RNPS Commando - Petty Officer Harold Hiscock

PO. Harold Hiscock, courtesy
Commando Veterans website

I was recently talking to a colleague, a retired British Army Major who now leads battlefield tours in Europe and who had been investigating the records of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, in what was East Germany. He had come across a reference to an Royal Naval Patrol Service member, apparently a commando, who had been executed there in 1945 and who is mentioned on the Addenda Panel of our Memorial in Belle Vue Park, Lowestoft. Knowing my interest in RNPS matters he mentioned the details to me.

I had not heard anything about him and I checked with those at ‘the Nest’ (Sparrows Nest Gardens, Lowestoft where the RNPS Museum is situated) and they hadn’t either so I have been trying to follow it up. The name on the Addenda Panel is Petty Officer H. Hiscock and the details of the Commonwealth War Graves record of him as ‘of Newfoundland’, his service no: LT/JX 217862, his date of death: as 02/02/1945 and that he was attached to HMS Quebec.

Isn’t Google wonderful! Cutting a long story short(er) it appears from a WWW search that PO. Hiscock was a member of a seven strong team trained at the Combined Forces Training Centre at Inverary (HMS Quebec), operating as part of No. 14 (Arctic) Commando who were sent to Norway in Operation Checkmate to attack Axis shipping by attaching limpet mines to them. In mid April 1943 the team, a fishing coble and two canoes were dropped by an MTB on a small island north of Stavanger from where they operated, attacking and sinking a number of ships at Haugesund.

Subsequent details are somewhat sketchy but it appears that the whole team was captured by the German Army over a period of several days in mid May, with the aid of the police and Norwegian civilians. The team were operating in uniform and should have been regarded as prisoners of war but for Hitler’s notorious ‘Commando Order’ of October 1942 ordering the execution of any commandos. They were handed over to the Security Service (SD) and after spending some time in Grini Concentration Camp in Norway they were transferred to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp just outside Berlin. There they underwent forced labour, marching 30 miles per day over cobbles breaking in army boots for a number of months.

PO Harold Hiscock recorded on the
RNPS Memorial in Belle Vue Park, Lowestoft

Except for two the almost exclusively naval team were executed at Sachsenhausen on 2nd February 1945. The team comprised Lieutenant John Godwin, RNVR (in command), Sgt. Victor John Cox (on attachment from No. 12 Commando), Petty Officers Alfred John Roe and Harold Hiscock, and three Able Seamen, Neville Arthur Burgess, Keith Mayor and Andrew Anthony West. Two of the team, PO. Alfred J. Roe and AB. Keith Mayor, were transferred to Belsen where PO. Roe was executed on 7th April 1945 and Mayor died there from typhus.

As is the sad way with these things the men who served together and mostly died together are commemorated separately on a number of different memorials for those with no known grave. Lt. Godwin is mentioned on the Portsmouth Memorial, Sgt. Cox at the Brookwood Memorial, PO. Roe at Portsmouth, PO. Hiscock at Lowestoft, AB. Burgess at Chatham and ABs. Mayor and West at Plymouth.

So much time has passed that it may be too late but PO. Hiscock was a Newfoundlander and it would be great to hear of any recollections of him from any surviving RNPS members, other wartime colleagues or from any of his family in Canada or elsewhere.

An RNPS silver badge file in the National Archives

Late last year I was asked if I would like to give a short talk to the local Rotary Club about the Royal Naval Patrol Service. Flattered that anyone would think that I knew enough about RNPS to take it on I readily agreed and then wondered if I could really get away with it. This would be to a local Lowestoft audience, men who could well have served or whose fathers had served in RNPS and I needed to get my facts right. I knew my limitations but fortunately I had a couple of months in which I could refresh my memory and try to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge.

I was a bit hazy about the sequence of events surrounding the development of different minesweeping methods. I re-read my references and all that I could get hold of from elsewhere. Amongst the sources I examined were the cabinet papers of the first few months of the war, when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. These are held in the National Archives and fortunately most of them seem to be online. It was while I was searching in the National Archives (as one does!) that I checked to see what they had on the silver badge and I came across a file from 1940 with the name:

HONOURS AND AWARDS (85): Institution of silver badge for personnel serving in Auxiliary, Anti-Submarine and Minesweeping Vessels.

