The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

Convoying, however, quickly proved successful by demonstrating that unescorted ships were much more likely to be sunk than those sailing in company and with escorts. In 1939 there was still some residual Admiralty resistance to convoys, but the main problem – as indeed it had been in 1917 – was a lack of suitable ships and a general shortage of sufficient ships of any kinds.

The first homeward-bound convoy sailed from Gibraltar in mid-May 1917 escorted by two special service ships (small, armed merchant ships manned by the Navy) and three lightly armed steam yachts. Convoy escorts were not markedly superior in the earlier phases of the Second War. The SC7 convoy that sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October 1940 was escorted by a sloop and an armed steam yacht. After two days the yacht returned to port, leaving the sloop as the sole escort until joined after nine days by a corvette and another sloop. Of the 30 ships that began the crossing, 21 were sunk by submarines, 15 of them in one six-hour period. The war was almost two years old before North Atlantic convoys were escorted for the whole crossing. The most heavily protected convoys were those bound for Murmansk and Malta. Losses were especially heavy in the Malta convoys, which, although made up of the fastest and most modern ships in the British merchant fleet, came under heavy attack from aircraft and surface ships. Similar onslaughts were experienced in the Arctic convoys. These engagements were arguably the most significant military events in the war at sea in Europe during the Second World War.

It may have taken the Admiralty a long time to develop effective tactics for the protection of merchant ships, but it was very quick to decide that it would like to impose military discipline on merchant seamen. In 1915 the two leading figures in the largest of the seamen’s unions, Havelock Wilson and Edward Tupper of the National Association of Sailors and Firemen, were summoned to the Admiralty to be told by the Prime Minister of a proposal to conscript merchant seamen for national service. Apart from the fact that at this time conscription had not yet been introduced for the armed forces, the union leaders, who were well known as super-patriots, were outraged at the idea that, although still working for civilian employers, seafarers themselves would be subject to military law if conscripted. The Prime Minister and his colleagues met with adamant refusal from the two union leaders and no more was heard of the scheme. However, the idea resurfaced in 1941 when Lord Marchwood, together with a group of retired admirals, some serving naval officers and members of the consular corps, were proposing that merchant seamen become an auxiliary service of the Royal Navy. This time the proposal lacked any superior backing and was quickly strangled by an ad hoc alliance of trade union leaders and shipowners.

In both wars the Royal Navy took over large numbers of fast passenger liners for use as armed merchant cruisers, and many of their crews, including officers, volunteered to go with them and were duly entered into the Royal Navy. In the Second War, 50 of these ships were taken by the Navy and 15 were sunk, mostly by submarine, two of them, the Jervis Bay and the Rawalpindi, in hopelessly one-sided engagements with German battlecruisers. In the First World War 17 armed merchant cruisers were lost, also in the main to submarines. Other and similar merchant ships were taken up for Government service as hospital ships. Their crews stayed with them but retained their civilian status.

It was a matter for some understandable grievance that merchant seamen who stayed by ships transferred into the Royal Navy would be paid on service rates that were considerably lower than those paid to merchant seamen. In the Second World War the problem was pragmatically dealt with by paying these men a special rate. Generally, and as for other industrial workers, rates of pay for seafarers significantly increased in both wars. Able seamen who were earning £5 per month had doubled their wages by 1918. These gains did not survive the inter-war depression. In September 1939 the able seaman’s wage, at £9 6s 0d, had only recently got close to the 1918 level. By 1945 wages had once again doubled, although seafarer’s working hours were much longer than those in any other industry. In 1939 the basic working week before overtime was 64 hours, which was 20 hours longer than in the building industry and 17 hours longer than in engineering. Even when the basic week was reduced in 1943 to 56 hours, it was 10 hours longer than the all-industry average. The biggest wartime grievance, however, had little to do with either wage levels or working hours. What angered seamen was that their wages were stopped from the moment their ships were sunk. In the First War they had to wait until mid-1917, and until mid-1941 in the Second, before survivors were paid until their return to the UK.

