Chapter 1 - Ship Spotting On The River Clyde

I suppose that it was only natural that I would want to be a sailor. I was born and brought up at Kilcreggan living about one hundred yards from the edge of the River Clyde on the West Coast of Scotland. Our house had an uninterrupted view over the river and the many ships passing up and down were something to hold the interest of a small boy. Where were they from and what strange places in the world would they go to next?

Kilcreggan was a very boaty village with two separate building yards each with slipways and winter storage space. During the summer months many motor and sailing yachts lay at moorings in the bay and a large number of rowing dinghies were left on the beach by their owners who merely pulled them above high tide mark and removed the oars and rowlocks. Theft and vandalism had not been invented in Kilcreggan and a boat on the beach was perfectly safe.

As all of the various boats at the moorings were built from timber they always required regular pumping to keep the bilges free of the water which found its way inside. This was a job that us kids volunteered for gladly and led to regular daily duty during the summer school holidays. If any extra crew were required on a yacht for a race or competition we always hoped that, by being there as bilge-pumpers, we might be chosen to make up the numbers.

When the Second World War broke out the Clyde became one of Britain’s major safe ports and massive convoys of merchant ships with their naval escorts were to be seen lying at anchor behind the safety of the anti-submarine boom defence net which closed off the upper part of the Clyde from the Irish Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The ships unloaded their cargoes of food and other essential materials from overseas into barges and lighters for delivery to the various wharves and docks at Glasgow and Greenock, the many pre-war passenger ships were now all converted to carry troops and these were always to be seem with a full load of troops from overseas.

Ship spotting and ship recognition became my favourite pastime and I was proud to be able to identify many ships from their shape and also by the number of funnels. The drab wartime grey paint which covered all of their peace-time Company colours sometimes made a definite identification difficult and this led to friendly rivalry among the local boys. Sometimes an argument about a ship's name could only be settled by going out in a dinghy and reading the name on the stern. A close friend and I made regular and highly illegal trips out to as many ships as possible in a little wooden rowing boat looking for souvenirs from the crews and by the war’s end had collected many strange things. Foreign money, army badges and buttons, naval cap bands, a coconut husk carved into an American Indian’s head and a Canadian stock whip to name but a few.

Occasionally ships were left lying at anchor for prolonged periods of time and we made ourselves known to the crews and were allowed on-board some of the ships. I think that this only helped to increase my ambition to go to sea. All that plus the fact that my elder brother, Peter, had run away to sea in 1941. He had originally sailed as a deck-boy for about three months on short coastal voyages around the U.K. until Father, realising that he was determined to be a sailor, persuaded him to start an apprenticeship.

Peter accepted this suggestion and signed-on as an apprentice with J&J Denholm, a Glasgow tramp-ship company and immediately was sent to join S.S Wellpark under the command of Captain Cant. He made his first trip in a convoy to Philadelphia and back to the U.K. without incident, had a few days home leave and rejoined Wellpark for another voyage in convoy across the North Atlantic to Canada, where the ship loaded a full cargo of military supplies in St. John, New Brunswick destined for Alexandria in Egypt by way of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. On completing the loading the ship was sent off across the ocean without any naval escort or convoy, its sole armament being one small anti-aircraft gun on the stern and two light machineguns on the bridge, all of these were weapons which had been obsolete at the start of World War 1 in 1914 but were considered adequate for the protection of British merchant ships in time of war.

At noon on 30th March 1942 Wellpark was following the route allocated for the passage and was in position 21.09 South; 14. 06 West. One hour later the lookouts spotted the masts of another vessel on the horizon apparently steaming on a slowly converging course. At 2.00 pm an aircraft engine was heard and a short time later a seaplane dived out of the cloud-cover trailing a long wire with a hook on the end which pulled away the radio aerial suspended between Wellpark's masts putting the radio out of action and preventing any warning messages being transmitted.

The ship from which the seaplane had come was the German commerce raider Thor under the command of Captain Gunther Gumbich which had sailed from Germany late in November 1941 and managed to pass through the English Channel during extremely bad weather and, taking advantage of darkness, had been able to pass through the Dover Strait and proceed un-noticed to the Biscay coast of occupied France where final preparations were made for Thor to set out on her second raid against Allied merchant shipping in the South Atlantic Ocean. Thor was heavily armed with six 6-inch guns plus four torpedo tubes and carried a seaplane for spotting and, with a speed of eighteen knots was very much a hard foe to engage and not something that the crew of a lightly armed, slow tramp ship would look forward to meeting up with in the middle of the ocean.

The German ship opened fire at long range and quickly scored two direct hits with the 6-inch shells causing massive damage and a short time Captain Cant on Wellpark ordered the crew to take to the lifeboats by which time seven of the men had lost their lives and it was realised that any further opposition was not justified.

The German raider continued to cause havoc in the South Atlantic sinking another two British ships, Willesden on 1st April and Kirkpool on 10th April. After sinking this last named during bad weather and in the early evening many of the crew had to jump into the sea with no time to launch any lifeboats in the darkness. Captain Gumprich on Thor subsequently spent three hours using the ship's searchlights to look for survivors and successfully picked up thirty officers and crew from Kirkpool.

On 4th May 1942 the survivors of these three ships plus those from a Norwegian ship named Aust were all transferred to the supply ship Regensburg which eventually landed them in Yokohama, Japan where the crews were taken to a PoW camp at Nagasaki, all except Peter who was interned in an ex-convent building in the town of Fukushima along with a large number of civilians (men, women and children) who had been sailing as passengers on various ships previously sunk by German ships at sea and where they were to remain until the end of the war in 1945. Peter was eventually released and repatriated to Sydney, Australia on the aircraft carrier HMS Ruler and eventually returned to Britain and a very warm family re-union in Kilcreggan and just in time to celebrate Christmas 1945.