Originally Posted by
Brett Hayes
An Excursion with Everard. (Part 1).
[This is an account (mostly factual but sometimes tongue-in- cheek) of the couple of months I spent with Everard in the 1960s. It is based on rough diary notes that I kept at the time. For confidentiality reasons, I have omitted dates and the name of the vessel, and have left out or changed the names of some of the crew. Any helpful comments from members (as I am not sure about some things) will be gratefully received.]
In the late sixties, I was a DHU and had been given a berth on one of the vessels belonging to a company owned by a certain Frederick T Everard. (I can’t give his full name, as I don’t know what the ‘T’ stands for.) It was to be my third ship. l was instructed by the pool in Orchard Street, Swansea, to go to Adelaide Street, to the shipping agent’s office of John Stone and Co. — though, puzzlingly, at the time of writing, my online searches cannot trace this name.
I walked down a short passage to a door marked ‘Enquiries’. Inside on the wall was a picture of a famous tea clipper, the Thermopylae.
But apparently, I had been sent to the wrong place, and was subsequently taken by a lady down a long passage to the office of another agent, James German and Son. From inside, I could hear a hidden voice on a phone discussing grain prices in Rotterdam and Antwerp. I remember the figure of a pretty girl carrying a trayful of teacups who smiled at me. However, nobody else smiled at me. It seemed that as far as the officials were concerned, all they wanted to verify was that I was the DHU that had been sent down by the pool, and to look me over to make sure that I didn’t have have a wooden leg or a glass eye.
From there I was instructed to go to the Board of Trade building in Somerset Place. (I was a bit confused by this time, and thought I’d been sent there to sign on.) I entered a rather Dickensian-looking office with a high desk complete with inkstand and pots of ink, a fireplace with a brass fender and pictures of sailing ships on the walls. There I gave the clerk a form that I think was called a PC5 that had been issued to me by the NUS official in Orchard Street.
Anyway, I thought, what a lot of toing and froing, red tape and rigmarole! This company, Everard, must be a posh outfit and very fussy about its employees. I just hope I can meet their expectations — but I didn’t have long to wait to be cured of that delusion.
I travelled home to get my gear and in the afternoon took a taxi back to join the vessel. I was told she was loading at Bay 15, King’s Dock, but I had been misdirected yet again by the pool. At the dock gates I was told that she was loading coal at the Prince of Wales Dock. I expected to see a red carpet running up the gangway, the captain and the officers in gold braid on the wing of the bridge saluting as I was piped aboard, but disappointingly all I could make out through clouds of swirling, black dust was what looked like a builder’s ladder made of aluminium. It was lying almost horizontally, connecting the quayside to a small general cargo coaster with a pale yellow hull patched with rust. There was no welcoming party, and it seemed that the only way I could gain access to my place of future employment was to half climb and half crawl over the rungs of the ladder while carrying a heavy suitcase. Perhaps it was my suspicious nature, but I had the impression that health and safety wasn’t going to be a priority on that trip.
[Regretfully, I did not note and cannot recollect handing over my Discharge Book, signing on or arranging an allotment — as I had done on my two previous ships. Hopefully, readers of this article could help me here.]
My messmates were an AB (I shall call Frank) who had a typewriter in his cabin for writing a novel — partly about his days in the RN — an EDH (I shall call Alex) who was having a break from the gypsy life, and a middle-aged, dour Scot (I shall call Alan). And it is Alan, a seasoned AB — having already done countless trips on the vessel — who figures most in this account. He was a very private man, and only once did I catch a glimpse of the inside of his cabin which was next to mine.
(I had noticed a framed photograph of his wife and children on top of his chest of drawers — and a half-empty bottle of whisky on his bunk.)
By late afternoon, we’d finished loading at the chutes and had closed the folding steel hatch covers ready for sailing, but I was disgusted to find that, before hosing down, we had to shovel into the dock hundredweights of good Welsh coal that had been accidentally spilled onto the deck. I thought it was such a waste — some needy pensioners living nearby would have loved to have been given at least a few buckets of it.
