The Quick Boat Men Read online

  Copyright & Information

  The Quick Boat Men

  First published in 1992

  Copyright: Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1992-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755102509 9780755102501 Print

  0755127528 9780755127528 Mobi/Kindle

  0755127803 9780755127801 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Author’s Note

  From the day torpedoes were invented the one problem that occupied naval minds was how to deliver them. Submarines were one obvious solution but they were still unreliable and minds turned to fast surface craft.

  The firm of Thorneycroft – to this day involved in the development of high-speed craft – were among the first to produce light, quick steam launches but, as navies wished to put more and more armament on them as protection, they grew so big that thoughts turned towards the idea of small high-speed boats. It was an idea that appealed particularly to small countries with small navies.

  The coastal motor boats of World War I were the brainchild of three officers of the Harwich destroyer force who felt there would be a use for small petrol-driven shallow-draught high-speed boats able to cross minefields to attack German bases. By the end of the war sixty-six of them had been built and among the many awards for gallantry won by the crews of the CMBs and motor launches were three VCs. Their development to the high-speed craft of World War II resulted from the work of private companies and the achievements of men who wanted to break records.

  ‘The four horsemen were beginning their mad, desolating course…over the heads of terrified humanity… Humanity, crazed with fear…was fleeing in all directions on hearing the thundering advance of Plague, War, Hunger and Death…

  And the white horse, the red, the black and the pale were crushing all with their relentless iron tread.’

  Vicente Blasco Ibanez

  (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)

  Part One

  1905 – 1909

  One

  ‘This,’ Edward Dante Bourdillon pointed out, ‘is a torpedo.’

  The announcement was received with indifference by the older of the two girls sitting in the boat with him, with grave interest by the younger.

  He pointed at the slim white shape in the water just ahead of them. ‘That’s a yacht. Ketch-rigged.’ He patted the polished teak of the long, low launch lashed alongside him. ‘This is Triton, a quick boat. The description was first used in the last century for the fast steam launches of John Thorneycroft of Chiswick. Uncle Egg borrowed it for his petrol and paraffin-driven boats. They’re capable of almost twenty knots.’

  ‘Can we get on?’ The older of the two girls could not hide her boredom. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  ‘Right, Georgina.’ Edward recovered from the rebuff with an attempt at brisk forthrightness. ‘This–’ he patted the boat they were sitting in ‘–is a dinghy, muscle-powered–’

  ‘Oh, Teddy, do get on.’

  Edward frowned. He had been developing his talk carefully and he was young enough to enjoy having a captive audience.

  ‘Right,’ he said again. ‘Back to where we were: this is a torpedo.’ He indicated the apparatus he had mounted on the bow of the launch alongside them. ‘It’s what’s known, in fact, as a spar torpedo. It takes its name from the fact that it’s mounted on a spar.’ He paused to let the information sink in. ‘The spar, of course, is itself mounted on a boat. The boat is aimed at the target and, as the torpedo on the end of the spar strikes the target, it detonates the explosive and the target is destroyed.’

  ‘So, I imagine,’ Georgina Reeves pointed out from the centre of the dinghy, ‘is the boat the torpedo’s mounted on.’

  ‘Ah.’ Edward considered the question with all the solemnity of a seventeen-year-old male endeavouring to explain a technical problem to a female he was trying to impress. ‘But it does work. They used a spar torpedo successfully as long ago as 1877. A copper canister on a pole mounted on a boat. Against an obsolete French naval vessel called the Bayonnaise.’

  ‘Mayonnaise is a funny name for a battleship.’ The speaker this time was Georgina’s thirteen-year-old sister, Augusta, who sat in the stern of the dinghy holding the oars, something her eighteen-year-old sibling wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. Augusta was all plaits, teeth, legs and enormous eyes. Edward regarded her severely. She wasn’t supposed to be with them.

  ‘Not Mayonnaise,’ he said. ‘Bayonnaise.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Augusta lowered her eyes humbly.

  ‘It means someone from Bayonne. As it ends with an ‘e’ I presume it means a female from Bayonne, which would seem normal as all ships are considered to be female.’

  Augusta looked up, regarding him with adoration. Her sister’s attitude was more cynical. A year older than Edward, she considered herself – and was – more adult than he was. She was tall and slender and already shapely and beautiful, her face surrounded by a cloud of blonde hair tied back with a huge black bow. It took Edward’s breath away just having her there.

  He was sitting in the dinghy, the August sun hot on his back, with Augusta firmly relegated to the stern behind him. He had hoped to sneak away alone with Georgina but she had joined them, happily ignorant of their wish to disappear quietly. It had been Edward’s intention to put on a show and nobody, he felt, could put on a show with a thirteen-year-old interrupting all the time.

