Away Seaboat: Personal memoirs of Captain Charls Wickham Malins DSO DSC RN

Song

PROLOGUE

As the old saying goes, Life should be lived looking forward and not looking back, and the other day, while gossiping in the kitchen one of my daughters said "What did you do in the war. Dad? You never talk about it. This chance remark set me thinking What have I actually done with my life?" Perhaps I ought to have a look back before Anno Domini takes its toll of the memory, if only for the interest of future generations who may one day wonder what their grandfather may have done with his, as I have sometimes wondered about mine and wished they had left some sort of record.

There is a proverb to the effect that A life of love is better than a love of life and I am indeed fortunate to have had both. But it will not be about the former that I now write. That, if she is ever moved to do so, must be left to my much beloved partner, who, having kept family diaries and letters more or less consistently throughout our married life will be able to make a much better job of it than I can.

EARLY DAYS

Life for me began on 15th May 1913 at 2 Inglis Road, Ealing, a small semi-detached house in which my father had lived before his marriage in 1910 with his brother Arthur and sister Millicent who, to the end of their lives remained unmarried. What little I know about my Malins forbears is contained in a family tree, compiled after a visit in 1954 to see the parish records in the village of Deddington near Oxford where they came from, with such portraits as exist in a drawer of my desk. My father was born in 1865, and knew very few of his relatives until after his father’s death in 1926 when a number of them got in touch with him. His father was born in 1834 in Deddington where his grandfather was said to have had a prosperous business making hunting boots for the gentry. He died in 1888 leaving a large family of eight, of which my grandfather was the eldest son. My grandfather went to Stratford-on-Avon Grammar School, and by 1860 was teaching at a school in Hastings (possibly Summerfields) where he met and married in 1863 Elizabeth Green, the elder daughter of a brewer in Lydd on Romney Marsh. In those days you could not prosper in the teaching profession unless you were in Holy Orders so, with financial help from the Greens, he went to King’s College, London and later entered the Church.

My father received the main part of his education from his father, then a Curate in Islington, where his younger brother suffered from rickets. This prompted my grandfather to move his family into the country where he obtained a living, as it was called, as Rector of two small parishes in Suffolk, Hoo and Leatheringham where I believe one of his last acts was to marry the parents of the Miss Blumfields of Shawland Farm, Catsfield, and whose mother he probably also taught. As a boy, my father used to walk six miles to Woodbridge for his music lessons and used to play, while his brother pumped, the Church organ for their father. After completing his education my father went as a young man to seek his fortune in London, where he then had a rich and prosperous Uncle married to his mother’s sister, living in some style in Westbourne Terrace with, I believe, a coach and horses.

George Lipscombe made his pile trading generally in Singapore, and was by then retired. They had no children so more or less adopted my father whom they ordered to appear from time to time for a proper Sunday lunch. He was always reticent about it but I presume he must have lived a carefree life as a bachelor until his marriage at the age of forty five to my mother whom I believe he met on the golf course at Frinton in Essex, where my mother’s father had a summer residence and I spent some of my childhood in World War I. It was while there one day we saw a Zeppelin attacked by fighters. By then my father had become Secretary to a number of companies trading mainly in India and overseas, and when the Chartered Institute of Secretaries was formed, he became one of its first members, eventually being elected a Fellow. About 1900, thinking that his father had been buried long enough in deep country, my father bought the advowson of Somersham, a village which has now become a suburb of Ipswich, to which he appointed his father rector. There were no pensions in those days for the clergy, and his last sermon was said to have been preached shortly before he died at the age of 91. My father always claimed he was an excellent preacher but nobody knows how many people formed his congregation. I don’t remember ever meeting my grandfather who it was said owed his longevity to his housekeeper one Annie Noller, who fed him entirely on porridge. He was buried with my grandmother in Tunbridge Wells where she had died in 1911, while on holiday taking the waters with the Lipscombes. Their grave, alongside an opulent granite cross over that of the Lipscombes, is unmarked because my grandfather had a strong dislike for untidy and untended graveyards.

My mother was born in 1883? Her father worked all his life as a wharfinger in London at Bull and Brookes Wharf in Upper Thames Street, his forbears had also been connected with the Church. My mother’s mother came from a large family of Quakers in Northumberland called Mounsey. My great grandmother was said to have been accidentally killed when her shawl caught in the machinery of her husband’s mill in Sunderland while inspecting the works one Sunday after church.

My mother had no idea how, at a very early age, I acquired the nick-name Ticky. It is obviously a derivative of Wickham, but just how it got so shortened will ever remain a mystery. As a little boy my father used to call me Tick-Wick and it can only be assumed that either my elder brother, or perhaps my mother, took it further. I never remember being called anything else at home, although the name embarrassed me greatly at school and during my early years in the Navy, where it only generally came to be used by my friends in later life.

