Cruiser (9 page)

Farncomb had talent to burn. First at Osborne, and then at the newly completed naval college on the shores of Jervis Bay in New South Wales, he threw himself into three years
of study that even today seems dizzying. Arithmetic and algebra, plane and spherical trigonometry, electromagnetics, navigation and pilotage with nautical astronomy, engineering, geography, history, English literature and composition, French and German, chemistry and religious instruction filled those waking hours when he was not learning the intricacies of parade-ground drill, boat handling and wardroom etiquette. He obtained his colours at cricket and in 1916 he topped his class in his final year.

A dazzling career duly soared. As a newly minted midshipman in 1917 in the final years of the Great War, his first ship was the battleship HMS
Royal Sovereign
in the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, followed by a series of high-flying postings at sea and ashore in both navies. Recommended by his superiors for accelerated promotion, he was picked for staff colleges and specialist courses, where he shone again. He completed a short course at the Royal Navy's terror of terrors, the gunnery school HMS
Excellent
at Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour – a punishing ordeal that could make or break an officer's career.

He survived the purge of officers brought on by the financial cutbacks of the Depression years, served in what few remaining ships the RAN had to offer in those straitened times and also as a junior officer in two of the grandest British capital ships afloat, the battleship
Barham
and battlecruiser
Repulse
. In 1935, with the brass hat of a commander, he was assigned to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty in London, and in 1937 he became the first graduate of the RANC to wear a captain's four gold rings on his sleeve. His first command afloat was the Australian sloop
Yarra.
HMAS
Perth
would be yet another step up, a challenge for which he was supremely well trained.

Now at the age of 40, the task ahead of him was formidable. Farncomb had been in Britain since the beginning of 1939 for a senior officers' technical course, another brief spell in Intelligence at the Admiralty and, finally, another tactical course in Portsmouth. As he watched his new crew come on board
Amphion
, he was acutely aware that it was made up
largely of youngsters who had never been to sea in a ship of war. He would have to turn them into fighting seamen in months, if not weeks, with only a small backbone of experienced officers and senior ratings to help him. And this in a ship he barely knew himself and which, as he surveyed it on that summer's day in Pompey, was patently not ready to go to sea. Undaunted, he set to the job.

When the new arrivals had dumped their kit below in the for'ard messes, he gave the order to ‘clear lower deck'. This brought the men topsides to
Amphion
's quarterdeck, and there he addressed them. Briskly, he read to them a formal document commissioning the new ship into the RAN and appointing himself as her commanding officer. He reminded them of the good news, that their return home would include a visit to the United States to officially represent Australia at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, with a trip through the Panama Canal and then stopovers in Los Angeles and San Diego on the American west coast before the long leg south-west across the Pacific. There was also another duty. Here in Portsmouth, there would be a naming ceremony for the new
Perth
, attended by royalty, no less. Her Royal Highness Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, would do the honours on board, on 10 July. They had ten days to get the ship gleaming like a new pin.

There was one matter that Farncomb did not share with his ship's company. His time at the Admiralty had given him a window on great and grave events, a perspective rare for an Australian naval officer. It had convinced him that war with Germany was inevitable and that war with Italy would very likely follow. At the end of June 1939, he knew that dismal certainty was closer than ever. There was also the growing might and menace of Japan. If Germany, Italy and Japan were ever to join in another world war against Britain and her Empire in a fight to the death against Western democracy, the future for Australia would be dark indeed. It was entirely possible that the lights of civilisation might flicker and die, extinguished by a new dark age.

Farncomb allowed the crew a weekend's shore leave two days after they arrived. After that uncomfortable voyage, they deserved it. Excited, they set foot on the soil – or, in His Majesty's Dockyard, the cobblestones – of the Mother Country for the first time. It was a welcome chance to get away from authority for a bit, to stretch their legs, to relax before the hard work began, to discover the dubious delights of warm, flat English beer in the sailors' pubs of Pompey beyond the dockyard gates along that venerable stretch of waterfront road known as The Hard. Portsmouth had hailed and farewelled sailors for centuries, but these Australians were a bit out of the ordinary. Suntanned from their voyage, taller and more athletic than their English cousins, they were an exotic species. They found the Portsmouth women warm and welcoming.

