Cruiser (8 page)

Station Pier had known farewells like this before. The first contingent of troops for the Boer War in South Africa sailed from here in August 1899, and in October 1914 a convoy of 16 ships left Port Melbourne carrying the men, horses and supplies of the Australian Imperial Force to the Great War.

The
Autolycus
would follow in their wake, westwards across the Indian Ocean. At exactly 10.15 on this Saturday morning,
the steam tug
Tooronga
helped her nudge slowly away from the pier towards the bay and the open sea, and once again the web of coloured paper streamers strained and parted to the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne'. The next stop would be Durban, South Africa.

Conditions on board were now more cramped. Down in the dim and almost airless hold, each man had a space just eight feet long and 15 inches wide to sling his hammock, and as the ship ploughed into the rollers of the Great Australian Bight, literally dozens of the first-time sailors discovered the bottomless misery of seasickness. On deck, the rails were lined with retching young men, for whom death would have been a blessed relief.

About 12 hours out from Melbourne, Jock Lawrance discovered a stowaway. He was a young stoker, 20-year-old Harry ‘Curly' Sutton, originally assigned to the new
Perth
crew. Just days before the departure, he had come down with chickenpox and been ordered instead to hospital. Desperate to make the voyage anyway, he had managed to slip on board with the rest of the men at Station Pier, but both the chickenpox and seasickness had taken hold. Covered in bright red spots, he went to Jock to confess all. The
Autolycus
hove to in King George Sound off Albany in Western Australia while he was put aboard a launch and sent back to dry land.

As the sailors passed from Australian waters and into the Indian Ocean, naval routine began to take hold, with morning lectures and classes. By day, there was more than enough time for some knockabout exercise, under the enthusiastic eye of the man who would become
Perth
's physical-training instructor, Petty Officer Julius Patching, a fit young bloke of 22 from Geelong who had joined the navy in 1935. ‘Judy' Patching, they called him. He and Elmo Gee had been shipmates in the cruiser
Canberra
a few years back, and they were pleased to be renewing the friendship.

Judy would survive the war and eventually become a prominent and popular figure on the Australian Olympic
Committee, acting as the chief starter at the Melbourne Games in 1956. For now, he was getting his charges out for physical jerks on deck after breakfast and arranging deck-hockey games and boxing matches for a bit of entertainment. Sometimes, there was a bit of fun shooting pistols at bottles and boxes thrown over the stern. By night, there would be a much-awaited beer issue and perhaps a sing-song or a movie.
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And then the Indian Ocean turned nasty. The roaring forties, the southern latitudes infamous to sailors the world over for their sudden and treacherous spells of bad weather, flung four days of rain and storm directly into the ship's path. The
Autolycus
laboured heavily as huge green seas broke over her straining bow, forcing Captain Hetherington to slow her to little more than a walking pace of seven knots. The temporary accommodation built on deck took a hammering. Packed like sardines in the hold at night, many of the men came down with heavy colds – Elmo Gee remembered it as pneumonia – and Surgeon Commander Charlie Downward's temporary Sick Bay was full to overflowing. Three weeks after leaving Melbourne, it was a mightily relieved ship's company lining the rails as the
Autolycus
came alongside in Durban to refuel and take on more stores, food and water. Elmo recorded his impressions of the town:

After three days, they set off again, the decks laden with extra coal for the run to England. In fine and sunny weather, they made a further westing to round the Cape of Good Hope, and Ray Parkin got out his small tin palette of watercolours to
paint an albatross wheeling and swooping in the ship's wake as they entered the Atlantic. On 14 June, now heading north, they crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. A canvas swimming pool was rigged up on the foredeck and filled with seawater to provide some relief from the heat, but, measuring only about three metres by ten metres, it was hardly enough for 500 men to splash around in, and some of them came down with throat and eye infections. Then something went wrong with the ship's water supply, which turned salty and discoloured and meant stopping the showers for several days until it could be fixed.

Crossing the equator brightened the men's spirits again. Few of them had ever done it, and they threw themselves into the traditional ceremonies of King Neptune's Court with a will. Rowley Roberts made a careful note for his diary:

The shellbacks – the sailors who had already done an equatorial crossing – had gone to remarkable trouble to put on a show for the pollywogs, the rookies. Ray Parkin was the creative director. Next morning, the circus began. Neptune was imperiously grand and hairy, his queen equipped with a shaggy rope wig and a pair of enormous breasts made from baker's dough. A yahooing retinue of policemen, bears, Judge Barnacle Seahorse and the Royal Barber, cavorted in their wake. The crew, stripped down to just shorts or swimmers in the sweaty heat, crowded the rails, perched on the ship's boats and squatted on the deck as charges were read and punishments dispensed. As Ray Parkin recorded in his diary, the officers were not immune from the frolic. Bill Cook, aged 23, was one of the lieutenants drafted for
Perth
:

Neptune and the bears respected no rank. To hoots of laughter,
the victims copped the traditional shave with the barber's filthy lather and a head-first dunking in the murky canvas pool.