When I mentioned this to one of the lads, he agreed and said that normally they would have bagged some of it to sell shoreside at a later date. But their hand had been bitten once before — on a previous trip, they’d bagged a good quantity of maize with the same purpose in mind but the Old Man had quietly half-inched it to repay a favour he’d owed. A dirty trick. So they didn’t fancy being cheated out of a hard-earned perk once again.
(Thus, before we’d passed through the lock on the evening tide on course for Antwerp, I knew that the skipper was a man of few scruples who needed to be watched.)
Two days out from Swansea, in the English Channel while painting on deck, I heard the sound of a powerful diesel engine coming from what looked like a trawler that had turned aggressively onto our wake. It had a sharp turn of speed for a trawler and was closing rapidly. I was told that it was a Russian ‘spy ship’ intent on buzzing us. It had two sets of goalpost masts, a flat stern and what appeared to be a large container on deck atop of which stood four sinister men, some with binoculars. Perhaps they were pretending to be bird watching, but they didn’t fool me. As it swept past, I saw on its hull a serial number which was something like B3254. They hadn’t waved or shouted hello or got in touch over the radio or even tossed over a friendly bottle of vodka, so I had a sneaky feeling that they didn’t like us very much.
On arrival at Antwerp on a dark, misty night, we slowed right down to pick up a Scheldt river pilot. Alex was on call and the mate came down wih a mug. He gave him the mint-flavoured teabag that the pilot had handed to him, muttering something about these foreigners having strange tastes. He told Alex to fill the half-pint mug with boiling water, to let the bag soak for a few minutes, then bring it back up to the bridge. I studied Alex’s face. He had been looking up at the mate as if mesmerised. I knew he hadn’t been listening and might have become hypnotised by gazing into the pair of bleary eyes that seemed to hang in the mate’s long, lugubrious face. Alex, eager to please, had said, “Yes, yes,” but had appeared to be in a trance. When he got back down from the bridge, I asked him if everything had gone alright. “Yeh,” he said, “but I forgot how much milk and sugar the pilot wanted, so I put in two sugars and a spoonful of connie-onnie.”
“What!” I said. “He didn’t want any milk or sugar! I bet he’s on the wing of the bridge right now spitting it out and saying, “Ach! These English swine! Mon dieux! They don’t even know how to make tea!’” And we both nearly collapsed in stitches, shutting the door of the mess in case the mate heard us and came down in a bit of a huff to see us bent over double while laughing our heads off!
We had to wait a few days to unload in Antwerp. One night, I went ashore with Alex and visited a place called Harry’s Bar. After a few bevvies, during the course of the evening, I remember talking to an attractive woman, but when I slipped my arm around her, I had a strange experience — I could feel the firmness of a man’s back — so I declined the offer to go back to her flat with a bottle of wine, and Alex and I left soon after.
Having discharged our cargo of coal, we cleaned out the holds and shifted to another berth to load a cargo of phosphate for Dublin. The first night out, when on lookout and proceeding south through the Strait of Dover, I was told to change the bulb in the mainmast navigation light. I climbed aloft for the very first time, holding a torch in one hand and the new bulb in the other, with the coaster pitching and rolling. It was a bit of a hairy climb — and done without a safety harness (I wasn’t sure if Everard had ever heard of one) but, thank God, the bulb came on and I didn’t have to risk my neck doing that again!
During mealtimes in the mess, I got to know my crewmates much better. Alex and Frank were easy enough to get along with, but the much older AB, Alan, was a different kettle of fish. He kept himself very much to himself. Perhaps clammed up would have been an apt expression. I would find out that almost every time we’d berthed and had got the hatches open, he’d disappear into his cabin with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. With the door shut, he’d remain there in solitude until hunger would bring him out into the mess or if he was needed for work on deck.
Although in the eyes of the officers Alan was regarded as the go-to man, I’m afraid that in the eyes of his fellow deck ratings he was sometimes regarded as a bit of a danger man. That is not to say that he wasn’t held in respect by us. He was looked up to as a very experienced AB who had his foibles. For instance, if we went for a smoko, he might decide to work on, and hence make us feel uncomfortable — knowing that he was busying himself on deck in full view of the bridge, while we were having a cuppa, a rollup and a chat. And inversely, if we were working on deck, say, doing a bit of painting, Alan might decide to knock himself off to have his own private smoko — but with no comment from above. If he was their favoured son, then we were merely long distant relatives.
