that stage I was 14 or 15 years old. It was a life that took strength, although I’m not very tall – only about 5 feet 6 inches. A lot of the rigging was hand-operated, although we did have a winch for the mainsail and for the lee boards. One incident we had was when we were anchored in Long Reach for the night; when it came to get the anchor up we could hardly move it. We had a hell of a job to get it up with the winch, and when it was clear of the waterline we could see we had a big cable stuck in the flukes. It was probably the telephone cable from Kent to Essex! We put a rope around the other fluke, made it fast, and then lowered the anchor so it [the cable] tipped off. We got the anchor up quite close, so we could make it fast without going over the side.
Life on board was pretty basic. There was one cabin with two bunks and a cooking stove. The heads [toilet] was a bucket up forward. We took turns to do the cooking; it wasn’t very cordon bleu – baked beans and bacon or something like that. The trips varied in length; we did one trip up to Maldon, which took about two or three days, but normally it was about one to two days on the Thames. Of course we had no engine – it was purely under sail. I took the wheel several times. Once my uncle became ill. He had stomach trouble. He curled up on the deck, and I was a bit frightened. I was steering and we were doing about 5 knots. I could see the bank coming up – we were on Gravesend Reach where it turns into Short Reach, so I had to do the turn until he came round. I had to go and fasten the foresail – when you swing over onto the new tack you have to go back and release it. The lee boards were up, so I didn’t have to do those.
I managed to get home about every one or two weeks. I liked the sea, but I couldn’t swim. I became very, very muscular at that time. I was on her for about nine months, and then I went, with my uncle, to the Leslie. We left the Derby because we went onto a full-rigged barge; the Derby was a stumpy. We picked the Leslie up in Milton Creek near Sittingbourne, which is quite near the River Swale. We were carrying the same sort of cargoes, because she belonged to the same firm. Because she was a full-rigged barge she was a bit more work, because she had a topsail – not like the Derby, which had an ordinary mainsail, with mizzen and foresail. We had to haul the topsail up by hand, so it was set all the time we were sailing. I was on her for a good year.
Fred applied to join the Navy whilst he was on the barge Leslie, at the age of 15. The standard length of service at that time was 12 years, starting on his 18th birthday. On joining, he would be attached to one of the main naval bases: Plymouth (Devonport), Portsmouth or Chatham. In Fred’s case, as he lived close to Chatham it was to that base that he was attached.
Training of boy entrants was undertaken at HMS Ganges, which took boy entrants from the Chatham area and the south-east of England. It had been established in the 19th century, initially based on retired warships moored in the River Stour, which runs between Suffolk and Essex, but in the early part of the 20th century had become a shore establishment. It was located at the end of the Shotley peninsula, on high ground overlooking the confluence of the Rivers Stour and Orwell, and Harwich harbour. Ganges had jetties on the Stour side, at which the launches that brought trainees from the railway station at Harwich, Parkeston Quay, would arrive.
Ganges had a fierce reputation for harsh training. In Hostilities Only, Brian Lavery quotes the writer and explorer Tristan Jones:
since I left Ganges I have been in many hellish places, including a couple of French Foreign Legion barracks and 15 prisons in 12 countries. None of them were nearly so menacing as HMS Ganges as a brain-twisting body-racking ground of mental bullying and physical strain.
He had been at Ganges at about the same time as Fred. The Admiralty’s description was different, noting that life compared favourably with that of any good school.
The Annexe, in which Fred was to be housed, was described as ‘depressing, ugly and utilitarian’. The uniform with which all boy entrants were issued was comprehensive and complicated. Also in Hostilities Only, Ken Kimberley noted:
two jumpers, two pairs of bell bottom trousers, two collars, two shirt fronts, one black ribbon, two pairs of socks, one pair of boots, one cap and one cap band, one oil skin, one overcoat, one pair of overalls, one housewife [husif] (a sewing kit), one lanyard and one Seaman’s Manual.
The bell bottom trousers were particularly complicated, as they had six buttons to fasten, three of which were vertical as a waistband and three horizontal as a flap to cover the waistband.
Fred joined Ganges in December 1939. Despite the comments about the harsh regime at Ganges, Fred seemed to have escaped the majority of it. Possibly two years on Thames barges may have made him tougher than some of his contemporaries, who may have come straight from school.
I got my call-up papers before the war started, but we were told we had to hang on until December because they were dealing with the reservists that had been called up. I had applied to join at the back end of 1938, when I was 15. I was given a date, when I was called up, to go to Whitehall in London with a rail warrant that they sent us, and we went to a part of the Admiralty building. There were a couple of dozen of us, shipped to Liverpool Street by lorry. We had a petty officer who came with us to Liverpool Street. He saw us onto the train at Liverpool Street, and then we were met at Harwich by a petty officer in a launch, who then took us across the river from Parkeston Quay.
Fred’s term at HMS Ganges [photograph recovered from Truculent] (by permission F. Henley)
I was wondering what was going on. It wasn’t too official until we got there, and then it was a different story. They took us to an annexe to the main building across the road – they were Nissen huts. We trained there, drilling and being familiarised with the Navy and the regulations. We didn’t do any practical seamanship there: we spent a lot of time sewing our names into our clothing and our hammock. We got given all of our kit, kit bags and hammock – although we didn’t sleep in hammocks at Ganges; we slept in beds. We used our hammocks as bedding, as well as a blanket. They had racks to put your hammocks in.
Reveille was at 05:30, when you had a big cup of cocoa – well they called it cocoa. Then you did chores, mostly cleaning, and then you went to breakfast. After breakfast it was instruction through until lunchtime. You finished dinner, then you had an afternoon session of instruction. We had a meal about six o’clock, and then it was chores or something; we weren’t let off the hook. Pipe down was at nine o’clock.
The food was fairly good, better than the barge – it was more varied. We did some boat work at Ganges. We used to go quite a long way up the River Orwell in pulling boats –cutters – and we did some sailing in whalers, which were rigged with lugsails, which was quite similar to the way the barges were rigged. My instructor, who was a leading seaman, was an old chap from the First World War. His name was Percy Humphreys, and he found out that I knew how to sail. He was a nice, very amiable, chap, and he treated us quite well, not like the main instructor Chief Petty Officer McIntyre. He was a hard taskmaster – he could use his fists. I had a few slaps around the ears. If you made a mistake in drill he used to come up to you and then glare at you – and then bump! It wouldn’t be allowed these days. I had some home leave at Easter. I was at Ganges for about three months.
In May 1940 all boy entrant training was moved from Ganges to a new naval base, HMS St George in the Isle of Man, which had been set up at Cunningham Camp, a former holiday camp on the island. When Fred went there it would have been at the beginning of that move.
Fred’s move with the rest of his class to the Isle of Man was one of the results of the necessarily rapid expansion of the Navy with the outbreak of war.
Prior to hostilities the number of volunteers joining had increased year on year, but now many more were urgently needed. In its early estimates the Admiralty considered that it needed to expand by 75,000 men in the first stage of