Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy (2026)

Name: Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy (2026)
Author: Quintus Andradi

He joined the Navy to see the world. He spent the rest of his life giving it back.

by Quintus Andradi

AngryPages Book

5.0 · 5 reviews

The complete first-person account of a Royal Ceylon Navy signalman whose life moved from service at sea to decades of work for fellow veterans.

Understand the book quickly

Read the complete first-person autobiography of a Royal Ceylon Navy signalman, from a postmaster's son in colonial Ceylon to a man decorated for veterans' work in 2025.
Move through his full run: naval training, the Parakrama years, love and betrayal, a year in Sweden, and over twenty-five years organizing veterans, including major improvements to the Veterans Home.
For readers of Sri Lankan history, naval life, diaspora stories, and first-person accounts written by the people who lived them.

Pages91 pages · 6 chapters

GenreIllustrated Sri Lankan naval memoir

CountrySri Lanka

PublisherAngryPages Inc

PublishedAvailable now

LanguageEnglish, Sinhala

Meet the author

Quintus Andradi grew up in Sri Lanka as the fifth child in his family. From a young age, he showed a deep sensitivity toward his siblings and the people around him, a quality that stayed with him throughout his life. His schooling was often interrupted by his father's transfers as a postmaster. Though academically strong in his early years, he later studied at St. Benedict's College in Kotahena, where his adventurous nature began to overtake the classroom. As a teenager, Quintus stowed away on the S.S. Stratheden in a determined attempt to reach England. The attempt failed, but it marked the beginning of a life that rarely followed conventional paths. He later joined the Royal Ceylon Navy and served as a Signalman. During the 1962 coup attempt, he risked his own safety to hide Rear Admiral Royce de Mel in Kanatte cemetery, keeping a solemn promise made to a brother officer. His story brings together bold adventure, personal courage, deep loyalty, and a lifelong search for meaning.

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Where it begins

A boy who watched the harbour, then joined what he was watching

Andradi grew up moving between his father's postings as a postmaster, cut class to sit on the Galle Face wall and watch ships come in, and talked his way into the Navy Volunteer Force at seventeen.

Two years later he was in the largest intake the Regular Force had ever taken — nearly four hundred recruits. Barracks life after the 1958 riots was chaos: stolen kit, no passing-out parade, and a bout of hepatitis that put him in the sickbay for a month.

Restless and frustrated, he and a Tamil friend, Mylevaganam, tried to cross to India by catamaran from Point Pedro, planning to walk the rest of the way to England. A storm nearly drowned them; a fishing boat brought them back at dawn.

“I wrote to him saying I would be there for him even if I have to risk my life.”
In Andradi's own account, Chapter 3 — on hiding Commander Royce de Mel, Commander of the Navy, during a coup attempt.

The promise

Life on Parakrama — the years he calls the best of his life

H.M.Cy.S. Parakrama, a gift from Britain, took him through Trincomalee patrols, a Far Eastern cruise, and a night in Hong Kong holding hands with a girl he seriously considered jumping ship for.

By his own account, when a coup attempt put the Commander of the Navy on the run, Andradi — a signalman with no rank to protect — hid him in Borella cemetery, on a promise made years earlier to a friend.

The cost of trust

He built businesses, trusted people, and paid heavily for both

He left the Navy for love, rose at CARE International from field rep to the highest post a local could hold, then built a safari touring company and a contract with the British engineering firm Kellogg's.

In 1977 he handed the whole arrangement to a colonel so he could accept a friend's invitation to Sweden — and the colonel never paid him back.

He spent a year in Sweden living on strangers' goodwill, candles lit and flags raised whenever he visited. Later came a spiritual retreat in Rajasthan, and two decades of letters to people who had no reason to write back: Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, the Irish President, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Several did.

“For my own self it was not a loss, for I enjoyed to the fullest…”
Chapter 5 — on giving up his safari business for a year in Sweden.

