4 China Station
My enthusiasm suffered a sudden check at the sight of the
ship which was to take us out to relieve another crew. This ship was not
exactly one of the fleet that Julius Caesar brought over to see what lay behind
the white cliffs of Albion, but how it had stayed afloat during the war was a
mystery. A couple of shells dropped within two hundred yards must have sunk it.
It was a half-oil, half-coal fuelled, four-funnel cruiser, aboard which,
against all naval traditions and regulations, the officers lived forward. The
first few miles at sea explained why. The funnels poured out a mass of smoke
and debris, so that within a short time the quarter-deck was covered with a
soft warm layer of soot and cinders. So the officers were given the forecastle
whilst we had the pleasure of the holy of holies, the quarter-deck, with the
additional joy of digging ourselves out of the ashes when, in the heat of the
tropics, we slept on deck.
The sailors’ bathroom was so small that if one asked a
friend to wash one’s back, the friend was obliged to stand in the corridor and
wash through the door. If he scrubbed too hard, the unfortunate man being
washed was in danger of having the skin scraped off his nose on the opposite
bulkhead. The ship was badly undermanned and instead of four watches we were
compelled to work two, so throughout the trip nobody got a good night’s sleep,
for during the day we had our usual work to do. In addition to all these minor
discomforts, the Admiralty, in its wisdom, delayed our sailing by twenty-four
hours and changed our captain. Instead of sailing with the quiet, submarine
VC-holder, with whom I had served on the cruiser, we were presented with one of
the most unpopular captains in the Navy.
So we set off on the six-week journey to Hong Kong and it
did not take us long to run into trouble. In the Red Sea a stoker was hauled
out of one of the bunkers where he had been trimming, in a state of utter
exhaustion. The time of year, early September, the hottest season in the Red
Sea, did nothing to improve his condition and within three days a healthy young
man of thirty-odd was dead, leaving a wife and children. Not only those working
in that hell, the bunker, were affected by the heat: even the civilian manager
of the canteen dropped and died. The officers’ forecastle was soon a hospital
with no less than six cots rigged up for men whose lives were in danger. They
had not only the double awning of the quarter-deck to protect them from the
broiling sun, but each cot had a whaler’s awning rigged just above it.
In that same sea we picked up the most primitive of distress
signals, used only when no other means are available. It came from a merchant
ship that would have looked small on one of England’s minor rivers and which,
with a crew consisting of a captain, a mate who doubled as boatswain, three
stokers and two upper deckhands, was on its way to Australia. When the captain
fell seriously ill the crew hoisted Red Ensign upside down. We lowered a boat
with the doctor, who ordered that the captain should be taken aboard the
cruiser. The amazing thing was the attitude of our own captain, who ignored the
desperate situation the remaining men were now in. Between them the captain of
the merchant ship and the mate could navigate in turn, taking a short rest
between watches, but with only one ticketed officer on board, the ship was now
left to its fate; for no officer could keep a watch from the Red Sea to
Australia without leaving the bridge, it was not humanly possible. Not to bring
the ailing captain on board our ship was likewise impossible, but was it
imperative to leave such a ship in the care of a single man with a crude
knowledge of navigation and no radio at his disposal?
Perhaps the reader will ask what should have been done under
the circumstances. To which I must reply that I do not know. I was only an AB,
and a very young one at that. The answer lay under a service hat with one gold
laurel wreath on the peak. But in contrast to this episode I can describe the
treatment accorded the self-confessed murderer Prince Yusupov
[1] when he,
his family and his suite were taken aboard the British battleship
Emperor of
India on the collapse of Wrangel’s
[2] army.
Half the officers’ cabins were placed at their disposal, and at the entrance to
the passage-way stood a massive, bearded Cossack, with his sword at the ready.
If anyone attempted to pass him the Cossack, who knew no English, simply
dropped the sword across the passageway, hoping that his guillotine like weapon
would effectively express his intentions. Any rating who had cause to go along
the passage-way had to put on his number one suit, even if he was only going to
repair an electric fitting or wash the floors. Yusupov’s sojourn on board was
more than irritating to the lower deck; but the final indignity came when one
of the crew died. Against all tradition the captain refused the man the honour
that, in this moment of equality, is accorded to everyone from boy to admiral.
