Cruiser (10 page)

In the early days, there was the confusion of just finding your way around. To the newcomers, especially the youngsters, everything was big and bewildering, a maze of decks, passageways, lobbies, flats, ladders and dead ends. Where was the Torpedo Head Magazine, the port-side Gunner's Store, the main ladder to A-boiler room, the High Angle Control Position, the Blacksmith's Shop, the starboard 27-foot whaler, the stokers' mess? But from the very first, the familiar naval harbour routine began to take shape. The hands were out of their hammocks and fallen in at six o'clock each morning to hose down the decks, barefooted. Every so often – which meant whenever the Commander felt like it – there would be what they called bible class: sailors on their knees with the sandstone blocks known as holystones, scrubbing the teak planking of the upper deck to a spotless white.

Breakfast was piped at 7.40 am, but the naval day would not properly begin until the ceremony of colours at 8 am, marking the end of the morning watch and the start of the forenoon watch until midday. In Portsmouth Harbour, the effect was tremendous – a ritual tableau of naval swank. On the quarterdecks of the British battleships, bandsmen of the Royal Marines would parade to the strains of familiar naval marches such as ‘Heart of Oak'. Smaller ships might sometimes
have a band, sometimes not. Precisely at eight, there would be the blare of bugles or the whistle of bosun's pipes and absolute stillness, the hands at attention and the officers saluting as the navy's White Ensign was run up at the stern of every ship in the dockyard. For another hour, the ship would subside into inactivity again, or so it might seem to an onlooker ashore. The men were below decks showering, shaving or cleaning their messes, but there would be no peace. At 9 am, the bugle would blare again for divisions, and the entire ship's company would parade once more on the quarterdeck for inspection by their officers, possibly a pep talk from the Commander or the Captain, sometimes prayers, and the assignment of jobs for the day.

The specialist officers and men set themselves to learning their way around their tasks and their new equipment, from the signalmen on the flag deck to the artificers in the engine room to the Captain's secretary and the writers whose job it was to churn out the Commander's endless paperwork. The Buffer, the Coxswain, the Chief Yeoman of Signals, the Chief Gunner's Mate and the Chief Petty Officer Cook bent to their tasks. The electrical experts, such as Reg Whiting, began to master the communications switchboards, the circuits to the guns and torpedoes, the intricacies of the Low Power Room and, Reg's particular charge, the ship's gyro compass deep below the waterline.

Other men would be drilling on the after searchlight platform, getting to know their gear high up in the Gunnery Director Control Tower, stacking stores in the galleys, exercising with the damage control parties. A team of specially chosen ratings rehearsed their drill as a royal guard of honour for the ship's naming ceremony only days away. The ship's bandsmen, a dozen of them, drummers and trumpeters, practised their salutes and marches and buffed their red and blue dress uniforms.

There was the occasional time for liberty, for the men to take a run ashore. Bill Bracht, a young petty officer gunner's
mate and coal miner's son from Kurri Kurri in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, danced at the local Hippodrome ‘to Harry Roy and his band, and Jack Hilton and his Orchestra'.
⁶
Norm King and his mates hit the pubs:

Around them was the ceaseless activity of a great dockyard preparing for war. Elderly destroyers were being brought back into service, and the day echoed to the clang of metal hammered, the hiss of welding and the grind of the towering dockyard crane that had been taken from the Germans after the last war. Sometimes, a battleship would glide past, provoking yet another flourish of bugle calls, salutes and dipped ensigns. Pinnaces and workboats scuttled across the harbour.
Almost every day, fighters of the RAF would wheel above them in the blue skies over Hampshire. Jock Lawrance noticed that the march to war was quickening, that anti-aircraft guns were being installed on the chalk cliffs that surrounded the city:

Dinner – which was actually lunch – was sounded at noon. Work resumed again in the early afternoon, jobs taken up where they had been left off. On a normal day, there would be an evening's shore leave granted for part of the crew from the start of the first dog watch at 4 pm. Adams beavered away at his paperwork. Bills, lists, the Captain's standing orders, daily orders, the confidential books that contained the various secret codes and signals grew and multiplied. The paymaster officers, the men in charge of the ship's supplies and stores, generated their own piles of paper as well. Everything on board had to be acquired and accounted for, from torpedoes to typewriter ribbons. In the machinery spaces below the waterline, the engineers and stokers were finding their way around the great steam turbines and boilers, feed pumps and engine throttle valves, condensers and steering gear, the brassy array of dials, gauges and levers that would rule their working lives.

