A SAILOR’S TRAVELS IN THE 1930s
In the collection in our care we have two albums which belonged to Loughborough naval man Archie Bacon. They contain photographs and postcards from the time of his Royal Navy tours of duty in 1931-1934 and 1936-1939, taking in many countries. They provide a fascinating glimpse into Archie Bacon’s service life and the attitudes of the time.
Archibald John Roberts Bacon was born in Loughborough in 1899, into a large family of at least eight children. For reasons unknown, the children shared Roberts as one of their second names. Their father was Tom Bacon, a farm labourer, born in Leicestershire. Their mother was Alice, who had been born Alice Bruce Bartley in India, where her father served in the British Army. Tom and Alice married in Loughborough in 1891 and at the time of the 1901 Census the Bacon family lived at 64 Canal Bank, off Bridge Street, but later moved to 24 Edwards Street, when Tom Bacon was working as a horseman for a sewage company.
Archie’s older brother Henry, born around 1892 and known as Harry, turned out to be the one the family never talked about. He joined the Navy in 1909 but his record shows he was constantly in trouble for infringing discipline. There is no record of his whereabouts after 1921. He may have gone AWOL during a voyage, died in mysterious circumstances or simply decided to disappear. The other siblings mainly settled in Loughborough for the rest of their lives.
1915: Archie’s adventures begin
Research gives the impression that Archie was an adventurous lad who wasn’t averse to pushing the boundaries. He had already had a very minor skirmish with the law when he was 13, receiving a police caution for playing football on the highway with some other boys.
On 6th December 1915 he attested at Grantham for the Notts and Derby (Sherwood Foresters) Regiment. He was 5ft 5ins tall, with dark hair and brown eyes. The problem was, he was only just 16. His age having been discovered, he was discharged just three weeks later under Para 392 King’s Regulations (vi): ‘having made a mis-statement as to age on enlistment’. He was typical of many youngsters who lied about their age to join up and take part in what was seen as a big adventure, far more exciting than Archie’s job as a warehouse packer. Perhaps he was influenced by the example of his big brother Harry, already serving at sea. Also, his mother Alice had died in February 1915, aged just 44, so perhaps Archie felt adrift and was keen to make his way in the wider world.
Signing on as a stoker
Not to be deterred, on 26th March 1917 he enlisted in the Royal Navy, joining the Royal Marine Light Infantry: Plymouth Division. He was now a legal 17½, service number 19487. He toiled away as a stoker and remained one throughout his long naval career, ending up as Stoker 1st class. The stokers were a breed unto themselves, toiling away in the bowels of the ship shovelling the coal to keep the engines running. Hard, dirty but vital work. They wore a badge with a propeller.
Archie Bacon served in many ships and for much of the time his home base was the Royal Naval Barracks in Chatham, also known as HMS Pembroke. It was an enormous centre, providing accommodation, recreation and training for sailors waiting to be assigned to a ship, as well as being an administrative hub. Archie returned there between tours of duty.
1919: an Imperial mission
In 1919 he was serving in HMS Marlborough in the Black Sea, during the Russian Civil War. The ship became a rescue vessel for the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna and other members of the Russian Imperial Family, the Romanovs, escaping the Bolsheviks. Marie’s eldest son, the deposed Tsar Nicholas ll, had been murdered by the Bolsheviks along with his wife and children in 1917 and the monarchy overthrown. The Dowager Empress had initially refused to leave Russia, but it became too dangerous for her to remain. She was living in the Crimea when she and a large number of other family members and their servants were evacuated by HMS Marlborough at Yalta. The ship had been sent to them on the orders of King George V. Marie Feodoronva, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark, was the sister of Britain’s Queen Alexandra and therefore King George’s aunt. She later returned to Denmark, dying in 1928. For his part in this humanitarian episode, Archie Bacon received a silver cigarette case. We can imagine he must have felt excited and honoured to be part of this event.
1923: signing on for long service
Naval life must have suited him. In January 1923 he signed on at Chatham for another 12 years, and in 1938 he was awarded the long service and good conduct medal. Unlike his brother Harry, his conduct was always rated satisfactory or superior.
