Epilogue

Epilogue

Now at the age of sixty-six, very happily married and having a regular income in the form of a pension plus what acting in some films and dubbing others bring me, spending my summers in a beautiful, country place about twenty-two miles from Moscow, I still believe that my life of extraordinary incidents has yet time and room for others unforeseen.

When I reflect that the first noteworthy incident was a school strike organised at the age of twelve, followed very shortly afterwards by an attempt to become a circus star, I have to admit that I had full and early warning that my life would be incident-prone. And so it has been. But I do not agree with those people who attribute their experiences, good or bad, to the fact that they are victims of circumstances. I tend to share Napoleon’s view, whose famous question on being asked to promote an officer was: `is he lucky?` For I too believe that luck plays a great part in the lives of those who experience more than the average person. A gentleman once said to me about his wife: `She is so lucky that if she fell under a tramcar there would be a power failure throughout the town that very moment`. With me, I am afraid, it is the other way about. If I went down a street where no tramcar had ever run, one would decide to take that route just when I am crossing the road.

Now, no one must think I am bemoaning my fate. Nothing of the sort. On the contrary I have long discovered that luck can be disciplined and although one may win little profit (except experience, of course) one can, by the proper control of luck, squeeze out of any tight corner or difficult situation. Controlling one’s luck means never shrinking in the face of adversity. One must watch adversity as a good boxer watches his opponent, not only his fists but his eyes also. There is always that split-second warning that, if immediately accepted, gives a way out of trouble.

Neither do I have any regrets, anyway, regretting is the most futile occupation one can engage in. I joined the Communist Party and parted with it by force of circumstances. Now I belong to no party, but I regret neither joining nor leaving. Each occasion increased my understanding of people and left me with another gain as far as experience was concerned.

My break with the Navy was against my will, but I have never once regretted my role at Invergordon, for again and again I have received confirmation that the step I took was right. Most of all I value that small but significant event in the aftermath of Invergordon, the grant the Canteen Committee wanted to send me, a rare vote of confidence from men who were to prove their worth a hundredfold at Dunkirk, and as such more dear to me than any sum of money.

And I still look back with admiration and gratitude to the Royal Naval Training Establishment at Shotley. As was to be expected, it strengthened me physically, but above all it provided a firm moral basis and wide mental vistas which no other school for a boy of my class could have given. If, after almost forty years’ absence, I visit or return to Britain, I shall go to Shotley to pay homage to the school I believe to be -in fact am absolutely convinced is – the best in the world.

 

14 I Join the Communist Party

14 I Join the Communist Party

Travelling around the country under the auspices of the many front organisations in Britain gave me a new insight into a way of life lived by a large part of the population but never really presented to the public by writers of note, except by a few failures. It seemed to me that almost every street of every town yet there were no films about it. It is not my job to ask why this should be so, and anyway if I did, the Professors of Gabology would all rise like one man and hand out a verbal thrashing that would leave me a mental invalid for the year or two left to me on this earth.

However in those days I came upon this life every time I visited a town. True, I had the most valuable pass-key one could wish for: my own working-class accent. Unlike the intellectual type who does not know the difference between slumming and helping, I did not have to prove my credentials by standing at the corner of the street with a flowing red tie for everybody to see and shouting `Daily Worker` in an accent which would have got me a chair at Oxford without any exams. As soon as I appeared amongst these people, they knew me for theirs. They showed me respect and in some cases admiration, after all I had made a bit of a name for myself at Invergordon, and they recognised it, although they all made the same mistake of thinking it had been something of a `Potemkin do`. In that they were wrong.

What interested and impressed me most were the little moments when the difficulties these people were facing came staring out at me. Following a tried and practised pattern I always arrived in a new town with a copy of the Daily Worker on view. The chap appointed to meet me knew me immediately, came and introduced himself and announced that he had been made responsible for me whilst in the town. They usually invited me first to go to their homes and have a bite, and then go on to the meeting place.

Everywhere I met the poverty of the unemployed. It is true that I was brought up in poverty, but the poverty of the poorly paid worker cannot be compared with the poverty of the unemployed. The poorly paid worker has a bright day at least once a week, the day when he collects his wages. For then he has the joy of picking out a penny here or there to give to his children. He knows he can scrape together the price of one trip to the cinema for him and his wife. However drab his life may be in the main, those little pleasures he still enjoys. It is the unemployed man who is denied even the simplest of these pleasures: for him pay day is a burden over which he has time to brood, gradually giving way in many cases to a despair which is reflected in the state of his home. Except for the `good Samaritan` groups that can always be organised around the hardest-hit cases, nobody was interested in the unemployed, especially not in helping to stop their moral decay.

That was where the Communists came in. one felt the difference as soon as one entered the house of an unemployed Communist. There was the same poverty as elsewhere. The little treat prepared for the visitor from the centre was obviously something they never had themselves. The little pale-faced child with the big round eyes, watching the strange man eating nice-looking tasty bits and hoping he would not eat it all, was there just the same. But there was an atmosphere of confidence, there was no sign of moral decay.

That was the picture I met when I went on these speaking trips, and the reason for it was that the Communists, whilst not offering anybody a rose garden, raised a feeling of hope. The slogan of the workers becoming the masters is as old as the hills. It is the same as the biblical saying that the last shall be first etc. But when an unemployed working man is told day after day that he must create the new world himself, he feels an inspiration that no charitable organisation can provide. True, he will take a hand-out from these organisations but he will never become part of them. For him they are either the enemy or near to it, the enemy being the person who knows not poverty.

He is ready, therefore, for a man who speaks his own language, who lives in the same insufficiency, but whose determined militancy imparts a moral uplift to those few he has collected round him.

For a person of my experience, who had seen and, to some extent, undergone injustices, it was the high moral standard of these people, their insistence on doing everything on behalf of those whom they called class brethren, which was the great attraction. It was least of all the will-o’-the-wisp idea that there existed a country where this idea held sway. For those who had looked on the world from the end of Wigan Pier this might be an attraction. But the Navy had at least given me the possibility of seeing the world better than many people see it, and during those travels I had become convinced that loaded tourists and newspaper correspondents were about the most ill-informed people of anybody in the world. One cannot see a country by driving round town in an excursion motorbus, nor learn about it by hanging round the bars of the best hotel, picking up fairy tales from drink scroungers. I, at any rate, had made a very simple discovery: that if the poor man gets the crumbs from a rich man’s table, the crumbs are somewhat different in different countries. Some are small and very dry, others are bigger and more nutritious.

I joined the Communist Part in July 1932 and, to begin with, it made little difference to my speaking in London and round the country. Then, in August, I was delegated to my first international congress, the first World Anti-War Congress, held at Amsterdam.

The hall was a huge velodrome with tables for representatives from all nations, spread all over the wide floor space. In those days halls were not fitted with facilities for simultaneous translation, so the congress was a real Tower of Babel with German the predominant tongue. In fact it soon became clear to me that the Germans were running this show, as the Soviet delegation, which included Maxim Gorky, had been refused visas by the Dutch authorities. When our little delegation tried to arrange for a representative to be elected to the speakers’ tribune, the man we talked with was Fritz Eckert, a member of the German Central Committee. The members of our delegation wanted to put forward my candidacy, but Eckert vetoed it right away. He said that first of all the British party was very small and secondly he knew that the sailors at Invergordon had sung `God Save The King`. It was pointed out to him that this was an anti-war congress, and that therefore anybody who was against war could speak, whether he sang `God Save The King` or not. We finally wore him down and he reluctantly agreed that I should speak.

Not before I had learnt, however, that there was a peculiar sort of `class` ladder in the international Communist movement. The German Party was at that time the biggest in numbers, other than the Soviet Part. It had over four-hundred-thousand, paid up, card-carrying, members. Its candidate in the German presidential election, Ernst Thaelmann, polled over ten million votes. The Party had a large apparatus and a widespread publishing concern, printing quite a number of daily, weekly and monthly papers and magazines. Besides these largescale propaganda media, there was a mass semi-military organisation called the Red Front Fighters, which claimed to be a counter-organisation to the Nazi Storm Troopers. So whenever there was any International Front affair outside the Soviet Union, the Germans took charge of it and imposed their will on it. They were good Communists to their own way of thinking, only they forgot to prefix the name with the word `German`. The influence of their nationalism was to be tragically proved in the bitter lessons of the period of Nazi power and the suffering it brought the German people.

In November of that same year I made my first visit to the Soviet Union, this time as a delegate to the international congress of the Labour Defence Organisation, for which I worked. Its head, at that time, had been a very well-known figure in the revolutionary movement before the October Revolution, although originating from an aristocratic family. For some strange reason aristocratic revolutionaries were not at all rare in Tsarist Russia. One poet of that day described the phenomenon in a short verse which I shall try to give in prose translation: `In the West, when the dustman wants to become a duke he makes a revolution. In our country the dukes make the revolution. Maybe they want to become dustmen.`

Yelena Dimitrovna Stasova was a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party before 1917.  She had spent some time in Siberia in exile. After the Revolution she was a secretary to Lenin and subsequently occupied important state posts. A very well-educated woman, she knew all the chief languages of Europe. She was a strict disciplinarian and had a biting sarcastic manner for people who made feeble excuses when she taxed them with laxity in their work. The employees of the organisation all knew her as `the Tiger`, but she was far from being a fierce character. On the contrary she was charming and polite in her everyday contacts with people. She died a couple of years ago at more than ninety years of age.

However on our first meeting at this congress in 1932 she was hale and hearty, for there she delivered an eighteen-hour speech to us. Of course, there were breaks, and it stretched over two days, but the lady did all the speaking for this time.

