fell but who all got up again at the conclusion of the show to stand for the national anthem. Then there was the ‘Great Train Robbery’, which seemed so realistic and exciting to me. Besides all this, there was the wonderful displays of wild animals, lions, tigers, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, bears (both brown and white), and many, many other exotic animals, reptiles, and birds from all over the world. Then there was the amusements such as the famous Big Dipper famous for many years and all the rest. A perfect place for a small boy, and how I loved the place and mourned with many when it was forced to close decades later.

My father’s brother was another person who remains etched in my memory. He was a small wiry man, a real Lancastrian man whose conversation was sprinkled with ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and whose favourite chair was a solid hard wooden upright backed fitted with wooden arms in which he would sit by the side of the kitchen-range fire always wearing his cloth cap and holding forth on whatever subject was topical at the time. He had a large family, common in those days, four boys and four girls with the youngest being a girl about the same age as me. My father used to visit them almost every Sunday, usually taking me along. Often, we would stay for dinner, a huge meal cooked on the coal-fired range with all of us sitting at a well-scrubbed table right in front of it, headed by Uncle, still wearing his cap. I often wondered if he ever took it off but was never brave enough to ask him. He was a coal merchant and general carrier and, at that time, owned a fleet of thirty horse-drawn vehicles, two steam traction engines (my favourites at that time), and a Model T Ford lorry, which was at the time the pride of Ancoats. One of the carts and a huge white horse was on permanent loan to my father, although we stabled it in my uncle’s stables near the canal off Every Street in Ancoats.

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Photograph of a horse-drawn coal cart

My uncle’s house was a very old rambling place with a huge kitchen, but my other recollections of the place are sketchy. I remember that there was a yard at the front leading to the front door and then a short corridor inside leading right into the kitchen with the cooking range on one wall and a window on the other. To the right of the fireplace, there was a doorway up three steps into another corridor, which led to another room, which was uncle’s office. One of my cousins told me that there was a secret passage under this area that led to the church, via a paved area, which was implied as having been the graveyard. The kitchen floor was paved and was ‘washed and stoned’ daily. There was a home-weaved rug, common of the times, in front of the fender that surrounded the fireplace. The fire burned all the time, driving the cooking ranges and heating the water, so the kitchen was always bordering on the ‘hot’. My memories of my cousins are also vague, but I do remember Maggie, a dark, nice-looking woman who always seemed to be standing to one side of the fireplace mantlepiece chatting to my father and uncle. She seemed old to me but was probably only about twenty at the time. The two eldest sons, James and George, were well-set young men who treated me well and were quite friendly. George used to help my father on his trips occasionally and drove the Model T.

On one of these trips in that Model T car, I ended up in the ‘doghouse’ after letting my curiosity get the better of me. I would sit between my father and George and was impressed by all the knobs and levers. The accelerator and choke levers were on the steering column and quite accessible to me in my mid-seat position. Temptation became too much, and I leaned forward and pushed the lever into advance, whereby the truck leapt forward almost into the path of a passing tramcar. Had it not been for my cousin’s quick reactions, there could have been a real disaster. So I was banished to the truck’s platform from then on, but not before being subjected to more direct physical discomfort of a couple of good slaps from my father. When the story was told later, there was a great deal of humour again at my expense, but it was a long time before I was trusted back in the cab.

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The 1912 Model T Ford built in the Old Trafford Factory, Manchester

©Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

Though I was never really in need of pocket money, my dad always being sympathetic to our needs, I used to find ways and means of augmenting my weekly allowance by various ‘legal’ means. I would wash our various neighbour’s steps up and down the street and do other odd jobs on request for a few pennies at a time, and on Friday and Saturday evenings delivering bread and cakes for the local bakers, which usually meant I was paid ‘in kind’, and then there were the two rather tight-fisted old ladies whom I would run errands for. All in all, I did quite well in tips and treats. There was one ‘customer’ of the bakery, though, who for some reason or another didn’t appeal much to me, and this was the monk at the Church of the Holy Name on Oxford Street. The monk’s quarters were down a side alley off Dover Street where there were big heavy double doors with a huge knocker fitted. One knock was enough to bring a monk to the door, which opened with a creak and a groan. This led into a long room down the centre of which was a long scrubbed table with benches on either side. There was always a large bowl full of fruits in the centre of the table from which the monk always gave me a very shiny red apple after I handed over the order. Notwithstanding this, I was always most uncomfortable and felt quite fearful of the place. There was nothing to account for this, but, nevertheless, I did not like going there.

