| British India Steam Navigation Company Ltd. |
Trooping with Richard Douglas Crow
The British India Steam Navigation Company (more usually known as the B I) passenger ships, particularly those employed on the Indian Coast and fitted for the carriage of both cabin and deck passengers were uniquely suited for a quick conversion to troop carrying vessels in times of war. Many of the Company's ships were so converted in W. W. 2 and some, including the TALAMBA and ROHNA mentioned later in this article, were lost by enemy action while so engaged.
I served in several such vessels during the war, my personal memories, as here recorded, could no doubt be replicated and augmented by any number of shipmates and contemporaries of those days.
TALAMBA
Built: 1924 by R&W Hawthorn, Leslie & Co., Ltd. Hebburn.
Tonnage: 8,018 g, 3,844 nt, 8,100 dwt.
Engines: Twin screw, 2 x Triple expansion four cylinder,, 8,000 IHP, 16.5 knots by Builder.
Passengers: 56 1st Class, 72 2nd Class, 2,777 Deck and Crew of 175.
Launched 16th July 1924, completed 2nd October 1924, Yard No. 533.
Talamba is a town near Multan in the Punjab, now Pakistan.
Group photograph
C/Off. McGuire, 3/Off Sangster, Extra 3/0 Crow, 2/0 Rouse,
Captain Williamson
In December 1939 four B.I. ships, the TALAMBA, TAKLIWA, ROHNA and RAJULA together with the Bibby Line troopship LANCASHIRE as Commodore, formed a fast, compact Military Convoy.
The B.I. ships were all fitted out with stalls in the 'tween decks and lower holds, with ramps leading down to them from the upper deck, for the carriage of animals, horses/mules. I do not now remember how many, several hundreds, possibly 400/500 in each ship with accommodation for some 300 troops to attend them. The LANCASHIRE carrying the main body of troops.
Military Convoy 1940, left to right HMT Takliwa, HMT Talamba, HMT Rajula, HMT Lancashire, HTM Rohna and within the van HMAS Waterhen.
Painting by Richard Crow
Captain Williamson was in command of TALAMBA, the Chief Officer, McGuire also doubled as Troop Officer, while the watch keeping officers were 2/0, Rouse, the 3/0, Sangster, and the Extra 3/0, Crow.
We embarked an Indian Army Mule Corps in Bombay with a full complement of troops bound for Marseilles and the battlefields of northern Europe. We were a fast convoy, 15 knots cruising speed, and being so small and compact were very manoeuvreable, in this respect we were put through our paces very thoroughly by the Commodore and the naval escorts right from the very beginning. Although I say it myself we turned out to be a very smart outfit.
The Red Sea was very hot and with a following wind the heat in the holds became unbearable for our animals. We did all we could, I even have a distinct recollection of straddling a 'tween deck hatch beam fanning an overheated mule with a portable electric fan. Conditions became so bad that the Commodore reversed the convoy on to its reciprocal course for some twenty minutes so that the windshutes could blow some fresh air into the holds.
On arrival at Marseilles our troops and animals were disembarked and we were told that our future role was to ferry Yeomanry Cavalry units from Marseilles to Haifa in Palestine. The operation was expected to take about four trips over a period of some four months.
In peace time our home line ships on the U.K. to Calcutta run used to call at Marseilles both outward and homeward so that passengers who wished could save a few days by traveling to Marseilles by the Blue Train and joining the ship there or on the homeward trip using the train to get home quicker. I remember one homeward voyage on the MODASA when a very pregnant lady got off at Marseilles and was able to greet the ship on our arrival at Tilbury with her new baby in her arms.
I don't suppose the troops had the luxury of the Blue Train but the principle was the same and when sufficient had arrived they were embarked and off we went. On our return it was usual for some seven to ten days to elapse before the next lot were ready for embarkation.