After a sightseeing trip around the country, which took in Erivan, Tbilisi and other towns, I returned to England through Germany on 1 February 1933, the very time when Hitler was preparing to take over completely.

Back in England I continued my public speaking obligations in different towns until a cablegram from Canada sent me speeding through England on a rescue mission. The telegram was very brief and rather confusing: `Kacik being deported to Yugoslavia on board Montrose`. I had to dig up a little party history to know what it was all about.

It appeared to have begun in 1930, when the whole Central Committee of the Communist Party in Canada was arrested and the members given prison sentences from two to five years. Amongst those who had a two-year sentence was Tom Kacik, who had escaped from prison in Yugoslavia, where he was under sentence of death, and had got to Canada. There he had received political asylum and had begun working for the local Communist Party, as head of the large Yugoslav contingent. He had now finished his time in prison and was being sent home, where his death sentence still awaited him. Hence the telegram, a cry for help to save this man from the gallows. The Montrose was due in Liverpool in a few days, when it was expected we would make some effort to prevent his dispatch to Yugoslavia.

We had the telegram, we had the desire to save him, but apart from that we had nothing, and quite a lot was needed: a car, since a rescue operation by train was out of the question, and money for expenses. However it seemed that a man knew a man who could get another man to lend us his car. As the owner of the car was the son of rich parents, who were much against him mixing with the Reds, the car’s delivery was to take place under special circumstances. He was to drive it up to our office and leave it outside, facing the window, and after we had given him time to get clear we would take it over. We agreed not to look out of the window during this manoeuvre in case our observation of the street should expose his connections with us and thereby lead his father to changing his will. So we sat deep in our one-room office and counted on our fingers the minutes necessary for him to get away. The we looked out of the window. That was not the only looking we did, for we looked at each other more amazed than ever before in our lives.

The chariot that stood outside had been, goodness knows how many years before, an Armstrong-Siddeley two-seater with a dickey. It looked as if the fifth owner had taken it to the knacker’s yard, tried to push it through the crusher and only succeeded in badly bruising it. So it was reprieved to take us to Liverpool. We went out to get a better look at this battered rickshaw. On the steering-wheel was fastened a piece of paper listing all the car’s defects and what one had to do to make sure they did not all operate together, as this would mean certain death to motor and motorists. One of the more outstanding defects was the steering-wheel itself, which had more than a half turn of free play each way. The radiator also leaked, but rags had been stuffed in cracks to ward off any threat from that quarter. It seemed from the long sheet of paper that the only thing in good working order was the sphynx sitting enigmatically on the radiator.

We knew we had to make the best of it. One must not look a gift horse in the mouth, even if the steed has lost several sets of teeth years and years before. At least the car went. It had arrived at the office, and we hoped this fact belied its appearance. Anyway we got it to a nearby garage and asked the attendant there to service it by midnight, the time we had decided to set out.

Exactly five minutes to the hour we arrived and sailed out of the garage at a good speed under the eye of the grinning attendant. We kept up a steady pace and soon reached the outskirts of London and the beginning of the Great North Road, as it was then called. It was when we were going up a small incline between rows of two-storey houses and shops that the motor died. We kicked it, cursed it and coaxed it, but it gave only one shudder, which was enough to bring us close to the causeway, and then expired. We were alone with this corpse in a deserted street, with the time going on for 2 am and no one about to lend us motorcars for love and kisses.

There we sat, looking at each other, not speaking and not knowing what to do, when a high-powered engine revved to a stop behind us. There was no mistaking that noise. We whispered to each other `Flying squad`. We were right. A head was stuck through the window and a voice said `What are you people doing here?` We said we didn’t know: the car had brought us to this spot and was now refusing to take us away from it, let alone to Liverpool, our intended destination. The policeman asked to see our driving licenses, then walked round the car examining it from all sides and chuckling as he did so. `All right,` he finally said, `but you chose a bad place to break down.` He nodded to the houses, and we discovered we had stopped next to a jeweller’s shop. That car certainly had it in for us. We pushed it into a side street and came back to the city by the first bus. Later we discovered that the attendant had serviced it thoroughly but had forgotten one thing: to fill up the petrol tank.

For all that, we could not abandon our mission, a chap’s life was at stake. So we started telephoning all over London and at last came upon a man willing and able to help. This was another of the well-loaded youths who were playing at Communism in the thirties. His father was chairman of the board of a large insurance company, and sonny boy was using his father’s allowance to keep the red flag flying high. He lived in a flat in the area of Russell Square, where all the Bloomsbury intellectuals spent their days arguing the virtues and vices of this or that `ism`, and on Sundays went to the Film Society to see a Soviet film. To show how involved he was, he had the walls of his biggest room decorated with murals of tow-headed workers demonstration under the Red Flag in defiance of Lord Trenchard[1] and his merry men. He had a new Morris coupe which he gladly presented to us, together with a real gilt-edged fiver. We were in clover and off we set again.

Without further setback we arrived in Liverpool at the very time when the local people were having a meeting in their hall. We went into a huddle with the local Party secretary and began to work out a strategy. Nobody in Britain had ever seen Kacik, and nobody knew whether he was travelling under guard or free. The Canadian court’s deportation order meant only that they wanted him out of Canada, and where he went thereafter was no business of theirs. The British authorities had the right to prevent him landing in Britain or staying there, but in fact they were acting not altogether legally, keeping his arrival secret so that they would not have to recognise, officially, his landing on British territory. That was our key argument. But we had to find out Kacik’s situation.

Most CP members in Liverpool were seamen. Amongst them we were lucky enough to find a ship’s cook who, dressed up in his white cook’s rig, talked somebody on the tug going out to meet the Montrose into taking him along. The cook had with him a letter for Kacik. If Kacik were free, he was instructed to leave the ship holding the right lapel of his coat so that it could be plainly seen as he walked down the gangway. People stationed at intervals in the port would tell him where to go and he would finally leave by a gate where a blue closed car was waiting with two men in it. He was to take a seat in the back and say `Let’s go`, and the car would set out for London.

As it turned out, however, Kacik was under guard, and when the other passengers left the ship, he was still aboard. Nevertheless the outposts we had placed everywhere remained in position. Shortly after all the passengers had been cleared, a black maria drove down to the ship and a number of policemen under the leadership of a local inspector got out. The inspector mounted the gangway and started to board the ship. Suddenly he stopped and looked back. For a moment he could not believe his eyes. The gangway was surrounded by Communists, every one of them known to him. It was a very unpleasant surprise, for it was clear that the secrecy of Kacik’s arrival in Britain was well and truly blown. Our outposts remained silent and waited. Later the black maria left the port and as it passed through one of the gates, we dropped in behind it and followed it to the police station where Kacik was to be housed until arrangements had been made for his further despatch through England.

Without stopping we dashed as fast as traffic laws allowed to the offices of the late Sydney Silverman[2]. We explained the situation to Mr Silverman, particularly emphasising the death sentence awaiting Kacik in Yugoslavia and our view that his being held by the British police was illegal. Mr Silverman, who must have been as much against death sentences in those days as he was later, immediately got on the telephone to the immigration authorities. Their first question was how he knew of Kacik’s secret arrival. Mr Silverman of course did not disclose his source, but emphatically demanded the right to have a meeting with Kacik. It was granted. His intervention delayed Kacik’s journey to Harwich by twenty-four hours and thereby saved his life. Having heard Mr Silverman’s report of his meeting with Kacik, we decided to make for London post haste and there continue harassing the authorities. It was dusk when we crossed on the Mersey ferry and already dark when we hit the little town of Whitchurch in Shropshire and with it more trouble, or, as they say in the Navy, things started going in favour against us. We had filled our petrol tank before leaving Liverpool and on seeing this small town we decided to top up so that we might make London without another stop. At the first garage I called for two gallons of petrol. The owner casually asked where we were going and we told him London. At that a policeman appeared from deep inside the garage. He had evidently been listening to our conversation from the start.

I am sorry to have to state it, but he was the typical storybook village policeman and his paunch was a typical village policeman’s paunch. If he had been tied round with a piece of string in two or three places he might have been taken for a roll of bacon with a helmet. `So,` he said, `you’re going to London on two gallons of petrol?` He looked us up and down and his suspicions were confirmed. It was almost three days since we had left London, and during that time neither of us had touched a razor to chine. We had slept in our clothes, added to which was the fact that I had been wearing the same white collar all the time and it was now the new modern colour, pale black. The policeman did not exactly take us for Bonny and Clyde, after all my companion was also male, but I am sure he thought we were just as dangerous.

We explained about our almost full tank and challenged him to measure it. He did so, and as the mark on the stick confirmed our assertions, the suspicion temperature around that garage dropped a bit and we took our seats to speed off. If, two nights earlier, the ancient Armstrong-Siddeley had refused duty because we had not fed him, why should the new Morris, only just fed to the tank-cap, similarly refuse? It did, and try as we might we could get nothing out of it except a splutter. I got out and started to push, my partner steering. Then the policeman joined in, but there was still no response from the motor. There was a little incline leading down to the centre of the small town, so thinking this would help restore discipline to the works we ran and pushed. No go. We pulled up at the next garage, the policeman remaining with us.

After a look at the engine the garage man quietly gave us the shattering news that the batteries had run down because of a broken lead and it would be necessary to put them on charge all night. This new delay put the criminal bug back in the policeman’s helmet. `Is that your car?` he asked. `No,` I answered, `we borrowed it from a man in London.` `Oh`, said the policeman, with a nasty shade of doubt in his voice, `and what is his name?` Well, that put the final stamp on our criminal characters. Neither of us knew the name of the owner and we were unaware that in the right-hand, door pocket was the insurance, complete with all necessary details.

