Year by Year
Discover the history of the HMS Cossack from 1944 to 1960.
You can search the ‘year’ and ‘month’ to find a specific date and also ‘click’ on the date itself to reveal any images and moments from that date.
03 December 1959
3 – 5 December. Gibraltar. On the way across the Bay of Biscay there was Force 9 winds which resulted in Stoker Rees spending 29 continuous hours in the engine room. The motorboat was torn from its davits and washed into the sea. The seaboat behind the motorboat was crushed with only one side remaining on the davit. Paint was stripped from the hull.
Memories from F. M. Thomas Known as Mike or Tomo
We decided to get married as I was going to join Cossack in Singapore in June of that year (the “overseas” allowance for being married would be useful, as indeed it was). We were married in April 1958.
After a very tearful goodbye I flew out to Singapore to join Cossack and didn’t see my “new wife” for eighteen months, the only communication being the flimsy air mail letters of the time. As I had already spent eighteen months on HMS Newcastle in the Far East previously I knew what to expect and it was a repeat “showing the flag”.
In many places, Australia and New Zealand in particular with lots of invites and hospitality from the locals .My wife “bless her ”stayed at her parents and carried on with her job (as a divorce clerk at a local solicitors). With the help of the previously mentioned overseas allowance and after I came out of the Navy in 1960 we were able to get a mortgage and bought our first house from new.
The day in I think was November 1959 was a day I shall remember for ever when we “finally” docked alongside in Devonport. My wife had travelled down from Leicester expecting the ship to be in on a certain date. It didn’t happen. On arriving at the
Dockyard gate she was told that the ship wouldn’t be arriving yet! We had been involved in an unusually powerful storm in the Bay of Biscay and eventually arrived, I think it was two days late.
The greeting we had on arrival was tremendous and we both learned later that we had been seen on TV. My wife to this day refers to her first sight of the ship she had not previously seen “in the flesh” so to speak as “I can’t believe that you have been on that tiny ship all this time and in all types of weather”. What was perhaps more shocking o her was the state the ship was in with lots of damaged items on the upper deck and lots of water where you wouldn’t expect it to be! The electricians mess was to her a little surprising “thirteen of you have lived in that small space”!!!
Needless to say we made up for “lost time” when I eventually was on leave and up the line.
