AB Arthur Bulmer RNVR C/TDX2127
Tyne Division R.N.V.R.
Arthur Bulmer was born in Elswick, Newcastle-on-Tyne, on 31 May 1921. Times were hard and he left Atkinson
Road Junior Technical School at 14 to bring in some money for the
family. He got a job as an office boy at the office of a small colliery
owner earning 7/6 a week, most of which he gave to his Mother. He
joined the local branch of the RNVR when he was still 17 in early 1939,
signing on as a boy sailor at the RNVR headquarters, HMS Calliope,
a wooden hulled ship built in 1884 tied up at Scotswood on the Tyne. He went there for a couple
of hours each week in the evening for drill practice, rope tying and
basic instruction in the ways of the Navy.
When the war started in September he was called in to Chatham Barracks on the Medway and was sent to HMS Ganges
at Harwich to join a transport ship which took a dozen men from the
Tyne Division of the RNVR to join the submarine depot ship, HMS Cyclops, on her way back from the Middle East. They came alongside at sea and transferred while she was enroute to her new base at Parkstone Quay, Harwich. Her CO was Capt Philip Ruck-Keene RN.
Harwich was considered too vulnerable to attack after the Fall of France and Cyclops was moved to Rothesay Bay on the Clyde estuary. She was the depot ship for the old S Class submarines, Shark, Salmon and Seahorse. Cyclops anchored in the bay and the submarines berthed alongside. HMS Thunderbolt (ex Thetis which was salvaged and renamed after sinking in Liverpool Bay) and the French submarine Surcouf,
the largest submarine in the world which had twin 8-inch gun on deck
and a watertight hanger containing a scout seaplane, also used Cyclops as their depot ship. The Admiralty considered Surcouf unsafe and she was not allowed to berth alongside.
"In normal times Rothesay is a popular summer resort. Now the
lovely bay with its long prospect of Loch Striven and the blue hills of
Argyll, wasa dominated by the dirty coal-burning merchant ship that had
been converted into an inadequate and uncomfortable submarine depot
ship. Only the wartime shortage of shipping had saved old Cyclops
from the scrap-heap. Throughout the submarine service she was known,
almost affectionately, as the "Cycle-box". Once a year she was taken to
sea on exercise to disprove (some said unkindly) the rumour that she
was aground on a self-made reef of empty tins. But between these annual
trips she rode peacefully at anchor, with her submarines berthed on
either side of her, a mother hen with her chicks, disturbed only by the
frequent gailes and squalls which came sweeping down the hills and
churned the bay into an angry ferment, so that the submarines began
bumping badly and had to lie off."
On 8 November 1940 Arthur Bulmer returned to Chatham Barracks and on the 14 June 1941 was posted to HMS Valorous at Rosyth.
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"I joined Valorous
in June 1941. She was based at Rosyth as part of the East Coast
Escort force. I joined her as a singleton and found that the mess
deck crew were mostly Glasgow naval reservists. The
hammock space on the deck head seemed to be fully taken and I
had to drag a 10 foot long, 9 inch wide mess bench to the ship’s side,
put my hammock on it and secure it to the hull. Not very
comfortable but I did find space to sling my hammock after a couple of days.
Valorous escorted merchant ships down the east coast and into the docks
in London. We passed under the Forth Bridge and met up with our
charges in the North Sea. Most were small coasters, often colliers but
some had crossed the Atlantic and rounded the north of Scotland to join
us in the Firth of Forth.
We were given some of the fifty old destroyers from America under a
lease lend arrangement but they spent more time in dock with engine
trouble than at sea.
Our first task was to get the convoy into columns. It was even more
difficult keeping them in line. There always seemed to be some
straggler moving out of position. Apart from the weather, the main
dangers were mines and aircraft. The Germans sent E boats out
from the French channel ports to lay mines in the shipping lanes along
the Kent coast. The sea was quite shallow and buoys marked the
wrecks but the odd mast could be seen sticking out of the water. On the
mess deck, we called this area the graveyard. This was where we lost
one of our sister ships, HMS Vimiera.
