Captain Thomas Sydney Horn, Merchant Seaman, OBE, 5 May 1899 – June 1971

A brief word of explanation about these biographical sketches. These will mostly be about the things I found out about these men for which there wasn’t room in Convoy. They do all feature in the poems but there is so much more to tell about their lives. Each one of them could do with a book to himself and many of them, for example Laddie Lucas and Tom Neil have written their own books.

Captain Thomas Horn is someone who I really wish had written a book about his experiences during the war. He was master of the Blue Star line’s Sydney Star. He was born in Amble, Northumberland in May 1899. He went to sea when he was fifteen and he obtained his second mates certificate in 1924 and his Master’s certificate in 1924, the year he got married. He took the Sydney Star on her maiden voyage to Australia in May 1936.

I discovered him and his ship in Ian Cameron’s Red Duster, White Ensign. Cameron evidently interviewed Horn for the book as there is a very full account of what happened to the Sydney Star during her eventful voyage to Malta as part of Operation Substance in July 1941. Thomas Horn and his ship have a poem to themselves in Convoy. He was awarded the OBE as a result of his actions, as was his chief engineer and other members of the crew also received awards as follows;

 London Gazette 16 December 1941 - For services when the ship was torpedoed and damaged during Operation Substance - a convoy from Gibraltar to Malta in July 1941.

Haig, George - Chief Engineer - OBE(Civ)

Horn, Thomas Sydney - Captain - OBE(Civ)

Mackie, James Hunter Andrew - Chief Officer - MBE(Civ)

Knights, John Arthur Bamford W/50 - Leading Seaman RANR - Commendation

Roberts, John Wakeling W/303 - Able Seaman RANR - Commendation

Robinson, Anthony Jesse - Gunner - Commendation

Ungazetted award by Lloyd's

Haig, George - Chief Engineer - Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea

Horn, Thomas Sydney - Captain - Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea

Mackie, James Hunter Andrew - Chief Officer - Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea

London Gazette 4 June 1943 - Birthday Honours List 1943

Bones, Frank - Carpenter - BEM(CiV)

The other glimpse I got of Horn was in the pages of Tom Neil’s Onward to Malta. Neil left Malta on board the Sydney Star on Boxing Day 1941. She’d been on the island since arriving in the summer undergoing repairs. Neil writes


“Mealtimes were welcome breaks [from the claustrophobia of his cabin] during which all four of us RAF officers dined at the captain’s table, the latter a worried little man who was only occasionally joined by the Chief Engineer and one or two others, their empty chairs serving to cast an additional shadow over our halting conversation.”

The following morning the ship is bombed by a Ju88 without any consequences although this does raise the spirits and interests of the pilots.


“The Captain and several of his officers having joined us for the meal, it was obvious that the headman was in a nervous and unsociable mood – as well he might be! Much less concerned we joked about the attack, pointing out that the bombing had been as effective as the gunfire, which seemed to us all bark and no bite The gunners were hopeless, we opined. How could they expect to hit anything if they were ignorant of even the rudiments of deflection shooting? Being fighter pilots we knew all about such things, naturally; it was a pity the gun crews weren’t similarly competent. We laid it on pretty thick, aware of our hosts’ frowning and slightly injured silence.

Finally the Captain stood up and blotted his lips. Did we think we could do any better? We all exchanged exaggerated glances of surprise. Of course we could; it was just a matter of know-how and practice wasn’t it? He nodded then turned away. In that case when the next attack came, we could show him just how it was done. All right?

So as the next attack starts to develop the forty-two year old Captain does turn the tables on these twenty-something year old pilots, Neil, Cassidy, Harrington and Peter Le Fevre by summoning them to the bridge and pointing out the machine guns he expects them to use. According to Neil what followed was

“ three of the noisiest and most hair-raising minutes of my life, the engagement introduced by the crack of countless guns, the shriek of four and five inch shells as they ripped through the rigging above my head, the thud-thud-thud of the Bofors, the tearing rattle of cannon and machine-gun, the soaring curve of flaring incendiaries and the white streaks of smoking tracer as it whipped across the waves. But through it all, seemingly unscathed and with magnificent, even foolhardy, bravery, came the Savoias. Line abreast, a terrifying phalanx”

They and the ship survive the attack and continue on their voyage.