We, and I suppose all the ships, were given a permanent military staff of an 0/C Troops, an Adjutant and supporting other ranks. The first embarkation had, not unnaturally, its teething troubles and fraught moments with nervous horses being led up and down the wrong ramps and so forth. I well remember one Company Commander being torn off a strip by an irate Brass Hat. I don't know what he had done wrong, nor, I suspect, did either he or the Brass Hat, but things seemed to settle down and all our horses and men were safely gathered in.
These were the early days of the war, the phony war it was called, and every one was feeling their way, peace time concepts were hard to shake off, one C/0 had even brought his hounds with him hoping for a little hunting on the side. For our part we had to get used to steaming at full speed in close formation and maintaining good station keeping in all weather conditions, especially at night with no lights except a shaded blue stern light.
Between trips, while waiting in Marseilles, the French authorities posted a Liaison Officer to each ship. On one occasion ours was a Police Inspector from the vice squad, you can imagine that we had some interesting nights ashore with him. Visiting nightspots we would otherwise not have found and being fairly sure we would not be taken advantage of or over charged when in such company.
The countryside around was also interesting and some of us used to go for fairly long walks, one afternoon, in country rather like the Yorkshire moors, we got caught up in a shooting party and were duly reprimanded by several excitable Frenchmen, I suppose we were lucky not to have been shot!
The sailor's church of Notre Dame and the Chateau d'Ife on its little island, the locale for the novel "The man in the iron mask" was well worth visits. I can only remember one street name, Rue Cannabiere, but whether that was a main street or one of those usually visited at night I cannot now say.
This was winter time and even in the Mediterranean there was some pretty rough weather, especially in the Gulf of Lyons. Our escorts included some small pre-war destroyers, one being the HMAS WATERHEN manned by Australians and they often had a tough time keeping up with our 15 knots, arriving in port salt encrusted right up to the tops of the smokestacks. The flotilla leader was a larger and more modern one of, I think, the Hunt class. I wish I could remember her name as I think she featured in some special action later in the war.
HMAS WATERHEN
At Marseilles it was usual, while waiting for our next trip to be moored Mediterranean style, stern on to the quay with anchors out ahead and an embarkation gangway up to the poop. Returning to the ship in the early hours on one occasion we found the mistral blowing strongly and the gangways unusable. Fortunately there was a quayside bistro near by and we were able to sustain ourselves in the bitter wind with hot cafe cognacs until the mistral moderated at daybreak and we were able to board our ship.
At that time I was clean-shaven and used to shave with a cutthroat razor. One morning at sea, shaving thus around the Adams apple area of my throat one of the escorts got a contact and let go a depth charge. That was the end of shaving with a cut- throat; in fact I then grew a beard which lasted until I went on home leave in 1942. However it did not prove popular with my nearest and dearest and lasted only a couple of days before falling before a combined assault by my mother, sister and girl friend, soon to be wife.
There was no opportunity to go ashore in Haifa in the usual way as the ships were turned round as soon as disembarkation had been completed but on one occasion the TALAMBA was delayed for a couple of days by a most unfortunate and tragic accident that cost the life of one of our crew members.
Backing out of the berth with a strong cross wind the headline had to hold her bow up until the last moment so that when it was finally to be cast off the long drift and weight on it was such that it could not be controlled and it took charge and ran out, the bight end, flipping round the bitts, hit the unfortunate lascar who, as one of our best hands was at the scene of action, each time it passed literally pulverising him to death.
As a result of this accident we were delayed by the necessary enquiry and, of course, the burial of the deceased crewman. We heard later that the Pilot was so upset that as a result he retired from piloting.
The main body of troops and horses had been moved, as planned, in four trips by the whole convoy but the TALAMBA was held back to do a final extra run to gather up all the stragglers, troops and horses, that for various reasons had been left behind, and a rag tail bob tail lot they were too, some were convalescing after hospitalisation and most were unattached and separated from their own Officers. I remember talking to the Adjutant on the bridge one afternoon and he pointed out two rather scruffy looking troopers on the fore deck "the only two representatives of a regular regiment on board" he said, "its difficult to maintain discipline when they are separated from their own".