The Germans had overrun the low-countries to the east and had access to
the airfields. They would send up a spotter aircraft to monitor
the convoy’s speed and position. It could be seen on the horizon
but kept out of range. My action station was the 4” gun on the
foredeck. My job as loader was to put the heavy four-inch shells in the
breech and the breech-block would swing round and knock my hand out of
the way. We were piped to action stations just before dusk and a
squadron of bombers would arrive before it became completely dark. They
came in low and the 4-inch gun was usually ineffective, putting the
pilot off target but rarely if ever doing any damage. They would come
down the lines of ships, very low. I remember one passing overhead and
seeing a bomb leave the fuselage. It dropped into the water about
a hundred yards ahead of us but did not explode. On one such
raid, we saw a few survivors drift past holding onto rafts and
wreckage. Admiralty orders would not allow us to stop and pick up
survivors if we were in action, so all we could do was unloosen the
fastenings on the carley floats in the ship’s waist and let them fall
over the guard rails into the water and hope they would be found.
Once the merchant ships were in the Thames estuary we refuelled at
Sheerness and returned to Rosyth. This routine was varied on one occasion by a quick dash north to
Lerwick, refueling enroute at Aberdeen on a mysterious undisclosed
mission which the "buzz" on the mess deck thought to be connected to
the clandestine conveyance of agents by fishing boat to Norway as
described in David Howarth's wartime classic, The Shetland Bus (1951).
We got shore leave at Rosyth between trips. I liked
to go to Dunfermline and try my hand at ice skating on
the rink and I still remember the beautiful plumage of the peacocks at
the entrance to Carnegie Park. I also used to go to
Edinburgh. I went to a dancehall somewhere down
Princes Street which had two bands on a revolving
stage. One of the bands was Ivy Benson and her all girls band. I
would get back to base on a milk train which left Edinburgh for Rosyth in the
early hours of the morning.
Valorous survived the war and
sometime in the 1940’s, she was sent to a breaker’s yard at Thornaby in
County Durham and broken up for scrap.
All I have written took place a very long time ago and I am now an old
man of 95. If there are any inaccuracies anywhere, I apologise.
Best wishes to everybody,
Arthur Bulmer C/TDX2127
Tyne Division R.N.V.R.
What came next
Arthur Bulmer left HMS Valorous on 25 November 1941 and on 17 February 1942 was posted to HMS Hornet,
the shore base for Coastal Forces at Gosport, Portsmouth. There were no
WRNS in those days and Arthur was a clerk in the office. On 20
September he was posted to HMS Attack
at Newhaven where Peter Scott was in command of an MTB Flotilla. He
also spent time at Coastal Forces HQ in London and recalled the
dreadful "pea-soupers" which made breathing difficult. He was sent back
to Chatham to train as a Torpedoman. During air raids they sheltered in
the tunnels beneath the barracks, crowded, cramped and full of
cigarette smoke. He returned to HMS Hornet
in February 1943 and blamed the conditions in the tunnels at Chatham
for the bronchitis and pneumonia he contracted which required hospital
treatment in Reading and Basingstoke and a lengthy convalescence at
Frilsham House in the tiny Berkshire village of Yattenden where he
celebrated his 21st birthday by going to the village pub with a friend
and two nurses.
At some
point he took a course as a TLW (Torpedo Lieutenant's Writer). The Navy had
decided to send a crew to replace the New Zealanders manning the
cruiser, HMNZS Leander, under repair in the naval dockyard at Boston, USA, and Arthur needed his TLW to replace the New Zealand TLW on Leander. Arthur takes up the story in his own words and described his voyage to the USA on the Queen Mary and his year in HMS Leander at Boston:
An ocean cruise on the Queen Mary
"In September 1944 I was in Chatham Barracks. Late in the month,
I was called to the drafting office and told I was to join the cruiser
HMS Leander. I was not told
where I was to join her but I was given railway travel warrants and
told to get myself up to Glasgow. I was met at the station by a
Navel Petty Officer who took me to Gourock. I was deposited on
the roadside by a little ramp leading down to a small landing stage on
the waterside. There were a few civilians waiting there too and
after a short wait, a ferry drew alongside, took us on board and headed
out to midstream where the huge Queen Mary was lying.
As we came alongside a hinged panel halfway
down, the hull was opened outward, a gangplank was pushed out down on
to the dock of the ferry and we all walked up and into the liner.
The man walking ahead of me, dressed in a trench coat and trilby hat
looked familiar. It was the singer and actor Bing Crosby.
He gave a concert in the ship’s ballroom halfway across the
Atlantic. I can still see the old groaner singing one of the
popular songs “Swinging On A Star”.