“Now about twelve hours sailing from Port Said, much of the tension had disappeared; it looked as though we would make it after all and even the Captain’s face was seen to crack into the occasional bleak smile.”

The Sydney Star reached Egypt on Tuesday 30 December 1941.

World Poetry Giveaway

Well as it turns out that today is World Water Day I'm going to continue accepting entries for the giveaway for A Handful of Water for a little longer. You have until midnight on Sunday (UK Time) to leave a comment saying why you'd like to read it.

World Poetry Day Giveaway

I’m giving away a copy of Rebecca Gethin’s A Handful of Water in celebration of today. Just leave a comment saying why you’d like to read it.

Percy Belgrave "Laddie" Lucas, RAF Pilot, CBE, DSO and Bar, DFC, (2 September 1915 - 20 March 1998)

Laddie Lucas lived a full life, as a champion golfer, an MP, a businessman and a writer as his volumes of autobiography attest. However I am principally concerned in this post with the time he spent on Malta during 1942 as an RAF pilot and from June as squadron leader with 249 squadron.

Laddie arrived on Malta on 17 February 1942, on a Sunderland Flying boat from Gibraltar. He describes his previous experience with the RAF in the Portreath sector (West Country) as ‘singularly dull’. That was soon to change. He and his friend Raoul Daddo-Langlois had volunteered for what had originally been billed as a posting to Burma. Their first encounter was with Squadron Leader, Percival Stanley ‘Stan’ Turner, a Canadian who’d fought in the Battle of France, at Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain. He flicked open Lucas’ greatcoat and took disdainful note of the young Flight Lieutenant’s lack of decorations. That also was to change during Laddie’s time on Malta.

He wrote about his experience in two books Malta: The Thorn in Rommel’s Side (Penguin 1993) and Five Up: A Chronicle of Five lives (Crecy 1999). He has a journalist’s eye for a story. He does tend however to stick to the facts and his books are those of a man who’d been brought up not to show his emotions. Just occasionally he lets his guard drop. It was through one of these clinks in his armour that I got a glimpse of a scared young man whose cockpit was filing with smoke and who was desperate to find somewhere to land – not easy on Malta with all its stone walls and tiny fields.

This incident became one of the poems in Convoy. Laddie made light of it in an article he wrote which appeared on the front page of the Daily Express on 23rd May 1942. He’d taken advantage of a brief period he’d spent on Gibraltar waiting to fly planes off an aircraft carrier back to Malta to send the article home as “a lobby briefing so that the editor might have it as background to counter some of the ridiculous propaganda which is being written about the fighting here’ (Lucas (1993) p156).  But in Malta: The Thorn in Rommel’s side he comments that the experience was ‘still cut deep in the memory’.  

Aside from the ferocity of the air battles where they were well and truly outnumbered by enemy fighters and bombers another issue for the pilots was that they were often not able to fly due to lack of planes. This was akin to asking an Olympic athlete to put in a world breaking sprint on the track but without having spent much time running.

“I flew only five times in April on interceptions for a total flying time of five hours and twenty minutes. Few, in my flight logged more. True such flying as we did was packed with action. Every minute of every scramble, from take-off to landing, was full of incident.” (Lucas (1993)  p96).

Laddie also makes an appearance in the longer poem about Operation Vigorous, the convoy that set out from Alexandria in June 1942. It was late in the day and he and his flight were expecting to be stood down…. when the telephone rings…

In July 1942 He was awarded the DFC for an attack on three Italian Bombers. The citation reads

Acting Squadron Leader Percy Belgrave, LUCAS  (100626), Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, Nor. 249 Squadron.

Squadron Leader Lucas displayed great courage in an engagement against 3 bombers escorted by 14 fighters. He unhesitatingly led his squadron through the enemy's  fighter escort and, diving down, they, destroyed all 3 bombers, 2 of them falling in flames. Squadron Leader Lucas has destroyed 3 hostile aircraft and damaged 7 others. 

