A few months after World War II began, Frank Wilson enlisted in the Royal Navy. He completed 10 weeks of training at HMS Collingwood and continued at HMS Wellesley in Liverpool, where he trained as an anti-aircraft gunner. Frank was then stationed on HMS Activity, a 14,000-ton ship, posted to the forward starboard side operating the anti-aircraft guns. He fondly recalls Captain Willoughby as an absolute gentleman. While training, Frank remembers being held in the harbour at Greenock when HMS Dasher exploded and sank in the Clyde in March 1943, with 379 out of 528 crewmen lost. He saw the smoke and heard about the sea being afire with aviation fuel. Frank’s first Russian Convoy was extremely cold, with temperatures below 50 degrees. He was part of the team escorting battleships Royal Sovereign and Missouri. On another trip, he witnessed HMS Bluebell get hit by a torpedo from the German submarine U-711 in the Barents Sea, where only one person survived. In Russia, Frank saw the hunger and gave food to the locals whenever he could. The Activity had to keep moving in dangerous waters to avoid being an easy target for the Germans. Frank was part of 20 different convoys, traveling in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Mediterranean. After serving on The Activity, he was transferred to HMS Berwick and sent to the Far East. In Singapore, he visited HMS Activity again to celebrate the end of the war with his old friends.  

Alan Johnson served in the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1947. The son of a professional Manchester city footballer he was enlisted as an Able Seaman on the Minesweeper HMS Onyx. In his expansive interview he talks in detail about his life onboard and the work he was involved in. He describes the mine clearing procedure in depth and the particular threats the ship faced day and night. The Onyx operated both in the Balkan seas on the Russian convoys and in the English Channel during the Normandy invasion. Alan shares entertaining memories from them all.

Harriet Wight was living in the countryside in North East Scotland at the outbreak of war and recalls seeing an enemy aircraft drop a bomb over Aberdeen. It was then she decided ‘to do her bit’ and joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). After a medical in Dundee she did her initial basic training at Balloch on the edge of Loch Lomond and began her duties as a messenger. She was eventually posted to Ilfracombe in Devon as a signaller and was involved in taking and logging signals which at that time mainly related to noting casualties from the North African campaign in 1943. Harriet moved on to operating telephone switchboards after a period of training and was posted to Hatston on the Orkneys, close to the vital naval base of Scapa Flow. Harriet spoke of meeting her future husband, who was a sailor involved in Arctic and Atlantic convoys, and how she never concerned about the danger he was in until she found out that an American soldier pen-friend of hers had been killed in Belgium and then the reality of war hit home. Harriet concluded by saying how very proud she was of having been a Wren.