History and Anthropology

ISSN: 0275-7206 (Print) 1477-2612 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ghan20

What did you do in the war? Revisiting the WW2

memoirs of Stoker Thomas Mouat Tate

John Hutnyk

To cite this article: John Hutnyk (2019): What did you do in the war? Revisiting the WW2 memoirs
of Stoker Thomas Mouat Tate, History and Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2019.1626853

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1626853

Published online: 20 Jun 2019.

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HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1626853

What did you do in the war? Revisiting the WW2 memoirs of

Stoker Thomas Mouat Tate
John Hutnyk
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
‘To write history and to live history are two very different things’, War; sailors; memoir; terror;
said Marc Bloch in 1943. In this paper, the Second World War diary; souvenirs; nostalgia
reminiscences of an anti-hero sailor are interpreted according to
Bloch’s credo: ‘there should be heretics’, and an approach to
historical interpretation is tested through the fictocritical
ethnographic moves of Michael Taussig, Stephen Muecke and the
life-writing of Bart Moore-Gilbert. An unpublished
autobiographical manuscript, telling tales of warships and A.W.O.L.
adventures in North Africa and across the Mediterranean, is
annotated according to contemporary concerns, in the era of
permanent war, with an ‘ethnographic’ revisiting practice
permitting meditations on camouflage, souvenirs, diaries, memory,
slavery, writing and history.

Thomas Mouat Tate’s unpublished memoir ‘Ship’s Stoker’, tells of his adventures in the
second imperialist world war. My writing about his life constitutes a memory project
taken up between annual fieldwork trips to India, and it involves following him to
places he visited – Chatham, Malta, Libya, Egypt, Senegal, Palestine, Lebanon …
Somehow the idea was that I’d do an ethnography-cum-travel diary of reading and
research on his memoir, and document this during the so-called, and never-ending,
‘war on terror’. Old historical material seemed very present as a perpetual war allegedly
fought far away has palpable effects at home and everyday. The dynamics of war,
whether against the Wehrmacht or against present-day prejudices, do not come
without complex ambiguities and complications, so I felt a more contrapuntal writing
was needed. A precedent for such writing can be found in the work of my late colleague
Bart Moore-Gilbert, whose investigations in India of his father’s role in the colonial era
Maharashtran Police Force, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets
(2014) was released just before Bart died. Offering a self-consciously post-colonial medita-
tion on travel writing, historical nuance, terror and violence, the book appeared after two
other travel diaries by scholars who were tracking family and history. Michael Taussig’s Law
in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Columbia (2003) revisits, after 30 years, the family
he had stayed with as anthropologist in 1969. Right-wing paramilitaries have been clean-
ing (limpieza) the village of undesirables: so-called delinquents, beggars, supporters of the

CONTACT John Hutnyk JohnHutnyk@tdtu.edu.vn Faculty of Social Sciences, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi
Minh City, Vietnam
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. HUTNYK

guerrilla, and anyone who crossed the unhinged and mercenary thugs who operate more
or less with police sanction. Then there was Stephen Muecke’s Joe in the Andamans and
Other Fictocritical Stories (2008), a tale of his travels to the former British colonial Indian
Ocean prison island, with a pre-teenage son, reading boys’ own adventure comics, and
meditating also on history, colonialism and violence, as well as flora and fauna, the con-
sequences of the tsunami, Lost in Space, and the ghost who walks. My diary, then,
would comment on these texts and the manuscripts of Thomas Mouat Tate relating his
WW2 war stories. The manuscript text is rather thin, retrospectively typed up on an old
Olivetti in the 1980s, of course with a damaged P key, from stories he used to tell a tear-
away teenager of 14, camped out in his back shed in 1974 …
The plan was to revisit sites from the old sailor’s war, in part as an excuse to travel with
friends, partners, and later with children. It was also a text generating device, reworking,
and perhaps distorting, the notion of ‘anthropological assemblages’ offered in this
journal almost as a credo by Bennett, Dibley, and Harrison (2014). They describe ‘the
whole set of relations and processes, from origin and conception, which condition anthro-
pologists’ routes to, conceptions of, and modes of entry into “the field”’ (2014, 142). In
common with Moore-Gilbert, Taussig and Muecke, they also enumerate complex relations
with others, to which I would add things, as well as routes taken and returns, ordering col-
lections and connections to institutions, Governance, and the administration of assembled
‘data’. I mean this text as an oblique exemplification of the formality of history, but do not
mean it to come across as informal as a diary in the strict sense of the term, which would
invoke a whole other kind of anthropology (cf Malinowski 1967).
I have an old faded photo of ‘Pop’ and some of his sailor mates in uniform. Typically,
they are holding bottles of beer. ‘Pop’ was his preferred old sea-dog style name, and he
loved to tell his stories. My method for making sense of his text has been to track down
the places, remainders, and reminders of what Pop had done in the war by visiting the
sites mentioned in his memoir (Figure 1). Something like a family heirloom, the Beirut
photo reproduced here is not the start of my practice, but it introduces a method. Retra-
cing his steps, I arrive in the summer of 2017 to a city struggling to accommodate nearly a
million Syrian refugees. Trying to follow a heritage trail tourist map, I want to find the
location of the time-worn snap, but seeking clues seems a forlorn quest. Happily on the
back, in faded cursive script, it says:
In the mountains at Beirut in Jan 1943. I managed to save it. The lad behind me belongs to
Sunderland and was the only other survivor

I am moved by this seemingly nonchalant inscription, but cannot search ‘the mountains’.
Of course I ask why there were no survivors, and of course it is not explained. The photo-
graph is saved, but not the people in it. I know too well that in war there is death, and
comrades in arms are comrades because of this. I’ve read the literature on war and find
resonances in many places – because ‘when war shocks the social order’, it releases
‘new quantities and qualities of death, and … [so] … emotions and norms confront
demands for expediency and survival’ (Haas 2015, 56). The violence and destructive
forces unleashed in the blitzkrieg, and the organized effort against it, ‘still seek to reach
beyond this period into an as yet unformed but nonetheless ominous new age’
(Morpeth 2005, 181). The photo anticipates the tales he less frequently told, but which
are engraved in memory like wounds – the sailors who did not return from the sea.
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 3

Figure 1. Thomas Mouat Tate, outside Beirut, 1943.

