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One day a keen young man filled the gun barrel of a destroyer with wood. I was the Electrical Officer when we commissioned HMS Defender before sailing for the Far East Fleet in June 1953 bound for the Korean War. We had three of the very latest twin 4.5 Mk 6 guns in armoured gunhouses with a mechanised ammunition supply system. Mike Page, the Ordnance Engineer, was refining the operation of the mountings and while we were anchored off Taechongdo one October day he had his team working on A Turret on-mounting shell and cartridge hoists; to tune the operation for the required high rate of fire without firing the gun they were ramming dummy shells and cartridges into the breech (the brass cartridge cylinder was automatically extracted after each simulated firing and ejected through the rear of the turret as would have occurred in a live firing). The dummy shells were pushed up the barrel, after a five-round simulated burst there would be five one behind the other in the gun barrels; a normal training and maintenance process.

The Gun Sweeper was left to clear the guns by elevating them and opening the breech so that the dummies could fall out through the ramming tray leaving five shells and five cartridges from each gun to be picked up from the deck and stowed away. The Sweeper decided to have his dinner and do the job in the afternoon. Mike repeated his tale to me in desperation later that evening.

"After my dinner I went up to A and switched on; I elevated to forty degrees and opened both breeches and the shells fell out, then I brought them to five degrees to put the tompions in. When I was stowing them away I found I had nine shells instead of ten. I opened the breeches and squinted up both barrels and there was one still in the right barrel so put the trestle under the right muzzle and pushed on the ejector staff."

An ejector is a twelve foot length of wood with a hollow cone-shaped head to fit over the front of a shell; it is used to push back any shell which has not left the chamber for whatever reason. "I thumped the ejector in a few times and the round didn't move so I got the hammer and gave the end a bash; I have seen the Chief do it and it usually shifts them. This time it didn't so I went to see Chippy and borrowed his maul. When I hit the staff with the maul it broke off and went down the side of its other half inside the barrel. I tried to pull the broken bit out but it wouldn't come. I thought I must do something before the Captain of the Gun came back at teatime to inspect the turret to make sure all was squared off. I went and had a smoke and decided to give the shaft one more bash because I reckoned the broken bit was probably resting on the ejector head and if I could just shift it a bit it would fall out. I thought that the driving band on the dummy shell was just catching the rifling and I only had to move it half an inch to unjam it."

He then bashed the staff until it disappeared which left him with a gun barrel full of broken wood. He went to the Sweeper from B Gun who was in the same mess and they decided that they would push the whole lot out by brute force and got a piece of four by two timber from the shipwright's heap and drove it down the barrel using the maul; again they finished up with a gun barrel filled with splintered timber. At four pm. they reluctantly called the Petty Officer, Captain of the Gun, he took one look and called the Chief Ordnance Artificer who called Mike.

By this time rumours had a large crowd gathered to look at this gun with a spray of wood at the end. Martin Dawson, the Gunnery Officer, came and had the fo'c'stle deck cleared and roped off; he then reported to the Captain who was reasonably placid provided that the barrel was cleared by sunset. By six pm Mike was telling us how they were trying to drill the timber out of the barrel but had so far not made a great deal of progress; Martin Dawson was looking grim and, Mike, Martin and I discussed methods of getting at the dummy shell. Even if the wood came out it was very firmly wedged in the barrel and would not necessarily move when a new ejector pushed on its nose so the approach should be two-fold; to clear the muzzle and to haul the shell out from the breech. There was a plug with a standard Whitworth thread in the base of the shell filling a hole where the fuse fitted in a live round. If the plug could be turned out then an eyebolt could be put in and a wire led from it through the breech and out through the cartridge chute to a block and tackle. That could pull up to two tons; I guessed that a pull of two tons would not strip the thread in the shell because we had similar eyebolts for lifting our generator carcasses which weighed eight tons. The problem was that all this needed to be done four feet up inside a four and a half inch gun barrel giving very limited access. I asked my Chief Electrical Artificer to unscrew an eyebolt from a main generator and to try it on one of the other dummy shells; luckily it fitted nicely into the hole.

The Blacksmith set up his forge on the fo'c'stle and started to hammer steel stock into shape as long tongs. We floodlit the area and the job of removing the timber was passed to the Gunners Party under the Gunner, Mr. Oliver. Martin had decided to burn it out using an asbestos blanket round the barrel and blowlamps and oxy-acetyline flames. This would ruin the paintwork which Olly and his men would repair so they would muck it up as little as possible.

The Captain was now concerned and said that if there was no progress by midnight he must signal the Flag Officer Hongkong that we were without one gun in A Turret.

Repeated attempts were made to get the plug out of the captive shell using a long box spanner made by the Blacksmith, then screw in the eyebolt using his other special device. It could not be done with a stiff steel wire attached but a light line had been threaded through and both ends of this hung out of the breech. This fiddly process was done by ten pm. and the Captain agreed to wait before sending his signal.

The Chief Boatswains Mate then fiddled a wire up through the eye and back to an eyebolt on the side deck where a Pull-lift could begin the big pull. Olly's men had been burning wood for nine hours, picking bits out from the muzzle with tongs as they smouldered and became free when the big moment came at three am.; after six strokes of the Pull-lift handle the shell came out and was dropped over the side by the Chief Ordnance Artificer while Olly was not looking (as he would need to account for it some time in the distant future). The gun looked a wreck but after a burnishing the old paint off a priming coat was applied and by the next evening it looked normal again. Eventually the Gun Sweeper was called to the Captain's Defaulter's Table and given a very severe blast for failing to report the initial blunder. That was the end of the matter officially but as a relief from the boredom of our daily existence off the coast it was very good for morale, whatever the cost in sweat and tears for Mike and Olly and their men.