He refused to let the man be buried over the quarter-deck and instructed that
there should be as little ceremony as possible: apparently such a melancholy
spectacle might have offended the tender susceptibilities of the exalted prince
and murderer. What entitled Yusupov to all this sickening kow-towing is difficult
to say: perhaps it was his princely title, which, by that time, was not worth
an obsolete farthing, or perhaps it was his British title, Lord Elston. In any
event it prompts the question: `How many hard-working British merchant seamen are
worth one unemployed foreign prince?`
For all our discomforts – the emergency sick bay on the
forecastle, the unconscious stokers being pulled from the bunkers to have hoses
turned on them as they lay on deck – we considered ourselves fortunate after our
meeting with the distressed ship. If by some miracle that floating coffin ever
arrived at its destination, it should be included in the annals of amazing
voyages. However our own troubles were just getting into their stride. We
turned east and were half way across the Indian Ocean to Colombo, alone in the
burnished sea, when the tired old engines revolted. It was not a sit-down
strike, which we could have coped with quite easily. It was the over-heated
shaft bearings meeting up with a liberal leaking of oil that led to an
inflammable conflict, or in other words a fire at sea. The news spread round
the ship just as rapidly as the flames spread towards the bulkhead separating
them from a magazine.
It was the magazines, carrying a consignment of munitions
which explained our presence on the ship. Usually relief crews were sent out by
passenger steamer, second class, a much cheaper expedient than commissioning a
warship for the round trip. But merchant ships and passenger ships do not carry
munitions, and this consignment had to be delivered at the same time as us. So
there we were together. The proximity had not bothered us at all. Ships’
magazines are fitted to deal with accidents, and nothing could send munitions,
ship and people to kingdom come except a shell right inside the magazine, or a
fire. By now the flames were affectionately licking the bulkhead of one of the
full magazines and the ship’s boats were turned out in readiness. But there was
no panic. One of the safety precautions of a magazine is an automatic flooding
device which acts as soon as the temperature reaches a certain height. In
addition, the ocean was behaving itself as it a steam-roller had passed over it
ahead of us.
Then came the cheering news that on the very bulkhead being
embraced by the flames a box of powerful detonators was screwed, and since the
box was watertight no amount of automatic sprinklers could help us. A single
detonator was powerful enough to supply the Indian Ocean sharks with meals of
roasted British sailors for some time to come. Still there was no panic. There
was anxiety certainly, but anxiety in a British sailor is transitory and after
a few seconds is replaced by that quality called determination. Determination
beat the flames by a short head.
In quelling the fire, however, we half-filled the
compartments with water, and now the overworked, tired and somewhat disgruntled
men faced the additional burden of pumping the water out by hand. We pumped continuously,
day and night, and before we arrived in Colombo the ship was high and dry. There
we met further trouble, but by then we were so used to it that not one grumble
was heard from the world’s champion grumblers, the seamen of the Royal Navy.
Despite the shortage of hands, the extra watchers, the
unforeseen troubles I have described, and despite the fact that at Hong Kong a
new crew would come aboard to take the ship home and there put her in reserve,
our captain wanted to run the cruiser as if it were newly commissioned from the
stocks. It just so happened that the man doing the sounding for our entry to
Colombo harbour was one of those prematurely hatched petty officers that the war
created but no school ever bred. He got the sounding line tangled round his neck,
he could not call the depths as he had no idea what the markings meant, and in
addition he gave this display of inefficiency right under the eyes of our
martinet of a captain. Instead of punishing this one defaulter, the captain
ordered every seaman to go through training in heaving the lead in his `spare
time`. Coming on top of all our other misfortunes, this might have had serious
consequences, but maybe the thought that we had only Singapore to call at before
saying farewell to that tub kept the men’s resentment off the boil.
That was the last incident of a voyage which reads like a
sailor’s nightmare in six short sketches.
Evidently our pleasure cruise had sent news ahead of itself,
for the men we had come to relieve were already looking rather glum at the
prospect of repeating our Odyssey, although they were going home after almost
three years on the China Station. Our new captain, Commander Alun Poland,
greeted us with the words, `Your living conditions will be better than those
you had coming out`, which news we received in silent but sincere thankfulness.
Our ship was an old CPR [Canadian Pacific Railway] passenger
vessel, converted into a submarine parent ship. Old in every way, she was
fitted with a single screw and obsolete reciprocating engines which, when they
decided to work, could push us along at about ten knots. Fortunately, it was a
long time before we could check on these statistics. When we arrived to take
her over, she was in dry-dock having a long refit, and there she remained for
another year until it seemed we might repeat the
Victory’s achievement
in Portsmouth and be fixed there forever. Later we did four or five trips to
sea on her, and on one of these we had a breakdown.
