Female radio officers at sea mid 70's on tankers before sex disc Act

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Originally Posted by robpage

On tankers from '73 to '75 I would say that by 1975 the old ways were going .

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Re drug taking at sea, Simon Halls book 'Under a Yellow Sky' re his cadetship with Shell Tankers in the early 70's describes one old Shell Tanker with a crew who were split between the older ones he called Alchies and the Younger ones Junkies taking a whole combination of things from smoking wacky Backies to uppers, downers and sniffing in the paint store and also getting hits from the aviation fuel they were carrying. They sniffed from the ullage pipes. To quote, he described on taking a good sniff and then saying to his mates 'Try starboard 3, really good stuff in it, before floating around the deck in Junkie heaven.

I expect I was a bit naïve re that subject and it might have explained some of the odd behaviour. In CP on the tanker Fort Edmonton, one senior cadet did get high having bought the weed from the Panama boatmen. It was brought to my attention by a junior cadet who managed to get him off the bridge when the Capt was on there and then came to me in radio rm as if I should do something to help. I was furious with him and hissed and who gave it to him. The last thing I wanted to do was get involved and then be in trouble as I was on a previous ship for not keeping the Capt informed.

That was on the Fort Kamloops when the ch eng asked me to go down to the crew accommodation and try and split up a fight between one of the engine room dept offs and another 2 ringer, saying they couldn't split them any perhaps a woman might succeed. What he didn't tell me was that a couple of men before me had already been slung down the alleyway and bounced off the bulkhead for interfering. I was now in a difficult situation. If I said no, I was basically admitting that I couldn't act the same way as a male officer if trouble brewed up. Like a fool I went down and within seconds of approaching them I flew down the alleyway and to quote the 4/eng who thought it was hilarious bounced off the bulkhead. I walked off and kept my mouth shut. Unfortunately he didn.t. A few days later the Capt came in the radio room furious with me for not keeping him informed.

...strange story that one lucy drunk or sober if a sparky tried to tell me what to do .....he would have gone back to the shack with a crack....regards cappy

Must have been a Chief engineer oozing oodles of Authority if he had to delegate a R/O to do his business, (in my experience a Sparks was the person with least authority on the ship unless a second sparks was carried which he/she could harass) most, if not all Masters and/or Ch Eng's I know would have been straight down there and logged the silly barstewards and given them a dressing down in a language they understood, sounds as if not only did you sail with a bunch of rapists and misfits you also sailed with whimps. Are you sure you didn't sail on 'The Good Ship Lollipop'

best one loking back was when the cook smashed the 2nd cook with the cleaver then threw it like a tomahawk as he ran away ......the word shot round the cook had gone mad ......the cook then locked himself in his cabin .....along came a very tall thin mate .......who stood as far away from the door as he could .....saying to the big bosun ....now bosun i will kick the door in then you run in and arrest him......even then a titter went round the rest of us ....as in true mn dialogue the the bosunsaid you can eff off ...iwill break the door and you effin arrest him ......atouch of humour even in a very bad situation....regards cappy....who i may say loitered at the back of the proceedings.....but with a brave look on his face

i am beginning to think lucy...you had more happenings at sea in your few years than ....js and ivan put together ....was it alice who said curiouser ..and curiouser...regards cappy

Again Lucy,
I can honestly say that I never ever came across drug taking or tank sniffing.
I dont know where you got your crews from, or were they a bunch of nutters sent to sea by the Courts, to keep the prison population down.
We had many Safety meetings, films, lectures, and ashore we had many three day courses at different venues around the country where we could take our wives, they were entertained with coach trips to places of interest while we had the training.
It is well known that sniffing Hydrogen Sulphide gases from petroleum cargoes can apart from doing Brain Damage cause Death,
I can honestly say, IN ESSO we were profesionals.and behaved as such.
It is little wonder that the British Merchant Navy went into terminal decline with behaviour from crews like that.
Cheers
Brian.

