Cruiser (7 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
By January, 7000 men were out of work. The Federal
Attorney General, a silver-tongued Melbourne lawyer named Robert Menzies, went to Port Kembla to confront the workers on the docks. Union leaders reluctantly cleared a path for him through an angry crowd. Menzies told them that government policy decreed the iron should go to Japan. That policy could not be set aside by a trade union or anyone else. In the end, it was the Dog-Collar Act that broke the union's resistance. The wharfies crumbled and the pig iron was loaded and shipped. Forever afterwards, trade unionists would refer to Menzies contemptuously as Pig Iron Bob.
Every so often, though, the Lyons Cabinet sought reassurance that the British were awake to the Japanese threat. Comforting noises flowed smoothly back from London. As ever, Singapore would be the rock upon which any Japanese wave would break. The British had resumed work on the naval base there, in fits and starts, as the Depression receded. Some Australian leaders, however, held strong doubts about the promise of âMain Fleet to Singapore'. While still in opposition in 1936, the new Labor leader, John Curtin, put his finger on the matter with telling foresight:
If an Eastern first-class power sought an abrogation of a basic Australian policy, such as the White Australia Policy, it would most likely do so when Great Britain was involved, or threatened to be involved, in a European war. Would the British government dare to authorise the despatch of any substantial part of the fleet to the East to help Australia? The dependence of Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous a hazard upon which to found Australian defence policy.
15
The speech provoked predictable uproar from the government benches, with cries that Curtin, the wretched socialist, had insulted Britain and trampled the bonds of Empire. But the question he had posed would not go away, despite purblind complacency in official quarters. In March 1937, the Australian
naval staff prepared for the government a confident appraisal, which read, in part:
The only possible enemy is Japan, and although the disparity of force in our disfavour will be large at the outset, we shall be in possession of a first-class and almost impregnable base â Singapore. Furthermore, it is impossible to conceive of a world situation such that the United Kingdom would be unable to despatch a large proportion of the Main Fleet to Eastern Waters in the case of such a war. Hence, we may expect the balance of forces at the scene of operations to be levelled up in a comparatively short time.
16
The âalmost impregnable base' was opened, with great fanfare, in early 1939. Winston Churchill would call it âthe Gibraltar of the East', and it was, indeed, a monumental feat of engineering and construction. There was only one flaw: there was barely a warship in sight and only a handful of obsolete aircraft of the RAF. Fortress Singapore was an empty shell, a grand delusion that would have tragic consequences.
TO THE WORLD BEYOND
The
Autolycus
berthed in Hobart only long enough to load her cargo of apples, then plodded back north across Bass Strait and into Port Phillip Bay to collect another contingent of sailors from Melbourne.
There were 300 men waiting at Station Pier to join the
Perth
crew. Many of them, too, were still teenagers, wet behind the ears, fresh from their basic training at the Naval Depot. They were rated as ordinary seamen and wore the square-rig naval uniform as proud as you like, but they had not yet been to sea. Others were more experienced sailors with homes in Victoria, or who had returned from leave in Tasmania, South Australia or Western Australia. One of them was Charles William Lawrance, 26 years old, a leading stoker, known to everyone as Jock. Born in Rotherham, near Sheffield, in England in 1913, Jock's few years in Australia had done little to take the edge off the thick Yorkshire burr of his youth. His shipmates had decided off their own bat that he was Scottish, so Jock he became.
His early life had been hard. His mother had died when he was a baby. When Jock was just eight, his father, a railway ganger, was found badly hurt beside the tracks one morning after a night of thick Yorkshire fog. Months later, he died of his injuries. Jock lived with his elder sister and eventually worked on the railways for a while himself, training to be a signalman for the old LMS â the London, Midland and Scottish company
â but they sacked him when he became entitled to a man's wage at the age of 20. With the Depression beginning to bite, he wrote to an uncle in Tasmania and another in Canada, asking about emigration. The Tasmanian uncle offered him a roof over his head and a job on his small farm on Bruny Island, south of Hobart:
I had some money left. My father had left me a bit from war bonds, and my married sister living in Manchester put in a bit. There was no dole. The trip to Australia cost me £54, a lot of money in those days. I had the fifty but not the four, so my sister gave me that, plus £5 to land with. There were no migration schemes, that was finished. My uncle had to swear I wouldn't be on the susso for two years when I got out here.
I came out on the
Themistocles
out of Liverpool. Left in November 1933. I got out here to Melbourne, across to Launceston on the ferry, then by train to Hobart, and they met me there. I worked on my uncle's farm, and got no pay for a while, because I was absolutely green, chopping wood and everything. I chopped my foot a few times. I said I'd have to have a weekend in Hobart now and then. He said, âYeah, we'll let you have a weekend in Hobart. Stay at the YMCA.'
So I went to the YMCA in Hobart and there was a big sign saying âWanted. Men For The Royal Australian Navy'. I couldn't get in there quick enough, to get away from slavery, six days a week.
Anyway, I said, âCan I join the navy?' And they said, âYeah, we want people for the navy. We've got to have a squad for Tasmania, and you'll make one of them.' So I did a few sums for them and then I joined the navy, at Flinders Naval Depot. When pay day came around, they put so many pound notes in my hand, I'd never seen so much money.
