~ Chapter Nineteen ~
A New Family, Another War

When he returned to Margate in 1929, Tom took a job with the Post Office.  At the same time, he joined the Royal Naval Reserve, hence maintaining his association with the Navy, the only life he had known since he was a fifteen year-old boy.

            Soon after his return, he met a local girl by the name of Gwendoline Sutton.  Gwen was some ten years younger than Tom and was working as a waitress at the time.  It wasn’t long before she and Tom began a family.  Their first child, Anthony, was born in Margate in May 1933.  Their second, Pamela, followed in May 1934.

            In that same year, having completed fifteen years of reckonable service from the age of eighteen, Tom was awarded the Royal Navy’s Long Service and Good Conduct Medal.

            Then Tom began working for the Admiralty in central London and the family moved more than fifty miles inland to Sidcup, a suburb in the south-east of London, to be closer to his job.  Their new home was a recently built three-bedroom terraced house in Brookend Road.  The address was only a few miles from the Admiralty buildings at the Royal Arsenal on the south bank of the River Thames in Woolwich, where Tom would be transferred a few years later.

            It was in Sidcup that Tom and Gwen’s third child, Michael, was born in November 1939.  But Tom may not have been present for the arrival of his latest son.  Another “great war”, one that threatened to be even bigger and more devastating than the last, had erupted two months earlier.  As a Reservist, forty year-old Tom was one of the first of millions of British civilians to be called up to fight in that war.

            While we don’t have full details of Tom’s Second World War service record, we do know that in 1939 he returned to Scapa Flow, the scene of the scuttling of the German High Fleet more than twenty years earlier, where this time he was Leading Signalman on a naval trawler.  We also know that his last posting before the War ended in 1945 was to Iceland.  These are very strong indications that for the duration of the War Tom served in the Royal Naval Patrol Service.  Here is the Wikipedia description of that service:
The Royal Naval Patrol Service (RNPS) was a branch of the Royal Navy active during the Second World War. The RNPS operated many small auxiliary vessels such as naval trawlers for anti-submarine and minesweeping operations to protect coastal Britain and convoys during WWII.

             The RNPS had its origins in the trawlermen and fishermen who belonged to the Royal Naval Reserve Trawler Section in the period leading up to the war. When the Royal Naval Reserves were mobilised in August 1939, HMS Europa, usually known as Sparrow's Nest, became the Central Depot of the RNPS. Sparrow's Nest was located at Lowestoft, the most easterly point of Great Britain, and then the closest British military establishment to the enemy.

             The advantages of using small ships for minesweeping and other duties had been recognised during the First World War and many of the crews of the peacetime fishing fleets had been encouraged to join the Royal Naval Reserve. Because the majority were Reservists the RNPS became a “Navy within a Navy”.

             Because it used out-dated and poorly armed vessels, such as requisitioned trawlers crewed by ex-fishermen, the RNPS came to bear a number of unofficial titles that poked fun at it, such as “Harry Tate's Navy”, “Churchill's Pirates” and “Sparrows”.

             The name Harry Tate dates back to the First World War and was used as jargon for anything clumsy and amateurish. It originated from an old music hall entertainer who would play the clumsy comic who couldn't get to grips with various contraptions. His act included a car that gradually fell apart around him. By the start of WW2 it had been adopted by the Royal Navy and used for the purpose of poking fun at the trawlers and drifters of the Royal Naval Patrol Service. In true RNPS style they took it on the chin and the title of “Harry Tate's Navy” was proudly adopted. As the war went on it was to become a worthy password for courage.

             Because the peacetime crews become Naval seamen together they developed a special camaraderie. This camaraderie continued in the Service throughout WWII, even though by the end most RNPS members were “hostilities only” who had had little connection with the sea before the war.

             The RNPS fought in all theatres of the war, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the Far East, involved in convoy duty, minesweeping and anti-submarine work. Most particularly they kept the British Coast clear of the mines that were wreaking havoc with merchant ships.

             Its fighting fleet consisted of hundreds of requisitioned fishing trawlers‎, whalers, drifters, paddle steamers, yachts, tugs and the like, “Minor War Vessels” as the Admiralty called them.
Picture
The RNPS fleet was highly vulnerable to German mines, as well as to attacks by aircraft, U-boats and submarines.  Of approximately 1,600 craft manned by the RNPS, some 260 were lost in action in the course of the War.  Over 15,000 RNPS seamen were also killed during that period, including nearly 2,400 with “no known grave but the sea”.  It is very clear, therefore, that Tom did not have an easy War.  However, any fears that he may have had about his safety are not evident in this photograph of him, taken in 1940.

            Tom was demobbed in 1945.  Having participated in and emerged unscathed from two World Wars, he was finished with the Navy at long last.