Biography
A Young Man Goes to War
Peter Thomas Pullein Brown was born in 1925 in London, England. He was fourteen and a half years old when war broke out in September 1939.
Two days before Britain declared war on Germany, the government initiated Operation Pied Piper — the largest internal migration in British history. Over three days, more than one and a half million people were moved out of Britain's cities by train and bus, the vast majority of them children. Each child carried a gas mask in a small cardboard box around their neck and a name tag pinned to their coat. They did not know where they were going or when they would return. The official goal was the survival of an entire generation — to ensure the country could rebuild once peace was restored.
Peter went with his school to Kings Lynn, Norfolk, on the east coast of England. There he sat his General School Certificate at a good level. With the war still on, he saw little point in leaving early. He applied instead for an Engineering Cadetship — a wartime scheme offering a compressed eighteen-month engineering education that led, if you passed, to a commission in one of the armed forces. In his own words, it was "an Engineering degree shortened to 18 months of sweat." The stakes were simple: pass every test and phase and earn a commission. Fail, and you were shipped out immediately as a sailor or a soldier. He passed, and chose the Royal Navy.
While Peter was at school in Norfolk, the war in Europe was moving with terrible speed. His eldest brother Arthur was part of the British Expeditionary Force sent to France — the same force that in May and June of 1940 found itself encircled and driven to the coast at Dunkirk. What followed was one of the defining moments of the war: a desperate and improvised evacuation by sea, naval vessels and civilian boats alike, pulling over 300,000 men off the beaches under fire. Most of the equipment was left behind. Britain had been pushed to the edge. It was in the shadow of Dunkirk that Winston Churchill stood in Parliament and gave the speech that would define the war — that England would fight on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets, that it would never surrender. A magnificent and necessary moment.
Arthur did not make it to the beaches. His tank was hit. He was the only survivor. Badly burned, he was taken to hospital by German troops — an act of basic humanity in the middle of war. After his recovery, he was sent to Stalag VIII B, a prisoner of war camp in the southern part of Germany, where he remained until Russian troops liberated him in 1945. In a gesture of quiet and extraordinary generosity, Arthur's peacetime employer continued paying his full wages into his bank account for the entire duration of the war. He came home to find himself solvent.
The war came close to home, during the Blitz. At some point — the family was back in Hadley Green, as many evacuees returned during lulls in the war — Peter and a young woman were sitting across from each other at a small side table. She was Arthur's girlfriend, and would later become his wife. They did not yet know if Arthur was alive. His father went to the back door and opened it to look outside. Something made him throw himself flat against the wall of the entrance hall. A piece of shrapnel came through the open door, missed him in that narrow space, travelled the length of the house, and passed between Peter and the young woman before going out through the far wall. They were astonished. A bomber had just released a stick of bombs that fell across Hadley Green — one after another in a line, walking across the open common just beyond the back fence of the family home. Every window was blown out. Most of the roof went. They were very fortunate that night.
He trained in Wales and in Eastbourne in Southern England, and was made a Midshipman — a junior officer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the "Wavy Navy." His own handwritten account breaks off at the moment he was sent to his first ship: "...was made a Midshipman and was sent to my first ship the cruiser..." The page ends there. The evidence strongly suggests that ship was HMS Kenya.
What came next — between joining Kenya and his later confirmed postings — we do not yet fully know. His flimsies (officer's fitness reports) confirm he served aboard HMS Victorious in 1947 and aboard HMS King George V in 1948, both post-war. He kept the brass crests of three ships for the rest of his life: Kenya, King George V, and Victorious.
While serving aboard HMS King George V, he spoke with crew members who had been on the ship during the hunt and sinking of the Bismarck in May 1941. They told him that in the final minutes, ships had been firing at point-blank range into a vessel already destroyed — retaliation, they said, for the loss of HMS Hood just three days before.
By 1947 he was serving aboard HMS Victorious. On 9 May 1945, earlier in the war, Victorious had survived two Kamikaze hits in a single day off the island of Sakishima Gunto in the Pacific — hits that her armoured flight deck absorbed where a wooden-decked carrier would have been lost. After the war she visited Hong Kong, repatriating civilian families to England.
He declined a permanent naval commission, returned to London to study engineering, worked for GEC, and eventually moved to Brazil — where he spent the rest of his career with LIGHT, the Rio de Janeiro electricity company.
This archive is being assembled by his son Bernard, with the hope that his sister Anna and future generations of the family will know what he did.