George Hatfield, a leading seaman, had been in the navy since 1932, joining up when he was just 19. Like so many of
Perth
's crew, he had grown up as a Depression kid, the family battling along in the Melbourne suburb of East Brunswick, where his parents and three younger brothers still lived. His sweetheart, Alma Parkin, was with her family in Glebe in Sydney. George kept a diary from the day they sailed in the
Autolycus
. Portsmouth and England were an eye-opener:

On the Monday, the holiday was over. Since her return from African waters,
Amphion
had been lying idle for six months while dockyard workers put her through a thorough refit. Her engines were overhauled, her boilers cleaned, and new refrigeration was installed for her galleys. Most useful of all, she had acquired a new high-angle armament: eight brand-new 4-inch anti-aircraft guns in twin mountings. The dockyard mateys, though, were notoriously uncaring of a ship's appearance. They had left her even filthier below decks than above; the stink of foul bilges was everywhere. Slowly at first, then more quickly, the ship began her return to life, from dawn to dusk. And dusk came late, because this was high summer in southern England and the twilight lingered long after the evening watch had begun at 8 pm. The men laboured mightily to wash off the grime. They painted her from stem to stern, scraped her decks and woodwork clean, and polished her brightwork. It was a hard slog, but slowly she was returned to a proper state of naval cleanliness and efficiency. To the old salts on board, she was beginning to look, sound and feel like a ship of war again, ready to do a warrior's work if the call came.

In the navy, a captain in his ship is a godlike figure, with sweeping powers of command and of punishment and reward. Within wide limits, it is his duty and privilege to decide how he wants the ship to be run. Some captains issue whole volumes of standing orders to cover every possible eventuality, from air attack to a burned fried egg at breakfast, insisting that every order be followed to the letter. Others prefer a light touch, keeping their instructions to a bare minimum, trusting in the competence and common sense of the officers and men.

Harold Farncomb stood about halfway between these two extremes. He was strict and demanding, as it was his right to be, but not excessively so. He had laid his plans and prepared his orders for the new cruiser well before the
Autolycus
arrived in Portsmouth. It was now his Executive Officer's job to put them into action.

Centuries of naval practice require the Executive Officer, as the second-in-command, to present his captain with a clean and efficient ship ready for sea in all respects, as the official phrase has it. The other officers are there to make the process happen in all of the ship's departments: from Engineering, Gunnery, Torpedoes and Electrical, Communications and Navigation and the like, to the less salty but equally important business of feeding three meals a day to a ship's company of more than 600 men.

Next down the chain of authority are the senior ratings,
the chief petty officers and petty officers, some of them with jobs or nicknames dating from the days of sail. The Executive Officer's right-hand man is the Chief Bosun's Mate, invariably known as the Buffer, because he is seen as the figure who stands as a buffer between officers and crew. The Master-at-Arms is in charge of the ship's police and referred to, for reasons long forgotten, as the Jaunty. Others are Coxswains, Quartermasters and Yeomen of Signals. Below them, in descending order, come the leading hands, sometimes known as killicks, from the anchor badge that indicates their rate, and then the able seamen and, bottom of the pile, the ordinary seamen. To care for their bodies, the new ship's company would have two doctors and a dentist, all officers and known in the navy as surgeons, assisted by their Sick Bay attendants. For the good of their souls, there was a chaplain.

Farncomb's new Executive Officer was Commander William Adams – not an Australian but an officer on loan from the Royal Navy. Before this job, he had commanded three destroyers, and he would end his career as a rear-admiral. But the new crew would find him stiff and humourless, an Englishman who had been educated at a prestigious public school, Christ's Hospital, and uncomfortable with more easy-going Australian ways. The Commander, as they called him, was obeyed, because both the Naval Discipline Act and the navy bible,
King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions
, required that it be so, but eventually the ship's company gave him a nickname: Flip the Frog – because he looked like a frog, according to the PT bloke, Judy Patching.

Commander Adams's task began with lists. And then more lists. And more lists after that. And books, too – everything from the gangway wine book to the cipher logs. Sometimes, it seemed, the navy floated on seas of paper. There was the Quarter Bill to be juggled and the Watch and Station Bill as well – complex documents that would assign accommodation and jobs to every soul on board. First, the men had to be settled in their living quarters – messes below decks in the for'ard half
of the ship. The crew – excluding the officers – were known, collectively, as the Lower Deck.

In 1939, the navy's living arrangements had barely changed since the days of rum, sodomy and the lash, as Winston Churchill once allegedly put it,
¹
and
Amphion
, soon to be
Perth
, was no different. The mess decks were divided into open but crowded compartments where the men were thrown together, cheek by jowl, to sling their hammocks, eat their meals and pass what leisure hours they had. There was nothing a civilian would recognise as privacy, although you could generally find yourself a quiet corner to write a letter or read a book. Cleanliness and tidiness came even before godliness in the navy; it was rigidly enforced and, in a well-run ship, happily accepted as an essential way of life.