I loved it. Anything better than farming. I loved it and I got on with it. I got a square meal and a few pounds in my pocket, and good mates.
1
Jock signed up on 4 June 1934. When he passed out from Flinders, he thought about becoming a seaman or perhaps a cook, but the navy told him it wanted stokers, so a stoker he turned out to be. The name came from the early days of steam, when coal was stoked into the furnaces to fire a ship's boilers. Naval folklore had it that stokers were all muscle and no brain; they messed apart from other sailors in all but the smallest ships and tended to stick together when they went for a run ashore in a foreign port. If there was a brawl in a dockside pub, it was a fairly safe bet there would be a stoker in it somewhere. The name lasted beyond the arrival of oil-fired machinery even though the job changed, and by 1939 stokers needed more brains and had significant mechanical skills. But they still did the dirty work.
Jock's farewell from Melbourne was a family affair because his brother-in-law, Arthur Close, was sailing with him. Not long after Jock had joined the navy, he had chatted up some girls in Melbourne's Swanston Street, and the prettiest of them, Mavis Malloy, had stayed in touch. As they'd got to know each other, the Malloy family had welcomed him as one of their own, and in 1935 he and Mavis were married at a church in suburban Brunswick. Baby Joan was born in 1938. The Malloy girls must have liked a sailor, because Mavis's sister Jean married one too. Arthur Close was not a stoker but a leading seaman. He and Jock got on like brothers and, with a bit of luck and good management, they wound up together in the Melbourne draft for HMAS
Perth
. On Saturday 20 May, the girls were there to see them off.
Another man waiting in the crowd with them at Station Pier, Ray Parkin, would, in time, prove to be one of the most extraordinary men ever to wear the uniform of the RAN. Like so many working-class boys of his generation, he had left school at 14, but he was a voracious reader and a talented painter and writer, with remarkable powers of observation. He carried a small collection of carefully chosen books to sea, and the study of history, philosophy and natural science, entirely self-taught,
enriched his mind. Towards the end of his years, the gifts of his intellect and his achievements in literature would win him a global reputation as a naval historian and the award of an honorary doctorate of letters from Melbourne University. But on this day he was merely Petty Officer Raymond Edward Parkin, aged 28, with the two crossed anchors and the king's crown of his rate displayed on the left sleeve of his brass-buttoned jacket, and another crown and circled anchor on his cap.
Ray was a Collingwood boy, the son of Arthur James Parkin, a coach and motor trimmer, and his wife Laetitia. In later life, he would write of the sights and sounds of his birthplace: the gritty gaslit streets; the lamplighters cycling by with their long poles at dusk; the bells of the trams and the rumble of iron cartwheels; the roar and clang and heat of the local blacksmith's forge, where the âblackie' hammering horseshoes would sometimes let him pump the bellows to set the coals glowing red.
After the First World War, the Parkin family moved away from Collingwood to the new suburb of Ivanhoe, then little more than scrub and paddocks. But already ships and the sea were calling the young bloke, exerting a magnetism that would fascinate him until the day he died:
I remember, when I was about only six, when on holidays at the seaside, standing at the water's edge with the sea lapping around my ankles, and gazing out to the horizon, stretching completely from east to west: the widest space I could imagine. At all hours of the day: dawn, broad day, dusk and night time. At night the navigational beacons blinked their coloured cautions all over the place. The horizon became like a magic line over which vessels sank when departing and rose up like magic on arrival. It was this âbeyond' that so intrigued me: as if the whole Rest of the World was waiting for me in this unrealised beyond.
An aunt of mine used to take me with her when she went to visit her relations in Geelong, some fifty miles or so southwest
down Port Phillip into Corio Bay. Her relations were shipping agents there, so we went by ship in the steamship
Edina
. She was quite an historic vessel. Having been launched in Scotland in 1854, she had served in the Crimean War as a troop transport â¦when I sailed in her she had a single mast supporting cargo derricks. She was painted green with a yellow sheer line, her funnel was white with a black top. With her curved clipper bow and elliptical stern she had a grace of her own. I was allowed to go into the wheelhouse and watch her being steered and her engine telegraphs being worked with their clanging bells.
In fine weather I was allowed to go and stand forward on the fo'c'sle right in the eyes of the ship. There I would stand, looking ahead along the bowsprit which she still carried, with the wind in my face scanning the horizon and imagining all sorts of things to suit my fancy of the time. These little voyages made a deep impression on me, which had some influence on my future beyond my knowledge then.
2
If the boy could not yet go to sea, the next best thing was the Yarra River, winding through its valley east, then south, of Ivanhoe. Sometimes an uncle would take him out in a wooden rowing boat, resting under the willows or the great gums for sandwiches and fruit cordial. As Ray grew older, his love affair with the Yarra deepened:
The Heidelberg School of painters last century in the eighties and nineties had found much of their inspiration here. A small red brick shanty with the skeleton of its roof, the bricks now crumbling, was still there overlooking the river. I joined the Scout Troop with its boathouse framed with unsawn timber and a tarred paper roof. My brother had been a foundation member of the Troop in 1908⦠being on the river with our boats it became a Sea Scout troop, with white sailor caps, blue jerseys, short trousers and socks, summer and winter. This was our Mecca.
