My Elderly Neighbour Jack

Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships Association

My Elderly Neighbour Jack
From the book
"Worlds Apart - A Collection of Short Stories"
by Martin R. Oliver

When I was a young boy I was always intrigued by an elderly gentleman who lived a few doors away from my house. Nobody seemed to know much about Jack Taylor. He was friendly enough and always had a smile and wished people a good day or good evening but, generally, he kept himself to himself and appeared to have very few close friends. He was a Rent Collector and could be seen most afternoons or evenings riding around the area on his bike or knocking on doors collecting the tenant’s fees.

I remember him on cold winter mornings after a snow fall. He was the first person in the street with a shovel in his hand and would start clearing the snow from the footpaths of people’s homes, usually for a couple of widows and old people who lived close by. He participated in very hard physical acts, even though he seemed much older than some of the elderly people he was actually helping.

Jack was still hanging around the area during my teenage years but it was a period of my life when I had little respect for elders and neither was I interested in their stories of the past. Stories of the Second World War or when a pint of beer cost just six pence and the basic salary was three pounds a week, or descriptions of their ailments such as back pain or gout etc., simply bored me to tears. My friends and I used to think that old farts who lived in the past and had never really lived at all. My priorities at that time were drinking beer in the pubs, hanging out with my mates, chasing girls, supporting my football team and listening to rock music etc. Nothing else seemed important.

It was some years later and a short time after I had joined the Merchant Navy that I met Jack again. He stopped me in the street one day and mentioned that my Dad had told him that I was at sea working as an engineer. He asked me if I could arrange to get him a Nautical Chart showing the east coast of northern Brazil and French Guiana and he would provide me with a couple of coordinates which he wanted marked on the chart (which he sent to me a couple of days later). I had no idea why he wanted it but after I joined my next ship I arranged a chart to be prepared, had the Chief Mate insert the coordinates and forwarded it back to Jack via my father and thought no more about it.

Jack thanked me a lot the next time I saw him some months later, mentioning that it was the coordinates of where he had been attacked by a U-Boat when he was with the D.E.M.S. during the Second World War aboard a ship called the M.V. Tower Grange.

It was during my next trip to sea when I learned about the Tower Grange. I was having a drink in the crew’s bar after my watch one evening, when a couple of elderly oilers were discussing ships they had sailed on during the war and the close encounters they had experienced with enemy ships and planes. I mentioned to them about my neighbour Jack and that he was on the Tower Grange during that time. One of them, an Irishman, thought for a few seconds and announced: “Wait a minute! I know about the Tower Grange. She was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat. Some crew members were lost and the others made it to the lifeboats and were picked up very close to death, some days later by a passing ship”. I realized then that the two coordinates which were put on the chart were where the Tower Grange had been torpedoed and sunk and where Jack and his shipmates drifted to and were rescued.

As time went by, working on Merchant Ships and talking to elderly seamen and reading books, I came to appreciate the important and dangerous role that these ships had played during the Second World War. These days, most films and books portray the war as something exotic, while normally showing military units with sensational encounters and battles between the various divisions in air, land and sea. Everyone is portrayed as either villains or heroes in an exciting game of warfare. Generally, people have absolutely no appreciation of the importance that the Merchant shipping played during the war and one wonders if most people today realize whether they played any part in it at all.

The Merchant navy, in fact, paid a very heavy price during the active war years. As many as 2,400 ships were sunk and more than 30,000 seamen lost their lives. The arrival and departure of shipping from all corners of the world was vital for Britain’s survival. Oil, steel, food provisions, ammunition and troop movements could only come in and out of the country by sea. German U-Boats were employed in a relentless effort to bring Britain to its knees. Where possible, merchant ships moved in and out of Britain in convoys escorted by Royal Navy Destroyers. Unescorted ships were easy prey for the U-Boat attackers. Attack from the air and magnetic mines were also a threat.

There were also the Merchant Raiders. These were enemy ships disguised as harmless allied Merchant vessels. The armaments on these vessels were well disguised and apart from being equipped with as many as six 5.9 inch guns they would also carry a couple of reconnaissance sea planes and were fitted for mine laying. The Merchant raiders were normally between 5 to 10,000 tons and converted from Fridge (Freezer) ships as these were normally considerably faster than the conventional Merchant vessels. These ships would subtly move in on their targets and once in very close vicinity would declare their real identity and demand complete radio silence. If the order was not carried out or the crew put up a fight or sent out distress signals, the raider opened fire with devastating results and a great loss of life. Raiders were responsible for the capture or sinking of close to 100 ships in total, during the war.