Ancient as she was, the
Ambrose was the real Casey’s
Navy for us, although we did not, as naval legend would have it, take a noggin
with the captain or smoke his cigars. The
Ambrose was wide and roomy,
with plenty of decks to promenade on and plenty of time to promenade. Alongside
the dock was a full-sized football field which, in the course of time, almost
became the property of the
Ambrose. The China station was on to envy. The
fly in the ointment was Hong Kong itself.
That town had more snobbery than an Agatha Christie novel. The
sailor was a pariah, his status that of an untouchable. At the public dance
halls, they took the sailor’s money but once he was in the hall nobody would
dance with him. A typist with a speed of about three words a minute suddenly
found herself next to a sailor in the cinema, she and her escort made a deliberate
demonstration of changing their seats. Even the white whores in their separate brothel
would not entertain sailors, refusing their good British money with a sneer.
And yet that town was kept alive and kept entertained by the
Navy. The best footballers were supplied by the Navy. The weekly boxing show
run by a local promoter was provided by soldiers and sailors. How those cheap
little snobs ran to the Navy when the Chinese working class called a strike! Never
has there been a strike of such formidable proportions. It was said that even
the beggars in the streets refused hand-outs. Then the despised sailor ran the
trams and operated the very important ferry service connecting Hong Kong and
Kowloon. It was a sweating RN stoker shovelling coal to fire the boilers of the
power station that kept the electricity working. But not a word of thanks. Who could
sink so low as to offer thanks to such people as sailors?
When later the Hotel Hong Kong caught fire, it was a sailor
who jumped from the top rung of the fire escape to the top storey window where
their children and children’s Chinese nurses were trapped. One by one he swung
them out of the window to a fireman waiting on the escape. Children and nurses
were all saved, but the hero crashed to his death when the wall he stood on
collapsed. In their snobbish way the British civilians remained true to
themselves, accusing the sailors of having looted during the fire. Such was
their gratitude. The funeral of this seaman was turned into a huge demonstration
by his comrades, with never a word or a look to right or left, their grim appearance
conveying their contempt for the onlookers from the town.
The most hilarious incident of our stay came, not from the
upstart white population of Hong Kong, but from one of our admirals. Just before
our departure from England the news of the troubles in China, under the
leadership of the Kuomingtang, had filled the newspapers, and as a
precautionary measure a cruiser squadron had been ordered from the
Mediterranean to the China station. The Admiral who commanded this squadron was
known to the lower deck as the `Monocled Menace`, and stories of his
unpredictable idiosyncrasies circulated throughout the Navy. It was said of him
that he reworded the jingoist `My country right or wrong` to a complacent `If
my country is wrong I’ll put it right`. Now he had come presumably to put China
right. He left the Grand Harbour at Malta with the crews of all the ships which
happened to be there on deck and cheering, and with his cruisers’ marine bands
playing `Hearts of Oak`. And the time was 2 am. When he arrived at Hong Kong
his first action immediately set the people staring googly-eyed.
The announcement, written in the stiff and very correct
manner of wardroom navalese, was so astonishing that everyone read it twice. Not
at first believing their own eyes. `On such-and-such a date, from so many
hundred hours to so many other hundred hours`, it said, `I (meaning the
Monocled Menace) will drive round Hong Kong in my car, dressed in civilian
clothes for every man to see. If after that any man fails to give me a salute,
no excuses will be taken and he will be punished for disrespect to an officer`.
An old sailor who had seen service with the great Beatty
[3]
commented: `It’s a pity there are no elephants in China. We could have fitted
one up with a diamond-studded howdah and two negro slaves with fans, and then
there would have been a real circus`.
It is doubtful whether the admiral’s tour round town in an
open car meant much to the native population: the thousands of natives who spread
their sleeping mats in the streets and whose sightless photographs filled, in
turn, one big wall of the local police station, when they were found dead by
the policeman coming to waken them. It probably did not impress the thousands
of families living in little sampans and allowed ashore for two hours a day to get
some exercise and draw water. For the rest of the day these sampans were not
even permitted to pull up alongside any pier on the whole waterfront, except to
take one of the supercilious snobs on board and ferry him across the river. Like
the rickshaw runners, the sampan owners would avoid taking such passengers if
there was a sailor in need of transport. The sailors did not carry malacca
canes and usually tipped liberally; and a few cents above the regelation fare
was much preferable to a whack across the shoulders with the cane.