The giving years

The part where the giving becomes the whole story

In 1998 Andradi co-founded the Association of Veteran Naval Communicators. By his own account, over the next twenty-five years, as Secretary of the Veterans Home Management Committee, he raised or secured more than Rs. 20 million in support for veterans — a twenty-bed residential facility, a modern kitchen, a deep well, and furniture and equipment — almost entirely from ex-Navy friends scattered across Australia and Denmark.

The honours followed: a medal from the Speaker of the House, a plaque from the Sri Lanka Armed Forces Veterans Association in September 2025, recognition as a Global Goodwill Ambassador. He was married for over fifty years to a doctor his friends called "the Florence Nightingale of Maharagama."

Letters to people who had no reason to reply

Replies from Downing Street, the White House, and Lambeth Palace

For over two decades Andradi wrote to heads of government and church. The book reproduces the replies as he received them — letterhead, signatures, and all.

“I am grateful for the support of people like you.” — President Bill Clinton, 18 June 2008
“The Prime Minister has asked me to thank you for your recent letter, the contents of which will be carefully noted.” — 10 Downing Street, 29 January 2002
“Thank you too for sharing your views on the relationship between Deitism and the three monotheistic faiths.” — Lambeth Palace, 18 January 2008
“The President is grateful for your thoughtfulness in writing and sends her good wishes.” — Office of the President, Dublin, 1 September 2008

Inside the Signalman's Story

The Boy Who Was Born to Give

Answering the Call

Life on Parakrama

Leaving the Navy, and a Run of Betrayals

Sweden, Rajasthan, and Letters to World Leaders

The Giving Never Stopped

A Life Married to Service

The Record of a Man Who Kept Nothing for Himself

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Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy — the complete digital reader edition, in Quintus Andradi's own words.

Digital reader edition · $10.00 · One purchase, permanent access.

Reader reviews

5.0

5 Reader reviews

AngryPages Editorial 4.2 / 5

Verdict

AI Kakutani-Style · 4.2 / 5

Ninety-one pages, written at eighty-seven, holding more life than books ten times the length. Quintus Andradi talked his way into the Royal Ceylon Navy at seventeen by offering a hundred-bird chicken pen as proof of employment, joined the largest intake the Regular Force had ever taken, and served ten years — two in the Volunteer Force, eight in the Regular — aboard a ship Britain had handed over as a gift. In 1962, when a coup attempt sent the Commander of the Navy into hiding, a signalman with no rank to lose helped conceal him in a Borella cemetery, on a promise made years earlier to a friend. He left the service for a doctor's daughter across the road, rose at CARE International to the highest post a local could hold, built a safari business, and in 1977 handed the whole arrangement to a colonel who never paid him. For two decades he wrote to people with no reason to answer — Downing Street, Bill Clinton, Lambeth Palace, the Irish President's office — and the replies are reproduced here on their letterheads. Then he spent twenty-five years raising more than Rs. 20 million for aging Navy veterans, and resigned in 2019 rather than sign off on a cover-up, forfeiting a seven-acre land grant he had secured himself. It reads in an evening. It is the record of a man who kept nothing for himself.

Writing

AI Wood-Style · 3.1 / 5

Watch what happens when Andradi reaches a loss. Of the year in Sweden that cost him his business, he calls it, in financial terms, the stupidest thing he ever did — then, of the night a room of Swedish sea captains rose to toast him with a drinking song, “For that moment, I felt like a king.” He does not reconcile the two sentences, and that refusal is the book's whole method: the ledger set beside the feeling, both left standing. The same evenness runs through the harder material. Of the colonel who took his jeep, his driver and his contract and paid nothing, he writes that this is the standard of some high-ranking officers in the forces, flagrantly seen nowadays — one flat sentence, no elaboration, moving on. He calls his final school the biggest mistake his father made for him, and leaves it at that. There is no ghostwriter here and no attempt to shape a life into an arc; chapters end where the memory ends. The prose survives having no polish because it never reaches for any. He writes the way a signalman transmits: one clear message at a time, no ornament, the meaning left to the receiver.

