HMAS Parramatta at Port Said, Frank Norton, 1941. [Oil on artist board with some scratching in, 50.6 x 35.6cm. AWM ART22476]

My darling,

This will only be a scribble of a few words but very good news! I have been appointed to ‘Penguin’ additional – which means some job starting off in Sydney anyway.

I was having an afternoon sleep when they brought me the signal and couldn’t believe it! Everyone else is to be stepped up one and a Sub [Sub-Lieutenant] to join. I went ashore for a bit of a party that night!

Trouble is I don’t know when I can get away – I should like to leave the ship straight away but the trouble is we are so terribly busy just now. However I’m coming sometime darling, which is the great thing and perhaps you might know more about that than I do.

Am much too incoherent to write much but you should know how I feel – I can’t register very well!

Am going to hop ashore this morning and see what I can find out. Wish I could wait ashore and get some shopping done – we are never in harbour long enough lately.

Must close – Lord I’m longing to see you both. Will write more as soon as I get a chance.

All my love
Scrub

Lieutenant William (known as ‘Bill’ or ‘Scrub’) Langford must have posted his wife’s letter as soon as he wrote it because his ship, HMAS Parramatta, sailed from Alexandria on 25 November 1941.

Two days later, on 27 November, HMAS Parramatta was lost in the Mediterranean off the North African coast, the third Australian warship lost to enemy action in World War II.

Since Marjorie Findlay, Bill’s fiancee, was from Tasmania and he was based in Sydney they selected Melbourne for their wedding on 19 December 1939. Bill was only permitted 12 hours leave so he arrived from Sydney at 11.40 am that morning. Their wedding ceremony was at 1.45 pm and the newly married couple flew back to Sydney at 3.00 pm the same day.

Early in 1940, Bill Langford was appointed First Lieutenant to the newly commissioned HMAS Parramatta and sometime during the next few months the newly married couple did manage to have a few days’ honeymoon at Manly Beach.

Marjorie and Bill Langford leaving Christ Church, South Yarra after their wedding on 19 December 1939. [Jill Green]

However, on 11 June 1940, the day after Italy declared war, Australia proposed to send additional naval assistance to Britain by releasing HMA Ships Westralia and Parramatta for service in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Marjorie and Bill had been married for only six months when his ship, HMAS Parramatta, left Australia for escort and minesweeping duties in the Red Sea Force.

In April 1941, Parramatta took part in the successful campaign to capture the Italian naval base at Massawas in Eritrea in north-east Africa and later she towed the torpedoed British cruiser HMS Capetown from Eritrea to Port Sudan further north on the Red Sea coast of Sudan. On 14 April 1941, Parramatta’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander Jefferson Walker, wrote of how he had he sent the ship’s motor boat through the mine-swept channel into the port of Massawa with some of his staff officers on board:

Thus … the first British naval officer to reach Massawa by sea was Lieutenant G W A Langford, RAN, in charge of my boat.

[G Hermon Gill, The Royal Australian Navy 1939-1942, Canberra, 1957, p.372]

On 3 June 1941, when Parramatta returned to Alexandria from the East Indies Station, she had spent nearly 40 unbroken weeks in the Red Sea. In the Mediterranean she sailed back and forth with the Tobruk Ferry Service. Men, ammunition and stores were shuttled to the Australian and British troops in the garrison there and Parramatta escorted the slower merchant ships in and out of the port.

During July and August 1941, Bill Langford was Acting Captain of the Parramatta while Lieutenant-Commander Walker recovered from injuries he had received in a traffic accident ashore in Alexandria.

HMAS Parramatta, circa 1940. [AWM P01993.010]

On 25 November, just after Lieutenant Langford wrote his last letter to his wife, Parramatta, in company with a British escort destroyer, took an ammunition ship, SS Hanne, westwards towards Tobruk. Early on the morning of 27 November, as she was escorting the SS Hanne with emergency supplies of ammunition, Parramatta was torpedoed by German submarine U-559 at a range of about 1500 metres. Another almost simultaneous explosion occurred and the ship rolled over and sank within minutes. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander Walker, gave the order to abandon ship but few of the men managed to get away. Only 23 of the ship’s company of 161 were saved. Lieutenant Langford and all of Parramatta’s officers were amongst those lost together with eight members of the Royal Navy travelling in the ship. The Hanne reached Tobruk safely.

Members of the Council of the City of Parramatta in New South Wales, the ‘home’ town of HMAS Parramatta, passed a resolution to convey the ‘sincere and heartfelt sympathy of the citizens of Parramatta to the families of the ‘gallant men’ lost when the ship was sunk off Tobruk on 27 November 1941. [NAA A1608 S51/1/6]

Jill Green, Bill Langford’s daughter, was born after her father left Australia in 1940. He would have seen his daughter for the first time had he returned to Australia.

According to Jill:

News of my birth arrived while the ship was in Bombay. The Parramatta was being overhauled and given a new camouflage and the crew enjoyed shore leave after very trying convoy duty in the Red Sea. I have a rather suspect piece of tissue paper from the Berkeley Hotel on which is written, amongst other things: ‘Baby’s head has been well and truly wet. Good luck’ Signed ‘Jono’.

On 17 June 2004, almost 59 years after her father’s death, Mrs Jill Green launched the new Anzac frigate HMAS Parramatta, the third ship to bear the name, at the Williamstown Dockyard in Victoria. In her speech she spoke of meeting some of the survivors from her father’s ship and of the collection of her father’s letters to her mother,

a very touching and remarkable record of life on board the Parramatta … which have helped me to appreciate the character and personality of the father I never knew.

There is another letter in Jill’s collection. The man who was to be Jill’s godfather, Commander Syd Dalton DSO, wrote to her mother Marjorie from HMAS Sydney on 9 February 1941, just as the cruiser was returning to Australia. Syd Dalton, the Engineering Officer in HMAS Sydney, was one of the 645 men lost when Sydney disappeared off the coast of Western Australia on 19 November 1941.

Marjorie Langford with her baby daughter Jill, circa August 1941. [Jill Green]

At Sea 9th February 1941

Dear Marjory (sic)

I met that scamp of a husband of yours a few weeks ago, a long way from here and he told me the grand news about your daughter. I am so glad, my dear, and feel particularly honoured that Scrub has asked me to be Godfather (subject of course, to the approval of your good self).

I shall try my best to lead her along the another of life that all good little girls should tread, and if she becomes, as she undoubtedly will, as charming a woman as her mother, then can I consider myself a very lucky godfather.

We are on the point of arriving home after a year away, so you can imagine how pleased I feel at the thought of seeing Margaret and David again tomorrow, after such a long separation.

Best of luck, Marjorie, and here’s hoping that Scrub returns very soon.

He is looking particularly well, I thought.

Yours very sincerely

Syd Dalton DSO (and am I thrilled!)

Eight days after Syd Dalton was lost in the Sydney, Jill lost her father in HMAS Parramatta on the other side of the world – just a week before her first birthday.