Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

HMS Illustrious 1948

(Looking at photo of HMS Illustrious) – HMS Illustrious in a Canal Loch – Panama Canal? Or is that Sydney Harbour Bridge in background. And aircraft, even with a big magnifying glass I can’t see but the ship is still equipped with 20mm Oer and not 40 millimetre Bofors AA guns. So that dates it to Malta Group days or maybe when it sank the Italian Fleet in Taranto Harbour en route to the Far East.

And I was sent, along with six others from my term to HMS Illustrious which was in Portsmouth Dockyard. Now this ship had seen the end of the war in the Pacific where it had been bombed. A Kamikaze had actually exploded on its flight deck, but because it was an armored flight deck, apart from denting the deck in one place, no great damage was done to the aircraft carrier. Because it was such a strongly constructed aircraft carrier by comparison to the American air craft carriers that generally did not have armor plated flight decks.  They had, I think, fairly thin flight decks made of timber and Kamikaze pilot attacks on them were lethal for American war ships because with Kamikaze fighters when they hit their aircraft carriers they went straight through to the air craft space below the flight deck and exploded in a ball of fire.

Our air craft carrier, the Illustrious was both training air craft carrier and combined the role of that and trials carrier, all new naval aircraft were carried out their sea trials on it. It as 31,000 tons and could speed along through the water at about 31 knots. It was quite a fast ship. We were in Portland Harbour one evening and my job, most of us Midshipmen ran boats, that was, we coxed, or we had boats that we ferried people from ship to shore, and from shore to ship. I suppose they were little commands. And there were a couple of motor boats for officers and there were some, what were called, pinnaces, for  the ship’s company, which had far less freeboard and they carried far more people, but not quite so fast. And as we discovered one night in Weymouth Harbour, or Portland Harbour, this was a lethal thing. I had been visiting my parents in Dorset, where my father had retired to. And they had taken me to Weymouth to await a boat back to the Illustrious, and on this particular night we got there about 10pm, we got to the jetty and were waiting for the boat to turn up, and then we saw a lot of lights over in the direction of the harbour, and search lights apparently were on. We soon learnt that what had happened was we could not be taken off that night because they had stopped running boats because a pinnace manned by a fellow midshipman, when it turned into the port after gangway of the aircraft carrier, it had been overwhelmed by a large wave, and the whole pinnace went down underneath the water when this large wave swamped it. And the people on the quarterdeck on top of the gangway saw its lights just disappearing under the water. It was completely overcome by this large wave. And 38 sailors were drowned in that tragedy. The rest managed to get rescued by another boat that was in the water that night manned by the Royal Marines, and another Midshipman Mid D.C. (Don) Smith. But I having just come back from leave on the Weymouth front had to spend the night there because all the boats had been hoisted because they had decided it was too rough to run boats that night.

You have no idea how that affected us. He was a fellow Midshipman. Another thing was he was not terribly fit, and he drank quite a bit of alcohol if he had a chance. However, that was nothing to do with it. He actually survived the actual sinking of his boat, and got up the gangway to the quarterdeck, and there he died of shock. I don’t quite know whether they covered him with blankets or what happened. Because, anyway I came back from ashore the next morning on an M.F.V. Motor Fishing Vessel when everything had happened and there was no sign to show of anything that had happened except that the 38 seamen had been drowned and our fellow mid-shipman had died. Now there were clothes rationing at that time and the parents of this boy, were aged about 17, 18, the parents of the boy gave all of us, his shipmates, his clothes to share amongst us, because clothes were rationed and  valuable, and I got his sports coat, because I had lost mine on a bicycle episode. I could have been allocated that boat to run, but I wasn’t, and it was him.

HMS Illustrious

17^th October 1948

Liberty boat capsized and sank in Portland Harbour.

Roy E. Ashwin, Naval Airman

Roy Binks, Leading Writer

Walter H. Black, Able Seaman

Robert A.E. Blakey, Stoker Mechanic

Kenneth C. Brenchley, Stoker

Richard A. Clough, Midshipman

Geoffrey G. Collier, Ordinary Seaman

Richard W.J. Cope, Regulating Petty Officer

Lewis Crowson,

John M.R. Davies, Naval Airman 2^nd Class

Dennis Elwis,

William E. Eyers, Ordinary Seaman

Robert H. Fennel, Naval Airman 2^nd Class

Geoffrey C. Hughes

Eric M. Jack

Thomas A. Leonard

Roy Lindsay

Leonard Llewellyn

Eric W. Marshall, Leading Patrolman

Ian Martin, Naval Airman 2^nd Class

James McBlain

Clement F. Mitchell, Leading Seaman

Edward J. Morrison, Ordinary Seaman

John R. Neale, Naval Airman 2^nd Class

Edward F.J. Rye, Able Seaman

EdmondR. Seaford, Ordinary Seaman

Ian Still, Ordinary Seaman

Geoffrey W. Williams, Naval Airman 2^nd Class

Alan Young, Boy Signalman

[Link to Youtube Video of the Memorial in 2010]