The same preference was noticeable among the menial labour
in Hong Kong. Because of its wallflower standing, our ship was granted a
special privilege: all the lower deck messes were allowed to engage (of course,
at our own expense) a `boy` - which did not mean a scruffy young chap in a
school cap, with dirty finger-nails, but a servant. We reserved the right to
sack the boy at a moment’s notice if the occasion arose, but we had no
difficulty in engaging them. Within half-an-hour of the dismissed boy’s
departure, half-a-dozen candidates would be clamouring for the vacancy. Whereas
the snobs ashore paid from four to six dollars a month, we paid ten. They kept
their servants in the kitchen and gave them rice to eat, whilst our boys ate
our food with us. There were other prerequisites. A Chinese holiday, for instance,
and there were plenty of them, always called for a collection for the `boy`.
Hong Kong was not all sneering upstarts and whisky-soaked petty
chiefs: it was also a terminal port for the large coastal shipping service run
by the Jarding Lang Company, with head offices in Shanghai. Hong Kong likewise
contained the `offices` of the gang which periodically pirated the company’s
ships. The pirates themselves were peasant fishermen from the villages around
Bias Bay, about thirty miles from Hong Kong, but it was suspected that the
organiser of these piracies was some capable criminal with a lot of pull and
connections.
These were not the pirates of romance, hoisting the skull
and crossbones to give chase to a prize, and after looting it forcing all those
who refused to join them to walk the plank. these pirates wore no black patches
and did not thrust cutlasses into their trouser bands. They were just ordinary
people, but their organisation was of high quality and they were well informed
about which ship was carrying bullion to a bank in Hong Kong, which rich Chinese
had cabins on the bridge deck. The inside knowledge, timing, and grasp of geography
and navigation which their successes betrayed were not supplied by illiterate
fishermen. But the clever Mr X who planned the operations remained a mystery,
and the backlash, when it finally came, brought suffering only to the pirates,
their families and the other peasants from the same villages who had nothing to
do with these nefarious exploits. But more of that later.
The officers on the Jardine Matheson Lang ships were Europeans,
mostly Scandinavians, Britishers and Dutch, whereas the crews were Chinese. Wanting
to use every square inch of their ships profitably, the company accepted as
passengers Chinese coolies on their way to Hong Kong to find work. About three
hundred of these coolies would be taken aboard a ship for the price of ten
Chinese dollars each and would be accommodated on the forecastle. They received
no food and therefore took with them cast-iron pots in which they burned charcoal
to cook the rice they had brought. All day they sat crowded on the forecastle,
chatting or playing fan tan or more rarely mah jong. At night they spread out
their straw mats and slept.
The pirates were indistinguishable from the passengers and
came on board with them. Their favourite weapon was the Mauser, for which they
were prepared to pay big sums whilst the ordinary service revolver was
despised. With their guns hidden away, they took their places on the forecastle
and bided their time, for the journey to Hong Kong took some days. Only when
the lighthouse at the entrance to Bias Bay came into view, or a little before,
would they move into action.
Then the guns came out. The pirates showed the quality of
their organisation, for each was responsible for a particular part of the ship.
First on the list, of course, was the wireless office, then the bridge and the
cabins of officers not on watch. The engine room and the passengers and stokers
were Chinese coolies who, so long as the ship did not sink, had no interest in
what happened to it. At the first sight of weapons they put up their hands,
whether a gun was pointed at them or not. One armed pirate could keep all three
hundred passengers absolutely subdued.
Once all the captured officers were on the bridge under
armed guard, the order was given to put out the lights and steer for Bias Bay. When
the water became too shallow for the ship to proceed, a crowd of sampans and
small junks surrounded it and the people from these boats looted the bullion and
took away with them any wealthy Chinese on board for whom they would later
demand big ransoms. European passengers were not molested. This done, the
pirates would leave the ship, which was free to proceed to Hong Kong and there
report the piracy.
Bias Bay was almost next door to Hong Kong, where a formidable
group of warships filled the harbour, so these piracies seemed particularly
audacious. Whenever an incident was reported, the local paper went to town with
questions on the lines of `Why Do We Pay Taxes To Maintain A Navy?` and
suggestions that the Navy was called the `Silent Service` because the sailors
were always fast asleep. The greatest scream of outrage came when the regelation
search of a pirated ship disclosed that one of its water tanks contained everything
that fired except field guns; a cargo which the captain claimed to be in
complete ignorance of. A big `If` appeared in the newspaper headlines: `If the
pirates had discovered the arms – what then?` We too thought along those lines,
for we knew that in the long run it was the Navy who would have to smack the
pirates down.
It was, however, the quick-thinking of a merchant service
officer, and the timely appearance of a British naval sloop, which turned the
paper’s outrage to eulogies of praise.