My father was too old to serve in the forces in World War I, except in various civil defence posts, and by the time my sister Gulie appeared on the scene in 1917 we had moved to a larger house in Ealing called Rosslyn, in Gunnersbury Avenue. All my earliest memories are centred there, muffin men, cars with gas bags on their roofs, Zeppelin raids, an allotment, outings on bicycles, church, school and bell-ringing, with a never to be forgotten enormous public bonfire on Hangar Hill to mark the Armistice in 1918. For our summer holiday in 1920 my parents rented the vicarage, Compton, Berks, whither we had gone by train with cot and nanny for my newly born brother Robert, and which was some seventeen years later to become our family home.

At the age of eight I was sent to join my elder brother Sam at a Preparatory School in Kent where he had gone two years earlier. After a summer holiday that year at Wimeraux in Northern France, I clearly remember returning to Dover on board the cross-channel steamer in fog. Thrilled to the core at the experience, I was running madly all over the ship making a great deal of noise and, no doubt, a nuisance of myself, when the Captain, leaning over the bridge rails, sternly rebuked my father. If you can keep that small boy quiet, I might be able to hear the fog signal and get this bloody ship into Dover Harbour. I feel that voice from God on High so impressed me that I decided there and then my life should be spent at sea.

When I was about nine my parents moved from Ealing to a newly built half-timbered house near Godalming, from where my father could commute by steam train to London, curiously called Minster Barn after I believe the farm from which its oak timbers had been salvaged. It was lucky I knew this as some four years later it was to become the only question I now remember being asked by an Admiral at my interview for the Navy; I see my boy you live in a barn, why is that? The property had a large adjoining field where, besides dogs, my mother kept a variety of animals, chickens, ducks, pigs and for a time goats which we used to milk. I kept ferrets. My elder brother was mad keen on carpentry and cricket so my father hired a steam roller to make a cricket ground for his so-called Minster Barn Cricket Club, on which in the winter and Easter holidays we also played hockey. There was a disused sand quarry at the far end of our field in which as small children we often played, camped and picnicked, where one afternoon I clearly remember treading on a wasps’ nest with bare feet and running like hell some 400 yards to the house, screaming at the top of my voice.

During one summer holiday, when I was about eleven, a family with two boys and a girl exactly our ages rented the house opposite where their mother sadly died in childbirth. Thus began my lifelong friendship with Peter Hogg who, even in those days, had an extensive knowledge of and passion for birds while I was mainly interested in animals. Peter had a powerful air rifle and many were the excursions we made together including his slaughter one by one of a covey of partridges feeding in a neighbour’s field. Our house was not very large so my parents built a playroom in the garden, known to us as The Little House covered by a very strong rambling rose (of which I still have a cutting) where we could make as much noise and mess as we liked. Later as a teen-ager, when my brother had gone to University in Germany, I took over one end which had until then been the carpenters shop as My Cabin and often slept there on my own. Wireless, as Radio was then called, was all the rage and the only pastime my brother and I shared in common. We used to spend much of our pocket money and time in the evenings constructing first crystal sets with headphones, the big thrill being to listen to 2 L.O. the forerunner of the B.B.C. and as things advanced we built multi-valved sets with loud speakers. A neighbour down the road with the improbable name of Fudger had a powerful set with which he could receive America, an ambition we never achieved. I think our hobby amazed our parents as much as children today astonish theirs with microelectronics and computers, but we actually had to construct our sets with the parts which we bought. We did all our shopping in Godalming, which we frequently visited on our bicycles involving a long walk up Charterhouse hill on the way home.

Having the Public School of Charterhouse only a short distance away, gave us a large circle of friends of our own ages and we never lacked for activities in the holidays. We could also use many of the facilities a large boarding school has to offer and without much difficulty could make up teams for games, particularly for mixed hockey and lacrosse. Peter Hogg’s aunt and cousins lived near the school so we often met in the holidays when he had gone to Sherborne. Among my special local friends were Adrian Somerset-Ward and his sister Julian, who later married Lance Finch, another local lad who had gone to Dartmouth a year before me and to whom I was best man when they married in 1938. Adrian married Peggy Tuckwell, whose large family lived down the road in Puttenham and another friend, Pat Jobson, was later to become my brother in law. Taken all together Godalming was in those days a grand place in which to grow up and little wonder I had serious reservations when, some years later while I was serving in the East Indies, my parents decided to move their home to Berkshire.

My Preparatory School, Wootton Court near Canterbury was in an idyllic country setting, and run on scouting principles. The fields and woods, the games, roller skating and the country pursuits we followed were all great fun, but the teaching was, I fancy, barely adequate. At one time I set up as a mole catcher, selling pelts in the village for a shilling, but had difficulty in getting the alum for curing them properly. At the age of thirteen, on account of my poor ability in Latin, (I could never see the point of learning a dead language), I failed to pass the Common Entrance into Marlborough, where my brother had already gone. As a result of this disappointment I decided public school was not for me, and that I would try the navy instead, where no Latin was required, or if that failed, the Merchant Navy. After pointing out to me what a life at sea would involve for a boy of 13, my father sent me for a term to a Crammer at Littlestone in Kent from where I passed both the interview and the Civil Service Exam for