NavyNet - 'Signalman Jones' by Tim Parker

“ … Wet and worry about our ways--
Panic, onset and flight--
Had us in charge for a thousand days
And thousand-year-long night.

We saw more than the nights could hide--
More than the waves could keep--
And--certain faces over the side
Which do not go from our sleep.

We were more tired than words can tell
While the pied craft fled by,
And the swinging mounds of the Western swell
Hoisted us Heavens-high…”

-

Kipling, “The Changelings”

Which, although written as a tribute to the RNVR officers in the Kaiser’s War, applies equally to their successors in landing craft, coastal forces and the Battle of the Atlantic a quarter of a century later.

Geoffrey Holder-Jones, born in 1915, was one of these. Fortuitously Tim Parker (only 18 years his junior) met him in 2008 at a dinner at Lancing College to mark its wartime use as HMS King Alfred, in which role it produced twenty thousand RNVR officers, mostly selected from Hostilities-Only ratings. Parker was so enthralled by Jones’ dits that he embarked on a project to bring Jones’ story for publication (in 2010), and now we are the beneficiaries. I asked for a copy for review after seeing the book mentioned in Jones’ obituary in November 2011. The book is written as if it were Jones’ autobiography. Parker was also RNVR and did his National Service in the Navy and so is able to serve up the story without a single solecism, which makes for easy reading.

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Jones was already an enthusiastic RNVR signalman when the war started, having joined as a weekend sailor in 1933 to mitigate the misery of a demeaning and boring job in a Liverpool drapery store. Dissuaded from a commission before the war because survival in the Mersey Division wardroom depended on having a fairly lavish private income, in the changed circumstances of war he was so selected and trained in 1940-1. By then he had been awarded a DSM and had experienced the shock and horrors of his ship being mined. I will not recapitulate or pré cis his stories as that would spoil them, but they are recounted with a self-effacing modesty which hides the fear, horror and sheer fatigue of life at sea on the heaving bosom of the Atlantic - which I why I have topped this review with that piece of Kipling. As a taster though he was involved in the capture of the U-boat that was eventually commissioned as HMS Graph.

As an officer Jones spent nearly all his time in armed anti-submarine trawlers, rising rapidly (and by accident) to Command in 1942. Technically he was clearly a natural ship-handler and a sound seaman, and more importantly he must have proved a natural leader, for his crews included hard fisher folk who would have needed quite different handling from HO conscripts on board a battleship. The book thus brings us the story of these largely unsung little ships, and in this we have a valuable insight into a somewhat obscure corner of the war at sea. The American who asked Jones if he had really crossed the Atlantic in ‘that thing’ said it all really. The trawlers’ part in trying to keep the U-boats at bay while America was still sailing ships independently up its east coast, brilliantly back-lit from shore, did the whole world a service. Weird odd jobs also came their way and no little truly appalling weather, of a severity that can perhaps only be truly appreciated by those who have had the good fortune to enjoy the same. The trawlers themselves are so small and obscure that they have even escaped mention in Janes’ WW2 compendium.

After the war, and a brief spell chipping paint off Brighton pier for a bigger wage than he had received to command an HM ship in war, Jones became a teacher and for 22 years a head, surely to the immense benefit of an entire generation of children in Portslade and, later, Hove. He was also a key player in the Sussex RNVR where his experience and leadership must have been invaluable - until his professional duties made this too difficult.

It is our blessing that this variety of adventures was visited on a natural raconteur with an unfailing ability to see the funny side, often of rather dire events. I found this a hugely enjoyable and also educational book and for a tenner, it’s any sailor’s stocking filler. Five anchors.

Seaweed