The
Sunning left Shanghai with the usual consignment
of currency for Hong Kong and, of course, the usual consignment of coolies. All
went well till, nearing Bias Bay, the pirates appeared, and in a very short
time the officers were gathered on the bridge under the guard of a little
Chinese with a big Mauser. It was a pitch-dark moonless night. As the ship steamed
along one of the officers suddenly shouted, `There’s Bias Bay`, and pointed in
the direction of the now visible light. The guard, taken by surprise, turned
his head, at which point another officer seized the long iron handle of a
fourteen-pound sounding lead and brought it down on the pirate’s head with all
his force. Down went the pirate, dropping his gun as he fell, and the same
officer immediately took possession of it. To everyone’s surprise, the pirate
began to get up again, but the officer quickly put a round in his stomach and
he went down again and stayed down.
Despite
the heavy blow on his head and the bullet in his stomach, he lived to face the
court and end up on the gallows.
Confused by the sudden change in their fortunes, the pirates
began to run around the deck in panic, whilst the one officer with a gun,
supported by all the others who had armed themselves with heavy objects,
prepared to defend the bridge against assault. Frankly the odds were on the
officers’ side. Access to the bridge was by a single steep ladder which a
determined armed man could hold against a number of attackers. At this point
the first glimmers of dawn began to appear on the horizon and after a lot of
screaming and shouting the pirates divided into two groups, one lowering a
small boat over the stern whilst the other set fire to the ship.
Not far away a Royal Navy sloop was on its way north, every
turn of the screw bringing it near to the scene of the piracy. The first billow
of smoke crawling its way into the sky was spotted by the sloop’s ever-watchful
bridge. There was no need to ask questions. That smoke could mean only one
thing – a fire at sea. In a moment the sloop increased its speed, the captain
was called to the bridge, the boat turned out and the pumps brought to the ready.
As the burning ship came clearly into view, a boatload of men frantically
rowing away was noticed. The order was passed along the upper deck and in no
time the sloop’s motorboat, with a Lewis gun mounted on the forecastle, sped
away in pursuit. One short burst was fired over the men’s heads, at which they
all stood up and raised their hands in the air. Back coursed the motorboat, and
whilst some seamen drove the captured pirates down to the cells, others
connected fire hoses and, with the sloop standing alongside the burning ship, a
row of powerful water spurts hit the fire in the very centre. This prompt action
by the Royal Navy soon put out the fire and, under the convoy of the sloop, the
ship, officers, passengers, and valuable cargo were brought into Hong Kong. Altogether
seventeen people were brought to trial, of whom one was acquitted and sixteen
were sentenced to be hanged for piracy on the high seas.
Graciously the local paper restored to the Navy its
honourable reputation, but old China hands among the seamen suspected that our
elevation was only temporary and that any day we would come crashing down again
like Humpty Dumpty.
In those years China, with its different warring groups, was
something like Chicago in the days when rivals contested for the exalted
position of Public Enemy Number One. Any half-penny mandarin could line up his
serf-peasants, call himself a general and then proceed to attack and plunder
his neighbours. Ships making their way up the Yangtze river had barbed wire around
the bridge as well as a couple of Sikh guards. The Navy’s destroyers and
gunboats carried defensive mattresses to protect the bridge from machine gun
fire or even shrapnel from a First World War field gun. Such measures had
hitherto passed Hong Kong by. Apart from the piracies and one very surprising
hijacking of a bullion-loaded steamboat crossing to Kowloon in the middle of
the day and under the eyes of the Fleet and a harbour full of merchant ships,
Hong Kong was well out of all the mainland troubles. And then came grim news
from close by that gave us to understand that if we were not in the troubles we
were on the edge of them.
The Canton Commune lasted only a few days, but it shook Hong
Kong more than any number of piracies. This town lies thirty miles up the West
river, in the mouth of which Hong Kong stands, and for days the island was in a
state that far from agreed with its name, the Island of Fragrant Streams. The counter-revolution
reaped a bloody harvest and heads floated past Hong Kong as if somebody had
kicked all the footballs out of a sports shop into the river. Soon the horror
merchants were busy, toting round the most hair-raising photos for sale. One family
of well-to-do people had tried to leave Canton when the Communists took over. They
had piled all their most valuable belongings and their two children in their
car and had put on red arm-bands in the hope that these would assure them a
safe passage. But unknowingly they left Canton by a road along which the White
troops were advancing. No amount of pleading could save them, they wore red
arm-bands and that was enough. In the photograph they lay in a row beside their
overturned and burnt out car. The children were terribly hacked, the father had
suffered multiple stab wounds and his genitals had been torn off, whilst the
mother’s legs had been forcibly stretched apart to an unnatural degree to show
the hilt of a bayonet sticking out of her vagina. Such photographs swept the
previous best-sellers off the market.
