With war, Dad’s photos changed from tropical cruises to the stormy North Atlantic, ice-bound ships and torpedoed merchant sailors floating in oil as they awaited rescue.
I regret that I was unable to attend Sunday’s Battle of the Atlantic ceremony at the Duncan Cenotaph but it did get me to reflecting on my father’s 20-year career in the Royal Canadian Navy.
A so-called ‘lifer,’ he ‘retired’ at the ripe old age of 36, then washed windows for two years while waiting for an opening in the Naval Firefighting Service in which he served another 22 years before taking retirement, for real, at 60.
If you’re wondering how he racked up 44 years in 60: he joined the RCN as a boy seaman after running away from home at 16. That was in 1929, meaning that he was a seasoned petty officer by the time war broke out and his ship, the destroyer HMCS Skeena, was assigned to convoy duty in the North Atlantic.
I recall his telling me that they’d returned to Esquimalt from somewhere up-coast when the order came to sail to Halifax via the Panama Canal. There was real urgency, HMC Ships Skeena and Fraser having to clear the canal before Canada declared war against Germany, a week later than Great Britain. This was intentional because the Americans, then neutral, governed the Canal Zone and the destroyers had to make it to the Atlantic before they were barred from using the canal or, worse, impounded.
Always a photographer, even when he wasn’t supposed to take pictures, Dad left two albums of pre- and postwar peacetime voyages (such as King George VI’s coronation in 1937). A Caribbean cruise the following year included a coveted ‘Crossing the Line’ service. In other words, life in the peacetime navy had its perks before war changed everything and Canada’s contribution soared from a handful of warships to one of the three largest navies in the world.
That’s when his photos change dramatically: from tropical cruises to the stormy North Atlantic and shots of ships so ice-bound that it threatened their stability. And shots of torpedoed merchant seamen on Carley floats, or floating in oil in their lifejackets awaiting rescue. Or awash in oil and held up by their lifejackets, but dead.
Dad also served on HMCS Saguenay and HMCS Restigouche (aka ‘Rusty Guts’), which is just as well as his first destroyer, Skeena, was lost off Iceland.
As noted, however, it wasn’t all doom and gloom and war. I mentioned Skeena’s Crossing the Line (that’s the Equator) ceremony; this was on Feb. 4, 1938. I have Dad’s nine-paged mimeographed programme of that historic day for Skeena’s company, few of whom (he being one of them) had been previously initated into King Neptune’s Court. This was a centuries-old custom long practised by most navies, in particular Britain’s Royal Navy and, in consequence, the RCN.
I don’t have space here to go into details of the event other than to define it, generally, as a raucous ceremony with humiliating initiation rituals inflicted upon ‘greenhorns’ and ‘tadpoles’ for them to be accepted into Neptune’s domain.
As Skeena wallowed at the Equator, each candidate of her 200-man company had to appear before King Neptune who was suitably attired and armed with a trident. To the ship’s executive officer he presented the Ancient Order of the ‘Pussers Lamp;’ to the medical officer, the ‘Bedpan Third Class;’ to the chief cook the Order of the Greasy Spoon, and so on.
For most of the others, including officers, it was ‘criminal’ charges! Punishment, in the case of PO Gleave whose crime was serving “muddy and sour lime juice, hot and barking dogs in tins, and green tomatoes,” it was a taste of his own medicine: a good shot of unsweetened lime juice.
For poor Stoker Aldred it was a bad haircut for having worked so hard since leaving Esquimalt that his engine room shipmates had been able to slack off. For coming on board from leave in a befuddled state and claiming to be an FBI operative, Seaman Dudman, too, underwent a crude shearing. For polluting Skeena’s torpedo tubes with profanity, and having “smiled on several occasions, thereby causing undue concern unto all his shipmates,” Snakey Cooper joined the barbering queue. And so on.
None of this is meant to deflect from the solemnity and significance of Sunday’s commemoration of the Battle of the Atlantic which cost Canada dearly in lost ships and seamen. I’m trying to illustrate that there could be much more to serving one’s country than the hardships and horrors of war. Civilians shouldn’t wonder that military service forges lifelong comradeships.
To his dying day my father wore his navy ribbons, even on his firefighter’s uniform, with pride.
They, the Crossing the Line certificate, the photo albums and my maternal grandfather’s First World War medals are among my most cherished family keepsakes.
Yes, I missed Sunday’s ceremony. But I didn’t forget.