J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Combined cadet force

Nelson’s Wavy Heir, Part 2

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I’ve been tagged! Both Gillian Bagwell and Linda Collison have tagged me as part of ‘The Next Big Thing’… Unfortunately all the people I’d tag in turn have already appeared in other people’s lists, so I’m afraid this particular bit of the chain ends with me – but even so, I thought it would be quite a fun thing to do, so there’ll be an extra post this week, on Wednesday, in which I answer the questions on ‘The Next Big Thing’. In the meantime, though, here are the continuing surreal misadventures of a very unlikely Sub-Lieutenant RNR (CCF).

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Serving as an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve (Combined Cadet Force) exposed me to a series of experiences that would probably otherwise have passed me by. I learned to sail – and got paid by the Royal Navy for doing so! – and was twice able to take two passages from Gibraltar to Portsmouth aboard HMS Jupiter, the old Leander-class frigate that served as the school’s affiliated ship. (Principal lessons learned: only start to get worried about how a wardroom dinner is developing when the ship’s chaplain falls over in a drunken stupor and fractures his skull on a table corner; and never agree to sleep on a mattress on the deck of the Exocet missile control room, as sleep proves elusive because of a nagging worry that one might roll over too abruptly, hit the wrong button, and obliterate Bordeaux.) I took cadets hill walking in Snowdonia and the Peak District, and spent a weekend day running from Rosyth dockyard in a patrol boat; as the navy largely goes home at weekends, at night I had the entire wardroom of the shore base HMS Caledonia to myself. I was divisional officer of a first aid course at the Royal Naval Hospital, Haslar, during the week which contained the 1992 general election, and watched with some bemusement as some of the navy’s most senior medics knocked back countless cocktails on election night. They were appropriately coloured cocktails, too: blue for Conservative supporters, red for Labour and orange for the Lib Dems (needless to say, virtually everybody was drinking blue, giving me a free run on red and orange).

(Before anyone contacts the authorities to bring charges of child neglect against me, I should probably hasten to add that during these courses, the cadets were always under adult supervision elsewhere on the base, and these being naval establishments, by definition their opportunities to get into trouble were effectively zero. For a teacher, this was one of the delights of being in the CCF: at night, somebody else looked after them!)

But perhaps the most memorable times I spent in the CCF were the four occasions in six years when I took cadets for a week on the Clyde Fleet Tender. This was a fleet tender of the Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service: the Cricklade on my first couple of occasions, then the rather more opulent Meavy, which had previously served as a commissioned warship (HMS Vigilant) on patrol off Northern Ireland, so the hold was fitted out to accommodate a dozen Marines. The tender was based at HM Naval Base, Clyde, the nuclear submarine base at Faslane, and to be in such close proximity to the navy’s ‘bombers’ – then the Polaris submarines – was a pretty amazing experience. On one occasion it was a pretty frightening one, too. We had arrived in Faslane late on the Sunday, the cadets were taken off to the Junior Rates Mess, and I settled into the wardroom of HMS Neptune, which was rather better populated than Caledonia had been. But when I went down to breakfast the next morning, I was the only person in the place. Still somewhat jaded from the previous evening’s ‘hospitality’, it took me some time to register the fact that the scene outside the window was rather busy. Remarkably busy, in fact – notably the amount of attention being devoted to the Polaris submarine alongside the jetty, which was clearly being made ready for sea. That was the moment when the wardroom steward informed me that there had just been a coup in Moscow. It was Monday, 19 August 1991, and the anti-Gorbachev revolt had begun barely a couple of hours earlier. As I chewed on my scrambled egg, an unnerving realisation grew upon me: I was eating breakfast in the middle of what would almost certainly have been one of an incoming hardline Soviet regime’s top two or three targets in Britain. So I was distinctly relieved when we put to sea later that morning, and, of course, by the time we returned to Faslane a week later it was all over.