Lucy.

I've been following the saga of your time at sea and concluded it must have been a dreadful time for you. During my time1950/1960's I got invloved in a few escapades but nothing like as happened to yourself. Did your bad luck continue when you left the sea and took shoreside employment.?

John Albert Evans.

Clan line in the mid 1960s still had a few pre war relics held together with in situ metal locking in the engines and lots of concrete on the hull , staffed by some of the Wild Bunch , crazy but happy , I think a lot of B&C was like that , good crowd , even on the King Boats , where a percentage of the crew were clearing up the odd DR or two in their books , Sealink to some extent too was similar , Gulf Oil had all the unhappy brigade , I have sailed with nice nutters but the Gulf Oil nutters were certifiable , I said that to one third engineer who ran from my cabin and returned with a doctors letter less than a year old that certificated him now as sane . Weed smoking was rife amongst the younger men , The smell actually makes me physically sick , and the air conditioning was fully recycled so we all got some , like it or not . I found the weed smokers were nuttier than the average nutter , giving me a lifelong distaste of the habit . The ships were unhappy , the crew unhappy , made worse by circumstances . An afternoon ban on swimming pool usage , so Mrs Captain , Mrs RO , and Mrs Second Engineer could swim in peace . The ABs used to use it as a Deck urinal after that ban , and a medium size shark found itself in there after an anchorage . We were tramping around the Gulf in hurricane season that did not help either getting stuck in two of them , and the crude from Angola stunk of sulphur and had a high gas content so smoking severely restricted because the aft accommodation was bathed in fumes . If the ship had an old Clan Line crew we would have made the best of it and enjoyed the trip , but half the guys were certifiably depressed ., with or without the weed

The one person on a ship in my experience with the least amount of discipiline imposed on them was the R/O. He was always the first down the gangway on arrival and usually the last back. If was asked to do anyhing like tallying cargo etc. depended on his personlal disposition whether he did or not. Most claimed they worked for Marconi if they wanted and would say they had their own job in Radio Room to do if necessary. The only very slight hold you had on them was when they wanted their aerials back up before sailing as this involved pulling up long lengths of wire with sometimes very heavy and sometimes fragile insulators on. However as they had to be up before sailing had to do in any case. However were the one person on a ship who were virtually untouchable by the old mans authority, unless he wanted to make a real issue of it. Most sparkys kept themselves to themselves re shipboard activitys. It was a well known and often repeated joke that they went round the bend after 10 years or so, even talking to some I have watched them repeating the conversation tapping with their hand on something in morse. The one I mentioned in a post who was at loggerheads with the Master was a young lad, I had to borrow 20 pounds off him to enable me to get home from Japan. He followed me off the ship shortly after and came across from Southern Ireland to my home in W.B. to get back and stay a few days. Brian if you read this he never met up with your true love from the Rex to the best of my knowledge. As I said most sparks I met at sea were very independent people. JS

Ref. Previous post I was of course referring to the R/Os of the old school. Nowadays on general shipping dont carry any such person unless are classed an ER/O or whatever they are called. As one one of the old ones has just joined the site recently, on the likes of the rigs etc. just carry a restricted Radio Telephony cert. which used to be a days course and not even that, and if were on a ship an examiner would come on board and see if you were familiar with the workings of the 2182 set etc. and issue a restricted licence. I beleive the R/Os as we knew them ceased to exist in the late 70"s. Another loss on a ship as far as I was concerned as put a different kind of workload on the Bridge watchkeepers, however the powers that be maybe thought as they were supplying you with computerised navigation, they wanted their pound of flesh in return. Also all aerials are now whip aerials and are permanent fixtures. For those who gave the sea away in the 60s and 70s, it bears very little resemblance today of what it used to be. The only aim I had in life in the 80"s onwards was survivng in employment until retiring age which I succeeded in, however it was a hard struggle. JS