Traralgon and District Historical Society Inc.
    
February 2006    -   The Merchant Navy

Frank Beer, born in England became an apprentice in the Royal Navy eventually joining the Merchant Navy . After retiring , he and his family arrived in Australia in 1977. They lived at Blind Bight, near Tooradin, when Frank joined the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works as shift Manager at Carrum South Eastern Purification Plant. Frank also worked as a Prison Officer at Fulham and has  lived at Glengarry for the last 10 years.

ln the Greek and later Roman eras, ships were either galleys or pure sailing ships.  The galley was usually used as a warship due to its speed and the fact that the oars and rowers took up the space that a merchant ship would normally use for carrying cargo. However, by the 13th century, the galley Galea Grossa became the largest merchant ship. By this time there was still no fighting navy as such in England but merchant ships became warships when the country went to war as the cost of maintaining ships solely for war was too expensive. King Henry VIIl started the build-up of ships that became the Royal Navy and it was the development of heavy artillery for use at sea that   brought the final split between merchant and fighting ship design.

lt was at the beginning of the 17th century that the two sea services separated into the Royal and Merchant Navies. By the time of the French Wars (1756-1765) and through the Napoleonic War (1793-1815) the distinction between fighting and merchant ships became increasingly apparent. During the reign of King George 11 (1727-1760, Officers of the Royal Navy were given a uniform (blue and white because one of his mistresses had a blue and white dress that he liked) and in 1864 the lower deck were given uniforms. The Merchant Shipping Act was passed in l 854 to improve seamen's conditions and a uniform was copied from the Royal Navy but with different badges, buttons and braids.   ln the Merchant   Navy there is no such rank as Captain; he is the Master and the deck officers are Mates.  In 1855 a third of all ships in the world and 4/5 of all steam ships were British. Before WW1, 80% of all-ships were built in Britain. When Britain entered WWI there were over 19,000,000 tons of registered British merchant ships of which 9,000,000 tons were sunk. Until 1916 there were   rules of war governing the seizure and sinking of merchant ships.

For example, the Cruiser Convention stated that when a warship met up with an enemy merchant ship, the merchant ship was stopped and searched and the crew and passengers put into their lifeboats. The warship had to ensure that there were enough supplies in the boats for the number of survivors, and steps   were taken to ensure that the lifeboats could get to safety.

The invention of the  submarine and its use in WW1 changed all that. By the convention, the submarine had to surface and tell the crew of the merchant ship to stop and be searched. Winston Churchill (who was 1st   Lord of the Admiralty at the time) had most merchant ships armed with a 12 pounder or 3 inch    gun aft to fight off the  U boat. To the U boat commanders, this put their boats and crews at risk, so in late 1916,         a German  U boat commander decided to ignore the Cruiser Convention and started attacking merchant     ships without warning. This brought cries of piracy and war crimes from the allies, but the Germans counterclaimed that by arming their merchant ships, the British had made their merchant ships into armed merchant cruisers and therefore legitimate targets. Unrestricted submarine warfare began, causing many casualties amongst the merchant ship crews. During WW1, there were over 13,000 British merchant seamen killed. As a result of the horrific losses among merchant ships experienced in the 1915-1916 period, convoys were reluctantly introduced in early 1917   and a vast ship building program was put in place to build anti-submarine sloops and light destroyers.      

Less than 12 hours after the commencement of WWll, U30 torpedoed without warning the l 3,500 ton Donaldson Passenger Liner Athenia, outward bound to Montreal, causing 128 deaths of which 28 were American. This showed that the German Government intended to continue unrestricted U boat warfare so Britain immediately organised the convoy system where practical and by 1940, over half the British Merchant fleet had been given at least one gun. The Admiralty salvage Service salvaged over 1,000,000 tons of damaged or sunken ships in the first   18 months of the war. Together with new construction, repairs to damaged ships, and conversions to other purposes such as trawlers to minesweepers and anti-submarine escorts, the shipyards of Britain were kept busy. Between 1940 and 1943 over 35,000 ships were repaired and put back into service. However the rate of sinkings far outstripped the rate of construction.

At the beginning of the war, Britain was importing over 67,000,000 tons of food, oil products, raw materials, manufactured goods, armaments and personnel, and to do this she had over 9,000 ships of 18,000.000 tons (more than any other country), manned by 157,000 sailors of whom 27% were Indian and Chinese and 5% Arab, West African and West Indian, as well as another 2,000 ships of 3,000,000 tons throughout the Empire. With the Germans occupying the whole of Europe, the surviving merchant ships of Norway, France, Greece, Denmark, Belgium and Holland (over 8,000,000 tons) came to Britain and served throughout the war. By mid 1942, one third of the British merchant ships that existed in 1939 were sunk and by the end of the war, Britain had lost 2,426 ships totalling   11,331,933 tons of shipping. Britain lost over 60,000 merchant seamen, which was a higher percentage casualty rate than the armed services. It wasn't until 1998 that merchant seamen were recognised as returned veterans, and only then because of new laws requiring equal status under the law for minority groups in society.