But it was not the policeman’s suspicions that were worrying us now. We had to wait till morning before we could move on, and our meagre finances were in danger of disappearing entirely if we had to spend the night in some hotel. Then a brilliant idea came into my head. I turned to the policeman and hinted that perhaps it would be a good notion if he took charge of us. He seemed to suspect us in some way or another, so why not lock us up for the night? He fell for it and pulling a bunch of keys out of his pocket, said, `Come with me.` But my joy was short-lived, for as he got the door of the lock up, he turned round and said to me, `Oh, young man, you are very cunning, but it won’t was with me. You want me to put you up for a night free of charge. No, it won’t do. Wherever you are here, I’ve got you.`

There was no point in arguing, so we went in search of some place to rest our weary heads. All the doors were closed as it was now late, but at last we found a sympathetic old lady who agreed to take us in. in the morning the bill she gave us with the breakfast made me look round to see if there were any gold-braided flunkeys carrying the tray. When I had got over the shock I asked her `Is this place called the Ritz?` But she told me to mind my language in her house. Reduced to our last few shillings we made our way to the garage to find whether the owner was about to take the rest. He had more humane feelings, however, and charged us only one-tenth of the sum the old woman had demanded. Seeing no policeman about, I asked the garage owner where the roll of bacon was, at which a door in the side of the garage opened and out came our friend. He had found the insurance papers, telephoned to London and checked that everything was all right. We were free to go. Go we did, almost breaking some of the current world records, and very soon we found ourselves on the road to Oxford.

My companion, who was doing the driving, was an American, and he continually hugged the right side of the road in spite of a thick fog which had settled down, turning the asphalt surface into a perfect pitch for the Montral Stars ice hockey team, in addition to its other hazards. Then it happened. Out of the fog a horse and cart suddenly appeared, standing at a gate on the right side of the road, which my driver seemed to love so much. As he swung round, a huge van came tearing from the other side. Our car skidded under the impact of the brakes and a corner of the van hit us just in front of the right rear door. All the back part of the coupe was smashed to smithereens, hanging over like a heap of unwashed Maltese lace. Miraculously neither of us was in any way hurt, although plenty of glass had been shot in all directions. Moreover the chassis was in good order and the car could go as well as ever, if no longer with the contours given it by its makers.

After the usual writing and measuring by the police and the AA men, we mounted our wreck and drove into Oxford to the amazement of the people, both students and otherwise. We stopped at the first telephone box and I looked up the number of a student who was among those playing at revolution at that time. (Judging by a letter I received from him a few years ago, he has found other interests in the interim.) He told me to come round, and when we drove up to his house, in a classy residential district, all the window curtains in the street surreptitiously twitched. His own housemaid nearly fainted. Here we lunched, and then our student friend piled us into the wreck, drove us to the station, bought us tickets for London and after seeing us off took the car to the Morris works.

Back in London there was a telegram waiting: `Kacik leaves for Harwich today`. Then we knew that no more than for sinners is there rest for the unfortunate. Somehow we had to find another car, and we had already reduced the reserve borrowing park by more than fifty percent.  But at that point fate began to blush a faint pink for all the dirty tricks she had played on us. The British immigration authorities had arranged with their Belgian counterparts that Kacik should be shipped to Antwerp, but fate moved in with a thick fog and the ship was diverted to the Hook of Holland.

Now it was the turn of our man, sent to Harwich to take what action he could. More by good fortune than by good choosing we had picked on the right kind of person for the operation he had to carry out. He had a most impressive looking pair of horn-rimmed glasses and an equally impressive leather brief case, as well as the face of a lawyer who never uses the same lie twice. As soon as the ship carrying Kacik and himself docked in the Dutch port, our man was first off and went straight to the Dutch immigration official, to whom he told a really hair-raising story. He had, he said, absolutely authentic knowledge that the British police were attempting to dump on Dutch territory the most savage and bloody Communist rebel in the world. He had been kicked out of Canada for taking pot-shots at ministers, setting fire to government buildings and making bombs as big as coconuts. The story worked, the scared Dutchman went straight to the ship and told these perfidious Britons that they would not get away with it, Kacik must go back to England.

In the meantime we had been raising a little hell in official quarters and they gave us a letter to allow us to see Kacik at Harwich.

At this point the search for transport began again, and fate was absolutely red by now, for she helped us find a man with a Bentley and another student with an Austin Seven. The owner of the Bentley was G.P. Wells, son of H.G. whom we had appealed to on humanitarian principles. Evidently the idea of chasing through England on a life-saving mission stirred the romantic in him, and he took our chief and some other chaps with him full speed to Harwich. Following behind, with, of course, no hope of overtaking the Bentlry, was the Austin Seven driven by the student, and carrying the American, myself and none other than `I Claud`[3], at that time editor of The Week as well as being, simultaneously, the owner, the publisher, the printer, the sales manager and the office boy.

If the previous dash had been fraught, this one was no less so. Ours was the smallest and frailest car on the road. In addition it possessed no light-dimmers, and the continual flow of trucks and vans passing us in the pitch-black night took us for a crowd of road hogs that needed to be taught a lesson, and flashed the full power of their headlights right in our driver’s eyes. Half the time we were driving blind and sometimes we passed so close to an oncoming truck that I, sitting on the inside rear seat, was slashed by the ends of the securing ropes on the trucks. There was never a dawn so gratefully greeted as the one that met us as we drove into Harwich.

There we collected our fellow rescuers and learnt that they had managed to pass five pounds in money and a Soviet entrance visa to Kacik, who was leaving for Antwerp that day. Years afterwards I learnt that he had arrived in Vienna at the time of Dolfuss’s putsch, and, taking advantage of the upset, had walked out of the train, bought a ticket for the Soviet Union and lived their till the Civil War in Spain. He served in the Yugoslav battalion, which was led by Tito, and after the collapse of the Republic was landed in a French camp, where he was offered a ticket to Canada by the Canadian repatriation commission. This he refused. He wandered around Europe for some time, and when the Germans occupied Yugoslavia, he attached himself to Tito’s partisans and fought with them to the end of the war. He died in 1949.

Not foreseeing the future travels of Kacik, we returned from Harwich to send a delegation with a letter of protest to the Yugoslav Embassy in London. The letter was signed by the usual number of `Good Friends`, and at the head of the delegation was `I Claud`, who also wrote an article about Kacik for an American newspaper which he entitled `Is this the Yugoslav       Dimitrov?` - uite a popular name[4] in those days. I imagine `I Claud` was then serving his apprenticeship before joining the Party.

After the Kacik saga I was sent to Belfast to give some talks, and there I met a Communist who was so anti-negro that when he was obliged to refer to negroes in party meetings he could not avoid adding a whispered `nigger`. When I taxed him with it, he pulled out the old excuse: would you like him to sleep with your sister? To which I always replied `I would like his sister to sleep with me`. And there was another one who went to Mass every Sunday morning, I called it working on two fronts. Late, I heard that they were both expelled from the party.

On my return from Belfast I was told by the then secretary of the Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, that I was to go to the Soviet Union to work in the International Seamen’s Club in Leningrad. So, on 17 May 1934, I boarded the Soviet passenger ship Smolny and on 24 May arrived in Leningrad to take up my position.

---

[1] I assume this is referring to Hugh Trenchard the first viscount Trenchard. Trenchard was general in the British army who was active in establishing an air force during the First World War. He was a close associate of Churchill, an arch conservative and actively threatened to shoot mutinying soldiers at Southampton docks in 1919. In 1931 he was made Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and intervened with force against many demonstrations and strikes in London. [Reddebrek]

[2] Sydney Silverman (1895-1968) was Labour MP for Nelson and Colne from 1935. Before that he was a solicitor. He was the author (with R.T. Paget, QC, MP) of Hanged -and Innocent?

[3] Claud Cockburn, author of I Claud, London, 1967

[4] Georgi Dimitrov (1882-1949), Bulgarian Communist who became an international symbol of martyred innocence when the Nazis tried to blame him for the Reichstag fire in 1933. He was acquitted and went to Moscow. Appointed General Secretary of the Comintern in 1935. First President of the Bulgarian People’s Republic after the Second World War.

13 The True History of Mr X

13 The True History of Mr X


From the lately released naval papers, on which the most recent version of the Invergordon mutiny is based, it is not difficult to see why I was never court-martialled. Try as they might, the secret services could not produce evidence of a link between the leaders of the strike and any sinister organisation intent upon upsetting the country. The secret services did their best, but their best was a concoction of half-truths, lies and fabrications which would not have deceived an infant. Their report, it appears, was based mainly on information from an anonymous Mr X, who adroitly got it all from Wincott himself.


Mr X may impress others. He does not impress me. He served on Norfolk with me and was about as important as the `p` in pneumonia. However, let me tell the story as it happened.


Having checked in my bag and other belongings in the Sailors’ Mission on 3 November 1931, I took the midnight train to London, travelling in a full carriage, where the only female was a young woman whose face was vaguely familiar. I paid no attention to her. The male occupants of the carriage kept me busy with questions about Invergordon, still fresh in the minds of the British public, and it was only when we drew near to Paddington that the young woman leaned over to me and whispered `Do you know Terry Gentry?`


Then I recognised her. She was the wife of Terence Gentry, an able seaman on Norfolk who, we believed, had been invalided out of the Navy before Invergordon. I had seen her visiting the ship when it was at Devonport. When we left the train, we walked along the platform together and she told me that she, her husband and their small child were now living in London and that Gentry was working as an agent, for what she did not say. She gave me their address, somewhere on the Edgware Road, and, promising to call on them when possible, I went about my business.


My first call was at the offices of the old Daily Herald. I telephoned the paper and was invited to come along and meet a Mr Gideon Clerk. He received me in a very friendly manner and during the course of our long conversation said he would phone a naval contact. It turned out to be Admiral Dewar of Royal Oak notoriety.


