David White – Why I joined the Navy

my mate joined the Army and I saw the attraction straight away of, you know, he came home on leaves and told good stories. He had money in his pocket, smart uniform. He said he’d met a decent bunch of blokes, so I thought ‘maybe the armed forces isn’t such a bad thing’.

As I mentioned earlier, my dad had told some good stories about his time on the submarines, even though this was war time and people were trying to sink him, no-one ever did that to me, not knowingly anyway. So, it just struck me, why not, you know.

I think it was an epiphany sat in school one day, thinking I don’t know what to do, and of course it doesn’t take much thought to join the Forces, you know, it’s, you know, National Service had probably not long finished and I don’t think there was any real issue in getting in.

I went to Blackheath Recruiting Office, that was my nearest one in South East London. That was in the summer of, autumn ’62 and then I got sent up to the Embankment for a Medical on HMS Discovery, the old explorer ship.