On completion of that fifth trip we, too, made our way independently back to the Indian coast, in our case Rangoon. It had been a pleasant and rather stimulating interlude to usher in what was to prove a long five years of war in which the TALAMBA herself was to be lost, whilst serving as a hospital ship off Sicily in 1943.
KHANDALLA.
R.M.S. KHANDALLA . The Straits Mail, circa 1938
From an original acrylic painting by Richard D. Crow 2004.
©P & O Collection.
Built: 1923 by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson, Ltd, Newcastle.
Tonnage: 7,018 g, 3,289 nt, 6,662 dwt.
Engines: Twin screw, 2 x Triple expansion four cylinder, 7,000 IHP, 16 knots by Builder.
Passengers: 60 1st Class, 68 2nd Class, I,061 Deck.
Launched 16th February 1923, completed 30th May 1923, Yard No. 1124.
Khandalla is a hill pass between Bombay and Poona.
After the TALAMBA my next ship, as 3/0,was an old favourite of mine, the KHANDALLA. When I joined her in Calcutta she was on the peacetime Straits Mail run but after one voyage was diverted to Bombay and went trooping for the next eight months.
I cannot be sure of the exact sequence of voyages but they were all in and around the Indian ocean, with several voyages to Aden and up and down the Red Sea to Suez with Army and Naval personnel and equipment and one trip to East Africa with a company of Abyssinian brigands.
I'm pretty sure that for our first trip we embarked a unit of the Indian Army's Camel Corps at Bombay. The camels were slung in bellybands and hoisted aboard by derrick and lowered into the lower holds. They did not like it one little bit, standing at the hatch coaming during loading operations I received many malevolent glares from irate camels as they were lowered past me. Sand had been spread over the tank tops but a suggestion that pyramids should be painted on the bulkheads to make the lower holds more homely for them was not followed up.
Embarking camels, 1940
The original intention had been to land them at Berbera, but the Italian army had got there first so we had to take them on to a small place in the Red Sea called Gul Mahomed instead.
After disembarking the Camel Corps we returned to Aden to pick up a party of some 600 Abyssinian brigands, commanded by one of the Princes of the Royal house of Haile Selassie, who had been fighting a guerilla war of hit and run skirmishes with the Italian army for some three years. It had been originally planned that we should pick them up in Berbera but when we had not turned up as planned they had managed, with their liaison officer, a very large and charismatic Scots Major from one of the Highland Regiments, to make their way over to Aden.
They were an amazing bunch of people, men women and children. No uniforms as such and a motley collection of weapons ranging from modern rifles to old muzzle loaders, swords and, in one case, and I do not lie, a wooden club with nails stuck in it the owner himself wearing an old and battered bowler hat. It's facile to be facetious about such an outfit but take it from me they were an outstanding fighting unit with a unique standard of self-discipline. Each and every one of them was alive and alert as, of course, they had had to be to survive dodging around the Italian army in the mountains for three years.
Take this example, after embarkation I went round the entire troop decks with the Scots Major and read out some quite simple standing orders, blackout, drinking water, cooking facilities etc. These were translated by one of their officers and then after a short pause the Major would pick out one of them at random and say "Repeat those orders". In each case in every troop deck they were correctly and accurately repeated back. Can you imagine that degree of attention in any normal body of men?
After embarkation in Aden a roll call had been held and it was discovered that they had acquired an extra woman along the way. Each of the Company Commanders claimed her but the Prince settled all arguments by pulling rank and putting her in his own company.
We took them down to Mombasa where they were going to be entrained up to the Northern Province and thus back in to their own country by the back door. There was a two day delay while rolling stock was being assembled for their train so the Major said, we must not let them get too slack, lets have a route march. Without more ado or prior warning they were ordered to evacuate the ship. Within less than five minutes they were all, all 600 men, women and children off the ship and out of sight. An amazing demonstration of corporate initiative and discipline engendered, no doubt, by three years of guerilla war against the Italians.