It was in 1927 that the conflict aboard the Royal Oak, which came to be called the `Officers’ Mutiny`, took place in the Mediterranean. According to the official version it involved an admiral whose name was Collard and a captain whose name was Dewar and these two gentlemen so far forgot their gentlemanly obligations as to quarrel before witnesses, ending up by washing their dirty linen at a court-martial. When one officer objects to another calling a third `bugger`, one wonders what further ridicule they are prepared to inflict on the Royal Navy, a service with a world-wide reputation, the envy in those days of every other maritime power. At home and abroad scorn for the silliness of the `Officers’ Mutiny` was universal, but there was another side to the story, not officially recorded, unless the Admiralty has super-secret archives which no one is allowed to see. And this version, passed from mouth to mouth, illustrates my contention that the story excluded from the records may often be the true one. According to the unofficial version, the conflict between the high officers was only a portrayal of the general situation on the Royal Oak. Just before the incident which led to the court-martial, the captain had ordered the lower deck to be cleared so that he could address the men. The ship’s company crowded on to the deck, a fact which was, in itself, an intimation that something was wrong, because usually the men stand in ordered ranks. Then Captain Dewar added to the disorder by saying that the crew was mutinous, words he repeated several times. At that something happened which could never have taken place aboard a well-disciplined warship: from different parts of the crowd came that very impolite sound known as a raspberry. It was repeated again and again until finally the angry captain dismissed the men without having re-established order and himself disappeared below.


This same Dewar was now confronting me in the offices of the Daily Herald. He seemed very interested in my appearance at the newspaper offices and asked me to tell him the story of Invergordon as I knew it. I proceeded to do so. Suddenly he turned to Gideon Clerk and said, sounding both disappointed and annoyed, `But he cant tell me anymore than I know already!` With that he brought the interview to an end and said goodbye to both of us, shaking hands with Gideon Clerk and ignoring me.


It was later, when I was on the street, that the reason for the sudden change in atmosphere became clear to me. The admiral had not come to hear my story but for an entirely different purpose. Captain Dewar had, of course, been an intelligence officer when serving and no doubt still had his contacts. It was the intelligence officer who had conducted that interview, not an admiral interested in the affairs of the lower deck. Like most of his fellows he was obsessed with this idea of a secret organisation. It seemed that it had taken them like the Great Plague and that they, like the untutored doctors of the fourteenth century, were convinced that everybody was bound to get it one day or other. Later, when the official papers became public property, I discovered that the disease continued to hang around for a long time after Invergordon and that the maggots, who had been bloating themselves on taxpayers’ money existed for many months on the corpse of the decaying fable.


After paying a visit to some friends at a quiet little resort on the east coast, I returned to London, fixed myself a room in the Paddington area with a church-going landlady, and joined the `seekers`, that is the unfortunates looking for work.


Then I visited Gentry. He, his wife and child were living in one room over a newsagent’s shop, and by the disorderly look of it, Gentry’s agency business was giving very weak returns. I asked if there might be an opening for me in this agency. I fancied myself as a talker, although my Leicester accent was very prominent and, to avoid looking foolish, I had dispensed with aitches altogether. He seemed reluctant to introduce me to the secrets of his trade or to explain why his work was so irregular. Soon I discovered that it was a racket. For next to nothing he bought tea-dust from a tea-packing works, packed it in impressive-looking packages and hawked it round small enterprises and the houses of retired businessmen, whom he talked into buying a packet at a fabulous price with the promise of a £2 bonus if, when he returned in two weeks’ time, they gave him a letter of recommendation for the `company`. Of course he never returned and they got no bonuses.


When I next visited the Gentrys they looked very down in the dumps. His persuasive powers had deserted him, the racket was not paying dividends and the landlady, tired of asking him when the rent was coming, had given them notice to quit. They changed to another, cheaper, and of course smaller, room and, to pay the deposit, I lent him five shillings from my meagre savings.


About that time I was coming home one evening when I was attracted by the speakers at Hyde Park Corner. One of them, obviously a Communist, was talking about the Invergordon mutiny, which he was sure was the blood brother of the Baltic Fleet revolt in 1917. He maintained that the only reason the sailors had not ditched a huge weight of gold braid was the absence of real political leadership. Anyway I introduced myself to this speaker and he invited me to a meeting near Paddington Labour Exchange, where I was now an honorary member. With Gentry I turned up at a meeting and said a few words, after which this person took me to a rather shabby-looking office, equipped with even shabbier furniture.


A young chap who was there introduced himself as Alum Thomas, secretary of the International Labour Defence, a Communist front organisation, whose purpose was to defend people accused of political offences. Through a door at one corner was another room, occupied by another front organisation. Although I had not invited him, Gentry was still tagging along with me. On our entry the young man talked first to him and told him to leave the place and never come back, whilst I was told to leave my naval papers, which would be returned to me the next day, and meanwhile to stick around. That night I was taken to a crowded meeting somewhere in Shoreditch. Very soon I was appearing at regular meetings for the Communist Party although I was not a member.


Some days after my introduction to the Communist Party, Gentry came to my room and asked me to put him up for a little while. He had done a midnight flit from his lodgings and sent his wife and child back to Plymouth. Always the good Samaritan I spoke to my landlady, who promptly agreed and as promptly raised the rent.


I was returning home late almost every evening and one evening, when I was very late, my landlady met me at the bottom of the stairs. With her best church-going frown on her face she informed me that a guest was in my room with the other er, er, gentleman. Gentry and this guest were sitting before the fire and he immediately presented her to me as his cousin, but by the look of her I guessed she was cousin first, second or third, to about half the men of the district. I told Gentry to take her out and hand her over to any spare cousins who might be hanging about.


Fortunately I was due to go to my friends on the east coast the next day, so I closed up the room and disposes of Gentry.


The folks I visited had, besides other possessions, a neat little café, and early every Sunday a regular customer called for his usual breakfast of tea and toast. It happened that I was sitting before the fire of the family dining-room when the bell rang that Sunday. The dear old lady who ran the place went out to answer the summons and I went with her. The regular visitor turned out to be a slight, neatly dressed gentleman somewhere about fifty who greeted us with a very charming smile and in a rather pleasant and cultured voice. After ordering the usual he took a seat at one of the empty tables. It was then I noticed the dog-caller, and having seen that face above a dog-collar in almost every newspaper of the country for days on end, I had no trouble in guessing that here was the Reverend Harold Davidson, the Vicar of Stiffkey (pronounced Stukey, which stopped the low wits from making crude puns). We began to talk. Instead of a high-pressure mixture of Casanova and Don Juan, which the charges against him led one to believe he was, here was the type of man who could  be pictured with a group of children in some local church, timidly saying `Now children, shall we dust the hymn-books?` I was amazed. The man was charming. True, it has been said `Charm is one of the most dangerous gifts of nature`, but he smiled in a very disarming manner and did not lose his smile all during our talk. When he said without pathos, without emphasis, `Do you think I am guilty?` I answered `No`, and I still believe it.


On my return to London Gentry had disappeared and I began to work in the offices of the International Labour Defence organisation and to speak at meetings, for which I was very much in demand. I had a little room for which I had to pay ten shillings a week, so when one of the young men doing clerical work in the office suggested I should room with him, I welcomed it. His room was bigger and more convenient, but what was attractive was the financial arrangement: the tow of us would between us pay the fifteen shillings rent. However, as I had guessed, there was a snag. There were several candidates for the room and if I wanted it, I had to take it immediately, on an evening when I happened to have a big meeting and would not be free before 11 pm.


We managed to overcome the problem. It was arranged that he would bring the key to the office and I would bring my suitcase which he would take home, leaving me to make my own way to the room after the meeting ended, around 11 pm. I was extremely surprised to waken in the new room next morning and find two gentlemen sitting on a small couch looking at my bed and waiting for me to regain consciousness. It did not take me long to put a professional label on them, for although they did not have big feet they had the inevitable bowlers in their hands.


I did not question their presence or ask how they knew where to find me, when nobody except my friend and myself was aware that I had moved to this room. They did all the talking, what there was of it. Their chief, the man in charge at Bayswater police station, would like to see me, they said. Of course, they reminded me, I was not compelled to go: It was entirely voluntary. And of course, I reminded them, if I refused, they would come the next day with a piece of paper ordering me to go. They mutely agreed to my `of course`, and I got dressed. They had a car waiting and off we went.

The chief, who was wearing civilian clothes, started a conversation about Gentry, leading up to the inquiry whether he and I had had any talk about a rather brutal murder of a twelve-year-old girl in a Bayswater basement. I said we had talked about the matter in the way people do when such things are blazoned across the front pages of newspapers. There were more questions. Where had Gentry been on such-and-such a date? Was he ever in an excited state? Was he secretive? Then I was sent home and heard nothing more about the business.


Shortly after that, when I had joined the Communist Party, I was sent down to Portsmouth and then Plymouth on a speaking tour, and there I met Mr X.


In Plymouth I was housed for my stay in a room over a shop and the first meeting arranged for me was held in a small hall in Devonport where, in my more frivolous days, I had spent my evenings dancing. The hall was full but only one man in the audience was in naval uniform. It was Gentry. After the meeting he approached me and expressed great satisfaction at seeing me the speaker for the evening. Then he told me in brief the story of his return to uniform.


