Coincidences

A.P, FLETCHER

WARTIME EXPERIENCES SEPTEMBER 1939 TO MAY 1948

In 1937 my father’s work took him to Rugby from South Wigston near Leicester and I completed my secondary education at the local grammar school there. I left the school at the age of sixteen and enrolled as an electrical engineering apprentice with the British Thompson Huston Company at its local works, a company world renowned for the wide range of electrical equipment it produced.

The day after I joined the Second World War broke out and the recent threat of war had brought government orders for a range of products for the armed forces. However, this had no effect on the apprentice training and on my course we continued to work a forty eight hour week, which included an afternoon at the local technical college, which we also attended on three evenings. Homework was done of course, but we still found time to take part in team games on Saturday afternoons and go to the pub, the cinema, or the dance hall or all three on Saturday evenings. Many of us also did Home Guard training and exercises on Sundays.

As the war progressed, with so many men in the armed services, manpower became a problem in the agricultural community at harvest time and the company arranged for apprentices who wished to take their annual holidays on farms, and in August 1943 four of us decided to do this and went by train and bus to a farm near Petersfield in Hampshire. Here we found we were to help bring in the wheat harvest. We were to sleep in bell tents, have breakfast and dinner in a barn and cut lunches on the job.
When we settled down we found, to our surprise that we were going to operate in a gang with four girls of our own age, who normally worked in government offices in nearby Southampton. Farming at that time was not nearly as mechanised as it is today and our job was to get the wheat that had been cut, bound into bundles and stacked onto wagons. The wagons were then taken alongside a steam driven machine where the bundles were passed up to a platform from where the threshing cutters were hand fed.
Before we started operations we were told to work in twos so each of the girls paired with one of our group and as things turned out we not only worked together, but also dined in the barn together, lunched together and sometimes went to the pub at night together. Thus we got to know each other very well, and after thirteen days, when we broke up Marjorie Lane, my work partner and I, as did our colleagues parted with some happy memories.

Two months after returning to work I learned that I had passed the final examination that qualified me as a professional electrical engineer so I applied to the company to let me cut my five year apprenticeship by six months so I could join the navy and go to sea. The company was willing but the RN, it turned out, would have used my services to inspect and test radar, anti- mine anti-submarine equipment as it was installed in vessels being built or overhauled in the nation’s shipyards. However, by chance I had a brother in the army based in Liverpool who had friend whose father had merchant navy connections and his influence resulted in my joining in April 1944, a cargo ship named the Port Dunedin in Glasgow, and in early May we left for a six month return trip to New Zealand.

Our first port of call was New York, followed by Panama, to both of which we sailed in convoy. Lastly we sailed unaccompanied to Wellington in New Zealand taking a southern circle route and we returned to UK in like manner. We had guns fore and aft and two naval gunners to man these, but we were perhaps lucky that at this time the Japanese had serious problems in the Pacific elsewhere and we were able to return to UK with our ship undamaged and our cargo of frozen meat fully intact. I then joined the crew of a French liner the” Pasteur” which had been commandeered by the Canadians when France fell and converted into a troopship. It was now being used to bring service men from New York and Halifax in Nova Scotia to Liverpool to reinforce the troops in Europe, After doing eight such trips, including one up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, in June 1995, the war in Europe ended and with the English Channel quickly cleared of mines we started returning troops to North America with Southampton the port of embarkation. On the first visit to our new home port,a brother officer, Norman Jackson who knew it well suggested that as it was a Saturday we should put on our best uniforms and go to an hotel he knew where there was a restaurant and dance floor where there would certainly be an orchestra on Saturday night. So we went along and heard the music when we entered the foyer so made our way to the bar where we had a good view of the dancing. After ordering drinks and talking to the barman for a couple of minutes the lights were lowered for a waltz and when we turned round to view the dancing a well dressed, well groomed, young lady approached us and turning to me said “Tony Fletcher, how lovely to see you again, won’t you come and join our party?. The young lady was my former farming partner Marjorie Lane.
That the very first girl I met in Southampton on my first night ashore there should be the partner from my working holiday in Hampshire two years before was undoubtedly a strange coincidence. The hotel where we met was not one that Marjorie frequented, the ships arrival on that particular day was determined by the rate of minesweeping in the English channel and my shipmate Norman Jackson, who knew of the Hotel, only happened to be free that evening by chance. What a coincidence. I saw quite a lot of Marjorie Lane and family when I was in port and I played a lot of tennis with her brothers. However if we class this coincidence as strange then the one I was involved in later that year was extraordinary.

