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R & R Barnwell back at HMS Quebec for some 90th birthday R & R

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This is the story of two lives – Ruth Farnish and Ron Barnwell – brought together here in Argyll during World War II, at HMS Quebec, one of Argyll’s main centres for the development of Combined Operations. It was a relationship woven in Furnace under the benign eye of local businesswoman, Mrs Catherine George, who became a surrogate mother to Ruth – stationed here for four and a half years; and to Ron, who was here for eighteen months – but made sure to get Ruth signed up before being posted to India in March 1944.

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Ron and Ruth are now each 90 years old and have been married for 67 years. Their children arranged for a holiday for them back here in Argyll, at Douglas Lodge, now on the fringe of the Argyll Caravan Park and within the bounds of what was then HMS Quebec. The caravan park hosts a memorial to the multinational servicefolk who were stationed there during HMS Quebec’s duty in Combined Operations training for World War II. The visit was a 90th birthday present for Ruth, from their three children, Marie, Andrew and Elaine – and it happened also to be close to Ruth’s and Ron’s 67th wedding anniversary, on 26th April 2014.

When it became locally known that these particular visitors were coming, John and Dilla Patrick of Argyll Adventure, who own Douglas Lodge, got moving, Then Argyll Estates, owners of the Caravan Park and the park’s own immediate management team, did the same.

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Ruth and Ron have found themselves the subject of a flurry of media interviews – with cameras everywhere.

R&R at HMS QUEBEC

Today, 21st May 2014, they planted a tree , with tributes from the Inveraray branch of the British Legion, alongside the memorial to Combined Operations. The tree is a Canadian maple – with a Canadian battalion training at HMS Quebec back then for the D-Day landings of Operation Overlord.

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After the tree-planting, Ruth and Ron were entertained to lunch by the Argyll Estates at the lovely new Skippers Bistro, below, beside the reception building which used to be HMS Quebec’s cinema.

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The British Legion, the Ambulance Service, Police Scotland and Jim and Pat Jepson – who are in many ways guardians and custodians of the local heritage of the Combined Operations initiative, were all present in the audience there to honour the Barnwells – and Pat Jepson presented Ruth with a glorious bouquet of flowers from the Argyll Caravan Park Management.

Ron’s solo story

Ron was 16 years old on 3rd September 1939, and at London’s Alexandra Palace – the much loved Ally Pally, the People’s Palace of entertainment, recreation and education. It was there, following sirens sounded at 11am, that he heard the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, broadcast to the nation to say that we were at war with Germany. He remembers that, as the sirens shrieked, a skyfull of barrage balloons rose out of nowhere and became the sky for the duration.

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When he was 19 he was called up and did his initial training at HMS Royal Arthur – formerly Butlin’s Holiday camp at Skegness. He chose to join the Navy. The Air Force offered a workplace too far to fall from. He didn’t fancy being below the waves in a tin can; and he had two school mates who joined the army and lost their lives very quickly. That remains painful to remember.

Having worked with his father on a plumbing and electrics service, Ron was assigned as a ‘wireman’ in the Navy – which, given the range of things he was called upon to do, seems to have involved anything and everything to do with power cables, power sources and power controls – including some weapons work. He talks of testing the ‘rocket boats’ which seem to have been something like landing craft with runnels on the cargo deck down which live rockets were channelled in firing.

After training, he was, of course, posted to HMS Quebec for Combined Operations training. He was billetted in Hut 11, on the hillside near the cinema building, holding 20 men. He remembers the jetty out into Loch Fyne, on the shore of the camp, with the two paddle steamers, Northland and Southland, moored off. These were once the billets for Wrens at the camp, obstructing access at night from enthusiastic sailors.

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One Sunday Ron and a friend walked to Furnace and, hungry by the time they got there, were directed to ‘a bungalow that serves food and drink’. This was the establishment opposite Mrs George’s and the one she provisioned. At the end of their meal, they went across the road and offered to help wash up. Mrs George set them a heavy duty test with what seems to have been a kitchenful of dishes to wash – and when they set to and completed it, they’d passed. She told them that every time they came back to Furnace they were to come into her cafe to eat and she would look after them. She did – and they looked after her too, at one point painting the place for her.

It will be no surprise that Mrs George played matchmaker, introducing two of her favourite young people to each other. At Hogmanay 1944 she invited two sailors and two Wrens to her house for the celebrations. One of the sailors was Ron and one of the Wrens was Ruth. This was a meeting that would shape a marriage, two long lives and a close family.

Ron was soon being offered a post on base staff at HMS Quebec – but his abilities came between him and what must have seemed, with his relationship with Ruth blossoming, a dream position. But HMS LCH 101 -  a Landing Craft operations HQ vessel, needed a wireman, as did a transport leaving for India where LCH 101 was based. Ron was that wireman and before he left, on 27th March 1944, he and Ruth got engaged, as young couples did then, to cement their commitment to each other at a time when any parting might be the last one.

