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Gerald Grant's Tales of Seaside

Espionage at North Dock

One day before the start of the Second World War, Sea Side was agog with speculation because one of the dockers had told his son, a ship was expected at North Dock on the evening tide. Not unusual you might think for a ship to visit North Dock, but the fact that only one truck of coal was required caused rumours to run rife in the dockland.

The order was for one truck of 10 tons of coal, for the bunkers, or for its own use.

Because the ship would depart on the same tide as it arrived, everything had to be ready. The truck with the 10 tons of coal was waiting on the hoist, the lock gate was open and everyone was standing by.

Interested to see what all the fuss was about, Gerald and the other local lads arranged to meet at the Dock Head at the expected time of arrival of the ship. Gerald recalled that they were exciting times, it was June 1939, and the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon. Arthur Neville Joseph Chamberlain, was flying to and fro seeking to placate Germany, and at one time he was waving a piece of paper, declaring ‘Peace in Our Time’.

Not many people know this, but Chamberlain was a Director of Frickers Chemical Works at Burry Port, which was part of a Birmingham Group of Companies.

The lads did not have to wait long before the ship arrived and they could see it was called the Lotte R, and the port of registration was Hamburg. Flying on the staff at the stern of the vessel was a black and red Swastika, the flag of Nazi Germany. The crew visible on deck, sported black beards, were tall and broad in the shoulder and probably handpicked specimens of the ‘super race’. No doubt there were others down below decks.

There was a deathly hush on the quayside, whereas usually, there was a lot of banter between the crew and the spectators. Sid y Dolau, the lock gate man, usually shouted out ‘Where you from Mr Mate?’ to one of the two crewmen on the bow of the ship. When a ship was leaving the dock he would shout ‘Where you bound for Mr Mate?’ and back would come the answer that would be any of the destinations, Antwerp, Rouen, Bruges, Belfast, Liverpool, Rotterdam, etc., and this is how local lads learned their geography.

The day of the German ship, each side weighing up the other, there was complete silence, for once Sid y Dolau could not bring himself to utter his question to the Mate on board ship. The Lotte R loaded its coal in silence and departed on the same tide that it had arrived, its Nazi Swastika with it.

About two years later, Sea Side had another visit from the Germans, but this time it was from the air. German planes had dropped a stick of bombs on Llanelli, on the houses at Machynys, on the Morewood Steelworks, two on the mud of Llanelli Flats and on the petrol dump at the North Dock. The petrol dump which had consisted of five gallon drums of petrol, stacked all over the dunes, blazed night and day following the air raid.

The question on everyone’s lips ‘was espionage the object of the German’s first visit?’

Gerald said he did not know for sure but what he did say was that the following day, when the boys visited the Flats to look at the bomb craters in the mud, when they looked from left to right, they could see quite clearly that the line of bombs followed the channel leading to the North Dock. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that bearings had been taken by the ship on its visit for the one truck of coal.