The Cruel Sea (1951) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright & Information

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Before the Curtain

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART FIVE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART SIX

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART SEVEN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Synopses of Nicholas Monsarrat Titles

  Copyright & Information

  The Cruel Sea

  First published in 1951

  © Estate of Nicholas Monsarrat; House of Stratus 1951-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Nicholas Monsarrat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755131282 9780755131280 Pdf

  0755131290 9780755131297 Mobi/Kindle

  0755131304 9780755131303 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Nicholas Monsarrat was born in Liverpool, the son of a distinguished surgeon. He was educated at Winchester and then at Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied law. However, his subsequent career as a solicitor encountered a swift end when he decided to leave Liverpool for London, with a half-finished manuscript under his arm and £40 in his pocket.

  The first of his books to attract attention was the largely autobiographical ‘This is the Schoolroom’. It is a largely autobiographical 'coming of age' novel dealing with the end of college life, the 'Hungry Thirties', and the Spanish Civil War. During World War Two he joined the Royal Navy and served in corvettes. His war experience provided the framework for the novel ‘HMS Marlborough will enter Harbour’, and one of his best known books. ‘The Cruel Sea’ was made into a classic film starring Jack Hawkins. After the war he became a director of the UK Information Service, first in Johannesburg, then in Ottawa.

  Established as a sort after writer who was also highly regarded by critics, Monsarrat’s career eventually concluded with his epic ‘The Master Mariner’, a novel on seafaring life from Napoleonic times to the present.

  Well known for his concise story telling and tense narrative, he became one of the most successful novelists of the twentieth century, whose rich and varied collection bears the hallmarks of a truly gifted master of his craft.

  ‘A professional who gives us our money’s worth. The entertainment value is high’- Daily Telegraph

  Dedication

  To:

  Philippa Crosby

  Author’s Note

  All the characters in this book are wholly fictitious. If I have inadvertently used the names of men who did in fact serve in the Atlantic during the war, I apologise to them for so doing. Where I have mentioned actual war appointments, such as Flag-Officer-in-Charge at Liverpool or Glasgow, the characters who are portrayed in such appointments have no connexion whatsoever with their actual incumbents; and if there was a W.R.N.S. officer holding the job of S.0.0.2 on the Clyde in 1943, then she is not my ‘Second Officer Hallam’. In particular, my Admiral in charge of the working-up base at ‘Ardnacraish’ is not intended as a portrait of the energetic and distinguished officer who discharged with such efficiency a similar task in the Western Approaches Command.

  Before the Curtain

  This is the story – the long and true story – of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men. It is a long story because it deals with a long and brutal battle, the worst of any war. It has two ships because one was sunk, and had to be replaced. It has a hundred and fifty men because that is a manageable number of people to tell a story about. Above all, it is a true story because that is the only kind worth telling.

  First, the ocean, the steep Atlantic stream. The map will tell you what that looks like: three-cornered, three thousand miles across and a thousand fathoms deep, bounded by the European coastline and half of Africa, and the vast American continent on the other side: open at the top, like a champagne glass, and at the bottom, like a municipal rubbish dumper. What the map will not tell you is the strength and fury of that ocean, its moods, its violence, its gentle balm, its treachery: what men can do with it, and what it can do with men. But this story will tell you all that.

  Then the ship, the first of the two, the doomed one. At the moment she seems far from doomed: she is new, untried, lying in a river that lacks the tang of salt water, waiting for the men to man her. She is a corvette, a new type of escort ship, an experiment designed to meet a desperate situation still over the horizon. She is brand new; the time is November 1939; her name is HMS Compass Rose.

  Lastly, the men, the hundred and fifty men. They come on the stage in twos and threes: some are early, some are late, some, like this pretty ship, are doomed. When they are all assembled, they are a company of sailors. They have women, at least a hundred and fifty women, loving them, or tied to them, or glad to see the last of them as they go to war.

  But the men are the stars of this story. The only heroines are the ships: and the only villain the cruel sea itself.

  PART ONE

  1939: Learning

  1

  Lieutenant-Commander George Eastwood Ericson, R.N.R., sat in a stone-cold, draughty, corrugated-iron hut beside the fitting-out dock of Fleming’s Shipyard on the River Clyde. Ericson was a big man, broad and tough, a man to depend on, a man to remember: about forty-two or -three, fair hair going grey, blue eyes as level as a foot rule with wrinkles at the corners – the product of humour and of twenty years’ staring at a thousand horizons. At the moment the wrinkles were complicated by a frown. It was not a worried frown – if Ericson was susceptible to worry he did not show it to the world; it was simply a frown of concentration, a tri
bute to a problem.

