He joined the RAN in March 1914 at the age of fourteen as an ordinary seaman second class. When war was declared on 14 August 1914, he was 15 and serving aboard the training ship , which was docked in Rose Bay, Sydney. He served on board until the end of the war, and became an able seaman in 1915. When he was eighteen, he survived the Spanish flu pandemic, which killed over fifty of his shipmates on a transport voyage between Cape Town and Sierra Leone.
