Friday, April 24, 2015

Not an Anzac...

But my grandfather served as a signalman in the British navy on the HMS Indomitable during WWI. 

    
HMS Indomitable was one of three Invincible-class battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy before World War I and had an active career during the war. She tried to hunt down the German ships Goeben and Breslau in the Mediterranean when war broke out and bombarded Turkish fortifications protecting the Dardanelles even before the British declared war on Turkey. She helped to sink the German armoured cruiser Blücherduring the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915 and towed the damaged British battlecruiser HMS Lion to safety after the battle. She damaged the German battlecruisers Seydlitz and Derfflinger during the Battle of Jutland in mid-1916 and watched her sister ship HMS Invincible explode. Deemed obsolete after the war, she was sold for scrap in 1921.


Grandfather was born in 1900 in Battersea London and joined the British Navy at the age of 13. After leaving the British Navy he joined one of the passenger  ships  which travelled between London and Sydney and it was on that ship that he met my grandmother who was travelling out to Australia with her family.   

On the ship’s arrival in Sydney he disembarked and my grandparents were married not long after that at Rose Bay. He then joined the Royal Australian Navy for a stint and left in 1930. 


He lived to the age of 102 and often spoke of his time as a sailor in the British and Australian Navy.  

  
Lest We Forget.

2 comments:

Shirlwin said...

What a lovely family story Karen. Fancy joining at 13!! Still a child in our eyes, but living to such a wonderful old age it does go to show that one doesn't need to attend an education facility until almost 20 to make a man.

Anonymous said...

Oh, how wonderful you have all those photographs and know something of his story! I'm always looking for bits and pieces about members of my family, going way back as far as I can. How lovely to have had him for so long, too.