The Sad Saga of Billy Shaw

Billy Shaw's British War Medal and Mercantile Marine Medal were sent to Dunollie in New Zealand in September 1922, almost five years after he had been killed. Image from the National Archives, Kew, England.

Billy Shaw, a "gentlemanly, studious little fellow" from the mining hamlet of Dunollie outside Greymouth, was surely one of the youngest New Zealanders, if not THE youngest, to be killed in an act of war. Billy was 11 days shy of his 16th birthday when, without warning, a torpedo from the German U-boat UB40 exploded into the cadet sleeping compartment on the port side of the stern of the SS Aparima, at 10 minutes to one on the morning of Monday, November 19, 1917. The Aparima was crawling at 11 knots six miles south-west from Anvil Point off Swanage in Dorset, headed from London for coaling at Barry in south-west Wales before a scheduled crossing of the Atlantic to New York. She sunk within eight minutes and 56 lives were lost - Billy Shaw was one of 16 New Zealanders killed, a quarter of them with close West Coast connections. The wreck now lies 45 yards deep on the bottom of the English Channel, listing to starboard. 

What the Aparima looks like now. At far right is the stern where the cadets slept, and where the UB40's torpedo struck.

I wonder if Billy's name appears on any war memorial, other than the Merchant Navy Memorial at Tower Hill in London? Another cadet, Billy Williams, is commemorated at the Clevedon War Memorial in Auckland, and Australian victims are remembered on the Australian Merchant Navy Seamen’s Memorial in Canberra. But what of Billy Shaw?

Billy Shaw left Grey District High School in December 1914 and went to work as a clerk for the Union Steam Ship Company's Greymouth agents, Nancarrow, on Mackay Street. From there he was encouraged to take up an officer training cadetship aboard the Aparima, the USS's training ship since 1913.  “It was my boy’s first trip," his Dunollie coalminer father, also Bill Shaw, later said in a claim to the New Zealand Seaman’s Compensation Fund. "His kit cost £60, but that is nothing as the losing of my boy, so young and bright.” The Grey River Argus added that Billy was "a good musician".

The Aparima leaves Wellington for Egypt, October 1915.

Requisitioned by the British Admiralty for general cargo carrying in mid-February 1917, the Aparima had returned to Auckland from Plymouth to pick up a supply of wool for uniforms for soldiers serving on the Western Front. At the same time, 30 new cadets, including Billy Shaw, joined the crew to start their four-year apprenticeships. One day out from London, Captain James Gerald Stokely Doorly (1880-1956) was hurled across the chartroom as the UB40's torpedo smashed into his ship. Second Officer George McDonald shouted “Torpedo sir! Aft, there the stern’s blown off sir!” Doorly’s first reaction was, “Oh Lord - the poor boys”. Within a minute Doorly felt the stern sinking - 17 of the cadets sleeping there were either killed outright by the explosion or drowned as a result of it. Captain Doorly told the Sydney Daily Telegraph in May 1918:

In fact, the UB40 went on with its evil hunt, but was scuttled in Ostende when the German army retreated from Belgium on October 5, 1918.

The UB40, above, and below what remains of the Aparima's one gun.

Of the 17 cadets killed, 13 were young New Zealanders, the remaining four Australians. The cadets who perished ranged in age from 15 to 20. They were:

BANNANTYNE, Walter James, Waikouaiti, 16

BARGROVE, Geoffrey Robert, Christchurch, 16

CHALMERS, Geoffrey Walter, Tasmania, 15

HOARE, Donovan O'Bryan, Christchurch, 18

McDONALD, Colin Boyd,  Dunedin, 18

McKENZIE, Ian Kenneth, Auckland, 20

MARSHALL, Robert Joseph, Westport, 19

MARSHALL,  Adam Houliston, Kaitangata, 17

MASSEY, Leon Joseph, Gisborne, 18

NEWTON, Sydney Allison, Melbourne, 17

PROUDFOOT, John Frederick, Christchurch, 16

RAMSAY, Alex McKinley, Dunedin, 18 

SHAW, William, Dunollie, 15

SMITH, John Gordon, Warepa, 19

STACEY, Aubrey Beckingham Neale, Melbourne, 19

TOWNSEND, Philip Mervyn Maunsell, Victoria, 16

WILLIAMS, William Harry, Auckland, 20

Robert Marshall's headstone at Orowaiti Cemetery in Westport. Below, Colin McDonald's headstone in Dunedin mentions "Imperial service".

