Duties Aboard Ship

In all the ships, I think the Duke of York, and the Prince of Wales, and the Rodney, and the Nelson or some of those ones, and there were about, up to a dozen cruisers and untold destroyers, and they'd go up, because don't forget, this was the period that headquarters for the Russian convoy area, which I can get into because we get, I got involved in all that. The, the ship worked up in the Pentland Firth, which is the water between the Orkney's and Scotland, and that period was pretty busy for me because I, for some reason, was put into the aircraft plot, which, with one other officer who was the air direction officer, and we had 281 radar, which was pretty good, you know, it was a brand new set more or less and we had a Canadian Radar Officer, Doug Armstrong, who'd been brought over as a, a whole lot of radar officers brought over from Canada, to fill a gap that the British didn't have. But, so I was, I was, I was learning how to be a, to support the aircraft direction, I was keeping a ledger, I was keeping, I was cyphering about one in four watches, and as I've said more than once, I was a pretty busy boy at the time, and I remember being pretty tired. But the, the aircraft plot it was, you're just keeping track on air, (inaudible) research table, everything that's done today digitally and automatically in the new ships, you don't have to do it all plotting by hand, which is basically what I was doing. And I also got, I think on one occasion or two, I talked to aircraft which were during our working up period. That was Anson, so that pretty well covers it I think.