“Q” Boat Captain Now Tug Hand

Taranaki Daily News, 13 October 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

“Q” Boat Captain Now Tug Hand

HARD FOR* RESERVISTS TO FIND EMPLOYMENT AT HOME

'PHIS STORY is one of the saddest X of all the uncounted tragedies that men of the British Merchant Service have endured since the shipping slump laid up so many British merchantmen.

It concerns a Royal Naval Reserve officer who commanded a “Q” boat during the war and sank at least one German submarine. Now he is a deck-hand in a tugboat (writes Montague Smith in the Daily Mail”). , x ... Yes, and glad indeed to get the £ z a week wages which that job brings. He has a wife and two children to .keep in what was once a well-furn-ished home in West Hartlepool. He asked me not to give his name, but I have seen his papers and can vouch for all the facts of this story. Before the war he was an officer in ships of the Ellerman Hall Line. As a Royal Naval Reservist he joined the Fleet on the outbreak of war, and was eventually appointed to command the “Q” boat Mollina, with 70 men under him. This was at a time when the camouflaged <4 boats were a surprise to the enemy. From “Q” boat' commander tne next step was to first lieutenant in H.M.S. Ramillies, in which he served

until May 1919. Then he came home and disillusionment began. “I found,” he said, “that all the men who were too young to serve m the Navy during the war were m the Merchant Service jobs, and, of course, they stayed there. But I got a few posts as a ship’s officer, and the last was in command of a tanker. When the world' trade slump came this was laid up in New York in January 1932. “I do not want to remember much of the next two years. I had six weeks’ work as a temporary clerk at an employment exchange, and for a time I tried to sell vacuum cleaners. “The home we had built up went bit by bit. We sold furniture for food.' We had to live somehow, the wife and children and I. “You can understand that even to a man with a clean record who can still command a ship it was something to be offered £2 a week as a deckhand in a tug. I jumped at the chance.” i I wish I could add a happy postscript to-this story, but the fact is that the work of the tugboat, in which my friend ,is now a deckhand is nearly finished, and former Naval officers are not supposed to draw the dole.