“I was born in 1920 at Hackney Wick.  I attended the Sidney Road School until the family moved out to Becontree on the outskirts of London in 1926.

In 1931, after passing the then equivalent of the eleven plus exam, I attended the Beal Modern School leaving in 1935 (I still attend the same school for the Marquetry group meetings, though in a different building).

During the war I was in a reserved occupation, but being on Admiralty work, was able to join the Royal Navy as an E. R. A. (Engine Room Artificer) with the rank of acting petty officer. Most of my time in the Navy was spent on repair work, firstly, for the North – Western Approaches mine laying fleet and various drifters, trawlers and other small ships, mainly to the ships’ engines, boilers and all other machinery. After this I joined the newly built repair ship H. M. S. “Beachy Head” at Vancouver.

I did enough engine – room watch – keeping in this ship to pass exams and become a chief petty officer. After sea trials, we put into Pearl Harbour on our way to the Far East. Here the American ships were sunk, but there was a lot of superstructure visible above the water – a very sorry sight.

We would swim at Waikiki Beach, and on one occasion in common with a few other members of the ship’s crew, I was made a life member of the surfing club there.

Soon after sailing from Hawaii for New Guinea we broke down – a bearing on the main shaft (11” diameter propeller shaft, in metric that would be about 29cms) was overheating and we were adrift in the Pacific. Being a repair ship – we didn’t have far to go for help. Together with three or four others, I worked in the shaft tunnel on renewing the bearing. It took about a day – my 25^th birthday, and we were drifting nearer and nearer a coral reef – we asked the Americans to send a tug, but in view of the Pearl Harbour disaster they were apprehensive about opening the boom to let a tug come to our aid, but we managed to repair it enough to get us back into Pearl Harbour where those of us who had done the repair work were granted a weeks leave.

During the war the family home was bombed out and I was obliged to lodge with an uncle in South Wales where I met and married a local girl in 1944 and we stayed happily married until she passed away in 2000.

After de – mob, I stayed in engineering, my jobs being sheet metal-works foreman, draftsman, chief draftsman, and finishing up designing heating and ventilation schemes, and estimating.

I retired at 65 and after finishing my first 80 years I’m now making a good start on the second.” 

Thanks Tom that was excellent, I reckon there’s the makings of a blooming good high adventure film there, can I be your agent? 

Well, if you found Tom’s life story interesting and, like me, found his naval memoirs completely absorbing, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve craftily managed to “borrow” Tom’s log and note book that he kept during the days of his naval service and have included a few examples from the book. To keep the format, style and look of the book as original as possible, I’ve decided to scan in each page of the book and present it to you in the same style as our picture galleries, just click on each thumbnail picture to see the selected page full screen. To read the selected samples from Tom’s book just click the button below.

Tom has kindly made available some of his pictures for us to display for you on this web site. We are also including some pictures of Tom's famous spiral patterned table. which we think you will find intriguing.
Click this link button below to see the pictures.

We are including a series of photos from various events in Tom's life, to see them click the photo album link button below.