He began his story sotto voce, as if he were a little ashamed. He had not been invalided out of the service, but was a deserter. His cousin in Paddington, it appeared, had given him a present of which in his penniless state he could not be cured, so he had turned himself in the Navy. Where the cure for that kind of present is quick and efficient. Then he received another present, ninety days’ detention for desertion. Of course neither of these presents was the sort one puts on the mantelpiece for public admiration, but he was very anxious to tell me all the details. I was most touched, but the questions I kept to myself were: `Since when have such cousins given anything gratis? Where did Gentry get the money to buy himself such presents?` For he never had a penny of his own those few days he was at my place. The answers were clear to me but I let him continue with his story.


He was now serving his detention in the White City but had been allowed out because his mother was very ill, as proof of which he promptly produced a telegram announcing the emergency. I almost burst out laughing. Either he was very badly coached or they had grossly underestimated my brain power. The telegram was written in ink with neither time nor place of despatch, just a blank form and the writing. For all that, I kept myself under control, sympathised with him about the illness of his mother and promised to see him about.


As I left the house next morning with the local Communist secretary I saw an obvious Special Branch man standing just a few yards away. When we moved off he followed. He made no attempt to cover himself, just plunged after us some five yards or so behind. We then decided to part to establish which of us he was interested in. If he continued to follow me, I was to inform the secretary by telephone and cut short our programme of activities for the day.


He did continue to follow me. After about an hour of this shadowed progress, I went to keep an appointment with a young lady whom I had been on friendly terms with before I left the Navy. After all, Devonport was my port division and in my dancing days I had made quite a number of friends. When we met I pointed out my unsolicited bodyguard and described what had been happening. She clapped her hands with excitement. `How wonderful!` she said, `Let’s go everywhere and see if he comes after us.` We walked round every floor of the local Selfridges, examining goods in every department; so did he. From there we went to a continuous performance cinema; he sat just behind. From there to a tea shop; he came in too. And everywhere the three of us went he kept the same distance, as if he had been instructed never to let the space between us by any more or less than five yards.


At about 6 pm I parted with my friend, promising to be at her house that evening. I turned down a narrow street running parallel to the main street in Plymouth, and there, by a pub, I saw Gentry, approaching me from the side, with his head down, as if this were an accidental meeting. He greeted me effusively, nodded at the pub door and suggested taking a glass of beer. I did not refuse. I was getting only seventeen and sixpence from the state, so why not add a few state coppers to the total, if only in kind? It was over this state-paid glass of beer that the real conspiracy began. Looking round with the exaggerated secrecy of a ham actor, Gentry squeezed out of one side of his mouth the words, `If you have any leaflets or anything to distribute in the barracks, give them to me. I’ll get them in for you`.


`OK,` I said, looking round in the same ham actor manner. `There’s a piss house across the street. Let’s nip over there and we can talk.` It was empty when we came in, but the clump of heavy boots dashing up to the entrance stopped me socking Gentry and landing him right in the excrement. I told him to go to his ailing mother, and walked out alone; but the tail still stuck. However, by means of the old motorbus switch, which was very easy in Plymouth then, I lost him and spent a pleasant evening in delightful company.


So Terence Gentry, deserter, small-time crook, whoremonger and syphilitic, went down in the annals of naval history as `Mr X`, an undercover, ocean-going James Bond, who exposed to the British Secret Service the nefarious plot of Wincott. I have perhaps devoted a lot of time and space to a figure who did not even rate the honour of being burnt on a bonfire on the Fifth of November. But he is an example of the sources of information the Admiralty were prepared to use in the panic caused by Invergordon.

12 Inquest

12 Inquest


Two of this century’s outstanding figures have left us definitions of history, the written version of history, that is. The intellectual Anatole France gave an appropriately intellectual definition: `History is not a science, it is a deception`[1]. The second celebrity is Henry Ford I, no intellectual but a straight forward, hard-headed business baron, whose definition was in keeping with his character: `History is bunk`.


To these definitions I, who am neither distinguished nor famous, perhaps a little notorious, would like to add my contribution: `And historians are the bunkers of historical bunk`. Bible students say that in the course of time the original text has been so chopped around, distorted and altered that the authors would not recognise a single comma today. At least the process took four thousand years to accomplish. But the story of the Invergordon mutiny in 1931 has been so rehashed by writers and official document compilers that, after only forty-odd years, I find it difficult to recognise the incident I participated in.


In the latest, `most authentic` account by David Divine, Defence Correspondent of the Sunday Times, so little space is devoted to the activities of the lower deck that a reader might wonder whether the strike was actually run by sailors or by a group of panic-stricken senior officers, few of whom knew what to do or when to do it. As on of the lower deck men who were there, I declare, without fear of contradiction, that the sequence of events described by me is exact and true, and any different version only hearsay, imagination and exaggeration.


Someone who got near the truth in summing up Invergordon was Yexley[2] when he said `That what may be called a strike in the civil world would, in their case, be mutiny, hardly occurred to them. Many people think of mutiny as bloodshed, the anxiety of the men blinded them to its true meaning`. But Yexley did not go far enough. Put briefly, the men of the lower deck were like a father, unable to swim, who sees his only child fall into a deep lake; at first he hesitates, then discards all fear and dives to the rescue, knowing as his head strikes the water that it is a tremendous risk but that he must take the one chance in a million or forever be responsible for his child’s death.


We took that million to one chance and won, not because we were led by experience agitators but because the people responsible for protecting us failed in their duty, not only to us but to the country. Despite their gold braid, their honours and their orders, they cowered before incompetent politicians and crucified the finest body of men in the world. They hurried to make sacrifices for the good of the country, but they did not realise that with their large pay, privileges and extras, it was not themselves they were sacrificing. They sacrificed, in fact, both the lower deck, whom they did not even trouble to inform of their gallant gesture, and the prestige of the Royal Navy. What they had really done became clear the moment the men refused duty. Instead of acknowledging their blame and resigning, however, the Board of Admiralty took the measures described in the last chapter against the strike leaders of the lower deck, and then set to work to find a scapegoat with enough gold braid to look impressive, but not so much as to make it impossible to hang the can on him. Admiral Tomkinson was the chosen victim.


The disgracing of Admiral Tomkinson was not achieved until February 1932. It took time to mature. Whilst I was going through the process of being kicked out of the Navy with the best of character, Whitehall was conducting its own `secret` inquest, with a view to finding the necessary scapegoat and covering the Board of Admiralty with the thickest coat of whitewash ever prepared by that experienced whitewashing firm. Alas, the sins already paraded before the public were too blatant to be concealed by the slapdash artists they employed. Moreover, the Board’s obstinate belief in its own righteousness and its complete misunderstanding of Invergordon led it into further blunders. For instance, they appointed Admiral Kelly, Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet and instructed him to conduct an official inquiry into the whole affair. Now Admiral Kelly was not only efficient, but was unswayed by bias of rank, and he approached his task with an open mind. He found his answers where nobody else had looked for them. He went to the lower deck and, after an almost microscopic study of every event, small or significant, he drew the one and only possible conclusion: the Board of Admiralty were guilty of mishandling the affair from the moment the cuts were first suggest to the closing chapter.


Understandably the Admiralty were not anxious to publish the full text of Admiral Kelly’s report (a gap which no later writer has filled), so they set about drawing up a `table of guilt`, demonstrating, rather in the manner of a detective story diagram, which of the various participants should carry what degree of blame. Unlike the detective story diagram, there was no arrow pointing to where the body lay, but chief responsibility was shared out among the First National Government, the high command of the Atlantic Fleet, the officers and men `of a few ships of the Atlantic Fleet`, the imaginary agitators and the mutineers; whilst a very minor degree of responsibility attached to the secret service for failing to find any agitators and to the Admiralty themselves. It was a magnificent gesture on their part to admit a little guilt – like the unmarried mother who was still a virgin because her baby was such a teeny weeny one.


Was this `table` a part of the screen behind which the Board was preparing to disgrace Admiral Tomkinson? Several months elapsed before the public of Britain and Admiral Tomkinson himself suddenly discovered that he was responsible for Invergordon; or, to be precise, responsible for not taking the measures which the mutiny at Invergordon called for. It can only be assumed that, long after the mutiny was over, the Board decided that force should have been used to suppress it. Evidently the Admiralty had so convinced itself that `only a few` were involved that they could see no problem in Admiral Tomkinson’s finding enough `loyal` men to carry out a punitive mission. The Mediterranean Fleet did not strike, the three main depots did not strike, the men of the destroyers did not strike and neither did the men of the submarine force, so `loyalty` was general and mutiny the aberration of a few.


A more purblind summing up of the situation could not be found in the whole of British history. The lower deck throughout the Navy was behind the men of the Atlantic Fleet. There are only one or two minor incidents to support this, but I believe they confirm it beyond doubt. I have already recounted how the men of Norfolk unanimously voted me on to the Canteen Committee after the strike and without any canvassing on my part. In addition to this overwhelming vote for me, to a position I never had the chance to occupy, there was a second demonstration of support. After I had left the Navy the men on the Canteen Committee moved that I, and the other discharged men, should be sent a grant from canteen funds. This act needs no commentary: it was more heartfelt and sincere than all the Board’s declarations of pseudo-loyalty. To the commander who was presiding, it was a bombshell, and he quickly vetoed the suggestion, although in practice, he had no say over the allocation of funds to which officers did not contribute. A small postal order to supplement my salary as the fifteen-thousandth member of St Pancras Labour Exchange queue would have been most helpful at that time, but it was a still greater uplift to feel that solid support which only the lower deck is capable of. The voices of individual sailors spoke of support for the strike everywhere. One man who had no reason to be kindly disposed towards me said: `It doesn’t matter what personal injury he did to me. I only know he did this for us`.