I am struck by the ways places change and stay the same, and how they lodge in
memory, or morph into other names, places, or in this case, even ships. Sunderland is
just across the way from Thomas Tate’s home town of South Shields. I have memories
of the place as well, it was where my favourite Great Aunt Agatha was from, and she is
a sort of reflected memory. I remember her from photos where her name was also
written in elegant blue ink on the back. Should we worry that in the present digital era
such indexical identifiers are not being kept? Those in the electronic files never fade,
but without names they grow old much too fast. When we visit Sunderland and South
Shields we pass by Newcastle on the train and my eldest son is engrossed in colouring
a picture and will not look up when I call him to look out the window and see the
Mott, Hay and Anderson arched bridge, based on the much larger one in Sydney. ‘Seen
it’, he says. In Pop’s picture Thomas (Tommy) is the one on the front left. Is the man
4 J. HUTNYK

from Sunderland or did he ‘belong to’ HMS Sunderland, a minesweeper, which was
renamed HMS Lyme Regis after its sister ship was sold to the Indian Navy?
Trying to work out who is who, and where is where, when most of these young men
cannot be traced. Memory is fragile. In my version of Pop’s war, his story keeps overflowing
with missing sailors, and indeed, missing experiences. Some of these we want to recall and
some are lost to history as times and places change, with war devastating entire countries
and populations spilling across borders to destabilize neighbours and disrupt entire regions.

From the memoir of Thomas Mouat Tate, on The Welshman – mine-laying

cruiser:
Most of my time aboard was spent deep below decks in the engineer’s workshop, helping the
‘tiffies’ (engine room artificers) and keeping a record of all tools and equipment borrowed
from the stores. In my spare time I was allowed to play around with the lathes, making cigarette
lighters from spent cartridges. One chore I was not enamoured of was being detailed to accom-
pany the chief or second engineer on periodical inspections of the propeller shafts. In the narrow
passage-ways in which these shafts were housed, conditions were very cramped, with only a
slim grating to stand on, and very noisy. I was always glad to get out of there.
Once again we sailed to Scapa and, for the first time, loaded up with mines, 300 or so of
them, went out and laid them somewhere in the Shetland area. The mines on their trolleys
were winched aft to within two feet of the stern doors, and then pushed manually into the
water by the mining party, of which I was now a member. It was fascinating to watch the
mines bobbing astern of us then suddenly disappearing below the surface. Negative thinking
maybe, but I thought it a little disappointing that we would never know if our ‘eggs’ ever col-
lected any victims.
I’ve learned that the first bombs to fall on British soil were on the Shetlands. The only
casualty was a rabbit, which German propaganda magnified into a cruiser. The R.A.F. later
made a parcel of the rabbit and dropped it over Germany, addressed to Field Marshal Goering.

To think of writing as analogous with warfare is one of Taussig’s conceits in the afore-
mentioned Law in a Lawless Land, his Colombia diary, published 2003 and written in part in
my kitchen. To think of writing a diary as cathartic engagement, also a cleansing, means to
think of writing as tactic and strategy of a war machine that he associates with the Friei-
korps of Germany and the henchmen of Hitler’s SA (Taussig 2003, 11). Not a fashionable
analogy by any means, suggesting an indictment of writing. Editing is glossed as tactics
and strategy, and I realize that Bronisław Malinowski’s famous diary is a war diary too
(1967). At the outset of the First World War, the Polish-born Malinowski found himself
an enemy alien in Australia, and was sent to New Guinea – ‘imagine yourself suddenly
set down … ’ in exile in the Trobriands (Malinowski 1922, 4).

Enemy Territory:
February 6th 1942, fully loaded, sailing out of the harbour in the late afternoon gave us the
impression that we were in for something special as our previous excursions had started in the
forenoon. This was later confirmed when we were told we were bound for Brest, with the inten-
tion of bottling up the German battleship, Scharnhorst, and the cruisers, Gneisenau and Prince
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 5

Eugen. The knowledge that, for the first time, we were to operate in enemy-held territory was a
sobering thought and life-belts were kept within easy reach and in many cases, donned. The
journey south, which I estimated to be at a speed of about 25 knots, the frequent zig-zags and
the fairly heavy rollers made caution necessary when moving about the upper deck, where I
spent most of my time.
Dusk came and with it the pipe ‘hands darken ship, and out pipes on the upper deck’. This
meant no smoking. Away went the calming influence and more butterflies in my stomach.
Adding to my disquiet, I imagined the myriad lights, caused by phosphorescence in our
wash, must be visible for miles.
‘Action stations and mining party to your stations’ was relayed verbally just as the speed
was greatly reduced and we sailed into calmer waters. On the mining deck we found that
the stern doors were already open and all the shackles off the mines.
The disposal of the mines passed off without incident, to my great relief, as I had not ima-
gined we could go so close to shore without being spotted.