  The launch that lay alongside the dinghy was facing the yacht, Fairy. Pristine and polished to within an inch of its life, it belonged to Edward’s uncle, Egbert Bourdillon, who owned and ran the boat-yard that lay along the shor
e behind them.

  ‘Go on about the Mayonnaise,’ Georgina said casually.

  Edward frowned, ignoring the deliberate mistake. ‘I suppose you’ve heard of the Battle of Tsu-Shima.’

  The two girls looked blank.

  ‘It was in all the newspapers,’ Edward said. ‘Out in the East. China Seas. In Tsu-Shima Strait. The Russians lost thirty-four warships against the Japanese loss of three torpedo boats.’

  They still looked blank.

  ‘It was only four months ago,’ he explained irritably. ‘27 May 1905. It started a revolution in Russia.’

  ‘The Russians are always throwing bombs.’ Georgina gave a little shudder. Revolution in Edward VII’s England was unthinkable.

  She was the daughter of the vicar whom Edward regarded as a sanctimonious old hypocrite, very like the school chaplain. The chaplain did a lot of hard work on his knees and liked to get the pupils to learn by heart not one of the sterner passages from the Old Testament or the Ten Commandments but the Song of Solomon which, it was firmly believed, he admired less for its inspirational beauty than for its erotic content.

  As it happened, Georgina didn’t try very hard to conform to her father’s mould and had enough strength of character to stand up for herself. And she was useful to have around because she was virtually the only girl in the village of Porthelt of the right age and class – and class, in 1905, was important. Unfortunately, she wasn’t a good listener because in a group of two she always considered herself the more interesting.

  At that moment, she was hitching at the belt at her waist and, smoothing her skirt over her knees, was showing rather more leg than was considered permissible. She didn’t care much for convention, however, and Edward was enjoying the view.

  But he was beginning to feel she wasn’t taking him seriously. Now she was straightening the tie she wore under the sailor collar of her white blouse and wasn’t even looking at him.

  ‘After all–’ he spoke loudly to attract her attention ‘–it was only an experiment to see what would happen. The attack was made by a Thorneycroft boat with a French naval squadron and the Bayonnaise was unmanned and towed by a tug. There was a story about it in the Graphic. I cut it out and stuck it in a scrap book. It said the whole French squadron watched, expecting the torpedo to destroy the Thorneycroft as well as the Bayonnaise and–’

  ‘Who was driving the Thorneycroft?’ Augusta interrupted.

  It was a normal enough question for Porthelt, even for a thirteen-year-old girl, because the village was dominated by the Bourdillon boat-yard. The local houses were hidden by its workshops and boat sheds which in turn were blurred by the forest of masts belonging to the yachts lying in front in the little bay made by the curve of the land.

  ‘A French officer, I suppose,’ Edward said.

  ‘Did he volunteer?’ Georgina asked.

  ‘You could hardly expect them to order a man to do a job like that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t volunteer.’

  Edward looked at her angrily, still not sure whether she was genuinely interested in what he was trying to show her or whether she was deliberately making fun of him.

  ‘Well, he did,’ he said sharply.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Edward glared at Georgina. ‘Are you really interested or are you just being clever?’

  An expression of mock dismay crossed her face. ‘Oh, Teddy,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly interested. But it all sounds so silly. This man trying to blow himself up with a ship called the Mayonnaise. Please go on.’

  Edward’s manner had grown a little stiff. ‘When the torpedo struck, there was a deafening–’ he lingered on the word for the drama it conveyed ‘–a deafening report and the Bayonnaise sank almost at once. As for the Thorneycroft, the shock caused it to bounce back a matter of fifteen metres – that’s a bit more than fifteen yards – then it went round and round in circles for a while as if dazed, until finally it resumed its course with the rest of the squadron.’

  ‘So it was all right?’

  ‘It was all right.’

  ‘I bet it gave the crew a headache,’ Georgina observed gaily. Edward frowned, convinced by this time that his demonstration wasn’t being treated with the respect it deserved. He was a well-built boy, beak-nosed and lean-faced, dark hair curling tightly round his ears. Augusta thought the world of him. Georgina felt he had too high an opinion of himself and needed taking down a peg or two from time to time.

  He tried to ignore her smiles and indicated the long boom he had secured to the launch. He had required help from Augusta to get it into position, but the spar had finally been lashed stoutly down the length of the bow and protruded a matter of about eight feet beyond the stem.

