Free Cruiser by Mike Carlton Page B

swooped overhead. At noon on 29 June, chivvied by yet another tug, the Autolycus secured alongside HMS Amphion , the cruiser that would in ten days become HMAS Perth .
    They had sailed 21,000 kilometres in seven weeks, cheerfully enduring discomforts casually inflicted upon them by a penny-pinching Australian Government and the Naval Board. Years later, many of them would look back with nostalgia at this landmark in their lives.
    As a gangplank was laid across from the deck of the Autolycus to Amphion , the Australians marvelled at the scene around them. In the watery summer sunlight, all the naval might of England seemed to be on display. The pride of the Royal Navy, the great battlecruiser HMS Hood , lay in the next dock, and beyond her was the formidable grey bulk of the newly rebuilt First World War battleship Queen Elizabeth . A forest of masts and funnels revealed a line of destroyers berthed side by side. Launches, barges and picket boats scuttered across the harbour waters. A red and white admiral’s flag flew from the white semaphore tower atop the Georgian brick of the base headquarters building. His Majesty’s Naval Dockyard, Portsmouth, throbbed with purpose.
    HMS Amphion , however, did not. Her new crew saw, to their dismay, that she was filthy and, at first glance, deserted. She looked like a ghost ship. Her paintwork was scarred where rust had been scraped away and replaced with blotches of red lead preservative, and her upper decks were strewn with stores and spares and just plain rubbish. After the rigours of the long trip from Sydney, it was a disheartening sight, but there was nothing for it. Gathering their kitbags, the men left the Autolycus and trooped aboard their new home, to be met by their new captain.
    Harold Bruce Farncomb was born in 1899, if not with a silver spoon in his mouth at least within fairly easy reach of one. The second child of a comfortably middle-class timber surveyor, he grew up on Sydney’s North Shore, where his first school was Gordon Public, an elegant pile of colonial sandstone. After that, he went briefly to Sydney Boys High, but in 1913 he changed course. Young Harold, barely a teenager, and certainly not old enough to shave, joined the first intake of boys to be trained as officers in the temporary Royal Australian Naval College (RANC) at Osborne House overlooking Corio Bay near Geelong in Victoria.
    The RANC was modelled, in almost every way, on the Royal Navy’s officer college in Britain. This was very deliberately done. The Royal Navy had ruled the waves for a century, and the Australian Navy had been designed, nut and bolt, rope and wire, hull and funnel, to the British template. It flew the same ensign: the red cross of St George on a white background, with the Union flag in the top-left corner. The ranks and uniforms were identical. Young Australian officers would be in no way inferior to their Royal Navy counterparts. They would absorb the skills, knowledge, customs and traditions of the senior service. They would hold the King’s commission as officers and, trained as such, they could be posted to any of His Majesty’s Ships, British or Australian, as the Empire required. There was, however, one specific difference. The Australian Government had made it clear that social class, or lack of it, was not to be a barrier to entry for would-be officers. In Britain, good breeding was not infrequently regarded as an adequate substitute for ability in young midshipmen, but this was not to happen in a more egalitarian Australia. Talent was all that counted. British naval cadets were still required to pay for their training as if they were at an exclusive public school. In Australia, it would be free. 9
    Farncomb had talent to burn. First at Osborne, and then at the newly completed naval college on the shores of Jervis Bay in New South Wales, he threw himself into three yearsof study that even today seems dizzying. Arithmetic and algebra, plane and