#######sure charlie there was gold in the ensign.......loads of it......regards cappyQuote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Hannah
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#######sure charlie there was gold in the ensign.......loads of it......regards cappyQuote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Hannah
We have been doing the family tree for years now. Last week I put our surname into the register to see where it originated from. Low and behold we found over 40 with the surname who were transported here.Quote:
Originally Posted by j.sabourn
CHAPTER SEVEN
FLUOR
Next ship was an old coaster called Fluor. As she was a coaster with a small crew I signed on as Ordinary Seaman a fifty percent hike in wages. She was owned by Robinsons of Glasgow who had quite a fleet of these old coasters. All named after semi precious stones. The names belied the actual vessels as Fluor was a real bucket of rust. Once again we were living in the forecastle, a practice that was mostly dropped is post war built vessels. In addition to living in the forcastle, the only form of heating was a coal stove in the mess room. We had to fetch our meals from the galley which was midships and we also had to go midships for showers. Coaster men were tough in those days.
Our main cargos were stone from Llandulas in North Wales and coal from south Wales. I had my first and only visit to Eire on that boat. We took either coal or stone to Dublin, I don’t remember, and had a couple of nights there. Brendan had joined the ship with me and he went home for a couple of days and left me to my own devices. I met a very nice young lady in a pub in Dublin centre and when the pubs closed we went for a walk by the canal. I think it’s called Bagot st Bridge.It was a lovely warm evening and we settled down on the bank of the canal and I fell into an alcohol induced sleep. When I woke up she was gone and so was my wallet. But at least my shirt didn’t get damaged, just my pride. As it was the days before credit cards the loss was only money and there wasn’t a lot of that as coasting men spent it as they earned it.
Next port was Belfast. I can’t remember whether we were taking cement to Belfast or loading cement in Belfast to take somewhere else, all I know was that cement was involved somewhere. I had informed the skipper that I was paying off in Belfast and catching the ferry to Liverpool but I decided to have a night ashore as there used to be a famous
Pub, I think it was called Ma Doyle’s but that’s an aside. When the pubs closed I was making my way back to the docks and I passed quite a nice looking young lady and wished her a pleasant good evening (at least that’s what I meant but it probably came out differently).Just behind her, initially unseen by me was her husband or boyfriend, we never actually got round to discussing his relationship with the young lady. What happened, he barely spoke but just hit me and walked away leaving me absolutely floored. He was only small but he really could punch his weight. It was a drizzly night and I made my way back to the ship drunk, stunned and wet. So much so that I didn’t notice that on my way through the warehouse I was walking through cement dust. On the ship, I undressed hung, my clothes over the back of a chair and went
to bed. Next morning I woke with a hangover, a sore and bruised face and trousers which would stand up on their own as the cement had dried. But my at least my shirt wasn’t damaged.
To get back to Liverpool I had to get the night ferry from Belfast, this included a bar in which I spent most of the night. Next morning we docked at Liverpool Pier Head at what must have been about seven o’clock and I staggered off the ferry, hungover, bruised, haggard with my trousers still stiff with cement. A true picture of British manhood.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HERDSMAN
After four weeks on the coaster I decided that sunshine was what was needed so I signed on another Harrison boat the “Herdsman” .This time as Junior Ordinary Seaman. We did the West Indies and Galveston in Texas also Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela which was a most unusual experience as we dropped of drilling equipment at villages around the lake and at every dock there were a couple of policemen ,carrying sub machine guns. Nobody went ashore in Venezuela. I do remember going ashore in Georgetown, British Guiana (as it was then. Now called Guyana) and in the course of the evenings drinking I met a young lady? We became quite friendly and she suggested that in the interest of my further education into the living conditions of young single females in British Guiana. Being the sort of young man that was always looking to increase his knowledge of the world I accompanied her to her room. One thing led to another and she decided that I should stay for coffee or something. I did actually learn quite a bit that night, specifically that things were tough for single young ladies? Especially with regard to finance. I felt obliged to assist in that respect, purely to reimburse her for the coffee. We never made an arrangement to see each other again. Imagine my surprise when she turned up at the ship the following evening complete with minder and made her way to the captains quarters. A bunch of us were sat on the hatch drinking tea, which is all we could afford at the time and someone informed me that she was the captains regular when in Georgetown. The crew were quite impressed that a seventeen year old junior ordinary seaman had spent the evening at her house. Drinking coffee.
I managed to do the trip without getting beaten up or ripping my shirt. I suppose I was starting to mature.
The main cargo we loaded in the West Indies was sugar and also a fair amount of dark rum, which apparently was what was called over proof and needed diluting before bottling. The Liverpool Dockers didn’t see the point of diluting it and by the end of the day didn’t find a need to go to the pub on the way home from work. In spite of the fact that the rum was in hogsheads and sealed ,and there were security guards watching the whole unloading process, the Dockers still managed to take enough to keep all of them happy. This was done with a bradawl or sharp spike and a drinking straw to put in the hole that the bradawl made and drain it into a bottle or canteen. Liverpool Dockers in those days where among the best in the world at breaching cargos. A later trip saw me on a ship in Glasgow loading whisky for the US. The Glasgow Dockers were experts at liberating their national drink so that not all of it went to foreigners. In spite of dock police being in attendance there seemed to be an awful lot of breakages and the fumes of the spilled whisky must have got to the Dockers, as at the end of the working day, most of them seemed unsteady on their feet. One way that we used to amuse ourselves at the Dockers expense was to disturb their lavatorial routine. The toilets in the docks consisted of a long row of cubicles with a stream of water continually flowing underneath to flush away their waste products. The Dockers were very fond of skiving and at any one time there would be half a dozen of them sat in the toilets reading their daily mirrors. On the way back from a liquid lunch one of us would make a ball of newspaper and set light to it and drop it in the upstream toilet so that it floated down the row. And run, because to get caught was to get a beating. There would be howls from the cubicles as the flames floated beneath each toilet seat but we made sure that we were well out of the way by the time the Dockers hitched their trousers up and came out of the toilets.
Later on in the year I signed on the Heathmore for a trip to the Medditeranean.By this time I had progressed to Senior Ordinary Seaman. No big thing but a hike in wages again. At seventeen I was doing alright as most seventeen year olds were still deck boys but I already had eighteen months service so I got my promotion.
CHAPTER NINE
HEATHMORE
I shared a watch on Heathmore with a Scot called Jock (all Scot were called Jock) Gear and a Salford guy called Joe Durkin.Joe was a so called hard man from Salford with a nasty manner and a broken nose. At that time I used to think that it was wise to be careful around blokes with broken noses as they seemed to be tough. It is not necessarily these that are the tough guys but the person that gave them the broken nose.
