Reviews

Five Islands - Autobiography of a Royal Dockyard Apprentice

I’ve always wished to see my father’s story published and to share it with others interested in our great Naval tradition. This publication and the selected family photographs and Arthur’s sketches used to illustrate it would have pleased him.

Harrold Hart 2007, Plymouth

Harrold Duncan Hart
1920 -

From the Professional Engineer,10 July 2002, when Arthur’s papers and text books were donated to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers by his daughter Dorothy.

Decoys and disguises

The profession of dockyard engineer was a busy one in the period when the British Fleet genuinely rules the waves. Papers recently donated to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ archive shed light on this peripatetic lifestyle.

Arthur James Hart became an engineering apprentice at Sheerness in 1898. Once qualified, he travelled widely within the United Kingdom and Ireland and overseas to Malta, Bermuda and elsewhere – wherever the fleet was active. In addition to technical notebooks, Hart kept a diary and would later compose an autobiography based on these volumes.

Regrettably for historians, the Navy enforced wartime secrecy regulations with rigour. The keeping of diaries was banned during the war years of 1914-18. Hart retrospectively noted the main events of this period. Following some work on the battleship Iron Duke (later Admiral Jellicoe’s flagship at Jutland), Hart was posted to Cobh in Ireland, then called Queenstown and a key British naval base.

Queenstown was the home to the Q-ships, Royal Navy decoy vessels intent on destroying German U-boats. Hart worked on these vessels periodically and related how he authorised a signal giving notice of Q-5, the Farnborough’s action sinking its second submarine. The ship’s commander, Gordon Campbell, was awarded the Victoria Cross. Other residents of the base included British submarines and torpedo boats and Hart maintained them for service. He also readied boats of the rescue flotilla aiding the stricken Lusitania.

There were conflicts closer to home. Following the Easter Rising, the IRA campaign that ultimately created the Irish Free State reached the Cork area. The Queenstown base became a regular target for rifle fire and Hart’s apprentices took sides. Leather belting used in Hart’s workshops and white metal from junction boxes in Royal Navy vessels would turn up as captured IRA belts and brooches. These engineers were colleagues by day and enemies by night.

Keith Moore