It all came about as a result of the decision to hand the SS Pasteur back to its French owners. We made five more trips, all from Southampton, when the British crew disembarked for the last time. I was now given a choice. I could join a cargo ship about to go to New Zealand via the Suez Canal or join another troopship, probably on the North Atlantic run. I chose the former because I could expect five months of summer in the southern hemisphere. This appealed to me more than a second winter in the North Atlantic.

With the Japanese war now over, I joined the Paparoa in Tilbury docks at the beginning of October 1945. It was a 7,000 ton vessel and from the UK would carry various manufactured goods including machine tools, vehicles, textiles and scotch whiskey, and would return with other food products. It was equipped with a refrigerating plant for this purpose.

Outward bound we had a very good run, stopping only at Port Said to put ashore a sick apprentice and at Aden to refuel. We made landfall in Auckland on Christmas day. We docked around 10am and normally we would have prepared the derricks, winches and holds for unloading. However because it was a holiday all, bar a skeleton crew, were given the day off. Almost all the crew wanted to go to town in the evening so the Captain decided that the traditional Christmas dinner should be served at lunchtime. I was quite happy with this arrangement but was diverted from it when the second engineer asked me if I would accompany him to a tennis party with a local family, to which he had just been invited. I was not at all keen, but he pleaded that I was his only hope of taking someone who knew something about tennis, so I agreed. On what was a warm sunny afternoon I soon found myself in a taxi bound for the home of a Mr and Mrs Savage.

We arrived by taxi at a large wooden house about 4 miles away to find about 20 adults sitting on deck chairs on the lawn or playing ball in a corner of the garden with a number of children. Beyond the lawn a tennis match was in progress. We were offered ice tea and introduced to a number of the guests including Toni the daughter of the house. After a while we were invited to play a doubles match and Toni offered to be my partner. After about 20 minutes we were interrupted by a rain shower and so went into the house for tea. We, the tennis players, were the last into the house. By now the dining room was full so Toni told me to take my plate of food through to the living room and she would follow with the cups of tea. I was soon joined by and attractive middle aged lady with the cups of tea. She introduced herself as Mrs Savage and apologised for not greeting me earlier, but pointing at her apron, explained she had been busy preparing all the food. She then asked me where I came from in England. I replied that, unlike most sailors who come from ports, I was born in a small inland town she would never have heard of, South Wigston in Leicestershire. She gasped and asked, “Is your mother Connie Fletcher?” I replied “Yes Constance”. Mrs Savage then told me she knew my mother well. The Savages had come to Auckland from South Wigston eighteen years before. At this point she opened the draw of the sideboard and bought out some photographs. One was of a South Wigston Mothers Union garden party held in the summer of 1926. The mothers were hard to recognise because of the floppy hats covering their eyes but sure enough Mrs Savage and my mother were there and you could just pick out Toni and myself sitting amongst the 3 years olds on the front row. I had come across the what, almost certainly must have been the only photo of me in New Zealand and probably the whole Southern Hemisphere.

The series of events the lead up to this coincidence are incredible. Had Mrs Savage not bought the tea through to me, had it not been Christmas Day when we arrived in Auckland, had my shipmate not been invited to the party, had he not thought of inviting me, had the Pasteur had been handed over on a different day or had a chosen a different ship to the Paparoa, this amazing coincidence would never have happened.

After loading we returned to New York. Even though it was April 1946 and I had only signed up for the duration of the war, I was not allowed to leave the Merchant Navy because of the shortage of officers. I signed on a tramp steamer, the Tweedbank and did four more trips round the world. I finally returned to the UK on the Queen Mary, but as a passenger this time from New York, in May 1948, which is when my war finally finished.

I am still in touch with Marjorie who lives in the Southampton area and still have a photo of the South Wigston mothers union, tough it is not of good enough quality to scan in.

Tony Fletcher

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