Otago Daily Times, December 10, 1917

One cadet, Thomas Evans Bevan from Manukau, had a miraculous escape. “I was asleep,” he said, “and something hurled me out of my bunk into the sea, I thought. But in a moment I knew I was still in what was left of our cabin, because as I swirled round and round in water I bumped against bunks and bulkhead. My head was under water all the time, but I didn’t become unconscious. Then I felt the deck overhead pressing me down, and the water dragging me up. All of a sudden I was sucked up that 10-foot ventilator in the centre of our cabin deckhead, and shot clean out of the cowl. I landed on something hard. It seems a wonderful thing, but it was on that raft; it must have slid off the boat deck and hit against the ventilator just as the stern began to sink. I lost my clothes coming up through the narrow shaft - they were stripped off me. After the ship went down under me I managed to unscrew the brass cap of the provision tank, grabbed a signal light, and set it off.”

The Aparima was a twin-screw, schooner-rigged Union Steamship Company of New Zealand shelter deck merchant vessel, which had been chartered by the New Zealand Government as a troopship to take reinforcements to Egypt, starting in August 1915. By 1917 it was considered too slow for this task and after arriving at Plymouth with the 22nd Reinforcements First New Zealand Expeditionary Force and 14th Reinforcements Maori Contingent, it was requisitioned by the Admiralty. It was then defensively armed with one 4.7 inch quick firing gun. mounted on the stern. 

Billy Shaw was one of four young men with West Coast ties to die as a result of the sinking of the Aparima. The others were chief wireless operator Robert Perrett Taipo Millington, who was born in Greymouth in 1891, Robert Joseph Marshall, a 19-year-old cadet from Waimangaroa, inland from Westport, and the ship's chief engineer Tom Rogerson from East Gore, who had been a coal mine engineer on the West Coast. 

One of these two wireless officers photographed on the Aparima is Greymouth-born Robert Millington, probably the man on the right. The other is Australian Alton Frederick Vipan, who was a year older than Millington.

News of the UB40 attack on the Aparima reached the Grey River Argus on November 23 in a Press Association story from Wellington which listed the names of those saved and which, in doing so, indicated Billy Shaw had perished. Billy's parents, Bill senior (1871-1951) and his wife Kate (1874-1964), were officially notified of Billy's death by his aunt, Frances Harriett James of Greymouth, who received a cable from Union Steam Company of New Zealand general manager, David Alexander Aiken in Dunedin. The bodies of Billy, Robert Millington, Robert Marshall and Tom Rogerson, along with those of all but one of the Aparima's 56 victims, were never found, but all crew members are commemorated at the Merchant Navy Memorial at Tower Hill. 

Billy Shaw was born on November 30, 1901, at Hale, a village in Trafford, now part of Greater Manchester, England, where his father was a journeyman baker from Earlestown on Merseyside. His family moved to New Zealand and settled on the West Coast when he was eight. Bill Shaw senior first worked as a coalminer at Stockton outside Westport while Kate set up the family home at  38 MacDougall Avenue, Dunollie, beside the State Colliery town of Runanga. It seems a little ironic that if Billy had survived the torpedo explosion and had been picked by the Norwegian steamer, the Selun, he would have been taken to his mother's hometown, St Helens. The couple had an elder son, Alf (1896-1934), who was born in Golborne, Wigan, and was a grocer in Dunollie. He enlisted in 1916. William and Kate continued to live in Dunollie into the 1950s.

Bill Shaw senior's headstone in Greymouth.

Billy Shaw didn't sign up to serve with a military unit, and I grasp that "killed in action" is a casualty classification generally used to describe the deaths of combatants. Nevertheless, Billy died as a result of a hostile attack by an enemy force, and in 1917 the English Channel was surely one theatre of war as much as any other. I'm not sufficiently schooled on military matters to mount on argument on this, but I take as true of attitudes of the time the sentiments expressed by New Zealand newspapers, which listed victims of the Aparima's sinking as among "the fallen". The New Zealand Free Lance, on what would have been Billy's 16th birthday, November 30, said, "We offer our heartfelt sympathies to the parents and relatives of the lost men and youths [from the Aparima]. They died just as much for Britain and for Britain's cause, the sacred cause of Liberty, Truth, and Justice, as if they had been bombed in the trenches or had fallen victims to the deadly machine guns whilst crossing No Man's Land [on the Western Front]."

The Otago Daily Times headed a death notice for another cadet as being "For the Empire's Cause" and the Christchurch Press listed the death of 16-year-old cadet John Proudfoot under the heading "Roll of Honour". The Free Lance ended its tribute by saying "New Zealand mourns them, but is proud of them, and will hold them in treasured memory". This has not proved to be entirely true, as the victims from the sinking of the Aparima have been largely forgotten in war histories.
As one grieving mother said in a claim to the New Zealand Seaman’s Compensation Fund, after the loss of yet another teenage cadet, "The steamer [the Aparima] was entirely under military control and the boys were on active service." Another bereaved mother added, "I may also state that [my son's] death has quite unnerved me - the awfulness of it is too dreadful.” 

Amazingly, for this cowardly act of killing 17 young boys while they slept in their bunks, UB40 commander Kapitänleutnant Hans Howaldt (1888-1970) was awarded the Orden Pour le Mérite (the "Blue Max", right), Prussia's highest military award, "for repeated and continual gallantry in action". Gallantry!? In all, Howaldt sank 65 ships and took thousands of innocent lives.

During the Russo-Japanese War, the Aparima had been fired upon by a warship. Once bitten, twice shy, the Union Steam Ship Company had offered concerned parents the chance to remove their sons from the ship once it was know it would be sailing into war zones in World War I. Fourteen did so, but other cadets continued to sail on troop and cargo runs to Britain and the United States.

I am unable to find a list of New Zealand's youngest war dead. However, it is known that at least one 13-year-old and four 15-year-olds served in World War I - none of them were killed in action. Another boy called Shaw, Leslie Raymond Shaw, born in Napier on January 17, 1901, was 13 when he enlisted in England and 14 and three months when he landed at Gallipoli. Frederick James Ewart enlisted as a drummer boy with the Auckland Infantry Battalion on September 7, 1914, aged 15 years and 10 months, and also reached Gallipoli. James Dunlop of Christchurch was 15 years and five months old when he signed up on June 1, 1916. He served on the Western Front. Sydney George Stanfield of Dannevirke was 15 years five months old when he joined the 9th Hawke's Bay Company, 1st Wellington Infantry Brigade. Alfred James Hutchins was 15 years and eight months old when he enlisted with the 14th Reinforcements on January 16, 1916.
Chief wireless officer on the Aparima, Robert Perrett Taipo Millington, was the son of English-born general practitioner and surgeon John Perrett Millington (1863-1925). Dr Millington established his practice in Greymouth in 1890, went bankrupt in 1893 and moved to live with his father Joseph in Picton, then returned to Greymouth in 1898. He finally settled in Auckland in 1912. The Millingtons had moved to New Zealand to join in-law Robert Sparke Perrett, a storekeeper at Nobles who had landed at Nelson in 1856.

