Cruiser (13 page)

Clear of the English Channel,
Perth
dipped to the long Atlantic swell, Farncomb driving her westwards along the world's busiest shipping lanes at a steady 14 knots. This long leg would be another test of her sea-keeping abilities. The older cruisers in the Australian fleet,
Australia
and
Canberra
, were bigger ships, but, with their high freeboard – their tall, steep sides, in lay
terms – they were notorious for their ability to roll on anything wetter than a damp blanket.
Perth
was a very different kettle of fish, infinitely more sea kindly. But, as George Hatfield noted, the crew was struggling. ‘The chaos on board among the ordinary seamen has doubled now that we are at sea,' he wrote. ‘As the greater percentage of ship's company are young in the Navy, no one knows what they are doing.'
³

Rowland Roberts, standing his watches as a signalman on the flag deck, diligently recorded in his diary the wireless traffic that crowded the commercial-shipping frequencies. On several days, they found themselves shrouded by the low sea fogs typical of the Atlantic in summer:

Without radar, Farncomb and his watchkeepers had their work cut out. One sunny day in the middle of the passage, he took
the opportunity to drill the crew at action stations. On a foggier day with a calm sea, the Commander had the hands on bosun's chairs over the ship's side, to give her another lick of paint before her arrival in the United States. This was not popular, provoking a rumble of complaint on the mess decks, which held to an opinion that all this tiddlying-up could be taken too far.

At five o'clock in the morning of Friday 4 August, with the dawn still an hour away,
Perth
's lookouts spotted first the flashing white light and then the rust-red hull of the
Lightship Ambrose
marking the entrance to the channel into New York harbour. Soon enough, she had picked up the pilot to take her gliding through The Narrows that separate Staten Island from the Brooklyn shore. A heavy sea mist slowly lifted to unveil the towers of Manhattan gleaming in the sun rising astern.

New York. Skyscrapers. Film stars. Broadway. Nightclubs. Cocktails. Girls in tight sweaters and nylon stockings. Dancing the Jitterbug. Cadillacs, Fords and Chevrolets. Hot dogs and Coca-Cola. Baseball. In an age before jet airliners and cheap package holidays, travel overseas was only a dream for all but the most wealthy Australians. New York City was a place you got to see at the pictures or not at all, its on-screen inhabitants invariably glamorous, enviably urbane, rich beyond belief and, above all, modern.

And yet here they were, a young ship's company, most of them not yet 21, many of them Depression kids and country boys, about to step ashore into the midst of it all. The excitement on board that morning was electric. Hammocks were lashed up and stowed in record time. Breakfast was bolted down. A bugle call had the hands racing on deck to line the rails in their best white uniforms for a ceremonial arrival. At 7.30, with the Statue of Liberty looming through the mist ahead to port, the two small three-pounder saluting guns mounted near
Perth
's After Control Position thundered out a 21-round salute of formal greeting that rolled and echoed around the harbour. This was answered, in turn, by a US Army battery at the historic Fort Jay on Governor's Island away to starboard. The
cruiser eased into the Hudson River, tied up at Pier 53 at the foot of West 13th Street on Manhattan's Lower West Side and broke out a forest of coloured signal flags from stem to stern in honour of the Queen,
⁵
whose birthday it happened to be.

And then it all came unstuck. Simmering discontent in the mess decks boiled over. Within hours of their arrival, the crew went on strike, in direct defiance of an order. It happened in the most public way in a foreign port, on a visit that was no mere routine refuelling stop but a flag-waving exercise to represent Australia and the RAN itself. Disaster beckoned.

A lot of how and why it came to that flashpoint is lost in the fog of time. There are differing versions of what went wrong and when, but the basic facts are clear enough. Captain Farncomb had decreed that liberty men going ashore before 6 pm should wear white summer uniforms. If they wanted to stay ashore after that time, they would first have to return to the ship to change to blue uniforms to be worn at night. The order was in line with the practice on the Royal Navy's America and West Indies Station, which was technically where
Perth
found herself at this particular moment, and Farncomb no doubt assumed he was doing the right thing.

It was not the right thing. It was a petty and unimaginative piece of naval red tape. As an Australian ship,
Perth
was not under Royal Navy control on matters of uniform or anything else, and both Farncomb and his Executive Officer, Adams, had been around long enough to know that the order would inconvenience and irritate the men. It meant cutting into their valuable hours of liberty. They would have to interrupt whatever they might be doing – seeing a movie, chatting up a girl, having a drink – to go back on board. And if they'd already got a few beers down, as thirsty sailors will, there was every chance the Officer of the Watch might spot it and not let them go back ashore again, blue uniform or not.