Details

AI Garner-Style · 4.7 / 5

He was the third child but fifth of seven — hence Quintus. A postmaster's son whose schooling moved with his father's transfers, he read Dickens and the Bright Story Readers and ached to see England before he knew where it was, then tried to stow away on the P&O liner Stratheden. It failed. A cousin of his mother's got talking to him on a bus and pointed him toward the Navy. He trained under P/O Rahman, boxed at the YMCA beside two of Ceylon's 1948 Olympians, and put five bulls out of five shots at Diyatalawa. His intake of nearly four hundred lost its passing-out parade to the 1958 riots; then came stolen kit and a month of hepatitis in the sickbay. He and a Tamil friend, Mylevaganam, pushed a catamaran off Point Pedro meaning to reach India and walk to England, and met waves he describes as high as coconut trees before a fishing boat brought them back at dawn. H.M.Cy.S. Parakrama — formerly H.M.S. Pickle — took him to Cochin, Trincomalee and Hong Kong, where he spent two hours holding a girl's hand near the Peak while the ship nearly sailed without him. At CARE his salary went from Rs. 250 to Rs. 1,300 in a year, and he still swept the warehouse floor after they gave him a Chevrolet.

Idea

AI Sehgal-Style · 4.4 / 5

Everything in Andradi's life runs on promises made to individuals rather than to institutions. As a boy he protected a servant girl, Alice, from an abusive employer; the family stayed close to her for the rest of her life, and she named her own son Quintus. As a young sailor he told a fellow officer he would be there for him even at the risk of his life — and when a coup put the Commander of the Navy on the run, he made good on it in a graveyard, with nothing to trade and everything to lose. The same instinct costs him repeatedly. The businesses he loses, he loses to people he trusted on a handshake. The arrangement he hands to a colonel in 1977 is never written down. But the ledger runs the other way too: the Rs. 10 million that built a twenty-bed block for veterans came anonymously from an old comrade in Australia; a kitchen came from an officer in memory of his late wife; exercise equipment came from two friends in Denmark — men who knew him mostly from a newsletter and sent money anyway. When the institution he founded covered something up, he left it. Rank never held this life together. The promises did, in both directions.

Reader

AI Charles-Style · 4.5 / 5

This one takes an evening. Ninety-one pages, six chapters, plain first person, written by a man of eighty-seven who is not trying to impress anyone — and it moves: Ceylon in the fifties, a Far Eastern cruise, a failed midnight crossing toward India, a year in Sweden lived on the goodwill of strangers who lit candles and raised flags when he visited, a spiritual retreat in Rajasthan, a stretch of dry-fish trading among Tamil fishermen in Pooneryn who treated him with total warmth. If you like a memoir with documents in it, the book reproduces the replies he received from people who had no reason to write back, dated and on their letterheads. Be ready for a chronology that wanders, because memory does, and for chapters that close before you are finished with them. Readers of Sri Lankan history, naval life and diaspora stories will find things here that exist nowhere else. Stay with it to the last chapter, where the man finally comes into focus: fifty years of marriage to a doctor colleagues called the Florence Nightingale of Maharagama, a medal from the Speaker of the House, a veterans' association plaque in September 2025 — and a home full of old sailors who have somewhere to sleep because of him. Ten dollars, one purchase, permanent access.

Review this book

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Dhinush Jayasuriya · Aug 7, 2026

I bought this for the history and stayed for the person. Quintus writes without pretence — service, hardship, and decades looking after fellow veterans come through clearly.
This is a beautiful tale; I felt a yearning for the seas

Lehan Edirisinghe · Aug 6, 2026

It tooks a great deal of courage, to write this with no fear. This book is exactly what any young sailor needs, as a cheat code or a guide on how to be one of the best.
Shioni Mattern · Aug 5, 2026

Clear, steady storytelling from a real signalman's life. I learned a lot and felt I was listening to someone who was actually there.
Charles Kiel · Aug 5, 2026

A rare first-person look at the Royal Ceylon Navy. Honest, grounded, and full of the kind of detail only someone who lived it can write.
Romesh Jay · Aug 4, 2026

This is the Sri Lankan navy story we don't get often enough. Practical, personal, and proud without being showy. Worth every page.