Joe didn’t like me. He was also a rotten watch mate as he was always late to relieve us on the wheel or lookout and never tidied up the mess room before going off watch. I was heading for a tough trip as he never stopped pulling fast ones on me or threatening to “fill me in” Jock never got involved as Joe never bothered him .Durkin obviously thought that the guy would be a tougher proposition than me although every now and again he would have a little “chip” at Jock. I suppose it was to test the water and see how much he could get away with.
It all came to a head when we got to Piraeus in Greece on New Years Eve. We had just tied up and were having a few drinks after our tea prior to going ashore. Three or four of us were drinking in our cabin (the watch shared a cabin) and we had a couple of the crew for a drink. I could feel the tension as Durkin got more and more booze down him. It was time for me to get ashore where I would be away from Durkins bullying. As it happens I had a great time in some of the dockside bars. It was the first time that I had been exposed to the lesbian fraternity. There was a cute little lady (I use the term politely) who took a shine to me .We danced and things were going very nicely when we were approached by a very, very good looking female. There were some words, in Greek which sounded angry and within moments fist were flying and hair was being pulled. Not me, or by me. It seems that these two were an item and the aggressor was peeved thinking that her partner fancied me. I beat a hasty retreat.
I should mention that it was New Years Eve and there was plenty of action in the bars around the port. Some kind lady took a shine to me and decided that I needed educating with regard to Greek cuisine. She took me into a café and ordered wine and food for both of us. Mine was a fish, with the head on and the eyes looking at me. Prior to this my experience with fish was either out of a tin or wrapped in batter. I persevered. After the meal I thought that it would only be right and proper to escort her home. After all Piraeus is a seaport and a lady (?) walking home alone at one o’clock in the morning could very well be molested. It was about eight o’clock in the morning before I returned to the ship to start work. When I got to the room, Durkin was in his bunk, flat out and covered with blood. Jock was in his bunk sleeping like a baby. The story was, apparently that the drinking carried on for some time after I left, with Durkin getting more truculent as the evening progressed, chipping away at Jock until Jock suggested that they went up on deck and sort out any differences that they might have.Durkin swaggered up to the deck followed by Jock and then nobody was quite sure what transpired but one of the deck hands they had been drinking with heard a banging on the deck above him and went up to see what was happening. The Scotsman had been banging Durkins head on the steel deck and then he picked him up and was about to throw him over the side when sanity prevailed and the other deck hand intervened and rescued Durkin and split them up. Then a couple of others helped get Joe to his bunk and left him. A combination of an excess of drink and the fact that nobody liked Durkin anyhow meant that nobody bothered to see if he was alright.When I found him I got the chief steward (he was in charge of medication on board) to look at him he decided that more medical skills than he possessed were needed, he called an ambulance and Durkin went off to hospital. Apparently he didn’t come round for several days and the police took Jock away and kept him for a few days pending a manslaughter charge. When Durkin came round Jock was released and joined us in Turkey about four days later.
I only ever saw Joe Durkin once after that and he was completely gone .He didn’t recognise me and apparently had no recall of that New Years Eve. It was rumoured that a few years later he fell between a ship and dock while drunk and was crushed to death. All I know is that the trip was a lot happier without the Salford hard man. At a later date when I sailed out of Manchester and related the story several people knew Durkin and were not surprised with the trouble he caused and someone suggested that the reason he was sailing out of Liverpool and not Manchester was that many seamen wouldn’t sail with him.
CHAPTER TEN
SICILIAN
The next trip was back to the Med on the Sicilian. One of the ports we called at was Algiers and as usual I went ashore on my own. Very early in my time at sea I realised that going ashore alone was a better option that teaming up with a bunch of shipmates. If you went ashore as a team, everybody knew the best bar to go and every opinion was different. What usually happened was discussion as to the merits of the different bar and before long, as we would all be thirsty we would go to the nearest bar to the dock gates to have a discussion. Of course the tendency would be to then stay there as after a while we got comfortable. I knew many seamen who had been many years at sea and the only thing that they could tell you about different ports in the world was the name of the nearest bar to the docks. Of course I was different; I knew the name of the second and the third closest bars to the docks. So off I went ashore in Algiers and after calling at several bars around the docks I staggered up side street and started to wend my way up some steps that were very poorly lit and with a lot of dubious looking Arabs sitting outside their little tea houses. Even in a state of intoxication I was starting to realise that this wasn’t really where I wanted to be. Coming down the street were two Gendarmes who stopped me and babbled some foreign language at me, which was obviously French but it could have been Chinese for all I knew but their sign language was pretty good. There was a lot of shaking of heads and then the classic finger drawn across the throat, which I did understand so I
agreed to let them escort me back to the civilised part of Algiers. It would appear that not all the French are all bad all the time. Later I was informed that I had been in the Kasbah which was a place where Europeans did not go alone, it had a history of producing dead bodies with empty pockets.
On returning to the ship I found most of the crew sat around drinking red wine, which was not the normal tipple for merchant seaman but it turned out that the French boat tied up ahead of us was loading red wine in bulk from a road tanker I was told that if I took a jug and a few francs the driver he would fill it for me. None of us were connoisseurs of wine as this was raw new wine on its way to France, probably to be made into industrial something or other. We didn’t care it was cheap booze. What a headache I had next morning, combined with a series of rainbow yawns.
John the lot was part of barta,good laugp seeing the fighting over it, always made sure i resieved my price before letting it go.
Chapter 7. The Bar in Belfast was Ma Carroll's.
bob correctQuote:
Originally Posted by Bob Hollis
PORT OF MANCHESTER
I decided that it was time to start sailing out of Manchester. Although I had never lived there but my mother had a guest house and at least I could stay somewhere while in England without paying for it and also get some home cooking and some laundry done. Although, after one of my early trips out of Liverpool I decided to visit my mother it was probably six years since we last saw each other. When I had suggested on the telephone that I was coming to see her she gave me instructions that I had to catch a sixty two bus from town and get off at the Lloyds Hotel in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, her house was opposite. When I rang the doorbell and she opened the door she didn’t know who I was and after we had sorted out our relationship she suggested that I get a room at the YMCA as the bed that she had earmarked for me was now let, it was the YMCA or the settee in the residents lounge. I stayed one night and went back to Liverpool and didn’t visit again until I signed on the shipping office in Manchester two years later and made my first trip with Manchester liners. Over the years I met and sailed with some real characters out of Manchester. Some of them shaped my life in future years. Several of the characters that I sailed with would pay off a ship with a good pay-off and a week later sign back on with not a penny to their name. They could be maybe forty or fifty years old and when they signed on all they possessed in the world was what they stood up in and what was in their kit bag(usually not a lot)and maybe a couple of bottles of beer.
