HMS Belfast a War Ship

 I have looked at Life on Board HMS Belfast in a previous post, here.

Food, laundry, spare-time, sleep and shopping.

But HMS Belfast is a war ship,

commissioned in 1939,

at the beginning of the second World War.

My kids have studied the second world war,

in both primary and secondary school.

Would this ship connect to the history they had learnt at school?

What would our kids make of war?

What did war at sea look like?

There are guns.

These guns, if fired, would hit Scratchwood motorway services,

the southernmost services on the M1, 14 miles away.

Deep below deck,

shells are stored, ready to be sent to the gun turrets.

 Each 6" shell weighs as much as two small children.

We could demonstrate that weight, sometimes it's useful having twins.

Steering the ship was done from a safe position, below deck,

but you still had to wear your anti-flash gloves and hoods

to protect you in the event of fire.

War is strategic, it involves planning,

team work where every man had a specific job.

We worked together to locate aircraft parts,

studying the map, plotting journeys and moving ships and helicopters into position.

 Ooops!

We did it!

 It was important to take orders rather than 'selfies'.

If you didn't follow orders, and you misbehaved,

you could end up in the punishment cells

being shouted at and having to unwind rope.

Having been caught drunk on duty,

this guy is too busy throwing up into a bucket to unwind any more rope.

The top misdemeanours were being drunk, absent without leave and fighting. 

For some reason the punishment cells appealed,

we fought to try out the wooden pillow.

 Now moored on the Thames by the City of London

HMS Belfast doesn't look so big.

It is though.
It's two football pitches long and nine decks high,
they can all be explored, many are below the waterline.

All those different greys.

That's called dazzle paint, designed to confuse the enemy when it is spotted at sea.

It does a pretty good camouflage job in the City too.

As for war,

secondary school history has given them some context for the life of HMS Belfast,

the Second World War and later conflicts.

I learnt a lot from the older two.

For our primary school children, HMS Belfast was appreciated more for being a ship,

what it did and how it worked.

It is perhaps difficult to comprehend the realities of war for the crew on HMS Belfast,

at sea, in action.

I'll leave you with words from archive footage, heard in the Gun Turret Experience,

spoken by former crew who had fired those guns.

Food for thought.

"...we wanted to get the ships, not the crew..."

At that point, I gulped.

HMS Belfast is open everyday.

Occasionally there are still veterans on board to meet and hear their stories.

Details on their website, here.

I recommend the children's audio tour. It was the one we used for our family,

aged eleven to adult.

Life on board HMS Belfast

Who'd have thought that when we walked down the gangway

and stepped onto the quarterdeck of HMS Belfast,

it would have connected so much to family life at home.

Obviously, we don't have that view from our front door.

But we do have a kitchen...

...with a fridge, not quite as well stocked as this.

Mind you, we're not catering for up to nine hundred and fifty

and not able to pop to the shops, being away at for months at a time.

Fish. It must be Friday.

A question I never found out the answer to, was whether they caught their own.

18,000 meals were prepared each week.

Not sure what this dish is.

Food that looks like this doesn't seem to need a 'Do Not Touch' sign.

It's kind of lost its appeal,

suddenly I don't feel hungry any more.

Bread is such a staple.

For those of you who like statistics, each day six bakers produced...

...fifty-two loaves, 1,440 rolls,

plus pies, pastries and cakes.

They didn't just bake for their crew,

but also baked to cater for men on board smaller ships that sailed in the fleet.

The galley on board HMS Belfast is great as you get to wander right through it
and meet the crew,

without feeling at all guilty about not offering to lend a hand.

Whatever they ate, there's still the same old perennial argument

about who does the washing up.

With all that food on stored board,

it attracted mice and rats.

Meet Frankenstein, the ship's cat.

Now which is worse...

...the rat in the sack of potatoes

...or a cat climbing all over the food.

Washing up done, time to think about the laundry.

Before the 1950s the crew had to wash their own clothes in a bucket.

I bet they were pleased to get washing machines installed?

But you had to be careful!

You were warned.

This appeals.

Neatly folded, 'sorted into piles', clothes.

No scrabbling around for clean uniform on a Monday morning...

...and trying to work out whose black socks are whose.

 Then there's the ironing.

This isn't done on a Sunday night in front of the TV!

You've had your dinner, cleared away, washed up.

Washing and ironing sorted.

Now time for a little relaxation.

A snooze and letter writing.

Looks private.

 Dominoes and shoe polishing.

Games, magazines and newspapers.

There weren't many places to go on board HMS Belfast.

Where you hung out, you also slept.

So mind your head on that hammock above!

There were so many men, in order to accommodate them all,

many hammocks were hung amongst the ship machinery.

A quiet night's sleep?

Frankenstein was comfy though.

This is one of the most creative uses of taxidermy that I've ever seen.

Washed and dressed, it was important you were ready for action.

Yes, this really is a museum mannequin!

One last connection with urban life in the 21st century.

Shopping!

The NAAFI

Home from home,

Kit Kats, Bountys, Cadbury's chocolate, Brylcreem, Bovril and Ovaltine. 

And of course,

Fishermans Friends.

Were they though? They're not my friend.

So if you came on board expecting war, battles, guns, explosions, planning, strategies, operations, missions

and the like,

hold fire, we'll get there.

There is so much to see on HMS Belfast. There are nine decks.

HMS Belfast is open all week, it's free for kids and sitting on deck provides one of the best picnic views in London.

Details on the website here.

What would your birthday cake have looked like during wartime?

Visit the Imperial War Museum in London to see this great exhibition A Family in Wartime.

A Family in Wartime tells the story of the Allpress family during the Second World War. They lived in Stockwell, South London. The exhibition documents their family life during the war, and hence tells many a family story looking at the impact the war had on everyday life, such as feeding a family, maintaining a house and garden, doing the laundry, going to school, commuting to work, not to mention birthday celebrations.

There is a beautiful small-scale model of their family home as it was during the war, made by a model maker, the husband of one of the Allpress daughters. You can view it from every angle, the bedrooms, the living room, the kitchen, the Anderson shelter and even the inside loo.

We loved this exhibition, imagining our lives in the Second World War. We sat in the Anderson shelter and imagined what it would have been like to spend the night in there, discussed who would have which bunk and how we would have assembled it in our garden. My kids were quite impressed when I told them that I had found scraps of corrugated iron when I had been digging in the back of our garden (a London terraced house) when they were little. They must have been the remains of an Anderson shelter. The Second World War has been a piece of history that they have been able to relate to and connect with personally and being at this exhibition helped that to happen as they got to see genuine artefacts for themselves.

Having thoroughly enjoyed studying the Second World War at school, we went to this exhibition  a week before their 9th birthday, to be confronted with the question, "What would your birthday cake have looked like during wartime?" A timely question.

The answer, well with sugar rationing, icing on cakes was banned during wartime from 1940, to conserve sugar. They certainly wouldn't have looked like this...

Thank goodness sugar is not still being rationing now. In fact it came off rationing in 1953, 8 years after the war had ended.

 http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/a-family-in-wartime