Michael Heath-Caldwell M.Arch
Brisbane, Queensland
ph: 0412-78-70-74
alt: m_heath_caldwell@hotmail.com
General Frederick Heath-Caldwell CB aged 84/85
Constance M.H. Heath-Caldwell aged 74/75
Capt. the Rev. Cuthert H. Heath-Caldwell DSO aged 53/54
Violet Heath-Caldwell (ne Palmer) - aged 57/58
Patricia C.M. Heath-Caldwell - aged 22/23
Diana Heath-Caldwell - aged 19/20
Rosamond Heath-Caldwell - aged 17/18
James A. Heath-Caldwell aged 12/13
Memoirs of J.A. Heath-Caldwell - aged 12/13
And what happened was that I was born on the 28th March which has some bearing later because my term that went into the Navy in 1943, I was the youngest bar one in the term. If her pregnancy had been three or four days longer I would no longer have been in that lot of cadets who went to Dartmouth in 1943
At the age of 13 I had the chance to take the common entrance examination to an exam for entry into the Royal Navy. This was quite an event.
My grandfather had tried to join the navy but he failed the exam. That was around about 1870. But he later became a Major General in the Royal Engineers and finished up his career as an Air Commodore organizing the Royal Air Force. Anyway he failed to get into the Navy, but for some reason or other, I don’t quite know how, I got a scholarship into the navy. My father was not too pleased when he found that he still had to pay the school fees. I suppose in times of peace he might have got off paying the school fees because scholarship people were supposed to have got their education free.
That happened when I was 13. The actual interview down in London was quite a exercise and quite an adventure. The headmaster accompanied me down to London by train, we went to the Admiralty, I did not know where I was going but he obviously knew the way, and their my interview was just after lunch time and once while I was waiting for them to process me or for me to go in front of the board I was asked to sit down and write an essay about what country I would like to visit most at the end of the war.
So I thought for awhile and thought I might say Switzerland, but I thought that would be a bit, and I had another choice, so my choice was that I would like to visit Poland. And I did that because I could then get in all the reasons for why the war had started in 1939. That was four years previously and that must have gone down well, and I was perhaps just lucky and I also had a word from the father of a fellow pupil at my prep school who had been the first man to dismantle a magnetic mine on beach without being blown up. Other bomb disposal men had been killed because mines and shells and bombs were sometimes booby trapped so that if somebody tried to get in to them and find out how they worked that would cause the mine.
Having passed in to the Royal Navy, having passed the exam, I found that I was not the only one from my school to get in, there was another friend of mine from the school called Geoffrey Lemon, who also gained entry into the Navy. He was actually turned down for a start because his doctor said he was colour blind. The only thing was that on rechecking him they found that was not the case at all so he did very well in the entrance exam and got in as well, so there were two of us who had been at prep school together and then entered the Navy together.
The Navel college was originally situated at Dartmouth in the south of England where it was on the sea. Then when the war came in 1939 and things did not go very well for England in the war the college was evacuated up to a place in Bristol, that was in range of the German airforce, so they decided to move the college again to the Duke of Westminster’s country seat near Chester, and that was where I went with 45 other young boys aged 13 ½ in September 1943.
There was a certain amount of language to be learnt there, all the various terms the Navy used for all sorts of things, for instance when you went on holiday you did not actually go on holiday, you went on leave.
Eaton Hall – Which reminds me why my naval colleagues called me “Woggles.” I spent the last summer holiday at my prep school ‘Digging for Victory’ as the Government slogan went. And a party of us from school weeded a farmer’s potato field and I got very brown doing that so when I, along with 50 others, joined HMS Brittania or R.N. College, Eaton Hall, Chester, and here we met together for the very first time off a special train from Paddington Railway Station in London. And we were bussed to Eaton Hall and we were put in what was called Drake House, after the famous British Admiral.
And it was in the main building and our gunroom was in the Painted Hall and we’d been given strict instructions to look after the Duke’s property and not treat it as of very little worth as we were told the Army did, because they’d been there occupying it before the Navy took over. And all was well till a cadet who had made a model copper or bronze cannon turned at the Engineering works we attended at Chester, set it off in the main fire place with ammo in it and this hit the ceiling, damaging it. And so we were moved downstairs in the basement in the old kitchen area with its giant spits for roasting sheep and pigs. The Masters and Officers used the Painted Hall as their Common Room. Punishment Naval fashion came quickly.
Another thing was that if you went out into the country side or left your naval establishment, you went ashore, in spite of the fact that you were all on dry land. And that was just part of the language that was taught us. And that was all part of the acclimatization to a naval culture.
At this particular naval establishment, the Duke of Westminster’s country home, he lived there in quite a big house but separate from the main building where the whole college had their classrooms and a few dormitories, and throughout the grounds of the Duke’s country estate were prefabricated buildings and huts and divided up into groups of houses. They would have been called houses in a public school, but our school was not a public school, it was a government run school, we were actually HMS Britannia at that time.
