Robert S. Arbib Jnr. - Here we are together

Robert S. Arbib Jnr.
Courtesy Lois Gebhardt and
American Birds obituary, 1987

I have only recently discovered the recollections of an American serving with 820th Engineer Aviation Battalion, Staff Sergeant Robert S. Arbib, Jnr., called ‘Here we are together’.

Robert Arbib relates his experiences in Great Britain during WW2 when he and his unit came over to construct airfields for the US Army Air Force. He and 4,000 US service personnel arrived in Glasgow aboard 'Monterey' in August 1942, a ship designed to carry 700. Arrival was soon followed by a somewhat disastrous march from the ship to the railway station when, as part of the headquarters platoon, he was towards the front of his column and dropped his entire reserve of seven cartons of cigarettes and twelve packets of pipe tobacco. He managed to retrieve them all but at the expense of the derision of the remainder of his battalion as they marched past and the polite amusement of the Scottish audience as he scrabbled to gather up the scattered packets. As he relates, a good sergeant would have left them and marched on but he never professed to be a good sergeant and apparently his company commander entirely agreed.

His battalion took the long journey by train non-stop from Glasgow to Woodbridge, near the coast of Suffolk in East Anglia. There they were soon started on establishing the ground works for a new airfield at Debach (Station 152), just outside Woodbridge, living in tented accommodation in nearby woodland which they nicknamed ‘the maze’ before later building their own Nissen huts. Their training in airfield construction had been for the establishment of temporary airfields behind the moving front line of an advancing army, the sort of thing where air-strips were graded and rolled, and then metal matting was laid rather than the more permanent construction of concrete runways required for the heavy bomber airfields but within a few days the battalion was learning the hard way.

Much of their introduction to the customs and currency of the country was provided by the local beat constable whom they called ‘Sheriff’ Moody. They discovered their nearest pub., the Grundisburgh ‘Dog’, and the warm English beer. Some of the visiting Americans tended to stay on their base but many were to become more acquainted with their host country. Work on airfield building was dirty and hard and the impression is that ‘play’ in their time off, taken by most of them in Ipswich, was also hard. A truck would take as many as it could carry into the blacked out town to relax in the many pubs to be found there although he was a bit of a loner on these excusrions and found somewhere quieter. He later related how the drinking habits of the two countries differed a great deal.

Robert Arbib had trained as a camouflage expert and he soon found that he was redundant. There was no time to camouflage airfields under construction and he became the battalion postal clerk and errand boy, travelling daily to the clearing centre for all US mail at Sudbury. He and his driver would stop for a wash and shave in the luxury of hot water at the YMCA in Ipswich before breakfast and then going on to Sudbury, visiting banks, laundries, dry-cleaners and anywhere that official business sent him, and some places that it didn’t. He made a number of friends in Sudbury and names many of them, in particular those at the post office, at the bank and where he occasionally stayed when on an overnight pass, Gainsborough House.

Work progressed until late April 1943 when, with Debach still unfinished and with only one runway completed they were suddenly transferred to nearby Wattisham also in Suffolk, an old established RAF fighter airfield with grass runways where they were to build concrete ones for a new bomber and transport base. Here his unit had the luxury of purpose built RAF accommodation and the occupants Nissen Hut 7 at Debach found themselves in Flat 33 of the living quarters for married NCO’s at Wattisham. His visits to Sudbury continued but in May 1943 he was transferred to Watford into a new role as part of the Army Public Relations team.

This role took him to the many different US units under the administrative control of the Eastern Base Section, which was based in Watford but which was responsible for US army personnel from the Thames to the Scottish border, reporting on the many human interest stories. In Watford the members of the EBS were billeted in private houses and marched each day up Langley Road to their headquarters in a building which had been a school. At Watford he made many more friends and remembers with particular fondness the regulars of the public house ‘The Unicorn’where he learned the variety of English beers as well as making new English friends from the villages of Kings Langley and Chipperfield.

