http://tinyurl.com/lrmsweb http://www.angelfire.com/home/hmsfiji/ _____________________________________________________________________________ \\\\\___LIVERPOOL RETIRED MERCHANT SEAFARERS___\"-._ /////~~~ HISTORY MARITIME LIVERPOOL ~~~/.-' _____________________________________________________________________________ REMINISCENCES OF RETIRED MERCHANT SEAMAN JACK BROTHERIDGE _____________________________________________________________________________ Jack Brotheridge was awarded the Freedom of the City of Liverpool View this Document Here: http://lrms.bravepages.com/brotheridgefreedom.jpg _____________________________________________________________________________ RIP John Lewis BROTHERIDGE 1920 - 2018 Daily Post (Liverpool, England) Date: Nov 11, 2006 Remembering all of our heroes; As the nation dons poppies, a Battle of the Atlantic veteran, whose father served in both world wars, tells David Charters why we should never forget the Merchant Navy. _____________________________________________________________________________ Byline: David Charters YOU have to remember the mothers, those dear old mums with white handkerchiefs, whose chins always puckered and trembled a little, however brave they tried to be. Through clouded eyes, they watched their smiling sons go away to fight the war and halt the crazy ambitions of Mr Hitler and his puffed-up pal Mussolini. To the women waiting at home, the young men in the smart uniforms were always their boys and they stayed young forever, frozen in the memory, like photographs on mantel-pieces. One such mother was Minnie Reeves, a former servant girl, who had married John Brotheridge, an adventurous chap, prepared to take chances in life. But he had seen some terrible things during his service with the Royal Navy in the Great War, which you wouldn't talk about. Now another war had started and Minnie was standing at the Alexandra Dock, Bootle, waving off their son, Jack. He had joined the Merchant Navy as a carpenter. Minnie had watched him grow into a strong and handsome fellow. But, at that moment, Jack was her little boy again. And she threw a parcel towards his ship, the 2,000-ton Mardinian. "You'll need this," she called. A comrade caught the parcel. Everyone looked. "What's in it?" they all asked. The answer was a bottle of "opening" medicine to protect the inexperienced stomach against the torments of constipation, yet another peril of the sea, or the ship's food. "I got some ribbing over that," recalls Jack, 86, as he rubs the poppy in the buttonhole of his Donegal tweed jacket. It is just a tiny story from a huge war. But we should never forget the little stories because they tell of the people who were there when it mattered. This morning at 11 - the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month - Britain will remember the Armistice which ended the First World War. Tomorrow is, of course, Remembrance Sunday, dedicated to those who lost their lives in both world wars and all subsequent conflicts. In this season of brown and curling leaves, when the grass is wet and the mud squelches underfoot in the cemeteries, we are united in our thoughts by the poppy, lying vivid red against the white of the memorial stones. The nation, quite properly, thinks of those who served in the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. But on Merseyside we also pay our respects to the sailors of the Merchant Navy. More than 30,000 of them were killed during the Battle of the Atlantic, run from the headquarters of the Western Approaches in Liverpool. German submarines stalked the water, destroying shipping convoys between Britain and the Americas, as well as supplies on the frozen routes to our wartime ally, the USSR. But merchant ships were involved in many other theatres of the Second World War, carrying troops and supplies to North Africa, Italy, the Normandy beaches and southern France. Jack served through all 5 1/2 years of the war. Astonishingly, he was never seriously wounded, although he suffered the anguish of seeing other ships on his convoys being destroyed by enemy torpedoes. But the call of the sea was strong. His father, John Brotheridge, had joined the Royal Navy in 1912 when he was 16 and served on HMS Swiftsure during the First World War. She was in the ill-starred Dardanelles campaign of 1915, shelling Turkish positions. However, thousands of soldiers from Britain, Australia and New Zealand were killed on the beaches at Gallipoli during eight months of fighting. John was deeply disturbed by scenes of almost unimaginable horror. Soon after the war, he married Minnie and Jack was born in 1920. The little family lived in appalling poverty in Bootle, renting rooms in various houses in the "Klondike" area. David Lloyd George, Britain's wartime Prime Minister, had wanted a country "fit for heroes to live in". But with no prospects of improvement, John and his brother-in-law, Lew Reeves, took work on a White Star liner sailing to the USA, where they hoped to make enough money for the whole family to emigrate. Briefly, he was hired by Prohibition bootleggers, driving a motorboat around New York harbour, carrying illegal hooch to the speakeasies. Then he found work as a factory foreman and was sending money home to pay for their passage. However, John and Lew were tracked down by the immigration authorities. Lew did a runner to Canada, where he joined the Mounted Police. John was shipped home. A few years later, he had another go at making a fortune in America, land of dreams, but arrived just as Wall Street crashed. After a spell as a hobo, he returned to England. "I could cry about this," says Jack. So it was back to the British Merchant Navy. By then, the Brotheridges were living in Towcester Street, Litherland. Jack, a pupil at Lander Road School, remembers hearing people talking about the rise of Hitler, but his father was finding regular work with the Ellerman and Papyanni line, to help feed the family, which now included Jack's brother, Rothay. Then Hitler invaded Poland, starting the Second World War. Now a respected sailor in the Merchant Navy, John was appointed bosun on the Estralun. She was torpedoed off Portugal with the loss of many lives, but John managed to cling to an upturned lifeboat with some other men. They had a six-hour wait before the Royal Navy ship Deptford rescued them. By then, Jack was also in the Merchant Navy. "My father wasn't at all well after that," says Jack, "but he had no money and there were bills to pay. So he got out of his sick bed to go back to sea, joining the Laffian. She was also torpedoed in the northern Atlantic with the loss of many lives. Some of the crew managed to get onto a lifeboat and they reached the Azores, where they were saved from starvation by islanders and priests. My mother didn't know where he was. "But eventually a ship came back to Liverpool and he was carried off it on a stretcher and taken to hospital. He died two days later. He was 46. My mother didn't get a pension because he was a civilian and they reckoned he had a bad liver." Jack, who had served his time as a carpenter, was at sea on the Mardinian, which he had joined soon after the outbreak of war. He didn't learn of his father's death until much later when a letter reached him from his mother. Without being advised of their course, Jack's crew had headed for the Mediterranean. Italy had just entered the war. They were joined by Royal Naval ships and 100 men in civvies, who were hidden with explosives in a cargo hold. They sailed by the Greek islands and Istanbul. There, a squad of Turks boarded the ship and disarmed the gun, but failed to find the men and explosives. They then advanced up the Danube, in Romania, where there was a German ship. Even so, they secretly loaded the explosives onto barges with the men, part of an elite team on a mission to destroy German and Italian ships. They were soon captured by the Germans and executed. During this time, Jack and a greaser had gone ashore, not seeing the Mardinian sail away. They were young men alone and cold in a foreign land. Jack, though, was a tough and wily fellow. He found a little boat and rowed them back to their ship, thus escaping certain death. In the convoy home, two of their ships were sunk by U-boats. Later that year the Mardinian was sunk, but Jack was not on board. His next ship was the Flaminian. He served on eight ships including the Ocean Vesper, a 7,000-ton American Liberty Ship. There would be further sinkings, horrors, and then the landings in France, which ensured Germany's defeat. After the war, Jack returned to the building trade and married Margie Bean. They had a son, John, and adopted another, William. Jack built them a house in Crosby, in which he still lives. Minnie died, aged 88, about 20 years ago. He remembers how he came home on leave one day and gave her a pounds 5 note. "She had never seen one before and showed it to all the neighbours," he says. Margie died seven years ago, aged 75. Tomorrow, Jack will go to the war memorial in Waterloo, this time wearing the Merchant Seafarers Veterans' badge, issued earlier this year after the Ministry of Defence belatedly accepted that the bravery and sacrifices of our sailors should be commemorated with those of the Armed Services. "I don't like war," says Jack. "It was started by a bunch of fanatics who got so powerful that something had to be done. "If we hadn't declared war on them and they had got here, we would have been finished. We have to remember that." The Battle of the Atlantic THE Battle of the Atlantic was the only one to last the duration of the war. It began on September 3, the day war broke out, when the Montreal-bound, SS Athena, was sunk west of Ireland with the loss of 112 passengers and crew. By the end, more than 30,000 merchant seamen had been killed. Submarine attacks from the Germans, Italians and Japanese resulted in the sinking of 2,828 ships, mostly British, totalling nearly 15m tons. German U-boats sank 175 Allied warships. Of these losses, 61% were sailing independently of convoys, 9% were stragglers from convoys, and 30% were in convoys. It was essential to the Allies' cause that supplies of food and weapons should reach Britain and Russia from America. Liverpool was at the heart of that effort. davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk ____________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html Doctrine of International Copyright Law ____________________________________________________________________________