The River had its dangers and we had our adventures with
rising floods, when only the gable ridge of the boat shed was left above water; with drowned cattle coming down the stream and stranding and having to be moved. We learned to swim like water rats among the currents and snags until we took it all for granted, but never foolishly. We learned boat handling until they seemed to be another part of ourselves. In the water or in the boats we felt equally at home. This brought us self reliance and a proper respect for what could happen without warning. But there were others, not so familiar, who were attracted to the river for other reasons. Some, who simply got into trouble from just not knowing, we were able to pull out. But others drowned and we had only bodies to pull out. With our boats, we sometimes used to help the police to drag for bodies that the current had taken before help could come. Some were suicides. Once we found a body hanging by the neck from a tree branch overhanging the water.
In 1928, the day after his eighteenth birthday â it was ordained; it was inevitable â Ray Parkin joined the navy. He thrived with the singular happiness of a young man whose dreams were coming true. It was the art and science of the sailor that claimed him, seamanship in its purest form; that and the majesty of the ocean itself. Naval routine and logic appealed to his disciplined mind. He revelled in learning to steer by a compass, in heaving a line, in lowering a boat, in standing a watch on the bridge on a starry night.
Away at sea, in the cruisers
Australia
or
Canberra
, he would write long letters to Thelma Kerwin, a girl he had met on the river when he was a Sea Scout and who intuitively understood his sailor's calling: âI would tell her of my amazing adventures; she would tell me of home, of which I could never hear too much.' In 1934, they were married in the respectably sober brick Methodist church in Ivanhoe. Thelma was just 21. In four years, she gave him a daughter, Jill, and a son, John. Ray had signed up for the customary 12-year stretch in the navy. If all went well, he would be out of uniform and back with his family in 1940.
Stoker Norm King almost didn't make it on time. He and a mate had been stuck in a lift at the YMCA, where they had spent the night. They rushed into Station Pier with just minutes to spare, out of breath, frantic at the thought the ship would leave without them.
Born in the London suburb of Finsbury, at the age of four Norm migrated with his family to Adelaide, where his father, Charlie, got work as a cabinetmaker. The Kings did well to begin with. Charlie managed to scrape together a £50 deposit on a £700 house in Colonel Light Gardens, which was then an Adelaide outer suburb of bush and paddocks with the Mount Lofty ranges rising in the distance. Norm and his three siblings enjoyed a country childhood of climbing gum trees, yabbying in creeks and occasional trips to the beach. But the Depression hit the King family as it did everyone else. Charlie lost his job, and at 13 Norm had to leave school for work in a furniture factory that would bring in a few shillings to help out. He was 16 when he enlisted in the navy and 17 when he joined the cruiser
Canberra
as an ordinary stoker, the lowest of the low:
Working conditions on sea-going ships for young stokers were deplorable. Our time was spent cleaning and red-leading smelly and filthy bilges, boiler cleaning and scraping the soot from the inside of the funnels. Whatever the job, we finished up covered with soot or filth. To help clean our bodies we rubbed ourselves down with oil or, if we could get hold of it, butter.
Despite these precautions and no matter how hard we scrubbed ourselves the grime stayed in the pores of the skin. Clean clothes, and especially our white summer uniforms, would be grubby within minutes.
3
Norm liked the mateship of the navy and the travel, especially a trip
Canberra
made to the island of Bali, where he and his mates, still teenagers, were agog at the sight of the local women wearing only sarongs, their breasts bared. But he chafed at the naval discipline:
Between breakfast and Captain's Rounds it was a frenzy of activity. Each mess under the eagle eye of the Leading Hand was responsible for the immaculate state of their own area. We scrubbed and holystoned the wooden tables and stools. Polished the cutlery and plates, burnished the food trays. We scrubbed with soft soap and hot water the deck, deckhead and shipside. We even polished the spittoon inside and out. With all this spit and polish we knew that some fault would be found.
The whistle of the Bosun's mate's pipe preceded the Captain and his officers. We stood stiffly to attention alongside our table. The Captain checked the laid-out plates and cutlery on the table, peered under the table, rubbed a delicate finger over the locker tops and poked his stick into every nook and cranny.
We thought we had passed the test but he spotted the porthole. The brass fastening clips had been polished to perfection but the Brasso had smeared onto the glass. The Captain indicated his find to the Commander who in turn informed the First Lieutenant, who had words with the Divisional Officer who laid the blame squarely on the Regulating Chief Stoker. When the inspection party moved on, the buck finally stopped with the Leading Hand.
If the ship was kept scrupulously clean, so were the crew. The bathrooms had no showers, only rows of small stainless steel bowls. The sailors rubbed themselves down with sweat rags and soapy water. New recruits soon learnt that if their idea of hygiene were below standard, the older members of the crew would fix it for them. With a stiff brush. With so many men living in a combined space, this was necessary.