Oral History Gallery

Propulsion Conditions 2 - We always had leather soled shoes 1940s

Name: Gordon Dance

Service: 1944 - 1947

Rate: Stoker Mechanic

Branch: Engine Room / Marine Engineering

Gordon Dance joined the Navy in 1944 and trained as a stoker at HMS Imperieuse. His first sea-going ship was HMS Newcastle in 1945, which took him to the Far East. He worked in ship's boiler rooms, controlling the amount of steam the boilers supplied to the engines for different powers and speeds. The role of a stoker was manual and physical, with few automatic or remote controls.

Here Gordon describes one of the unpleasant jobs of a stoker in the 1940s.

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Extract Text (Duration01.29)

Q: So what was your first task on [HMS] Newcastle in the engine room?

The dirtiest, filthiest bloody task you could come across. Under the chequer plates in the boiler room was all the unspilt oil, unused oil and filth and gubbins and bits and pieces that had drained out when you cracked a valve open and the steam come to atmosphere, turned from atmosphere to condensate, dropped down into the bilges. Somebody had to clean it up and make sure that when you put the bilge pumps on they worked, and they had to be cleaned and that was the first damn dirty job I ever had to do. But it was all part and they all took the mickey, "Oh he's on bilges today" and you would come out filthy, absolutely up to your neck, from the top of the head to the bottom of your shoes away, you were filthy. And if you didn't keep the bottom of your shoes clean you slipped 'cause there were chequer plates on the floor and you'd be sliding around like nothing on earth, and we always had leather soled shoes, we never had hub nails or anything like that, leather soled shoes all the time.