These were the deck hands that sometimes didn’t even possess any heavy weather gear (oilskins, seaboots etc) and in northern waters would be borrowing our gear to go on watch. I used to look at them and think, without care, I would finish up like them. As I said, they help me shape my future.
One of the characters was Sully (Sullivan).I am certain that it had been many years since he had seen Manchester in anything but an alcoholic haze. Once paid off he would head for either the Salisbury or the Clowes hotel (both well known hostelries on Trafford road in Salford) and drink until thrown out or broke, then go and sign on another ship. There was a story about Sully that he came out of the Salisbury at closing time one afternoon and got caught short so he decided to urinate against a post box. He was half way through the deed when he looked up and noticed a policeman leaning against it. It did solve the problem of where he was going to sleep for the night. The man was harmless and had spent all his adult life at sea including several trips on the Russian Convoys during world war two. He used to tell stories about being sent to the states during the war to crew on newly built Liberty Ships. Sometimes they would be stuck over there waiting and having used up all the subsistence pay they were given would have to sell blood. He told us the the bars round the shipbuilding yards were full of British seamen ,some of them passing out through lack of blood and others passing out through excess of alcohol and most of them passing out through a combination of the two.
Another character was Bill Avril.This was a man that was a giant, so much so that he was able to get occasional work as an extra in films. His best known role was as one of the oarsmen in the whaling boat off “Pequod” in Moby Dick (that was the fifties version with Gregory Peck).Then there was Johnny Bardsley, who I believe gave up the sea and became a painter of some repute.
Around the docks in any country in the world there always “ladies of the night” Manchester was no exception, apart from the fact that these women were really part of life on Trafford road. There was “Singing Lucy” who would get up on the mike in the Clowes pub at the drop of a hat, she had quite a good voice and was reputed to have been auditioned at the BBC, then there was “Mad June” who apparently had the occasional holiday in Prestwich (asylum) and then there was “The Shore Bosun”.I swear that the character of Ena Sharples in Coronation Street was taken from the Shore Bosun, right down to the hairnet and the long black coat. She was around a long time before “Corrie” started. I don’t know if she was ever “on the game” certainly in my day she was well past the age that anyone would be interested, even drunken Scandinavian Sailors, after months at sea would not be tempted. What she did do was sit by the piano every night and organise the girls.
There was an unusual situation with the girls? In the Clowes.Although they were on the game it was mostly with seamen from elsewhere. Many of them had men friends who sailed out of Manchester and even left them a monthly allotment from their pay just so that when they came back to port they had a woman and somewhere to stay. Some of the girls were getting allotments from two or three different men, and the men knew it but it didn’t matter they needed a base to come home to.
The exciting time at the Clowes was when an American ship came up the canal to Manchester. Then the Clowes would get really busy as the Americans were paid huge incomes by our standards and were willing to spend on booze and women. The place was invaded by girls from Oxford Street in Manchester city centre where their usual trade was American airmen from Burtonwood, who also were paid huge incomes by our standards. I am sure that the hookers had subscription to the Lloyds Register of Shipping or the Journal of Commerce, as the minute one of Lykes Lines tied up in Manchester docks the girls would arrive.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MANCHESTER PROGRESS
So here I was sailing out of Manchester. I signed on the Manchester Progress one of the older Manchester Liners. They were popular with most steady seamen as their normal trip was four weeks and ten days at home, so a married man would have at least some semblance of a steady life.
On the Manchester Progress I met another of the Manchester characters. The bosun, Ned Lambert, or Uncle Ned as he was known. What a hard man. When we were working on deck washing paint work(Soogying),if we happened to take a break for a smoke or chat ,a head would appear round the corner and we’d hear Psst,Psst and he’d make washing motions with his hand. Even in the North Atlantic in winter, shipping spray, he would have us washing paintwork, because that’s what had to be done outward bound and homeward bound we would paint what we had washed. Many times I’ve been soogying a deckhouse and the water has frozen as I put it on which made the exercise a waste of time but Ned didn’t care that was the routine.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BRAZILIAN PRINCE
Next trip was on the Brazilian Prince. This was another Liberty Ship built for one trip across the Atlantic during world war two and here it was nineteen fifty two and she was still going strong. The trip was through the Panama Canal and up the west coast of the States and Canada. Calling at Los Angeles, SanFransisco, Vancouver and a place called New Westminster and then back calling at the same ports on the way home.
In San Francisco I was introduced to Frisco Paddys.This was a second hand shop where we could buy American clothes. Bearing in mind that clothes rationing had not been finished that long and addition to that, most of the good clothes were exported, also there was no way that anybody in the UK sold any American clothing whatsoever. Frisco Paddys was like Aladdin’s cave to us. We could buy lumberjacks shirts and ex American army uniforms all of which we lusted after. I bought an American army staff officer’s coat, the sort that Eisenhower wore at the Normandy landings. It saw me through north Atlantic watches for years and would just not wear out. It was rumoured that Paddy got most of his stock from morgues’ and prisons and some of the guys told of getting their purchases back to the ship and discovering hole in the item which looked suspiciously like knife or bullet wounds. But I’m only telling that second hand, or third.
We had a good crew on Brazilian Prince and the trip was a happy one. A picture that I will always retain in my mind was looking over the rail of the ship from the deck, in Long Beach, Los Angeles and seeing a procession of fruit cocktail tins floating down the dock. We had loaded fruit cocktail and fig rolls to unload in Canada and obviously some bright spark had managed to nick a case of each. The deck crew were ensconced in some ones cabin having a feast. It happened to be Del Monte fruit cocktail and the television add with the Man from del Monte slogan still reminds me of the trip.
Vancouver was the place where we spent the most time on the trip. It was the final port for unloading and the first port for loading. There wasn’t much to do in the town in those days, as far as merchant seaman were concerned, being a highly civilised type of community there weren’t a lot of interesting bars. One of the places that a lot of us went was to the Saturday night dance at the seaman’s mission .The attraction there was that there were a lot of young Canadian ladies who took it on themselves to entertain foreign seamen far from home and loved ones. We didn’t see it that way. We thought that by our innate charm and good looks that one of them might succumb to our carnal wishes. It never happened, at least not to my knowledge. The other attraction at the Saturday night dance was tea and tab-nabs (cakes) which we desired almost as much as the charms of the young ladies. There was a routine though. Before the dance or the tea and tab-nabs we had to attend chapel and say prayers and sing hymns and listen to the parsons sermon don’t believe that any of us paid any attention to the parsons sermon as all we could think about was getting out teeth into some cream cakes and our arms around a buxom young Canadian girl. In those days we used to dance holding each other, it was much more fun than the modern version of the dance. Especially for horny young sailors.