  On the desk in front of him was a grubby, thumbed-over file labelled ‘Job No. 2891: Movable Stores’. Through the window and across the dock, right under his competent eye, was a ship: an untidy grey ship, mottled with red lead, noisy with riveting, dirty with an accumulation of wood shavings, cotton waste, and empty paint drums.

  The file and the ship were connected, bound together by the frown on his face. For the ship was his: he was to commission and to command HMS Compass Rose, and at this moment he did not wholly like the idea.

  It was a dislike, a doubt, compounded of a lot of things which ordinarily he would have taken in his stride, if indeed he had noticed them at all. Certainly it had nothing to do with the ship’s name: one could not spend twenty years at sea, first in the Royal Navy and then in the Merchant Service, without coming across some of the most singular names in the world. (The clumsiest he remembered had been a French tramp called the Marie-Josephe-Brinomar de la Tour-du-Pin; and the oddest, an East-Coast collier called Jolly Nights.) Compass Rose was nothing out of the ordinary; it had to be a flower name because she was one of the new Flower Class corvettes, and (Ericson smiled to himself) by the time they got down to Pansy and Stinkwort and Love-in-the-Mist, no one would think anything of Compass Rose.

  Those were trivialities, anyway. Perhaps the real trouble had to do with this precise moment of history, the start of a war. Ericson had been just too young to be closely involved in World War I: now he was secretly wondering if he were not too old to play a worthwhile part in the second round of the same struggle. At the moment he had, as his novel responsibility, a new job, a new ship, and a new crew. In theory he was proud of them all; in practice, he was unsure of the ordeal and concerned about his fitness for it.

  He felt remarkably out of practice . . . Ericson had been axed from the Navy in 1927, after ten years’ service: he had been on the beach for two hard years, and then spent the next ten with the Far East Line, feeling himself lucky all the time (what with the depression and Britain’s maritime decay) to have a seagoing job at all. He loved the sea, though not blindly: it was the cynical, self-contemptuous love of a man for a mistress whom he distrusts profoundly but cannot do without. Far East Lines had been a tough crowd: progress was slow, with the threat of dismissal always poised: in ten years he had only had command of one ship, an old two-thousand-ton freighter slowly pounding herself to bits on the Dutch East Indies run.

  It was not a good introduction to responsibility in war. And now here he was, almost masquerading as Lieut.-Commander G. E. Ericson, with one of His Majesty’s ships of war to commission, a crew of eighty-eight to command, and a hundred things in the realm of naval routine to relearn, quite apart from having a fighting ship to manoeuvre and to use as a weapon.

  A fighting ship . . . He raised his eyes from the interminable office boy job of checking stores, and looked at Compass Rose again. She was odd, definitely odd, even making allowances for her present unfinished state. She was two hundred feet long, broad, chunky, and graceless: designed purely for anti-submarine work, and not much more than a floating platform for depth-charges, she was the prototype of a class of ship which could be produced quickly and cheaply in the future, to meet the urgent demands of convoy escort. Her mast, contrary to Naval practice, was planted right in front of the bridge, and a squat funnel behind it: she had a high fo’c’sle armed with a single four-inch gun, which the senior gunnery rating was at that moment elevating and training. The depth-charge rails aft led over a whaler-type stern – aesthetically deplorable, but effective enough at sea. Ericson knew ships, and he could guess how this one was going to behave. She would be hot in summer – there was no forced draught ventilation, and no refrigerator – and cold, wet, and uncomfortable at most other times. She would be a natural bastard in any kind of seaway, and in a full Atlantic gale she would be thrown about like a chip of wood. And that was really all you could say about her – except that she was his, and that, whatever her drawbacks and imperfections, he had to get her going and make her work.

  The crew he was less worried about. Both the discipline and the habit of command instilled by the Royal Navy died very hard: Ericson knew that he had them still. All things being equal, he could handle those men, he could make them do what he wanted – if he knew himself. The flaw might be in the material he would have to work on: in a rapidly expanding navy, a new ship’s company was likely to be a scratch lot. The advance guard of a dozen key ratings had already arrived, to take charge in their various departments – gunnery, depth-charges, asdic, telegraphy, signalling, engine room. As a nucleus, they were satisfactory: but the numbers might be made up, and the gaps filled, by anything from professional hard cases just out of Detention Barracks to green ‘hostilities-only’ ratings fresh from the farmyard. And his officers – a First Lieutenant and two subs – could make a hash of anything he might want to do with the ship . . .