Being put on the spot, Admiral Tomkinson knew that a strike so all-embracing and solidly supported could not have been answered with the measures the Admiralty was later to prescribe; but that, on the contrary, such action would have led to a catastrophe in which Britain would have suffered damage more serious and lasting than Invergordon ever did. As it were, Invergordon led to widespread reforms in the structure of the Royal Navy, particularly in the relationships between officers and men. I was assured of this by a present-day, serving, naval officer whom I met at a reception in Moscow, and who respected me as one of the body of men who had brought about those reforms. He told me that after Invergordon the Navy was so radically changed in every way, that it was the only British armed force ready to meet the threat of Hitler when it came. Judging by Dunkirk, the gentleman was right; and he could not have paid the lower deck a greater compliment.


So, as I come to the end of the Invergordon story as I saw it and know it, a few conclusions may be drawn: That the mutiny was a purely naval affair, started by naval men alone, conducted by naval men and ended by naval men, without the least interference of any shape or shade from outside; That the men were forced to take an action which was in every way against their creed of loyalty to the service and against their political beliefs, if any; That this was their only alternative to allowing the cuts to become operational and thereby reducing the Navy to the level of a fleet of Greek raisin boats and their families to poverty; That the Admiralty had, without the least protest, thrown to the wolves ninety thousand men, the bulk of whom had signed their lives to the service at a very tender age and for whose care and welfare they were responsible; That when the Admiralty met resistance they resorted to devious methods to save their own careers and their future awards and honours; That in addition they prepared the downfall of a brother officer whose efforts on behalf of the service were worthy of the highest praise.


What motivated the Admiralty to betray the men they were called upon to lead, to start a smear campaign against them, and finally to break their promise of no victimisation? However these facts are examined, there seems but one explanation: class prejudice. They were high-ranking officers, with distinguished careers in war and peace and in some cases noteworthy personal achievements to their credit. Yet, at the least sign of any differences with the lower deck, they became obsessed by an uncontrollable urge to persecute and punish, with the vicious spleen of a Judge Jeffreys. Scarcely one measure of any kind, carried out by the Admiralty and concerning the lower deck, was not based on class prejudice, from their refusal of the simplest requests of the Welfare Committee to the major event of Invergordon.

As one historian puts it: `There are good and bad Boards, and this Board was very bad`.

---

[1] These may not be his exact words, but if not I must beg tolerance as I have translated them from a Russian translation of the French. His point is clear.

[2] Pen-name of a former able seaman, James Wood, who edited in turn The Bluejacket and The Fleet in the inter-war years.

11 The Admiralty’s Revenge

11 The Admiralty’s Revenge


We now entered a phase at Invergordon which did not exist in any earlier mutiny and will probably never exist again. The men did nothing, in the full meaning of the word. In fact on one of the big ships they pulled out the piano from the recreation room on to the forecastle and ran impromptu concerts. But apart from that there was nothing to do. We had done what we considered needed to be done, and now it was up to the Admiralty and the government. With the typing and circulation of the manifesto – copies were distributed round the Fleet by motorboat – the strike was at its apex; but unlike most movements it was not faced with a decline. Had we threatened an intensification of our efforts if the cuts were not rescinded, there might have been a danger of weakening. But in the circumstances a straightforward rejection could only mean our continuing as we were, refusing to serve. We had bypassed our officers and appealed directly to the Admiralty; our answer was to come from them, and soon. We were losing nothing by the continuation of the strike whilst the Admiralty was on the way to losing a navy.


As it happened, the end of the strike was delayed a whole twenty-four hours by the Admiralty’s strange behaviour. Knowing that the Admiralty had every modern means of communication and transport at their disposal, we expected our manifesto to reach them within hours of it reaching Admiral Tomkinson at Invergordon. It was our officers who had asked us what we wanted, and we had responded immediately, so we could not be accused of presumption in expecting a quick answer. Moreover, it was not only we who were waiting but the whole country. The day dragged on and no answer was forthcoming. Evidently some of the denizens of Whitehall were not prepared to sacrifice anything, as for instance their tea-breaks to expediate matters.


While the Admiralty were engaging in pure adventures – not least in blowing up Invergordon into a national revolution to frighten the King – Admiral Tomkinson, the man on the spot, who did not depend on conflicting reports from rival security services for his information, was successfully playing the affair down and controlling hot-headed young officers. Already an army of pressmen had converged on Invergordon from London and the central towns of Scotland. Even in those days cameras were efficient and easily portable, yet no photographs of Invergordon exist. This is to Admiral Tomkinson’s credit. As soon as the newspapermen arrived he took them aboard the flagship and gave them to understand that sensationalism was not required. So effective were his powers of persuasion, (and they have to be good to get a newspaperman to ease up on such a question) that nowhere are there pictures of sailors massed on the forecastles of ships at Invergordon. And yet there were quite a number of local boat owner prepared to take newsmen out in the Firth, and likewise there were newsmen willing to fork out a tidy sum for the trip.


If Invergordon was the ideal place for springing the cuts on an isolated Fleet, then it was doubly ideal for settling the dispute without publicity. The canteen and fields around were government property where no local civilians ever came. When Admiral Tomkinson reported the first rumblings of dissatisfaction to the Board, they should have travelled to the scene of the action, as their predecessors did to settle the Spithead mutiny of 1797. In 1797 travel was difficult. In 1931 it was not, and although air travel was not yet widely used, with so much at stake the Admiralty could at least have taken a plane to Scotland. All the measures eventually taken, the cancellation of the exercises, the setting up of a commission, the investigation of the men’s financial situation, the restoration of part of the cuts, could have been done in the isolation of the Firth of Cromarty and no outsider any the wiser. Had these measures been taken then and there, the Admiralty would have scored a greater political victory than any Board in history. Of course, they would have eaten humble pie over the cuts, but this they did in any event, and publicly. Here it would have been magnificent humble pie, and afterwards the mere mention of the words `Board of Admiralty` would have called for a gesture of reverence from the lower deck.


Only when it was beginning to get dark at Invergordon on Wednesday, 16 September 1931, did the captain of Norfolk come forward and read a new Admiralty Fleet Order to us:

The Board of Admiralty is fully alive to the fact that amongst certain classes of ratings special hardship will result from the reduction of pay ordered by HM Government. It is therefore directed that ships of the Atlantic Fleet are to proceed to their home ports forthwith to enable personal investigation by C.-in-C.s and representatives of Admiralty with a view to necessary alleviation being made. Any further refusals of individuals to carry out orders will be dealt with under the Naval 

Discipline Act. This signal is to be promulgated to the Fleet forthwith.

Whether it was light or dark at that moment, one thing was clear to us: we had won the day. The threat at the end was just normal form for My Lords of the Admiralty, every one of  whose Articles of War ends with a promise of punishment. Without that formality I doubt if they wrote a letter home to their loved ones: it was the thickening ingredient of their blood. But why should we continue disobedience? We had gained our point, a review of the cuts. The tacit promise in the order that actions, up to the time of its promulgation, would not be punished was later made explicit in the House of Commons. But still a vengeance-seeking Board had to invoke the Naval Discipline Act to justify their claims of agitators, secret societies and other conspiratorial groups, which were so clandestine that the conspirators themselves did not know they existed. At the moment of the reading of the order, however, I doubt if any man paid the slightest attention to those threatening words. The strike was over.


Discipline had not even been bruised and had taken us through to victory. It was still the main binding force of a powerful navy which we were prouder than ever to be a part of . With pride too, the `few`, the `handful` that the Board blamed for Invergordon could count their achievement. They knocked Britain off the gold standard. They caused the cancelling of excercises for some ships of the Fleet. They brought about the recall of ships to home ports from the unfinished cruise, an event which had last happened with the declaration of war in 1914.


That, up to the time of receiving the new Admiralty Fleet Order, was the list of favourable results of the activities of the `few`.


Within a few seconds of Captain Prickett’s announcement the forecastle on Norfolk was empty. It needed no pleading, no threats or trickery; the men’s aim had been achieved, the strike was off. A short time later the Norfolk was steaming down the Firth on her way to sea. As we passed close to one of the big ships a crowd of men lined up on the forecastle gave vent to an ear-splitting cheer and Captain Prickett on the bridge of Norfolk exclaimed, `My God! Have they started again?` It was not, however, a cheer of defiance but a cheer of victory.


During the three days’ trip to home ports we were without news. The only radio receiving set was in the wardroom, and the moment when the commander of Norfolk had invited a few of us to listen to it had passed, never to return. For us the show was over and we were once again the `ready boys, steady boys` of the British Navy. But the admiralty, fuming in defeat, was plotting its revenge.

There is an old sea story showing how something perfectly ordinary can be made to appear extraordinary. The story goes that a captain warned his boozy mate that if he again appeared on the bridge inebriated, he, the captain, would enter it in the log. Despite the warning the mate turned up next day in a drunken state and he captain duly entered it: `Today the mate came on the bridge drunk`. When, however, the captain came to relieve the mate, he found this entry in the log: `Today the captain came on the bridge sober`.


A similar technique has been used to suggest that on its return from Invergordon the Atlantic Fleet got a frosty welcome from the British people. Writers on Invergordon have alleged that, in defiance of tradition we were not cheered as we entered harbour. Of course we were not cheered, and there was no such tradition. The three towns had seen the ships moving in and out of harbour so often that they were not excited by the fact. To have cheered every time they returned would have meant a permanent cheering party. Whatever scheming and intriguing was taking place at the Admiralty, as they prepared to break their promise that no one should be penalised for Invergordon, we on the ships felt nothing out of the ordinary going on around us. True, the local paper at Devonport had a banner headline to greet our arrival: `Home In Disgrace, Sailors’ Wives Turn Husbands Away From The Door`, but this was just a ridiculous example of yellow press journalism. If we had agreed to allow further disruption of any kind, it would have been possible to organise such a demonstration of sailors and their wives at the editor of that paper would have crept around the back streets of small European towns for the remainder of his life. No one was more disturbed by the cuts tan sailors’ wives or, as they were officially designated on more than one occasion, `sailors` women`.


