Cruiser (11 page)

Back in his office that afternoon, Bubbles sent a signal: ‘To Perth, from C-in-C Portsmouth. Excellently organised and executed. The Guard was very smart.'

The Admiral was, however, premature. Elmo Gee had been presented with a silver bugle to mark the occasion. On
Perth
's quarterdeck that evening, he placed it to his lips for the ceremony of sunset, the lowering of the White Ensign at the end of the day. Consumed by nerves, he mistook a preparatory
signal for the ‘execute' and sounded off early, causing chaos around the entire anchorage as confused buglers on board the cream of the Royal Navy struggled to catch up:

There were no repercussions. Despite his Gilbert and Sullivan surname, Bracegirdle was an officer with a sense of humour. It was embarrassing but not the end of the world. Elmo got to keep the silver bugle.

The Australian taxpayer had stumped up £1,360,000 for this new cruiser, with extra to be paid for the provision of food, medical supplies and other stores. It was money well spent. HMAS
Perth
was a modern and well-found ship for her day, handsome to the eye with her sharp stem flaring upwards to a curiously chunky but purposeful trawler bow. She had two tall, upright funnels spaced well apart between towering masts. Her long, lean, tapered lines flowed elegantly back to her stern.

Beneath the steel skin, she was tough and powerful. Her engines were four Parsons steam turbines, which could deliver a massive 72,000 horsepower to the shafts that turned the four great bronze propellors beneath her counter – a force strong enough to push aside 51,000 tons of seawater every minute and to propel her through the oceans at an officially calculated speed of just over 32 knots, or 60 km/h. At her normal cruising speed of perhaps 15 knots, she would have a range of about 16,600 kilometres – enough to take her across the Pacific Ocean without refuelling.

Technically,
Perth
was known as a light cruiser of the
modified Leander class. The word ‘light' referred to two things: her size and her armament. With a displacement of 6830 tons and an overall length of 169 metres at the waterline,
Perth
was smaller than ships classified as heavy cruisers, which generally clocked in at around 10,000 tons. And her main armament was lighter, too. The RAN's bigger cruisers, the older HMAS
Australia
(II) and
Canberra
, carried guns of 8-inch calibre, which was a measurement of the inner diameter of the gun barrel.
Perth
's guns were 6-inch, firing smaller shells. She had eight of them, known as the British Mk XXI. They were mounted in pairs in revolving turrets labelled A and B at the front of the ship, and X and Y to the rear of the ship. The standard armour-piercing shell for these guns weighed 50.8 kilos. In theory, a well-trained turret crew could fire 16 shells per minute, the projectiles spinning from their rifled gun barrels at a speed of 3027 km/h. They had a maximum range of 23.3 kilometres.

These were her big guns, designed for use against other ships or for bombarding targets on shore. They would elevate to an angle of only 60 degrees, and were therefore not much use against attacking aircraft, unless the planes were flying very low and suicidally slow and straight – which, understandably, almost never happened. Her secondary, or high-angle anti-aircraft, armament was of eight rapid-firing 4-inch guns, twin-mounted. Each of these mounts could fire about one round every two seconds, or 30 shells a minute – a far better proposition for air defence, although they, too, would have their failings.

In addition,
Perth
, at different times in her career, would acquire smaller machine guns for anti-aircraft protection. And she had eight torpedo tubes on the upper deck in the waist, or middle, of the ship, four to port and four to starboard. They carried the customary British 21-inch torpedo. Once fired, they could not be reloaded at sea.

Unusually for a cruiser,
Perth
had an anti-submarine capacity, of sorts. She was fitted with an early version of Asdic, the British invention eventually known by the American name
of sonar, a device that transmitted sound waves from a dome beneath her hull to search for lurking submarines. Not that she could have done much if she had found one. She carried exactly five depth charges – an entirely useless number. As her crew sometimes joked, if they detected a submarine, they would have to chuck beer bottles over the side to sink it.

Two other features, or lack of them, were worth noting. In 1939, radar, another British invention, was in its infancy.
Perth
did not have it. Only a handful of Royal Navy ships did at that time, and the RAN stood at the end of a very long queue waiting for it to become available. She should also have carried a small seaplane for reconnaissance work, launched from a catapult located amidships between her funnels and recovered by crane when it landed alongside again. But a red-tape mix-up meant the British Admiralty had no suitable aircraft ready at her commissioning, and she would have a long wait to acquire that as well.
Perth
's eyes and ears, therefore, would be just that – the keenness of the lookouts and signalmen on her bridge, in her Gunnery Control Towers and in the old-fashioned crow's nest mounted halfway up her foremast.

All in all, by the standards of 1939, HMAS
Perth
was a fast and capable ship, packing a big punch. But those standards were changing, and changing fast. In the years to come, the flaws in her armament would be revealed, with tragic consequences.

‘Special sea-duty men close up for leaving harbour.'

