Cruiser (18 page)

A sailor's leave is never long enough.
Perth
's refit had been finished by 29 April, her bottom scraped of the weed she had gathered in the Caribbean, her boilers cleaned, her engines
tuned up. Amidships on her upper deck, between her two funnels, she now carried the aircraft catapult that should have been installed in Portsmouth; if not yet the actual aircraft. Her men returned to her for sea trials and a gunnery shoot to make sure that all was in working order. In May, she began the job of patrolling and convoying in Australian waters – a routine that would keep her occupied for most of the rest of 1940.

June saw her back in Sydney again. There was to be a change to her world, too – a change of captains. ‘Fearless Frank' Farncomb was posted to a new command: the heavy cruiser HMAS
Canberra
– a mark of the RAN's confidence in his abilities. He had done well in turning
Perth
and her raw ship's company into a competent operational unit, and it was as sure as could be, given the fortunes of war, that a distinguished career lay ahead of him.

But it cannot be said that the crew of
Perth
was sorry to see him go. The men respected him, but they did not like him. They thought him aloof and humourless, curt in speech and abrupt in manner, and all too ready to punish heavily for minor offences. Some thought him firm but fair. Others would say he was ‘a bit of a bastard'. Worse, they were not impressed by him as a ship handler – a grievous sin for a captain in the estimation of the Lower Deck. Jack Lewis used to call him ‘Crasher' Farncomb. He told Joan that, from below in the engine room, as the ship was coming alongside in harbour, you could always tell if the Captain had the con. There would be sudden and urgent helm and engine orders, back and forth, often followed by a not-so-gentle crunch as the ship thumped the dock.

Stoker Norm King, the Reluctant Warrior, has a revealing story in his memoirs. King was a stirrer in the larrikin tradition, chafing at authority – the sort of man the navy calls a sea lawyer. He had been a willing participant in the famous mutiny over the white uniforms in New York. After that episode, he had obtained a copy of
King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions
, where he discovered, to his delight, that attendance at Sunday
religious services was not compulsory:

Perth
's new captain came aboard, with all due naval ceremony, on Thursday 6 June. Those who had disliked Farncomb must have wondered if they were in for something a fair bit worse. The signs were not encouraging.

Captain Sir Philip Bowyer-Smyth was an officer of the Royal Navy and an aristocrat. The ‘Sir' was no mere
knighthood. Bowyer-Smyth was a hereditary baronet. To be precise, he was by style and title the 14th Baronet of Hill Hall – a gracious Elizabethan mansion of mellow red brick built by a Tudor ancestor at Theydon Mount in Essex, outside London. He could trace the baronetcy to a loyal courtier of the executed King Charles I, and beyond that his lineage went back to the Crusades.

He had joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in his early teens and was an acting sub-lieutenant in time for the outbreak of war in 1914. But his mother was an Australian. He was born in 1894 at Moss Vale, then a country hamlet in the highlands south of Sydney, and he had served for three years with the RAN just after the First World War. A signals specialist, he had commanded a sloop on the East Indies Station and the seaplane-carrier HMS
Pegasus
. His last job before his return to Australia had been as naval attaché at the British Embassy in Rome.
Perth
would be Sir Philip's first cruiser command.

To complete the picture, he spoke with the urbane diction of the Royal Naval wardroom, played the flute in his cabin and never appeared on the bridge in anything less than immaculate uniform, as if expecting an invitation for lunch at the Admiralty.

King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions
would guarantee him the obedience of his ship's company, or else, but earning their respect was another matter altogether. At least he would have time to get to know his ship and his men in the relative calm of Australian waters, although his task was not made any easier by the arrival of an admiral and his staff on board the very day after he took command.
Perth
became the flagship of Rear-Admiral John Crace, another Australian-born officer of the Royal Navy, whose job, officially described as Rear-Admiral Commanding Australian Squadron, placed him in charge of whatever ships of the RAN were to be found afloat in Australian waters. To Crace's constant chagrin, there was precious little to command. Most of his naval strength, including
Australia
and
Canberra
,
Perth
's sisters
Sydney
and
Hobart
, and the destroyers of the Scrap Iron Flotilla, had been despatched to foreign waters to bolster the Royal Navy. In 1940, Australia was still a backwater in the war. Most of the action at sea was on the convoy routes of the North Atlantic and in the Mediterranean – Mussolini's boasted Mare Nostrum – where the storm clouds were gathering.

As the months ticked by,
Perth
continued with the important but unspectacular job of convoy and patrol, much as she had done in the Caribbean. Sometimes, it was along the Pacific coast or across towards New Zealand; at others it was down around the Great Australian Bight and into the Indian Ocean. For the new Captain, it meant a breathing space to get the feel of his ship and the measure of his officers and men, and to exercise them to the standard he expected. For the ship's company, while the work was monotonous, there was always the chance of a quick run ashore at the pubs and the girls, or the occasional longer bit of leave with friends and family.

Jack Lewis found the time to get married to his sweetheart, Joan. He was 26; she was just 20. Joan was a Catholic and he was not, so it took a bit of arranging, but on Saturday 6 July they made their vows in the cool sandstone splendour of one of the chapels at St Mary's. The wedding photographs, carefully tinted, show Jack standing proud and handsome in the blue and brass of his petty officer's uniform, Joan slender and glowing in a long white satin dress with a sweeping train and veil, and holding a bouquet of sweet peas. Her mother worked as a chef at the swanky Australia Hotel in Castlereagh Street and knew all about planning a wedding breakfast. Even though it was wartime, they pulled out all the stops at a reception centre in inner-suburban Petersham. They danced the night away and managed a few days on honeymoon. Then Jack returned to sea again.

When
Perth
was back in Sydney, Jack would not let Joan come to the ship itself. Too much of a risk, he said, with all those uncouth sailors likely to muck up or drop a swear word that a lady, most especially a respectable married lady,
shouldn't hear. But sometimes in the summer evenings after work at the photographic studio, when she knew Jack was on watch, Joan would catch a tram through the city to the Botanic Gardens, where she could see the cruiser alongside at Garden Island or moored at the naval buoy in Farm Cove. She would sit alone in the twilight beneath the great Port Jackson fig trees, warm in the knowledge that her man was there on board. Silently, she willed her love to him across the darkening harbour waters. The ship's lights would come on as dusk fell, and there would be the momentary stir on
Perth
's upper deck at six o'clock as the first dog watch changed to the second. Then she would catch the tram back home again. He never knew she did it.

As the navy expanded in 1940,
Perth
began to lose some experienced senior men, who were needed to take their knowledge and skills to other ships. New names and faces arrived on board to replace them.

Like so many of his shipmates, Jim Nelson had known the hardships of a kid growing up in the Depression years. Home was a rented two-bedroom cottage in the tough working-class Sydney suburb of Belmore. His father, Bill, was a foreman brickburner at the nearby Punchbowl Brick and Tile Works. When that job died with the collapse of the building industry, Bill was packed off with his mate Wally Anderson to some goldfields near Goulburn in southern New South Wales on a government relief scheme. Jim and his mother, Mary, and his two sisters, Norma and Vi, stayed behind to battle along as best they could. Every so often, they would push a wheelbarrow up to a government depot in Lakemba to collect a few humble groceries, and Mary took on cleaning jobs to make ends meet. As Jim recounts in his unpublished diary:

Wally Anderson became a sort of honorary uncle. It was he who taught Jim the cornet. And because he had been in the navy in the First World War, it was Wally who thought it might be a good idea if the young bloke joined the Royal Australian Naval Reserve.

Jim was a bright kid and good with his hands, smart enough to get a job at 16 as an apprentice mechanic with Bennett and Wood, a company that sold Harley-Davidson motorcycles. He loved the work. And there he met his sweetheart, Jean Connor, a beautiful young girl who lived with her maiden aunt at Lewisham. When he was not courting Jean, he would go for training at the Naval Reserve depot at Rushcutters Bay on the harbour. So, when war broke out, there was a uniformed petty officer knocking on the front door at Belmore in the middle of the night with an order for Able Seaman Nelson to report for duty. The navy taught him the ropes at Flinders, and in June 1940
Perth
became his first ship:

Jim Nelson was assigned as a gunner in one of the 6-inch turrets. When it became known he could play the cornet, he joined Elmo Gee as a ship's bugler, and the motorbike fanatic from grimy Belmore and the bush kid from Silver Creek became good mates. They ran the ship's Crown and Anchor game, a dice game that had been a gambling favourite with sailors since time immemorial but was illegal in the RAN. This had them constantly running foul of Chief Petty Officer Hubert ‘Jan' Creber, the Master-at-Arms, the ship's police chief, but it made them some extra pocket money.

A year or so older than Jim Nelson, Signalman Brian Sheedy had been an apprentice baker in the Melbourne suburb of East Brunswick when he joined up a year before the war in 1938. His father had died when he was seven. His mother, Vera, worked to keep food on the table for her four children, helped out by Brian's wage from the bakehouse of 28 shillings for a minimum of 50 hours a week: