Ahoy! Welcome on board, it's great to welcome you back here
aboard my boat. My name is Ngaire, I work for Imperial War Museums
and on our Adventures in History we have explored
the paintings, letters, photographs, interviews and objects that make up the
collections of the Imperial War Museums that tell the stories of real people
whose lives have been affected by war and conflict.
And well, for today's adventure, I feel like leaving the wheelhouse of my own
little boat, stepping ashore and venturing off to one
of the objects in the museum's huge collections. And
huge is the right word because the object i'm thinking of
is the biggest of all our objects and while i could tell you a bit about
it from sitting here, it'd be much better to go and visit it
ourselves. So come on i'm taking you with me.
We made it! Welcome to HMS Belfast, the largest object in
Imperial War Museums collection, a warship
but also a floating town home to nearly a thousand men
in the Second World War. Inside there is a carpenters,
a butchers, a bakers, a post office, a shop, a doctors and, a dentist....
everything that you might find in your community is here on board
to make sure the sailors were fed healthy and
able to do their jobs. How do we fit it all in?
Well there are nine decks of HMS Belfast and every deck
holds clues and each of those clues leads to a different story. Stories of
real people in some of the biggest moments of
history and our first clue is right behind me
just on the gun turret. If we take a close look you can see the
ship's badge. Now when HMS Belfast was first
built in 1936 she was the first ship to be
given the name of Belfast so she didn't have
a badge with her own picture on it. In fact the name of the ship was much
easier to come up with - she was built in the city of Belfast so
the name was the straightforward part of her ship's badge. I bet you won't have
heard of the shipyard that built HMS Belfast - Harland and Wolff aren't well
known - however, i bet you've heard of another
ship that they built, probably the most famous ship in the
world. It wasn't a warship like this one, it was a huge big passenger ship and on
its very first voyage, hit an iceberg. You've got it now haven't
you? Yes, Titanic. HMS Belfast and Titanic
were both built in the same shipyard in the city of Belfast.
So that's how she gets her name but let's go back to the story of her badge.
So there was no picture because Belfast was the first ship to have this name
so we now need to think about a sailor called Stuart
Ferguson. So while the ship is still being built,
Stuart Ferguson - who is a chief engineer - is sent
by the Royal Navy to see how work is getting on.
Now Stewart was a drawer and a bit of a keen walker
and one of his walks he had picked up the skeleton
of a seahorse and realizing that there was also a seahorse
in the crest of the city of Belfast, drew his idea of putting a seahorse
right in the middle of Belfast's badge. He sent it to the
admiralty and they accepted the design and so that is how Belfast got her badge.
So one tiny detail like the ship's badge reveals a whole big story and that's
true of HMS Belfast. In fact there's lots of
different naval words on board that a young sailor would have to learn.
So i'm not stood talking to you on the floor i'm stood on the deck.
This isn't a wall it's a bulkhead, even something often overlooked as a drain
is called a scupper. All of this naval slang would have to be learnt by the
sailors when they first stepped on board. It's a bit like the language that you
might use at home in your communities or where you're from. Words
change according to different places and that's
another reason that Belfast is a bit like her own floating town.
Let's go down the ship's waist on the port the left side and find out about
another one of those sailors who lived and worked here.
Ah popped by the ship's bakery just to see what was
being made today but i'll save this for later. However
it does remind me of a story we heard about in our last Adventure in History.
Do you remember the little boy whose mum was working in the munitions factory
and after a long day in the midst of all the rationing of the Second World War,
she came home with a doughnut for that little boy as a special sugary treat?
And that little boy had wanted to grow up to become a sailor?
And he did indeed fulfill that ambition! And HMS Belfast became Bernie Bristoll's
place of work and the place where he lived and had
donuts freshly baked by the ship's bakery.
Up above me is the back of the bridge wireless office.
Bernie joined the royal navy at the age of 16
and when he joins the crew of HMS Belfast,
he is fully trained as a radio operator - a telegraphist.
Now that means he is trained to use a very special code
called Morse code. Now if you look at morse code on the page
it's a series of dots and dashes, each letter of the alphabet
has its own combination of dots and dashes, it's quite complicated,
though i can always remember the letter E because that's just a single dot -
because E is the most used letter in the English alphabet.
Well Bernie was very very good at Morse code and so he's trained up
and on board Belfast he is receiving and sending messages
in morse code at a rate of 25 words a minute. That's faster than i can
type on a keyboard. Below my feet is where bernie lived
he slept in a hammock in a mess deck - another one of those sailor slang words.
A mess deck was your home on board and your mess
mates were a bit like your family, they were
the people who did a similar job to you and you all live together. You ate scran -
healthier than doughnuts! Most of the time scran was the navy nickname for
food and it might be also where you went and
got some nutty. Now if you remember the Adventure in
History with my friend Ed - he was the submariner - and you'll
remember that he said nutty was the slang
for sweets and chocolates on board. So if you needed to go and visit the
dentist because you've had too much nutty,
there's one of those on board here as well. It's
quite hard to imagine this ship teeming with life with
men doing their jobs and it's also really hard to imagine here on the river,
the sort of motion that a ship even as big as this
one would have had going on under our feet.
If you felt seasickm as a sailor there was
no going to the doctors, that was not considered
an illness - you'd be given short shrift and told to get straight back to work!
You might have a friendly mess mate or a work companion who would give you some
time up on deck for some fresh air or maybe someone would give you some dry
toast to help settle your tummy. And i do know that one of the other
preferred remedies for seasickness was something
called kai. And kai is probably my favorite bit of
navy language because that's hot chocolate and they
had a special way of making it on board. Slabs of pure chocolate grated
into a great big saucepan, taken down to the boiler rooms
a steam pipe diverted to put hot steamy water onto that with some
condensed milk and then mixed in with lots of sugar.
Apparently the test of a good mug of kai was if your spoon
pretty well stood up in it. And it wasn't just for seasickness.
This ship never slept, it was a 24 hour a day
job on board and so a good hot sweet mug of kai
would keep you going on those long hours of your watch
in the middle of the night as well. Let's think more about that rough weather
and to do that we'll carry on going forward towards the bow of the ship and
think about some of the worst weather that the crew and this ship have
ever experienced.
It's quite hard to imagine on a bright sunny day here on board
and on the lovely calm river just how appalling the weather conditions could
get for the men who lived and worked here particularly in the
Second World War when the ship was in the arctic.
She was protecting the arctic convoys on their
dangerous, perilous way to Russia with vital supplies for that ally.
And the Arctic might give you a clue to just how bad the weather conditions
could get not only would the seas be incredibly
rough with great big waves plunging over the front of the ship
where we are now, but the old sailors would come back
where Belfast is today, look at some of the buildings on the
shore side and say the waves were as high as that building
over there. These great big walls of water crashing
over the ship and freezing once they hit the frozen
metal. Remember this is the Arctic, it was
colder out here than the inside temperature of your
freezer. And to every wave that hits is another
layer of frozen water, so the men have to walk around and try
and not fall overboard. Because if you fall into these
Arctic waters you're going to last about two minutes
before you freeze to death. So sometimes while the men were working they'd
actually tie rope around their waist and tie
themselves physically to Belfast so that it would protect them
and keep them on board. One of those sailors who remembers a
very important day when he had his life saved
by HMS Belfast was John Harrison and to find out about
his story we need to go to his gun turret.
This is a turret and John Harrison wasn't just a sailor on board
HMS Belfast, he was a gunnery officer and this was
his turret. And the men who worked inside
were his gun crew and even in the Arctic
conditions these guns still had to be kept working
and maintained because even these could freeze up in those really harsh
temperatures. So it's one incredibly rough day at sea
and John Harrison is trying to get from the doorway - another one of those sailor
slangs the hatch - to his gun turret to get to work and
there are huge waves crashing over the side of the ship.
John thinks he's been a bit smart, he thinks he sees a slack wave - a wave with
much less energy and power- approaching and so he takes that moment to
dash across to his turret. He just gets his hand onto the door
handle when this great big wave hits him. It
wasn't a slack wave it was like being hit by a brick wall.
It takes John's feet from under him and he would have been dragged
overboard over the side of the ship into those
frozen waters. But John's hand is still attached
to the door handle and I say attached because it's not
because John is very strong that he is still
there on that handle. Can you think what happened?
Yes that's right, his hand had frozen - had stuck to the metal
of the door handle. Now when John picks himself up and gathers his feet back
underneath him he does have to peel finger by finger his hand off
of that door handle. He lost some skin but better than losing his life in those
Arctic waters. It's a little bit like if you've got an
ice cube out the freezer and stuck it to your tongue - so it can be
a bit painful trying to peel it off but better that
than losing his life. John still returned to
his ship because he really did think of her as his
and every time he came back on board he'd look at this turret
and say 'thank you' for saving his life. John is many of the veterans that have
lots of stories to tell about HMS Belfast. We started on the quarter
deck at the stern at the back of the ship, we
looked at the ship's badge. We walked down the waist and stopped on
the boat deck and thought about morse code
and Bernie Bristoll growing up to become a leading telegraphist
on this ship. We thought about some of the horrendous conditions
that the men faced in the Arctic of the Second World War
and we thought about the men who worked on board
in those horrendous conditions and John Harrison, whose life was saved
from being sent into those Arctic waters. In each of these places we have walked
in the footsteps of those crew and here the ship waits
for you to come back and visit her. The men were incredibly proud of HMS Belfast
they called her by the affectionate nickname of 'tiddly b'.
Tiddly is slang for tidy or looking neat and shipshape
and b for Belfast. So tiddly b was their home
and somewhere they were really proud of as well.
Beneath my feet remember those nine decks
full of the places where men would have done their jobs and also had their homes
on board but it wasn't just men that lived here.
In the Second World War there were also three cats
on this ship as well. Now while they might have provided a bit of a reminder
from home, they were also here to do a job hunting
out the rats and the mice that might have got into the food
supplies that were here for all those months away at sea. So from
three cats and 950 men all looking after this ship,
all with a job to do, we think about your next
Family Mission What job on board would you have been most suitable for?
Join CBBC presenter Ben Shires on Friday as he sets your latest Family Mission.
You can also start planning your very own
Adventure in History. For while HMS Belfast stays shut for just a little
bit longer, IWM North in Manchester, IWM London
Churchill War Rooms and IWM Dxford are ready to open their doors and
welcome you back from the 1st of August. We can't wait to
see you! Until then farewell!