I learned that the D.E.M.S. that Jack had mentioned actually stood for the ‘Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship’ service which was sadly referred to, years later, as ‘The Forgotten Service.’ I came to know that he was a senior member of the gun crew serving on a number of ships throughout the war.

The D.E.M.S. was formed to arm merchant ships as a defence in case of warfare. Sadly though, it became apparent that they were at the bottom of the food chain when it came to a budget for providing defensive equipment. The main armament was a 6 inch or 4.7 inch Naval Gun mounted at the stern of the vessel which could also be used against U-Boats. The manufacture of a number of these guns such as the A.A. Gun dated back to 1917. Others were manufactured for the Japanese Navy during the First World War but were never delivered.

There is a story of a young gunner who joined a ship in Australia and when he was shown the gun that he was training to operate, he joked that it looked just like the one that had stood for many years outside the Auckland Museum. The Officer seriously replied: “Correct! It is the same one.”

All ammunition had to be accounted for and every brass cartridge returned and in most cases the gunners were not provided for or allowed ammunition for target practice. They also carried some strange concoctions such as a P.A.C (Parachute and Cable) Rocket. The P.A.C. was a vertical rail to which a two inch rocket was fixed. It was attached to a strong wire and was launched electronically. At each end of the wire was a parachute; one large and one small. These were used against any attacking aircraft. The idea was that the wire would attach to the wing of the diving plane, and the large parachute would drag the small parachute, which held a small bomb, up to the wing of the plane and the bomb would either blow the wing off or seriously damage the plane, or cause the plane to crash. Other equipment ranged from Bren, Sten and Hotchkiss (French) machine guns; depth charges and smoke screen canisters and even degaussing equipment used to neutralize the magnetic field of a ship’s hull to fend off magnetic mines.

It used to be an International Law that if an enemy was sighted, the sighting should be reported firstly to the officer of the watch on the bridge who, in turn, would hoist the ships red ensign before giving the order to fire. Failure to conform to this could be interpreted as “an act of piracy.” This was later amended after a fully laden oil tanker was torpedoed and sunk by a U-Boat whilst awaiting the officer of the watch to perform his task.

Many of the ships that the D.E.M.S. gunners were assigned to, were tramp steamers which were also run on a tight budget. The accommodation on them left a lot to be desired, mainly because of the extra space, necessarily required for the additional men, made it very cramped indeed. The poor conditions, great lack of hygiene and the poor quality of food, together with the pressure of being under constant attack for hours and days on end, caused extensive PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) to those on board.

Possibly the worst assignments were with the convoys that carried essential supplies to and from the USSR, now known as just Russia or officially as the Russian Federation. The enemy employed a fleet of Battle Ships and Cruisers, Destroyers and U-Boats in an attempt to keep Russia cut off from supplies and external assistance. The natural elements were also against the convoys with the harsh Arctic winters, long hours of darkness, drifting icebergs, and mountainous seas, whereas the summer months left them in almost perpetual daylight making them open and easy targets from the air, sea or submarines.

Sadly, because the D.E.M.S were known as – and are still known as – ‘the Forgotten Service’ they felt that the regular armed forces and other services looked down their noses at them and following the war they have never received the recognition that they so truly deserved. Even today, acting members of the British Royal Marines and Royal Navy and even the R.A.F. (Royal Air Force) will ask: “D.E.M.S? Who are they? What does D.E.M.S. stand for?”

One evening, during a break back home between my trips to sea, I came across my elderly neighbour Jack Taylor, who was sitting alone in the corner of the bar in my local pub. I bought him a beer and asked if I could join him. He was interested in how I was doing, the ships I had been working on and the places I had visited. Over a few beers I got Jack to talk about his experience on the Tower Grange. He told me that during May 1940, whilst he was registering for National Service, he had seen on a noticeboard outside a Royal Navy recruitment office an announcement that gunners were wanted for service on merchant ships. He explained that he had also heard that gunners were served the same meals as the Merchant Navy officers and ate them in the officer’s saloon. He immediately volunteered and within ten days he was accepted and sent off on his way for a few weeks training before joining his first ship.

He did a couple of trips between the UK and the USA transporting high octane aviation spirit and on another ship taking R.A.F stores to Gambia, West Africa before finally joining the Tower Grange. It was whilst the vessel was en route between Calcutta and Trinidad carrying a mixed cargo including a freight of manganese ore that, at 08.34 hours on 17 November 1942, a German U-Boat was observed tailing the vessel. The crew were put on high alert and maintained all stations whilst the vessel carried out strategic zigzag maneuvers. At 06.39 hours during the following morning the U-Boat fired three torpedoes which the ship managed to evade. Later, at 07.01 hours, the U-Boat fired off a second spread of torpedoes of which two hit the Tower Grange causing it to take in some considerable amount of water. The order was given to ‘abandon ship’ and the lifeboats were put in the water with some of the crew aboard whilst other crew members immediately jumped into the sea to swim.

