Commanders McDowell Commanding Officer LtCdr K

Our 45th Anniversary

President Jim has invited me to have a word on the occasion of OTAGO’s 45th anniversary since commissioning, and to spin a bit of dit about it and what happened afterwards.

Captains who claim to know all about what was going on around them are liars - and if they were not liars, what a pain in the bum they would be, don’t you agree! All I can claim are memories of a few things that went on pretty close around me.

Immediately after the commissioning itself, my wife Eleanor reminds me, we ran out of tonic. She remembers this because, obliged to entertain the V.I.P’s in the “cuddy”, we found that the hand-picked captain’s steward had also run out, and she had been required to take his place dispensing the drinks. He remained nameless and was replaced by the shy Brian Finnerty, who could not have been a more loyal or competent keeper of the Captain for ever after.

It was during the final phase of the Portland work-up, with FOST onboard and most of the day closed up for action that, when the very taut Admiral Peter Gretton looked at his watch and told me I had the next 30 minutes in which to give him lunch in a cabin cleared for action, Finnerty placed a beautifully cooked chicken in front of the great man - with the words “Sorry, Sir, no gravy - action messing”. Believe it or not, the Admiral smiled.

While doing trials etc in Portsmouth, come Navy Days, the local hierarchy thought this was no place for colonial troops and so we were invited to go and do a shakedown somewhere else. I don’t claim it was my idea to go to Copenhagen, but the busy Channel and the Sound were ideal experience for keeping wits about. When I made my call on the Admiral at Copenhagen, there was another senior officer sitting quietly behind him - and he would not refuse if we asked him to our cocktail party. Thus the Prince of Denmark drove himself and some of his lovely family down the jetty to the ship.

In Portsmouth Dockyard we were a bit different from others - Kiwi matelots running through the yard passing a rugby ball around or, in an otherwise very quiet yard, up the mast on a Sunday afternoon preparing for the morrow’s trials. At the end of each day’s trials we persuaded our visiting specialists (ie we kept the brow inboard) to join us for a discussion on what went right and wrong and how to do better tomorrow. When they got over the initial shock, they thought it was not a bad idea.

I am sure that few of us would believe we’d berth in the Pool of London where our Patron Princess Margaret would visit us - a happy lady that day; rather more than P.O. McLaren who served her an excellent lunch, though with a broken rib strapped after a fall that morning in the liberty boat. Then there was the Mayor of Stepney, Mrs Elboz - a lady of magnificent proportions, whose diminutive Mayoress (her niece) called out “Mind your bum Mum,” as Mrs E . negotiated the hatch to the bridge. I recall we left the Pool briskly with a fair bit of power involved in the 180 degree turn - and a Thames pilot with skid marks on his nether gear.

I doubt very much whether our operational education could have been better, short of actual warfare. We had all kinds of consorts and there seemed to be submarines everywhere. Some of these were driven by captains who had been in New Zealand, and I recall one time that, while re-joining the convoy a huge and inviting echo appeared astern; it was one of them - spoiling for a fight! In another exercise, I think the log read 31.5 knots as we pursued the American nuclear submarine, “throwing” everything we had at her - or at least the huge noise she made. And no, I have not forgotten that lovely cartoon of the messdeck, entitled “Hands to dinner; hard a starboard!

While it would not have been obvious to everybody, one factor which helped smooth our progress was the number of friends the RNZN had at that time serving in the Royal Navy. These included Admiral Sir Charles Madden, ex CNS, who was in charge of the advanced exercises; Captain George Pound, ex C O of the RNZN cruiser, Chief of Staff at Portland; Captain Terry Herrick (kiwi in the RN) who made us most welcome on the way home, as NOIC Gibraltar. Also, of course, we owed much to Captain John O’Connor Ross RNZN - the head of our Defence Liaison Staff in London.

Finally we were on our way home to a wonderful reception in Dunedin. There are many other yarns to be spun, and let those who remember them please tell. As for me, I’ll stop here.

Max McDowell