On another visit to Aden the port was bombed by the Italian air force from, I presume, Massawa. Fortunately their aim was poor and they bombed Little Aden across the way by mistake but, with all the naval ships in port blazing away it was quite a noisy and lively night. Heading north up the Red Sea the convoy was again high level bombed off Perim Island. I can still see our Captain Dudley Barling, who had a reputation for being sensitive to Mackinnon's office directives, on the bridge happily watching the aircraft from under his tin hat and saying to the Chief Officer "if they hit us the Office can't blame me"
Later on, abreast of Port Sudan, two RAF Beaufighters buzzed the convoy. I think every ship in the convoy had a go. A French passenger ship in the centre column was blazing away despite repeating the Commodore's flag signal "the aircraft in sight are friendly". Apparently her Captain had been bombed before and was taking no chances!
On one return trip from Suez we, with our sister ship KAROA were at the back of a painfully slow 5-knot convoy. After several very tedious days we were both told to stand by to join a 15-knot convoy at midnight. The KHANDALLA was an old ship by then and had probably not done that speed for years but the Captain and Chief Engineer decided to give it a go. Just before midnight the fast convoy hove in sight, big North Atlantic liners, the Empress of Britain amongst them.
I think our 3/EO on watch must have had a stoker at every furnace with a shovelful of coal because when the order "give her the gun" was given a huge gout of smoke rose out of the funnel and blacked out the whole convoy including the escort HMAS HOBART who duly reprimanded us for making too much smoke!
Having successfully joined them we were able, by the skin of our teeth and by cutting corners in the zigzags, to hang on to the back of the fast convoy until it had cleared the entrance to the Red Sea when we were released to proceed independently to Bombay.
My eight months in the KHANDALLA saw the end of the first full year of war and by now we had all become more or less accustomed to wartime conditions and regarded convoys and steaming at night without lights as more or less the norm.
It must have been easier for we junior officers to adapt than for the Masters and other senior officers as they had a much longer background of peacetime experience behind them. It is probably true to say that many junior officers rather enjoyed the additional interests of convoys, station keeping etc., at least in the eastern theatre of war where conditions were generally better and the dangers from the enemy less at that time.
After a couple of months in the BARALA on the Slow Gulf run I was appointed as 3/O to the TALMA.
TALMA.
Built: 1923 by R&W Hawthorn, Leslie & Co. Ltd., Hebburn.
Tonnage: 10,000 g, 6,154 nt, 9,416 dwt.
Engine: Single screw, Quadruple expansion, 4 cylinder, 5,000 IHP, 13 knots, by Builder.
Passengers: 60 1st Class, 74 2nd Class, 3,136 Deck, 220 Crew.
Launched 14th June, completed 13th September 1923, Yard No. 529.
Talma is a village in Faridpur District, East Bengal, now Bangladesh.
The TALMA was trooping, initially, up the Persian Gulf where nothing of great interest happened except that on one occasion when entering the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf the convoy was brought to a sudden and confused halt by the orders of a local naval patrol ship stationed there.
A young Lieutenant from her boarded us; apparently he thought we might have some mail for him. He was taken up to the bridge, where he was confronted with the convoy's Commodore, a choleric retired R.N. Admiral. The Admiral did not repeat himself once, by all accounts, in a ten-minute tirade after which the shell-shocked young man tried to disembark by climbing over the wing of the bridge. Taken gently by the hand he was led down to the fore deck where his ship's launch awaited him at the foot of the pilot ladder.
On one occasion when we were in Bombay two large North Atlantic liners the MAURETANIA and NIEUW AMSTERDAM, arrived with troops from the Antipodes. They were too large to berth alongside and had to anchor off in the stream. The TALMA, one of the largest BI ships , all two funnels and ten thousand tons of her, was ordered to go alongside them and act as their tender ( Oh the shame of it ! ) to ferry their troops ashore to Ballard Pier.
