The Navy
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T
he Navy taught me discipline, self reliance and being tolerant with other people, I think it made me more assured of my self, more confident and more able to help other
people as well, also being able to cope with different situations as they arise.
My nickname in the Navy was Swany, I got that when I first joined the Navy and it followed me right the way through, for seven and a half years, on every ship I went on, somebody knew me or knew of my name, even when I came out and I was on reserve, somebody wrote to me and addressed it to me as ‘Swany Lake’, and I didn’t know him and they didn’t know me, it was only through a mutual friend. I remember coming in to Hong Kong, we were due to come off the ship it was the end of our commission, and when you pay off on a ship you fly a pennant, a paying off pennant, the longer you’ve been on the commission the longer the pennant is and ours when we got off the ship, at that time, was the longest it had ever been, the pennant flag that they put up was three times longer than the length of the ship, because our commission was so long, we were on board for two years and eleven months or so. Normally the commission would run at two years and six months but because the Korean War was on, and we were up there in Korea, there was an army group called the Gloucester’s, they’d had a bit of a bashing there, and the troop ship that we were supposed to come home on, they asked the captain of the ship if they didn’t mind if they could put the Gloucester’s on the ship and we would stay on board the Concorde until there was transport available, it was put to the ships company and we stayed on board for another two months, but it paid of for us in the end because we came back on a far better ship, an immigration boat that used to go down to New Zealand, Captain Hobson was the name of the boat, we came home on that and we had waiter service, it was just like luxury!
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Grandpa in his Naval uniform at HMS Raleigh, 6 months after joining, along side is medals for his involvement in the Korean war and below, the German E Boat 55/14 which they sailed back to Germany.
A Family History | 13
