JLK's three chapters are written in his three writing names. The J Lennox Kerr chapter 'Third Officer Felicia McClusky' is a very amusing piece about a ship who invented a female officer, giving her a dressed up room and referring to her in ways that seemed to make her more real over time. The WRNS took her to heart and in the end, after visiting her, took her away with them. When an officer was married, a joke telegram was received from Felicia expressing her dismay but wishing them well. Under the pen-name Peter Dawlish, he wrote 'Those Charming Old Gentlemen' is an amusing appreciation of the old-timers who, brought out of retirement, worked behind the scenes to set up and inspect the raggle-taggle efforts of seamen in harbours across the land with no navy training or discipline. They are described as having worked miracles, in a job that was intended to marginalise them since they had kicked the hind-ends of My Lords of the Admiralty (as boy trainees) and knew senior officers as scruffy midshipmen.
they possessed one tremendous quality: they were stiff with Naval tradition and pride in a craft they had never forsaken in their hearts. To these charming old gentlemen theirs was a holy task. They swept aside the rights of property owners like any 'damned socialist' and claimed the fairest vistas in England; they remembered every trick of scrounging orthievery they had learned as magistrates on the Bench; they tricked their bosom friends, lied, bullied and black-guarded; and they raised every sort and shape of hut in every possible material from asbestos sheeting to plywood and named it HMS This or That. A square of concrete became a quarterdeck. A tin hut was a wardroom. Their bridge was a varnished chair, and, I repeat, they built a Navy - our NavyThey were "quite the wrong people to be running us amateur sailors". In learning to fool them, they actually got what they wanted : "we had built our little Navy, and it worked.
Under the pen-name Gavin Douglas, 'Tell Us about D-Day' gives an account of a support vessel taking American troups over to Omaha beech on the second wave of D-Day. It sounds autobiographical, but he is using his fiction-writer's persona. He, the captain and supposed writer, is aged about 45 with most of his crew under 20, most of whom had never sailed before their training in Scotland. This is the right age for JLK. His age at the time of writing (1949) he gives as around 50, again right. In my view, he wanted to tell the honest tale of stubborn bravery without seeming to boast.
The boat was an LCT Mark IV in Q squadron. It was to carry 6 Sherman tanks, 2 half-track supply trucks, and a Red Cross jeep, plus 4 officers and 54 GIs. The Americans, well supplied with cigarettes and chewing gum, gave most of this away with obsessive generosity. The paperwork was so dense that it had to be sifted for things of relevance and the rest carefully burnt. The craft were gathered in orderly fashion in Plymouth Sound. The convoy departed at 2am on 4th June, only to be ordered back until next day. The author gives high praise of the efforts of these amateur crews.
The scene off the beach was too astounding for an emotion so inadequate as surprise. One accepted it because the the only way to marvel was to start counting the ships, barges, landing craft, concrete units, battleships, cruisers, sweepers and the hundreds of other types of vessels, and to consider how this multitude had been collected in the ports of England, and had sailed across enemy waters in one night...and none of us was in a mood for counting ships.They all mustered without collision. The hands had dressed for the occasion in their best uniforms. The landing was difficult as battle raged, the jeep being lost in an invisible hole. But all was landed and some wounded taken off.
I am a seaman of many year's experience, and am a steady old man nearing fifty. I want to say how much praise is due to the young fellows who officered and manned those landing craft. No one, in our own or other navies, could have done the job better. There were no heroics, nothing but an even and high standard of ability as seamen and as men.Any attempt to make the voyage glamorous or exciting would be stupid. A cold description that requires no adorning is the only tribute anyone can pay.Editors have a number of jobs, one to source material, and another to make the whole readable. JLK produced these three stories to add enjoyment to the mix of material. Another, 'First Trip' by Ronald Hope, is on a subject close to JLK's heart since he wrote two first tripper books. Hope produced an impressive list of seafaring books: any reader with information about his life please get in touch through comments.
Postscript.
Dr Ronald Hope OBE, after war service, left Oxford University in 1947 to become first Director of the Seafarers Education Service. This became part of the Marine Society (an ancient Navy recruitment charity) in 1976, a year which saw many such amalgamations as the Marine Society refigured itself into an educational support service. Hope was first Director of this new enterprise. He wrote several books on the Merchant Navy, including The Seaman's World: Merchant Seamen's Reminiscences (1982) from which these details come. See also the Wikipedia entry on The Marine Society.
Finally: J L Kerr also edited Touching the Adventures of Merchantmen in the Second World War in 1953. This was a joint enterprise with Dr Ronald Hope, then of the Seafarers Education Service, who did the "tedious clerical work and organization" (Preface) after an appeal for stories in nautical journals. This volume includes a story by "Peter Dawlish", a JLK pseudonym: it is a tale of a navy old-timer returning to serve during the war, finding that the navy had changed, and old skills were difficult to recover. Hostility to him by fellow crew disappeared when he spotted a mine and instinctively steered the ship away from it while everyone else panicked. He had served previously on minesweepers and now won instant respect for this newly needed expertise.
Touching the Adventures of Merchantmen can be regarded as the start of a programme to encourage seaman literacy which has matured today into the educational mission of the Marine Society.
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