From the mid-1920s to the early 1930s his naval service took him to the China station and East India station, the ships including HMS Hawkins, Vindictive and Enterprise.
His family home remained in the Loughborough area, and he may have returned there from time to time. The electoral roll absent voters list for 1922 shows his address as a cottage in the parish of Cotes. He was still registered at this address in 1930, but by 1931 the family had moved to 15 Palmer Avenue, Loughborough. His widowed father Tom, sister Susannah, her husband Ernest Savage, and younger sisters Alice and Jessie lived there too. Archie’s name is marked with ‘a’ for absent as he would have been serving at sea.
1930s: the albums
The albums in the collection in our care cover the time Archie spent serving in HMS Enterprise and HMS Achilles, the latter when the ship was loaned to the Royal Navy’s New Zealand Division.
His travels in HMS Enterprise (1931-1934) covered 53,025 miles and took him to India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Persian Gulf and East Africa. In HMS Achilles the ports of call were New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, Fiji, Tahiti, Panama, Jamaica; 60,240 miles in total.
The albums are beautifully presented, each photo captioned in neat handwriting, many with humorous comments. They are a mixture of commercial postcards and photographs, mostly hand-coloured. They are too good to have been amateur snapshots, so we must assume that Archie bought them from tourist shops when he was in port. There are a few, taken on board ship, with a more authentic feel. These may have been taken by a crew mate or by Archie himself. These including crossing the line (the equator), his crew mates, and VIP visitors to the ship.
Views of different times
Archie clearly wanted to make a comprehensive record of the places he visited. The photos include landmarks like Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Gateway of India in Bombay (Mumbai), Government Buildings in Karachi, pagodas in Rangoon, and the Panama Canal. Some record local life; street scenes, snake charmers, fisherman, tea pickers, working elephants, spectacular scenery.
However, some of the subject matter must be viewed through the prism of bygone days. Not Archie’s fault; these photos are nearly 90 years old and attitudes were different. To tourists and travellers, local people were seen as curiosities to be captured as visual souvenirs, posing as smiling ‘natives’ or going about their daily business in strange garb.
Many photos and postcards in Archie’s albums feature pretty young women, often wearing very few clothes, or in some cases, none at all. Archie was clearly entranced by these ‘hula girls’ ‘Hawaiian flappers’, ‘Maori maidens’ and ‘belles of the village’ as he captioned them. One wonders what their lives were really like behind the smiles and the exotic costumes, but it’s not likely that a typical serviceman of the 1930s would have asked that question.
The 1940s and later
Throughout World War 2 Archie was still in the Royal Navy but seems to have been UK based. From 1939 he was at various shore training establishments, HMS Eaglet, HMS Cochrane (both in Leith) and HMS Pembroke in Chatham. In October 1941 he was in Beaver 2, another shore base in Grimsby. A faint pencilled note on his naval record says he was released from Beaver on 11th September 1945. There’s no indication of his whereabouts between October 1941 and September 1945; it’s possible he remained at HMS Pembroke, which supported many important wartime operations.
He would have been in his mid-forties when the war ended.
Someone who knows a few details about Archie Bacon’s postwar life is his great nephew Anthony Savage, the grandson of Archie’s sister Susannah, and the only person still alive who remembers him. Anthony is certain that Archie returned to Loughborough after the war, and guesses that, with his engine room experience, he may have worked for a boilermaker or similar. Anthony remembers him as “clean cut, cool, typical ex-military.” It’s known for certain that he never married.
Archie died in December 1968, aged 69, and his last address was 4 Holmfield Avenue in Loughborough, also the address of his sister Susannah and her husband Ernest Savage. He died intestate but left £2516; around £47,000 in 2026 value.
The Bacons must have remained a close-knit family, as sisters Susannah, Alice and Nellie lived next door to one another in Holmfield Avenue, and their father Tom had lived at number 4 until his death in 1960, aged 87.
Many thanks to Emma Savage and her father Anthony Savage for much useful information.