Six days later, the
Autolycus
called in briefly at Funchal on the island of Madeira to take on more water. The Australians had been taking too many showers in the heat – a curious colonial custom for which the English shipowners had been unprepared. There was no leave ashore, but the ship was surrounded by local traders in small boats hawking souvenirs and Madeira wine, which, Rowley Roberts ruefully noted later, ‘turned out to be highly inflammable “metho” coloured with cochineal'.
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The voyage was nearly over. On the evening of 28 June, there was a last sing-song on deck and they saw the French island of Ushant to starboard, marking the entrance to the English Channel. Early the next morning, The Needles, those three ancient chalk pillars off the Isle of Wight, rose up to port. The pilot boat was waiting for them.

Portsmouth, a natural harbour on the southern coast of the county of Hampshire, is the home and heart of the Royal Navy and has been a haven for shipping since Roman times. For reasons nobody can remember, sailors have always known Portsmouth by the nickname Pompey. Intimately bound up with the history of England, it was here that Richard the Lionheart gathered a fleet for the Crusades against the Muslim heathen, and that King Henry VIII wept at the horrifying spectacle of his great wooden flagship
Mary Rose
foundering off Southsea Castle as she sailed to do battle with the French in 1545, with the loss of some 500 souls.

Arthur Phillip's First Fleet lay at the Mother Bank anchorage off Spithead as the convicts were gathered from the jails and prison hulks for transportation to Botany Bay in 1787, and Nelson's last footsteps on English soil before his death at Trafalgar had been at Pompey's Sally Port in 1805, a small crowd cheering the one-armed Admiral as he took a boat out to his flagship HMS
Victory
.
Victory
was still there in 1939, firm in her dry dock, watching over a great naval base readying
once again for war with a European tyrant. The signs were unmistakable. In the Channel, the Australians lining the deck of the
Autolycus
saw a flotilla of lean grey destroyers heading at speed for the Atlantic, and as they steamed up Spithead towards the dockyard a flight of RAF Hurricane fighters swooped overhead. At noon on 29 June, chivvied by yet another tug, the
Autolycus
secured alongside HMS
Amphion
, the cruiser that would in ten days become HMAS
Perth
.

They had sailed 21,000 kilometres in seven weeks, cheerfully enduring discomforts casually inflicted upon them by a penny-pinching Australian Government and the Naval Board. Years later, many of them would look back with nostalgia at this landmark in their lives.

As a gangplank was laid across from the deck of the
Autolycus
to
Amphion
, the Australians marvelled at the scene around them. In the watery summer sunlight, all the naval might of England seemed to be on display. The pride of the Royal Navy, the great battlecruiser HMS
Hood
, lay in the next dock, and beyond her was the formidable grey bulk of the newly rebuilt First World War battleship
Queen Elizabeth
. A forest of masts and funnels revealed a line of destroyers berthed side by side. Launches, barges and picket boats scuttered across the harbour waters. A red and white admiral's flag flew from the white semaphore tower atop the Georgian brick of the base headquarters building. His Majesty's Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth, throbbed with purpose.

HMS
Amphion
, however, did not. Her new crew saw, to their dismay, that she was filthy and, at first glance, deserted. She looked like a ghost ship. Her paintwork was scarred where rust had been scraped away and replaced with blotches of red lead preservative, and her upper decks were strewn with stores and spares and just plain rubbish. After the rigours of the long trip from Sydney, it was a disheartening sight, but there was nothing for it. Gathering their kitbags, the men left the
Autolycus
and trooped aboard their new home, to be met by their new captain.

Harold Bruce Farncomb was born in 1899, if not with a silver spoon in his mouth at least within fairly easy reach of one. The second child of a comfortably middle-class timber surveyor, he grew up on Sydney's North Shore, where his first school was Gordon Public, an elegant pile of colonial sandstone. After that, he went briefly to Sydney Boys High, but in 1913 he changed course. Young Harold, barely a teenager, and certainly not old enough to shave, joined the first intake of boys to be trained as officers in the temporary Royal Australian Naval College (RANC) at Osborne House overlooking Corio Bay near Geelong in Victoria.

The RANC was modelled, in almost every way, on the Royal Navy's officer college in Britain. This was very deliberately done. The Royal Navy had ruled the waves for a century, and the Australian Navy had been designed, nut and bolt, rope and wire, hull and funnel, to the British template. It flew the same ensign: the red cross of St George on a white background, with the Union flag in the top-left corner. The ranks and uniforms were identical. Young Australian officers would be in no way inferior to their Royal Navy counterparts. They would absorb the skills, knowledge, customs and traditions of the senior service. They would hold the King's commission as officers and, trained as such, they could be posted to any of His Majesty's Ships, British or Australian, as the Empire required. There was, however, one specific difference. The Australian Government had made it clear that social class, or lack of it, was not to be a barrier to entry for would-be officers. In Britain, good breeding was not infrequently regarded as an adequate substitute for ability in young midshipmen, but this was not to happen in a more egalitarian Australia. Talent was all that counted. British naval cadets were still required to pay for their training as if they were at an exclusive public school. In Australia, it would be free.
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