MAURETANIA TROOPING
Reproduced with the kind permission of the Australian War Memorial Collection Database. ©
When alongside them the huge difference in size became very apparent, they simply loomed over us.
This was exemplified when I was sent aboard the NIEUW AMSTERDAM with my Captain's compliments to her 0/C troops and the request that he order the New Zealand troops on the upper decks to refrain from tossing their empty cigarette tin down our funnels (Query to our Mistri Sahibs. What would happen to the tins, would they lodge in the uptakes somewhere, burn up in the furnace or roll out on to the stokehold deck when the furnace door was opened? )
NIEUW AMSTERDAM
Reproduced with the kind permission of the Australian War Memorial Collection Database. ©
Insult was later added to injury when one bright lad tied his tin to a length of string and, throwing it over our whistle lanyard, proceeded to blow a tune on our whistle
My last memory of them is of the Chief Officer of MAURETANIA bemoaning the fact that they were to return to Australia in a SLOW convoy of only 20 knots
After some months on the Gulf run the TALMA was switched to the Bay of Bengal where we embarked, at Madras, units of the Indian army. I seem to remember they might have been the Rajputani Rifles but am not sure of the name, anyway I don't think any of them had ever seen the sea before as they appeared quite transfixed by the view from the breakwater. We were part of a sizeable convoy so quite a large number of troops were involved which is a great pity as they were landed at Penang shortly before the Malay peninsular was over run by the Japanese army and so most of them must have ended up as P o W's, a sad end to many young men's careers.
After the TALMA I had some six months or so in the ORNA, doing another trip up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal zone where gangs of London Dockers masquerading as the Pioneer Corps off loaded our cargo of military equipment at Ismalliah. This was followed by a trip to Australia with a full cargo of dates (some 470,000 boxes) from Basra for the Australian Christmas market.
Guncrews, 1942
On the passage to Australia, during an afternoon watch in the southern part of the Indian Ocean I sighted what I thought was an aircraft in the western sky, the alarm was sounded and we all went to our stations, mine, as gunnery officer, to the 4 inch gun on the poop. It was only after some ten or fifteen minutes that those on the bridge were able to establish that it was not an aircraft but the planet Venus which, with the wind blowing light clouds across it, appeared to be moving at speed.
It was not unreasonable to suppose that we had sighted a reconnaisance aircraft as it was known that German commerce raiders were operating in that part of the Indian Ocean, indeed the Australian cruiser HMAS SYDNEY had disappeared without trace in those very same waters barely a month earlier ( although, of course, we did not know that at the time) presumed sunk in an engagement with the German raider KORMORAN.
Later, on the day we were due to arrive in Adelaide, (it was Christmas Eve) at 0400 hours while the Chief Officer and I were handing over the watch we sighted, on the southern horizon, silhouetted against the sky, a large ship heading westward. Fortunately for us we,being deeply laden with a low profile and the loom of the land behind us would not have been visible to her. In accordance with wartime custom the C/O made an entry about the sighting in the log and I supplemented it with a rough sketch of the silhouette. The ship disappeared astern and we thought no more of it. On arrival in Adelaide, however, when the Captain reported to the Naval Authorities it caused quite a stir as no ship of that description should have been there. The C/O and I had to go to Naval H.Q. and view various pictures of enemy ships and it was generally agreed that the silhouette fitted the description of a German raider that was thought to have sailed from a Japanese safe haven recently. The port was closed as a precaution while mine sweepers swept the approaches in case she had been mine laying and we enjoyed a two day Christmas holiday in port at Adelaide.
On returning from Australia I was posted to the GHARINDA as 2/0 for passage home for my overdue U.K. home leave.
VARELA.
©P&O Collection
Built:1914 by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd., Newcastle.
Tonnage: 4,645 g, 1,932 nt, 5,160 dwt.
Engines: Twin screw, 2 x Triple expansion, 4,700 IHP, 14.75 knots by Builder.