By this time the investigating commission set up by the Admiralty had arrived at Devonport and was now sitting in the barracks interviewing seamen and collecting their complaints. This was merely a time-waster, during which hundreds and thousands of lower deck men repeated practically the same story. Had the commission discovered a handful of ratings whom the cut would have hit specially hard, the Admiralty would not have made exceptional rates for them. The lower deck had made its one demand, one big one: we do not intend to serve for such pay. There was nothing more to establish, for if the proposed cut had been reasonable and bearable, there would have been no mutiny and no need for commissions. The Admiralty, however, had taken a 180 degree switch, and from doing nothing whatever had now launched into action every kind of investigator, commission and informer to contribute to the cauldron of fables, half truths and direct lies which, when boiled, would make the whitewash for the guilty parties. My Lords of the Board of Admiralty.


I had an early sign of things to come. On our passage south I had written a letter to Captain Prickett about the consequences for the Navy if the cuts, as originally proposed, were carried out. My letter was somewhat on the lines of the manifesto, but more elaborate. I was invited, as were other seamen, to talk to the captain in his cabin and explain my own position. Also present at the interview was the paymaster commander who, I take it, was to back up the captain with figures showing how wealthy I was.


I was a single man, I smoked but did not drink. According to my papers I enjoyed a fairly good reputation amongst the officers. At that time I was engaged to be married to a girl who was the only child of parents much better placed financially than were the parents of the average sailor’s wife. I had a promising career in the Navy and was fully intending to continue my service to pension and rise as far as a man of proletarian origin could. It is possible that the war might have helped me even further – or put me at the bottom of the sea. In fact by my action at Invergordon I simply threw all this away.


Right away Captain Prickett began talking about my individual case, pointing out that I had no financial commitments to be threatened by the cuts. From the Sunday evening when I made the first speech in the canteen, I was concerned only with the lower deck and the impoverishment of the best fighting service in the world and how best to stop it. But this was beyond the captain’s comprehension. Someone brought up in a society where the children are daily asked what they are going to be, daily warned that they cannot hope for a good job without going to college, as if a diploma were a pair of trousers, indispensable, finds it difficult to accept a non-selfinterested action. For people who are launched into the rat-race when they begin to walk and who learn the underhand tricks of infighting for position and rewards, the idea of being a crusader, if only briefly and small-time, is as alien as a Catholic priest propagating voodooism.


So Captain Prickett stuck to his line of argument, occasionally appealing for confirmation of his points to the paymaster commander. Very soon I saw that it would develop into the poor man begging the local philanthropist to intervene on his behalf with the heartless landlord. Actually it was because of Prickett’s behaviour at this meeting that I eventually refused to go before the Admiralty commission who pursued the same lime in their `investigations`. That it was a policy deliberately pursued I am convinced, because I caught Prickett taking a surreptitious glance at my letter, which was hidden under other papers on the table. When he saw that I had noticed the move he immediately covered it up again. It was not a benefactor’s interest that Prickett had in me. He was, I think, looking for `ringleaders`. (It is curious that a college student at the head of a movement is a `leader`, but a worker similarly placed is inevitably a `ring-leader`.)


The authorities knew quite well that it was the Admiralty which had inspired the strike and kept it alive, but they persisted in looking for something deep underground, a politically motivated person or, better still, a group. To begin with all jobs were shifted around. I for instance had had, before the strike, a so-called `quiet number`, which kept me away from daily surveillance by my divisional officer. That I hated this job, a trained seaman gunner who wanted to go to school again to advance my qualification was of no consequence either to the people who gave me the job. I had been taught a little about everything that shoots, from a 2.2 rifle to a fifteen-inch turret gun. I had actually come out top of the class, but with a job such as I was doing, I would soon forget which end of a gun did the shooting. In the meantime I could polish the metal legs of the mess table till my officer smiled and said `Well done`.


Almost immediately after the ship set sail for Devonport, however, I was shifted to an ordinary upper deck job and it was then I discovered that I was the object of surreptitious observation. Quite often our commander found an excuse to make some remark or other to me, but he spent more time looking deep into my eyes, no doubt searching for something he had not noticed in all the year and a half we had served on the same ship. Our commander was one of the most popular officers on the ship and we affectionately called him `Jigs`, after a strip cartoon character of the time. From behind he looked exactly like the real `Jigs`, even to the crease across the seat of his trousers. The nicknames that men give to their officers is more informative than many people think. If an officer is given a number of nicknames, and more and more are conjured up, it is a sure sign that he is far from popular. If on the other hand he gets one which sticks to him, one can be certain that he is respected. Commander Dunne was always `Jigs`.


He gave me quite a number of crystal-gazing stares, which did not worry me, while my own divisional officer kept clear of me. The unfortunate man had no doubt received a reprimand for not being able to detect my latent mutinous tendencies. When men were being sought to appear before the Admiralty Commission, my divisional officer approached a seaman standing a few yards from me, and asked him to ask me if I wanted to appear. Evidently the reprimand had been no light one. Evidently, too, the search for an underground organisation among the men was being paralleled by a campaign to find scapegoats among the junior officers, whose daily contact with us had failed to discover potential rebels.


If evidence were needed that no outside influence inspired the mutiny at Invergordon, that evidence was supplied by the Communist Party of Great Britain. When the news of the mutiny hit the world, many people and organisations reacted to it in their various ways. One of these was the British Communist Party, which had long harboured a desire for contacts in the Royal Navy but had up till then failed to realise its desires. This absolutely unexpected event offered, in their estimation, a splendid chance not only to get contacts but to achieve even more. Immediately after the ships arrived in home ports, the Communist Party sent two men to Portsmouth, obviously for the purpose of inciting the Fleet to further rebellious activity. It was an action which demonstrated the Communists’ complete ignorance of the lower deck, for the two men chosen were as unsuitable a pair as it would be possible to find. One was a miner and the other a woodworker, the sort of men described by sailors as not knowing the fat end of a ship from the thin end.


Their adventure was doomed to failure before it started, for, as anyone with even a butterfly-wing contact with leftist politics should have known, the moment the rumblings of resentment were faintly audible, all the organs of security were on the alert. Not so the CPGB. The miner and the woodworker set off for Portsmouth so deep in the grip of their important mission that they failed to hear the clanking of the handcuffs in the pockets of the policemen following them, and having plunged into the adventure head first, they hit bottom head first, as might have been expected.


Under the impression that Portsmouth was the place to go to, although Devonport was the centre of the mutiny, and still retaining the `drunken sailor` image in their heads, they began a political pub crawl. Even when a co-operative sailor met them in the very first pub they called at, they were not in the least suspicious. Why should they be? Had not the sailors mutinied? Were they not ready to heave their officers overboard, as the sailors of the Russian Fleet had done in 1917? All that was wanted now was firm political leadership, and these two men, who had recently come from the International Lenin School in Moscow, were here to offer it. So they made their offer. But, as it happened, the sailor they were talking to, who listened to their political lecture and drank their beer, was none other than Stephen Bousefield, the telegraphist `interviewed` by the captain of Warspite, under whose instructions he was now working. The seditious leaflets were handed over and straight away relayed to the intelligence service men, who, possessing all the evidence they needed, brought these two Communists to Winchester Assizes. There the same Bousefield appeared as the principal witness for the prosecution. The Communists were tried, convicted and sentenced.


From this story we can establish that informers were signed up from the first signs of trouble at Invergordon; that on the basis of their unreliable information responsible officers of naval intelligence made wild conjectures about events that had no place in the affair at all; and, most convincingly, that the Communist Party had no connection with Invergordon. Their belated attempts to make contact, at a time when the men considered victory theirs and meant to serve once more in the loyal manner they had always served, could lead only to the criminal courts.


Blinded by nightmares of revolution, dreamed up in their need for vengeance, the Admiralty had set all the security services of Britain on a massive search for hidden agitators, secret societies and all sorts of non-existent seditious groups that could never have found a square inch of fertile ground in the Royal Navy. Each security group engaged informers, agents provocateurs and casual snoops who invented what they failed to find. Even the man who ran the first meeting in the canteen on that Sunday evening, 13 September, was given at least three identities, and this despite the fact that the men on Norfolk knew who he was.


Whitehall demanded evidence of an underground plot and people, from the rank of captain down to the `white rats` on the lower deck, let their imaginations run amok to provide it, even to the extent of reporting that meetings, secret and otherwise, had taken place among sailors before the Atlantic Fleet arrived at Invergordon. It can only be concluded that the different reports, including those made by responsible officers, were the products of afterthoughts, once the incident had aroused suspicions of a plot. It is said that fear has large eyes, and it is possible that surreptitious glances between sailors engaged in some act against the regulations were remembered later and blown up to be read as sinister signals. It sounds childish, but it is only human: anyone can misinterpret the past in the light of the present, and I suppose this is what some of the officers did.


However, reading the reports assiduously collected by naval investigations overt and covert, by the dockyard police, public house scroungers and secret service informers, it is plain that the material is mostly half truths, distortion and just common or garden lies. Some of the shipboard informers seem to have been indulging in a grand leg-pull. I do not know who was responsible for organising the reports of preparations for further disruptive activity after our return to home ports. To call them the `Crazy Gang` would be to insult a popular comedy team, but clearly someone had grasped the chance to collect a goodly sum of taxpayers’ money whilst the panic lasted. Somehow I missed out on the shareout. Twice in those days I was in a pub and nobody offered me a drink. In one a group of working men called me over to their table and pointed to a chap in a soft hat standing at the other end of the bar. `Be careful, Jack,` they said, `that man’s a coppers’ nark`.