The Chief Engineer, Robert Gray, also wore the three gold rings of a commander. He was known formally as the
Commander (E), informally as Chief, and to his stokers, although never to his face, as Dolly. He was 37 years old, born in 1902. From Scotch College in Melbourne, he went to the naval college at Jervis Bay in 1915 and from there to various ships of the Australian fleet and an advanced course at the Royal Navy's Engineering College at Devonport. He, too, had been in Britain from the beginning of the year. His entry in the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
describes him as ‘strongly built … an accomplished athlete who played Rugby Union football. He was a sociable person and a good messmate, but a stern disciplinarian who earned, and kept, the respect of his men.'
⁹
In the late nineteenth century, when sail was giving way to steam, the seaman officers would regard engineer officers as mere grubby mechanics, a lower form of life altogether. The joke persists to this day. But men such as Gray kept the whole show on the road. They were indispensable, and they knew it.

Early on 10 July, a cool but sunny Monday, the ship shifted to a pier close to the Portsmouth Harbour railway station, the South Railway Jetty. Her Royal Highness Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent and a leader of London fashion, was arriving by train for the naming ceremony. Rolls of red carpet were unreeled on the dock and there was a flurry of last-minute rehearsals for the 14 men of the ship's band and the guard of honour. John ‘Tubby' Grant, a cornet player, had spent days ensuring that his bandsman's uniform was in perfect order. It was almost identical to the Royal Marines uniform, a splendid scarlet and blue affair with a white pith helmet. Tubby had also been a boy trainee in the
Tingira
, or the
Tinny
, as they all called her. His mother had died when he was five, and desperate relatives had packed him off to a Catholic orphanage in Melbourne, where he was beaten by a succession of sadistic Christian Brothers with leather straps and shillelaghs. Joining the navy at 16 had been a breeze after that. But at least the Brothers had taught
him to play a musical instrument, and Tubby was no stranger to royalty. He had been in the RAN band when the Duke of York, the future George VI, opened the new Parliament House in Canberra in 1927.

The
Perth
men were proudly Australian and would have happily started a fight in any Portsmouth pub if anyone suggested otherwise. But, in 1939, Australians also unaffectedly thought of themselves as people of the British race. They were loyal subjects of an empire united beneath the British Crown. It was, after all, the
Royal
Australian Navy, and therefore only natural that a duchess should do the honours. The crew, every man jack, knew that on this day British eyes would be watching to pass judgement on the new arrivals from down under. They were determined to do it well, for the honour of their country and their own self-respect.

And they did. It went off perfectly, with all the pomp and flair of naval ceremony. Captain Farncomb, dress sword slung at the side of the knee-length frock coat that was formal uniform for officers at the time, met his guests as they were piped aboard beneath a white canvas awning hung tautly over the quarterdeck: Stanley Melbourne Bruce, the former prime minister and now Australia's High Commissioner in London; the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth, Admiral Sir William James, a grey-haired and infinitely distinguished officer known throughout the navy as Bubbles.
¹⁰
And then Princess Marina herself, willowy and elegant in a spotted dress and long white gloves, with a rakishly angled hat and a luxuriant fur stole.

The band played ‘God Save the King'. The guard of honour – caps, belts and gaiters blancoed to a dazzling white – snapped to the present arms with the stamp of boots and the satisfying thwunck of the taut webbing slings of Lee Enfield .303 rifles being smacked against metal magazines.

Perth
's rearmost gun turret had been trained slightly outwards to face the jetty. Between the two long gun barrels, a Union Jack and the White Ensign concealed the ship's new name and the coat of arms of the city of Perth. Bruce made a
speech, described by Signalman Rowley Roberts as ‘a rather lengthy address in which was embodied the part Australia was playing in this great National Defence Rally of our great Empire'.
¹¹
The duchess pulled on a silken bell rope, the flags fell away and His Majesty's Australian Ship
Perth
was born. Her motto would be ‘
Floreat
' – ‘I flourish' – the same as the city. There was a rattle of applause from the watchers on the dock, a bouquet of roses for HRH, and a call from Farncomb for three cheers from the crew. As Roberts recorded it:

The cousins were impressed. The Duchess drove off waving, to more cheers. Royalty had done its work. Ordinary Seaman Basil Hayler, from Werribee in Victoria, a baby-faced 17-year-old and a foretop man under Ray Parkin, stood ramrod straight as Marina wafted by. He wrote in his memoirs: