This is a photo of my Dad with his mother and my grandmother Annie Quigley (née McKay). Dad had joined the Royal Navy by then (according to his Certificate of Service, he was 5 feet 3¾ inches on entry), so the photo must have been taken in 1944 when he was 18 shortly before he went to sea. He served on the brand new light aircraft carrier HMS Vengeance which set off in 1945 on a twelve-month journey. The War with Nazi Germany was over by that time, while the one with Imperial Japan was about to come to an abrupt end. Vengeance sailed to Malta, Egypt, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore before arriving at Iwakuni in Japan, very close to Hiroshima where the Atomic Bomb had been dropped some eight months earlier. In the space of a year, Dad had seen more of the world than I’ve managed in a lifetime. As he wrote ever so politely in a letter to a prospective sweetheart on the day the ship docked at Iwakuni, “Well Mima in the year since I left home we have travelled quite a bit, too much I am afraid to tell you about as I will take so long.”
In The Bookie’s Runner, my little biography of Dad, I’ve written about some of his escapades while he was in the Navy. But there is one remarkable piece of information I came across only yesterday. In Hong Kong in September 1945, HMS Vengeance was used as the venue for the Japanese surrender of the territory (second photo). It’s remarkable because Dad’s father Tom Gisby, a veteran of two World Wars and a hero to boot, was also an eighteen-year-old seaman serving aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, at the head of the Grand Fleet in the Firth of Forth in Scotland, when the ship was used as the venue for the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in November 1918 (third photo). A case of history repeating itself?
In The Bookie’s Runner, my little biography of Dad, I’ve written about some of his escapades while he was in the Navy. But there is one remarkable piece of information I came across only yesterday. In Hong Kong in September 1945, HMS Vengeance was used as the venue for the Japanese surrender of the territory (second photo). It’s remarkable because Dad’s father Tom Gisby, a veteran of two World Wars and a hero to boot, was also an eighteen-year-old seaman serving aboard HMS Queen Elizabeth, at the head of the Grand Fleet in the Firth of Forth in Scotland, when the ship was used as the venue for the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in November 1918 (third photo). A case of history repeating itself?