There were no plans for further disruptive action. We had gained our objective and saw no need to create some permanent illegal lower deck grouping. But the plot-searchers went on and fantastic stories continued to circulate about a planned enlargement of the strike. One incredible tale was that known elements, and I take it I was among them, were `agitating` on the lower deck for more serious, anti-government action.


The ridiculous fable of the `march on London`, or as it might be called the `Mangel-wurzel Banyan Party`, made its reappearance, and was solemnly carried to King George V. But the Admiralty was pulling nobody’s leg. When Sir Austen Chamberlain, First Lord of the Admiralty, informed the King on Monday, 22 September, that a dangerous situation still existed in the Fleet, he was not just following normal procedure. He knew very well that King George V had been a full naval captain, for when the Duke of Clarence was alive, his chances of becoming a king had been slim, and he had gone the way of second sons, into the Navy, where he was far from being a popular captain. For instance he had a reputation for severity. Punishment for misdemeanours of a serious character could only be administered by the admiral of a particular unit. The captain conducted the trial of the man, then sent his recommendation to the admiral. This procedure was better known to the lower deck as a warrant, and it was common knowledge throughout the Navy that the late King George V, when captain of a warship, had more of these warrants than any other captain in the Fleet.


By facing a man of the character of King George V, who bore no love to the lower deck, with the bogey of revolution from within the Navy, the Admiralty could not fail to produce the results it wanted. Given the public assurance of no victimisation, the Admiralty could not charge anyone with what happened at Invergordon; it therefore became necessary to invent something that happened after it, if they were to have their revenge.


Whilst these things were taking place elsewhere, for us routine went on in the same old way, except that our ship’s company did a stint on the rifle range, where I walked away with a first-class marksman’s badge, amongst my scores being five bulls from five rounds at five hundred yards: no mean feat. Moreover, and more heartening than the winning of any badge, was the fact that, at the very time when the powers that be were scheming, in their underhand way, to work up evidence against me, the lower deck of Norfolk unanimously elected me as their representative on the Canteen Committee. I never took my place but my election remained, a resounding reply to the band-of-agitators theory, and a proof that the lower deck as a whole appreciated my efforts on its behalf.

Almost three weeks had we been in home ports, with the commission working every day, when the surprise signal came. We knew the Fleet could not spend much more time in port, but the order to move was still unexpected. All ships were to put to sea and rendezvous at Scapa Flow. Two hours after this announcement and an hour before the ships were due to sail, the most outstanding men in the mutiny were collected together. From Norfolk Leading Seaman Richard Carr, Able Seaman James Shields, Able Seaman O’Toole, Able Seaman Frederick Copeman and myself were rounded up, along with one or two regular discipline breakers, thrown in to give the group a colouring favourable to the Admiralty. Here again the opportunity given by the official movement of ships had been seized, for, while we were to go to the barracks, our comrades in the affair were being despatched to sea, where for some three days on the way to Scapa Flow they would be ignorant of our fates. It was the move of people still scared by the Invergordon event. Although all available facts had firmly been established the complete lack of outside influence on the movement; although our behaviour after the strike was exemplary, they were still obsessed with the idea that action against us, whatever it was to be, should be carried out secretly, to avoid possible trouble. We were despatched to the barracks and left there until the General Election of 28 October 1931, which would bring a new Cabinet and new ministers, and therefore he who had made the promise of no victimisation would not be the one who broke it. The lessons of Invergordon had simply passed over their heads, not only of the politicians but also of those who were supposed to be our leaders.


When we arrived in the barracks we were joined by ratings from the many ships in the port, thirty-six men altogether, though Bond was not among them: the originator of the mangel-wurzel march on London was left in the Fleet to develop his talents. As was always the case when men entered the barracks after a period at sea, we first went through the `clothing class`, where our kit was inspected and we were `robbed` of a few pounds from our meagre savings. After a week of that we were attached to the `Introductory Course`. This was a well-known course intended mainly for supplementary ratings, cooks, supply assistants and such people who, whilst at sea, had forgotten how to turn right or left and which end a rifle fired from. The moment the course started, under the command of two specially-instructed petty officers, we knew we were in for a bad time. Till dinner break we ran around the barrack square, our rifles held high above our heads.


This action was the decision of Commodore Laurence of the Royal Naval Barracks. By virtue of our being so unexpectedly removed from our ships, we had been recognised as the leaders of a mutiny in the most powerful fleet in the world, yet Commodore Laurence DSO was here attempting to subdue us with petty sadism on the level of Dickens’s Squeers. If his aim was to make us refuse this disguised punishment and thereby leave ourselves open to a very serious charge, he failed. At the end of the first day I suggested that every man should individually write a complaint of unlawful treatment to the admiral of the port.


On the third day we were marched into the drill shed, all other groups and classes were sent out, all the doors but one closed. Then through the one open door appeared Commodore Laurence and probably every officer in the barracks. They lined up in an arrow head, the commodore making the point. He was a big man with a powerful frame. He stood there with his legs astraddle, clasping his gloves behind his back as if they were a hunting crop. In fact that is just what he looked like, an overseer of the last century confronting his colonial slaves.


`I hear,` he began, `that you have written a complaint against me.` (In fact we had not mentioned any name in our letters of protest.) `I have information that you are continuing your disruptive work and I, as commodore of this barracks, will take what steps I consider necessary in order to prevent your doing so`. He tried a little provocation, challenging anybody who had anything to say to step out, strangely adding `I am not afraid of you`.


Why a commodore DSO should be afraid of a group of ratings is difficult to imagine, but in those words we could measure the extent of his lack of understanding of the lower deck. We did not accept his offer to speak. Maybe it was genuine, but we could no longer trust him after such behaviour. With the words `Carry on` to the petty officers, he turned round and walked out, followed by his suite. Whether he was afraid of us or not, the sadistic drill ceased forthwith, and one by one we were invited to the division office to discuss our request with the lieutenant of the division.

I never knew the name of my interviewer but I knew what his instructions were as soon as ever he spoke. He pointed to my complaint and asked `who wrote this for you?` Of course a dull, half-literate able seaman could not write such a letter, there must be some `outside influence`, and here was a clue to this mysterious somebody lurking in the offing and urging sailors of His Britannic Majesty to seditious action. When I answered `I did`, perhaps I said it with such calm conviction that he really believed it. Anyway he switched to another tack and began talking about politics. All this, he assured me, was `high politics`, which neither he nor I knew anything about. He just blinked when I quietly said `it’s a pity, sir`.


Undoubtedly he knew I was to be discharged, but that I was being held until the end of the secret service investigation; for had it produced the desired results I would have been court martialled.

The fact that I was due to be discharged came to me by another source which the authorities had not taken into account. I was ordered to have a routine revaccination and because, with my first vaccination on entering the Navy, I had suffered very much, almost losing my arm after six weeks in hospital, I simply refused to have it. The surgeon-captain of the barracks interviewed me and said he would have to consult someone about my case and would I come back next day? I did so and he just looked at me and said `it doesn’t matter, you may go`. Then I knew I was to `go out`.

Nothing, of course, came of our requests, except that Commodore Laurence backed down and we joined up with all the other ratings in the barracks and waited. That we were due to `go outside` was not only known to us but, in a certain way, desired. It was a very risky enterprise, given the large number of skilled workers unemployed, but there was one consideration which made discharge imperative from our point of view. If any of us had remained in the service, the future would have  been very bleak indeed. Should I, for instance, have been drafted, after two or three years, to a ship where some totally unsympathetic officer of the old school type was commander or captain, the inevitable result would have been a serious charge brought against me, and my consignment to the naval jail.


No one had the slightest desire to make a sojourn, however short, in the establishment just across the Tamar that bore a noble name, White City, and a terrible reputation: the place where ex-masters-at-arms with a penchant for brutality did their worst to men whose crime was sometimes no more heinous than a breach of pettifogging discipline. Carting a heap of bricks back and forth in the yard without a break whilst the warden yelled abuse, was just one of the reputed delights of the White City. The really choice item was the daily loader drill in gasmasks, with the warders goading their prisoners to break every record they had thought up. No prison reform society ever visited that hell on earth and the inmates did not make complaints about the texture of their pyjamas, as convicts, according to the press, do today. Evidently nowadays the more dreadful the crime, the more certain the complaints. I am sure that the next grievance will be lack of escape facilities provided through the good officers of the Society For The Care And Comfort Of Bloody Murderers, Gangsters and Dope Pushers.


Then, on 3 November, I was working in a barrack room, pushing a cloth over metal bag-racks for the lack of something better to do, when I saw Leading Seaman Richard Carr in the act of packing his bag under the supervision of a regulating petty officer. Without waiting for my inquiry he said `I am going out` and before I could gather further information, I head a voice calling my name. another regulating petty officer took me straight to the commander’s office. Behind the desk where he usually dealt with defaulters stood the commander of the barracks, holding an impressive looking document in his hands. Without any ceremony he began to read the Admiralty letter ordering my discharge to shore, and, as if by an afterthought, kindly informed me that I was entitled to unemployment benefit. In the next hour or two twenty-four of the thirty-six men removed from the ships were rushed round from office to office, finally to be passed through the main gates to the world at large.


By six o’clock I had signed all the documents, drawn my final pay (including thirteen shillings towards the purchase of a civilian suit), and received my naval papers. They read rather strangely: `Third of November 1931, Conduct: Very Good. Ability: Superior`. That was the last of my six-monthly recommendations, the highest possible for a lower deck man. Immediately underneath was: `Third of November 1931: Discharged to Shore, Services No Longer Required`. I still wonder which of these two entries, made at the same place on the same date, really reflects my character.