Included in the narrative Robert Arbib relates his impressions in more depth of many aspects of his experiences here. There are some sharply observed chapters on the personnel of the Observer Corps post at Grundisburgh, of a Sunday spent at Felixstowe, of a dance at Woodbridge as a guest of the warrant officers and sergeants of 7th Highland Light Infantry, of London and Sudbury at night and of the sight of the many searchlights, of the eccentric personnel of the Public Relations unit at Watford, of Kingston upon Hull as the reception port for much of the US equipment being landed here, of the homes and hospitality of the many English friends he made as well as accounts of visits to the countless places between London and Scotland that his public relations role took him.

This slim volume is a gem of a memoir about relatively unrecorded aspects of the war and relates the author’s sympathetic appreciation of the countryside, the buildings, the English and their heritage. It is also the only published account by an American that I have come across of this aspect of the US war effort in this country, when great numbers of airfields were built from scratch to accommodate the US Army Air Force.

Originally published by Longman’s Green in 1946 'Here we are together' was also issued by the Right Book Club in 1947 but remains quite an uncommon book in either edition. It appears from other sources that Robert Arbib went on to become a respected ornithologist and it is apparent throughout this account that his skill in observation was already acute during those early years. Do look out for a copy.

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.

RNPS Silver Badge File (II)

The front and back of the original RNPS Silver Badge,
about the same size as an old shilling or new 10p

On delving deeper into the file about the Royal Naval Patrol Service Silver Badge in the National Archives (the account of the discovery of which was first published in the RNPS Newsletter), we find it lays to rest some of the folklore about the reason for the change of design of the Badge, from the original pin type to the later four-eye type, with a rather more mundane account.

Traditionally the reason for the change was that Badges of the original pin type were too easily detached from clothing. So many were being reported lost or stolen, when in fact many were probably being given away as sweetheart brooches, that the design was changed to make them more securely attached. The facts are a little different.

The initial production run in 1940 had been of 20,000 Badges and by late September 1941 the Commander of the Patrol Service Central Depot, Commodore Daniel de Pass, anticipated that the supply would be exhausted by the end of the month and he requested the Admiral Commanding Reserves for the supply of a further 10,000. He also noted that it was possible that there was 'a certain amount of trafficking in these Badges' and suggested that future replacements, which could be obtained for sixpence, should be noted in the rating's pay book with the date of issue, date of replacement and issuing signature.

Certain minutes seeking Treasury approval then follow until a letter from the Royal Mint on 31st October which states that while there is no problem with producing the Badges, the contractors who supply the pins and catches are having difficulties in obtaining them. The reason for this is not given but it can only be assumed that the steel for pins is of a high quality, and it is known from other sources that high quality steel was in short supply and probably reserved for more warlike purposes.

Before the difficulty in the supply of pins and catches was resolved the Commander Minesweeping - Peterhead, Cdr. J. P. Dobson, submitted a suggestion, on 20th March 1942, that because of damage to clothing the Badge be remodelled with two eyes so that it could be sewn to the sleeve. This was amended to 'four small loops' by the Flag Officer-in-Charge - Aberdeen, so that the Badge would lie flatter, and submitted through the Commander-in-Chief - Rosyth to the Secretary of the Admiralty and recommended for the concurrence of Their Lordships, a copy being received by the Silver Badge Office at Lowestoft on 30th March 1942. There is also a copy of the concurrence of Commodore Daniel de Pass with this proposal.

The later version of the RNPS Silver badge

Not surprisingly with such support subsequent Badges were produced to this new pattern with four eyes which overcame the problem of the shortage of pins and helped to prevent damage to ratings' clothing. By 25th August 1942 there is a note that an initial supply of the new style Badges has been received at Lowestoft.

There is correspondence in the file between the Naval Branch at the Admiralty and The Treasury about the recall of old style Badges for exchange for the new, which was eventually agreed but only on a voluntary basis. Also in the file is a new Admiralty Fleet Order dated 3rd September 1942 amending the description of the Badge and specifying that it is to be sewn onto the sleeve, and on 4th March 1943 a new AFO incorporating the old Orders specifying the qualification for receipt of the Badge as well as the new description.