In theory, we could go wherever we pleased in the Firth of Clyde and its environs, but in practice this depended on where the surly and distinctly bibulous Glaswegian crew of the tender had already decided they wanted to go. On my first trip, I’d done my homework in advance and had calculated that a day run down to Campbeltown, at the southern end of the Mull of Kintyre, might provide good seamanship training for the cadets. I was quickly disabused by the ship’s cook: ‘you dinna wanna go to Campbeltown’, he said emphatically, ‘it’s a c*** of a place’. (I eventually got there on a subsequent trip, and found it very pleasant – which was more than could be said for the return voyage, when we ran into a gale off the south coast of Arran and I had one of the most violent attacks of seasickness I’ve ever experienced: the fleet tenders were atrocious seaboats.) Luckily, on my first trip I was accompanied by a Maths teacher from the school who wasn’t actually in the Corps but had been seconded to the trip, principally because he was a local lad from the west of Glasgow. The crew, accustomed to dealing with archetypal ‘posh’ public school masters, were surprised and delighted to encounter one of their own, and were prepared to make allowances for the Welshman he had brought in tow. This stood me in good stead on the subsequent cruises, when I was always remembered as ‘Joe’s pal’.

Over the course of the four trips, I got to know the waters and the harbours of the Firth of Clyde pretty well: lovely Millport, on Great Cumbrae Island; Rothesay, the epitome of a genteel Victorian seaside resort; Largs, Dunoon, Greenock, Inveraray, Arrochar, the Kyles of Bute, and others too. In those days we slept aboard the ship – on one occasion I slept in the wheelhouse – so would moor for the night, ensure the cadets were bedded down and under the supervision of the crewman left on watch, then head ashore to sample the delights of our port of call. (Nowadays, alas, ‘Health and Safety’ dictates that cadets and officers must sleep ashore, in youth hostels; I’d finished in the CCF long before this ludicrous change was made, but it seems to me that it wrecks an important part of the purpose of the cruises, namely teaching the cadets what life aboard a ship is like.) My particular favourite of all the ports we visited was Tarbert on Loch Fyne, a picture postcard fishing and yachting harbour where the pubs seemed never to have heard the term ‘licensing hours’. Another glorious port of call was Carrick Castle on Loch Goil; on one occasion, we’d just left the Ministry of Defence jetty there when we encountered the Polaris submarine HMS Repulse, which passed us majestically but menacingly, just a few score yards away to port, as she went up the Loch to carry out her diving trials. The skipper of the tender warned us not to take photographs of her or we might be shot; I’m still not sure whether he was joking.

Before anyone gets the impression that these cruises were purely jollies designed so that the CCF officers could extend their knowledge of single malt whiskies in an eclectic series of bars across the west coast of Scotland, I should emphasise that we worked hard. (Having said that, I remain to be persuaded that the cruises weren’t purely jollies designed so that the tender’s crew could revisit said bars at frequent intervals; they certainly seemed to be greeted as regular customers in all of them.) The cadets spent the days learning navigation and seamanship; we practised man overboard drills, coming alongside buoys, and so forth, in Lamlash Bay, Loch Long and the other gloriously scenic anchorages in the area, took countless bearings on the likes of the Cloch Point lighthouse, and the cadets learned the essentials of watchkeeping, notably that there is no possibility of devising a watch system which means that one watch entirely avoids dishwashing duty for the entire voyage. There were also opportunities for adventure training ashore, such as hill walking on the Isle of Arran. The latter provided one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, when I was convinced that I was experiencing every teacher’s worst nightmare – losing a student. This is a long story, but it basically hinged on the absence of mobile phones (this was c.1992, after all), the fallibility of my assumption that ‘there’s only one road running around the perimeter of Arran, it’s impossible for cadets x, y and z to get lost’, cadet x then disobeying the express instructions he’d been given and separating from y and z, followed by a complex saga that hinged upon the unexpected intervention of a Calor Gas lorry. Being driven up said one main road on Arran in a police car in a state of mounting terror, failing to find cadet x, and driving back to the ship convinced that I was about to become a Daily Mail headline, is not a feeling that I ever wish to repeat. My emotions when I saw cadet x safe and sound on the mess deck, eating his supper and being mercilessly ribbed by his mates, are probably best left to the imagination. To his credit, the policeman wordlessly took me to one side and then drove me to the Brodick Castle Hotel, where, still wordlessly, he placed a large Scotch in my hand.

Ultimately, my four memorable voyages in the Clyde Fleet tenders had a sequel many years later: they provided me with the settings, and some of the inspiration, for the plot of Gentleman Captain, the first Quinton novel. I’ve been back to the area many times since, but somehow, visiting it as a tourist isn’t quite the same as sailing up and down the great sea-lochs aboard a naval vessel (of sorts).

