I am most grateful to Frank Shipp for this (colour) photograph he had taken of himself while on shore leave from HMS Rushen Castle in Gibraltar in 1944/45. See also "Rushen Castle's Signal Staff".
Frank was called up for the Navy in 1943 when he was eighteen, becoming a Devonport Rating - he did his specialist training at HMS Impregnable, a Signal School in Plymouth.
Frank served on Rushen Castle from the time she was commissioned in early 1944 all the way through to VE Day, during which period the ship escorted approximately twenty convoys between Liverpool and Gibraltar without the loss of a single merchant ship*.
He describes Rushen Castle as "a very happy ship in which I was proud to serve."
After leaving Rushen Castle Frank returned to Devonport Barracks, hoping a posting to the Far East (and the continuing war with Japan) would not follow - he was lucky - he was sent to Capetown in South Africa, to join Admiral Sir Robert Burnett's staff at the Signal Station at Simon's Town. Below are some of his photographs of this "great time":
A year later Frank returned to the UK - he was expecting to be "de-mobbed" but instead was drafted on to HMS Escapade, an old destroyer. However, six weeks later he returned to "Civvy Street" and went to work at Sainsburys Head Office.
Frank married in 1949 - he has four children and eight grandchildren. He stayed with Sainsburys and became a Personnel Manager, finally retiring in 1987 - currently he is Secretary of his local Sainsburys Veteran Group.
He remains a "football mad season-ticket holder at West Ham United"!
Posted 7 November 2006: See also Frank Shipp (1925 - 2006).
* Colin Warwick, in his book "Really Not Required", wrote that following VE-Day "all German U-boats had been instructed to surface and signal their positions in plain language. Being rather curious about the U-boat dispositions provided by naval intelligence, I instructed my W/T operators to keep watch and record these positions for my navigator, Lt. Weeks, to plot on the charts. Intelligence was absolutely correct. About 15 or so U-boats were in the Bay of Biscay, as were 8 more in the Irish Sea!"