In terms of more than just danger, the years 1917 and 1941 were significant ones for merchant seamen. For more than two decades before 1914 shipowners had fought a militant and highly organised campaign against the seafarer trade unions. By far the largest of the unions, the National Association of Sailors and Firemen, had a modest ambition – the creation of national collective bargaining machinery. In 1917, and at the height of the German submarine onslaught, the Government pressured the shipowners into creating the National Maritime Board, and also produced some significant symbolic gestures. A silver badge was struck for war-disabled seamen, a roll of honour to publicise brave deeds was to be issued regularly, and an Act of Parliament provided for the voluntary adoption of a standard uniform, identical in style to that of the Royal Navy and differing only in badge and insignia of rank. In 1941 the provisions of the Essential Work Order as applied to merchant seamen certainly tied them to their industry, but in return provided paid continuous employment, paid leave, paid study leave for approved courses, and proper compensation for lost effects in the event of shipwreck. In this war there was little additional need for symbolic gestures.

In 1928 the Prince of Wales had acquired the additional title of ‘Master of the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleets’, and this then passed subsequently to the Monarch. Resentments in the First War at merchant seamen’s ineligibility for medals and honours were laid to rest as the CBE, OBE, MBE, DSC, DSM, BEM and Mentioned in Dispatches all became available. In January 1940 Royal Assent was given to the production and distribution of a Merchant Navy buttonhole badge to be worn voluntarily. Merchant seamen, however, still commonly believed that they went unnoticed and unappreciated. Rarely practised but significantly often spoken of, the MN badge could be worn upside down as NW, to indicate ‘Not Wanted’.

There were roughly a quarter of a million seafarers employed aboard British merchant ships in 1914 and almost 200,000 in 1939. In both years at least one-third of these were foreigners – mainly Europeans, but also Indian, Chinese, West African, West Indian, East African and Arab. Ships regularly employed in the trade to the Indian sub-continent were typically manned by British officers and Indian petty officers and ratings, and complements were high. In 1940 the Clan Forbes, for example, had a total crew of 108, of whom 87 were Indian. At the same time the Biafra, a ship trading to West Africa, had a total crew of 54, of whom 27 were from Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Manning levels per ship, whatever the nationality composition of the crew, changed little between the two wars, although average ship size increased considerably. The crews engaged in UK ports for coal-burning tramps averaged at about 42 men in both wars. Ships in the cargo liner trades, and with ratings recruited in India and China, rarely had crews of less than 80. Cargo liners with all-European crews comprised between 50 and 60. The fact of war made very little difference to crew size. In the First War the average foreign-going merchant ship doubled its complement of radio officers (from one to two) and in the Second three radio officers were carried but no other additional personnel were shipped, if members of the armed forces signed on as gunners are excluded.

Images and identities

In the Great War the mass media was in its infancy, unable to pick up and put into deep national circulation stories of the doings of merchant seamen. In the early decades of the 20th century far more people read local and regional newspapers than national ones, photo-journalism as a distinctive genre was under-developed, and the same went for cinema (even though the soundless newsreel could present actualité); books were relatively expensive and talking radio was still a few years in the future. In 1939 all these means of communication had reached high levels of technical development and, furthermore, were within the economic reach of the great mass of the population. But it was as much the politics of the Second War as the technical and economic development of the media that made merchant seafarers such an obvious and prominent focus for the attention of newspapers, radio and cinema. Where the First War was a patriotic war fought in defence of great power status, the Second was quickly announced as a ‘people’s war’, to be fought in defence of democracy. The one war required examples of patriotic heroism and helpless victims of enemy brutality, the other needed patriotic heroic instances as before, but especially needed ordinary people being good citizens. Merchant seafarers were well cast for this role and no doubt for that reason received an enormous amount of publicity.