But China, that cauldron of trouble, never gave any atrocity
the chance to hold the public interest for long. Unlike a volcano, its seat of
activity was not permanent and nobody knew where the next eruption would take
place.
By this time our ship had been pulled out of dry-dock and we
found ourselves getting up steam for an emergency sailing. What our wagon could
have done in an emergency was difficult to say. True, there was one 4.5 gun
standing on one side of the quarter-deck, but it looked so insecure that one
expected the first shot to send it toppling over the side. Our gunnery
instructor, who had been on the staff of the Gunnery school, simply ignored its
existence. Instead two submarines, each equipped with a proper 4.5 gun, were to
accompany us on our secret mission.
Our destination turned out to be the port of Amoy, where
everybody was on strike and five different political factions were fighting
amongst themselves somewhere outside the town. Offshore, in the mouth of the
extremely fast-moving river, was an island on which lived all the Europeans,
consuls and business people. An American destroyer 222, the
Bulmer, had already
arrived, like us, to cope with the emergency. Like us too, the men were not allowed
ashore on the mainland but could take walks only on the island. the Europeans
were just the opposite of the Hong Kong snobs, and bent over backwards to entertain
us with tea parties, dances and very amateur concerts – but only till 6 pm,
when our leave ended. Their life on that island must have been as boring as a
book by Anthony Trollope, and in everything they were ten years behind the
West. At that time the Charleston had just swept Europe and my chum and I had
mastered this somewhat energetic dance before leaving England. When our hosts
learned of this they demanded to be taught, so we set up lessons in the Charleston
in their little club. Our pupils were all well-equipped matrons of the
light-heavy-heavyweight class. With a memory of the shabby treatment served out
to us by the ladies of Hong Kong, we got those bulging bosoms and buttocks
bopping and gyrating and shaking whilst the floor vibrated like a couple of
hundred tam-tams.
They grasped and they sweated
but each was vying with the others to impress their teachers. By the time we
called a halt their eyes were sticking out like organ stops and I realised it
was less a dancing lesson than a slimming exercise. I am sure they lost a stone
each.
That dancing lesson was the only departure from routine in
the whole emergency. Our officers no doubt realised that we were there to do something
other than just watch the river flow out to sea. We were taken round the little
island, boasting, like all similar places in China, its King Edward the Seventh
Hotel, and shown where we should mount a Lewis gun if the worst came to the
worst. But the trouble, if there was any, preferred to remain on the mainland
and not even a whiff of it reached the island. Nothing happened to lighten the
burden of our monotony except a visit by a Japanese fleet containing every type
of warship of that day. A Japanese ship, or group of ships, was its own
personal leper colony. One day we took one of our officers over to the flagship,
and the moment he had stepped out of the boat, a Japanese officer leaned over
the rail and ordered us to lay off two hundred yards. There was no suggestion
that we might tie up to there lower boom, which would have made things easy for
us: keeping the boat up with the ship in that current was very difficult and
demanded considerable manoeuvring with the motor. Likewise we only once saw the
Japanese seamen ashore, and then they were in groups, no man being allowed to
walk alone. they carried their own supply of drinking water in water-bottles
slung from the shoulder on a white strap, and they passed us without the usual
smile that sailors of different countries give each other even if they cannot
speak each other’s language. They may have been wearing sailor’s uniform but to
us they were more like prisoners from a special security block.
Our return to Hong Kong, with nothing achieved except an unofficial
dancing class guarded by two submarines and a parent ship, dropped us right in
the middle of trouble with a rolling `r`. The pirates had struck again and this
time there was no fourteen-pound sounding lead to foil their plot. Now the
`Monocled Menace` was raring to go.
Through diplomatic channels arrangements had been made with
the government in Nanking to clean out the pirates’ lair. Close to midnight the
expedition, consisting of a cruiser, an aircraft carrier and two sloops was to
set off. Evidently someone meant business, to throw all that armament against
Mausers. All the ships engaged were to prepare landing parties of seamen and
marines which together would make up a sizeable invasion force. On the day before
the assault our little party, including me, muffled the twelve oars of a
cutter, which was later hoisted aboard the cruiser. It was done in absolute
secrecy, or so the chiefs believed at any rate.
