Forty year old Ralph Hobbs, the one-time former Second World War Lancaster wireless operator and Edinburgh-based Marconi radar man, had been on board HMS Talavera on the night of the October War ironing out the converted destroyer’s new electronics suite. The older man rose to his feet and with and ever broadening smile shook the tall young officer’s hand.
Ralph Hobbs was half a head shorter than the acting Captain of HMS Talavera, his face pale from the cold of a northern winter and his angular frame unhindered by a single ounce of spare flesh. His hair was noticeably thinner than fifteen months ago when the two men had bidden each other farewell at Rosyth, where Talavera had docked five days after the war. At the time they had assumed they would never meet again.
“What on earth are you doing out here, Ralph?” Peter blurted.
“I came out on the Sylvania with most of my department from Scotland. My wife and both my girls came, too. Things have been a bit grim in Edinburgh the last year,” he pursed his lips, the grey green in his eyes clouding, “out of the frying pan into the fire, as they say. Marconi was running down my research program and I reckoned Sarah and the girls deserved a little sunshine.” He seemed to remember the real object of the original question. “I’m to be assigned as Under Manager of all Electrical Installation at the Admiralty Dockyards. I’m the new head radar man, essentially. A lot more good men will be coming out to the Mediterranean but I’m reliably informed that the C-in-C — you father — wants me to train up as many locals as possible to install, configure and maintain the latest state of the art kit.” He hesitated. “I imagine there must be a lot of bad feeling about bringing so many people in from the old country?”
“A bit. I’m not convinced it has been handled very diplomatically…”
The door to the office of the Superintendent of the Admiralty Naval Dockyards opened suddenly.
“What’s that? Not diplomatically?” Demanded the small, bustling figure who bowled into the reception room. Two uniformed typists leapt to their feet.
“Er, no criticism intended, sir,” Peter Christopher said hastily.
Commodore Kelvin Renfrew tried to give him a hard look but gave up quickly because he was getting a crick in his neck. The boy was a fraction of an inch taller than his only slightly more famous father and cut exactly the same kind of handsome dashing figure Julian Christopher had between the First and Second World Wars, in the days when he was a society dilettante racing America’s Cup yachts at Cowes with that incorrigible rogue Nicholas Davey.
The likeness is uncanny!
“Ralph said you two were old friends,” Commodore Renfrew observed, tersely. “Both of you come into my den,” he commanded, turning on his heel and marching back into his relatively palatial office on the top floor of the Victorian building which butted onto a high barbed wire topped iron fence which separated the dockyard from the closely-packed streets of the ‘city’ of Senglea. He waved for his guest to sit down, in motion all the while, radiating nervous energy in every direction. “I had a good chin wag with Mr Hobbs yesterday while you were meddling in the industrial relations of my bailiwick, young man,” he went on, bristling momentarily before he dumped himself into the big chair behind his even bigger mahogany desk. There were grey and buff Manila folders and files on the desk, and a dozen large, partially unfurled blueprints and mechanical, engineering and electrical schematics apparently strewn at random.
Peter Christopher forced himself to stop studying the fascinating detritus on the Dockyard Superintendent’s desk.
“I apologise about that, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“Oh, never mind,” the older man said instantly, as if he had already forgotten about the transgression. “If you hadn’t stuck your oar in I’d have had to lock the blighters out and then there would have been a general strike in the dockyards. I’d have probably have had to sack that little so and so Joseph Calleja, too. As it was somebody had time to whisper in my ear that sacking the blighter would have gone down like a lead balloon in these parts!”
Peter Christopher decided that the best thing to do was to say nothing.
“Right! Talavera!”
“Yes, sir,” the younger man acknowledged, holding his breath.
“We’d have to rebuild her from the deck up to restore her to her former Fast Air Detection Escort status. I know she’s not seen a huge amount of service but we’re talking about a twenty year old hull with a 1945 vintage machinery set. Not to mention she’s taken a fair old bit of stick lately. So, we’re not going to put her back the way she was last autumn.”
“Sir, I,” the destroyer’s proud commanding officer began to object.
Commodore Renfrew raised a hand.
“Ralph assures me that we’ve got the equipment to hand to sort out your Type 965 air defence bedsteads. Your existing ranging and gunnery control radar will have to go but we’ll weld something better onto the foremast. We won’t waste time rebuilding the amidships Command Information Centre or attempt to refit a Sea Cat launcher aft. Too much fiddly electronics work involved and the idea is to get Talavera back to sea sometime in the next three to four weeks. However, in her present state Talavera is missing roughly sixty or seventy tons of top weight in comparison with her post Fast Air Detection Escort conversion, all of which weight can be loaded back on above main deck level without unduly mucking up her undoubtedly fine sea-keeping characteristics. So,” the older, now grinning man declared, “we’ll use the opportunity to put some torpedo tubes amidships and a clump of anti-aircraft guns on the stern.”
The Dockyard Superintendent jumped to his feet and beckoned his guest to peer at the somewhat hastily drawn line plan he unrolled.
“A quadruple 21-inch torpedo mount, sir?” Peter Christopher queried, thinking aloud. “Do we actually make those things anymore?”
“We’ve got several of them in fairly good condition in a storehouse,” Commodore Renfrew chuckled. “No idea where they came from. Probably the second mount off ships on which we’d bolted so much radar and electronics that they’d have capsized if we hadn’t removed top weight elsewhere. My design people say we can get at least two or three twin twenty-millimetre mounts on the stern deck house without having to strengthen it, probably another one on the stern where the Squid anti-submarine mortar used to be. How do you feel about a couple of barrels in single mounts on the bridge rails? Or on the foredeck between the bridge and the back of ‘B’ Turret?”
Peter was feeling a little drunk; decisions that normally tied design committees in knots for weeks and months — it was not unheard of for decisions to be so long delayed that ships were scrapped without ever getting into dockyard hands — were being addressed with a cavalier abandon. Suddenly, the process was simplicity itself; we don’t have this kit so you can’t have it, but we’ve got other stuff we can weld onto your spare deck space so let’s do that instead!
The Royal Navy’s role in the Mediterranean was no longer one of explicitly fighting a modern, long-range enemy with missiles and fast jets, it was — for many of its smaller ships, destroyers and frigates in particular — one of challenging and stopping suspicious vessels, chasing down pirates and patrolling coastal waters. The age of the gunboat was back; or at least that was Talavera’s fate.
He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair.
“All the extra barrels will make her look a little untidy, sir,” he observed wryly, “but personally, so far as I’m concerned you can put as many guns on her as you like! The more the merrier!”
Chapter 16