the skies behind us, looking for sign of enemy bombers’ and the passage back to Alexandria was made under almost continuous red warning. Nevertheless, except for one ‘halfhearted attempt at intervention’ that hit nothing but got a hot reception from the anti-aircraft gunners, the passage was without incident.
Unfortunately, it was not so for two venerable anti-aircraft cruisers, Coventry and Calcutta, that Admiral Cunningham sent from Alexandria to shepherd them in. Ignoring the Abdiel’s troop-laden band, a Ju 88 attacked up-sun at 09.45 and put two bombs into the Calcutta’s engineering spaces. She sank in just five minutes, with two officers and 116 ratings,57 the Royal Navy’s last loss in the painful battle for Crete.
As Alexandria came into sight, Major Dyer of 28 Battalion told his men, ‘Let’s tidy ourselves as best we can, smarten ourselves up and march off the ship like the good soldiers we are.’ His men went to work with a will and did what they could. The force arrived at Alexandria at 17.00 and Midshipman Goodwin recalled the Abdiel’s arrival. ‘Once we knew which side we were going to at the landing wharf, all troops were cleared to the other side. This gave us quite a list, which quickly prompted an anxious signal from the C-in-C, Admiral Cunningham, asking if we had suffered any damage’, but he was assured there was none.58 Once the men had disembarked, waiting trucks took them away to camps.
Admiral Cunningham signalled, ‘I congratulate you all on a very successful effort on the night of 31/5’.59 The evacuation of Crete was finally over. By this time, the Abdiel was one of only five or six ships in the Mediterranean Fleet left unscathed. In the previous forty-two days, she had been at sea for thirty-six of them and had sailed about 17,000 miles.60 The Abdiel had played a vital part in the battle for Crete, though certainly not in a role she was designed for.
The month of June was relatively quiet for the Abdiel, as she was not needed in the Syrian Campaign and all that came her way was working-up, drills and exercises, a boiler clean and various odd jobs. Perhaps at this point she was repainted into an unusual scheme of light gray overall with very dark gray or black geometric shapes on her funnels and superstructure and on her hull extending from the waterline to the uppermost row of scuttles.
On 21 June, the Abdiel was joined by her sister-ship Latona, so she finally had a companion that could keep up with her. The Latona had sailed from England all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, an adventure in itself. More adventures would follow for both ships.
THE LATONA TAKES TO THE WATER AND SAILS AROUND THE CAPE, 1941
THE second ship of the class to complete, the Latona, had the shortest career of all the fast minelayers, but it was in no way an unexciting one. She was built by Thornycroft & Co. Ltd. at Southampton and was the largest ship ever built by that firm.1 She was laid down on 4 April 1939, was launched on 20 August 1940 and was completed on 4 May 1941.2
The Latona was manned out of Portsmouth,3 and was assigned the pennant number M 76. Her motto was Vestigia Nostra Cavete, which translates as ‘Beware our tracks’.4 She seems to have had two crests, an official one with a gold sun eclipsed by a white crescent moon and another – which adorned the Captain’s stationery – featuring a bird on an island.
When new, the Latona was painted up in a layer-cake camouflage scheme of three tones, with the darkest one lowest and the lightest one highest in the ship. She was the fourth Royal Navy warship to bear this name, the Latin version of the Greek ‘Leto’, the mother of the god Apollo and the goddess Artemis. The Latona was also named after the small, old protected cruiser that was converted to a minelayer in 1908 and served in the First World War,5 during which she supposedly laid the mines that sank the German light cruiser Breslau and badly damaged the battlecruiser Goeben off Imbros in the Aegean Sea on 18 January 1918.6
The launch of the Latona on 20 August 1940. (National Maritime Museum N 14035)
The Latona’s first and only commandeering officer was Captain Stuart Latham Bateson, who took command on 15 January 1941, when she was still fitting out. Wanting to know more about this Latona woman, he wrote to his sixteen-year-old son Alec, who was then pursuing a classical education at Rugby School. Alec told him that Latona ‘was a Roman mythological figure derived from a Greek one called Leto, one of the Titans, who had been punished for – or had escaped from – an “affair” with Zeus (Jupiter) the King of the Gods and helped by Poseidon (Neptune) the God of the Sea, against the angry vengeance of Hera (Juno) the Queen of the Gods, into becoming a quail, alighting as a fugitive on an island (Ortygia/Delos) floating in the sea, which was then anchored for her comfort and where in due course she became the mother of Apollo and Artemis (Diana) the twin deities of sun and moon’. The Latona would also have an exciting life, but not quite as colourful as that of her namesake.
Captain Bateson and his twin brother were born in 1898, their father being a High Court judge. He attended Rugby School and the Royal Naval College Keyham and then entered the Royal Navy as a special entry cadet in 1916. In 1923, he qualified as a ‘Torpedo Officer’, when the Torpedo Branch was responsible for maintaining ships’ electrical equipment. Also in 1923, he married Marie Elphinstone Fleming Cullen and they had two children, Alec and Isobel. Stuart Bateson was promoted to Captain in 1939.7
After Admiral Bateson’s death in 1980, Marie Bateson received a letter from the Latona’s Cook-Baker, a Charles Simmons, who offered a glowing tribute to her husband, a ‘Real Gentleman’ whom he greatly respected. He reported that the ‘bond of friendship we had aboard HMS Latona was created by our Wonderful Skipper who always had time to listen to what one said to him’. After his signature, he added, ‘The Baker who used to make the cakes your husband did so enjoy’.
As the Latona completed in Southampton, the rest of her crew joined her. One was a Telegraphist Sidney Albert Banner, who was born in the Aston district of Birmingham. Once the war began, he tired of life in the barracks and volunteered to go to sea and was informed he was on draft to a ship called the Latona. No one seemed to have heard of her, though some, confusing her with Laconia, thought she was a liner converted to an armed merchant cruiser. Telegraphist Banner recalled later that ‘it was something of a shock to us when, having been trucked to the appropriate dock, we were confronted by a sleek, three-funnelled warship like a small cruiser in appearance’.8 Once again, an Abdiel had fooled someone.
Captain Stuart Latham Bateson. (NPG × 163947, portrait of 25 January 1949 by Walter Stoneman, © National Portrait Gallery, London)
On completion, the Latona, as Job No. 1198, ran a four-hour full-power trial. Maddeningly, Thornycroft’s one-page record of the trial did not record the speed attained, but did record the shaft horsepower (72,860, higher on the starboard shaft than the port one), fuel consumption (24.5 tons per hour), steam pressures, draught and other information. A few slight defects were found, but a handwritten note at the bottom of the record declared, ‘A very fine performance + shows care in design + construction’.9
The Latona was allowed no time to dawdle about. She was sent straight to Milford Haven to have her minelaying equipment checked, which was done by dropping dummy mines
