Gravesend 1953

[Pamela Brough]

I'm posting on behalf of my dad. He joined the Merchant navy in 1953 when he was 16 yrs old. . His name is Tony Brough. He remembers a friend called Masher (not sure if I've spelt that correctly).
Does anyone have any memories of that time?

[j.sabourn]

It would help if you knew the name of his first ship Pamela. His age lines up with mine and I knew someone called Nash converted to Nasher and sometimes called Pasha . To rhyme with his addiction at school to smoking Pasha cigarettes . He was a few years older than me and as a pain in the neck we used to shout at him Nasher smokes Pasha. In 1953 he would have been about 18 whereas I was the same age as your father. Best of luck JS
On the 1% chance the ships name was Avonmoor we had 4 deck boys in 1953. The four apprentices were myself , Alan Cook, Jeff Fisher, and Brian Nicholas, from Whitley Bay, Sunderland , Hexham, and believe Yorkshire. Nasher turned up a couple of years later as 3 mate. He was from Northumberland somewhere. JS…

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi Pamela
I went to the Vindicatrix the sister training school, but there was a website for the Gravesend Sea school, I don't know if it is still running, look it up on Google or one of the search engines they did have many names on there. Please let us know how you go.
Good Luck Des

[j.sabourn]

#2.. As a tribute to Cappy at the mention of the word Avonmoor he would of been in like a flash as believe a few years later in 1958 he came home on this vessel as DBS from Australia , he paid off in Hawthorne Leslie’s and I must have missed him by a whotsit hairs breadth. As I rejoined her there as 3rd mate prior to her being sold to the Chinese , not the Chinese chop shop in Ocean Road South Shields. To make the story more unusual the other mate was Nasher now 2 mate and the two of us were the sole watch keepers in Drydock doing 3 days each turn about. He was always late in getting back, and always blamed it on some female detaining him. Cappy has now departed for more splendid places, but this post would have been full of his memories and of his time of being one jump ahead of being deported from Oz. Probably because he was still classed as a young person at the time. Cappy was one who learned the hard way to accept hard times together with the good like most seafarers of his era. Cappy also used to talk about the second mate on his passage back to blighty as used to talk to him quite a lot about life in general, and this would also I believe have been Nasher who smoked pasha , from my council school days. Cheers JS