So his first action was in 1942. Late to join up, perhaps because of the Essential Work
order that prevented coal miners from leaving the mines, he was 32 years old. Meanwhile,
the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, under the command of Flottenchef (Chief of
Fleet) Admiral Lütjens, had sunk 22 vessels in two months in 1941. In Brest harbour RAF
attacks damaged Gneisenau and the Prinz Eugen, which had escaped the battle with the
Bismarck and made it to the relatively safe port. With the Scharnhorst suffering boiler pro-
blems, there were several months spent in dry dock hidden beneath camouflage netting
and with trees and shrubbery growing upon their decks (Busch 1956, 14). Never convinced
of the value of the navy, Hitler ordered the fleet back to home ports in an order of January
1942 (Ford 2012, 17). This was significant in that it was the first indication that allied forces
were winning the ‘war against “wolf packs” in the Atlantic’ (Bell 2011, 110). Leaving on 12
February, successfully traversing the Channel, the Scharnhorst hit a mine off the mouth of
the River Scheldt (Ford 2012, 66), but it was not fatal. While it may have been an ‘egg’ from
The Welshman there can be no certainty. Ford however credits The Welshman with provid-
ing the mine which holed the Gneisenau ‘off the Dutch island of Terschelling’ and soon
after, in the same area, the Scharnhorst hit a second mine, sustaining serious damage,
yet still managing to limp home to German waters, as did the other German boats.
Later in February Allied raids destroyed both Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, but the Scharn-
horst fought on for over nearly two more years before being sunk in a battle off Norway.
Not far from the action then, in another fragment of memoir, from the same typewriter,
Pop told the story of seeing a Zeppelin dropping bombs in WW1, when he was six. His
elder sister calls him, ‘Come in our Tom, else you’ll be bombed’. I wonder if he has this
correct. Memory plays tricks with recall. Events that were nearby come closer, things
that were overheard become experiences. I am intentionally ‘thinking about plural
pasts’ (Zeitlyn 2015, 387) when I try to manipulate what I know of his stories and what I
can fit into my present, even as, walking through the town of Chatham, it is cold and
no-one seems to care for the ghosts that haunt the streets, forgotten, ignored. Visiting
the Naval training base, we’d come to examine records and check dates and actions of
the fleet. Only some stories can be verified, which makes sense since besides occasional
port sightings, the secrecy of war means it is possible only to confirm some actions and
some attacks well after the events, and even then there is no guarantee. War is a frame
6 J. HUTNYK

for secrets, deception, fog and camouflage. Chatham seems bleak and it is hard to imagine
a different war-time life on the base during the months Pop spent there, apparently having
fun away from work for the first time. While his stories evoke the cramped lower decks
boiler stoker’s life as claustrophobic, it is also easy to believe he made some things up,
though I think he was not one to embellish his own glory. Over and over he tells of his
nerves, and as we will see, naivety, but also disasters and loss. Am I less naive to
believe? If at all, maybe only because, counter-intuitively, my naivety about the war is
based upon his, and my recollections, of present day wars interspersed here as I track
down his echoing voice in Chatham and Beirut, must be equally fallible.

A sailor travels the world to collect:

We sailed into Gibraltar harbour and tied up on the South Mole, and when all but the auxiliary
power had been closed down, I was pleased to learn that leave was to be given to the port
watch. Prior to stepping on soil that was not part of the British Isles for the first time, our
medical officer gave a talk to the liberty men, in which we were warned of the perils ashore.
This was mainly directed towards the first timers, like me, advising us not to partake of the very
potent ‘jungle juices’ available in Gib., and to try to resist the solicitations of members of the fair sex.
It intrigued me, when nearing the gangway, to see most of the matelots take off their hats
and hold them uppermost towards a medical orderly, who placed a small flat packet in it.
Never one to pass up a free gift, I proffered my cap. The package contained a condom.

I feel like I need to justify the indulgence of making too much of a personal diary, even
when the memoir, notebooks, letters from the field, pictures and sketches have a greater
currency in anthropology today. The ephemeral residue of the research process has
increasingly attracted attention, become raw data for navigators trawling for new mean-
ings, from Roger Sanjek’s Fieldnotes: the Makings of Anthropology (1990) to Taussig’s I
Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own (2011). Sparing you
my scrawled impressions of rocks, maps and boats in port, from Gibraltar I head by
ferry to Tangiers in 2011 as uprisings across Morocco provoke foreign office travel bans.
Feeling anxious even though I see just two of the largely peaceful Sunday protests, my
focus cannot only be on collecting trinkets, souvenirs, and stories as I walk through the
lanes to the crowded square. Engrossed in a nostalgic reverie, I cannot find the places
Thomas Tate stayed. I cannot stay more than a week at the Dar Omar Khayam, but one
day at lunch I am eating mokh with a friend and an American comes and sits down
asking questions – he is an anthropologist working on tourism and asks if we know
what we were eating. ‘Yes, we do. We are anthropologist too! Goat’s brain stew is the
best’, we declare, and lament the shortcomings of revolutionary tourism measured
against an expectation of a longer visit. Visa irregularities threaten a fine – and before
the July referendum I opt for a ticket to the far end of the Mediterranean to take up a
post to teach anthropology and Capital in Istanbul. The tranquil middle sea was made
into a theatre of conflict when Mussolini launched a ‘parallel war’ in 1940, which Eisenwein
points out, ‘led to Italy’s subordination to its German ally but also greatly expanded the
war’s boundaries’ (2016, 219). This same sea is now a theatre of death with desperate
crossings of those fleeing the chaos in Libya after NATO removed Gadhafi. The criminal
avoidance of obligations to rescue those struggling in over-crowded refugee craft has
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7

been exposed by my former colleagues in the Forensic Architecture project (M’charek

2018). This conjures a reflective cruise that renders impressions of violence into notes,
the alchemy of converting musings into manuscripts, gossip into gold, as practiced by
some of those brain-eaters we call ‘ethnographers’.

More Rabbits:
Outside the dockyard gates in Gib, with Topsy Turner as our guide, a group of stokers including
Jumper Collins, Jock Meehan and I, went looking for ‘rabbits’. ‘Rabbits’ are presents for people
back home which were in very short supply there. Nylons were top of the list, and castanets
very popular. It was a change to most of us to see the fruit shops overflowing with oranges
and bananas and, a real delicacy, dates.

Perhaps like Pop, the more I write the less this writing and its ephemera are a record of
the big movements of the war, and instead the minor asides, fruity distractions and trinkets
he collects appear as historical material. The rabbits are souvenirs, the memory of family
back home is close. And the war seeps into everything, so that trying to manage a coherent
project that expands its itineraries and focus with each new day, I am not able to talk about
just one war, and no one site, but rather repeated visits looking for the old haunts. Seeking
out Tommy Tate became a gnawing obsession, his memoir of war shaped my travel plans.

