In 1939, Ralph had become a ship’s officer, the holder of a certificate that entitled him to be third mate and watchkeeper on a merchant ship. On September 3rd in the same year, while he was serving on the British Merchant, a BP oil tanker in the Mediterranean on her way to Ibadan in Nigeria, the crew heard that war had been declared. Immediately the tanker was commandeered by the Royal Fleet Auxiliary as a navy supply ship, and began a number of missions in that role, to Palestine, Malta, Alexandria and Gibraltar carrying ‘Bunker C,’ essential fuel oil for Royal Navy destroyers defending British interests in the eastern Mediterranean from Nazi raiders, although at the outset there were no German vessels in ‘the Med.’ This was soon to change, especially after the fiasco at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria on July 3rd, 1940, when the Royal Navy had to destroy French naval vessels sheltering there in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the victorious Nazis after the cataclysmic fall of France a few weeks earlier, on May 10th. Some of the French naval survivors, bearing the British no ill-will, were then in a quandary until some, Ralph recalls, managed to join General de Gaulle and his Free French forces in England whither he had fled when France fell to the invaders.
Ralph did not think highly of some of his crew. They were, he says, “not of the highest calibre.” These “rum dummies” were with them for 16 months, and were far inferior to sailors from Devon. Soon thereafter, the captain had orders to proceed to Curacao, a Dutch island in the Caribbean, where they found 8 months of mail awaiting them. The captain discovered that his house in London had been destroyed during the Blitz and his wife had had to move away. Ralph’s own mother had had a scare, too: she had heard on the radio that the BP tanker British Commander, the vessel Ralph was an officer on, had been “captured by raiders,” but this was erroneous, as the captured vessel was her sister ship, the British Commodore.
In Curacao, the captain received orders to proceed to Bermuda in order to assemble a convoy to brave the Atlantic in order to deliver food, fuel, and armaments to Britain, running a gauntlet of German submarines (“Unterseebooten” or U-boats), surface “raiders” like the notoriously predatory “pocket battleships,” and Luftwaffe fighter aircraft closer to Britain. They were told they would have destroyer protection from the Royal Navy, and the captain privately scoffed at this assurance, Ralph said, until five minutes later when he saw one of them on the starboard bow. The convoy reached safety in Plymouth, but only after some moments of apprehension among the crew after a scare from a report about magnetic acoustic bombs at the entrance to Plymouth harbour turned out to be overstated.