The weekly photo-news magazine, Picture Post, famous anyway for its celebration of the ‘common people’, regularly carried articles on merchant seamen. The following sequence appeared in 1940:

‘ONE OF THE MEN HITLER CAN’T FRIGHTEN

Harry Townsend of the Dunbar Castle

Harry Townsend, 60 years old, is just one of over 150,000 men in the British mercantile marine. He had a berth as a cook in the Union Castle Line’s Dunbar Castle. On a Tuesday, the Dunbar Castle strikes a mine off the south-east coast, and sinks in 10 minutes. With other survivors, Harry Townsend is picked up by a lifeboat. He reaches London wrapped in a blanket, a pipe stuck in his mouth. That was Tuesday. By Saturday, Harry Townsend has found another ship. He is at sea again.’

‘WHAT IT MEANS TODAY TO BE A MERCHANT SEAMAN

Lifeboats pull away from the sinking Clan Stuart

All day and all night ships are putting into the ports of Britain. They bring us food. They bring us metal. They bring us the needs of war and the comforts of life. They bring us them in spite of mines and submarines. They bring us them at the cost of heavy risk to our merchant seamen – the men of Cardiff, Glasgow, Tyneside, London; the men of Bombay, Singapore, and the little ports of the Near East.’

‘AND STILL THE CONVOYS COME…

The strain on merchant seamen’s nerves is terrific, as the ships proceed at snail’s pace over the ocean and nobody knows from minute to minute when disaster may come from under the sea, on the sea or in the air. The merchant seaman is given an inconspicuous little badge, about half the size of an air-raid warden’s. He is paid (if he is an AB – a skilled man) £9 12s 6d a month, plus £3 danger money. For this he risks his life every minute of his day and night, awake and asleep… doing what is in the last analysis, the most important job of all – the job of keeping the nation fed, and its trade flowing.’

Picture Post’s only competitor, Illustrated, was no less concerned with celebrating the merchant seaman. A seven-page photo-article on the rescue of the crew of a sunken ship by a Royal Navy destroyer contained these captions:

‘Rescued! The face of the Lascar survivor betrays his ordeal. His feet are frozen.’

‘James Fitzpatrick, junior wireless operator of the torpedoed freighter, is only nineteen years old. “I’m ready to sail again at any time,” says James.’

‘Chief Steward Dumbill after being torpedoed four times, believes firmly in his lucky star. He was in his cabin rolling a cigarette when the torpedo struck the freighter. “I ran on deck to help with the boats then returned for my shipmates,” says Dumbill, affectionately nursing his canaries.’

The cinema and the popular daily press were no less attentive. There were seven documentaries, three full-length feature and at least 29 newsreel items. The Daily Mirror deliberately set out to champion the merchant seaman, as might be expected from the archetypal left-populist newspaper, but the patriotically populist Daily Express carried a similar number of stories. These two newspapers were certainly idiomatically different in their approach, but they were nevertheless staunch friends of the seaman. The same was true of the BBC, which broadcast at least 19 talks given by serving merchant seamen recounting experiences. The BBC also broadcast a number of charitable appeals on behalf of seafarers. Its greatest achievement was the programme Shipmates Ashore, which in its first six months went out as The Blue Peter. Devised as a light entertainment for merchant seamen of all ranks rather than about them, it had established a home audience of six million listeners by 1943. It went out at peak period on Saturdays, was one of the very few BBC programmes to be repeated on all its short-wave services, and was the only programme solely dedicated to an occupational group unless one were to include the musical offering of Workers’ Playtime.

The press, film and radio output was supplemented by a number of novels and non-fiction books – at least 30 titles of each category. As we have seen, means of mass communication were of a different order in 1914–18, and there is therefore quite simply no comparison between the publicity attached to merchant seamen in the two wars. There were a number of 1914–18 wartime books that were wholly concerned with merchant seamen – but almost certainly less than ten titles. The idiom of the non-fictional books of this war, if just slightly more luxuriant than those of the Second War, was rhetorically interchangeable. The reader could have heard:

‘Concerning the seafarer the slightest suspicion of degeneracy was never entertained. He toiled on in fair weather and foul, in every clime, in every season, all day and every day. He had neither the opportunity nor the desire to follow the path of the landlubber. Atlas-like, he supported Britain on his broad shoulders despite increasing hazards. The might of the navy is due to a very appreciable extent to the might of the Merchant Service, and it is the latter which is the real binding link of the Empire. Never before in our history have we so much appreciated the men who “go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters”. The present conflict has accentuated our irredeemable debt of gratitude to them.’