Before World War I, Robert Millington worked in the cinema industry in Wellington. He was a nephew of movie pioneers Edward Joseph Righton (right, 1872-1942) and Henry John Hayward (1865-1945), who were brothers-in-law, as were Hayward and Dr Millington. Hayward was born at Wolverhampton, the son of a professor of music and former court violinist to King William IV. Among Henry's achievements was to bring the typewriter-inventing Maskelynes to New Zealand and Australia (as magicians). 
West Coasters certainly dominated the illustrated pages of the Auckland Weekly News at the end of November and early December 1917, with images of members of the Aparima crew as well as one of Blackball coalminer Samuel Frickleton (1891-1971) being presented with his Victoria Cross by King George V in Glasgow. Frickleton was awarded the VC for real gallantry in the face of the enemy, for his actions in the Battle of Messines. "He set, throughout, a great example of heroism." The same cannot be said of Herr Howaldt. But what of little Billy Shaw, who was brave enough, at age 15, to leave a peaceful village in far off New Zealand and sail right into a war zone, and who paid the ultimate price?

Australian Prime Ministers and Typewriters: The End of an Era?

Australian Federal politician John Chambers Eldridge at his Underwood 5 typewriter in his electoral office during the last year of his term as the Labor Party Member for Martin. Eldridge (1872-1954), represented Martin  from October 12, 1929, to December 19, 1931. In 1916, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. 

Some Australians took delight last week in sharing on Facebook the Mother of Sarcasm meme, "America and Britain are having a competition on who can f*** themselves up the most. Britain [following Brexit] is in the lead, but America has a Trump card." Those same Australians might now be feeling just a little bit silly themselves, given this country did a pretty good job of stuffing itself up in the Federal elections held last Saturday. Silly, that is, if they have any comprehension at all of the ungovernable nation they're created for the foreseeable future. And that in itself is very doubtful. Indeed, if they're still feeling smug, they're more stupid than even I could have imagined.

What's also still doubtful is who will attempt to govern and how. As of this morning, the Liberal-National Coalition has 74 seats of the required 76 to hold a majority (having gained 42 per cent of first preference votes), and the Labor Party 71 (35.25 per cent). The counting and re-counting goes on. Can the ALP cobble together a coalition of its own in order to put little Billy Shorten in charge of our floundering country? If so, he will become the first Australian Prime Minister who has had no experience whatsoever of using a typewriter. This fine tradition includes little Billy Hughes, PM from 1915-23, who was the first of our leaders to use a portable, a Corona 3 (and the only one to ban Remington typewriters). Yes, both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott also used them.

The incumbent Prime Minister, for the time being, is Malcolm Turnbull, who as a child used a Mercedes portable, and later as a Bulletin and London Sunday Times journalist a Nakajima Chevron. Turnbull, who seems likely to remain in power, albeit with a very slender majority, pulled the double dissolution trigger back in early May and during one of the longest election campaigns in Australian history (a tortuous eight weeks) he used this logo to try to get himself re-elected. Please note how close it is in design to the logo for the Early Typewriter Collectors' Association (ETCetera). The upshot, sadly, was that the vast majority of Australian voters interpreted ETCetera as meaning:

The Smoking Typewriter

My good friend, the New Zealand historian Ron Palenski, sent me this poem, which appeared in The Otago Daily Times in Dunedin last Saturday.

David Eggleton (above, born 1952) is a leading New Zealand poet and writer. Born in Auckland of Rotuman, Tongan and Pakeha (Māori for European) ancestry, he was raised in Auckland and Fiji and dropped out of school to take up performance music and poetry. Eggleton later moved to Dunedin, where he has been based since the 1980s. Eggleton's creative output has been diverse, including mixed media recordings involving poetry and music, several volumes of poetry, histories of New Zealand music and photography, and a large number of literary reviews. He is also an established art critic. He has been editor of New Zealand's premier literary journal, Landfall, since 2010. Eggleton was awarded the London Time Out magazine's Street Poet of the Year in 1985 and the 2015 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry. His poems are frequently iconoclastic or anti-establishment.
The great New Zealand author Janet Frame herself owned a number of typewriters, including a Brother, an Olympia Splendid she gave to an aspiring writer, and an Imperial Good Companion:

But back to the Smoking Typewriter:

Hunt for the Wilder Typer

Barry Crump at his Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter

and his then partner, fellow writer Jean Watson, on a fishing trawler

off the North Queensland Coast in late 1962. During their two years in Northern Australia, Crump also went crocodile hunting in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

We managed to catch a movie yesterday, for what seemed like the first time in ages. Happily, the opportunity - amid more pressing grandchild-minding duties - arose while the critically acclaimed New Zealand movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople was still playing at, appropriately enough, Manuka. The last time we were there, a month or so ago, people were queuing out the door to get to see Hunt's Canberra opening. It had broken box office records in its homeland and reviewers on both sides of the "dutch" were raving about it, one saying it was the best movie he'd ever seen. Even the Hollywood Reporter called it "a deliciously good time at the movies". 