And a friend of mine called Hargraves decided one day that he would venture into the Duke’s part of the establishment where he lived in private and had a few green houses in which peaches grew, and my friend, John Hargreaves, he pinched a couple of peaches from there but got caught doing so. Now this was a very sort of bad mark for the Navy, I suppose being caught in the first place, it was not exactly acceptable and my friend Hargreaves was caned in front of the whole assembly in the gym. I did not actually see it, I was not there, I think I was sick at the time or was attending sick bay.
And one of my friends, A B. Eagles, because we scoured the woods round the Duke’s estate and brought back anything edible. This included chestnuts and edible fungi. These we cooked on the round stoves in our hut. Poor old [Barry?] Eagles was slung out of the R.N. before we graduated because he didn’t work enough. Once, at a half term, we visited together the Forest of Dean in Wales – there we also sought edible fungi etc.
At that time, just next to the Duke’s buildings and estate and polo grounds we found marvelous, there were lots of grounds for rugby, football, soccer and hockey and just over or outside the boundary on this very flat farmland area there was an aerodrome which had been built at the beginning of the war for training purposes and while we were there for a start Air Speed Oxfords took off from the nearby runway, and they circled and flew around the area teaching people to fly, bomber pilots. One bomber pilot unfortunately, on take off, crashed into the school grounds and all on board were killed, except one who was injured and he was taken to the sick bay in the college grounds and unfortunately, everybody asked after him, and he died there. So that caste a bit of a pall over the college for a few weeks or so until the event sort of merged with the past and we got on with our lives.
Later on in the war the aerodrome which was just next door to us was taken over by the Americans and their transport aircraft, Dakota DC3 they were, and hundreds of them used to use it.
...
I went on to Eaton Hall which was where the Royal Naval College had moved during the war. We only had eleven terms there altogether, that was just under four years.
I spent three weeks in a military hospital near Chester having had my large appendix removed by a well known Irish surgeon. From there I went on to a place called Pasquarum which was a hospital for Cadets to go to which was a hospital about twelve miles away in the lower Welsh foothills and there I spent a week or two to recover after the appendix operation, and I note that my parents travelled all the way up from Wiltshire to visit me in the hospital at Mostyn Hall.
They also met the medical officer, Dr Bentz of HMS Britannia which Eaton Hall was, and he told them that they were very worried at that time, in mid 1944, about the food situation and keeping the whole college well fed. An interesting thing that, that was due to the fairly successful German U-Boat campaign to keep the number of food ships and supply ships crossing the Atlantic down, a lot of them were sunk as they came across, so some people thought the Germans were winning the U-Boat war and England, it was thought, could have been starved into submission.
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More on depth charges. At about of the age of 13 some of us discovered that if you got an empty tooth paste tube and pricked it with a pin, and you put a bit of sodium in it and closed up the end of the tube again, it had to be empty, and it had to have a very small hole in it. If you put the tube in a basin of water a marvelous bang ensued when the water got into the empty tooth paste tube, reacted with the sodium and caused a small explosion.
We were doing this in the basement, with the basins, this was about the age of 14, myself and another chap were amusing ourselves. Well, what happened was with one particular bang and the whole basin disintegrated. It had water in it, the whole basin blew out and we took to our heels in all directions, and in this case, who would have been to blame, we wondered. Now it so happened that at Dartmouth there was a custom that if somebody did something like that and nobody ever owned up to doing it, it was blamed on some mythical cadet, Heath-Thompson, so on this occasion Heath Thompson would have been blamed, as he was and we never heard anything more about it.
Evidently the basin was repaired and they evidently could not conduct an enquiry to find out who had done it. So that was another of my first endeavors with depth charges in the Navy.
Crewe Chronicle
Saturday 11 September 1943
Lawton - Garden Fete in Aid of Church Schools.
Mrs Heath-Caldwell, Linley Hall, opened a garden fete on Saturday at the Rectory in aid of the Church Schools.
Capt. Kilburn, who presided, emphasized the need for keeping the parish schools in repair. It was, he said, essential to the children's health that the schools should be kept in repair.
After Mrs Heath-Caldwell had opened the fete and Miss Margaret Arrowsmith hada presented her with a bouquet, the Rector (The Rev. B. Martin John) thanked those who had taken part. He hoped the people would do their best for the schools. It was the Church School, he added, that would help to maintain the standard of Christian principles handed down by their fathers.
The refreshments and produce stall was in the charge of Mrs Bosson, Mrs Leeson, Mrs Dale, Mrs Heath, Mrs Boffey, and Miss Stubbs. Hoop-la, Mrs Brereton and Mrs Webb; crockery stall, Mrs A. Bosson and Mrs Arrowsmith; bagatelle, Tom Martin-John; "spinning arrow" John McLean; bran tub, Joyce Heath.
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Heath-Caldwell All rights reserved.
Michael Heath-Caldwell M.Arch
Brisbane, Queensland
ph: 0412-78-70-74
alt: m_heath_caldwell@hotmail.com