Each mess was a jam-packed but ordered clutter of collapsible wooden meal tables, benches, kit lockers, and food and utensil stowage. Well before the days of air conditioning, fresh air was blown through the lower spaces by the fans of the ship's ventilation system, but this was never very effective. In hot weather, the mess decks would reek with the sweat and odour of male bodies, which became infinitely worse if scuttles, or portholes, had to be closed in a seaway or in action. In cold weather, the bulkheads were clammy with condensation. Hammocks were slung from hooks in the deckhead beams by night, so close that they often touched each other, then stowed again each morning, which meant that men coming off watch and needing to sleep by day had to snatch whatever horizontal space they could find.

Eating was almost equally primitive. The United States Navy had modernised itself, with the enlisted men taking their meals at a central ship's cafeteria, but in the British and Australian navies messing remained as it had been for centuries – hopelessly old-fashioned and inefficient. The ship's cooks prepared meals in a central galley, from a weekly menu put together by the supply officer and the chief petty officer cook. The food was carried back to the living spaces by a
rating known as the Cook of the Mess, to be eaten there. The navy, in its wisdom, calculated that a man required elbow room of about 21 inches, slightly more than half a metre, to seat himself with his mates at a mess table. Nelson's Jack Tars would have found nothing to surprise them in that, although the food had passed beyond the stage of salt beef and weevilly hard-tack biscuit.

Then there were the social divisions in the ship's company, hallowed by tradition that no captain or Executive Officer would dare change. Stokers did not mess with seamen for, as the saying went, oil and water did not mix, and the separation had to be carefully made. Stokers here, seamen there. There were other messes for the petty officers and chiefs, divided port and starboard.

For their labours, an ordinary seaman 2nd class, a boy of 17 or younger, earned the grand sum of one shilling and ninepence (20c) per day and an able seaman seven shillings (70c). A chief petty officer luxuriated in 11 shillings ($1.10). Skilled sailors, such as a chief engine room artificer, made 14/6d ($1.50). There was a marriage allowance of four shillings and sixpence (45c), and a few shillings extra for each child.
²

The RAN enjoyed a unique jargon,
³
much of it borrowed from the Royal Navy, where a rich vocabulary had built up through the ages. Food was scran, and garbage was gash. Bacon and tinned tomatoes, regular breakfast fare, were colourfully known as train smash. Cornish pasties, always a favourite, were invariably called tiddy oggies, which was British West Country dialect. Soft drinks were goffers and alcohol was a wet. Every so often, the ship's company would be granted a make and mend – an afternoon off work to relax. That phrase derived from the days of sail, when sailors stitched their own clothes. Toilets were unknown; you used the head. England's Jack Tars had once squatted at the very front or head of the ship to empty their bowels directly overboard.

Curiously, the men sometimes referred to themselves as matelots, the French word for sailor – as in ‘I'm just a poor
bloody matelot'. A midshipman, the youngest and most junior of all the officers – in fact, barely an officer at all, by some estimates – was a Snotty. That word, it was cruelly said, came from the midshipman's habit of wiping his nose on the cuffs of his jacket. The captain was often the Old Man to the Lower Deck. The officers sometimes called him Father, although never to his face.

Another naval term that almost defies definition was pusser. Still used to this day, it is thought to be a corruption of purser, the man in charge of supplies and victualling in the old wooden navy. Pusser came to mean anything uniquely naval, or even the navy itself. There was pusser's rum, a pusser's dirk, which was a seaman's clasp-knife, and the ship's aircraft was often called the Pusser's Duck. More curious still was the nickname you got if you came with a certain surname. Men called Clark were always Nobby. Millers were Dusty. Whites were either Knocker or Chalky. If your name was Murphy, you were stuck with Spud.