That job did not last for long because, one Saturday when I arrived at the bakery, I found the two ladies that owned the shop lying on the floor in the hallway between the shop and the bakery, and smoke was pouring out of the bakery accompanied by a horrible smell of burning cakes. I ran back out of the shop and told my mother, who raised the alarm. It seems that the two ladies were fond of a tipple and were ‘secret drinkers’. I never went back after this incident, and not long after, the bakery closed. I was about nine at the time, and soon after I started another similar job with a travelling greengrocer, which proved much more interesting.

My schooling started when we lived in Ancoats when I used to be taken to the infants’ school by my brother Arthur, when he wasn’t playing truant and heading down to the canal to catch rats and other forays. Memories of these early school days are patchy, but after moving to the elementary school on Webster Street, Moss side, things became much more exciting and interesting. This school had the unusual feature of having the boys’ playground on the roof and other playgrounds for the infants and girls on either side of the school building. The building itself was a large two-story structure with high ceilings, and the classrooms had moveable partitions, making it possible to convert a large area into a hall. I thought this was a very progressive approach, and, in those days, Manchester was progressive with nursery schools emerging soon after the First World War ended, and many other innovations emerged during this period. There were plenty of toys for the youngest kids to play with, including a huge doll’s house, or so it seemed to me at the time. Once a week, we had to give this house a thorough cleaning, each child being allocated a particular part to clean. This often irked me because boys were not really welcome to play in it despite participating in the cleaning process. We were used to having a nap in the afternoons, though we didn’t have beds or cots. Instead, we were laid out in rows on rush mats with a small pillow. Nevertheless, these rests we always most welcome. Nursery school days were happy days for me as was all the time I spent at this school.

I progressed, as is the nature of things, in the usual way of work and play happily throughout my school life, though there were things that somewhat saddened me later in life. For instance, we were taught to love our country and our sovereign and to celebrate things or events that would perhaps invoke horror and criticism from the ‘do-gooders’ of the present times, especially the teaching profession, who seem not to consider the children in their charge with anything like the degree of affection that the teachers of my day displayed. Empire Day, Trafalgar Day, St George’s Day, I recall, were all celebrated. Children in the Scout movement, Boy’s Brigade, Church Lads Brigade, etc., together with the female counterparts, all proudly wearing their uniforms and drilled to perfection. These things seem not to matter as much today. One day I remember, whilst I was still at the infants’ school, in the early 1920s I guess, we were all taken to see the huge airship R34 flying overhead but quite low enough to easily see the people sitting in the gondola hanging underneath the giant rigid silver ‘cigar’. It was a tremendous thrill for all of us in those early days of flying machines. The R33 class of British rigid airships were built for the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War but were not completed until after the end of hostilities, by which time the RNAS had become part of the Royal Air Force.

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Photograph of the Airship R34

The headmistress of the junior school was Miss Birkby, a very kindly and regal person who habitually wore clothes in style with those worn by the then queen mother, Queen Alexandria and Queen Mary, a style much in favour with the middle-aged ladies of the day. Coincidentally, her brother was later to be my form teacher when I moved to Manchester Central High School, so more of this later in the story.

Memories flood back from these days, names and faces of my early playmates, one of whom was Bunny Hebb (I never knew his proper first name), who contracted ringworm in his head and had to have all his hair shaved off and was told to wear a cap all the time. He once fiercely resisted a teacher who tried to remove it, and we all admired him for this. There was Horace Munday, who, although supposedly frequently off sick, turned up at school one day with a pram full of bricks and a lame excuse. Then there was Willy Trevena, a great ‘academic’ rival of mine in composition, spelling, and dictation, whose greatest ambition was to be a newspaper reporter, and I often wondered if he ever made it. Another good classmate was Arthur Britain, whose father was in the funeral business.