‘Here then are the great arteries supplying Great Britain with survival power in the shape of food and raw materials; and over them every day and every night, in the piercing cold of winter and the blazing heat of summer, through fog and snow and ice and rain, with mortal danger hovering above and lurking below, go the brave obscure men of the Merchant Navy on whom now our hopes and our lives depend.’

Just how far these images and implicit identities were heard, read and seen among seafarers themselves was finally what mattered. That the public at large and especially seafarers’ families knew that seafarers were valued was of course important. But by being mostly absent for at least nine months in very twelve, it was unlikely that seafarers would themselves have had much opportunity to see themselves as others saw them. If, therefore, the imagery produced and distributed in the public domain was to percolate into the seafarer’s own consciousness, it had to be passed on primarily by intermediaries who in most cases would have been family members.

In the First War at least, this two-step flow of communication was inevitably an imperfect process. The economic costs and the skills needed to consume the printed media must have meant that at best only a substantial minority of seafarers’ families could have been aware of what was being said about their fathers, grandfathers, husbands, brothers or sons. And of those who did receive and pass on to their seafarer relatives the images in circulation, by far the great majority must have been officers’ families. The two-thirds of crews of cargo-carrying ships who were ratings must surely only have seen themselves as they saw each other. Their image was their self-image. In the earlier war it is safe to say that most seafarers’ experience of their conduct in war was little touched or influenced by the perceptions of the wider world.

The situation in 1939–45 was undoubtedly different. The economic costs of media consumption had fallen, the growth in scale and variety of the media had been enormous in order to feed the information demands of a developing democratic state and levels of literacy that were continually improving. On the other hand, the rhythms of the seafarers’ life as dictated by the conditions of employment, passage times, trade routes and port stays changed very little in the inter-war years. In short, the pattern of sea life in 1939 was much the same as in 1918. This was an infinitely more closed occupational community than those of farmworkers, miners and quarrymen. Paid leave was still wholly unavailable to ratings and petty officers in 1939, and not much known among officers either. Being a seafarer meant being aboard ship for not less than 80 per cent of the year provided jobs were available, and that meant almost literally being out of touch with families and having only a sketchy awareness of world events. The enhanced pervasiveness of media messages in the Second World War, the introduction of paid leave and continuous employment, and the development of welfare services can only have brought seafarers ‘closer to home’ than was possible in the earlier war. But as we shall see, to be a seafarer was to live a life apart. All those carefully wrought images, as well as all the thoughtful and considerate good intentions, could not have weightily touched the Second World War seafarer. Although writing almost a century earlier, the Victorian poet Arthur Clough had found a universal measure:

‘Where lies the land to which the ship would go!

Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.

And where the land she travels from? Away,

Far, far behind, is all that they can say.’

Custom, practice and intrusive war

David Divine, a well-known writer of middle-brow popular non-fiction in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, successfully caught the mundane social character of the crew of the Heronspool on her departure from Swansea in 1940:

‘Except that she was painted in a dull unloveliness of greys and blacks there was nothing to mark this from a peace-time sailing… perhaps the 4-inch gun mounted on the poop lent a point and purposefulness to the departure, but certainly there was nothing else. There was, for example, no grimness. It is one of the extraordinary characteristics of the seamen of the Merchant Navy that they do not go to sea grimly, even in time of war. They may go bad-temperedly, they often do, but a certain acerbity is the proper hall-mark of sailing day whether in peace or war. It is compounded partly of hangovers, and partly of regret for the absence of hangovers, and it has nothing to do with forebodings, or anticipatory hates.’

