A Pipe & a Novel
A bearded crewman sitting benignly on some Mark VII depth charges, smoking his pipe and reading a novel on board the K-class destroyer HMS Kelvin (F37) during WWII. As each ash can carries 700 pounds of TNT, the rating is relaxing about a smooth ton of high explosive.
Royal Navy official photographer, LT Christopher John Ware, RNVR, IWM A 1534
Ware– a skilled press agency portrait photographer who volunteered his services to the RN during the war– captured this rating from two different angles, with the second clearly showing it as a posed shot with other tars looking on amused.
IWM A 1533
Kelvin is perhaps the best photographed British tin can of WWII as Ware was apparently aboard her for most much of 1940 and 1941 and captured no less than 380 images while embedded with her crew, some of them rather hamming it up for the camera.
ON BOARD THE DESTROYER HMS KELVIN. 1941. (A 3855) Seaman gunner carrying two belts of 2 lb pom-pom ammunition. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205138210
THE NAVY SETS AN EXAMPLE IN READINESS FOR GAS ATTACKS. FEBRUARY 1941, ON BOARD THE DESTROYER HMS KELVIN, IN PLYMOUTH SOUND. DURING A GAS DRILL WHICH LASTED THREE-QUARTERS OF AN HOUR. ALL DUTIES WERE CARRIED OUT WITH GAS MASKS. (A 3187) Sailors on the mess deck wearing gas masks while reading and writing letters when off duty. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205137601
Commissioned 27 November 1939, Kelvin survived the war– unlike many of her J-, K- and N-class sisters and half-sisters– and earned no less than 8 battle honors: Atlantic (1940), Spartivento (1940), Crete (1941), Mediterranean (1941–43), Sirte (1942), Malta Convoys (1942), Normandy (1944), and Aegean (1944).
HMS Kelvin (F37) Underway in the Clyde. IWM FL 3886
BRITISH FLEET OPERATIONS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. NOVEMBER 1940, ON BOARD THE DESTROYER HMS KELVIN. (A 2463) A depth charge dropped by the destroyer during a submarine attack exploding astern of the ship. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205136839
Post-war, the worn-out tin can was soon laid up and disposed of, sold to the breakers in 1949, just shy of her 10th birthday.