 

Nelson’s Wavy Heir, Part 1

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I have to confess that I rarely watch the Military Channel, one of the more obscure recesses of the vast satellite TV channel list – so obscure that it doesn’t even make it into the TV guide we get every week, unlike such offences against humanity as the various spin-offs of Channel 5 and the increasingly laughably misnamed History Channel. (My definition of ‘history’ is very broad, but it doesn’t extend to ‘Storage Wars’ or ‘Ice Road Truckers’.) Even when I do take any notice of the Military Channel’s programming, there’s rarely anything that appeals; let’s face it, when you’ve seen one programme about ‘the world’s deadliest aircraft’ or Israeli special forces, you’ve seen them all. But they’re currently running a series called ‘Officers and Gentlemen’ about trainee Royal Navy officers going through their paces at the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and this definitely caught my eye – although it’s a sad indictment of ‘sea blind’ 21st century Britain that such a programme is exiled to the obscurity of the Military Channel rather than getting an outing on a more mainstream service. For one thing, it brought back happy memories of the time over 20 years ago when I, too, was an ‘officer’ under training at Dartmouth. So I thought that I’d spend a couple of weeks taking a trip down memory lane to the somewhat surreal previous life of Sub-Lieutenant J D Davies, RNR (CCF).

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The British public school is a very strange place, even before one considers the political and moral arguments for and against its very existence or ponders the undue influence its alumni exert in supposedly ‘modern’ Britain. One of the odder rituals that characterises many public schools takes place on one afternoon every week, when mild-mannered teachers disappear into changing rooms, discard their off-the-shelf TKMaxx suits or tweed sports jackets that were briefly fashionable in 1925, and re-emerge in uniform, miraculously transformed into Lieutenant-Colonels, Pilot Officers, Sub-Lieutenants and the like. For this is the demi-monde of the Combined Cadet Force, a Victorian creation originally designed to provide training for future generations of officers and gentlemen. For such an apparently old-fashioned pillar of the establishment, the CCF can be a remarkably subversive organisation. For one thing, it entirely overturns the hierarchy of the school: thus a head of department, say, or a deputy headmaster, can find himself having to salute the most feckless classroom teacher, who happens to be his superior officer within the Corps (as it’s colloquially known). This was certainly the case when I joined the CCF of Bedford Modern School in 1988 as the newest officer of its Royal Navy section. The contingent commander, and thus a baton-wielding Lieutenant-Colonel, was a school legend, a much-loved, charismatic but famously disorganised Geography teacher, and the majority of his officers were from the same mould, thus turning the school’s Corps into a somewhat anarchic gentlemen’s club. Perhaps the classic example of this was one of the annual inspections, when it was announced that we were to be graced by the high-ranking military attache of a Middle Eastern state. The dignitary arrived and passed down the lines of cadets, all standing stiffly to attention. Virtually nobody realised that this was the contingent CO’s brilliant response to the last-minute cancellation by the regular officer who was meant to be carrying out the inspection: the swarthy Arab colonel walking up and down the lines was in fact the Head of Classics, brilliantly disguised by the Drama Department.

My entry into the CCF was inevitable from the moment the Headmaster who appointed me looked at my CV, noted my interest in naval history, and suggested that a willingness to join the Corps would greatly strengthen my prospects of being offered the job. (Similarly, ‘being Welsh’ was considered sufficient qualification to place me in charge of the Under-15B rugby team.) Public school teachers are expected to become involved in the extra-curricular life of the school, and I have to admit I didn’t object to being semi-dragooned into the CCF; I realised at once that this presented an unparalleled opportunity for me to experience something of the Royal Navy from the inside, insights that were likely to prove valuable to me both as a historian and a potential future writer of fiction. (The rugby was a different matter; I still shudder when I recall the level of parental abuse from the touchlines that greeted some of  my more eccentric refereeing decisions, or getting soaked to the skin on the touchline during a monsoon at Oakham School as my team and theirs played out a 0-0 draw, a scoreline virtually unknown in rugby, on a pitch that resembled a swamp.) So I was duly appointed an officer in the Royal Navy section, which meant my name went onto the Navy List, albeit somewhere near the very back of it. This made me a Sub-Lieutenant, Royal Naval Reserve (Combined Cadet Force), and one of an elite body entitled to wear a very special uniform; along with our brother organisation, the Sea Cadet Corps, we were the only arms of the RNR still to wear the ‘wavy navy’ stripes which had been worn with such great distinction in wartime by the RNVR, the former Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