The
huge 85,000 ton Queen Mary, pride of the Cunard line, slowly made her
way down the Firth of Clyde. It was October 1944 and she was operating
as a troop ship bound for New York. Once clear of the Scottish coast
and into the open waters of the Atlantic, she worked up to her cruising
speed of 30 knots on a slight zig-zag course. There were no escorts;
none were needed. Her speed alone was enough against any U-boat attack. Most of the Passengers were American air
force crews being returned home for leave or redeployment. They
did not seem to have any particular duties on board, I guess they must
have been paid up to date before leaving the U.K. because any sheltered
spot on the upper deck seemed to harbour a high stake poker school or
crap game. I was given 4 hourly watch keeping duties
round the clock, manning an Oerlikon gun, way up in the ship’s
superstructure. I still remember the nights I spent in the
Oerlikon nest in the darkened ship. Alone with my thoughts and
memories for 4 hours, the only sounds were that of the drone of the
ship’s engines and the soft swish of the bow waves sliding down the
hull. Above my head, a canopy of shimmering silver stars as far
as the eye could see. I found it truly awesome. I found
myself wondering whether there were any other planets with any form of
intelligent life up there and if so, were they looking down on our
planet and wondering why the most intelligent forms of life on it
seemed to be so intent on destroying each other. Anyway, enough
of my mind’s fantasies – back to the story.
The
crossing was uneventful, the meals were good, the weather good and
there were no signs of aircraft or U Boats, so I never got to try my
hand on the Oerlikon gun. Five
and a half days after leaving the Clyde estuary, the ship glided past
the Statue of Liberty and tied up alongside pier 90, New York. I
managed to get into the city for a couple of beers in Jack Dempsey’s
bar.
The Boston Mutiny!
I slept in the nearby U.S. barracks that night and
travelled by train to Boston the following morning and finally joined
HMS Leander. At
this stage I should explain the catering arrangements that existed in
the Navy in those days. It was known as canteen messing and
involved each mess of around a dozen men being given a weekly
allocation of dry provisions and each day a ration of meat from the
butcher’s cold store. Two delegated mess members had the
responsibility of collecting this and preparing it for the main meal,
which was at noon. In normal conditions this system worked pretty
well throughout the Navy, but conditions were far from normal on the Leander.
Dust, dirt and flaked paint were everywhere, including the mess deck.
Tables and mess stools were regularly scrubbed clean each morning, but
by midday they would be just as dusty. The plus side of course, was the
delights of being able to go ashore and enjoy the city of Boston.
Local leave for us was very generous, but unfortunately our meagre
naval pay did not match it. Many of us took up casual work in town to
supplement our money. A few of the hotels were happy to pay us in cash
by the hour to do general labouring duties. A few of us worked on a
casual basis, nights and weekends for the Wells Fargo Company in the
Boston Station, moving freight around. I still have my American Social
Security card given to me at the time. Months rolled by and our
living conditions on board were not getting any better. Several
other factors contributed to our increasing mutinous mood. The
war in Europe was virtually over and we were in dock undergoing a
seemingly endless re-fit. Most of us were volunteers who had already
seen nearly five years of service and we had not seen our wives or
families for over twelve months. We also knew from our observations
that our American counter parts would not have been expected to live as
we were. They would have been billeted and fed ashore during a major
re-fit.
Ropes, wires and electric cables littered the mess decks and
passageways. For the duty mess cooks, collecting, carrying and
delivering the trays of cooked food from the galley was like an egg and
spoon race over an obstacle course. The situation came to a head one
day when we found our main midday meal barely edible. There had been a
power failure during the morning in the ship’s galley. The meat
and vegetables were only half cooked and barely warm. The grumbles were
in full flow, when one of the leading seaman stood on a mess stool and
shouted for silence. “Right Lads” he said, “I reckon we have had just
about enough of this”. He then instructed us to stay put when the
tannoy summoned us to fall in on the upper deck after the dinner break.
There were about fifty or sixty of us and he said that if we stuck
together and remained on the mess deck, someone would have to come down
and listen to our complaints. Wartime discipline in the Navy was
very rigid and disobeying a direct order was no petty offence.
However we knew that we had numbers on our side and we were all in the
same boat (excuse the pun). When the tannoy trilled into life, we all
remained seated and waited. After a couple of minutes, there was
a clatter of boots and down the ladder came the Chief Bosun’s Mate. He
glared around the mess deck and using a few choice naval expletives
wanted to know why we were not on the upper deck. Our Leading Seaman
spokesman stood up and reeled off our grumbles and complaints. Chief
Bosun’s Mates are usually long serving, experienced and held in high
regard by both mess deck and wardroom alike, but I don’t think he had
been confronted by this situation before. There was silence while he
collected his thoughts and weighed up his options. Finally, he spoke.
