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Freetown
Our next port of call was at Freetown [on June 1st], up the west coast of Africa, where we stayed waiting for a convoy to bring us home to England. We had several trips to the beach there and got terribly sunburned. But there was very little to do in a one-horse town like Freetown, and we all got pretty bored moored in the harbour day after day. We had to make all our friendships on board ship amongst the passengers, of whom there were only about 28 on this occasion, and of course by the time we had spent six weeks on board and got to West Africa we knew everybody else's life histories in great detail.
Freetown was the capital of Sierra Leone and provided a vital base to protect shipping from South America and southern Africa heading to and from Britain. The Royal Navy's South Atlantic Command was based there along with the RAF's local headquarters. Its harbour could hold 150 ships - so many that crew and passengers were not allowed ashore in order to prevent social problems.
The Convoy System
The presence of so many ships meant that Freetown was also a major target for German submarines. To counter the U-boat threat ships heading for Britain sailed in escorted convoys which were given the prefix SL (for Sierra Leone).
When Britain declared war in September 1939 two sets of plans were immediately set in motion. The first as previously mentioned was the evacuation of children from the cities to the countryside, while the second was the introduction of a convoy system to protect the merchant shipping so vital to the Empire. The convoy system had originally been developed during the First World War but was expanded and enhanced during the inter-war years, with the result that this was one area in which Britain was prepared. Within hours of the sinking of the SS Athenia by U-30 on the very first day of the war the convoy system was deployed.
The SS Dunottar Castle before her conversion to an Armed Merchant Cruiser
The Convoy Home
The main purpose for waiting so long in Freetown was to gather together a convoy[SL35], the first one to leave West Africa for England since the beginning of the war, and we were a motley collection of about 26 boats, mostly very slow cargo steamers in various stages of decrepitude. Our ship, which was a passenger liner, was the biggest and therefore had on board the Commodore. We saw very little of him as he kept to the bridge, but we were aware that he was there, and that all the messages were coming and going from our boat by semaphore. When the convoy finally set off it had an escort of a destroyer or two, and it was forced to go at the speed of the slowest vessel. [The passage to Liverpool took 19 days travelling with the convoy. Alone the Sagaing would have managed it in 10]. This usually seemed to be a rather decrepit little Greek tanker, which could barely keep up. The boats sailed very close to each other so you would wake up in the morning and look out of the porthole windows to see a boat on one side that you felt you could almost touch. The boats would regroup according to their various speeds. There was always one trailing along behind that had to be chivvied along by the destroyer.
The SS Sagaing joined convoy SL35 as its flagship (which meant she hosted the commodore as Sheila remembered) which departed Freetown on 8th June. Their escort was HMS Dunnottar Castle, a Union-Castle liner that had been converted to an Armed Merchant Cruiser (AMC) by the addition of 7 x 6 inch guns.
The first convoy from Freetown, SL1, sailed on 14th September 1939, so Sheila was wrong about this being the first convoy from West Africa. However it may well have been the first convoy containing shipping from the Far East diverted from the normal route through Suez.
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