HMS Tartar 4th Commission 1970 9

This morning we were all up early and dressed in half whites, white top and trousers, at some point we made our way on to the upper deck in a very humid heat and took up our station near the flagdeck, after all those weeks on Beira Patrol we were at last heading for dry land. We entered Kilindini Harbour for our stop in Mombasa at full Procedure Alpha, with the crew lining the ship sides all looking very smart, I seem to remember we were pretty close to the shore as we made our way in, ramshackle houses lining the route. If we were there to impress the locals we must have done as we glided to our moorings, shades of Empire flitting around our presence.

Needless to say everyone who could was desperate to get ashore, for me it was exciting, South Africa, at least in the Cape had a very European feel to it, but here it was different, this was my first real foreign footfall. We anchored out and were immediately surrounded by 'bum boats' trying to sell us all sorts from food to wooden carvings, it was too soon to start collecting 'rabbits' to take home so as soon as leave was announced and as we were already dressed a bunch of us dropped into a small boat and headed for the shore. We were surrounded as soon as we landed, beggers and traders all after our cash, but of course we only wanted to find the nearest bar, before settling down to a beer we did wander along the main drag and I remember sitting for lunch at a small cafe and getting a sandwich which was delicious, funny what sticks in your mind. I did indeed pick up some 'rabbits' the customary wooden carving and a painting, done in grey, white and black of a tree which caught my eye, god knows where I was going to keep it. My parents got it eventually and it hung in their house for years, I have no idea where it is now as it was replaced by a large, gaudy sombrero and a rawhide whip, courtesy of one of my brothers from a trip to the other side of the Atlantic.

As I said Mombasa had a reputation as a kind of frontier town where anything went as long as you had the money to pay for it, as I sat sipping my first ice cold beer I got a flavour of this as other Jack Tars kept disappearing upstairs for half an hour or so and returning full of smiles and we had only been ashore for a few hours.

Still relatively sober we returned to the ship to deposit our wood carvings and sundry other local rubbish which seemed like a good idea at the time and prepared for a night on the town, such as it was, Mombasa didn't seem that big and was still mainly off the beaten track for tourists. The bars beckoned that evening, in particular the Casablanca (which is still there) and the notorious Sunshine Bar, the age limit for drinking seemed to have disappeared as soon as we got out of the Channel.

The MOD had a prize piece of real estate on the famous Nyali Beach here in Mombasa and it was used by all forces for rest and recreation, we had it booked for our stay and I would be there for the next three days. We still had a Naval presence there back then and they must have been given the task of looking after our signal traffic otherwise we RO's would not have got more than a day off.