“All right lads, now listen to me. I’ve heard your complaints, I cannot
promise anything except that I will have a word with the Commander on
your behalf, now get your backsides off those stools and get fell in
before there is serious trouble”. We were satisfied we had done what we
could. We followed him up the ladder and normal ships routine was
resumed.
There were no charges or punishment following our mini mutiny and a few
days after our “sit in” the ships tannoy crackled into life one
afternoon to tell us that as from the following Monday our main meal
would be taken in the American mess hall on the dockside. I remember on
that first Monday, picking up a stainless steel stamped out meal tray
and passing along a row of cooks complete with their tall white hats.
Two pork chops with all the trimmings, followed by a large slice of
deep dish apple or blueberry pie topped with two scoops of ice cream
and a slice of cheese – lovely grub!
It was
the 20 October 1945 before
we left Boston and put to sea. We had been in dry dock for at least
fifteen months and I was beginning to feel like a naturalised American.
To our surprise, we headed up North, up the Eastern seaboard of
America, into the Gulf of St Lawrence and tied up alongside at
Montreal. We remained there for only a day or two before steaming back
to the U.K. The mess deck rumour was that we had diverted to Montreal
to pick up gold bullion that had been sent over at the beginning of the
war for safekeeping. We went to the Northeast coast and into the River
Tyne and guess what! Straight into dry dock again, this time in South
Shields. A few days later I went down Leander’s gangway for the last
time to return to Chatham barracks to await demobilisation. Before the
month was out, I was given a civilian suit, a trilby hat and a railway
warrant to Newcastle upon Tyne. My Navy days were over. I do not know
where Leander was sent for
the next five years, but I have looked up Naval Records and discovered
that in December 1950, she was sent to the breakers yard at Blyth on
the Northumberland coast and broken up for scrap.
All of these events occurred a long time ago. Seventy two years to be exact. I believe Queen Mary
has been retired somewhere in the United States and is being utilised
as a tourist attraction and a restaurant. I’m sure her visitors
will find a lot of interest exploring the old lady, but I very much
doubt that the Oerlikon gun nest will still be up there in the
superstructure."
After the war was over ...
Arthur returned to his old job in the office of a builder’s merchant in
Newcastle but he was unmarried and not yet ready to settle down. In
1947 he flew from Northolt airport to Toronto with a small suitcase and
£20 in cash. The plane landed in Northern Ireland to take aboard some
Irish passengers including Brian Moore, who would become a good friend.
On landing at Toronto he booked in at the YMCA and went to the Labour
Exchange to look for work. Arthur did not mind where he worked or what
he did and accepted the offer of a job as a clerk earning $25 a week on
a dam construction site near Thessalon on Lake Huron in Ontario 600 miles north of Toronto and was surprised to
find Brian Moore was also there. The site was miles from anywhere
and the construction workers spent their leisure time playing poker.
Arthur had never played poker but he joined a small stakes school. The
other players did not have "poker faces" and it was easy to see when
they had a good hand. Arthur won $600 during the six months he worked there.
His Mother's sister in Newcastle told Arthur his
Mother was seriously ill and he decided to return home to be with her.
This was a critical turning point in his life. Arthur returned to
Britain on the Empress of Francefrom Montreal and
became a sales representative at a timber merchant in Newcastle. He
married, settled down and had three daughters. Brian Moore had left his
middle class home in Northern Ireland in disgrace after changing his
religion and felt unable to return. He got a job as a cub reporter on the Montreal Gazette,
had several short stories published and was awarded a scholarship to
study creative writing and became famous as an author of novels set in
Northern Ireland. Arthur read about his friend's success and got in
touch via his publisher. Brian Moorewas short-listed three times for the Booker Prize and was 77 when he died at his home in the United States in 1999. Arthur
Bulmer is 95 and alert and well though physically frail and lives in
his own home looking after his younger wife but with family living
nearby.
If
you want to find out more about the wartime service of a member of your
family who served on HMS Valorous
you should first obtain a copy of their service record To
find out how follow this link:
http://www.holywellhousepublishing.co.uk/servicerecords.html
If
you have stories or photographs of HMS Valorous you would like to
contribute to the web site please contact Bill Forster
"I joined Valorous
in June 1941. She was based at Rosyth as part of the East Coast
Escort force. I joined her as a singleton and found that the mess
deck crew were mostly Glasgow naval reservists. The
hammock space on the deck head seemed to be fully taken and I
had to drag a 10 foot long, 9 inch wide mess bench to the ship’s side,
put my hammock on it and secure it to the hull. Not very
comfortable but I did find space to sling my hammock after a couple of days.