Passengers: 32 1st Class, 24 2nd Class, 1,292 Deck.
Launched 27th March 1914, completed 28th May 1914, Yard No. 930.
Varela is a Cape in southern Indo China, now Vietnam.
Having acquired my Master's certificate and a wife, in that order, I returned from home leave and served in several ships, including the Empire Tugela for a long nine months voyage that included visits to South Africa, South America, the U.K. and North America before returning to India. I was then appointed, as 2/0, to the VARELA and was engaged in trooping in her for the next two years or so. The VARELA was, initially, in the Bay of Bengal supporting the troops in Burma , places such as Chittagong, Akyab, Kyauk Pyu, Rangoon and, on the Indian side,Vizagapatam and Madras, appear in my Routier and other notes.
We were then, early in 1946, switched to the Bombay side and did some eighteen or so trips up and down the Persian Gulf, firstly taking the P & I Force (Persia & Iraq) up to Basra and then, when the disturbances there had settled down, bringing them out again.
Impromtu concert on the Forehatch, at sea Persian Gulf April 1946.
The war was well over by now and these latter trips were almost back to peacetime conditions, but not entirely, as we knew them pre-war.
In those pre-war days, the B.I. had it's own uniform livery but during the war, in order to avoid confusion and fall into line with normal naval custom, the standard Merchant Navy insignia was adopted. Likewise the usual Naval tropical uniform of white shorts, stockings and shirts with epaulettes became the normal "rig of the day" even on the most prestigious of passenger and troop ships. Prior to the war, indeed right up to 1939, it was the custom to wear, on deck, full whites, No. 10's, long white trousers and a tunic type jacket buttoned in front right up to the neck. This was expected, even on the old "G" class cargo ships, humping rice and coal around the Indian coast.
Richard in No. 10s, Pre-war 1938 Richard and the Radio Officer,
in shirt and shorts, war-time, 1941.
To go back even further, When I joined the Company in 1932 one of the items of equipment specified for new cadets was an old fashioned Solar Topee, as now worn by Royal Marine Bandsmen on parade. I can remember wearing mine only once, helping the 2/0 to tally mail bags in a lighter at Aden on a very hot afternoon. In 1942 when 2/0 and responsible for the gunnery in the ORNA I indented on the naval stores at Suez for solar topees for the use of DEMS gunners standing watch on steel gun decks in the heat of the Red Sea, to be told they were no longer available and were not necessary anyway.
Apart from matters of dress and protocol the war had poised many more fundamental problems for the peacetime Merchant Navy. Naval control and routing instructions, sailing in close company in convoys with the attendant problems of station keeping, manouevring and signaling, and, of course, the blackout, steaming in or out of convoy at night without lights.
Individuals instinctive reaction to sudden situations will always be influenced by their training and experiences, in this respect, the Merchant Navy differed significantly from the Royal Navy.
Once, in the Indian Ocean during the South West monsoon, I sighted a large black hulk close ahead in the troughs of the seas, my immediate reaction, as a peace time Merchant Navy Officer, was to avoid it, which I did and watched a dead whale pass by close to the starboard side. If I had been Royal Navy trained and fresh from escort duty in the North Atlantic my reaction might well have been to ram it in case it was a U boat!
I am not competent to speculate on any of the modern aids to navigation, never having sailed with any.
A few years ago I had the nostalgic pleasure of taking an Indian Ocean cruise in a ship called the Royal Star. Sailing from Mombasa and calling at Zanzibar, the Mafia archipelago, Comoro Islands, Madagascar, Reunion, Mauritius and ending at the Seychelles. As an ancient Master Mariner the Captain very kindly invited me up to the bridge where he and his Navigator proceeded to baffle me with science and all their latest gadgets and wonders of satellite navigation.
A far cry from the old days of the three L's, LOG, LEAD, and LOOKOUT!
Go to Richard Crow's transition to Pilot.