A sea-going career that started aged 17
Meets a veteran Bristol seafarer who spent the Second World War with the Norwegian merchant marine, and who brought the famous first shipment of bananas to Avonmouth at the war’s end.
IN March 2023, I wrote to the Post extolling our city’s long tradition of seafaring with a tentative suggestion that the derelict Seamen’s Church might be brought back to life as a memorial to the countless mariners who for nearly a thousand years traded out of Bristol Channel ports.
My bright idea did not so much hit the rocks, as sink without trace. Well, almost. I had one reply, as I thought, but it was a coincidence, from someone who had not seen the letter but had enjoyed one of my blogposts.
(For anyone interested this post is “Sappho & her Sisters”, but if you expect erotic fragments from a Greek poet BCE, you will be disappointed. The title refers to the coasters of the Bristol Steam Navigation Company, which had classical names, little ships recognisable from my school poetry lessons:
butting through the Channel in the mad March days with a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rails, pig-lead And cheap tin trays.
The nearest we’ve ever come to a celebration of our mariners was in the marvellous Up the Feeder, Down the Mouth, by the Bristol Old Vic in 1996. But that’s another story. I suppose a reprise would be “Too expensive!” (to quote, out of context, from the show itself.)
So back to my one ripple of a response. My correspondent told me he had been at sea aged 17 in 1943 and could tell me a few tales. Surely, I thought, this was a mistake in the date? If correct, he was eleven years older than me, which takes some doing.
I read the letter a few times before I phoned him. No, it was true, he said. He was 97. This made me feel quite skittish. He didn’t sound like an old man at all. We spoke for quite a long while. His name is Richard Hendy.
A week or so later we chatted in person at his appropriately shipshape house. He never married, “I didn’t really have time”, he said, but in later years he had a partner, “my lady”, who sadly died a year or so ago from dementia. He began to tell me his story:
In the war, he said, he knew a man. The man said he could get him a ship. In exchange for this service, Richard had to “do the man’s fire-watching for him.” (All males not in uniform had to take turns standing on high buildings in the dark of night watching for incendiary devices. No street lamps. There was a war on. The watchers were issued with a tin helmet.)
Richard did a stint on the roof and the man kept his promise. He found the boy a ship. One snag. He had to be in Avonmouth the same day.
“I was up all night. I had to go straight there.”
“What did your parents think of that?” I asked.
“Not much” he replied.
“Why the Merchant Navy? And so young?”
His reply was pragmatic: “I would have been called up before long in any case,” he said, “and I didn’t fancy killing anybody.”
The ship he joined on December 7 1942, was not one of the little traders; they would come later in his sea-going career. No, with this
ship he went port-hugging first to Swansea, then along the British coast before leaving Liverpool on New Year’s Eve 1942, in a convoy bound for the west coast of Africa. He was away seven months until 25th June 1943.
This first voyage was on a Norwegian ship. The SS Tanefjord. “Norwegian?” I was surprised. “That’s right. Oil Tankers and that. Atlantic Convoys.” My mouth was agape.
“Very dangerous stuff. But I got away with it.”
At which point I became absorbed in a theatre of the war previously unknown to me.
When the Second World War broke out on September 3 1939, Norway was a neutral country. For the next seven months Norwegian mariners already at sea had been engaged in “a forgotten war”, dodging submarines and mines with large losses of ships and men.
In April 1940 when invasion by Nazi Germany was imminent Norway’s ships at sea were quickly incorporated into the state shipping company, becoming the country’s “outdoor” merchant fleet, and part of the Allied war effort. The men had to stay in the vicinity of the port each time they docked. They were not allowed to go home to Norway until the Liberation, May 8 1945, V.E. Day. There were losses. They took on “foreign nationals” as required.
Richard’s Norwegian registration shows his nationality, British, date of birth, 15 March 1926, at Treherbert. (when his father was employed for a period as a miner), home address 57 Fairlawn Road, Montpelier, Bristol, and rank: “Messegutt/Jungmann” (Mess boy/young man).
He was in the Norwegian Merchant Navy for the remainder of the war. He served on three different ships. He learned enough Norwegian to get by, to understand orders.
“They spoke better English than I did.”
He crossed the Atlantic four times in convoy during the war years. Norwegian oil and other supplies were vital in keeping us going in the war years.
“Hairy moments?”
“I saw some of our ships in our convoy. They got hit,” he replied, “but we were lucky. I got away with it.”
As you’ve probably guessed by now, Richard does not indulge in hyperbole.
“I would have stayed with the Norwegians,” he said, “but after the war they could get their own men.”
He had been a galley boy but by then, he was an experienced seaman. He joined the British Merchant Navy, as a steward, and as a stoker, and was at sea, with brief gaps, until 1966.
By then it was hard to find work. The industry was no longer viable.
His peacetime service began with the Tilapa the first Elders & Fyffes banana boat to come into Bristol at the end of the War, amid huge rejoicing. Each Bristol child allegedly received one banana from the cargo. If I got one, aged 8, I don’t recall it. Our house was just over the border in Gloucestershire, so I probably didn’t qualify.
Tilapa was the first of Richard’s many crossings to and from Jamaica. He also went several times round the world in 31 vessels, all named. The list he provided is worthy of Homer’s famous “Catalogue of the Ships”. He has an archive of his old pay books. But this was not all. When he was in Australia he seems to have got fed up with the sea, temporarily. He joined the Australian Army. The Korean War was on at the time. This man never did things by halves.
“We pushed them right up to the top, nearly into China,” he said, “And then they pushed us all the way back again.”
Seeing my next query coming, he answered, “Not a scratch.”
He still rides his bike to get his morning paper. He visits his elder sister, once a week. He’s a real gem. If only he wasn’t given to understatement.
» The full story of “The Life and Seafaring Times of Richard Hendy, mariner” is at www.bristolhbistory. co.uk
» The series War Sailor a dramatised depiction of the Norwegian convoys in WW2 is available on Netflix.