The end of the first trip - Baron Jedburgh 1966
Seamen always get excited when the ship is on its way home. We all remember that condition experienced when thoughts of home are constantly on one’s mind. It’s called “the Channels”. Originally meant to refer to how a sailor feels as his ship approaches and sails into the English Channel, it’s more likely to start when the ship is much further from home than the Channel. In our case I think the ship had entered the Red Sea, when talk of “the Channels” became common place.
It didn’t help that it was such an awful ship to begin with. There were few “Company” men on board apart from the skipper and one or two of the senior officers. Most of the rest of the crew joined the ship through the “Pool”. Their leave having run out from their previous engagement, they simply turned up at the Pool and were allocated their next ship. At the time, there was wide employment and many sailors, knowing the reputation of Baron boats would turn down the job, opting for something better. This meant that many of the crew we had on board were people who had previous poor discharge reports, and poor performance records, and it was they who were left when everyone else had taken a better job. Obviously this wasn’t the case with everyone on board, and to this day, I still regard Dave Davies as someone who epitomised the good humoured, long-suffering British Seaman whose company I enjoyed so much during my years at sea.
The food on the ship was awful. Described by many as strict “BOT” which meant no frills and not a penny spent over that needed to meet the regulations. This meant that something as simple as eggs for breakfast were considered a luxury and most definitely not provided as an everyday item on the menu. Dinner was often nothing more than ham and chips and if we had beef stew on Monday, you could be sure we’d have beef soup on Tuesday and beef consommé on Wednesday.
As we sailed into the Red Sea, word got around that this may be the last trip for the Baron Jedburgh and that after this trip she was likely to be sold either for scrap or to one of the many Greek and Cypriot shipping companies that bought second hand, down at heel old cargo tramps. As it happens the rumours were untrue and it was to be another ten years before the ship changed hands, but this didn’t stop some of the crew deciding that they would start selling to the locals anything that wasn’t tied or bolted down as soon as we got into the Suez. So spare valves, scrap metal, pump parts (everything that wasn’t bolted down, and a lot that was) were removed from the store and exchanged for Egyptian beer which appeared by the case-load. I don’t know what Egyptian beer is like today – I’m sure it’s a fine brew – but the stuff that we were drinking out of those little green bottles in 1966 was vile.
As we got closer to Greenock, our final destination at the mouth of the Clyde, the Chief Engineer called me into his cabin for one of the few exchanges of words that took place between us in the six months that I had been on the ship. He told me that he was happy with my performance and asked me if I would like to take some leave in the UK and then return to the ship as a junior watch keeping engineer. I didn’t think about the job offer for long (about a micro-second). I told him that I planned to take some leave and then explore other opportunities with some of the other shipping lines. What I really meant was that wild horses would not have got me back on another Hungry Hogarth ship.
And so it was that sometime in June of 1966, while the Rolling Stones were belting out Paint it Black and Lennon and McCartney were singing about paperback writing, I paid off the Baron Jedburgh in Greenock and walked down the gangway on a misty Scottish morning. The British shipping industry was in the throes of an industrial dispute, the result of which was a major seaman’s strike which was to affect the whole industry and last many weeks.
I had decided the first place I wanted to visit was London, and caught the overnight train from Glasgow to London Euston. I travelled with big Dave and Paddy, both of whom were also headed that way and we all had sleeper accommodation. There was something very special about being able to sit in the bar of the Dining Car, drink as many cans as I wanted of Watney’s Red Barrel or Double Diamond and roll back to my bunk in the Sleeping Car without anyone shaking my arm in the middle of the night and talking about my Daddy’s yacht (which by the way, was a 10 foot clinker-built rowing boat, which I went out in once with my Dad in Smith’s Creek and spent the day getting badly sunburnt and catching sweet Fanny Adams).
First Days at Sea December 1965
After five years, as an apprentice at the local brewery I completed my “time served” on 3rd December 1965 and emerged a fully qualified fitter and turner. I wasn’t always the favourite apprentice during that final year. I was involved in a couple of union disputes and generally was regarded as a bit of a “pinko” who spent too much time with the proletariat for my own good. The brewery's chief engineer, a red-faced Irish Australian had never been my greatest admirer, and he made it clear that once my indenture was complete it would be to our mutual benefit if I started looking elsewhere for employment. In those days, there was always work for a qualified fitter, so I don’t remember being unduly concerned that I might soon be out of work - but then I was 20 years old and immortal.
As it transpired, there was no need to fire me, because a few days earlier a family friend, a manager at the local harbour board, asked my dad if young Michael was interested in a career in the Merchant Navy. There was a British ship in port which was short of a couple of hands. if I was interested there was a job for me as an engineer’s assistant, with an option of promotion to junior engineer as soon as a position became available. This sounded like what I had been looking for, so having finished my apprenticeship in that first week in December, I signed on a couple of weeks later as a crew member on the MV Baron Jedburgh as its most junior of junior assistants – my official position – “donkey-greaser".
The ship was registered in Scotland in the west coast port of Ardrossan in Ayrshire. She was 8,337 tons (11,675 tons deadweight), built in South Shields in 1958 and was one of a fleet of cargo tramp ships owned and operated by H. Hogarth and Sons of Glasgow. It was only later I found out that the company was known throughout the merchant service as “Hungry” Hogarth.
The ship’s captain was Archibald McKinley, a large forceful man, who smoked oval Passing Clouds cigarettes that looked like they had been sat on.
I had a tiny cabin in the fo’c’sle of the ship (where crew were separated from officers) and I was taken under the wing of big Dave Davies, who may have had Welsh ancestry but was a Londoner through and through. He was a generous, down to earth fellow, who used to wake me every morning with “Come on then, rise and shine, you’re not on your Daddy’s yacht now, y’know!”
There were three donkey-greasers including Dave, all of whom were watch-keepers. Dave, Yorky (who as you might guess was from the north of England) and Paddy (yes, he was an Irishman). I was a day worker – 7.30 to 5 o’clock with a half hour for lunch.
We all shared the Greasers’ Mess, a little room just across from the galley where we would eat our meals and meet for smoko during the day. It was here that I learned to put condensed milk in my tea, because it wasn’t easy to find fresh milk at sea and of course, this was before Long-Life Milk appeared on the scene. The additional advantage of condensed milk of course was that it also obviated the need for putting sugar in your tea!
There were seven engineers on board – all of them Scots, mostly Glaswegian. In charge was the Chief Engineer who seemed to spend most of his time in his cabin. I don’t think we exchanged more than two words the whole time I was on the ship.
The second engineer was a genial portly middle-aged fellow, who had been in the merchant service since the war. Always shirtless when he was working, he seemed to know everything that anyone was ever going to need to know about marine engineering. The third engineer was a sharp tongued, sandy-headed Glaswegian whose frequent expression was “och awa’ an’ keek” (which I translated as meaning you are full of ****, go away). Once I became an engineer myself later in the voyage, I spent all my watch-keeping with Gordon on the 12 to 4 watch. The fourth engineer was another tough talking little Glaswegian. He was always the first to lead the singing after a few “bevies”. His favourite song was “I’m no awa’ tae bide awa’” but there were a host of others most of which I found incomprehensible, but oddly enjoyable.
I sailed on the Jedburgh for about six months with sugar from Queensland to Japan; light ship to Canada, then timber from Canada back to OZ before taking another load of sugar back to Greenock. What an experience - what an eye opener.
