At the outbreak of WWII I was seven years old. My father, my sister and I lived near Liverpool where he had the odd title of Naval Liaison Officer. Neither he nor the Admiralty understood what it meant. It had been a blissful year since he got a shore job. We had a small sailing boat and good times on the Mersey Estuary. War came quickly, Dad was to be called to London to supervise the North Atlantic convoys and life would change forever.
But not before he got me on a launch going round the cargo and armed fleet of ships to collect the Captains for their convoy conference. The weather was rough but I wasn’t seasick. The skippers we collected were not used to convoys and pooh-poohed the idea that they needed briefing. The Captain of the launch I was on collecting them was faced with turbulence and arrogance. It’s no wonder today’s geopolitical scene reminds me of it.
The Captain was a stalwart man with a seasoned face. The sort you might find in charge of a lifeboat crew in the early years of his retirement. He didn’t smile much. When he did it was the smile of someone enjoying his own internal joke, not the raucous, ‘please-others’ charm of compliance. But when he laughed it was the roar of a predator determined to overwhelm the prey of the sea. His personality wasn’t secret but he didn’t broadcast it either.
We were delayed by the Captain of the biggest escort ship, a fearsome destroyer. He rather fancied himself as the Commodore of the convoy. Whether he really was I don’t know. I didn’t like him much and I could tell the feeling was mutual. At one point he questioned my being there. As soon as it was pointed out who my father was he became egregiously patronizing in the extreme – a poor example for a child trying to find his sea legs.
The Captain of my launch accepted it all with good, quiet humour and eventually we returned to port and the sailors went off for their briefing. I was left with the skipper of the launch. He suggested a cup of cocoa but managed to turn it into an icecream. I asked him about the briefing. He explained that the problem was that the speed of a convoy is that of the slowest ship. If the convoy ran into a group of U-Boats (German submarines) and one or two ships got hit the rest of the convoy had to go on.
The rules, he explained, weren’t dogmatic, just guides as to the course of action most likely to deliver as much of the much needed cargo as possible. I remember all this because my life was becoming ruled by instructions of what to do and what not. I didn’t believe they were all necessary but found it difficult to decide which mattered and which didn’t. I think this skipper was the first person to point me in the direction of common sense.
That was a phrase and practice we used then. It was one of the characteristics of British culture. Largely lost today in the melee of rules, regulations, guidelines and legal piffle which proliferates to swell the service economy, common sense has a loquacious cousin, ‘muddling through,’ which suited the ethos of leaving you to choose for yourself, very handsomely. Even though it gave rise to some catastrophic mistakes they pale into insignificance when compared with the disasters that surround us now.
I’ve forgotten the skipper’s name but I’ll never forget the comfortable confidence he had. He passed a little of it on to me. It wasn’t award-winning stuff, nor yet a Socratic revelation to stem the onslaught of mealy-mouthed hyperbole.
Just common sense comfortably muddled through.
With confidence.
Good morning
John Bittleston
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10 Jul 2025