With lights out the force moved towards Bias Bay. When the
cruiser had got as far as it could without running aground, the sloops took all
the cutters in tow, and when the sloops in turn could go no further, we were to
go on to the beach under our own power, the fifteen-foot cutters’ oars. Motorboats
were also lowered, but remained in tow of the sloops in case the chug-chug of
their engines endangered the secrecy screen. The boats grounded on the beach a
few minutes before daylight, and armed marines and seamen poured out of them to
advance on the small village set back a few yards from the beach. Our secrecy
had been broken long before we got there, for the village was absolutely deserted.
Half-finished breakfasts on the sandalwood tables were the only signs of human habitation.
Then we began our destruction, setting fire to sampans of
all sizes and to a single large junk moored off the beach. But the first
casualty was our own: our cutter, which had been lying in the dockyard so long
that its boards had warped. The moment we began to embark the detachment of
marines, water poured in from everywhere and with the marines trying to get out
of the sinking cutter and three or four officers shouting orders from different
parts of the upper deck, it was a scene of panic.
It was now full daylight and cutters loaded with armed men
were spread all over that part of the bay. When I looked at them I remembered
that `If…` Yes, I thought, if the pirates had found that cache of smuggled arms….
Somehow we managed to beach the leaking cutter and at that
moment the explosions began. Sixteen-and-a-half-pound charges were placed under
all the dwelling houses, all of them one-storey, one-room structures, and a
whole street went flying in the air. In the meantime the marines marched inland
and began their destruction there. All day the destruction continued until every
building was blown up except the temple. On its locked door, notices prepared
and printed beforehand were hung up, warning that any further acts of piracy
would be met by more strenuous measures. Whether anyone in that village could
read or write I cannot say, but probably not, for within two weeks of our raid another
piracy had taken place. Considering the amount of damage we had done to both
pirates and non-pirates, it is best to put down this almost immediate return to
piracy to their inability to read. Or maybe they just ignored the notices,
there were so many ruins to look at.
Then appeared an apparition. A motorboat nosed itself slowly
through the shallow waters to ground its prow gently on the soft gravel, and a
long figure in riding breeches with a sports coat and cap and a malacca cane in
his hand (shades of General Gordon) stepped on to the beach. It was the
Monocled Menace. Any second I expected him to say `Lead on my nag, I wish to
see if my vassals have been subdued`. In stead he gave the order to retire and
then left in the motorboat. We, with our leaking cutter, were told to stay to
the end and take off the captain in command of the operation, who, in
accordance with naval tradition, must be the last to leave.
All this time there had been no sight of the villagers. They
seemed to have walked into the ground, or maybe sky. But while the captain was
backing down the beach, a service revolver in either hand aimed at the
destroyed village, the scene suddenly changed. It was as if a trick artist, with
one sweep of his brush, had filled an empty page with a large body of people, still
and quiet. They were the inhabitants of the village, men, women and children,
clustered all together and slowly moving down towards the beach. Old men and
women were crying. The first one on the beach was an old man who, not paying
the least attention to us, continued to walk slowly straight into the water to
a burning sampan and with tears streaming down his cheeks made feeble efforts with
his hands to throw water on the burning wreck.
Soon a large number of men and women followed his example,
standing up to their waists in water and making hopeless attempts to save the
now smouldering boats. No cinema producer ever imagined such a scene –
attackers and attacked together in the same waters, the one sitting in boats
and the other standing in the sea. No words or gestures were exchanged, not
even scowling looks. The fist-shaking and shouting of insults that the cinema
is so fond of did not happen, but the Chinese remained mute and crying, their
only care for their boats, and the British went about their evacuation. Finally
the captain climbed aboard our cutter and a motorboat towed us to the cruiser for
our return trip to Hong Kong.
As I have said, a piracy took place very soon after this punitive
raid. all naval vessels were thereupon ordered to go round the bay instead of bypassing
it. This measure had no effect either. The pirates were irrepressible. Finally
our submarines were instructed to cruise the bay on fortnightly reliefs, submerged
by day and surfaced at night.
One very dark night when the submarine on duty was on the
surface charging its batteries, the men on the conning tower saw a massive
black object coming slowly towards them. In a second it was clear what had
happened: another ship had been hijacked and now, in the hands of the pirates,
was making its way to the looting rendezvous. The signal to stop was flashed,
the alarm sounded, and the gun crew closed up to their stations. Slowly the high
prow of the ship swung round until it pointed directly at the submarine, then increasing
speed it plunged forward to ram. A blank shot left the gun and whistled over
the forecastle. Still the ship came on, gaining momentum with each yard.
Without hesitation the submarine captain took a momentous
decision, and the next moment a lyddite shell crashed into the advancing ship. It
landed amid ships, shattering the main steam pipe, and at the same time fire
broke out aboard where the lifeboats were stowed. on board, as well as the gang
of desperate pirates, were the European officers, some cabin passengers and
hundreds of panic-stricken coolies. But once again the submariners showed their
indomitable courage.