Another prolific writer of popular non-fiction, Owen Rutter, also looked to realism for his characterisation of merchant seamen, and in doing so went very close to the seafarers’ preferred version of themselves:

‘They have been tough-livers, used to giving hard knocks and taking them, improvident and thriftless by standards ashore… They have always been, and still are, impatient of discipline, fiercely tenacious of their rights, and ready to combat any infringement of their independence… Among the industrial workers of Great Britain they are the supreme individualists… [they] are nomadic in habit and temper, brooking no restraint…’

There are two things to be said about this commentary. First, that it is a liberal political understanding of seafarers’ attitudes and behaviour, and second, that the characterisation was only intended to describe ratings and petty officers. At no time in the modern period has it been possible to construct a social character for seafarers that was inclusive of all ranks. The simple popular stereotype of the seafarer as a roistering, insubordinate profligate can be made to work for able seamen and firemen, but not so easily for navigating and engineer officers. There is a great deal of reportage of the former and scarcely any of the latter.

In their own words and voice, the ‘common people’ are as absent in the case of merchant seafarers as they are everywhere else. They are there as objects of others’ observations, commentaries and statistical aggregations, but rarely for themselves. What we have in evidence, when it comes to social behaviour, are descriptions of people acting that are written from within the perspective of people whom we might call the ‘recording classes’. What we do not have are either the ‘common people’s’ understandings of their own actions or descriptions of the social behaviour of the ‘recording classes’ as seen and understood by the ‘common people’. This stricture can be relaxed somewhat when we get to the Second World War, where oral historians have tried to rescue the ‘common people’ for posterity. The rescues, however, have come at least several decades after the event and cannot therefore be used to equilibrate the recording classes’ contemporary accounts. Oral history may be able to redress the imbalance when it comes to perspectives and interpretations, but not often reliably when it comes to the detail of patterns and sequences of events.

For the period immediately preceding the outbreak of war in 1914 there are substantial sources recording the character and behaviour of seafarers. The war years have mainly been recorded in published and unpublished memoirs, diaries, etc, of officers and in the surviving papers of Government records.

Writing in 1906 of his experience as a ship’s engineer, William McFee commented:

‘We were always losing men out of the fo’c’sle. At each port a small, ever-changing reservoir of convalescents, gaol-birds, wanderers and stowaways was drawn on for replacement. Our problem in Bremen was, we were going back to the States, winter North Atlantic, in ballast, the worst combination imaginable. British seamen could not be persuaded to sign on.’

Captain John Carrington, highly regarded among his shipmaster peers, told a Board of Trade Committee of Inquiry in 1900:

‘All those who have anything to do with shipping crews know that the majority of sailors are a very rough lot to deal with, and perhaps especially English sailors. The sailor is probably a man who has tried most things on shore, and gone to sea as a last resource, or he may have been a boy so thoroughly bad at home that his parents sent him to sea. That is the class of material we have to work with. Masters are put to a great deal of trouble to manage such crews.’

As if writing in confirmation, F. T. Bullen observed at the turn of the century:

‘Foreign seamen, especially Scandinavians, are not only biddable, they do not growl and curse at every order given, or seize the first opportunity to get drunk and neglect their work in harbour. Occasionally a truculent Norseman will be found who will develop all the worst characteristics of our own seamen, usually after a long service in British ships… But insubordination in the absence of any means of maintaining discipline is a peculiarly British failing.’

Then, writing in his notebook during a voyage aboard a tramp in 1916–17, J. E. Patterson wrote:

‘In the old days, when he was virile and wicked, [the seaman] got drunk and tried to paint the town red. But [he] paid for doing so… In these times of degeneracy afloat, however, a man may be ashore, drinking instead of being at work; and if he is logged [punished] for doing so, especially in an American port, he just “jumps” the vessel… As for telling a man at sea that he is inefficient, or lazy, or is not sick when he lays up because he has stomach-ache or has tapped his finger with a hammer – well, the only result of such temerity and want of tact is to have the man say: “All rite, pay me off, then…”’