The pipe and then the order over the public-address system was the moment they had been preparing for. All over the ship, it sent men to their stations for departure, parties of seamen tumbling onto the fo'c'sle and the quarterdeck to cast off the lines that secured
Perth
to the dock. It was the day after the naming ceremony. They were putting to sea for the first time, to discover how they and their ship would perform.

For Farncomb, high on the open bridge at the compass platform, with Portsmouth laid out before him, this would be the most exacting test he had faced in his naval career. It was where it all came together. The lofty eminence of his four gold-braided captain's rings, the saluting and the prestige, the automatic obedience of the crew, the confidence invested in him by the Navy Board back in Melbourne: all these now had to be paid for. The ship was his to command. He could do it well, even brilliantly. He could do it competently, getting by. Or he could do it badly, perhaps even disastrously. Whichever way, the responsibility was his alone.

His most critical judges would be the ship's company. From the youngest sailor up to his Executive Officer, all eyes would be upon Farncomb from the start. Even as the ship began to edge away from the dock, they would evaluate his handling – his helm and engine orders, and the manner in which he gave them – to assess what sort of seaman and captain he might be, whether he was in fact worthy of their respect and loyalty or a dud they would have to suffer. They were, after all, entrusting their lives to him.

Some captains, all blood and guts, tried to impress their men by rocketing away from a dock with dazzling skill and devil-may-care bravado. Others would creep off with infinite caution, as if they were hoping nobody would notice. Crews liked neither. They wanted a calm and confident man conning their ship smoothly and easily. In the weeks ahead, they would watch Farncomb like so many hawks, isolating him in the loneliness of command. If the Captain cocked up for all the world to see, there was no one to tell him how to do it better next time. The disapproving silence would be deafening. He was on his own.

For the next two weeks, Farncomb put himself, his ship and his crew through their paces. Past Spithead and the Solent, out beyond the Isle of Wight in the soupy grey slop of the English Channel, they tested and trialled. There was no gunnery shoot, but every other part of the ship's machinery and electrical
equipment was tried to the fullest stretch in the time available so that defects, if any, could be remedied back in Portsmouth.

On the second day after the naming ceremony, it was full-power trials. For the first time, with an empty Atlantic horizon in front of him, Farncomb gave the order for full speed on all four engines. Deep below on his footplate in the engine room, Bob ‘Dolly' Gray, the Engineer Commander, a chunky figure in clean white officer's overalls, heard the clang of the brass telegraphs and watched with studied calm as his stokers threw open the oil sprayers and his artificers worked the throttles to unleash the steam turbines in a thunderous burst of power.

The rumble of the huge fans sucking in air and forcing it under high pressure to the boilers rose to a mind-numbing roar.
Perth
lunged forward like a warhorse in a cavalry charge. Throbbing in every bone and sinew of her body, her bow hurling up great plumes of white water and her stern dug so deeply that it seemed to disappear beneath the sea boiling furiously behind her, she ate up the miles like a creature possessed, a spirit in her element. The wind of her passage howled through the halliards on her masts, setting her signal flags and ensigns bar tight and the wireless aerials thrumming. On the high exposed spaces of her bridge, or way down in her bowels, the ship's company thrilled to the might they had unleashed.
Perth
passed with flying colours. It was grand, it was great, it was glorious, and no man there that day would ever forget it.

The final week in Portsmouth passed in storing the ship with fresh food and ammunition and a dry-docking to spruce up her hull below the waterline. For Commander Adams and the department heads, there was yet another blizzard of paperwork. Reports and requests flew back and forth to fix last-minute problems that had arisen with the ship's boats, a turbo-generator and a shortage of medical equipment for the Sick Bay.

Sensibly, Farncomb gave all his non-essential people a last four days' leave, which they grabbed with both hands. It was their final chance for a look at Mother England. Reg Whiting,
a happily married family man, sent a photograph back home to Chatswood of himself and a messmate posing in uniform in a picture-postcard Hampshire village. Jock Lawrance took a train to Manchester to visit the sister who had stumped up the few extra pounds for his trip to Australia just six years before. Ray Parkin, always content with his own company, took a train up to London with the small box of watercolours he carried everywhere. Setting himself up on the Thames Embankment, he painted two finely worked scenes of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Bill Bracht went dancing again, this time at the Savoy Ballroom to Victor Sylvester's Orchestra. Then it was the London Palladium to see George Formby and on to the Windmill Theatre in Piccadilly, where nude showgirls stood on stage, rigidly unmoving as the law decreed. ‘Which to my mind was very risque in adult entertainment until I went to the Paris Folies Bergere,' Bill noted in his diary.
¹⁵
Paris, he added thoughtfully, ‘was the most enlightened sex city in the world'. London, though, was not short of sex itself, as George Hatfield found on a last pub crawl. His diary has a vivid portrait of a sleazy city amazing to Australian eyes: