Pattinson, James Soldier, Sail North

Murmansk Run convoy tale. “Mr. Pattinson’s book is an honest, authentic account of the life of some gunners on a Russia-bound merchant ship, sailing in winter convoy. There is a certain amount of flash-back sentimentality, dealing with faithless wives, East End childhoods and so on; also a good deal of action. Mr. Pattinson, unfortunately, lacks the equipment to make anything fresh or exciting out of it” – The Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 1954. The Times’ reviewer must have been in a rather grumpy mood the day he encountered the novel, since this reviewer found the book both fresh and exciting. Pattinson’s highly readable prose clearly describes the horrors of a Murmansk Run convoy, while his descriptions of the Soviet port of Murmansk in wartime are particularly evocative. His individual portraits of the various Maritime Royal Artillery men who manned the guns aboard the fictitious S.S. GOLDEN RAY on her ill-fated trek to Murmansk and back are uniformly moving, as is the GOLDEN RAY’s own ironic ending (she hits a drifting mine just in sight of Scotland and sinks with many of her crew and gunners)