It was in July too that Lucas came to the end of his tour of duty on Malta. He and Daddo-Langlois were the only two pilots still flying of those who had come to the island in February. The newly arrived AOC Keith Park had decided they should be sent back to England. Laddie writes

"...I knew I had had my chips and ought to be taken off but the news depressed me. I have never been any good at saying goodbye... Leaving 249 which, for months, had been my life, and where I found friendship, kindness and loyalty, was just like going away to school. I longed suddenly to be picked up from the bar, parcelled up and, without anyone else noticing, deposited by some magic in London without having to say any goodbyes. I didn't know how I was going to face them. I was close to tears when I put my head on the pillow of my bed in the Xara Palace that night. Exhaustion leaves you with no resistance once you let go."

Rebecca Gethin's A Handful of Water

Today I’m delighted to welcome to my blog, Rebecca Gethin, whose second collection A Handful of Water, has just been published by Cinnamon Press. I enjoyed reading this so much that I asked our mutual publisher, Jan, to put me in touch with Becky so I could ask her a few questions. Becky lives on Dartmoor. Her first collection, River is the Plural of Rain, was published by Oversteps Books in 2009. Her novel Liar Dice was the winner of the Cinnamon Press Novel Award 2010 and was published in 2011.

Your poems cover a range of topics, the first world war, the lives of contemporary prisoners and the natural world so do you consciously look for subjects for poems or do the poems come to you? In short what inspires you?

I think ideas for poems come to me. I find them as one would notice an interesting pebble on a beach or an insect one hadn’t seen before. I never consciously look for subjects: it’s just a feeling or a thought that comes over me in odd moments often while doing something else (i.e. not writing). I remember Don Paterson saying at a poetry reading “Whenever you think you think that that would make a good poem, it won’t.” Well, I have lots of those. Usually any poem is sparked by just a small idea or a single phrase or a feeling and I just write about what presents itself to my mind. I carry a notebook in my jacket pocket and try to keep one beside my bed. I forget lots of so-called “good ideas” so that might be a good thing! You see I have this almost –permanent feeling that I must pay attention carefully or I might miss important things. If only I were less busy, impatient or grouchy and were more perspicacious and empathetic I would be able to notice things more clearly.

How long did it take you to put together this second collection. How did you decide upon the order of poems and were there any which had to be left out?


A Handful of Water took me years. I have found that I do need time .... not many of my poems are written under pressure and in a short space. And, in the end, lots of poems were inevitably left out. I’ve heard some poets keep themed files and when they complete a poem they decide which file to put it in so they are at work maybe on various collections at any one time. I admire that hugely. I found the order of this book extremely difficult at first and wanted someone to come to my rescue and find the golden thread running through the dog-eared pieces of paper. Until I realised, with horror, the only person who could do that was me, and that there was no golden thread except that of my own psyche. I wondered and wondered what should go in and what shouldn’t. The bundle of poems I had stored away seemed to have become a sort of closely-packed forest and eventually I saw that there were all sorts of interconnections between the poems’ roots, twigs and branches. I hadn’t been able to see this till I entered the job of trying to make them into a collection: couldn’t see the wood for the trees perhaps? I approached this particular task with A Handful of Water as though I were taking a walk over terrain where there was no visible path between the trees and I could only make progress by putting one foot in front of the other and hoping the next foothold would present itself – looking for something, (image, atmosphere, the underlying feeling) that linked one poem to another. A Handful of Water thus made, emerged as a rather different creature – more edgey and nerved – than the pile of paper from which it emerged.

There is one poem in particular which intrigued me and that was All at Sea i.m. John Hasemore 1893-1916. Could you tell me more about him and how you came to write the poem?


I am very interested in how to write political poems, especially poems about experiences like war when I haven’t been there myself. I was researching for a character who is a conscientious objector during World War One for my next novel (called What the horses heard) in the Quaker Library in Euston. I read about John Hasemore there and his plight captured my imagination. I wanted to write it as starkly and unemotionally as possible. So I am glad you were intrigued by that poem. It really happened like that and his court martial was indeed transcribed in pencil. I used the exact words he gave as his futile defence. Reading about people with scruples against the War in that library was an eye-opener. Those shelves were full of poems I could’ve written. (For your information, the poem called Tribunal was read out by the Peace Pledge Union at their Armistice ceremony in Bradford a couple of years ago and I felt very honoured.) But not all the World War One poems do come from there.... for instance, I found going to the Somme battlefields a terrible shock. And the plaque to a young man in our church says so much by saying so little.

