Well here we are and it’s October already. Sorry for the delay in posting but I’ve been preoccupied by this and that.
Anyway: I spent last weekend in Sunny Scarborourgh where I had a loverley time. Part of the loveliness was that it was as a guest of The Big Chap, Thelovelyfiona, Ginge and Sooty. The other part was that I spent Saturday evening at the Grand Hotel in the company of the HMS Ocean Association.
I should clarify that last sentence: the Grand Hotel itself was not lovely. It is a fantastic location and a great, iconic building and so ought to be wonderful – but it is not. The food was mediocre and the service polite but glacially slow.
My Dad served on HMS Ocean in the Mediterranean in 1947 /1948. He was a fitter/electrician with the Fleet Air Arm, servicing the aircraft of 816 Naval Air Squadron – principally Seafires and Fireflies. Sadly, the Association was formed a couple of years after Dad’s death but I went down with his old photo album at the invitation of Bill Entwistle who is, I think, the last survivor of the crew who worked with my Dad on Ocean shortly after the war. Two others of that vintage were there too but didn’t remember Dad except as a face in a picture. Bill knew “Geordie” Burdon well though.
Bill Entwistle
They were in Palestine in 1948 when Israeli terrorists – sorry, I mean brave freedom fighters – were trying to mine Royal Navy ships at anchor and generally being beastly to us Brits. Bill was still quite discrete after all these years but did tell me of one occasion when four aircraft from 816 NAS were based ashore briefly at Ein Shemer. Bill and my dad and others were there as ground crew – Bill was an armourer. They decided (apparently at my dad’s suggestion) that since they were ashore they should get hold of passes to go off and explore the delights of Haifa which six of them duly did. Alas, strong drink was taken and they missed their transport back to Ein Shemer just before nightfall. So they decided to walk, no problem, it wasn’t that far after all.
After hiding from small arms fire in the night and eventually being picked up by a heavily armed British Paratroop roadblock (“Halt or we will shoot: *%_/ me!! its the Navy!”), they were held over night (“where do you think you’re going”? “Ein Shemer”. “Like *%/- you are, you’re coming with us”) and were eventually returned to Ein Shemer the next morning. Once there they came close to being court martialed for bringing The Royal Navy into disrepute.
Oddly enough, I don’t recall dad ever telling me that one.
Nor, I think, do official histories tell quite the same tale as the 816 veterans about the partial destruction of the old port of Brest when the USAF tried to bomb the U-Boat pens using precision guidance systems and missed. And then there was the South African pilot who inherited half a million pounds in 1947 and shortly thereafter crashlanded a Firefly at RNAS Hal Far. If our scanner was working I’d post a picture of it. When the CO came over to remonstrate, the pilot’s response was “Don’t worry about it Old Chap; I’ll buy you another one”.
Bill is a lovely man, courteous and gentle, who has acquired, I think, considerable wisdom over the years. I was taken by his explanation of how the Navy differs from other branches of the armed forces because they have to contend with the sea, one of the four elements and one which sustains them but can kill them in a moment. He was insistent too on the law of the sea – a man in the water is a man to be rescued irrespective of his nationality or allegiance in a conflict. And I absolutely concur in his philosophy of life – be kind and be happy.
The journey home was routine and I once again had to remind myself to chill out and not let my prejudices get the better of me. It is too easy to judge people harshly, even those who think that wearing a football team’s shirt is ever an acceptable way to dress, albeit that this is an increasingly common error. I buried myself in an MP3 player and a fresh attempt to read Pynchon’s Against the Day.
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