He nearly severed my leg once when we were closing the MacGregor sliding hatch covers on Number Two — I was standing on a coaming nudging a wedge out of the way with my boot when Alan, half pissed, started winching forrard the folded up covers. As the first of the steel slabs started to roll along the rails and tilt towards me, I leapt off just in time and yelled, “You nearly took my leg off then, you stupid b — — — — — d!”
The mate sidled up to me and said in a cool, matter-of-fact tone, “Yah noo, laddie, if ye’d lost yer leg, you wouldna got a cent in compensation. Aye, you wouldna. You shouldna been up there, d’ ye ken.” I rankled at this because I’d seen him witnessing the lads doing the very same thing — but perhaps then he conveniently turned a blind eye. No doubt, if there was an accident, he would have said that it was the fault of the rating but certainly not that of an officer or (God forbid) that of the company.
As I was walking alongside the coaming raising the eccentric trackway wheels to lower the hatch covers, Alan slowly came down from the deck housing, clicking his dentures to ask me what I’d said. Heatedly, I looked him in the face and said, “You’re a dangerous man, Jock! A dangerous man. I’ll be watching you from now on!”
Perhaps to rub salt into the wound (and obviously not having been too drunk to have heard the mate’s words), he turned away, clicking his false teeth again, and said, “An’ ye needna worry about compensation, Taff — cos ye’d be deid.” I seethed at this comment, and told him (in two short words) where he could go. But the stark reality was that neither he nor the mate had been joking.
One could say that the problem was partly due to ‘weak management’. If Alan had been threatened with being logged a day or so’s pay for being drunk on deck or had not been allowed to buy so much spirits ‘on tick’, it might have helped to sort matters out. Yet the fact remained that, with his drinking unchecked, he could be a real hazard to his shipmates — and to himself.
(Regarding Alan’s apparent proclivity for peril, and though the following may be a bit of a yarn that has most likely improved with keeping, I would hear that he had narrowly escaped with his life some years before. I was told that he’d been working on an oil tanker down in one of the wing tanks. Seeing the men come up with their gear and head off for lunch — and without looking or shouting below to check if anyone was still cleaning — an apprentice had shut the tank and reported it ready for filling with ballast. Luckily, someone had noticed that Alan was missing, so they stopped pumping. On opening the tank top, they saw him hanging on, half way up the ladder, semi-conscious and on the verge of collapse through gas inhalation. Whatever the full facts were, I should think that such a near-death experience would unsettle the mind of any man.)
After docking in Dublin with the cargo of phosphate, we went ashore for a few drinks, as unloading wouldn’t begin until the next day. One evening we welcomed aboard some German sailors from a neighbouring vessel and on the next evening we were visited by some members of the fairer sex — though in this case the term might be rather flattering.
From Ireland’s capital, we set out for Rotterdam to load a cargo of maize for the UK. While I was on the wheel a few days out, I heard the macho side of the Old Man being aired. He was telling the officer of the watch that, in his opinion, a young and feisty Irish politician (much in the news at the time and known as Bernadette Devlin) needed a good seeing-to with a certain male anatomical member. But he also showed his more sensitive side when he protested to his fellow officer about how much he adored his wife — ah, yes, a lovely woman — although he had spent the last few nights in Dublin’s fair city no doubt sampling the wares of his regular sweetheart, Molly Malone. The shifty-looking second mate, perhaps to his credit, said nothing.
Having been loaded to the gunwales with maize in Rotterdam, we set a course for Manchester via Liverpool. We encountered thick fog off the south Cornish coast and, after rounding Land’s End, we heard on the VHF that a vessel had just been wrecked not far from us. It was called Hemsley 1.
(I would find out that, at over 50 years old, she was the oldest vessel in the British Merchant Navy. Without radar, the small tanker had got lost and the navigating officer had thought that they were off the north Cornish coast — not the southwest. Instead of going to Antwerp to be scrapped, the little steamer would be broken up where she lay.)
Fortunately, the crew had scrambled onto the rocks, and it was a relief to know that there were no deaths or serious injuries.
Brett Hayes R863743 (to be continued)