(For those unaware, the silver badge was unique to the RN Patrol Service. It was produced at the personal intervention of Winston Churchill when First Lord of the Admiralty in December 1939 and it was awarded exclusively (it was believed, more later) to RNPS personnel after six months sea time on minesweeping and anti-submarine duties to reflect the hazards of their tasks. It was indeed solid silver and was a much prized mark of distinction).

The file sounded intriguing but unlike the cabinet papers, it was not online I could not dip into it to confirm what it was about and there was no mention of the Patrol Service in the heading. To have confirmation I would need to get it copied and there would be a cost involved, unless I wished to travel to Kew to view it in person.

As I hadn’t previously heard of this file before deciding what to do I checked with the RNPS museum curator to see if he already had a copy or even knew of it. He hadn’t heard of it so I asked the National Archives to quote for supplying a copy.

The basic information available about the file did not give any indication about its size. The scale of charges by National Archives is a very reasonable 43 pence per A3 photocopy plus a charge for post and packing. When you ask for a quote they promise a reply within ten working days and after about a week the quote duly arrived.

They set out the number of pages and the cost of copying and shipping. Although the per page cost of 43p had seemed very reasonable it was a bit of a shock to find that the file contained 120 separate pages and the quote including carriage was £65.00. This was, however, a record that needed to be investigated, would be cheaper than travelling to Kew and I am delighted to say that it was worthwhile.

Although there appear to be gaps in the file it contains copies of correspondence between Admiralty departments, between the Admiralty and the Ministry of Shipping, the Patent Office, The Royal Mint, the Naval Press Bureau etc. on all aspects of the design, production and distribution of the badge. There is even a covering letter from the Royal Mint to the Admiral Commanding Reserves for the fee of 50 guineas charged by Mr Kruger Grey for designing and modelling the badge, asking for sanction for its payment.

Unfortunately there are copyright issues with showing some of the contents of the file which I have not yet cleared with the National Archives. There is much more of interest in the file which needs time to detail than I have at present but I hope to have a better description and permission to supply images available in subsequent posts.

Rotary East, Lowestoft

What nice people they are at Rotary East, Lowestoft.

They recently invited me to talk to them for 20-30 minutes about the history of the Royal Naval Patrol Service, a branch of the Royal Navy which had been based at Lowestoft during WW2. They gave me a very nice meal and were very patient when I was still talking 40 minutes later.

I took a visual presentation with me, to help get the message across. They seemed to appreciate it and were very complimentary at the end.

I wonder if they'd invite me again if I could think of something else to talk about?

Collecting Royal Naval Patrol Service books

(...originally published in the ibooknet newsletter for November 2002)

A brief history of the Royal Naval Patrol Service

The Royal Naval Patrol Service (RNPS) was a 'navy within a navy' during WW2. In 1939 much of Britain’s domestic freight distribution still relied on coastal shipping. The experience of WW1 had taught the Royal Navy that mines in our coastal waters could bring this distribution to a standstill and they recruited to the Reserve many civilian fishermen from the home fishing fleets to act, with their vessels, in a minesweeping role.

At the outbreak of WW2 this reserve was mobilised and became the Royal Naval Patrol Service with a shore base at Lowestoft in Suffolk. Originally HMS Pembroke X (as a subsidiary of Chatham which was HMS Pembroke) it soon became a base in its own right called HMS Europa.

These reservists were similar in many ways to the ‘pals’ battalions of WW1 in that they had known and worked with each other in peacetime and now found themselves facing a new enemy together. Despite some postings in the interests of Naval efficiency, many men swapped their draft chits so that they could remain together - resulting in chaos in pay records and even in some cases, false 'missing' notifications sent to next of kin when ships were lost at sea.

Purpose of the RNPS

A major role of the RNPS was to keep “the war channel” clear in home waters, a channel which was kept swept through enemy minefields laid off the East and South coasts of the British Isles. In the daytime attacks by fighter-bomber aircraft were frequent and most nights visits by E-boats and aircraft would re-block the war channel with mines. It was the job of RNPS to clear them again - especially hazardous as new types of mines were developed from the traditional contact mine, including magnetic, acoustic and pressure as well as combinations of these types. It could often take the loss of several vessels before it was realised that a new type of mine had been encountered.