The camoflage story:

Back on the wharf, we found the Welshman completely hidden from view with huge canvas
screens on the jetty, and barges outboard. On board, we found a large number of ratings from
the shore establishment busy changing the external appearance of the ship. The upper deck of
the Welshman was a straight line from bow to stern, but now she was taking on a different
shape with the addition of a canvas forecastle. Also, the fore and aft funnels were being made
to look the same size as the centre one, by addition of a canvas covered framework.
Next morning, May 8th, we learned the reason for all this when all hands were mustered on
the quarter-deck and addressed by Lord Louis Mountbatten. He told us that we were bound for
Malta, information that I thought was a little superfluous, that the alterations to our silhouette
were to give us the appearance of a French destroyer, and also that we would be flying the
tricolour, which would be replaced by the Union flag should we be called into action.
This news caused me a little concern as in all the boy’s magazines that I had read in my
younger days, to ‘sail under false colours’ was a reprehensible thing. He went on to say
that it was vitally important that we delivered our much needed cargo to Malta, and that
whether we returned safely was of no consequence. Not very encouraging to be told we
were expendable. Because of his exploits with the ‘Kelly’, I had been an admirer of Mountbat-
ten, but at that particular time he sank in my estimation a little.

With Taussig, we visit London Imperial War memorial exhibition on camouflage. The
mundane presentation in a space crowded with the permanent war exhibits left in situ,
this in the former administrative wing of the ancient Bedlam Asylum. The madness of
war shows its examples as decoys to the main display, hiding amidst equally horrific
tools and terrors. If the exhibition was not interesting then, reading the diary and
8 J. HUTNYK

retrospectively fitting it to a wider political importance seems to illustrate Zeitlyn’s use of

Freudian theory’s notion of nachträglichkeit – a term ‘translated into English by Jones as
“deferred action”’ – to help us ‘see how pasts, presents and futures inter-relate [so that]
we reconsider … we change our understanding’ (Zeitlyn 2015, 394). Only on reflection
do I recognize how the dazzle-scatter pattern of naval mimesis, guile and deception
tells us much about the illegible in depictions of war. It is not even clear who first
comes up with the dazzle tactic. Texts mention various confusing combinations of its orig-
inators: either Thayer or Wilkinson according to Scott-Samuel et al. (2011); then an aston-
ishing six different people in Colvert, who reports that, ‘In 1914, Sir John Graham Kerr
hypothesized that a disruptive camouflage would work’ (2007, 50) and that ‘during the
war, P. Tudor Hart and four artists, Sydney and Richard Carline, Hugh de Poix and James
Wood, considered the idea of using dazzle to camouflage ships, but the idea again was
abandoned’ (2007, 51). The cubists, particularly Picasso, also claim to have been respon-
sible for ‘razzle dazzle’ and in an article called ‘The Dazzling Zoologist’ in The Northern
Mariner/le marin du nord, Murphy and Bellamy offer careful work showing that Sir John
Graham Kerr proposals ‘pre-dated French sections de camouflage set up in 1915 who
used cubist techniques to confuse aerial observers above and enemies in the field’
(2009, 173). Within the first weeks of the First World War Kerr had put ‘before the Admiralty
a summary of his plans for colouring ships’ (Murphy and Bellamy 2009, 175). With all and
sundry coming up with variations on a similar theory of misdirection, it is a wonder how
everyone managed to ignore suggestions that such techniques were ineffectual. The effort
to find disguises for huge warships reinforces what we must understand about how often
the fighting relies upon a deadly game of distraction and deception.

Valetta:
At about 6 bells of the morning watch (7 a.m.) on May 10th, we sailed into the grand harbour,
Malta, and for the first time no ‘hands to station harbour’ was piped, so I was able to stay up
on deck to watch without getting told to ‘get lost’. The whole population of Valetta, the
capital, seemed to cover every vantage point and were cheering madly and waving flags of
all sizes in celebration of breaking the blockade, a most unforgettable welcome. Valetta
itself slopes steeply upwards from the waterfront, and it was hard to pick out an undamaged
building. To me, it had the appearance of what I imagined a limestone avalanche would have.
The scene in the harbour itself was just as bad, with the superstructures of a lot of ships
scattered around, including four vessels from the last convoy, the only ones from the 20
that had started out. Almost before we had completed tying up we heard, via the dockyard
broadcast, ‘air raid number 17 now in progress’. Heartening information! Then the sirens of
Stukas, and suddenly the guns of the Welshman were firing in anger. We could hear the
crump of the bombs exploding behind us, but it felt strangely quiet.

I grew up more aware of a different war. Vietnam was on the television, for example in the
serial ‘The Sullivans’ (Crawford Productions, 1976–1983), and I went to moratorium marches
against conscription and for bringing troops home from ‘Nam. Later scoffing at the revisio-
nist Rambo films (First Blood dir. Kotcheff, 1982), I taught beginner’s English to refugee kids
from Saigon and hummed along – ‘hey there, hi there, ho there’ – with perverse irony to the
finale sequence of Full Metal Jacket (dir. Kubrick, 1987). ‘Forever let us hold our banner high
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 9

high high’. But that was a different style war no doubt, and both naval strategy and aerial
dogfights were the war games Thomas Tate knew. He would be bombed by Stukas, by
then obsolete but deadly, the Junkers Ju 87, or Sturzkampfflugzeug, dive-bomber. By
1943 the Germans had scaled back production of this aircraft, as they had become too vul-
nerable to spitfire (Griehl 1998, 118). I made airfix models of these terrifying machines when I
was a boy, so with nostalgic, but guilty, reverie, I am distracted. Even in this time of desert
wars, the strategists perhaps ignore the evocative, seductive, romantic propaganda of the
war effort as it creeps into homes and the hobbies of children and youth. I learnt to read
from war comics, my father had retained a full set of Jungle War Stories that were full of
the humour, and racism, of the hierarchical army life, likewise also in denial of green hell
horror of jungle warfare – perhaps only in favour of jungle tourism in ways I try to reconcile.
I am reminded of a family trip that should have been when I read Stephen Muecke’s won-
derful book Joe in the Andamans, which turns writing into a cosmic comic and a father-son
travel adventure of some subtlety (Muecke 2008). Like the Rambo action figure, the
Phantom cartoon superhero guides our travels while controversies, for example the atroci-
ties of incarceration on the Andamans, force themselves into text. The appeal of Muecke’s
book relies upon careful inter-weaving of critique and ‘boy’s own adventure’ reminiscence.
Associations proliferate, I cannot unravel how much Thomas Tate’s tales are similarly great to
me because of the military ruckus, or because of the ways culture and imperialism keep
irrupting unapologetically into his story.