  Ericson frowned again, and then stopped frowning. Whatever his doubts, they were not to show: that was a cardinal rule. He was a seaman: this was a seaman’s job, though it didn’t feel like it at the moment. He bent to his desk again, wishing he could develop some sort of a taste for paperwork: wishing also that his First Lieutenant, whose work incidentally should have included the file in front of him, was a slightly more reassuring character.

  2

  Lieutenant James Bennett, R.A.N.V.R. (the ‘A’ for Australia), First Lieutenant of HMS Compass Rose, strode round the cluttered upper deck as if he owned every rivet of it, with Petty Officer Tallow, the coxswain, following him at a disrespectful distance. Bennett looked tough, and knew it, and liked it: everything about him – the red face, the stocky figure, the cap worn at an unusual angle – all proclaimed the homespun sailorman with no frills and no nonsense. That was the picture he had of himself, and with luck it was going to carry him through the war: certainly it had got him his present job, aided by fast talking and a selection board preoccupied with more important things than sifting claims about past exploits.

  Chance had found him in England at the outbreak of war, instead of clerking in a shipping office in Sydney: his commission in the Volunteer Reserve was undeniable: the rest had been easy – an anti-submarine course, an interview in London, and the job of First Lieutenant in Compass Rose. It wasn’t all that he wanted – too much paperwork, for a start, though the subs would take care of that as soon as they arrived; but it would do until something better turned up. And meanwhile he was First Lieutenant of this little crap barge, and he was going to act the part.

  ‘Coxs’n!’

  ‘Sir?’

  Standing by the four-inch gun, Bennett waited for Tallow to catch up. It took a little time, for Petty Officer Tallow (seventeen years in the Navy, three stripes, due for Chief P.O. any moment now) was feeling disgruntled. This certainly wasn’t what he had volunteered for – a fiddling bloody little gash boat instead of a proper ship (his last ship had been Repulse), a First Lieutenant like something out of the films, and Christ knows what sort of a ship’s company due to join next week. But Tallow, like the Captain, was a product of the Navy, which meant, above all, acceptance of the current job and the current circumstances: only in the subtlest ways (and none of them destructive) would he indicate that this sort of thing was not what he was used to.

  As Tallow came up: ‘This man,’ said Bennett heavily, pointing to the rating who was working on the four-inch gun, ‘is smoking during working hours.’

  Tallow restrained a sigh. ‘Yes, sir. Not working proper routine yet, sir.’

  ‘Who says not?’

  The seaman under discussion surreptitiously disposed of his cigarette, and bent to his task with extraordinary concentration. Tallow tried again. ‘I was going to leave it until we had the full ship’s company aboard, sir.’

  ‘That makes no difference,’ said Bennett briskly. ‘No smoking except during Stand-Easy. Understand?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘And don’t you forget it.’


  Jesus, thought Tallow, what sort of a country is Australia . . . Following once more in the First Lieutenant’s wake, he sank a little deeper into resignation. This bastard was all wind, and the only other officers were two green subs (he’d had a glance at the scheme of complement). Barring the Captain, who was OK, it looked as if he’d have to carry the bloody ship himself.

  3

  The door of the dockside hut flapped open, letting in a ferocious draught. The Captain looked up, and then turned in his chair.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘And shut the door very firmly.’

  The two young men who stood before him were, physically, in strong contrast with each other, though their uniforms, with the single thin wavy stripe on the arm, gave them a surface similarity. One of them, the elder one, was tall, black-haired, thin-faced: he had a watchful air, as though feeling his way in a situation which only needed a little time to fall into its proper category, alongside hundreds of other situations which he had dealt with competently and effectively in the past. The other one was a simpler edition altogether: short, fair, immature – a very young man in a proud uniform, and not yet sure that he deserved the distinction. Looking at them, Ericson suddenly thought: they’re more like father and son, though there can’t be more than five or six years between them . . . He waited for one of them to speak, knowing well which of them it would be.

  The elder one saluted and said: ‘Reporting for Compass Rose, sir.’ He proffered a slip of paper, and Ericson glanced at it.

  ‘You’re Lockhart?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’