Anthony Paul Farr (Primary Source)

Transcript

I was sent to LCT142, which is landing craft and joined it in Scotland. We were getting ready for Dieppe at that time. Our ship was taken out of the flotilla to lay a cable across the strait of Severn Estuary, in Wales. We laid that cable, about five miles of it, and it worked. So then they set about getting a bigger ship and a longer cable, and it was laid across the [English] Channel for Dieppe, carrying gasoline, rather than the cable, the wires that were originally intended to carry. But we didn’t get to Dieppe because of that. Because we were about 400 yards off the coast, we assumed that the troops we were supporting had got to that point. But they were not there yet. Consequently, the Germans had an 88 [millimeter] gun battery, placed in the hills. And they fired first. So we didn’t get into action until we were hit by a shell, killed two men and wounded about four others. As soon as we’d been hit, we got our guns swirled around and fired at the shore, not being able to see anything, but it was the right place and we put these German 88 battery out of action. The captain got a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] for that. Well, we spent near Christmas in the Isle of Capri [an Italian island], as guests of the Americans, who’d taken over the rest camp, that’s the Isle of Capri. And we went and saw Gracie Fields’ [English actress/singer] house, which was empty at that time. She was in America, it was a lovely spot. Well, it was the custom in the Navy to dress up as the Commanding Officer, two men took to dress us, the two officers that we had at that time. Oh, we had two Naval officers and one marine officer. They wore their uniforms, not their real uniforms, and served Christmas dinner to the troops. And on the ship, they numbered about 45. That was a great hit. I was a guide on the Nelson’s flagship, the [HMS] Victory in January 1946. The ship sits in the dry dock with concrete all around her. During the big race of 1941, a bomb had fallen between the ship and the side of the dock, blowing a hole in her timbers, through which icy February winds entered the lower deck. The other guides and I escorted groups of visitors around the ship and gently ushered them ashore, managing to carefully place ourselves so as to hide the side which we had no gratuities. On March the 3rd, 1946, I was sent to sea again with the home fleet on its first post-war cruise. We called it Gibraltar where I volunteered as one of nine sailors to go as guests of the magazine, Illustrated, on a tour to Tangier [Morocco]. This is one occasion that did not make the news. We went to the Casbah [citadel of Algiers, Algeria], which is much cleaner than the Algiers Casbah, and were entertained by a British artist in his old Moorish house. He showed us an ancient victory in his inner courtyard under which Samuel Pepys [seventeenth century English diarist] had sat when Tangier was under British control. We watched a snake charmer supposedly charming two four foot snakes, but one tried to escape. Then onto the Sultan’s palace, now a museum, where we were served mint tea while a native band played boorish music on weird instruments. I noted that it sounded like Ravel’s bolero, only worse. When we got back on the [HMS] Nelson, we anchored at Spearhead outside Portsmouth [England]. The officer of the watch, the first mate, the guard of the gangway, the quarterdeck messenger and I as quartermaster are all squatting around a little fire at the end of the quarterdeck, was a large dish of sausages sizzling on it. We were as far away as possible to keep the smell of cooking out of the commander’s cabin. Those sausages plus an egg or two, tomatoes, baked beans, bread and cocoa, made quite a pleasant little watch. That was my last watch before going ashore for good. I was given a de-mob suit and a pair of shoes. The suit was poorly made, but the shoes were very good, lasted 20 years.