There is a park in Vancouver called Stanley Park and one evening somehow or other I finished up there and wandering around got into conversation with a local lady. At the time I was eighteen, she must have been about thirty five and seemed much taken with me. In today’s world she would probably be termed as a stalker. Somehow she got the number of the telephone that was hooked up to the ship in the various ports round the Canadian coast and kept calling me to make arrangements for a tryst, much to the amusement of the Chief Mate who was the only one supposed to answer the telephone and he used to make the announcement over the loudspeaker that there was that woman on the phone for Sutton and would I hurry up and get to the phone as she was desperate to speak to me. Much to the amusement of the crew .The Chief decided to call me “Stud” Sutton and was highly amused by all this, but he was an American and they amuse easily. After a run up the British Columbia coast we returned to Vancouver where the lady in Question invited me to join her at her house for a meal and some post prandial exercise. When I queried where her husband would be, she told me that he was taking the children to the cinema. It all seemed a bit odd to me but I agreed and had a very pleasant evening. It was only when I was older and more worldly wise that I realised that her husband was probably in the wardrobe watching the activities. I was only eighteen at the time and not familiar with the foibles of some of the more adult members of humanity. He must have been uncomfortable as I got the directions wrong. I thought I was told to look for the house with a tree in the front garden. All the houses had trees, it took some time and a telephone call from a box half a mile away to realise that I was looking for the only house with two trees in the front. Never have been very bright. If the husband was in the wardrobe all that time he must have been passing out. Maybe he was asleep during the action and missed it all.
CHAPTER FOUTEEN
SOMME
Later that year I signed on a coaster called the Somme. She was the smallest ship that I’d ever sailed on, being just four hundred and fifty ton. She was owned by Muller’s of Rotterdam and sailed out of Manchester to Rotterdam then to France and up the Seine into the heart of Paris. I spent Christmas and New Year on her and for most of the sea trip from Rotterdam to France I sincerely wished that I’d spent Christmas somewhere else, like a prison camp or a leper colony, somewhere that didn’t move. We came up the English Channel New Year’s Day and the Channel was really misbehaving itself. There was a gale blowing all the way. Being a small coaster we had the minimum crew allowed by law. Watches consisted of two AB,s and an officer of the watch and we only had two watches which meant four hours on and four hours off. At night the officer who’s watch I was on stayed in his cabin most of the time and the helmsman had orders to stamp on the floor if the officer was needed. His cabin was under the wheelhouse. Most of the time I was at sea I suffered with seasickness in rough weather. It wasn’t pleasant but over the years I’d learned to live with it. On the Somme, she was such a small vessel and faster than most coasters so that in bad weather she had a really uncomfortable motion. It was the worst seasickness that I ever had.
Keeping the watch consisted of steering the ship and also keeping a lookout as only having two deck hands to a watch meant that a separate lookout wasn’t possible. So there I was, seasick, trying to steer the ship in a gale and also keeping lookout. About every ten minutes I would have to rush out through the lee side door to the wing of the bridge, heave my guts up and then rush back to the wheel and get her back on course. Of course in those days there wasn’t as much traffic in the Channel as there is today so there was a lot less chance of hitting something.
The trip up the River Seine was quite unusual. We couldn’t get up to Paris in one day so we had to tie up for the night to a tree on the riverbank, outside a set of locks. It was there that I had my first taste of “filter coffee”. The other deckhand and I walked up the bank to a café for rum and coffee, it was a cold night, being January. When the drinks came, the coffee was in a filter and we had to wait for it to filter through, so we drank the rum and ordered another and waited, and waited and drank the rum and waited. For some reason by the time the coffee had passed through the filter it was cold, we were drunk and the barmaid wanted to close up as we were the only customers and my pal had fallen in love with her but she hadn’t fallen in love with him. So we walked back down the riverbank to the ship and climbed aboard. At least I did. My pal fell in and I had to haul him out and get him down to the galley to dry out in the warm. This was not an unusual type of accident for this guy. Some months later I met him in Chorlton village (Manchester), he lived round the corner from my mother’s house, and he was on crutches. When I asked what was the cause he told me that he’d fallen out of the mast. He had been climbing the topmast which was a wire ladder and he had caught his hand on a wire snag .At the time he was going up “one handed” as he was carrying some tools in the other hand. He let go of the wire to look at what damage he had done to himself (he was obviously drunk at the time, as he usually was) and as he was then not holding on to anything, fell about forty foot to the deck. They do say that the Lord looks after fools and drunks. He got away with just a broken leg and as he was on a vessel coming up the Manchester ship canal he got to hospital quickly to have it set.
We got to the outskirts of Paris and tied up at a place called, I believe Port le Stad, which is where the football stadium is. We spent the day there preparing the ship for the trip to the centre of the city. The roof came off the wheelhouse, all the railings came down on the bow and the lifeboat davits were dropped. As the river was high through recent rains we had to load about a hundred ton of sand on the deck to make her deeper in the water.
The next day we headed up stream to Port du Nord(again I think that’s what it was called).Passing under the many bridges on the way up the river ,the pilot, who was the only one allowed to steer on the river had to duck every time we went under a bridge. There couldn’t have been much more than twelve inches of clearance from our highest point going under the bridges.
Paris was a bit of a disappointment .Only being on a deckhands wage made it difficult to see the sights of the city, although I did manage to see the Folie Bergere, which in those days was far racier than anything one could see in England. I could only afford a ticket in what was called the “promenade” section, which meant standing all through the show. What I hadn’t realised was that this was a section where a lot of pick-ups took place, especially among homosexuals. I was really upset when some old queen tried to buy me a drink and I beat a hasty retreat to the other side of the section...
At the end of the trip I decide that coasting wasn’t for me so I looked for a deep sea trip.
One of the skills that I learned while in the merchant navy was the ability to read upside down. It was a skill that I perfected over the years when looking for my next trip. When we called at the shipping office we had to speak to the clerk through a hatch. He had a large ledger open in front of him with a list of the ships in dock and what crew they required, also where they were bound. His job was to fill these vacancies and some were easy and some were almost impossible so the strategy was to offer the bad ones to everybody that came in until that ship was filled, with the excuse that there was nothing else available. Those of us who were not on contract to the “pool” and who could read upside down, could point out to him that there were several other options open and we fancied ship x or y and not the old scow that he was trying to shanghai us on. This skill stood me in good stead years later when as a salesman, it enabled me to look at paperwork on a prospects desk and get information that occasionally helped me get a deal.
