It was a lovely bright sunny morning with the sun streaming in my bedroom which faced east, when Mother entered with a grave face to say that Mr Chamberlain our Prime Minister had declared War on Germany. She mentioned yet again the evil that was Hitler, Munich, and the Danzig corridor , both of which were at that time hard for an eight year old to comprehend let alone understand. The pressure of events were very soon going to give me a crash course in both political and military appreciation, well in advance for my young years.
The first crisis for our family to worry about, were the exact whereabouts of Hugh. He had completed a year at Harper Adams Agricultural College, and then in the summer holidays, had taken a boat to visit Grandfather and Granny in Turkey. He adored the doctor, and relished his company and the quiet discussions that they had together. On his return war was declared whilst he was still at sea, and the ship instead of coming back to England as intended, put into Lisbon, disembarked all the passengers and headed for America. Meanwhile at Luckyland Mother was beserk. Telegrams were sent to Turkey, to the ships owners in London to find out what was happening. Eventually they discovered that he had been put off in Lisbon , so more telegrams were despatched to the British Consul there. Mother would storm up and down the morning room at Luckland shouting, “ For God’s sake Fred do something. I haven’t raised a son all these years for him to become cannon fodder and end up being eaten by the fishes. I am sure he has got on another boat and has been torpedoed.”
Eventually the Consul tracked him down after three weeks. On the boat from Turkey was a very attractive blonde girl Jane Whittall, and they had struck up a friendship, and a few weeks enjoying the pleasures of Lisbon could not have been more fortuitous and the last thing on his mind whilst all this was going on , was to have to cable his whereabouts to his parents. Anyway contact was resumed and he was ordered to come straight out to Ceylon which he did arriving in the middle of November.
I had my first taste of the many disasters that were to follow in the early part of the war when I was staying with Ian my cousin with Aunt Helen at Albion. At the time Frank was having a new modern bungalow built on the Estate in a hollow with a lovely orchard below filled with mulberry trees, chinese guavas, cherimoyas, oranges, and lemons. So whilst the building was going on, they lived in the small cramped tea makers bungalow by the factory. It was an attractive place with flowering purple ipomeas and roses up its walls through which the long eight foot but harmless ratsnakes would wander up to the roof in search of their quarry. only once did we ever see a cobra there. There was also a fast flowing small stream through the garden, filled with land crabs, and with its bottom glistening pure silver with the mica at its base. The rocks abounded in the most enormous mica crystals which as children we would carefully peel to make windows for our model houses and forts that we built in the garden. One evening on the 15th October Frank had his shortwave radio on to hear the tragic news that the Royal Oak had been torpedoed by a U boat that had penetrated the defences at Scapa Flow. We all listened intently dumbstruck how such a tragedy could have happened, and how in the confines of a harbour there was a loss of 780 men. It seemed amazing that such an episode could ever been allowed to happen to the greatest navy in the world by such a small submarine.
The next bit of news that galvanized me was following the extraordinary chase of the Admiral Graf Spee, the German Pocket Battleship that had sailed into the wide spaces of the Atlantic before the outbreak of War, ready to prey and cause havoc to merchant shipping. She had eventually been tracked down to an area just off the River Plate where she was met by the 8 inch gunned cruiser Exeter, and the two 6inch gunned light crusers, Ajax and Achilles. In the ensuing battle , the tactics of the British Commodre Harwood by steaming directly at the bow of the Graf Spee , making a closing speed of 50 miles an hour, confused the German Captain Langsorff who had less than a minute to alter his tactics. In the salvoes that followed Graf Spee was repeatedly hit by the lighter vessels that had been able in this way to get within range. By the time he could use the full force of his large eleven inch guns, and damage Exeter severely, it was already too late,he was already badly damaged, and he turned under smoke and sheltered in Montevideo harbour, where under the neutral accords, he was allowed to spend three days.
We had all been following intently, over three or four days , the details of this protracted saga, when at an evening party at Rappahannock the news came over the radio that Captain Langsdorff had put to sea, only to scuttle his ship rather than resort to another action. Cheers went up all over the room, as Father and Kenneth, Mother and Evelyn Gordon all toasted the Navy each other and damned Hitler and the Germans. More and more whiskies were poured whilst we as children were thrilled to bits, especially as in a few days time we were all going to spend Christmas with cousin Ian ,Helen and Frank at Chardon Lodge in Trincomalee.
When we arrived there was a great deal of activity in the harbour, the principal ship being the Aircraft Carrier HMS Glorious, with her supporting destroyer HMS Bulldog lying alonside both anchored in the harbour close to the Sober Islands. They had been covering the Gulf of Aden in case Graf Spee should have turned up there after having made sinkings off Capetown. We were all invited to come and have Christmas Lunch on board, and whilst the grown ups were busy in the ward room savouring Gin and tonics, us three children were taken all over the ship. We clambered in the Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers, which even in those days looked so old fashioned and incongruous, being slow biplanes when all other planes were monoplanes. It was the first time I had ever been on a carrier, and on a flight deck, and to spend Christmas aboard one was the best present I could have ever had, and it was a pleasant memory that I have never forgotten.
Some 30 years later I was having a curry lunch with a friend Roy Hinton and I noticed that he had large photographs of the Glorious, and I recalled my Christmas on board in 1939 as a child. “Yes I too remember that Christmas party”, he went on. “I was the youngest midshipman aboard, and I got so incredibly drunk that later I was charged with behaviour not becoming of an officer and gentleman, and as a result was transferred to another ship. Such are the vagaries of war, that had I not been transferred, I would probably have been one of the 700 men drowned when she went down six months later at the Narvik evacuation having been engaged by both the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