Tribunal
He had no words for what grew between
him and his father down in the garden shed
with its smells of stored apples, potatoes in a sack.
Intent on the objects they were mending on the bench
they passed pliers or chisel one to the other –
large, furrowed hand – soft, marked hand –
a blackbird singing outside, spiders weaving webs,
and cabbages growing in soil they kept hoed,
while the feeling in his vitals formed into shape,
recognised itself, crystallised in the No
he said to the recruiting officer at the desk
in the town square. At the tribunal they asked his age –
You’re not old enough to have a conscience,
next case, next case

And my final question is about an issue that many of us wrestle with. What are your strategies for making the time to write?

Refining as much as possible the art of “No-can –do”..... ruthlessly.


You can find out more about Rebecca from her blog including information about the artist, Lydia Corbett, whose painting is on the cover of A Handful of Water


A Handful of Water is available from Cinnamon Press or Inpress Books

James Honeybill, Merchant Seaman – 8th March 1903 – 12th March 1993

Earlier in the year I promised to provide some biographical details about the men who are in the poems in Convoy. The only place to start is with my grandfather, Jim, taid as I called him (Welsh for grandfather). He was a merchant seaman all his life and first went to sea in 1919 at the age of sixteen, following in the footsteps of his older brothers Bob and Will.

 I’ve already mentioned how the first poem came to me at one of Pascale Petit’s writing workshops and also how I thoroughly resisted the idea of writing about my grandfather and his wartime experience. I didn’t know anything about it. He’d hardly ever talked about it and all I knew was that it involved Malta. And yet once I had that first poem about what it might have been like to be on the deck of a ship under attack it seemed inevitable that more would follow. My uncle, also called James, had his Discharge book so I knew he was with the Blue Funnel Liner, the Ajax (not to be confused with HMS Ajax). I turned to the Maritime histories to find out about the convoys she had been involved in. Richard Woodman’s (another Blue Funnel line man) Malta Convoys provided a wealth of detail and the information that she had been stuck on Malta from September 1941 to Boxing Day that year. Rather a shame for as Woodman says (p274)

The Ajax… was equipped with such superb cargo-handling gear that she had discharged her lading within forty-eight hours of her arrival only to spend three months dodging about Grand Harbour, ending up moored at the head of Marsa Creek. Here, surrounded by the heights of Marsa, the ship’s company sheltered in an adjacent tunnel during air raids, leaving one watch on duty to man the ship. as they were forbidden to used their anti-aircraft armament because of the shortage of ammunition, it was a profoundly frustrating experience…”

So this was why when Taid did mention the war it was about Malta and the suffering of the Maltese people. I can remember being well and truly told off as a child for not eating all the food on my plate and being told the Maltese had to survive by eating rats. I’m still not sure if that story is true but as an adult I can understand his annoyance at my not appreciating how lucky I was.

I talked to my uncle, born after the war who remembers some more stories including one involving Taid and the captain of the Ajax arriving in Grand Harbour. Then a fellow poet, Peter Marshall, put me in touch with his father, John who sailed with the Ajax after the war. John sent a photograph of her arriving in Grand Harbour in February 1942 and in return I sent him a naval message from Operation Vigorous. Taid had helped himself to a paper copy of the message.

I started reading Tom Neil’s book Onward to Malta to find out what it was like to be on the island during 1941. He left on Boxing Day 1941 on board the Sydney Star. Hadn’t something happened to the Sydney Star earlier? Didn’t Taid mention her as being a fine ship? So by this stage I’m was surrendering. The universe seems to have decided I am going to write about Malta as there was not just my grandfather’s story but also all the other men. And as I have discovered many of these stories have been forgotten. Not by the Maltese who still commemorate the arrival of the Operation Pedestal Convoy and whose government honoured the surviving seamen by issuing a medal in 1992. My grandfather was immensely pleased to receive his medal not long before he died.

What would he have made of this book I wonder? I like to think he would have been proud and pleased. In lots of places I have had to imagine what it was like so I’m sure he would be able to find things I’ve not got quite right. I've never been to sea, never been under fire and never been to war. I expect like one of the RAF pilots he would tell me that what he did was nothing special. I disagree.

Today Jim would have been one hundred and ten years old and I leave you with a photograph of him and my Nain on their wedding day on 12^th August 1932.