Herbert
McWilliams, "architect, naval officer, artist, author, wit,
photographer, Springbok yachtsman, yacht designer and builder,
traveller in the Victorian sense" (Keith Sutton) was rescued by HMS Venomous when his ship, HMS Hecla,
was torpedoed off the North African coast on Armistice Day 1942.
His
vivid description of that night written in a letter to his mother
within days of his rescue and the extraordinary ink wash drawings of Hecla sinking in the Imperial War Museum, London, will keep the memory of her loss alive for generations to come.
McWilliams was born in Port Elizabeth, Cape
Province, South Africa, where his father, had an architectural
practice. As a boy of five he made a voyage to England with his family aboard RMS Grantully Castle,
was taken down the engine room in his dressing gown and made his first
drawing of a ship. He was educated at St Andrew's College, Grahamstown,
but did not impress the
Headmaster who told his father in 1923 that even if his son remained at
college
"until he had a long white beard" he would never be able to pass
'matric'.
He left at the age of sixteen and was sent as an articled
clerk to the
office of Sir Herbert Baker and Partners in Cape Town, to be trained as
an architect. He went to London in 1926 to study at the
Architectural Association in Bedford Square and obtained his diploma in
1929. He travelled in Italy, Germany,
Holland
and Spain and exhibited at the Royal Academy before returning to South
Africa in 1931 to enter his father's practice of Jones and McWilliam.
From
left: Italian cruiser, Zara, at Brindisi in 1933, ink
wash;
Forward mess deck, HMS Queen
Elizabeth, 1945?, ink wash; Street in
Capua, watercolour.
Courtesy of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port
Elizabeth, South Africa.
During the Depression in 1932 he went to Russia with the idea of
working there but this proved unrewarding and he returned to Port
Elizabeth. In 1934 he went on a sketching
tour of Holland, France and Italy and then joined an archaeological
expedition to Egypt organised by Chicago University and spent six
months sketching and
drawing at Sakkara before joining the
Colt-Welcome expedition to Palestine excavating the
Biblical city of Lacish near Hebron. He returned to England with four
companions in a converted Ford lorry via Anatolia and the Balkans and wrote an account of the journey
which was published as The
Diabolical (Duckworth, 1934) the name he gave the lorry in which they travelled. On returning to South Africa in
1935 he joined his father's practice in Port Elizabeth.
HMS Shropshire on Arctic patrol, 1940
Painted
while McWilliams was serving as an Ordinary Seaman (OD) prior to
officer training at HMS King
Alfred
Courtesy of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port
Elizabeth, South Africa (Accession No. W69/74)
In 1940 at the age of 33, he
joined the Royal Navy as an Ordinary
Seaman (OD) and served in the heavy cruiser, HMS Shropshire,
as a CW Candidate (Commissioned and Warrant). McWilliams wrote in the
catalogue for the 1973 exhibition of his work that "a large percentage
of the ship's company were South Africans. I saw action in places as
far apart as Italian Somaliland, Iceland and Murmansk in Russia". HMS Shropshire was often in Icelandic waters and In August 1941 at Havelfjord, where HMS Hecla was based, McWilliams saw Churchill during his brief visit after meeting with Roosevelt in Newfoundland. HMS Shropshire was part of the escort when the Prince of Wales
left Havelfjord with Churchill aboard on the 18 August. Michael Mills
writing from Port Elizabeth described a walk his father Thomas ("Billy") Mills, an AB on Shropshire, took with
McWilliams up the rocky slopes overlooking the fjord from which he brought
back a pressed Iceland poppy for his wife.
HMS Ashanti in dry dock at Immingham on
the Humber estuary
Watercolour, probably painted in 1940 while McWilliams was stationed at
Lowestoft
Courtesy of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port
Elizabeth, South Africa (Accession No. W70/74)
After completing his sea time as an OD (Ordinary Seaman) McWilliams was sent to HMS King Alfred
at Brighton and Hove for officer training. His first posting was as Executive Officer at the shore base, HMS Minos II, in Lowestoft where the Thirteenth Flotilla Coastal Forces protected
the east coast convoys from marauding E-boats. He did many drawings of
the 40 knot motor launches and motor gun boats of coastal forces at
Lowestoft including studies for a mural in the wardroom of Minos II. Was this mural completed and does it still exist today?
Slow Convoy - Mid Atlantic, 1942 "An
idea of the slow speed of these ships on a calm sea can be obtained by
observing that the smoke is blowing ahead", McWilliams
This picture was probably painted while McWilliams was taking passage to Simonstown where he joined HMS Hecla
Courtesy of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg
The end of a Merchantman This picture is undated but was probably painted while McWilliams was taking passage to Simons Town where he joined HMS Hecla
Courtesy of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg
He was
promoted to Lieutenant SANF and drafted to Simon's Town. These two
paintings (above) may have been painted on the voyage south. Mcwilliams
described "The end of a Merchantman" in the exhibition catalogue:
"This
steamer was torpedoed off the West coast of Africa; she lay down by the
bows for several hours while her crew took to the boats and waited to
see the last of her. Dawn was just breaking and her funnel was sending
up a wisp of smoke to join the large cloud that hung overhead in the
still air after the explosion. In order to prevent her being a danger
to shipping she was sunk by one of our own torpedoes."
