Saturday 9th October 1954

Did not get much sleep as we had to be up in time for 6:15 breakfast!

There was a dock strike in London and they wanted to push us off as soon as possible in case the strike spread to Plymouth. Quite a number of the other ships queued up behind us, having been sent into Plymouth instead of London.

It was a glorious morning, and Plymouth sound looked really lovely. We disembarked on the tender “Sir John Hawkins” at 07:30. There was a long wait at the customs but I got through unexamined. Had a lot of goodbyes to all my friends as almost everyone was going up to Paddington on the boat train, and a bare half dozen, including myself, were going on the south coast route. Had a long wait for the train at 11:09 and an extremely hot and tiring journey back to Worthing where I arrived and was met by Doc at 17:00.