After the trip to Paris I made another trip through the Panama Canal to the west coast of the States and Canada and then two trips on an Esso tanker called the Esso Saranac.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ESSO SARANAC
When we joined the tanker in the Manchester Ship canal we took on a deck boy on his first trip. In those days the young style slaves were wearing their hair in Tony Curtis style or a DA (ducks ****).This deck boy had obviously spent a lot of time cultivating his coiffeur and we initially called him Elvis. In order to keep the hair in place he needed lots of hair cream or oil (there were no gels in those days).We pulled his leg about this and I warned him that once we got to the tropics he would be in trouble with that much hair as it got very warm and he would be very uncomfortable with melted grease running down his face and he should let me trim it for him as I was the ships barber. This went on until we were getting close to the tropics and every day I would offer to trim the hair for him. Finally as we were getting into the Gulf of Mexico he sheepishly asked if I really was a barber. I showed him my hair clippers and scissors and comb (god knows why I had them as I’d never cut anyone’s hair) and convinced him that I would only give him a light trim
We did the deed on deck so that he couldn’t see what was happening in a mirror until it was finished and I set too. I cut a swathe down one side so that he wouldn’t be able to chicken out and then helped keep his nerve by saying “just a bit more on this side” or “just a touch more at the back” Before the haircut he was called Elvis because his hair was modelled on Elvis. After the haircut we called him Audrey as his haircut looked more like Audrey Hepburns, but at least he felt cooler.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GENERTON
Somehow my upside down reading let me down as my next ship; the Generton was something out of the thirties. She was owned by Chapmans of Newcastle known otherwise, and rightly so as Hungry Chapmans .In the case of Chapmans they were called Hungry even though their name didn’t start with H.They really were Hungry. Generton was an old coal burning tramp ship with a tall funnel which was apparently to assist in the burning of the coal in the boilers. Known as “forced draught”. All I know is that when we left Manchester and went down the canal, when we got to Eastham at the bottom of the canal there was about twenty foot of funnel to re-fit as it had been removed on the way up the canal to get under the bridges. We lived forward which is some thing that died out in deep water ships after the war. Like the coaster I was on, the galley was amidships and all the food had to be carried forward in canteens. In rough weather we got cold food and in hot weather we got hot food. It didn’t really matter if it was cold or hot it was slop
In addition to sleeping for,ard we slept on paliases (straw mattresses) another thing that went out after world war two. Under board of trade regulations these mattresses had to be changed with every change of crew so when the new mattresses arrived and we were about to throw the old ones away, some bright spark informed us that we could sell them in the Cape Verde Islands where we were calling for coal bunkering, so we stowed then down the lazerete.
Generton, besides all the other antiquities had an open wheelhouse which meant that the whole of the navigating area was open to the elements and the steering position was a cubicle raised about two foot and surrounded by a barrier waist high.Reminisent of those old war films where Jack Hawkins was controlling the frigate from the upper bridge. Steering in an open wheelhouse is great at night in the tropics but not very nice at night in northern waters, especially in the rain around the European coast and it wasn’t very nice in the tropics during the day as the skipper wouldn’t put up any awnings so we spent the two hour stint on the wheel in full sunlight. These days they would probably get sued
The officer that I was on watch with, third mate, was renowned for breaking wind. He used to walk from one side of the bridge to the other breaking wind with very step. Whoever was on the wheel used to count the explosions and report to the mess deck the total to see who counted the record amount. From memory the record was twenty two. His party trick in bars was to ignite them. In actual fact my watch was the only one that was glad that we had an open wheelhouse. Life would have been unbearable in a closed wheelhouse in northern waters with all the doors closed.
We had a mixed crew on Generton, the stokers were Asians, I suppose there were no English stokers who would crew a coal burning ship in the tropics, even in the fifties. There were two ABs that were Estonian and we reckoned that they were ex German army and couldn’t go back to their own country as at that time it was under Russian control, they might have been disappeared. They had been on Generton for several years, probably because if they changed ships they may finish up where they didn’t want to be. I did learn though, that the Estonian name for kidneys is “pissfilters”.I supposed that piece of information could come in handy someday, although it hasn’t so far in the last fifty years. The rest of the deck crew were from Manchester and Salford.
We arrived at the Cape Verde Islands to bunker, which was a rotten job as the coal dust went everywhere and we spent days after cleaning everything. The palliasses were traded for American cigarettes which the knowledgeable one advised us brought a better price in the Argentine than English cigarettes. The fact that they were a brand nobody had ever heard of didn’t really mean much to us as American cigarettes where not available in the UK so we were not familiar with any brands.
When we arrived at Buenos Aires several weeks later (we only did eight knots) the local who was contracted to be night watchman offered to buy any American cigarettes from us so we unloaded the lot and had some pesos to spend. All the way across to Buenos Aires we had been practicing ordering steak ,eggs and chips which was the thing to eat in the Argentine(biffo,quevoes y papafritas).Everybody was walking around muttering it, in order to get it right. Steak wasn’t something that was served at the crews table on Generton.In fact it wasn’t readily available anywhere in the UK at that time. Of course when we got to our first bar and ordered it and they asked how we wanted it cooked the whole procedure broke down and we ordered in English by shouting, as you do, and all our rehearsals were wasted.
So the first night we had our steak egg and chips and very nice it was. Argentine steaks rank among the best in the world. Next day the watchman returned, and not in a good mood. He showed us one of the cigarettes that we had sold him. It was a paper tube with a little bit of dry tobacco dust in the bottom. It appears that these cigarettes were from US army supplies during world war two and had been lying around in the Cape Verde Islands for the past ten years. We had to repay him the money on pain of getting “duffed up” when we went ashore.
Buenos Aires, it would appear, is a really beautiful city. Probably the most European of all the South American cities. I say, would appear ,because as usual we only got as far as the dockside bars and they are the same no matter which country they are in.
One bar that I had a few drinks in there was a barmaid that I was quite attracted to, so I spent some time drinking there. At the time I was nineteen, she must have been at least fifteen years older but very attractive and South American. When the bar closed we went somewhere else in a taxi, originally for a drink but the place turned out to be a hotel. In the days of Peron it would appear that spending the night together without the benefit of a marriage certificate or on the basis of money changing hands, was illegal.
The taxi took us into the suburbs of Buenos Aires and pulled into a hotel. the driver sounded his horn, a roller door raised and dropped down behind us, we exited the taxi, the doors in front of him raised and he was gone. We went inside this old world hotel and into a magnificent room with mirrors on every wall, and the ceiling. In later years I often wondered if we were the entertainment that night and someone was behind the mirrors watching our activities.
