[The following is a transcription of an article which appeared in Crowsnest Magazine (Vol 3 No.7), May 1951. Laundry may seem like a very mundane task, yet without clean clothing, morale would be impacted, peacetime or wartime. Thanks to Walter Emery who located the article].
 

On Board HMCS ATHABASKAN, in the Yellow Sea - There are a couple of seamen on board this Tribal class destroyer who take in washing.

They take it in by the hundreds of pounds and wash it in water measured by the ton. The two operators of probably the world's most compact laundries are Able seamen Peter Doyle, of Victoria and Ed Fleming of West Summerland, British Columbia. The ATHABASKAN's laundry is situated on the forecastle deck, beneath the bridge, and there, in a space of about ten feet by ten feet, are housed a steam press, a large rotary washer, a drum spin dryer and a steam drier. It doesn't leave much for Doyle and Fleming to swing the proverbial cat but the two men have learned to tote 100 pound bags or laundry between the machines with comparative ease.

During the ships eight months of operation in the Korean theatre, the ATHABASKAN's laundry has had a complete workout. While spending long stretches at sea, the 270 officers and men serving in the destroyer have to depend on the Doyle-Fleming establishment for clean gear. The laundry has been equal to the task. Able Seamen Doyle 'skippers' the laundry operations and Able Seamen Fleming is his energetic 'first-lieutenant'. The two men, like the rest of their fellow-sailors aboard the Canadian destroyers serving in the Far East, know how to put in a full day's work.

Dungarees, work shirts and jackets and washed and dried twice a week. Blankets for the ship's company are put through the machines once each week and the remaining days are taken up with the cleaning of wardroom and officers' gear and ship's company whites. Then to fill in the corners, the press is kept busy pressing uniforms for the officers and men. A busy day will see 400 pairs of dungarees, 400 work shirts and work jackets - all paint daubed and grease smeared - tumbling about in the rotary washer, spinning to near dry in the spin drier and eventually emerging clean and bone dry from the steam drier. Four tons of water will have been used by the rotary machine by the time the operation is completed.

While operating the laundry is a full-sized job, Doyle and Fleming have other ships duties to perform as well. Doyle, one the ATHABASKAN's gunnery rates, is captain of "X" gun. At action stations or general gunnery drills, the chief of a laundry enterprise becomes the efficient senior hand of a four-inch gun's crew. Fleming is a stoker by trade and when general quarters sounds, he takes his post at the tiller flats in readiness for fire-fighting and damage control duties. "The Sioux is the ship that has a laundry setup" AB Doyle commented, but "we can turn out a pretty good job in our two-by-four cubbyhole in the ATHABASKAN". And that is what Doyle and Fleming are doing - a good job, often under trying conditions.
 
 

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