At the time, we had a trainee teacher, and no one liked him. He seemed to rub all the children up the wrong way, and his behaviour eventually led to what can best be described as a riot. He used to come to school on a small motorbike, which he parked in the shed. One day, it disappeared, and the bike was stripped by the older boys and components were distributed all over the school. This did nothing to improve the situation, which continued to deteriorate until one day all the scholars confronted the teacher, and he fled fearing for his life, jumping on a passing tram, and was never seen again. There were some harsh retributions for the instigators of the incident, but things quickly calmed down afterwards. Another boy in the class had early criminal leanings because the school operated a ‘savings bank’ scheme whereby the children were encouraged to deposit a weekly sum, usually one penny every Monday, and each child was given a passbook to record their savings and any withdrawals. My fellow student devised a scheme where he told junior children he was the designated collector and on receipt of the monies added the amount into their passbooks. Obviously, the scheme was bound to be discovered sooner or later, but it continued for quite a long time, and my colleague became clearly more affluent than the rest of us, flaunting new items such as torches, penknives, toys, etc. Eventually, suspicion was aroused, a trap was set, and he was caught red-handed and punished in front of the school by caning, with his parents having to make restitution. That was the only occasion when such a punishment was awarded during the entire time that I was at that school.

Our school life continued much as it had always done with differing talents coming to the fore in all the different subjects, from English composition, literature, geography, arithmetic, drawing, and painting, which was the field I felt was my forte. There were no school dinners at elementary school in those days, but children who lived nearby went home for lunch, and those who lived too far away were able to purchase food prepared in the cookery classes. Unfortunately, students that made edible things took them home, so the remainder were often inedible, but we ate them anyway! Away from school, I was often alone and liked nothing more than to wander through nearby fields or to play in Whitworth Park. Occasionally, a friend would join me, and my best friend at the time was Ernie Marshall. We would make a camp complete with a tent and a campfire and play hunters and trappers until we got hungry, and we would then cook a meal, usually potatoes baked in the embers of the fire with some bread brought from home and tea or cocoa (but with no milk or sugar). Even though the potatoes were often not cooked through and the drinks were at best warm, we relished it all.

When I was in my ninth year in January 1926, my little sister Sheila was born, and from that day on, I became her chief protector and bodyguard, at first pushing her everywhere in an old-fashioned pram and later carrying her piggyback almost everywhere we went. When she was only a few months old, we suffered the traumatic loss of our father after a long illness and a series of strokes. Prior to this occurrence, I had experienced what can only be described as psychic phenomena. I was playing in the park without a care in the world when suddenly I was struck by a terrible fear and rushed home. On arrival without being told, I knew that he was dead. The next few days were lost to me, and I cried when told that I could not go to the funeral, which was by all accounts a very grand affair. My father, and I have always thought of him as such, was a very popular and well-loved man. The cortege was taken past Princess Road tram shed on its journey to Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, and all the people from the works gathered in front of the building to pay their respects. The Manchester Corporation Tramways band was in attendance and led the way into the ceremony ahead of the horse-drawn hearse and coaches carrying the family members and friends. After the funeral, my auntie Lizzie from Yorkshire took me back to her home to stay for a while to get over the tragedy, and I stayed for four months from early August until December.

My aunt’s house was a converted barn just outside Hebden Bridge on the road to the reservoir at Widdup, where my uncle Eli was a foreman of the waterworks. The house was built on the side of the slope at the roadside, and its rooftop was level with the road, a fact that created problems when the snow arrived as drifting snow invariably filled the space between the road and the house blocking off the front entrance and the door to the fuel storage area, which was a part of the barn left undeveloped. We had to dig our way out of the house, which for me meant a day off school, which greatly appealed to me and my two cousins. My aunt also kept chickens, so another of the children’s chores was the ‘mucking out’ of the hen house. I was always amazed by the amount of muck those 100 or so hens produced, but they kept us in eggs and meat as well as ‘fertiliser’. There was a small parcel of land adjacent to the house, about three-quarters of an acre I guess, which sloped down to a small river and containing about eighteen freshwater springs or well holes. This gave rise to the name of this place, which was then known as Well-Holes Farm. The grass was particularly lush, and farmers from miles around would receive permission from my aunt to graze some prized animal to fatten them up for market. Consequently, the odd bull, cow, sheep, or pig was often seen placidly growing fat on our land, not to mention ducks, geese, and other birds that also turned up. Payment would often be in kind, and we fed often on prime fresh-killed meat of one sort or another.

I was sent to school, of course, attending the same village school as my cousins. A little school with only seventeen pupils of all ages, so the desks were occupied by children of similar age in one classroom with one lady teacher who managed us well and prepared the midday meals. We all had to take our meals to school, so the teacher heated or toasted whatever we brought. In our case, it was often meat and potato pie, which she would heat up in the coal-fired oven, and this formed part of a kitchen range that also provided heating for the school. I