The Royal Navy is unusual in that they are the only fighting Navy in the world to have always had their auxiliary ships such as fleet tankers, ammunition ships, tugs and mooring vessels manned by merchant seamen. This auxiliary service is divided up into two organisations called the Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service (RMAS) which man the tugs, mooring and salvage vessels, coastal vessels and certain specialist vessels, and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), a special group of merchant ships owned by the Admiralty that accompanied the Royal Navy ships anywhere in the world.

When WW11 started the RFA was reasonably well-equipped but once the Japanese entered the war and to enable the Royal Navy to keep up with the USN in the Pacific, it was necessary to form the fleet train. The train consisted of tankers and what is known as 'dry cargo' ships carrying ammunition, food, clothing, spare parts for the warships themselves, aircraft spare parts and sometimes complete aircraft. Bases were established in India and Australia to supply the warships' needs from the fleet train, but the bases themselves had to be supplied from Britain or the United States. Apart from the aircraft carriers, all these ships, both fleet train and supply ships, were manned by the Merchant Navy.

After WWII, the RFA became the leading exponent of 'Replenishment at Sea' (RAS) in the world. Besides being an essential part of the Royal Navy's obligations as part of NATO, Britain's peacekeeping forces in such places as Korea, Suez, Cyprus, Kuwait, Malaysia, Kosovo, the Gulf and Afghanistan have all been supported by the RFA and in some cases by other merchant ships taken up from trade.

My own little part in this started when I returned to England from Hong Kong where I had been living with my family. I'd been attending the KGV school to serve my apprenticeship in HM Dockyard Sheerness and then went to sea as an Engineer Officer in the Merchant Navy. I           

        I worked at various shipping companies as I wanted to see the world and get paid for it. In my first few years I spent 18 months in the West Indies, visiting Bermuda, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and Jamaica. I then changed companies to get to Singapore where my parents lived at the time, but ended up trading between India,     Sri   Lanka and Pakistan through the Suez Canal to USA and Canada. During that time I met my wife,  Rosemarie, who live in Liverpool. I moved to again to get short trips and ended up doing the west coast of Africa.

After a year I went to Blue Star and got on the west coast of the USA and Canada. I then moved back to the Admiralty and joined the RFA. In early 1963 I was sent to Singapore to join an ocean going fleet tug where we spent the next 13 months supporting the Royal and other Commonwealth Navies in the confrontation against Indonesia. After I was relieved and went home for leave, I flew to Aden and joined the RFA Bayleaf a tanker freighting from the Persian Gulf to Singapore. We eventually arrived back in Rosythe Dockyard and I resigned and took a job in Portsmouth Dockyard as my wife had given me our first child, Frank, and I wanted to be   home. However I didn't like working ashore so after a few months I returned to sea on the South African run, going to Mauritius and Ascension as well as south and south west Africa.

I decided to return to Blue Star line and commenced 10 years of sailing to Australia, New Zealand and South America. I was homeward bound from Australia when the 1967 Arab-lsraeli war started and two of our ships got trapped in be Suez Canal. We were diverted away from the Canal and I never thought that it would affect me; however after being trapped for over two years it became the company's policy to relieve the crews every four months, paying everyone a bonus because of the conditions on the ships, so I was sent out as relief 2nd Engineer on Scottish Star and transferred to the Port of lnvercargill.       We had a peculiar existence on the Canal. Two warring armies who regularly fired on each other surrounded us. One night the Egyptians tried to cross the Canal and were beaten off with many casualties, the bodies drifting around the ships for several days before they were retrieved.

Despite the odd existence, we had a great social life. There were 14 ships trapped together in the Great Bitter Lake and we were out in the middle of it. The ships tied up in pairs in a circle,           like a wild west wagon train, with the exception of the Bulgarian ship, Vassis Levsky, who would have nothing to do with the rest of us and was anchored well away from us. The other ships were Agapenor and Melampus (British), African Glen (USA), Sindh (French), Munsterland and Nordwind (German), Boleslaw Bierut and Jakarta (Polish), Nippon and Kilara (Swedish), and Lednice   (Czechoslovakian). We worked from 6 a.m.. until noon Monday to Saturday and had a sailing regatta each Saturday afternoon.

It was decidedly dangerous to go anywhere near the Polish ships as they would not let you leave until you had at least one drink, no matter what time of day it was nor your reason for boarding. I fell into my lifeboat engine one evening and had a suspected broken wrist. The Polish ships were the only ones with a doctor and at 9 am. the next morning I was taken over to see the doctor, but only after I had a drink. I ended up spending a week in Cairo having x-rays and other good things until finally it was decided that my wrist was only sprained. On the way back in the Agent's car we were bombed by the Israeli air force. The road ran down parallel to the Canal with minefields each side of the road. The driver and Agent jumped out of the car and ran across the minefields leaving me in the car with the doors open and a jet strafing the road towards me. I sat there sucking my thumb, wondering what the heck I could do, when the plane stopped firing and zoomed away.

I spent a few more years with Blue Star before moving on to other companies to see the rest of the world.  That included two years   at the Persian Gulf on 255,000 ton super tankers; fast banana boats from South America to Japan and the U.S.A.; bulk carriers from Australia to Japan and Canada; and sugar from such places as Fiji.  Altogether I spent 20 years in the Merchant Navy and have few regrets.  It was a great career for a young man, the only thing against it was leaving the family behind, although in my later career I was allowed to take my wife and children with me.