Life went on. It was a very busy ship. I think nowadays a ship would probably stop and there would be goodness knows, an enquiry on the spot and counsellors would have been interviewing everyone and goodness knows what. Well the war had only been a not very long time before that and people did not pay attention to the psychological effects of members of the armed forces being drowned at that time. I had lost my sports jacket on a bicycling trip from Devonport to Dartmouth. This I had done because I was amongst the few of us Midshipmen who had bicycles on board. It also happened that our Captain, Captain Hughes Hallet, was a bicyclist, who used to get on very well with his midshipmen and the four or five of us with bicycles, were asked to accompany him on bicycle touring in Devon and in Scotland, when we visited it too. And when you have a Captain of an aircraft carrier who you can bicycle with and talk about life in general, this had a great effect, as he was an exceptional man that Captain Hughs-Hallet. He had been the brains behind the fabricated ports that enabled the D-Day invasion ofNormandyto happen in 1944. His first invention had been of prefabricated gun platforms which were sunk in the estuary of the Thames and above the mud banks to provide gun platforms to defend London and Hull from attacks by air craft. A big estuary on which London was situated, it was easy for an airman to follow up on moonlights nights the estuary of the Thames, and if there was nothing there, no gun platforms there to spoil their aim, they could have just come up the River Thames and dropped their bombs and would have known exactly where they were. Captain Hughs Hallet’s invention which he was behind, and the experts had told him that his idea would not work, that the platforms, when they were sunk over the mud banks at high tide, they told him that they would turn turtle and not be upright when they were sunk in roughly the right position that they wanted them to be. However, he won his argument there and they worked and that led on to him inventing these block ships that were the break waters of the prefabricated harbours that enabled all the armor and tanks, ammunition and men to flow on to the bridge head in Northern France, which was the preliminary to the defeat of the Germans, and the invasion of occupied Europe. It was a very important thing that, and that had been his idea. And he told us about that and it was most interesting to hear it from him. He had been a young motorcycle racer as a midshipman. Another thing about him was that he actually had not got his wings in the Navy but he had his private flying license to fly civil aircraft, so he was not entirely ignorant about flying when he was given command of the Illustrious.

There were many plane crashes on HMS Illustrious and I observed many from Action Stations on the Flight Deck and its all in my journal.

The bicycle ride was two to three hours. We paid this fleeting visit back to Dartmouth. We pedaled up and down hill all the way, it was not flat, it was quite hilly in parts, Devonshire was there, we got within, what the Captain said, was a 2”mortar range of the Naval College at Dartmouth, and he said I think we had better turn around here because protocol has it that I mustn’t very well come on to the naval establishment of another commanding officer without him knowing so you will have to be content with getting within 2”mortar range of it. So we there upon turned back and bicycled back to Plymouth. He was a great fellow. You talk when you are bicycling in a group, we weren’t racing enthusiast or anything like that, we were bicycle tourists. Another trip we took was to have a look at Dartmoor Prison. He said he wanted to have a look at Dartmoor Prison in case he was shut up there later on in his own life. He said he wanted to see what the surrounding country was like, and so we travelled north fromPlymouthanother day bicycling and we bicycled up to Dartmoor Prison on Dartmoor, had a look at it and then bicycled back toPlymouth. And then up in Invergordan, in North of Scotland, there we went on another trip with him, and this was a special trip and we went in his barge, in the Captain’s barge, he took us and our bicycles to a place where the other tourist people generally didn’t go and there bicycled up and down hills, and there one of us actually had an accident. Cove lost control of his bicycle going down a hill which dipped to the right across a bridge at the bottom, and he was going too fast and hit the parapet of the bridge and he got quite hurt. We reckoned he was accident prone, and what happened was two years later he was climbing cliffs along Lands End in England with a party of Royal Marines, because he was an engineer and had been stationed in the Engineering College in Devonport, and he was with this party of Royal Marines who were cliff climbing and they climbed this cliff above the sea and he slipped and fell into the sea and was drowned. We thought he was accident prone. Which proved it rather as he did not live very long after that.

There was another Midshipman, called Antony Frew, he was the son of a Rear Admiral or Engineer Rear Admiral, and every time he got up in the morning, one of his favourite sayings was “One day nearer death.” And he said, “There was nothing wrong with the world, only the human being in it.” That was another of his statements and phrases that he used. Now he became a sub-mariner. He also was on a yacht that we did a trip from Torbay around to Plymouth– an ex-German yacht. And I was on the yacht with him and we all got very drunk after drinking cider, beer, cider, beer, in a pub on the front at Salcomb, which is half way between Torquay andPlymouth. And what happened was when we rowed back to the yacht that we were crewing I very nearly drowned poor old Frew, I did something and he just managed to get to the yacht. He was in the water, I think I upset the raft he was in, or the float. He was a bit annoyed with me then and I was a bit annoyed with myself but we were all absolutely under the influence of alcohol. Just the sort of things that we are told these days we must be very careful not to do.

He went on, and wanted to be a sub-mariner, and in one submarine accident he survived when HMS Submarine Truculent was collided with a Merchantman in the Thames Estuary. They got out using Davis Escape Appets and he was in the water and picked up and survived that but around about 1951 he was with a party of other Sub-Lieutenants who were doing training for the submarine service, and he was in HM Submarine Affray. HM Sub Affray, one night took on an exercise. They were going to go to the Channel Islands and then they were going to come back to the South Coast of England and land at night some Royal Marines, they would have been saboteurs or agents, it was just an exercise to show them submarines did, one of their things, which was to land people on foreign coasts to do reconnaissance or sabotage or whatever it might be in wartime. And what happened was somewhere near Jersey either the periscope, which was a snorkel periscope, that was it sucked in the air that drove its diesels must have hit an object big enough to fracture the snorkel

(There was a photograph album from Illustrious with lots of photos of the people on board in 1948 and a lot of photos of aircraft crashing on the deck and being thrown over the side, but we do not now kinow where it is - MHC 2013)