Townend, William Sink and Be Damned
This impassioned novel dating to the early days of World War 2 finds author Townend at the height of his narrative powers. Characters are delineated initially in broad brush strokes, and emerge gradually as fully realized creations as Townend moves his story forward. The novel opens in Galveston, Texas in late August 1939 with the British tramp freighter GRANGEMOUTH, skippered by Captain Inchmere, preparing to sail to Hamburg, Germany with a load of cargo. War erupts with the vessel mid-ocean, and the GRANGEMOUTH is diverted to England. Also aboard the tramp is an arrogant Nazi stowaway who does his best to sabotage the ship. Two encounters with German U-boats as well as a fire deliberately set by the fanatical stowaway very nearly do in the GRANGEMOUTH, but the foresight and heroism of her crew keep the ship sailing. Along the way, though, it becomes apparent that the German Navy has no intention of allowing the ship to reach the safety of Britain; obviously, something of vital worth to German interests (foreign currency? top secret American warship or aviation plans?) has been smuggled aboard the GRANGEMOUTH. The novel reaches a thrilling climax off Avonmouth in southern England when the ship is brutally shelled by a U-boat bent on totally destroying the gallant ship. The proverbial cavalry (in the form of a Royal Navy destroyer) arrives just in the nick of time to save the freighter and to destroy the enemy submarine.
In a cast of uniformly excellent characters it’s difficult to single out one or two, but mention certainly must be made of the GRANGEMOUTH’s Chief Engineer, a survivor of enemy action during World War 1, a man who is deathly afraid of dying in his engine room but yet never shows his inner fear, rather putting on a stoic demeanor which inspires his men even as torpedoes and artillery fire hit the ship. Also notable is the Jewish A.B., originally from Germany and whose older brother is incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp, who refuses to give in to self-doubt and whose actions while the GRANGEMOUTH is being strafed clearly helps guarantee her survival.
Townend clearly identifies with even the most marginalized of the GRANGEMOUTH’s crew, championing the very importance of their skilled (and unskilled) work in a manner which, under different circumstances, might be read as agitprop, but here reads more as an impassioned, angry paean to the common man:
“These men, for instance,” he writes, “these firemen and trimmers, like coal miners and fishermen, lived lives of danger and hardship, and in return received — what? — less money each week than some bitch of a film actress might spend on a pair of silk stockings! a living wage, perhaps, but little more than a living wage, and a poor living at that! The mean streets of Cardiff and Newport and Liverpool and Newcastle were witness.” — p. 204.
Finally, in its best “stiff upper lip” prose, The Times Literary Supplement of Aug. 1, 1940 noted that Sink and Be Damned was “a story which does everything to confirm that Mr. W. Townend’s reputation as a writer about the sea” and that the novel read as a “remarkably vivid and appropriate tribute to the courage of the Mercantile Marine” — surely an understatement for this excellent work of fiction!