Arrival/Departure Stories:
After our return from Malta, we were soon informed that we were going to Takoradi, which is
on the Gold Coast of West Africa, stopping on the way to pick up Senagalese soldiers, some of
whom spoke French. Where they were going, we, nor I think they, were not told. Not that it
mattered as it turned out to be a real pleasure cruise, and just what everyone needed. The
sea was quite calm all the way, and the temperature rising every day. We were escorted
almost all the time by porpoises, who cavorted around the bow waves, a new experience
for me, as was the sight of swarms of flying fish who would appear from the water, skim
the surface for a while and then disappear again.
At breakfast on the third morning out we felt the engines slow down and saw, when we got
up top, a long low very hazy coastline ahead. A heat haze caused through being not far from
the equator.
Drawing closer, and things becoming more distinct, we entered a long curving bay with
sandy beaches, a few jetties, and trees all around. Within minutes of dropping the ‘hook’, we
were surrounded by a host of boats of all descriptions, amongst them, another first for me, out-
rigger canoes. These canoes had a crew of two, a small black boy and an older native. The boys
were calling out something that I did not comprehend, but which our veterans obviously did as
they began throwing coins into the water, which the boys dived in after. In the clear water, it was
quite easy to see the coins as they pendulumed their way downwards, and every one was
caught in seconds. Very selective these boys. Though. Copper coins they ignored.
Once again the education of the novices amongst us was advanced when the old-timers
began wrapping pennies in silver paper before throwing them in. When recovered, and
handed over to the senior citizens in the canoe, it engendered much shaking of fists and
language that did not sound at all complimentary.
10 J. HUTNYK

They left us when the coin throwing ceased, and we were then able to concentrate our
attention on the bum-boats, which I learned they were. Loaded down to the gun-wales
with all types of exotic fruits, many of which I had not even heard of, let alone seen.
Mangoes, with tough green skin, which I was told were very nice but which I did not like
the look of, and paw-paws, which I also shied away from. Most of the experienced personnel
appeared to be concentrating their attention on the stalks of green bananas so my ‘oppos’
and I spent a little time haggling for one of them. By the time we had finished shopping,
all the mess decks were festooned with bananas and movement around was a little difficult.

Stories of exotic fruits might well be the temptation that shaped my interest in anthro-
pology and travel – but perhaps this is connected to why I am so disappointed at this
point in the manuscript when the usually honourable, observant, and even doubting,
Thomas, here omits something he must surely not ignore. It is not that I expect him to
comment on every pertinent political angle, but really, did he not remember, or not
know, West Africa’s place in a horrific trade? As they stopped alongside St Louis and
Dakar, did they not also visit Goreé? I know too well that the atrocities of global capitalism,
slavery included, are not confined to one place or one person, or even one kind of person.
And indeed, on Goreé there is stress on the complicity of many – the Muslim traders who
sold humans by the bunch to European captains who, once the hold was full, set off with
cargo under instructions of American owners and buyers. Today, French tour groups
crowd in to visit a slave house kept in conditions close to its horrible first use: the infamous
Maison des Esclaves visited by the Obamas in June 2013, pictured there as were previous Pre-
sidents, Popes and even Mandela. Shaken by the punishment room, a dank unadorned hole,
there were none of the usual prison museum add-ons, such as chains and shackles
embedded within stone walls or mannequins in horror pose. Upstairs, there were shackles
on view in vitrines – to remind us of the sensitivity of showing the instruments. And no bum-
boats here, no bananas. So I wonder why a fighter against prejudice, someone a part of the
largest combat force ever mobilized to defeat such racism, in this case the National Socialist
madness of Hitler, why did that fighter not connect slavery to Nazism? Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, visiting Goreé at the same time, said of epistemic violence, that ‘it is worse than
killing because while we all die, epistemic violence goes down through the generations
and years’ (personal communication). Perhaps we are forgetting the war was human at
the same time it was inhumane. Let us also not doubt that epistemic change, if possible,
is there even in the small move from war into story, from chains to souvenirs, trinkets
that might also outlast deaths, however many, inevitable for all.

Abandon Ship:
Just before 19.00 the ship was rocked with a tremendous explosion from aft, seeming to come
from the port side. Everyone was stunned for quite a while, and it wasn’t until a second loud
explosion that a scramble for the hatchway began. With over fifty ratings down there, and
only one circular round hatch in the deck-head for an exit, the evacuation was made
without any panic that I saw. When I did get up top, after collecting my life-jacket from my
locker, it was a scene of organized chaos, davits of all the boats being swung outboard,
and the many carley rafts being loosened from their shackles.
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 11

The ship had lost all way, and there was no throbbing from the engines. Also, all orders
were being passed verbally, so it seemed the tannoy was out of commission.
My action station being down in number one boiler room, I had, with some trepidation, to
go down there, leaving my lifebelt in the hatchway as it was an encumbrance when climbing
up or down ladders. My pump was running, having been started by one of the men on watch,
but there was only a couple of sprayers alight on each of the main boilers. I was asked what
was going on up top but what I could tell them wasn’t very enlightening. I did not need a
second telling when told to ‘get back up there, we’ll attend to your bloody pump’.
Up there, I found that my life-belt had disappeared but that did not worry me as the news
had gone around that an S.O.S. had gone out and that rescue vessels were on their way from
Tobruk, which was only twenty miles away.
…
Everyone on deck was scanning the horizon, hoping to see a ship, or ships, coming our way,
when a crunch was heard from below decks, aft, to be followed shortly after by another.
‘Christ!’, someone cried, ‘the bulkheads are going’. The ship, which had already a list to star-
board, then began to tilt more rapidly. I did not hear any order to ‘abandon ship’ but thought
it prudent to make my way to my allotted position for that emergency.
In the water, I first slipped off my boots, which are never fastened at sea, and then started swim-
ming away as fast as I could, having been taught that the undertow from a sinking ship could
prove fatal. Getting to what I thought was a safe distance away, I floated on my back and
looked towards the Welshman. Her bows were beginning to rise in the air and, when almost per-
pendicular, she began a slow slide downwards until she disappeared below the surface.

