Edward Sandle on Communications

Lisa: Were there any notable events? You mentioned about SOS calls came through sometimes. Is there anything that sticks in your mind?

I remember a Russian ship going down, that was rather hard going because they used to send very fast Morse and very difficult to read Morse and they tried to keep things within their own little community ‘cos a lot of Russian trawlers and that took a lot of organising, but otherwise I can’t actually remember any serious …there was nothing like the tanker that went aground down the west coast.

We didn’t have anything like that, not while I was there, but every distress call was serious obviously. We used to mobilise … the Admiralty used to run the any ship. We couldn’t communicate with Royal Navy ships funny enough.

They used to communicate with their own system, so that if we wanted to get in touch with any of the ships for distress purposes, we used to have to send our messages to the Admiralty and they communicated with the ship although he was just off the coast possibly. And then he might break silence and come and talk to us, but normally we didn’t talk to Navy ships