[moscowexile]

My old next door neighbour, Tommy, served in the RN and was in Scapa when the Royal Oak was torpedoed. He told me that the old World War I "battlewagon" was nothing more than a floating barracks, too antiquated to put to sea and that the majority of those that died on board were new, green ratings.

My neighbour served in the navy throughout the Second World War; for the bulk of his war service he was a submariner.

He was also my workmate. He retired in 1980 when he was 65 years old; I was only a 30-year-old "lad" then. We both worked in the local coal mines. I used to be surprised at how many of my older workmates down the pit had been submariners during WWII.

My old mate, Tommy, had joined up immediately at the outbreak of the war so as to escape the drudgery of life "down the pit", volunteering for the RN. Not long after he had joined the Senior Sevice, coal mining was made a "restricted industry", namely one from which the manpower could not be drafted as it was too vital for the war effort.

He explained to me that the RN used to sort out the "pit lads" for "the silent service". The navy logic was simple: it was expensive to train a submariner and, no matter how well a trainee submriner had done during his induction and training, if he cracked up under the claustrophobic conditions of a WWII submarine, all that training had been a waste of time and money. Miners, they reckoned, would find living in a cramped, stuffy steel tube a piece of cake.

It seems, judging by the number of ex-submariners that I met working down the pit, that they were absolutely correct.

Tommy must be dead now, although he was still alive and kicking in 2003 when I last was in the UK.

He was a tough old nut.