He floats in the water for 6 hours before being rescued.

I have been rereading these notes from a manuscript remnant war diary/memoir and tra-
velling each summer, looking for the places mentioned, and trying not to be haunted by
death. I walk along the cornice in Alexandria to the very impressive library. The harbour is
full of fishing boats and pleasure craft, a few traders and tugs. The library sits like a crash-
landed flying saucer lost at the east end of the corniche, rows of balconies behind me.
Walking up the hill, following the aqueduct, I find a bistro that I am fairly certain is one
Thomas Tate describes. I even suspect the ancient staff wiping the formica tables are
the very same staff of that old canteen. The window is wide-open to the street; the
cook lounging in the kitchen still manages to rustle up steak and chips, which I eat in
Pop’s honour. The newspaper reports another Israeli attack on Palestine – horrific photo-
graphs of torn bodies, wails and screams you can hear on the page. All this caught up in a
larger geo-political play, there is no escape or leave from the ways info-terror follows us in
these times, even as the time itself is reduced to pixels and grains of electrified dust.

The Seven Wonders of the World:

After telling us that we were to have seven day’s survivors leave in Cairo, our rescuers wished
us ‘good luck and goodbye’ … we were given a medical check, then a complete kit out, in
khaki, and more bank notes than I had ever possessed before, in Egyptian money. In the
hut that I was in, in the rest camp, were several Australian soldiers who adopted me,
calling me ‘bluey’ and what I thought was ‘the Tommy sailor’. It was not until I settled in
12 J. HUTNYK

Australia that I realized they had been saying ‘the Pommy sailor’ and ‘bluey’ because of the red
colour of my hair. My first trip out with them was to visit the pyramids.
There are three large pyramids at Giza, known, with mathematical exactitude, as number
one, number two, and the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Several smaller ones also. The great
pyramid is the only one remaining of the original seven wonders of the world. My companions
suggested that I climb this one, ‘The view from the top is wonderful’, while they had a stroll
around. I fell for the trap. After about half an hour of struggling upwards I realized my
knees were not going to last to the top. I was wearing shorts. I sat down to rest, looked
down, and saw my mates cheerfully waving to me with bottles of beer in their hands.
Back on the level, by way of atonement they paid for a photographer to take a snap of me
astride a camel, with the Sphinx in the background. As they told me about the pyramids, ‘once
you have seen one you have seen them all’, so we made the trip back to the city where we had
a very good meal in the services club, and then a liberal amount of cold beer.

Visiting Cairo I stay a night in a former British Officers’ Club which is now a budget hotel.
It retains a motley collection of RAF paraphernalia on the walls and an air of faded wartime
glories. There is a screening of the film Lawrence of Arabia (dir. Lean 1962) with the mar-
vellous Peter O’Toole. Yet deaths, terrors, the risks and romance of war – I am still a tourist
eating comfort foods on the nostalgia trail while the currents of war transform the lives of
locals – youth who look no more than 15 years old guard street corners, in uniform with
ancient weapons, the city armed. The pyramids, museum and library are ticked off on my
list and I try to imagine how the danger that all soldiers face becomes matter of fact, but it
is too strange. Tommy’s visits to brothels, heavy drinking, fighting for fun and other happy
go lucky routines only confirm the denials. His war was so horrific he has edited it out on
the spot – his text often makes the mundane and the boringly normal take centre stage.
Under occupation the occupied no doubt can only carry on, but the tension must be
buried somewhere. In those under-aged soldiers that patrol languidly today – unruffled
nonchalance awaiting what surprise attack? In Luxor, we hear nothing but stories of the
slaughter of tourists that occurred, then, some eight years earlier.

Absent without leave Thomas Tate spends more than six months in
Alexandria:
On one of our prowls round the harbour we were passing a barge in which we saw an opened
carton containing books. Reading material being a luxury in very short supply, I asked the
Gurkha sentry on duty what the chances of ‘borrowing’ a few books were. The Arabic word
for ‘steal’ is ‘clifti’, and for ‘look’, ‘shofti’. What he replied was ‘You no clifti while me shofti.
Me no shofti, you clifti’ I have treasured that reply ever since that time. He obligingly
turned his back on us and marched off. We got our books!

Taussig looks back over his ‘notes scribbled down at the time’ and ponders ‘the frank-
ness, the naiveté, and the imprecision’ (Taussig 2003, 47). Is it important to remember that
the published diary is always edited? Bart Moore-Gilbert also writes a diary on his blog
when he discovers he has terminal kidney disease. He will pass away in December
2015, we speak on the phone just a month or two before, moaning about institutional poli-
tics as usual. The criteria for good writing should not take account of special pleading, but
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 13

Moore-Gilbert was also a writer, and his care for the craft was palpable when we co-taught
our theory course introduction. Meanwhile, he would have enjoyed how Taussig’s diary
elaborates in a way that stages diary-writing but has a greater purpose. It is the form of
the diary at the service of ethnography, and may be the best way to tell the personal
stories or terrible violence he collects from the people he knows in the town. Brothers,
uncles, neighbours are killed, retributions, revenge, stalled legal proceedings and
threats, fear and silences: ‘the more violence and horror, the more my work seems worth-
while’, writes our diarist (Taussig 2003, 28) – but I suspect this was not written in the real-
time diary itself. It must surely, necessarily, be post-hoc, mustn’t it? This is ok. The diary
form facilitates a writing that is not not ethnography, and includes phrasings like ‘in my
opinion’ at the end of controversial sentences (Taussig 2003, 31). To find a form of
writing that best conveys what is so hard to convey is itself a great ethnographic skill.

