A Very Bad Night

There were times when it wasn't fun. Lots of times when it wasn't fun.

Interviewer: Tell me some of those.

Well I mentioned Burt Howard so I could start with him because I said he, he was donating his time to this project because his son was in the navy. And so it happened that in the channel battles when we were losing so many of our ships off the French coast usually, we would have to, when we lost a ship, all of us would work all night long getting out the press releases to hometown papers about the boys who'd been lost. I can still see us, we, we didn't have the machinery or modern equipment there for copying and photocopying or doing large numbers of releases. We used to walk around a table one after the other and pick up each page and collate them to send them out. And one night we worked all night having lost this ship and walking around the table with us was Burt Howard, his son had been on that ship and he just kept on going. It was, it was a, it was a very bad night. And he was there the next day to keep on working.

Interviewer: Did you speak to him and try to comfort him?

He knew how we felt, we were always there for him and how could you not work for a man like that, how could you not, terrific. And I don't think he ever got any medals he was civilian. But that was one of the moments I'll never forget and nobody said much we just went on working. And you know, to compare that with what people were going through in Britain or being bombed or shot at daily but that's, that's the sort of human moment that, that so many people went through and you didn't really have a chance to see them doing it.