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Ron went off to Bombay on a troopship, then overland through Madras and on to Cochin, where he joined LCH 101. His life at war in India was full of incident – best described by himself, dictated to their daughter, Elaine and published by her on the BBC’s World War II People’s War website here. Reading it, one of the most difficult incidents to accept was the fate of Gurkhas, sent in ahead of the main attack on Japanese defences, with gun emplacements on both sides of the narrow [one mile wide] entrance of the Rangoon River.

When the main attack came, the question was how the Gurkhas had got on. If they had been successful, the start of the attack would be relatively safe from fire from the Japanese gun defences. British naval ships there in support, to deliver bombardment to clear the way for the attack, stayed further off. When the attack force went in, the men found that the Gurkhas had been so successful that they were far ahead of where anyone expected them to be – and many of them had died in the forward bombardment from the Royal Navy, their own side.

When the war was over Ron got himself repatriated on a carrier, HMS Invincible, with a crew of 2,000 – and an electrical  installation in such a state that Ron’s skills as a wireman kept him down below for most of the journey back.

The ship came in to Portsmouth. Ron was entrained up to Rosneath where he was demobbed. Ruth was still at the camp at HMS Quebec. She was demobbed as well, and they travelled south together, she to her family where she went back to work at Slack’s  – this time as Manager; and Ron to his parents in London.

Ruth’s solo story

Ruth, about six month younger and living in Ipswich, was 15 when the war began. She had left school at fourteen and gone to work in a tobacconist and sweet shop called ‘Slack’s’.

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Her brother had a friend who had joined up, gone into the Navy and been posted to HMS Hood, the battlecruiser that had become the much loved flagship of the nation. Ruth had always been friendly with this lad and wrote to him regularly when he went to war.

As history records, Hood and the battleship, Prince of Wales, were ordered to sail to intercept the powerful new German battleship, Bismarck which, with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, had broken out of the Kiel Canal into the Atlantic to commence operations as surface raiders. On 24th May the intercept took place in the Denmark Strait. The  British ships opened fire. Bismarck’s first salvo straddled Hood and her second was a direct hit. Its ammunition store penetrated, Hood blew up and sank within three minutes, ten minutes after the engagement had begun.

1,415 men died in the Hood. Only three of her crew survived to be rescued some hours later. None of them was Ruth’s pen friend.

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After that, Ruth decided to volunteer to join the Navy herself, as a Wren.  She was sent to Mill Hill at Rosneath in Argyll, for 6 weeks basic training and was then posted to Helensburgh as an Officers’ Steward. After six weeks there she was drafted again – to Inverary, to HMS Quebec, for the duration. Others told her the Inveraray posting was ‘a dump’ – but she found it the best time of her life. A major early factor here seems to be that she didn’t need the wellingtons that had been a constant at Rosneath.

A friend made at Mill Hill, Renee Baker, was posted with her to Helensburgh and, again, with her to HMS Quebec.

They had every other afternoon off and would walk either to Inveraray or to Furnace. At Furnace they became increasingly close friends with Mrs Catherine George, who owned a shop, with a cafe and petrol pump and who supplied food to a bungalow across the road, which served meals. Mrs George was to be a lifelong second mother to Ruth.

Mrs George had other friends up her sleeve, though, and, as you’ll have seen above in Ron’s story, she brought them together in her house at a Hogmanay party at the start of 1944.

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Having been Officers’ Steward in Helensburgh, Ruth was Officer’s Steward to Surgeon Captain Goodfellow and Captain Ardill at HMS Quebec. She says: ‘My captain was a real sweetie’. She also says that being an Officer’s Steward meant that you got the same food as them to eat – a serious cut above the average.

She told their daughter Elaine, who has published Ruth’s wartime story on the BBC’s World War II People’s War website here, about what her work at HMS Quebec involved: ‘My duties included tidying their rooms, cleaning their clothes, serving meals. At one point the Surgeon Captain’s jacket was old and the lining has worn out, so I sewed blackout material in to repair it — he was very happy about that.’

She remembers one day when she got up at the camp and walked out of the wooden hut she shared with 11 other Wrens – to find a strangely silent world. The camp was empty, The men had gone – taken off in ships that had come up Loch Fyne. They were on the way to Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy on 6th June 1944.

In Furnace people who were around at the time still speak of the silence in the glen. When Combined Operations training was at its height, the glen between Furnace and Inveraray will have been a hive of activity – exercises, some with live ammunition and the inevitable deaths and serious injuries; ambulances; transports; ships in the loch; troops marching; accents from America and Canada as well as from across the United Kingdom – Irish, Welsh Scots and English; aircraft overhead; visits from King George VI and Winston Churchill… Suddenly all of that was gone. Over.