From Alexandria to Tripoli, rejoining the forces, in a way:

In my last days in Tripoli I had been given a job as a sentry on a brothel. It was out of bounds for
British service personnel, for a reason I was not told, but OK for Americans to frequent. The rating
whom I relieved put me wise to the procedure, and also gave me some information which proved
financially beneficial. He took me down to an Italian tailor shop just a few doors away and intro-
duced me to the owner. The routine was that I had to prevent our boys from entering, but then
quietly advise them that they could hire a civvy suit from this tailor, which would secure them entry
to the brothel. I received a good commission from the tailor, and all the vino I desired from the
establishment’s Madame. Much better than working for a living, I thought.

What is the contribution that a diary or memoir can make that other forms of writing
cannot? Is it a gentler form of persuasion, is it a more nuanced way of getting into the per-
sonal complexity and out-and-out messiness of lived experience, even amidst war? Is it to
remind our readers, and more so ourselves, that the everyday has a greater impact that
clinically calculated sentences do not capture? Does the diary form capture? Kidnap?
Detain? Render (as in ‘special rendition’)? Execute? Does it do all this all the more viciously
for its mufti disguise? Camouflage is a uniform too, and khaki, since the 1840s right up until
the present was not by accident the colour of choice for the military.
The war diary/memoir is more and more that faulty palimpsest. Tommy’s dodges and
wheezes, so impressive for a young teen, had their own raconteur-entrepreneurial efficacy.
I had a hand – fairly naively – in the construction of the text, but not in its content. I re-edit
it now, weaving in my own travels, anxieties, doubts and hesitations, and also the context
of a new interminable global war that I too find difficult to inscribe or describe. I am grasp-
ing for the modes of traveller’s tale and ethnography to tease out what I need. The travel
form, and the diary form, and the war memoir all contribute something to this ‘affect’, but,
but, but. I am still not sure the horror is conveyed – the horror made normal.
Back in Cairo I move into the Pension Roma, at the top of an old building – rickety art deco
iron cage lift and spacious rooms – down an alley off a wide boulevard in the commercial
district. In the afternoons a glaring hot sun streams past the canvas awning that protects
the balcony where I sit to read and write. Reports of Afghanistan and Iraq fill the newspaper
each day (and week, Al-Ahram for example) in a way that has become incidental in Europe.
The press is suffering from battle fatigue, the war is kept distant somehow, only splash
14 J. HUTNYK

exposés make any impression, and even then not much of that washes with the becalmed
readers. The returning coffins are no longer on display to keep the issues ‘live’ in the national
press, though they are prominent in local newspapers and gazettes. I imagine the agents of
the Ministry of Defence scanning the newswires for any upcoming mention of the death toll
so they can quickly roll out some mitigating spin, smothering us with an unpalatable nation-
alism that gags. Ensign Tate’s letters were censored in the war, though he wrote reams and
reams of them – alas they did not survive. I am happy we have his memoir.

A visit home: grandfather’s return from Italy.

About December 1st, 1944, I was told that I was part of a draft to H.M.S Pembroke. News that I
had not been expecting. It meant that I was being sent home. Surprisingly, my first thought
was how I would cope with the winter there, after more than two years in the balmy climate of
the Mediterranean area. I didn’t knock back the draft chit. Those on the draft were taken down
to Taranto, where we boarded a destroyer for passage to St Angelo, Malta. After a couple of
days there we were kitted out in our full regulation uniforms, which most of us had not worn
for some considerable time. I was especially ‘chuffed’ as I was now permitted to wear a
chevron on my sleeve, having been granted the three years good conduct badge. The
rating term for it was ‘three years undiscovered crime’ (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The collector of Rabbits.

 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 15

Thinking about this fatigue alongside the depth of feeling that WW2 maintains, still so
many years later, I wonder if it is that we need the longer rhythms of work – sometimes
offered in anthropology – to enact a greater contextualization of economic and political
history? Walter Benjamin mentions Scheherazade from the 1001 Nights three times in
his 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’, and imagines the world put to rights by tales told in
difficult circumstances (Benjamin 1968). What is it to find these whispers from the past
replete with affect and emotional depth charge? Usually a tragic story, these can be at
worst narratives of invasion, attrition, ‘development’ and transformation; at best a
heroic tale of resistance. More likely, the notebooks we mine tell of militarist annexation,
corporate appropriation or capitalist transition (not without romantic and pastoral nostal-
gia). I buy fashionable boots in Italy, a two day visit, more tourism than anthropology.

A Christmas dinner:
As we left the grand harbour of Valetta on December 5th, we were all looking forward to
spending Christmas at home. No such luck. The Sheffield called in at Algiers, stayed a
couple of days, and stopped at Gibraltar for a similar period. She then made an agonisingly
slow voyage over what seemed to be most of the North Atlantic, sailing into the Clyde, and
into a very heavy fog, on Christmas Eve. We dropped the hook somewhere off Greenock
but, because of the conditions, had to spend a frustrating night on board. Next morning, in
heavy scotch mist, we passengers were ferried ashore in a tug. At Greenock railway station
we boarded a local train to Glasgow. After an interminable wait there, the Chatham contin-
gent took the King’s Cross express. Imagine the feeling of the ‘Geordies’ on board when we
pulled into Newcastle Central. So near to home and yet so bloody far. I did try to phone up
Marie’s sister Lily, the only one of the family on the phone, but couldn’t find a Shields directory.
Christmas dinner on the train was a packet of sandwiches … big deal. When we eventually
reached Chatham Barracks, we did get some roast port and some plum duff. Also, privileged
personnel that we were, a couple of bottles of beer each.
Leave formalities completed the next day, I was able to get back to King’s Cross in time to
catch the overnight train north.

The war is always a part of a bigger war, within which mundane events – Christmas –
hang like extravagant decorations. The camouflaged ship is destined for the encounter
and the specificity of the singular voyage is suspended in vicious webs of repeat significa-
tion, or concentric circles or Venn diagrams of the war room maps accumulating overlays
of each other on the navigational charts of vast populations. Is it the task of the little stories
we tell to unravel these concentric circles? Making them human with the storytelling –
‘writing diary’ – resources we have, so that an encounter in a village in the tropics off
the coast of Papua New Guinea is a part of a wider struggle between capital and those
with a long bow not yet pacified for commerce.