I’d joined the CCF in September, at the beginning of a school year, which meant I couldn’t undertake the Officers’ Initial Training Course at BRNC Dartmouth until the following August. In the meantime I learned the ropes of the training programme that we carried out with our cadets at the school and accompanied a party of cadets to a course in Portsmouth: this was my first experience of both wearing uniform and of wardroom life, both aboard the accommodation ship HMS Kent and the adjacent shore base HMS Excellent, where the magnificent oak-panelled Edwardian dining room contains the original of the famous painting of a British sailor that once adorned packets of John Player cigarettes. This proved relatively straightforward in one sense – an Oxford education ensured that I already knew which way to pass the port – but an eye-opener in another, namely the astonishingly low prices of wardroom drinks, which, alas, means that many of my recollections of time spent on warships and shore bases are distinctly hazy. I also had my first of four memorable experiences of the Clyde Fleet Tender, of which more in a subsequent post. But finally the following August came round, and it was time for the train journey that generations of naval officers under training have made, down to Totnes station in Devon, there to be collected by transport from the college. And so I came to Britannia for the first and, so far, only time.

Britannia is a truly awe-inspiring building. Its huge, cloister-like corridors are impressive enough, but the major public spaces are veritable shrines to British naval history: for instance, the ‘quarterdeck’, effectively a vast assembly hall, and above all the gunroom, where we dined, the walls of which are adorned by huge paintings of famous victories. (A few years later, I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute to a book based on each of the gunroom paintings; my chapter was on Blake at Santa Cruz, 1657). Our theory classes took place in the same rooms where countless naval officers have been taught. These covered such subjects as basic navigation, which I took to like a duck to water, and naval knots, which for some reason continue to form part of the cadet curriculum. I never really got to grips with knots, especially the bowline, where all the talk of rabbits going down holes served only to confuse me. There were also lessons in etiquette; fortunately I’d been forewarned about the need to say ‘please excuse my rig’ to the senior officer in uniform at the bar if one happened to be dressed in ‘Planters’, the smart jacket-and-tie dress code for the evening, and thus avoided being forced to buy a round of drinks for everyone present by the devious midshipman who decided one evening to fleece this interloping bunch of unsuspecting schoolteachers.

But the most memorable training took place outside. Every morning was spent on the parade ground, teaching us how, when and whom to salute (I’d had a year to get used to such things so had a head start on some of my fellows), together with good old-fashioned square bashing. I wasn’t great at marching, but by the end of the course I could do it without committing the great sin known as ‘tick-tocking’ or resembling an arthritic duck, which is more than can be said for some of my compatriots. Several sessions were spent out on the River Dart in the college’s little flotilla of picket boats, learning how to navigate and steer them, how to bring them alongside, how to rescue a man overboard, and so forth – the basic staples of seamanship. Of course, there were several near disasters (fortunately none when I was in ‘command’) but fortunately there were always grizzled old salts on hand to ensure that we didn’t run onto rocks or collide with the Kingswear ferry. We were blessed by excellent weather, and I still remember the frisson as our ‘squadron’, in line ahead, sailing past Dartmouth Castle and out into the open sea.

I’d been dreading one particular element of the course: the compulsory swimming test, which I think was a couple of lengths of the Britannia pool, fully clothed. I can swim, just, but my lumbering and graceless splashing was barely up to a single length in swimming costume, let alone two in clothes. At this point, though, fate, luck, divine intervention – call it what you will – smiled upon me. We learned that our swimming test had been cancelled because the pool at Dartmouth had a crack in the bottom of it and was closed for repair. The navy being the navy, everyone just conveniently forgot about this particular ‘essential prerequisite’ of qualifying as an officer. And so, by the end of an all-too-short but memorable course, I’d made many new friends, could bring a boat alongside a quay without crashing into it, could march in step (after a fashion) and, all in all, I could just about pretend to be a naval officer without feeling like a monstrous fraud – although the first time I was saluted by a Royal Marine guard sporting a very large machine gun still came as a shock. We had a proper ‘passing out parade’, with one of the college’s officers taking the salute, and off we went, back to our various schools, fully fledged officers of Her Majesty’s Royal Naval Reserve (Combined Cadet Force).

(Next week: How to eat scrambled eggs while World War III begins, plus the reason for not going to Campbeltown.)