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The next morning I was fast asleep when all of a sudden their guns started firing, which were right outside the sickbay. One of the stewards came in who could speak perfect English. I asked him what was going on. He told me not to worry and that one of our ships had been sighted but it wouldn't give them any trouble. I asked him if he knew which ship? He replied that it was the Renown. On hearing this I waited for the whistle of the shells to come over as I knew that the Renown's 15 inch guns had a longer range than the Hipper's. But the Hipper managed to escape in the bad weather conditions.
Back at home my sister was listening to Lord Haw Haw who announced that I was one of the survivors of the Glowworm and she went rushing around to tell my Mum and Dad who thought I was dead as they had heard that the Glowworm had sunk with all hands.
As a POW I was separated from the other survivors and spent I lot of time at Stalag 13. In Poland. Most of the chaps in there were from the army. I mucked in with a survivor from the armed merchant cruiser the Rawalpindi. We kept ourselves busy helping the officers to escape. The Germans didn't allow them out of the camp to work, so we used to swap clothes with them. Quite a few officers escaped this way. On one occasion three of our Mosquito fighters flew over the compound. The guard in the watch tower, although he wasn't supposed to, fired at them. One of them broke off and flew straight at the tower. As if to say to the guard 'so you want to play do you?' The Mosquito pilot aimed and fired his guns killing the guard so that all the bullets landed outside the compound away from us.
Towards the end of the War we were woken up one night by the Germans in a terrible panic. We were told to move there and then. When we asked why, they replied "Russkies!" It appeared that the Russians weren't very far from our camp. We said we wouldn't leave without our large supply of Red Cross parcels. We managed to find some carts which we loaded up with them. I was glad we did as the parcels kept us alive in the following march into Germany during which many of us died.
After the War I retired from the Navy with the injuries I got on the Glowworm. But I still managed to keep fit by joining a cycling club for many years'.
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