Getting Leave:
Arriving at the South Shields railway station, too early for any public transport, I went to the
taxi stand outside and was surprised to see the lone taxi there had a big canvas contraption
fixed to its roof, having been converted to run on gas. Sharing a taxi with other travellers, I was
16 J. HUTNYK

taken for an unnecessary tour of the town, before being dropped off at 204 Prince Edward
Road. The driver would not take any money from me after hearing of my travels, which I prob-
ably embellished a little. As I had expected, one of his questions was ‘When do you have to go
back?’ He was more than happy to accept a couple of packets of cigarettes, which he said
would make a nice change from those ‘bloody pasha’ which were all that was around. For-
tunately, I had been able to stock up on the Sheffield.
Something else I had acquired, from the same source, was a good supply of ‘nutty’ [cho-
colate] which had also become a rarity. My daughters, Ann, now seven, and Margaret, now
five, thought it was nice to have two Christmas days in one week. I was not prepared for
how much they had grown since I was last home. Details of the 28 days leave are vague …

The scene of Thomas Tate, home for a month full of Christmas cheer, was no doubt a
Vera Lynn moment. Britain’s beloved war-time singer is still fighting the good fight, in the
2016 British referendum refusing to ally with any political party.
But back in Malta, in 2015, I arrive in the same port Tommy Tate visited so memorably
over 70 years earlier. Even after Valetta’s war-time devastation, and the museums and
memorials that remain in the town, the cheeriness of exported English tourism seems
strangely controlled. Amidst souvenirs, drinking and fun, there may still be some
residue of controlled arrogance, and I recall that in the same way that Moore-Gilbert
describes his father (2014, 18), my grandfather was always dapper in his ship-shape
fashions. But why join the navy, or the forces at all? I am on Malta thinking of how
many times he was sunk, the blockade, the many lives that were lost, and I wonder not
that he went A.W.O.L., but why he even volunteered in the first place? I could never
feel any such obligation to sign up, and doubt that I could march to any tune, let alone
a band in khaki, but while I have to try to comprehend those that do, I cannot resolve
the national affiliations.

One war ended, only to be replaced by the cold war … :

On August 14th we heard on the radio that the atomic bomb had been dropped by the Amer-
icans over Hiroshima. My main feeling was one of horror that such an action should have
been considered necessary, and then sympathy for the one who had to actually drop that
missile. The dropping of another over Nagasaki three days later made me physically sick.
One week later I left Chatham Barracks for the last time in uniform (I’ve been back since) for
the demobilization camp in Surrey. The time spent waiting for demobilization seemed inordi-
nately protracted, and we couldn’t understand why it was taking so long, but finally, the day
came when I lined up to go through the medical check, visit the paymaster’s department,
where I picked up the pay due to me, plus a £160 gratuity from a grateful government
(that’s what it said) and then finally, selected a civilian outfit. My choice of suit was a
brown pin-stripe, which a wide-boy waiting with a barrow just outside the building offered
me £10 for. That his barrow was well loaded with parcels showed me he had plenty of
takers. It also showed the value of the clothing.
After two weeks holiday, I returned to my job as a trolley-bus driver, early in February 1946.
Working six and occasionally seven days a week, the high cost of living still forced us to keep
dipping into the gratuity in order to live. After a few years, my wife and I decide there wasn’t
much of a future for us if we stayed where we were, so having learned from a relative in
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 17

Figure 3. Marie Tate, nee Linney, South Shields Pleasure Beach, circa 1935.

Australia that conditions there were promising we applied for, and were granted, assisted
passage to that country. I am pretty certain my family have never regretted the decision to
emigrate. The cost £20. I have to admit that I have several times been offered that amount
if I will only ‘go back to bloody pommyland!’.

He did not. I did; and since this, however entertaining the travels of Thomas Mouat Tate,
this is not only his story, but mine, precisely my grandfather’s story, the bomb has dropped
so I think I can end with a more personal narrative. I too am a war volunteer and fellow
traveller. The narration of these tales had always entertained me. It can be a catharsis, a
18 J. HUTNYK

context, an aide-de-memoire and a therapy – not to mention a memorial and a grave. I

have listened since I was 14 and on the run from home, sneaking back most nights to
sleep in his shed. Nipping round the garage back to the front door in the morning to
‘visit’ in time for breakfast. I sat leaning on a fridge full of Victoria Bitter, listening. His
old dog Shep panting on the lino floor.
He was not for me a war hero, or some sort of surrogate father-figure ‘constructed in
childhood’ who I found later to be violent or a failure or disappointment (cf Moore-
Gilbert 2014, 66). Rather, the first gleanings of the idea of being a writer, and editor,
when at 30, I recorded some of his stories on tapes, and typed some up, which Pop cor-
rected. He typed more, and some 15 years later I gathered them up into a booklet and pre-
sented them to him in hospital where he was after a second stroke. He did not recognize
me then, nor was he able to make out who my mother was, much to her distress. He
smelled of his own filth, the hospital was short of staff. I washed him and we looked
through the book, flipping the pages, which seemed not to make much impression.
That is until he came to the photograph I had included of his wife taken on the beach
at South Shields in England some 7 decades before. Immediately he recognized her
and said her name: ‘Marie’. The photo is from 1935, she is wearing a thick coat against
the cold, but still looks fabulous (Figure 3).
After identifying this photograph, my grandfather was lucid for the following six
months. He insisted we would publish his story and make a mint. This is that text, there
is little profit in it, alas.
In his important Weimar era essay ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament, Siegfried Kra-
cauer laments how photographs of grandparents lose meaning for the subsequent gen-
erations (Kracauer 1963/1995, 47–63). I want to preserve the memory function of the
snapshot. Poorly framed, a faded black and white, with a kind of palimpsest caption
that is part diary, part memoir. All the world shines through that picture, as if treasure.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
John Hutnyk http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4826-8949

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