I had arranged to see her the following night, late on so that I didn’t need to hang around all night drinking and when I got to the bar I could sense that there was a problem. The problem was two guys who were throwing their weight around among the customers, who were all seamen. My friend indicated that these two were police and I should leave and come back later and wait for her outside the bar. When I came back, I looked inside the bar and the troublemakers were just leaving. When they saw me they approached and started verbalising me in Spanish, which obviously I couldn’t understand apart from “andar vamos”which I thought meant I should leave so I started walking away and they followed me until we came to an alley where they again said”andar vamos”indicating I should go down the alley. I had a problem. Either they were thugs and I was about to get rolled(not uncommon in dock areas) or they really were police and I was about to get beaten up, robbed and thrown in jail(also not uncommon in Buenos Aires)When we got into the alley ,one of them stood back with his jacket open and his hand inside it and I assumed he had a gun there and the other squared up to me and started to throw punches .It didn’t seem sensible to stand there and get beaten up and I believed that if I traded punches I would be arrested. When the puncher got close enough to me and he was a bit distracted, smirking at his pal like it was a big joke, I hit him, hard, and ran, zig-zagging as I ran like they do in the movies leaving him stretched out on the ground and his pal not really knowing what to do but laughing at him. Obviously he could have shot at me but even in Argentina explanations would be required why he shot at a British seaman who was running away from nothing. A beating for resisting arrest was one thing but a shooting must have been a problem for him. Anyhow, I ran right through the nearest dock gate and up the gangway of a British ship. Fortunately the night watchman was one of the crew so I went down the galley and had a cup of tea with him. He told me that a couple of his shipmates had been worked over a few nights before.
I never saw my South American beauty again, although I was in Buenos Aires again on another ship I thought that it would be wiser to stay away in case the cops wanted a return bout.
In those days Argentine was run by Peron and the police could pretty well do as they pleased and if they picked you up and said you resisted arrest they beat you up and there was no arguments. I suppose I was lucky. And I didn’t get my shirt ruined.
From Buenos Aires we went up the River Parana to Rosario. The only notable thing that happened was that having got back to the ship very late at night I developed a hunger and as there was nothing available in the mess I decided to look ashore. There was an all night grocery store right opposite the nearest gate to where we were lying; the only problem was that the gate was closed. Not wanting to walk a quarter of mile up the dock and back and then walk all the way back, I decided to scale the gate, first making sure that there were no dock police around, went to the store and all I could find that I understood and didn’t need cooking was a tin of sardines, paid for them and scaled back and returned to the ship. Really proud of myself. It was quite a large tin of sardines so I ate half and left the rest, in the tin, on the mess table. I had the rest for breakfast. Big mistake. Halfway through the morning I developed stomach ache and then the trots. We left Rosario at about midday and it was my turn to go into the chain locker and stow the anchor chain. (Being an old ship she didn’t have self stowing chain)With the stuff that was coming up in the mud on the chain and the stuff that was coming up in my rainbow yawns it was not very pleasant down there. I wanted to die and quick but I managed to finish the job and return to my place on the toilet.
Diamante was further up the river Parana and we spent some time loading, I believe iron ore. We were so far up the river inland that the whole place was like the “Old West”. Just simply a mine and a dock with a couple of bars. The streets were dirt and there were no pavements and from memory very few street lights.
On the Generton we tended to drink ashore with whoever happened to go down the gangway at the same time whether it was an officer or one of the crew. I suppose that as we were all together in the heap of crap that the owners call a ship we might as well drown our sorrows together. In Diamante I got separated from the crew that I’d been drinking with and was wandering around when I was approached by a couple of the locals asking if I was interested in a couple of girls. I was always interested in girls but never enough to get involved in anything that was available in Diamante, where they probably had diseases that hadn’t yet reached Europe. They were persistent and said there was beer available and that the rest of the crew were there, so I followed them, cautiously(didn’t want to get rolled in some god forsaken South American town/village) to what turned out to be a mud hut on the outskirts of town and sure enough the boys were there enjoying? the company of two young women. There were only two rooms in the house. The bedroom was occupied by one of the officers, fast asleep, drunk and the rest of the team were in what I suppose was the lounge. Everybody was drinking and we were well on our way. The girls were offering their wares but there wasn’t enough beer available to make them attractive however one of the Estonians decided that his needs where greater than the lack of glamour and romance in the situation. He agreed a price, assuming that they would transfer to the bedroom but it seemed that the bedroom was for sleeping (the officer had taken the bed) and the lounge was for working. She went to a cupboard and took out a rattan mat and unrolled it on the floor, lay down, pulled her skirt up and indicated that she was ready for business. The Estonian was a little taken aback as we were all sat around watching. The room was lit by a single bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling with a pull chain as a switch. Having given the girl the money, which he wasn’t going to get back, he switched the light out and proceeded with the transaction. Someone switched the light on again so the Estonian got up and took the bulb out and carried on. Some of the spectators, who were smokers got their lighters out and shed some light on the action, by this time proceedings had started and he wasn’t going to abandon his endevours.We all sat around applauding and splashing beer on the pair of them. A goodnight was had by all.
We headed back to Europe, Antwerp to be exact and I personally couldn’t wait to get off Generton and sign on a proper vessel. Getting close to northern waters and cooler weather one night we were in our accommodation and I was trying to get some sleep, prior to going on watch at midnight when on of the AB,s came off the wheel and went into his cabin and turned the radio on. As we had no doors on our cabins I had trouble sleeping with the noise going on so I asked,nicely,if he’d switch the f******g radio off He turned it louder so I went to his cabin and switched it off, he turned it on so I went and took it and put it in my room. The deck hand concerned was Bob Powell, reputed to be a Salford hard case from a family of Salford hard cases, he came into my cabin to get his radio and as I didn’t want him to have it we had an altercation. Visualise one man in heavy trousers, two sweaters, and sea boots fighting with another deckhand who has just jumped out of bed, naked.We battled for about ten minutes and I really can’t remember the outcome except that the radio wasn’t played any more and I didn’t get my shirt ripped. Maybe I should have learned a lesson and always fought shirtless.
