HMS Belfast 80: Mike Matthews

Mike Matthews: “Ah, the mighty Belfast. When I go on board Belfast now, I still can't resist saluting the quarterdeck as I go on board. That's just a habit that doesn't die, I think. 

Way back in 1961, when I passed out from Dartmouth, we had an adventure, four of us I think, flying out to the Far East to find her. It took us about four days. We got down to Sydney about 9 o’clock in the evening but there was no ship there and we were told to fly on up to Brisbane then so we flew up to Brisbane, got there about 1 o’clock in the morning, seemingly absolutely nobody there except one sleepy taxi man, he said, ‘ah, you're the ones I was supposed to be looking for are you?’

So eventually we ended up in HMAS Vampire, Australian ship, in the middle of a party and we spent two days in her but eventually sighted Belfast for the first time in the Coral Sea at the end of an exercise. So we four joined off the end of a Jackstay, much to the delight of the ship's company and one, one of the tricks they like to do with rookies like us is to try and get our feet wet on the way, actually, so we went on and along came our kit bags behind us and that's how we joined Belfast.

I was an engineer under training. It was a year on board, the first six months of which were going around all the departments in the ship, learning how they worked, getting to know them, and then for the second six months we put our engineers’ white overalls on and started to earn our keep down below in the machinery spaces.

She was a comfortable ship to live in Belfast on the whole, she'd had a major refit not all that many years before and so the day of the hammock was gone, air conditioning was quite good on board, so the, the, the, the nice civilities of, of shipborne life were, were with us. So a nice one of Belfast in Sydney as well. It's a source of endless recall. 

Certainly over my engineering time we had a lot of watchkeeping down in the boiler room, in the engine room, and you really got to know the people around you then and you learnt the little tricks of the trade about how to bake a large potato on a steam stop in the middle of the middle watch, or how to make Kye, Kye is naval chocolate and it's made out of flaked hard chocolate and it's not worth itself unless you can stand the spoon up into it but my goodness it keeps the heat, and it's a wonderful thing to use for sustenance in the night watches. 

That's a good read. When I go back on board the ship, I get a tingle which takes me back 50 odd years and I would just like to feel that casual visitors, probably without any awareness of what the ship did or what she represents when they go on board, get a little tingle too by the time they leave the ship and just a little feeling of the historical events that she was involved in.”