By long tradition, the officers lived well away from their men. At the time of her commissioning,
Perth
carried about 40 officers and warrant officers, from the captain to the most insignificant Snotty. Farncomb had two places where he could relax in privacy and lay his head: a small sea cabin in the for'ard superstructure close to the bridge, where he commanded the ship, and a more comfortable day cabin for use in harbour, aft of the mainmast and just below X-turret, the foremost of the two main gun turrets at the rear of the upper deck. The officers also berthed in the after part of the ship; the more senior men with a small cabin to themselves, the junior lieutenants sharing. It was four-star luxury compared with the sailors' quarters. The officers' wardroom offered a few lounge chairs, with books and magazines strewn about, and a central dining table for meals served by stewards. There was a bar for use in harbour, gin being the naval officer's traditional tipple. The captain would generally eat alone in his cabin, served in lofty seclusion by his personal steward, sometimes
inviting one or two officers to join him if and when he felt like it. Occasionally, he might dine in the wardroom but – and this was another of the oddities of naval etiquette – only if he was invited to do so.

Pay for officers was better than for sailors. A midshipman, lowest on the wardroom totem pole, made two shillings a day (20c). A sub-lieutenant earned 12 shillings ($1.20), which would rise to 19 shillings and sixpence ($1.95) when he gained his second stripe as a lieutenant. On promotion, a captain could expect three pounds and one shilling per day ($6.10), which, after a long nine years at that rank, would soar to three pounds and sixteen shillings ($7.60). There was a downside to these lavish incomes. While food was free, alcohol was not: an officer had to pay what was quaintly called his monthly ‘wine bill'.
⁴

For working the ship, both officers and men had to be sorted into three watches, designated red, white and blue. In peacetime, this gave them four hours on duty and eight hours off. Within that framework, there were divisions, with the crew allocated to that part of the ship where they worked: upper deck, engine room, communications and so on. There would be another grouping for the upper deck seamen, yet again named from the days of wooden warships and towering masts: fo'c'sle, foretop, maintop and quarterdeck. Ray Parkin, as a petty officer, was the Captain of the Foretop, his immediate superior being a lieutenant, a seaman officer. The foretop men, for example, were responsible for cleaning and maintaining the bridge structure, the foremost funnel and B-turret – the second of the two for'ard pairs of guns – and, below that, B-deck. They would also be assigned as crew for some of the ship's boats. It was a system that worked, but it required the patience of a saint for an Executive Officer and his assistants to draw it up and get it right from scratch.

The added difficulty for Commander Adams was that he knew none of the men, their abilities or their failings. In the early days of the commission, they could be graded only by
rank and experience. That, however, was never an infallible guide to which were the good men of initiative who were like diamonds in a ship's company, the mass of reliable men who would respond to leadership, and the few outright bludgers and no-hopers who had to be tolerated and somehow brought into line and kept there. Yet Adams had to distribute them throughout the ship so that trained hands would be available at any moment for tasks that could be anything: firing the guns, recovering a man overboard, fighting a fire or formally welcoming an admiral on board for cocktails.

For the men, it was the same in reverse. By trial and error, and sometimes bitter experience, they would discover the officers who knew their job and who would provide the leadership they were entitled to. A weak or a bullying officer was bad for morale and therefore the ship's efficiency. A downright incompetent officer could cause immense harm in the close and often dangerous confines of a ship at sea, provoking sullen resentment and perhaps even full disobedience, sometimes to the point where no amount of gold braid and crisp orders could save the situation.

Another man the crew would come to know soon enough was the First Lieutenant – a seaman officer one rung down the ladder from the commander. Charles Reid was an Australian, born in 1904 at Hinnomunjie – a hamlet barely a speck on the map near Omeo, in Victoria's Gippsland district. He entered the naval college as a cadet midshipman in 1918, survived the Depression years of savage spending cuts and served in two grand but elderly British battleships, HMS
Emperor of India
and HMS
Marlborough
. His last ship had been the aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
. Invalided out of her with a poisoned leg, he had been packed off to the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar near Portsmouth and fixed up in good time to be available for the new Australian ship. Now with the rank of lieutenant-commander, with two and a half stripes of gold braid on his sleeves, Reid was also a force for the crew to reckon with, another unbending man who would make gears grind and
sparks fly. Like all First Lieutenants, he was Jimmy the One, or just the Jimmy. His nickname was Pricky. Patching found him ‘haughty, a man who didn't know how to say “good work, well done”'.
⁵

As the last of the civilian dockyard workers gathered their tools and left,
Amphion
was starting to look, sound and feel as a ship should, with the low rumble of dynamos and the hum of ventilation fans, and that pleasingly familiar odour of oil, steam and cooking from the galleys percolating through the flats and spaces. Here there would be the radio playing in the mess decks, there the clomp of heavy boots on a metal ladder and the tick-tack of typing from the Signals Distributing Office. Life had returned.