the mast on a Thames barge in 2017. Eighty years earlier on the Leslie it was done by Alfred Reid, the skipper, and Fred, the mate (Author’s collection)
The winches were heavy for an adult to operate. Fred was small in stature and at 14 the effort involved would have taxed him to the very limit. It was a hard life he was about to enter.
I was at Byron Road Elementary School. School was all right, but there were a few instances where I got the cane. When I first left school I was working in a metal factory, which I detested. I was always interested in the sea; I used to go down to Chatham and look at the ships there. There were a lot of ships laid up from the First World War. I didn’t think, as a small kid, I would join the Navy. My uncle was a barge skipper; he had the Derby and then the Leslie. His name was Alfred Reid. He asked my mum could he take me, as his mate had just retired and he couldn’t find anybody. He knew I was interested in the sea, so reluctantly my mother said yes. That’s when he was in charge of the Derby.
Most of our trade was from London Surrey Commercial Docks, loading from ships – cement, wood and stuff like that – which we would take round to Whitstable, and up the River Medway. We used to go up to Walden in Kent, which was near Maidstone. We had to lower all the gear to go under Rochester bridge, then you had big sweeps to pull yourself along.
At that stage I was 14 or 15 years old. It was a life that took strength, although I’m not very tall – only about 5 feet 6 inches. A lot of the rigging was hand-operated, although we did have a winch for the mainsail and for the lee boards. One incident we had was when we were anchored in Long Reach for the night; when it came to get the anchor up we could hardly move it. We had a hell of a job to get it up with the winch, and when it was clear of the waterline we could see we had a big cable stuck in the flukes. It was probably the telephone cable from Kent to Essex! We put a rope around the other fluke, made it fast, and then lowered the anchor so it [the cable] tipped off. We got the anchor up quite close, so we could make it fast without going over the side.
Life on board was pretty basic. There was one cabin with two bunks and a cooking stove. The heads [toilet] was a bucket up forward. We took turns to do the cooking; it wasn’t very cordon bleu – baked beans and bacon or something like that. The trips varied in length; we did one trip up to Maldon, which took about two or three days, but normally it was about one to two days on the Thames. Of course we had no engine – it was purely under sail. I took the wheel several times. Once my uncle became ill. He had stomach trouble. He curled up on the deck, and I was a bit frightened. I was steering and we were doing about 5 knots. I could see the bank coming up – we were on Gravesend Reach where it turns into Short Reach, so I had to do the turn until he came round. I had to go and fasten the foresail – when you swing over onto the new tack you have to go back and release it. The lee boards were up, so I didn’t have to do those.
I managed to get home about every one or two weeks. I liked the sea, but I couldn’t swim. I became very, very muscular at that time. I was on her for about nine months, and then I went, with my uncle, to the Leslie. We left the Derby because we went onto a full-rigged barge; the Derby was a stumpy. We picked the Leslie up in Milton Creek near Sittingbourne, which is quite near the River Swale. We were carrying the same sort of cargoes, because she belonged to the same firm. Because she was a full-rigged barge she was a bit more work, because she had a topsail – not like the Derby, which had an ordinary mainsail, with mizzen and foresail. We had to haul the topsail up by hand, so it was set all the time we were sailing. I was on her for a good year.
Fred applied to join the Navy whilst he was on the barge Leslie, at the age of 15. The standard length of service at that time was 12 years, starting on his 18th birthday. On joining, he would be attached to one of the main naval bases: Plymouth (Devonport), Portsmouth or Chatham. In Fred’s case, as he lived close to Chatham it was to that base that he was attached.
Training of boy entrants was undertaken at HMS Ganges, which took boy entrants from the Chatham area and the south-east of England. It had been established in the 19th century, initially based on retired warships moored in the River Stour, which runs between Suffolk and Essex, but in the early part of the 20th century had become a shore establishment. It was located at the end of the Shotley peninsula, on high ground overlooking the confluence of the Rivers Stour and Orwell, and Harwich harbour. Ganges had jetties on the Stour side, at which the launches that brought trainees from the railway station at Harwich, Parkeston Quay, would arrive.
Ganges had a fierce reputation for harsh training. In Hostilities Only, Brian Lavery quotes the writer and explorer Tristan Jones:
since I left Ganges I have been in many hellish places, including a couple of French Foreign Legion barracks and 15 prisons in 12 countries. None of them were nearly so menacing as HMS Ganges as a brain-twisting body-racking ground of mental bullying and physical strain.
He had been at Ganges at about the same time as Fred. The Admiralty’s description was different, noting that life compared favourably with that of any good school.
The Annexe, in which Fred was to be housed, was described as ‘depressing, ugly and utilitarian’. The uniform with which all boy entrants were issued was comprehensive and complicated. Also in Hostilities Only, Ken Kimberley noted:
two jumpers, two pairs of bell bottom trousers, two collars, two shirt fronts, one black ribbon, two pairs of socks, one pair of boots, one cap and one cap band, one oil skin, one overcoat, one pair of overalls, one housewife [husif] (a sewing kit), one lanyard and one Seaman’s Manual.
The bell bottom trousers were particularly complicated, as they had six buttons to fasten, three of which were vertical as a waistband and three horizontal as a flap to cover the waistband.
Fred joined Ganges in December 1939. Despite the comments about the harsh regime at Ganges, Fred seemed to have escaped the majority of it. Possibly two years on Thames barges may have made him tougher than some of his contemporaries, who may have come straight from school.
I got my call-up papers before the war started, but we were told we had to hang on until December because they were dealing with the reservists that had been called up. I had applied to join at the back end of 1938, when I was 15. I was given a date, when I was called up, to go to Whitehall in London with a rail warrant that they sent us, and we went to a part of the Admiralty building. There were a couple of dozen of us, shipped to Liverpool Street by lorry. We had a petty officer who came with us to Liverpool Street. He saw us onto the train at Liverpool Street, and then we were met at Harwich by a petty officer in a launch, who then took us across the river from Parkeston Quay.
Fred’s term at HMS Ganges [photograph recovered from Truculent] (by permission F. Henley)
I was wondering what was going on. It wasn’t too official until we got there, and then it was a different story. They took us to an annexe to the main building across the road – they were Nissen huts. We trained there, drilling and being familiarised with the Navy and the regulations. We didn’t do any practical seamanship there: we spent a lot of time sewing our names into our clothing and our hammock. We got given all of our kit, kit bags and hammock – although we didn’t sleep in hammocks at Ganges; we slept in beds. We used our hammocks as bedding, as well as a blanket. They had racks to put your hammocks in.
Reveille was at 05:30, when you had a big cup of cocoa – well they called it cocoa. Then