In Antwerp I was drinking in one of the dockside bars and in our company was the Chief Engineer. This was a man that spent half his life intoxicated and most runs ashore was either beaten up or rolled or both. He was a Geordie with the broadest accent possible, maybe that’s why he got beaten up, people thought he was insulting them. He cornered me with a proposition that I did another trip on Generton and go ashore with him as his bodyguard and he would make sure that I got a bottle of whisky a week for my trouble. The basis of his reasoning was that while in Buenos Aires on a Sunday afternoon some of us were painting the shipside and working with us was an officer apprentice. He was a big guy, another Geordie, in his last year as apprentice which put him at about twenty and he was a bit of a bully, especially among the young apprentices. He asked me if I’d done any wrestling which I hadn’t and he offered to show me Northumberland wrestling. thinking that he could show his prowess. Instead in about two seconds he was flat on his back and cracked his head on some rail lines. Half the crew were leaning over the side watching, which was probably why he had the idea in the first place hoping to show off. When he hit the ground all the spectators cheered and I got a few free beers out of it. So the chief said to me (in a broad Geordie accent)”I beeleeve yee can doo joojitsoo”or words to that effect, and offered me the position of his bodyguard. I had to explain that the skipper had invited me to do another trip if I promised to behave myself. I had told the skipper that I could not promise to behave myself, which was the message that I was trying to convey but the actual words were more along the lines of where he could shove the job. So I didn’t do another trip on Geneton.We paid off in Newport in Wales and the night we docked a few of us went to one of the local pubs and as closing time approached a comely wench caught my eye and I thought she might want some company on the way home. She told me that her dance card was complete and anyhow she only had liaisons on a professional basis but she had a friend who might care to be escorted home and she took me to the “snug” and introduced me to her friend. Who was a “midget”? I mean a “midget” on the game in a dockside pub. I didn’t even ask the price but beat a hasty retreat explaining that I had just paid off after a three month trip and was due to pick up my pay so I wasn’t really “that short” and anyhow had a train to catch back to Manchester.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PACIFIC STRONGHOLD
After a short trip on a coaster I signed on the Pacific Stronghold for a trip to Jamaica and through the Panama Canal to the West Coast of the States again .Jamaica was a wild time as the crew of the Stronghold were all Manchester and Salford lads and most of us had sailed together before. I remember the Berkshire bar which seemed to be the place to go and as there were about ten of us all in a serious drinking mood the owner gave us a large room on the first floor with one large table and French windows opening on to a balcony. The drinks kept coming and as we were drinking mainly beer (we were all wise enough not to have a heavy drinking session on the local rum) there was a need occasionally for the use of toilets which were on the ground floor. Somebody(not me, honestly) got the bright idea that the balcony was the best place to urinate and that it was great fun to see if we could catch a passer-by with our pee.We had to leave,hastily with the woman who owned the bar telling us what would happen if we ever came back.It sounded nasty.
The trip finished in London and we had a few days before pay off so I decided to have a night in the West End or there abouts.I tried to have a drink at Raymonds Revue bar,which seemed as though it could get interesting and tried to order a drink from a very nice barman who proceeded to chat me up.On realising that he was wasting his time as I didn’t play on that side, he did me the favour of suggesting that the place might be a bit rich for my pocket and I might be advised to find a place where the drinks were more reasonable.After the pubs closed I tried to get into some drinking clubs and one of them,, by accident let me in. Several people were entering a club called the Cosmos ,which was one of those clubs that existed in those days were you were supposed to be a member and you could only get in by knocking on the door and being inspected through a peephole. It was a bit like the old speakeasys in the prohibition. Anyhow I followed some people in who were members but when I got to the bar the barmaid suggested that I leave as I wasn’t a member and she couldn’t serve me as it was against the law. So I left but on the way out the girl that let us in asked why I was leaving and then suggested that if I wanted a drink she was finished work in ten minutes and she knew a place. So I waited and we finished up in the Mandrake club. People use the expression “it’s a small world” which in this case is true. The lady that took me to the club was called Patsy and several years later in Edmonton, Alberta I met a whole circle of people who not only knew her but used the Mandrake club extensively and two Edmonton girls who were barmaids there.How,s that for a small world?.
We had a drink and a plate of spaghetti, which I think was mandatory if you wanted to drink at that time of night and then it was time for her to go home so I got her a taxi and then went in for a coffee and she advised me that there were no underground trains at that time of night and taxi fare to Victoria docks would be exorbitant, would I care to stay till morning. It was a very kind offer and it would have been churlish to refuse. In the morning she very kindly made breakfast for me but insisted that I walk around the flat without my shirt .I don’t know why as my vest although clean and white wasn’t much to look at. Maybe she was hoping that I had some interesting tattoos although she wouldn’t have been able to see them clearly as I had a very deep tropical tan from the trip we’d just made through the Panama and up the Pacific coast.
On returning to the ship and telling the story, a couple of the engine room crew decided that they would do the same so that night they went up west to try their luck but unfortunately the club they picked was Churchills.They were joined by a lovely young lady who kept them drinking and when all their money was gone they were thrown out. I believe that they walked back to the ship, in the rain and it was a long walk.The following morning at breakfast they cursed me roundly as though it was my fault that they had been stupid enough to try to get a pick up in a club that catered for tired businessmen preferably with expence accounts and not wearing dungarees(that’s what we used to call them before jeans became a fashion item).
Any Manchester crew signing off in London and wanting to get home would usually travel on the “Mancunium” which was the six PM out of Euston. One of the reasons was that there was chief steward on there that was “gay”(the word wasn’t used in that way in those days) and if you were paying off, the chances were that you would want to do a fair bit of drinking on the trip to Manchester. There was a special half compartment that was there for the staff to have their meals but he used to get us ensconced in there and keep the drinks coming. I have seen as many as eight of us on a seat designed for four all singing pub songs with the beer in steady flow and the old queen giving us free sandwiches. He wasn’t a mug. Apart from enjoying being with some big rough seamen he knew we would be good spenders and good tippers.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MANCHESTER REGIMENT
A couple of trips to the Med and another to South America and I Joined another Manchester Liner. The Manchester Regiment which at the time was their oldest ship and it showed. It was on the Regiment that I first sailed with Dale Greenhalgh who I subsequently sailed with several time and years later met him when I was selling insurance and he was the northern manager for Godfrey Davis car hire. We remained friends for another twenty five years, at least. In fact until his death. One of the ABs on the Regiment was Bert Jones, another Salford hard man. He spent most of his time trying to impress everybody that he was a bit handy and had spent some time in the ring (boxing. But I think it was the circus) In the seamen’s mess room we had a small grill and toaster for making snacks in the night watches. One tea break I felt a bit peckish so I made myself some cheese on toast. As was my wont I dressed it up a bit with slices of tomato and some pepper(black pepper wasn’t something that ships supplied in those days) and put it on the table while I washed up the cooking utensils. When I turned round Bert was sticking a fork in it and tasting it. When I admonished him he said “if you don’t shut up I’ll throw it through the f*****g port hole.” My reply was to the effect that if he did he would follow it. He did throw it and to this day I can see my beautiful cheese on toast flying through the port hole and the cheese sticking to the security bars that crossed the port. Of course I hit him and we had set too in the mess room while the other deck crew were having their “smoko”(tea break) until somebody suggested we go on deck as we were disturbing their game of cribbage. I wasn’t too happy about this as I thought with a bit of space on deck Bert would give me a good hiding. Him being a boxer. He never laid a hand on me (so it probably was the circus and not the boxing ring), after about ten minutes he suggested we stop and call it a draw, as he’d had enough. I suppose I won that one, apart from the fact that I lost my cheese on toast. And I got another shirt ripped. This is a story that my pal Dale told for years at dinner parties in our post seafaring lives and I must say that over the years the event got more elaborate.