On arrival at Simons Town he joined
HMS Hecla and was on passage
to Algiers when it was torpedoed on the 11 November 1942. His wonderfully
realistic paintings of Hecla sinking done on the back of old charts (with a throat brush, iodine
from the sick
bay and rum) and his detailed description of that night taken from a
letter to his Mother written within days of its loss were included in
A Hard Fought Ship and the catalogue of the exhibition of his paintings held at Port Elizabeth in 1973. Click on the link for further details of HMS Hecla and the stories of survivors.
On survivor's leave in London he sold his finished paintings to the
Imperial War Museum and in a letter dated December 1942 wrote “I agree
that in respect of my pictures (three Admiralty subjects) purchased for
thirty five guineas for the three, on the recommendation of the Artists
Advisory Committee all rights of reproduction in any form shall be
vested solely in the Crown.” He retained the preliminary drawings made on the back of signal forms while still aboard HMS Venomous. His paintings and first hand description
of the sinking of HMS Hecla
make an
important contribution to this chapter in A Hard Fought Ship.
HMS Saunders,
the shore base at Kabret on Egypt's Bitter Lakes where McWilliams
trained with the troops for the amphibious assault on Sicily
Painted
from the water tower overlooking the base with latrines (lower left),
tent accommodation and the landing craft on the Bitter Lakes in the
background
Presented by McWilliams to the CO of HMS Saunders and inscribed "To Capt.
G.I.S. More - with admiration: HMS Saunders
& Kabret. From: H.H. McWilliams"
Courtesy of Henry More, the grandson of Capt G.I.S. More RN
Kabret: landing craft practicing
disembarkment (on left, ink wash) and landing craft discharging tank
(right, watercolour)
Courtesy
of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port
Elizabeth, South Africa (Accession Nos. W381/85 and W78/85)
"Full dress rehearsal for an Invasion"
The scene on the shore of the Bitter Lakes at Kebret where the troops and naval personnel based at HMS Saunders practiced the amphibious landings on Sicily.
Courtesy of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg
Early in 1943 he was attached to
Combined Operations and was sent
out, via the Cape, to the Middle East to be trained to take part in the
amphibious landings in Sicily at HMS Saunders,
the shore base at Kabret on the Bitter Lakes:
"This
was a 'ship of the desert' where for months before the Sicilian
invasion thousands of officers and men went through the training
for the Combined Operations course. The level sandy shores of the
BItter Lakes were covered for miles with tents and sheds, and not only
was this vast naval establishment placed near the rehearsal beaches,
but also army and Air Force camps so that a very great area was
occupied. In the early summer conditions were bearable but for the rest
of the time HMS Saunders was considered to be the worst ship to which one could be drafted".
At Alexandria he was made "Senior Naval Officer for a merchant ship
adopted for the transport of motor vehicles" to the invasion beaches.
His ship was part of a huge convoy carrying troops and equipment
from Alexandria to Augusta on the south east coast of Sicily. One of the escorts was HMS Venomous.
McWilliams described the voyage and the continuous air attacks during
the landings on the 10 July in a letter to his Mother:
"Owing
to the heat I was only clad in a pair of shorts. One doesn't feel very
secure in shorts and a tin hat and every time a bomb fell you could
feel its scorching breath on my body. This was my first experience of
dive-bombing but I can tell you it doesn't need much practice to fling
yourself flat on the deck when you hear the whine and screech of a
bomb. We had only two near misses, one falling ten yards ahead of the
ship and another only about twenty yards from the port quarter; this
last peppering our ensign with shrapnel until it looked like a piece of
open-work lace and puncturing the ship's side in many places, some
holes were as big as six inches in diameter. The whole ship was lifted
bodily by the explosion and the noise was astonishing."
The sinking of the hospital ship HMS Talambo, Sicily 1943 "All
British hospital ships were clearly marked with the Red Cross in many
places, several of which were illuminated at night", Herbert H
McWilliams
Courtesy of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg
After the Sicily invasion
he was returned to
Alexandria "to await further orders" and it was during this period that
"a
chance meeting with an Admiral [name forgotten]" gave him an
opportunity to display his drawings of these operations and others done
while attached to coastal forces in the UK. Many of them
were purchased by the War Artists Commission and after idling in
Alexandria for some weeks Lieutenant McWilliams was posted on the 10 September 1943 to HMS Nile, the shore base at Alexandria,
for press duties in
Cairo. He became Naval
Editor, artist and photographer on the staff of Parade, the service publication
produced simultaneously in Cairo and Naples and eventually Calcutta.