The hijacked ship’s boats were on fire and the submarine had
no boats to lower, but by now the flames were casting a circle of light on the
water to one side of the ship. The submarine moved in closer. The passengers
were ordered to jump overboard and as they did so, the submariners dived into
the sea and helped them on board the submarine – women first, of course. As they
came aboard, they were quickly stowed below and the men dived again to carry
out their rescue work.
As always a pirate looked no different from a coolie passenger,
and sailors who went to the rescue of a man struggling in the water sometimes
found themselves facing a hate distorted face an unpraised arm with a vicious-looking
knife in it. A crashing right to the jaw and a knew in his balls, and the
pirate was soon screaming with fear. But still the sailor grabbed him by the hair
and pulled him aboard the submarine. With the fire increasing in intensity, the
submariners kept up the good work, managing to save more than two hundred from
the burning ship and stow them into the very confined space of the submarine,
which then brought them full speed into Hong Kong.
I was on duty in the motorboat that night when we received a
call for the rapid manning of the big motor-launch. Within a few moments we had
run alongside the submarine, where a couple of police launches were already in
position. Flanked by policemen the Chinese compradore of the burned ship stood by
the fore hatch of the launch, carefully scrutinising each person as they came
on deck. When the compradore pointed anyone out as a pirate, he was seized and
handcuffed. Some already had their hands tied behind their backs as they had been
recognised by sailors who, in attempting to save them, had been met with a knife.
The story ended a little differently from that of most unsuccessful
piracies, for besides the trial and hanging of about fifteen of the pirates,
the captain of the submarine was also tried, by court-martial, where he was
acquitted with honour and then awarded the DSO.
All these events took place with two years of my arrival in
China.
One other event, a personal one but important to me, also
took place. I passed professionally for Leading Seaman and in so doing placed
my foot on the first rung of the extraordinarily designed promotion ladder of
the British Royal Navy. It is a unique structure, that ladder, for at the
bottom there are only a few rungs, each painted a plain navy blue. Then there
is a tremendous gap, without any rungs. Beyond the gap the rungs begin again,
but these are painted gold and there are many more of them than at the bottom. In
the gap there is a notice: `Plebeians of Britain, Keep Out! You have nothing to
gain here. You will get all you are allowed down below`.
The old
Ambrose went the way of all ships. She was
ordered home to be replaced by a new parent ship, and we were somehow to drag
her across the seven seas in company with a few old submarines which might need
a tow if their decrepit engines should fail. It was a long trip. We slunk from
port to port. But although we did have to tow one or other of the submarines
from time to time, to our great good fortune the sea behaved like a gentleman
throughout. Finally we crept into Portsmouth Harbour, delivered the underwater
old crocks to Gosport, and then went right up the creek where we would not be
an eyesore. Where the
Ambrose stood meant nothing to us.
Before us was long foreign service leave and for the
majority a neat little sum in the bank to break the boredom. For others there
was no sum in the bank; they had sacrificed it for a wife and children; but
what a homecoming they would receive in return for that noble sacrifice! For a
few there was no joyful homecoming, but wives who had not waited. It is best to
pull a dark blind over that. It was a tragedy if the husband came home to an unfaithful
wife, but what if the wife had come out there where her husband had left his
sins thousands of miles away?
Six months later the ship’s company of the old
Ambrose returned
to their own port division, Devonport, by specials train, the hundred-foot-long
paying off pennant tied to the chimney of the engine. On arrival at Devonport
it was a three-foot dirty rag. `That`, said one of the men, `is the way to pay
off. The ship is being broken up, the men are going their different ways, and
the paying off pennant is torn to shreds`.
[1]
Murderer of Rasputin Grigori Efimovich (1871-1916), Serbian peasant-monk and
`Holy Man,` who was influential at the court of Czar Nicholas II and Czarina
Alexandria.
[2]
Baron Peter Nikolaievich Wrangel (1878-1928), general commanding White Russian
forces in Crimea. He was defeated by the Bolsheviks in October-November 1920.
[Actually he was defeated largely by the Ukrainian Insurgent army led by Nestor
Makhno, who had a brief alliance with the Bolsheviks, before the Red Army tried
to liquidate them in the aftermath of Wrangel’s collapse. Reddebrek]
[3]
David Beatty (1871-1936), British Admiral, created first Earl of the North Sea
and Brooksby in recognition of his outstanding service during World War I.
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Albert Camus : lettre à un militant algérien