It was while on the Regiment that I met the Thief. We were tied up alongside another liner and I was crossing their deck when a deckhand stopped me and asked if I would keep an eye on the officer that was standing on the wing of the bridge and if he moved I was to bang my foot on the deck as he was going down the hold looking for booty. This guy was well known around Manchester and had apparently done some porridge in his youth. Any how I waited for him to emerge a few minutes later and didn’t think anything of it .A few days later I was in my bunk and he came visiting and left me a suit length of very high quality material which I had made up into a suit which lasted a long time until several years later while working in Germany I had a fight one night and it got ripped. (That’s progess, I, d moved up from shirts to suits)
A few trips later I actually sailed with the thief and one night at sea he invited me along on one of his forays.I,ve always liked an adventure so I went with him. The man was a pro.He took a torch, razor and needle and twine. While loading in Manchester he had obviously done his research and knew which holds held the interesting cargo. He would gently slit the seams on a bale and rummage around to see what was in it and if it didn’t interest him he sewed it up again. If it did contain suit cloth he would take out a few suit lengths and then sew the bale again. This was in the days that all the good suit cloth was going for export to help our balance of payments.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CAXTON
Some time prior to this I had taken up ice skating and had visions of a comedy act on ice and in addition to this had started courting a girl who thought that I should get a shore job. On the basis that if I stayed ashore too long I could get roped in for National Service I thought that I’d test the water and see what it was like working ashore. I tried a job in John Colliers the menswear shop. I spent a month of being shown how to get people to buy suits that intelligent people wouldn’t buy .One day I watched one of the old time salesman selling a suit to a young man.He did everything but do the old music hall ploy of taking a handful of the back of the suit while the punter was looking in the mirror.He did however persuade the kid that it was a “double drape” and that’s what the kids were wearing these days.The suit in question was one that was made to measure for someone who left a deposit while it was being made and never turned up to pay the balance and take the suit(the fashion must have changed in the interim)we got a very high rate of commission on these items and they were always the first suits offered to the unwary and the senior salesmen had first”dibs” on them.The following day the kids mother brought him into the shop and created merry hell and when the manager refused to refund the money she threatened to “punch his lights”.We had a very high class of customer at the top end of Market Street,Manchester in those days. One the skills I aquired in my brief stint there was how to wrap a suit.I got a lot of practice at that as the senior salesmen always passed the wrapping process over to the juniors so that they could attend to the”mugs”.They also taught me how to make the suits look neat on the rails . I went from deep tan to yellow and after about three weeks I went back to sea vowing that I would never be a salesman. Many years later when I was selling insurance many people would agree.
I joined the Caxton which was what we called a “paper boat”. She was owned by one of the newspaper groups who not only owned the papers but the printing business, paper mills and the ships to transport the paper from the mills in Canada. We sailed to Newfoundland or Nova Scotia with no cargo and returned with newsprint. Crossing the north Atlantic in winter “light ship” (empty) was no fun especially as when we got there we were in the back of beyond, Botwood, Newfoundland, where if you wanted a drink you had to find a bootlegger and they usually sold stuff that would blow your head off or we went to St Johns, where there was almost nothing but the paper mill. The only fun we had was, there was a weird guy used to come aboard who claimed he was an escapologist and if we tied him up he could escape from anything. He obviously had some sort of sexual kink and getting tied up turned him on. When he came aboard the Caxton somebody tied him up then threw him in a paint locker (not me honestly) and we all went ashore and forgot about him. He was there until the bosun opened the locker in the morning. When we got back to the UK we docked at Tilbury and I went back to Manchester for a week. While there I arranged for an audition in London for “White Horse Inn on ice” at Earls Court. I turned up at the audition, my first ever, very nervous and got ready for the big comedy act, which turned out funnier than I had anticipated, at least for the watchers. Part of my act was to pretend to trip up and fall onto my hands and then flip up onto my skates, unfortunately I mistimed the landing and fell backwards cracked my head and poured blood all over the ice. They took me in the dressing rooms and found some sort of medic who put two stitches in the back of my head. Apparently Princess Margaret was due to see the show that evening and they had to dig out a large part of the ice and re-freeze it.Surprise, surprise I didn’t get the job, and my shirt was ruined. In addition to this misfortune the skipper of the Caxton wouldn’t let me do the trip and paid me off, also he wouldn’t pay my way back to Manchester. Dale was on that ship as well and that’s another story he told for years at dinner parties.It also became more elaborate over the years.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CASLON
Three weeks later, the stitches out of my head and flat broke after Christmas at home I signed on the Caslon, another “Paper boat”. She was newer than Caxton but just as uncomfortable in a “force eight” in the North Atlantic in winter, light ship. At times it was a nightmare as nothing would stay still. It is hard to imagine how the cook coped for three to four days at a time in the sort of weather we were going through. Finally we were close to land and heading up an inlet to Botwood but it was winter so as we got closer to our destination the ice got thicker. We were still fifty miles from Botwood when we came to a full stop. Stuck in the ice. No matter what we did the skipper couldn’t work his way out of it until after twenty four hours with the threat of getting even more locked in he called for the icebreaker who made a path for us to our destination and when we had loaded up made a path out to the open sea again and into the North Atlantic. With a full load of paper the motion of the ship was a lot better but still not very comfortable
Three trips on the Caslon and with my immaculate timing I changed ships at the end of March, just when we were coming into nice spring weather and the cold winter runs were over for a while.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ARDETTA
Next came the Ardetta that I thought would take me to the Med again but it turned out that she was doing some home trade work first. It was hard dirty work as the skipper had the Dockers working to the last minute when they just walked off the ship and left the clearing up to us. I was on the foredeck with a couple of others and jokingly started a tirade about capitalists and how when the revolution came there would be none of this sort of work done by the crew unless double time was paid. As it happened I was working just below the wheelhouse and the skipper was listening. Having no sense of humour he decided that I was a communist agitator and mentioned it to the chief officer who then braced me as to whether I was a communist or not. This was like manna from heaven. Every time the skipper was is earshot I started my communist spiel
He put up with it for a week and then fired me.I,d only been aboard fourteen days but he paid me off with a months pay just to get rid of me.
Bl**dy Hell John! Just caught up with this. I need some quiet time to relax and enjoy.
Thanks for sharing.
Richard
Remember when we used to have to take a small bottle of water and
a cloth to clean our Slates at School. This was a Primary school in the
country with 11 pupils in total. Happy days:laughing: