For More to Come

I will add snippets of whatever may be of use in hopes of triggering the memory of someone who may perhaps have a picture of Uncle Jerry with their relative(s). Any such picture would be equally important. Relatives of Dame McNally being possibly among those who may have such a picture and maybe his medals. Parades are another source from which his image may have been captured, like Saint Patrick's Day and Anzac Day.

Mostly Positive Experience

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Wireless Operator working environment in 1944. The Merchant Navy symbol that I and my uncle as seamen wore. What a miserable, rotten hopeless life . . . an Atlantic so rough it seems impossible that we can continue to take this unending pounding and still remain in one piece . . . hanging onto a convoy is a full-time job . . . the crew in almost a stupor from the nightmarishness of it all . . . and still we go on hour after hour.

So described a sailor aboard an Atlantic Convoy escort in World War 2. Frank Curry of the Royal Canadian Navy wrote those words in his diary aboard a corvette in 1941, during the Battle of the Atlantic, a battle that would be called the longest in history.

Some merchant sailors went the whole war without witnessing enemy action be it from U boat or surface craft. But the tension and strain were there for all:
"the men in the engine-room suffered the tortures of the damned, never knowing when a torpedo might tear through the thin plates of the hull, sending their ship plunging to the bottom before they had a chance to reach the first rung of the ladder to the deck"

Add to this the notorious Atlantic weather and the fact of life that there were little life saving equipment on board these ships. Despite this:
"No British merchant ship was ever held in port by its crew, even at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, when to cross that ocean in a slow-moving merchant ship was to walk hand in hand with death for every minute of the day and night."

The Battle of the Atlantic, according to Churchill, was the Battle for Britain. The Merchant sailors, the very target for German torpedoes, received no paid leave on returning to port. If a man wished to spend some time with his family, he had to sign off ship and go without pay. Incredibly, under British law, when and if a ship went down, the obligations of the ship owner to the crew went down with it!! The lucky sailors who got home received their pay in full. Should a sailor go down with his ship, the relatives would, unless the sailor was a crewman of a more generous shipping line, receive no pay from the day he died. A sailor who spent 10 days in a lifeboat wrote:
"...as soon as you got torpedoed on them ships your money was stopped right away. That's the truth. Everybody kicked up a bit 'cos you couldn't walk about with nothing in your pockets, could you, let's be fair - and all the rum shops were open! Only thing they give us was our clothes....we couldn't walk about naked, could we? Well, we felt devastated because you didn't think they'd ever treat you like that. Because they treated you like you were an underrated citizen, although you were doing your bit for your country, know what I mean? It's hard to think what you been through and what you were doing...and they treat you like that. What did we get? Didn't get no life, did we. I even had to fight for me pension, me state pension. "

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Wondering if Uncle Jerry had ever togged out in a Kerry jersey. This is unlikely since he left home at age 17 in 1915. Also wondering if this vessel was akin to the "L.C.14," type I see documented on his seaman's card. The LC14 was a 521 ton type, with Newcastle as port of registry, its official number 165837 and had him serving on her as an Able Bodied seaman from April 19, 1945 till December 4, 1945. The next entry, the final one, has him sailing on November 19, 1947 on the "Lepton" and arriving in Brisbane on January 13, 1948. Living there for eighteen (18) until his death on January 22, 1966.