The harbour from a roof in Malta Malta survived the pounding it received from enemy bombers and by June 1943 convoys were once again able to go from Gib to Alex
Courtesy of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg
The first active resistance of the Italians against the Germans took
place at Piombino opposite the island of Elba. When the Germans were
driven out the harbour was unusable and McWilliams painted the
construction of a 'hard' where landing craft could land military
vehicles, salvage work to clear the harbour and the bombed ruins of the
nearby steel works.
The 'hard' at Piombino
Courtesy of the Ditsong National Museum of Military History, Johannesburg
Foating sheerlegs raising sunken wrekage (left) and bombed steelworks at Piombino (right)
Courtesy of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port
Elizabeth, South Africa
He took part in the allied landings in the south of
France, the liberation of Greece and the Dodecanese islands and the
invasion of Rangoon. He returned from Colombo aboard the old battleship
HMS Queen Elizabeth (see ink
wash above) and was
demobilised at Alexandria in 1945.
Oil painting of Herbert Hastings McWilliams by Dorothy Kay, 1944
McWilliams and Dorothy Kay both lived in Port Elizabeth
Courtesy of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, 1 Park Drive, Port
Elizabeth, South Africa (Accession Nos. W161/1988)
He returned to Port Elizabeth and when his
father died took charge of the practice in Port Elizabeth. He was
responsible for many landmark buildings in Port Elizabeth, ranging from
Art Deco to Classical and Moorish. He was a Trustee of the King George
VI Art Gallery, as well as the original architect for the building.
He was a
keen
yachtsman and was South Africa's
only representative in the Olympic Yachting events at Torquay in 1948
where he competed in the Firefly class. In 1947 he designed the largest
and best loved class of racing dinghy in South Africa and named it the Sprog, naval slang for small, and called the first Sprog, the one he sailed on the Swartkops river, Stroppy,
meaning cheeky. He was a keen member of the Swartkops Yacht Club and
lived nearby. Roux van der Merwe, Emeritus Professor at Rhodes
University and a close personal friend, described the unique nature of
the boats he designed:
"As
a fellow resident of Amsterdam Hoek, along the Swartkops River, my
personal contact with Herbert was as a fellow yachtsman. He was the
designer of a plywood sailing dinghy, the Sprog, of
pioneering “monocoque” construction, glued with urea formaldehyde
adhesive; at a time when even hard-chine boats were built on frames and
stringers, and fastened with riveted copper nails. Other of his boats
which I owned and sailed were a Winger (larger than a Sprog) and an
Extra (smaller)"
The idea for the design of the Sprog came to him "in the Bay of
Bengal in 1945 when we had to heave-to in the tail end of a cyclone"
and it was "launched" in March 1946. You can read Herbert McWilliams
own account of how he came to design and build the Sprog in the April
1958 issue of the Sprog Log which was rediscovered by Warwick Owen and published by Richard Crockett, publisher and editor of Sailing magazine, in his blog, Talking Sailing.
Warwick Owen has drawn my attention to a five minute film clip on You Tube
(‘saved’ by Bruce Baldwin from old film footage, from his grandfather’s
archives) of Sprogs & other dinghies sailing on the estuary of the
Swartkops which includes footage of Herbert and Albert Milde going down
the slip from his home, the ‘Poop’, at the grand launching of
"Stroppy" in 1946. Herbert McWilliams is easily recognisable as the
blond chap, the one with crinkly hair. Later you see them ‘planing’
along the river.
He was a flamboyant colourful character as Van der Merwe recalled:
"Herbert entertained royally at his magnificent riverside home, “The Poop”, with its figurehead of HMS Medusa,
now returned to the Greenwich Museum. He owned a majestic Rolls Royce,
later replaced by a more modern version (“but with less majesty” –
unquote!); and a superb 1950’s Bentley Continental fastback coupe."
The catalogue of the exhibition
of his work held in Port Elizabeth (1973) and in Johannesburg (1974)
which included the paintings in the Imperial War Museum is the best
published guide to his work:
The
retrospective exhibition of naval drawings and water colours from World
War II, 1939-1945; Herbert Hastings McWilliams.
King George VI Art Gallery, 1973 (ISBN 062001217X, 9780620012171).
In 1985 The Poop, the
luxurious home at
Amsterdamhoek on the Swartkops river fourteen miles east of Port Elizabeth, which he shared with Albert Milde, his
lifelong friend and
partner, "was gutted in a dramatic
blaze…. and most of his paintings and drawings were burnt." The Herbert
and Albert Charitable Trust was established in their names after the
death of Herbert McWilliams in 1995.
The Ditsong National Military Museum in
Johannesburg has six of his wartime water colours painted in the
Mediterranean and during the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky) and the Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum
in Port Elizabeth, formerly the King George V1 Art Gallery (designed by
Herbert McWilliams), has sixteen of his drawings and water colours.
Chapter 13 in the new hardback edition of Hard Fought Ship: the Story of HMS Venomous published on 9 May contains the most detailed description yet of the events of 11 - 12 November 1942 when HMS Hecla was torpedoed and Herbert McWilliams was one of the 500 survivors rescued by HMS Venomous