As a matter of interest the initial production of 20,000 Badges had been achieved at a total cost of £569.00, of which £329.00 had been for the silver bullion and 50 guineas (1 guinea = £1.05) the design cost paid to Kruger Gray. There is no record of whether the cost of silver bullion had risen by May 1942 when the new style Badge was produced.

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?

Churchill's Spearhead

John Greenacre, a currently serving officer (now retired, 6/5/11, ed.) and a colleague on the Lord Kitchener Memorial Holiday Centre management team is the author of a recently published book on the development of Britain's airborne forces during WW2, covering both parachute and glider elements.

The title is Churchill's Spearhead and is published by Pen and Sword at £15.99 plus post and packing. It is an in-depth study of the politics and policy concerning the development of the airborne forces; the methods and obstacles to providing bespoke equipment; the selection, recruitment and training of potential airborne personnel; how development was influenced by commanders both within and outside the new force; and how the force was employed in the Mediterranean and Western Europe theatres and the constraints encountered. Altogether a valuable contribution to the genre.

Dunkirk anniversary

To coincide with the 70th anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk we have nearly 60 items containing accounts of the progress of the withdrawal or the experiences of the soldiers, sailors and airmen involved.

Engineer and Novelist Nevil Shute (Norway) - A brief account

(...originally published in the ibooknet newsletter for October 2004)

Nevil Shute Norway was born 17th January 1899 at Ealing, London, the youngest of two brothers and the son of a senior civil servant in the General Post Office. At an early stage it was obvious that his interests lay not in things academic but in things practical, having been caught playing truant from school only to spend his time studying the mechanical exhibits in the Science Museum in South Kensington.

The family moved from London to Dublin in 1912 when his father was appointed Secretary to the Post Office in Ireland. Nevil Shute had attended various schools in England including Shrewsbury and it was whilst on holiday from there that he was in Dublin during the Easter uprising in 1916, and acted as a stretcher bearer.

In June, 1915, his older brother Fred had died of wounds in Flanders during WW1. He was quite philosophic about his future at this stage having seen a number of his seniors at school killed in the fighting in Flanders as well as his brother. His stammer, from which he was to suffer to some extent throughout his life, probably saved him from this fate as it prevented his earlier attempts to obtain a commision in the army and then the new Royal Air Force.

After enlisting in the ranks of the Suffolk Regiment he was posted to the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary for the last three months of the war. After the war he was demobilised and secured a place at Balliol, Oxford, where he studied Engineering, graduating in the summer of 1922.

During the vacations he became acquainted with boats by acting as crew on a sailing cruiser and had already started his connection with the aircraft industry, working unpaid at De Havillands and it was Geoffrey de Havilland himself who gave Nevil Shute his first experience of flying. His first full time work was at De Havillands near Edgware in January 1923 where he was employed as a performance calculator.

He started writing in his spare time in the evenings, first poetry and then a novel, and in the spring he learned to fly. Finishing his first novel later in 1923 he sent it to three publishers and was turned down by them all. A second attempt followed in 1924 with the same result. Later that year he left De Havillands to join the Airship Guarantee Co. at Howden, Yorkshire, a subsidiary of Vickers, as chief calculator on the R100 airship project.

This was the private enterprise project while the Air Ministry would build state project R101 in competition. (Chief Engineer at the Airship Guarantee Co. was Barnes Wallis, later to become well known as the designer of the Wellington bomber and the 'bouncing bomb' used on the dams raid). Nevil Shute's next writing attempt, 'Marazan', an aerial drug smuggling story, was accepted and published in 1926. At this stage he decided on his peseuodonym of Nevil Shute, not wanting his writing to undermine his credibility as an engineer.

As the R100 project continued he carried on with another novel, 'So Disdained', an aerial spying story, published 1928 (in US as 'The Mysterious Aviator'). By November 1929 the airship R100 was complete and ready for trials in 1930. Shute was by this time Deputy Chief Engineer under Barnes Wallis and effectively in charge of the project. The trials were successful as was a proving flight to Canada and back and the airship was then hangared whilst the testing of the competing government R101 was supposed to be carried out. In the event there was very little testing and R101, en route to India on a proving flight, crashed in France killing 48 of the 54 passengers and crew, ending all development of airship travel in England.

