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Geoff Dann 1951 - 1952
I spent a little time in Manxman. In fact I commissioned the ship for
the first Commission after she was mothballed at the end of the second
world War. I was a young AB then in, I was still U/A, If anyone knows what that
means now.
After we commissioned we went to Milford Haven and
picked up a full outfit of mines and then went to Malta to Workup. We were
always independent command and as such were away from the main fleet
most of the time.
We spent a lot of time in the canal zone, and had
just come out of the zone when King Furouk was overthrown. Having
just arrived in Cyprus we were ordered to return to Port Said at ALL
POSSIBLE SPEED we arrived there at 0800 the next day. I remember the
forward funnel had an inch of salt on it.. I also remember that as we
had left liberty men ashore.
I had to keep the middle (after driving a
boat the previous day up until we sailed at 2359) and be in the boat
to be lowered at entry. An interesting time.
The crew of the Manx man provided teams to berth merchant ships 24 hrs a day as well as armed sentries to guard the gash barges on their way to sea to dump garbage. We drove and cox'nd LC A's we always had a Bren up the front end manned by the trigger happy bowman, as we were given no specific orders as when were allowed to open fire it's a wonder no one was killed.
Later the ship was given a facelift to enable it to play the part of a WW1 cruiser In a movie starring Jeffrey Hunter after a book by C S Forrester called Brown of the Resolution . A lot of fun, we were not allowed on the upper deck without being in German uniform!
Photo taken in 1952 at Malta showing Manxman disguised as the German cruiser "Essen" for the film " Single handed", the main guns were given a third barrel and the funnels sloped back you will also notice the fake hole painted on the ships side forward.
While I was on Manxman we ran into a storm in the Med . The glass came out of the scuttle (PORTHOLE) and the forward mess deck took in a lot of water, at the same the intakes for the fresh air system were also flooded resulting in about 4' of water in the fr'd and port side midships mess decks. We had to call into Malta for repairs. As we got in, the Dockyard went on strike so we had to do most of the work ourselves!.
At that time Malta had a huge armament depot with hundreds of tons of all sorts of explosives in store. That was yet another job for us, to guard the place 24 hours a day. We also had to unload stores and load lighters, talk about Jack of all trades!
There was a change of the manning of Manxman in 52 resulting in a reduction of the
size of the crew and I came home halfway through the commission.
I've
seen the photograph on the site of the Wardroom at that time. I remember some of them,
third from the right sitting is Commissioned Gunner Sawkins,
but the one that stands out is the Captain Trevor Lean a Gentleman and a
great seaman a pleasure to serve under. More memories than I can write of
now but they keep coming back.
One last one in the crew were two or
three AB's who were reservists who had been called back for the Korean
crisis who had been on the Manxman during the Gulf of Genoa dash. I
ended up as killick of their mess age 20, another interesting time.
Geoffrey Dann RN. Ghana navy and RAN 1948 to 1987.
