[phil crawley]

As a topside man in the Carinthia I often served drinks to crew members in the tourist smoke room, you could always tell they were crew as mostly they were better dressed than the bloods.
Phil Crawley.

[Terry Worsley]

I began my sea-faring careerin 1943 at the Fireman's Training School in Newcastle. I was seventeen and whilst being medically examined before joining the course the doctor tried to dissuade me, describing it as a "Nasty, hard job" - how right he was.
Foolishly I ignored his advice. The course was a complete joke. The 'Stokehold' consisted of three 45 gallon drums mounted about 4 feet from the ground and the 'training' was shovelling chippings into the drums and raking them out again. Everything was rock steady and as cool as could be, in fact as far removed from the actual conditions in a stokehold were as far as one could imagine. I lerarned a few knots (which I can't remember ever using) and at the end of a week I was deemed to be a Fireman/Trimmer and sent on my way to join the pool in Salford. I joined SS Triona which was to be a nine months trip and the introduction to a real stokehold with the accompanying conditions was pretty traumatic. There were three boilers, each with three fires, 2 high and one low with one fireman to a boiler I was a trimmer on this ship and the first operation when going on watch was for a fire in each boiler to be cleaned. The fires to be cleaned were partly 'burned down' by the previous watch and all the hot clinker had to be raked out. As a trimmer, my job was to draw buckets of water from the sea cock and throw the water on the ashes and clinker being drawn from the 3 fires. Talk about Dante's Inferno - the place was full of steam mixed with ahes in the air. The next operation was for the trimmer to rake out the ashpit - all the fine ash below the fire bars. More water was thrown on this and the content of the ash in suspense in the air was even more dense. There was now a mountain of soggy ashes and clinker to be disposed of. In the Triona stokehold there was a 'Patent Automatic Ash Dumper' - this was rectangular steel container with a capacity of about eight cubic feet and was attached to two steel cables which went up one of the ventilators. The bucket was filled and I had to pull a lever which caused the bucket of ash and clinker to shoot up the vent at speed, at the top it hit a stop which made it tip and the contents dumped down the tube which ran down at an angle an out of the ships side. To prevent this tube from clogging up there was a cock which, when turned on allowed water to run down the tube. This did not always work. The soggy nature of the ashes sometimes caused them to remain in the bucket and when the 'empty' bucket was returned to the stokehold, it was often as full as it was when it was sent up so the drill was, when you heard the bucket hit the stop, you grasped the two cables and shook them as hard as you could hoping the vibrations would dislodge the ashes. Sometimes, unbeknown to the poor trimmer down below,and despite the water running down to disposal tube, this would get blocked and the clinker, ashes and water would build up with the result that when vigourously shaking the cables you were rewarded with a deluge of soggy ashes, clinker and water on your head. Dumping ashes was a no-win situation!. I discovered that, bad as I thought it was, the Triona was quite an easy firing job as I did two more trips in coal burners, both as a 'fully fledged fireman and both of these were much, much worse. One was the Bayano and the other the Port Sydney Both these had three double ended boilers and three single ended ones and each boiler had four fires. So, there were two stokeholds one with the one end of the three double enders making 12 fires in this stokehold. At the other end were the 12 fires of the opposite ende of the double enders and the 12 fires of the three single enders. I will leave it to your imagination what a hell hole thse were to work in. I really do not think that anyone these days would subject theirselves to this slave labour
with the rugged conditions to boot no matter what the pay. Wuzzer - Terry Worsley R 289123

[Keith at Tregenna]

http://www.barrymerchantseamen.org.u...Sfiretrim.html

K.

[jimmys]

Just a little bit about training which happened in the 1970's I was in my thirties and a Senior Second Engineer. The vessel was in Canvey Terminal and during a break in cargo the Mate and I were in the Lobster Smack discussing business. We were told the NUS union rep was coming to see us. I cannot remember his name, a large fellow and a Fifer, he was about the East Coast. He was buying beer which for a Fifer was a disaster. The GP seamen system was just starting. He had two young lads he wanted to get on to the ship for training. He was asked if he had tried the shipping company, and it turned out he had been told to p-ss off, he had caused so much trouble with them they did not want to know.
He said you pair could get the lads on for training, the Mate was Frank the Tank who proceeded to tell his fortune and it was not nice. He run away to get his two lads to protect him from Frank who drew the line at filling in teenagers. The lads were a sorry pair.
Local Authority Care and labouring around Hull Docks, even Frank felt sorry for them. I went to see the Chief and Frank to the Old Man and the lads got a job and wages. Its hard going to train lads on a running ship, especially GP seaman. Engineers, Mates, Bosun and Storekeeper involved. Lifeboats, Fire, Engine and Deck and all the rest. Everything is easy until you have to do it. We had one engine and one deck apprentice at the time which helped.

A long time ago. No training that was the problem.

regards
jimmy

[fahrwud]

I did a spell as Engineer Cadet at Glasgow Nautical College, but never did get the mathematics through my head. After a year I found myself at the Liverpool training school. They had two rooms with boiler fronts mounted in the walls, back to back. One side was oil burners, which we trained on seriously, and the other had two coal-burner doors. There were two piles of gravel and a few shovels on the floor. Those we trained on just for fun (?) as of course, nobody hand-fired coal anymore, or did they? The link is to the Edna G, a steampowered, HAND coal-fired tug that was retired in..........1981. She is now a museum boat in Two Harbors, Minnesota.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3079/...010e38ff_b.jpg