A few of the men had asked through their divisional officers for the order to be withdrawn, as it was their right to do, but they were told it would not be. Coming on top of the discontent
provoked by the repainting of the ship in the mid-Atlantic, and by what seems to have been an increasing dislike towards some of the officers, including Adams and the First Lieutenant, Reid, the spark ignited.

Rowland Roberts made a brief note of the blow-up in his diary. Later, he amplified that note in another longer and much more detailed account of
Perth
's world cruise – a book that now rests in the archives of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. This was his entry for that first day in New York:

There were about 50 or 60 men gathered on the fo'c'sle, rumbling with discontent. Farncomb was already ashore on the first of a punishing round of official calls. Adams – Flip the Frog – decided that he had a full-blown naval mutiny on his hands and, in an astonishing over-reaction, ordered that pistols be issued to the officers. Stoker Norm King claimed in his diary that the New York Police Department was called out, which would have been a diplomatic nightmare.

It was the Gunnery Officer, the popular Lieutenant Bracegirdle, who hosed things down. Jock Lawrance, one of the strikers, recalled later that ‘he was excellent. He saved the day with a bit of diplomacy.'
⁷
Judy Patching remembers him as ‘a
wonderful bloke'.
⁸

Bracegirdle assured the hands their concerns would be investigated and asked them to return to their jobs, which they did. Back on board the next morning, Farncomb gave the order to ‘clear lower deck', which mustered the ship's company on the quarterdeck before him, and there he sensibly defused the time bomb with a face-saving compromise. He would not withdraw the order to wear whites. But men who applied to wear blues ashore would be given permission to do so. Leave would also be extended by half an hour. The demand for the First Lieutenant, Pricky Reid, to be removed from the ship was so patently over the top that it was ignored.

The face-saver worked. No punishments were meted out, although the officers and the senior petty officers would undoubtedly have made a note of the men thought to have led the trouble. And there the matter would have ended. Except that someone talked to the newspapers. One of the city's racy tabloids,
The Sunday News
, came out with a headline: ‘AUSSIE MUTINY HERE – OFFICERS TOO BRITISH', complete with a quote from an anonymous sailor that undoubtedly owed a great deal to the reporter's creativity:

The more staid
New York Times
, under the headline ‘PERTH CREW WINS PLEA AGAINST WHITE UNIFORMS', reported that:

Farncomb's heart must have sunk, but, in fact, the publicity provoked a curious reaction in the crew. As ever, Roberts summed up the mood:

Enough was enough. It was one thing to have a domestic row in the ship. It was very much another thing, and furiously embarrassing at that, to have it splashed all over the Yank papers for the world to read.

So the Australians hit the town. New York had plunged the world into the Depression in 1929. Now, ten years later, the buck was back. The New Deal promised by a new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had restored the economy. The Big Apple was driving ahead again, neon lit, top down and chrome-plated on whitewall tyres, to a jazz and swing soundtrack brought to you by CBS network radio. At first, the
Perth
men just drank it all in. They wandered the sidewalks in the summer heat, marvelling at the sights, drawn by the art-deco splendour of the Empire State Building built to beat the Chrysler skyscraper as the world's tallest and opened just nine years earlier. They rode the elevated railroad lines, gaped at the advertising blimps flying overhead and tried their first-ever drink of rum 'n' Coke. As night fell on the Manhattan canyons, they discovered the bars and nightclubs, Radio City Music Hall and the famous Rockettes, and the dazzling theatres on Broadway, the Great
White Way, where the lights had never gone out.

‘This is sure the place for nightlife and spending,' Rowley wrote in his diary. ‘Although the gaiety may be found practically any place in New York, one has to pay for his or her pleasure. Uptown, life is one big whirl. These New Yorkers are sure the last word at fast living.'
¹²

The coalminer's son from the Hunter Valley, Bill Bracht, haunted the clubs and cabarets, noting it all down the next day. New Yorkers thought his accent was cute, and a bunch of them he met in a bar took him off to The Famous Door, a former prohibition-era speakeasy on the jazz mecca of 52nd Street. There, leaning on the piano, he heard Count Basie play ‘South of the Border' and ‘Deep Purple'. Then it was supper at the Cotton Club, where someone else introduced him to Cab Calloway and his band. Another night it was Harlem, finishing up at the Savoy Dance Hall to catch Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Waller. On Broadway, he saw the movie
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
, where the star, Gary Cooper, made a personal appearance.

George Hatfield did all the sights, from Central Park to the Empire State, and was tickled when a girl asked if he spoke Austrian: