Sailor in the Desert article

SAILOR IN THE DESERT David Gunn relates how he pieced together a fascinating account of his father’s life at sea in a 1903-built warship, and his part in the Mesopotamia Campaign of 1915 aving spent both world wars as a fighting sailor, my father Phillip Gunn became a landscape painter for his last thirty years and died in 1983. As I dealt with his effects in the little thatched cottage in Suffolk where he had lived and painted I came across some written memories that I knew he had been working on but I had never actually seen.

They lay in my safe for years. A writer myself, I knew there might be interesting material in them but life was too busy to do anything about it. Then one day I took the memories out and thumbed through the pages.

I was gripped by what I found.

Before Father’s death further material had emerged. By then a

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painter in oils, the Portsmouth Naval Museum had bought some thirty paintings of his early life at sea that he had executed in the 1970s, and staged an exhibition of them. And then something unexpected happened. The resultant publicity brought all sorts of people, mostly distant relatives with whom there had been little family contact for generations, out of the woodwork with interesting information.

Phillip used to say that his grandfather came from Dunkirk but I don’t think anyone in the family really believed that. The general feeling was that he must have got it wrong as most of the Gunns in Britain came from one of two

ORDINARY Seaman Gunn.

sources. They could be Scots, members of the Clan Gunn who came from Caithness. Or there was the darker origin of the name, especially relevant with a seafaring background. Sailors, before the nineteenth century, were given infrequent leave in case they deserted as many of them had been pressed into service anyhow. Women served in the warships, living with the sailors in their messdecks around the guns; children were born and

HMS CLIO, Gunn’s ship, looked more like a rich man’s yacht. She fought the Turks up the river Tigris in 1915.

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Family Archives Sailor in the Desert nobody knew who the father was.

So they were called Sons of Guns – hence the surname Gunn, the second ‘n’ perhaps having subsequently been added to cover up their somewhat less than respectable origin.

The long lost relatives who emerged as a result of the exhibition produced evidence that Phillip’s grandfather had indeed come from Dunkirk. There were letters from his relatives to him but his name had been Philippe Conne. This produced family embarrassment as ‘conne’ is, apparently, a word in French that is not spoken by respectable people. I still don’t know what it means but he obviously changed his name to Gunn before he died.

Philippe was French and wanted to go to sea but, as we had destroyed the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, he crossed the Channel from his home in Dunkirk and joined the Royal Navy. He served in various ships in a time of relative peace at sea, for few chose to take on the Royal Navy during most of the nineteenth century when it was also the engine behind the expansion of the British Empire. Philippe’s son James, born in 1864, followed him into the Navy as a boy seaman, ending up as a commissioned gunner, and his son Philip, my father, was born in 1895.

HMS Clio’s drum and fife band. Phillip Gunn, standing third from left, found his fife less heavy than a rifle as the band accompanied the route marches ashore on the way to Mesopotamia.

Twain got his name.

They steamed the rivers of China protecting British interests but before long, war with Germany loomed in August 1914.

The most interesting part of

Phillip Gunn’s memoirs lay in his account of the little-known campaign that followed. Clio was diverted to the Persian Gulf, where Britain had oil interests from south Persia that supplied the battleships

Learning the ropes Father’s memoirs started by covering the tough training of a boy seaman in the Royal Navy in 1911, the year Phillip joined, then to his first ship, HMS Clio, on the China station. She was built in 1903 - a sloop driven by sails as well as engines. Clio had no power on the upper deck – the anchor having to be raised by hand with sixteen burly seamen pushing on wooden bars to turn the capstan. You measured the depth of water by heaving a 12lb lead on a rope line forward in the same direction the ship was travelling, then reeled in the line until it was vertical to see what mark was at the water level. To communicate the depth to the officers on the bridge you would then call out the depth in fathoms (6 feet) with the phrase ‘By the mark ...’. This was how the author Mark w w w. d i s c o v e r y o u r h i s t o r y. n e t

SIXTEEN BRAWNY seamen weigh anchor. Phillip Gunn, copyright David Gunn D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 3 • D I S C O V E R YO U R H I S TO RY

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of the Royal Navy in the North Sea. Across a river estuary down which the oil had to come from Persia lay what is now called Iraq but was then Mesopotamia. This was then part of the Turkish Empire and the Turks had joined Germany in its war against Britain and other nations. They could cut off the Royal Navy’s oil supplies without warning.

India, often described as the jewel in the British Empire's crown, sent troops up the estuary called the Shatt al Arab, and captured Basra, thus forestalling immediate danger from Turkey. But there were few roads across the desert of Mesopotamia and the only real method of communication for armed forces was by water up the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. And so the Admiralty ordered certain shallow draught ships there, for the water was shallow, poorly charted and rapidly changed in depth throughout the seasons. My father’s ship, Clio, was one of these. She would assist the troops with her six

4-inch guns, and other armament, providing artillery support to the army.

Finding the facts Apart from his memoirs, I held many conversations over the years with Father and, I suppose, pigeonholed away in my memory many facts about his early life.

It was the Mesopotamian part of Phillip Gunn’s memoirs, and my conversations with him, that I have turned into a book called Sailor in the Desert. But during my research a problem arose. I had the memoirs and he and I had often spoken of his experiences. However, the work often raised further questions and the need for more detail.

My advice to anyone when considering their older generation is unequivocal. Think of all the questions you feel you might need to ask them in the future and ask them now. Once they have gone, you cannot ask them questions any more.

That part of Phillip Gunn’s adventures about which I have

PHILLIP GUNN is carried ashore with severe malaria. This probably saved his life as the rest of his crew were killed. Phillip Gunn, copyright David Gunn

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written was based on what he himself had written in the 1960s about events that took place in 1915.

It was not unreasonable, therefore, that sometimes his facts were at odds with other accounts. There were no major differences, but it was useful to have copies of the fourvolume Official History of the Mesopotamia Campaign and the other responsible accounts of the time against which I could check things.

I felt it was important to know what had been happening elsewhere. Searches through online copies of Hansard enabled me to quote what Members of Parliament were saying about the campaign while newspaper archives contained interesting matter. But I had to dig deep as they didn’t say much. Minds were concentrated on what was happening across the English Channel in the trenches, which seemed much more important. In fact, the Mesopotamia Campaign was critical, for if the Turks had driven our forces out of that country they would have cut off our oil supplies for the Royal Navy, much of which had just been converted to oil power. This could, for instance,

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Family Archives Sailor in the Desert

THE ROYAL MARINE butcher would kill one of the cattle for fresh meat as there was no refrigeration. Gunn did not enjoy watching this but the result was better than the alternative – aged salt pork from barrels. Phillip Gunn, copyright David Gunn

have meant no ships to fight the Battle of Jutland in mid-1916, which was a pretty close-run thing anyhow.

My research into newspapers of the time revealed that relatives at home were considerably angered at lack of news from Mesopotamia, which, in the early stages of the war, was the only theatre in which British forces had a non-stop succession of impressive victories.

Pictures of the past I discovered that First World War books only had black and white illustrations as there was no colour photography at that time, but here I had an advantage. I did, indeed, have good black and white photographs of my father as an ordinary seaman taken by a Mr Hing, photographer of Hong Kong, in early 1914. There were others of his ship and some other subjects.

However, much later and in a voyage from London to Aden in mid-1939, Phillip Gunn had sketched the headlands as the liner passed them and it was this that had aroused his interest in art.

So after leaving the Royal Navy in 1946, he taught himself to be a landscape painter, and then in the w w w. d i s c o v e r y o u r h i s t o r y. n e t

1970s embarked on a series of oil paintings portraying his early life in the Royal Navy. He covered his arrival in the tough training ship HMS Impregnable – little different from the sailing warships that won the Battle of Trafalgar – through the campaign in Mesopotamia to receiving the Distinguished Service Medal in 1916 for an act of bravery in that campaign. I was, thus, able to illustrate Sailor in the Desert with colour pictures, making it a unique visual record of and aspect of the First World War in contrast to the normal black and white snaps. There is, for instance, the Calcutta River Police launch towing two horse boats from the Suez Canal armed with guns with which to bombard the Turkish enemy. The guns had last been used at the Relief of Ladysmith in the Boer War in 1899. The paintings themselves are now part of the British National Art Collection.

Reluctance to recall It is helpful if someone in the family takes an interest in being the family historian. In our case a physically disabled, but extremely mentally active, cousin greatly enjoys fulfilling this role and has managed

to trace names back to the eighteenth century.

There is something that many people with relatives who have lived through a terrifying experience will have discovered. This is their reluctance to relive such experiences by talking or even thinking about them. For instance, after the Second World War Phillip Gunn bought a newspaper every day but only to read the sports pages. When questioned about this he told me once that he had seen so much horror, death and destruction that he did not want to think about any more of it. This understandable attitude can produce an obstacle to finding out what they experienced.

A useful aid to obtaining information can be via their grandchildren if they have any. They probably will not go into gory details for children, which is just as well, but the passage of time and a desire to educate the young sometimes results in the loosening of tongues that would otherwise have remained silent.

Phillip Gunn, who started out as a boy seaman in 1911, fought through both world wars commanding ships between them and during the Second World War. One of his later tasks as Duty Captain at the Admiralty in June 1944 was to answer Winston Churchill’s request as to what the weather was going to be like over the Channel the following morning. For a short period he was, thus, the only person in the world to know that the D-Day invasion of Europe would go ahead. But that’s another story. I

Sailor in the Desert is published by Pen and Sword at £19.99. Discover Your History readers can buy it for the special price of £15.99 with free postage by using the code 311113. Call 01226 734222 or visit www.pen-andsword.co.uk and enter the code.

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