The vessels employed in the early days were mainly civilian craft requisitioned for Naval service - trawlers, drifters, paddle steamers, etc. It was not until later in the war that specialist small minesweeping craft such as the Motor Minesweeper were built.Some of the larger trawlers of RNPS were also used in an anti-submarine role. Many of the Atlantic and later the Arctic convoys would have a trawler as one of the escort vessels, acting both as a rescue ship and as a listening post for submarine activity.Whatever their role these vessels were officially only lightly armed, with usually only a 12 pounder on the fo’c’sle and a couple of half inch machine guns on the bridge but many were also veterans of Dunkirk and unofficially sported a miscellany of weapons liberated from that operation.

Collectable works featuring the RNPS

The earliest accounts of the work on RNPS appear in some of the wartime anthologies and are of little interest because the prevailing censorship prevented the inclusion of much factual detail. An early title to look out for is ‘Terriers of the Fleet - The Fighting Trawlers’ written by an anonymous author using the pseudonym ‘First Lieutenant’ and although undated was published by Hutchinson about 1943.

A. Cecil Hampshire was the first to write in more detail in his ‘Lilliput Fleet’, published by Kimber in 1957. In the same year Souvenir Press published Alexander McKee’s Coal-Scuttle Brigade’ about the East coast convoys, the title making reference to the fact that many of the merchant vessels were colliers and coal fired, as were many of the minesweepers. In 1958 Jarrolds published ‘Glory Passed them By’ by Ewart Brookes, an account by the one-time commander of a minesweeping flotilla at Dover who went on to become a novelist.A detailed history by Hilbert Hardy, ‘The Minesweepers Victory’, was issued by the small Kent publisher Keydex in a limited edition in 1967 but probably the best known history is ‘Trawlers go to War’ by Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam (Foulsham 1971), an account told by anecdotes resulting from numerous interviews with members of RNPS, and the sequel which included the ‘pusser’ branch of minesweeping, the RN Fleet sweepers, called ‘Out Sweeps’ (Foulsham 1978) .

There are many references the RNPS in other works, not least by Nicholas Monsaratt in his early stories about his time in corvettes in the North Sea, and a number of other books of reminiscences by ex-RNPS members. The following is a list the titles already mentioned as well as some others that we have come across:

• Fane, Robert - We Clear the Way - Hurricane Books - 1942
• Fane, Robert - Ships May Proceed - Hurricane Books - 1943
• 'First Lieutenant' - The Terriers of the Fleet - The Fighting Trawlers - Hutchinson - 1943
• HMSO - His Majesty's Minesweepers - HMSO - 1943
• Monsarrat, Nicholas - East Coast Corvette - Cassell - 1943
• Monsarrat, Nicholas - Corvette Command - Cassell - 1944
• Hampshire, A. Cecil - Lilliput Fleet - Kimber - 1957
• McKee, Alexander - Coal-Scuttle Brigade - Souvenir Press - 1957
• Brookes, Ewart - Glory Passed them By - Jarrolds - 1958
• Ogden, Graeme - My Sea Lady - Hutchinson - 1963
• Lund, Paul and Ludlam, Harry - Trawlers go to War - Foulsham - 1971
• Hardy, Hilbert - Minesweepers Victory - Keydex - 1976
• Lund, Paul and Ludlam, Harry - Out Sweeps - Foulsham - 1978
• McAra, Charles - Mainly in Minesweepers - Leach - 1991
• Melvin, Michael - Minesweeper - The Role of the Motor Minesweeper in WW2 - Square One - 1992
• Brown, Jimmy - Harry Tate's Navy - Privately published - 1994
• Featherbe, F. C. (compiler) - Churchill's Pirates - North Kent Books - 1994
• Featherbe, F. C. (compiler) - More Tales from Churchill's Pirates - North Kent Books - 1996
  

....and our most recent stock can be viewed in our RNPS catalogue and the veterans of the service at the RNPS Association.