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We asked Ruth about the murder of Wren Gertrude Canning on 30th June 1942, which happened when Ruth was at the camp. She says they all knew about it but that the Wrens working at HMS Quebec, the Wrens working at Dalchenna House [now demolished, and then the Communications centre] and the Wrens working at Admiralty House in Inveraray [then the area HQ , now the Loch Fyne Hotel] – didn’t mix, so she never knew Gertrude. ‘We were the workers’, says Ruth.

Ruth Barnwell seems to have the gift of friendship. She joined the Navy almost in an unconscious sense of ‘a life for a life’, replacing the friend she and her brother had lost. At Mill Hill she met fellow Wren, Renee Baker, and the two were posted together to Inveraray. They were friends for life. At HMS Quebec, Ruth met Mary McColl and an Inveraray girl, Flora Scott [nee Graham]. They were and are friends for life. Ruth and Ron have been to see Flora since they arrived back at HMS Quebec – it’s Flora Scott’s 90th birthday too; and Flora’s grandson came in her place to the tree planting ceremony today and stayed for lunch and stories.

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Ruth is one of those people who are the glue in the works, keeping lives in touch, warm, smiling – and something of a star. At the tree planting, she sashayed unaided and easily across the eighteen inch high railing onto the grass where soil and spade awaited. She got a heartfelt and surprised round of applause. In true theatrical style, she called to her audience in an ‘aside’ explaining her speed and flexibility: ‘It’s the dancing’, she said. You’ve got to believe it. Ruth moves like a dancer, light and sure. Enviable. 90? Don’t be silly.

And then a shared life, 67 years and going strong

Mrs George from Furnace travelled down to the Ruth and Ron’s wedding – on Cup Final Day, 26th April 1947.

R&R 5She brought them back to Argyll with her and gave them the use of a house she owned for their honeymoon. The house had one round window, ‘like a lighthouse’ says Ruth. It was somewhere out of the village on the right hand side of the road, not far from ‘the doctor’s big house’.

In an astonishing coincidence, their honeymoon house is now Cameronian House, where Jim and Pat Jepson live – the couple who work endlessly to recover and share information about Argyll’s days as a centre of forces’ training in Combined Operations.

This wasn’t the only benevolent intervention Catherine George made in the lives of this young couple. When they found their first home together, a first floor flat in a terraced house in Shoreditch, costing £1,600, Mrs George lent them the money for it.  They repaid her at £50 every six months At that time Ron earned £10 a week, which must have been good money then – and a £1,600 flat an expensive property.

Their married life took them around the south of England, following Ron’s jobs – with the Ministry, with the Railways, teaching at Cheltenham College … He seems to have been a man – and it’s not hard to see why – whose ability was constantly being recognised in his being asked to take on all but impossible challenges – which he clearly relished.

They have lived in London, Reading, Denmead, Maidenhead, King’s Lynn.. amongst other places.

When Ron ‘retired’, they took on a Post Office and shop in Maidenhead, which Ruth managed. This was her first job since they married and had their family – but she seems to have had an innate business brain. The shop they inherited was unambitious and tired. It sold knitting wool among other things and had about half a dozen packs of wool in stock.

Ruth ordered £3,000 worth of wool from the salesman – who later told her that when he left the shop he was going to tear up the order because he thought she’d never make it.

Near their premises was an RAF base – and a community of air force wives with time on their hands. Ruth taught them to knit. They discovered the fun – and the utility – of this new skill. And they bought her wool. And they kept buying her wool. This was a pioneering example of what businesses now call ‘added value’. Ruth was well ahead on that game.

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The visit to HMS Quebec for Ruth’s 90th birthday has been unforgettable – full of events and surprises neither Ruth and Ron nor their family had dreamed of – but their joint 80th birthday celebrations weren’t half bad.

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Ron and Ruth may both have been in the Navy but they celebrated this previous major milestone in the air. Their son, Andrew, was a Concorde pilot for five years. He arranged a flight for them, out of Heathrow and into Kennedy, New York – on that unforgettably beautiful aircraft. They had a great holiday on the far side of the pond and flew back by 747. [And - just to push the envy button hard - Andrew also got them both onto the Concorde simulators.]

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The return to HMS Quebec has been a joyful and positive one – not only for Ron and Ruth [and old friends they have visited], but for everyone who has met them. Their visit has now woven their lives into even more lives, as more of us have met and listened to them, glad to have the memories and information only they can give us.

Note: The photographs above are by John Patrick [the good ones]; and For Argyll [the rest].


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