Barry Crump at his Olivetti Lettera 22.

Far from being "delicious", our expectations far exceeded the experience. But we found it well filmed and at least moderately entertaining (its 100 per cent score on the Tomatometer, with an average rating of 8 out of 10, and an audience score of 92 per cent, do seem a tad over the top). What delighted me most, however, was to notice, as the credits rolled, that the filmscript was based on a book by one of my favourite New Zealand authors, Barry Crump. His 1986 novel Wild Pork and Watercress was one with which I wasn't familiar, and so I hadn't realised the movie had a connection with Crump until it ended. Watching the movie, I had been thinking it may well have been inspired in part by The Loner, a well-received book written in 1974 by a friend of mine, Ivan Agnew (who, by the way, used a burgundy Imperial Good Companion 6). There's doubtless still a good movie to be made from Ivan's book.

It now seems highly likely to me that Hunt for the Wilderpeople (and obviously the Wild Pork book) may be based in some part on Crump's fateful experiences when he and a fellow hunter, George Johnston, ran bush camps for boys. During these, in August 1969, five teenagers drowned in Lake Matahina after a Land Rover ran off the road. Both Crump and Johnston were charged with manslaughter, and although the charges were eventually dropped, Crump became the focus of public disapproval - as is the case with Hector Faulkner ("Uncle Hec"), played by the ever reliable Sam Neill in Hunt for the Wilderpeople. As unquestionably a great actor, one is left wondering whether Neill's star quality alone tends to overshadow the role of the boy as the intended central character, Julian Dennison as Ricky. The "real bad egg" Māori youngster may be based on one, or many, of Crump's bush camp students, but Uncle Hec is definitely a haunted man (once jailed for manslaughter). Hec is most clearly based on Crump himself.

Notwithstanding the 1969 incident, Crump's output of semi-autobiographical comic novels, based on his image as a rugged outdoors man, went on unabated. His books have sold more than a million copies in New Zealand alone. In all, from 1960's A Good Keen Man, Crump wrote 24 books in the same taut, no-nonsense prose that celebrated bush virtues and rugged individualism.

Above, the real Barry Crump carries a wild boar, and below, as Hector Faulkner, Sam Neill reenacts the shot for Hunt of the Wilderpeople.

John Barrie (not Barry) Crump was born on at Papatoetoe on May 16, 1935, the son of a share-milking couple. Like the character Ricky Baker, Crump was not interested in school, preferring to let his imagination run free, fuelled by reading adventure classics such as Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island. In the 1950s, Crump worked as an itinerant farm hand and bushworker in areas as diverse as the Kaimanawa forest and my own old stamping ground, South Westland. From 1952 he served as a government deer culler in the rugged forest area of the Urewera region. He was to claim that he never stayed anywhere for longer than three months, but he carried his Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter wherever he went.
Barry Crump died at Tauranga hospital on July 3, 1996, aged 61, after suffering a heart attack. 

RIP Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who fought for peace, human rights and simple human decency, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87. Born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Maramureș, Romania, Wiesel was a Jewish writer, professor, political activist and Nobel Laureate. He was the author of 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, being described as a "messenger to mankind" who had delivered a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity".

In 1944, when he was 15, Wiesel and his family were placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Sighet. In May Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Wiesel's mother and his younger sister were killed there. Wiesel and his father were deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, where his father was also killed. The camp was liberated by the US Third Army on April 11, 1945. Wiesel's older sisters, Beatrice and Hilda, also survived the war and were reunited with Wiesel at a French orphanage. They eventually emigrated to North America.