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This contribution was submitted by Owen Cleaver to Edgar Lloyd and is added to the site with his permission.

The Caernarfon Castle was a good troop ship. It had two six inch guns on its rear deck. It had been an armed merchant vessel . Previously in its history it had been gunned by a German battleship…and everything had gone above the main deck. It managed to escape though and they towed it into New York and it had been refitted in America and so instead of hammocks we had what they called “Stand E sections” which were metal bunks which came down…so we were on beds if you like. It was pretty well equipped….American style. We left Liverpool due north round the north of Ireland. Joined up with the convoy we steamed west for three days, we steamed south for three days, we steamed east for three days and on the tenth day out of Liverpool we met Gibraltar. We knew we were going to Rhodesia and we didn’t think we’d be going round the Cape.

When we got into the Med it was like a millpond. Absolutely smooth and you could see the dolphins..under the boat, flying fish. We went through the Med stopped at Port Said overnight. There were the usual Arabs on the quayside, and the troops were throwing coins to them - which they’d previously heated up - and part of the fun was to watch them pick them up. We went down through the Suez canal and we had a few of the merchants from Port Said got on selling leather goods and got off at Aden at the other end…handbags, belts….a throw back to civilian life. In the Red sea you’d see thousands and thousands of jelly fish that make it the Red Sea. We stopped at Aden for a day….some people went swimming…and then we went on down to Mombassa. There was no RAF camp on the island and we went to HMS Kilindini which was a shore station. There were 250 of us going down to Rhodesia on the draft…we went to this place and the sort of discipline was rather alien to us. You couldn’t get a pass to go out into Mombassa…you had to wait until the liberty boat came. And being a shore station there wasn’t a boat, was there? You had to parade in front of the guardroom and then you were told to stop talking on the gangplank - of course that brought the house down! The Petty Officers were not very happy about this sort of thing. There wasn’t a lot they could do because there was 250 of us… We were there only a matter of days. We walked into Mombassa in the day…there was nothing else to do. They soon got rid of us to an RAF camp on the mainland Port Reitz. I think it had a runway…interesting thing, many of the camps I went to had runways, but I never saw them. My main idea was to get out of the camp not to go in further!
(While in Kilindini it was VE day)
In Port Reitz you slept under mosquito nets and there were plenty of bananas…monkeys about pinching the bananas. There was a lorry into Mombassa but we didn’t bother about that as we’d seen Mombassa and there wasn’t much there. We went swimming in the sea because it was right next to the sea and in the evenings we went to the Port Reitz hotel where we all learned what Cherry Brandy was. The first liquor we’d had really that wasn’t beer. We were there for three weeks and there was a Squadron Leader in charge of the draft - he was on the boat and told us a lot about South Africa while we were on the boat and what might expect - apartheid and all that sort of thing. And he came to us one day and said: “Well, there is a boat going down to Durban, however you can make up your own mind whether you want to go on it or not - we will not force you. It‘s the Chinese Navigational Company steamship Hu Nan Normally going up and down the Yangtze …its 1700 tons …and its a troop ship for 150 colonial troops. There’s 250 of you but its going down to Durban.” We said…alright we’d go down there. It wasn’t the Ritz it wasn’t the Caernarfon Castle. I slept on deck…it took us ten days to get to Durban and I slept on deck for nine. The tenth day it was raining in Durban and I didn’t want to sleep under a hatch cover any more. Most people slept on deck, some slept down below on a pile of lifejackets - they said it was quite comfortable. The ablutions were very crude or non existent. When we finally sighted land we were all on the deck at the front - there was another deck at the back but we didn‘t go there much, there‘d been a goat tied to the mast and chickens and things on the poop deck. So we saw land about the same time as the bridge …they turned north and we steamed up there for about four or five hours and there was an aircraft came up and did a bit of a turn…so we turned right round and went back south to where we’d come from. The captain was Royal Navy, the other officers were Indian Navy and the crew were the traditional sort of laskers and someone wasn’t very good at navigation. So it was getting dusk when we got near Durban and rumour has it we steamed right across a minefield into Durban. We were very very hungry because the food had been terrible. We could see into the officers’ dining room which was below the Bridge and they didn’t have bad food, naturally, but we used to queue up for about two hours at night for the white bread that was left over that they used to have. Our food….you used to have to go down to the one deck below …and there was a quite wide staircase down the side - probably called a companionway or something . I remember the porridge in the morning, every table had an orderly who would go up with a big pan to get porridge and the boat rolled one day and he came down one step ladder…he didn’t stop he went straight up the other one and the porridge went straight on out. We didn’t eat a great deal so we were very hungry when we arrived in Durban. There were two Royal Navy destroyers parked next door and their sailors came across to say hello and we told them we were hungry and they went back and came back with loaves of bread. Well they got half way up the gangplank onto our boat and they just went. People just grabbed them and shot off to corners anywhere. We were that hungry. No one was really grumbling because we were all together and it didn’t matter but we were not meant to go off the ship and some people went into the destroyers and had a meal there. A lot went into town, but they only had half their uniforms with them. They had no hats or anything like that. They were all brought back by the Military Police. But nothing was ever said or done about that. We left that boat the following morning and got on a train to go up to Bulowayo via Jo’burg and we were on the train for two nights. The South African railways didn’t go very fast…they had these observation coaches…like balconies on the ends of carriages, like the old American things so you could stand and look around. And you could drop off and run alongside….or go up the front of the train and drop off and take photographs if you had film with you…and climb on a coach at the back. And South African railways were built by the British of course and they were built by the mile so you’d be chuffing along and you’d think …“Oh there’s another railway down there,!” and about an hour and a half later you’d find your way on it. And you’d be going the other way. If there was a gradient of any sort they’d find the easiest way round….it didn’t matter how far it went so it was slow going. There was no food on the train…they’d stop at some little place where there’d be a couple of tin huts where they sold food. There was one place…I don’t know what people were doing…because we left the station to go on and after about a couple of hours the train stopped and reversed all the way back again to pick up some blokes who got left there! What they were doing I don’t know - but that was the sort of thing that happened. It was single track with passing places every fifty miles or so…you know.
It was after Jo’burg that you got this sort of meandering because it was up through the mountains and things. And we stopped in Mafeking…I think we probably had a meal in Mafeking and again we lost some members. I think it was standard practice that the train blew its whistle and a lot of steam and everything and it shunted up for two hundred yards and that produced all the latecomers. They’d come haring out of all the shops and cafes ….haring after the train. It would stop there until everybody got on. Then it was on to Bulowayo.

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