Nevil Shute had become engaged to be married to Frances Heaton, a doctor at York Hospital and at the end of the R100 project, when he found himself unemployed and newly married, he decided to start an aeroplane manufacturing company (as one does!). Aviation was booming and with a senior designer recruited from De Havillands and the backing of aviation pioneer and entrepreneur Sir Alan Cobham, the firm of Airspeed Ltd. was formed. Based at first in Yorkshire it held its first board meeting in 1931 with Shute as Joint Managing Director.

'Lonely Road', a novel of gun-running and political revolution, was published in 1932 and selling the film rights brought an additional welcome income but the next novel, 'Ruined City' about the depression in the shipping industry, did not appear until 1938, a reflection of his concentration on the fledgling company. Producing gliders under licence to earn some quick income, eventual success for the company came with multiple orders and a move to a new factory at Portsmouth but still little, if any, profit.

Airspeed Envoy The Airspeed Oxford, a twin engined trainer, was used to train most Bomber Command pilots and 8751 were built (most under licence by other manufacturers). The peak for Shute was selling one of their aircraft, an Airspeed Envoy (left), to the King's Flight in 1937 but this had been at the cost of little home life with his wife and two daughters except for occasional weekend cruising in their yacht, Skerdmore.

In 1938, with war brewing and orders for aircraft for the RAF in the hundreds, the Board of the company dispensed with Nevil Shute's services, an action which he says in his autobiography 'Slide Rule' (1954) was probably quite right - his forte was as a starter of companies and not a runner. With a generous settlement from Airspeed Nevil Shute could now reassess his future.

Prior to the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 saw the publication of 'What Happened to the Corbetts', his account of Britain under aerial bombing attack and which his publishers, Heinemann, had issued in a special paper covered boards limited presentation edition (illustrated left) for the personnel of the newly formed ARP. By 1940, deciding to give up engineering research to take part in the war, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

Within two weeks Sub. Lt. Norway was seconded from his training ship, still in civilian clothes, by the Admiralty's Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development where they wanted someone with aircraft experience to work on combatting air attacks on shipping. The DMWD (nicknamed the Wheezers and Dodgers) were a group of highly qualified scientists and technicians who evaluated numerous proposals for aiding the war effort, some highly successful and others less so.

Amongst them was a project inititiated by the Petroleum Warfare team of a large flame thower firing a mixture of diesel oil and tar as a shipboard defensive weapon - an idea familiar to those who have read his novel 'Most Secret', 1945. He wrote the foreword to the history of the work of the department, 'The Secret War 1939-45' by Gerald Pawle.

His novel, 'No Highway', 1948, covered the problems of metal fatigue and sudden in-flight failure of structures in aircraft, almost as if he had prior knowledge of the Comet disasters of the 1950's. Prior knowledge and second sight were themes that recurred and he also uses them to effect in 'An Old Captivity, 1940, and 'In the Wet', 1953, set in the rainy season in Australia. 'Round the Bend', 1951, a story of diligent aero engineer is set against the background of the development of a commercial air freight company.

After the war, disillusioned with political changes and the financial restraints of post-war Britain, Nevil Shute had settled in Australia and his later novels reflect this change of domicile. Probably his most famous was 'A Town like Alice', 1950, a love story set firstly during the Japanese occupation of Burma and the East Indies and later in Australia.

Throughout all of his books you find him drawing on his personal experiences, whether in the aircraft industry, wartime or his sailing but, authentic as they are, these are only the background settings. He had a natural ability to tell a story, to build characters that are sympathetic and to write in such a way that grips the reader.

One gathers from his autobiography that he spent his life as if each day were of 30 hours instead 24, in his engineering days doing a full days work before starting his writing in the evenings. Such a pace would wear down even a physically fit man but he had a long history of heart problems which finally caught up with him and he died 12th January 1961 at the age of 61 years.

Our available stock of titles by or about Nevil Shute can be found in one of our catalogues (please allow time for it to download) and a full bibliography of titles in our bibliographies section. For far more information see the Nevil Shute Norway Foundation.

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.