  ‘I’ve directed it downwards so it’ll strike Fairy just on the waterline,’ he explained. ‘A proper spar torpedo, of course, is rigged underwater and parallel with the surface, but, since I can’t do that, I’ve aimed it just above the waterline so that the pressure of water against it won’t slow the launch or turn it off course.’

  ‘Won’t it sink Fairy?’ Augusta asked.

  ‘Not on your life.’ Edward laughed. ‘The launch will be going very slowly. With the engine at low revs, it’ll just hold her nose on to Fairy so we can pick her up.’

  ‘It’ll never work.’ The words this time came from the deck of the yacht itself where another youngster, older than Edward, sat dangling his feet over the side, watching with a grin on his face. Edward tried not to notice him.

  ‘Your cousin Maurice’s talking to you,’ Georgina pointed out.

  ‘My cousin Maurice can go and jump in the creek,’ Edward said.

  ‘He’s waving.’

  ‘Georgy–’ Edward’s expression was one of pure fury ‘–let him wave. He can only sneer. He doesn’t do anything at all himself, except sneak into Uncle Egg’s study and drink his sherry wine and go around with that lout, Barney Scholes-Dever from the Manor House. He ought to be learning something about the boat-yard. He’s expected to take it over one day.’

  ‘When he does, will you get a look-in?’

  It was a good question. Edward’s father, Hubert Bourdillon, had been a very different type to his scholarly brother, Egbert, and, having got himself into trouble over a girl in Portsmouth, had run away to sea. More adventurous than Egbert, he enjoyed himself for three years around the world before returning quietly to take his share of responsibility for the growing boat-yard founded by their father. It had surprised everybody when he had brought with him an Italian wife, one Maddalena Uschetti, the daughter of another boat-yard owner in Livorno, known always to British people from its association with Nelson as Leghorn. Save for the fact that she wasn’t English, a state considered by the Bourdillons to be more or less essential for a happy life, Maddalena was regarded as an eminently suitable partner. But the boat-yard in Livorno was much bigger than the one at Porthelt and the Italian family’s indignation at Hubert Bourdillon’s cheek in marrying their daughter without permission resulted in her being cast out. There might have been a reconciliation – indeed, proceedings were under way – but for the fact that, sharing her husband’s love of the sea, Maddalena Bourdillon had been drowned with him when their yacht was run down in a sudden Channel fog by a coaster loaded with scrap iron bound for Cardiff. And Hubert’s brother, Egg, had taken in the orphaned Edward Dante, who had been brought up at Creek House, the Bourdillons’ untidy shambles of a home behind the boat-yard.

  ‘Well,’ Georgina persisted, ‘will you get a look-in?’

  ‘I’m supposed to,’ Edward said. ‘After all, my father and Uncle Egg were brothers and when my parents died he promised I would. He’s always said I’ll have a share.’

  For all his quiet eccentricity, Egbert Bourdillon was essentially a fair man and a far more stable character than Edward’s father. But Maurice didn’t like Edward, resented his intrusion, was not as clever as Edward and had a mean streak in his character which suggested that when Egg was gone, he would do things hi
s way, and his way was unlikely to include Edward.

  ‘That’s why I’m trying this out,’ Edward explained. ‘After all, Bourdillons isn’t just a yachtsman’s boat-yard. We build experimental stuff. The navy’s bought from us. There aren’t many bigger.’

  It wasn’t entirely true because there were plenty of bigger yards. Apart from one or two experimental craft, Bourdillons normally built orthodox boats, but were required from time to time to build on licence to hard-pressed, larger and wealthier yards.

  ‘There’s Thorneycrofts, of course,’ Edward admitted. ‘And people like that. They’re the first string. But we’re only just below. Now–’ he gestured ‘–about this torpedo.’

  ‘It won’t work, Georgy,’ Maurice called.

  ‘Oh, yes, it will,’ Edward snapped back.

  ‘It’ll just push the spar back. The lashings will give.’

  ‘No, they won’t. I’ve anchored the other end against the wheelhouse.’

  Edward turned back to his demonstration, frowning and red in the face.

  ‘It all sprang from the Merrimac–Monitor fight in the American Civil War,’ he said. ‘The Confederates made great use of torpedoes but in those days they were merely towed canisters of explosive and it was soon decided that small fast launches were a more suitable means of delivering an attack.’

  ‘You do know an awful lot about it, Teddy,’ Augusta said.

  Edward smiled. ‘The Russians were among the first to use them, on another launch built by Thorneycrofts. They hit a Turkish monitor, but they were driven off without sinking it and the commander of the launch and his observer were badly wounded. Thorneycrofts have been building quick launches ever since. Uncle Egg wants to get into that line. He has some good ideas too. He’s working on one he expects to go at over thirty knots.’