Nigel Stainforth was born in 1938 in Nashik in Maharashtra, India. He lived there until Partition. Having moved back to England with his mother and sister, he attended preparatory school in Sussex and then boarding school in Berkshire. He left school at 18 and was immediately called up to the Navy for National Service. After training, Stainforth was posted as a coder educational on HMS Warrior, which sailed to Christmas Island in February 1957. During Operation Grapple Stainforth assisted with meteorology and mapping safe zones for ships, as well as working in decoding and coding radio messages. Following his National Service, Stainforth trained as a chartered accountant. In 1968 he moved to South Africa where he worked as a financial director until his retirement. Since retiring he has volunteered with BirdLife South Africa. He married Sheila in 1969 and together they have three children and seven grandchildren. He currently lives in Somerset West near Cape Town.
Interview extracts
Description
Nigel Stainforth was a ‘coder educational’ on HMS Warrior. His job involved coding and decoding signals and teaching English and maths to junior sailors. In this clip he describes his peers’ enthusiasm to leave the service and return to ‘civvy street’, only to subsequently find that many had signed up for further service. His testimony speaks to the institutionalising effects of military service, which often gave its participants a sense of meaning and purpose, not to mention an opportunity to travel and engage in exciting missions. For Stainforth the thrill of military service did not last, as he subsequently trained as a chartered accountant and moved to South Africa.
This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Nigel Stainforth was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.
Transcript
Back to Portsmouth, and then assigned to, from Portsmouth, left the ship… oh, it’s quite interesting, actually, the other thing I made a note on is quite interesting, that all the way back to Portsmouth, a lot of my shipmates were saying they can’t wait to get ashore and sign up to what they call Civvy Street, to get out in the civilian life again, and then we’d see them the following day back on board and they said no, they’ve signed up for another ten years or something. [laughs] So the terror of civilian life, I think, you get quite institutionalised I think, in the Navy, which is fine.
[ends at 0:00:44]
