Life on HMS Kent in the Arctic

This story has been contributed to the People’s War by the BBC Learning Centre on behalf of Harry Wright’s son John, with his permission.

My father Harry Wright died in 2001. He was a petty officer on HMS Kent, a county class cruiser in the Russian convoys. Kent joined the Fleet in Scapa in October 1943. From then until 1944 she patrolled the Northern approaches to the Atlantic and escorted more than 18 convoys to Russia.

He would never talk about if afterwards unless I pressed him about it so I only heard snippets about it over the years but he left a fantastic collection of photos.

He wouldn’t go to reunions or be drawn to talk about it in any detail, He said: “Living it was bad enough without talking about it afterwards.”

I tried to get him to apply for the medal that the Russians awarded. I don’t know why our Government didn’t give them a medal. “I don’t want a medal” he said but I thought he should have had it.

Once they shot down a German plane and took the pilot captive. They had to feed him of course and a couple of the crew objected wanted to do something to him. Dad said to me: “Hitler put him in a plane and told him to go and bomb the British and he probably hasn’t got any idea why. “ In the 1970s I got a job and went to work in Germany for a while and I asked Dad if he minded me going but he said: “That’s what we fought the war for, so that you could have the freedom to do that.”

I heard a few stories. Before they sailed to the Arctic he was with a mate in Plymouth and they went to a hotel but they only had one vacancy and as they wanted to stay together they decided to go somewhere else. The first hotel was bombed in the night and the next day they were pulling out the bodies of their shipmates from the wreckage.

Another story was that the ship was up in Scapa Flow in the Orkneys one day, and a German battleship went across the top of Scotland to get to the Atlantic and they’d only loaded corned beef on the ship when it had to sail to give chase, and they had corned beef for every meal, fried for breakfast, stewed for lunch and for their tea, too. They couldn’t have outgunned it so the captain said “If we fined it, we’re ramming it,” so my Dad hoped to goodness they didn’t find it, and they didn’t.

The ship had a mascot, a bull mastiff which looked like Churchill, and he was called Happy — it was an ironic name because he looked so miserable. He would lie on the deck and his ears would go up and he’d start whining and they were at action stations before the German aircraft came. He heard them before the crew knew anything.

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