The Tower Grange slowly went down by the stern and after 20 minutes disappeared entirely. In the meantime, those in the boats were trying to pick up and recover their shipmates out of the water. Jack said that the battle for survival in cold or rough heartless waters, while clinging to the side of small life rafts which were already overloaded with survivors, and trying to hold onto debris from the ship and watching shipmates fighting a losing battle for life, as they were covered in oil and grease and injured, must have been one of the most horrific experiences of war for all of those involved. This was particularly true when considering that many of the merchant seamen were young and had never been suitably trained or prepared for such a dreadful event. Even when struggling for survival in the water there was a chance of being fired upon by low flying aircraft or U-Boat gunners. The sad and shocking news is that if they managed to survive such a sinking and got repatriated, they were soon sent directly back to sea with the dread of it happening all over again – which it tended to do all too frequently.

After sometime, the U-Boat surfaced and moved in close to the survivors and observed them for some time before heading off and disappearing over the horizon. Orders from Hitler, the German Nazi leader, were not to rescue any survivors, so they had been left there to float and die.

Over the next few hours, the overloaded lifeboats drifted away from the sinking position and over the next couple of days gradually lost sight of each other. Jack and his shipmates survived in the overloaded, waterlogged, lifeboat with insufficient provisions for an incredible six days before being rescued by the British steam merchant ship Castalia, which landed them in the Port of Spain in Trinidad. During that time at sea they had survived gun fire from a mysterious unidentified ship that approached them in the darkness of night and also suffered attacks from a Hammer Head Shark. Some in the boat had festering wounds and serious sunburn, while others dying of thirst would try to lick the sweat off the other men’s backs.

The survivors in the other lifeboats were picked up by another ship seven days after the sinking. Four Seamen and two of Jack’s gunners were lost during the sinking of the Tower Grange. The survivors were landed on a Friday and on Monday Jack was on a ship to New York to report to the D.E.M.S. office there. Later, on his return to the UK, he rejoined Capt. Williamson (who had been the Captain of Tower Grange) on his new ship the Pentridge Hill where he served until the end of the war.

Jack became silent for a few minutes, looked out into the distance and then said: “You know, when I saw that U-Boat disappear over the horizon and the German Commander leaving us there to die, I thought to myself, ‘if I am able to survive this, I will hunt you down you bastard and I will introduce myself to you – and you will be sorry.”

Well, Jack did survive and later discovered that it was the U-154 which had sunk them under the leadership of Commander Heinrich Schuch who, during his career, sank a total of seven ships totaling 39,187 tons. Jack had mellowed over the years but still planned to knock on the Commander Schuch’s door and introduce himself as the Gunner aboard the Tower Grange which he had torpedoed and cowardly left the crew to die. Commander Schuch had, however, died in 1968, just shortly before Jack was able to catch-up with him.

I left the UK to live abroad not long after that, but I heard that well into his 80s Jack would grab his shovel and clear the widows footpaths after the snow and run errands for them all (Hmmmm…….he was indeed “Jack the Lad”). The last thing I heard about him, before he passed on, was that whilst one evening riding his bike through an alley, two young thugs stopped him in an attempt to mug him for the rent money he had collected. He wrapped his bike over the head of one of them and laid both his fists into the other until they both ran off, empty handed.

Because Jack wanted to know more about the U-Boat that sank his ship, he did some research which turned into a lifetime hobby of tracking U-Boats. People around the world who lost family and relatives at sea would contact him to learn more about their ships that were sank and by which U-Boat. He could tell them by referring to his records, which U-Boat was involved, the exact locations, the name of the Commander, how many ships and the total tonnage the Commander or U-Boat had sank. He even boasted on having had an actual U-Boat Commander on his mailing list! He was also the founder of the Birmingham and District Naval D.E.M.S. Association and was responsible for connecting them together with their counterparts in other countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

The above text is my humble attempt to pay tribute to my genuine hero Jack Taylor, who used to be my neighbour in my teenage years – and a small contribution to inform others of the highly important role that the Merchant Men and Defence Teams made to the war effort and the extreme conditions and suffering they endured while fighting for freedom. The next time you see movies of the military saving our beloved land and military men proudly displaying their medals, please remember – and always bear in mind that – there were many unsung heroes supporting them. That support also includes that elderly neighbour who might seem to be nothing but a pain in the arse to you most of the time! He or she may also have a very significant personal and moving story to tell. You never know what you might learn from them!

Martin R. Oliver