90-year old Bill Wren moved to Cromarty in 1978 after many years involved with the sea and the oil industry, both in Britain and overseas. He first came to the Cromarty Firth before the Second World War.

In 1937 I arrived in the Cromarty Firth on board the submarine HMS Swordfish. She wasn’t an ocean-going sub; she was one of the smaller ones with a complement of about 32 men, including that most important person, the cook! I was one of four ERAs, that’s to say Engine Room Artificers. We were the engineers that kept the Navy going.

I had joined the Navy in 1935 as a trainee ERA. After 6 months I ‘passed out’, (passed the Navy trade tests). My first commission was HMS Valiant, a battleship. We went to the Mediterranean: first stop Gibraltar, second stop Malta, through to Alexandria and joined the Fleet. From there we went round to the Suez Canal as guard ship, because the Italians had just started a war against Eritrea. After doing quite a while there we had to come up to Haifa in Palestine where the first Arab uprising against the Jewish settlers was. We were there for 10 months and the Navy took over the railways so I was one of the engineers from HMS Valiant on to the railways. We then trailed the railways up and down Palestine and then the Spanish Civil War broke out.  HMS Valiant was the C-in-C (Commander in Chief) of the Mediterranean’s draft ship, which he could send anywhere at any time without detaching it from the Fleet, so from Haifa we had to go up to Majorca as guard ship for British evacuees coming out of Spain to Majorca to be shipped out. We were there until January 1937.

Whilst we were in Alexandria a big submarine called The Clyde tied up alongside Valiant and there happened to be an ERA on there who was going through the school at the same time as me and I went down with him, had a chat and looked round the boat, and I thought ‘that’s for me’. So when we got back to Devonport in 1937 I volunteered for submarines and instead of going back to my home base, HMS Pembroke, Chatham, I was drafted round to HMS Dolphin at Gosport, commonly known as Fort Blockhouse. From there I did my training on a WWI submarine, the L26, and then passed out.

So, in 1937 we came up to the Cromarty Firth with the Fleet on a summer cruise, on the sub, HMS Swordfish. Our depot ship was HMS Lucia, a pre-war German passenger ship that had been captured and converted. Whilst we were up here at Invergordon we used to use the canteen there, which to me was a bit too noisy, so we either went to the Balblair Ferry Inn (which intrigued me because all the furniture had King George V’s head on the backs of the chairs and on part of the table) or we would come to Cromarty, to the Royal Hotel. Incidentally, these two hotels and the other one in Cromarty – the Arms – they were all at that time government-owned.

If we came ashore like that, the depot ship supplied a launch which would go round the fleet and drop you off wherever you wanted to go. So we used to come to the Royal Hotel, and in those days if you had a florin (present day 10p) you could get two pints of beer, a dance in the Victoria Hall and on the way back to the ferry there used to be a fish and chip shop above old Bank House (where Derek and Margaret Matheson lived). So after the dance we used to go back down, get fish and chips and wait on the jetty until the launch came to collect us. One of the dances I was at in the Victoria Hall was on my 21st birthday, I remember that well.

We were in Singapore in September 1939 when we got the signal that war had been declared. We went straight back to Hong Kong, got live torpedoes on but not mines, refuelled, replenished everything and then left Hong Kong, went back to Singapore, crossed to Ceylon again, Aden, up through the Suez Canal and back to Alexandria. The depot ship HMS Medway was with us. There were 11 submarines altogether in the flotilla on the China Station. We all made our way back to Alexandria, our base. The China boats were all big ones: 1500, 1750 tons. The eastern part of the Mediterranean was deep so we could work that part, whereas the western part was shallow, so that’s where the smaller boats from Malta and Gibraltar would work. We’d be at Alex on a three-week patrol and you’d be given a box (on a chart). Once you were in that box you did not stray from it, otherwise you were fair game from your neighbours, see what I mean? Friendly fire, that’s right! 

Every inch of spare space on the subs was loaded up with wooden cases of food. After the patrol we’d go into Malta and offload the food. (Malta was being blockaded by the Germans and was being starved.) We’d go into the harbour that was the submarine base at Malta, where the flotilla from Malta worked. We’d offload the food and the army’s lorries would come and distribute it. On my sub, the Rorqual, where we carried the 50 mines along the outside, we used to fill up with drums of petrol, kerosene, so that we could then take fuel in as well. And then we would refuel and get stock, then it was back to a patrol for three weeks and then back to Alex, get tidied up, do your washing, air your bedding for about a week and then you were off again. I didn’t get claustrophobic in subs. Anyone who did was out. I moved around a bit in the war, always in subs.
In 1950 I was working for the Iraq Petroleum Company and was transferred from the Basra area, Iraq, to Abu Dhabi. I was one of the engineers overseeing the contractors building a tanker loading terminal. It was sheer desert back from the coastline except that behind was a huge salt dome, 370ft high. We built a road up to the top of this salt dome first of all, from the shoreline, levelled the plain out and that’s where we built our tanks.

The oil used to come down from there through meters out to the tankers that were moored three miles offshore. They were fed by two 18-inch underwater pipelines to each berth and we could load two tankers three miles out to sea. My office was right on the shoreline where I could watch the sea hawks fishing. The company built a little harbour which the Arab dhows used to come into and unload fish in the area of Jebal Dahhna – this was where we built the tanker loading terminal. It was 70 miles across the desert from Abu Dhabi town.

After a tanker had finished loading we used to stop the meters and read off how much had been loaded in tons. During loading, the temperature and gravity of the oil had to be taken every hour and centrifuged to see if there was any sediment in it. If so, that was noted. At the end of the run from start to finishing loading the tanker, these figures were then collated and laid out. They would then go on to the ship’s captain’s papers and the main office in Abu Dhabi. After that we used to shut down maybe for a few hours and then another tanker would come in and during a month we could load up to 24 tankers. One month in 1955 I loaded over one and a quarter million tons of oil! The tankers would get their papers but the owners would then radio them and tell them to go to Aden or Gibraltar for wireless orders where they would go and offload it. We had no oil spills during my time there. I left in 1966.

I came to live in Cromarty in 1978 because of my affinity for Cromarty and the Black Isle. Then, by a strange coincidence, it wasn’t long after that, in 1983, that the oil terminal was built at Nigg. In the local press they were advertising for people who knew all about tank farms, tanker loading and all that. But they had to live on that side of the Firth, and anyway, by then I’d had enough – I was retired.

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