by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
As we scrambled aboard, sweating and swearing in the rain, hauling our gear up a gangway perversely designed, so it seemed, for the passage of a single drunk, our nostrils were assailed by exotic smells. There were scents of copra, the more pungent whiff of rubber and the faint, elusive aroma of tea, all coming from the ventilators that found the upper deck along the centre-castle alleyway. No trace of these commodities remained on board, yet their lingering perfumes had an odd, nostalgic power. We leaned on the rail, pausing to catch our breath, with two decks still to go.
Below us a narrow strip of water ran between ship and quay where the floating wooden fenders held the hull clear of the granite coping stones. The vibration of the generators which provided auxiliary power to the domestic services of the ship set up tiny ripples in the filthy water and these radiated and reverberated in a mathematically precise wave-form between the hull and dock-wall. From the quay dockers stared incuriously back at us from the warehouse doors, having watched our antics scaling the gangway with our traps.
‘Bloody class warfare,’ growled the Purser scowling at them. The remark set us in motion again. As we lumbered up to the promenade deck and negotiated the final ladder to the boat deck the squeal of more taxis braking sounded from the quay now far below us. While we gasped on the boat-deck at last, a crane driver ascended to his cab, silhouetted against a solitary patch of blue sky. We watched as the tall jib jerked into motion and the weighted hook plumbed the quay. The midshipmen were pulling their gear out of two taxis, the senior was waving the crane-driver round to where his companions were manoeuvring their trunks into a purloined cargo-net. We watched dumbly as their personal effects were hoisted smoothly onto the deck alongside us, to be dumped right outside the half-deck door. Calling to his men, the Senior Midshipman took the gangway steps two at a time. I noticed the raw recruit was left to pay the taxi. The lounging dockers grinned up at us. One sensed a kind of solidarity, abandoned when one gained one’s first ‘ticket’.
‘That young man’, said the Second Mate, ‘has more leadership potential than is good for him… ah, Middy!’
The Senior Midshipman had reached the boat-deck unencumbered and unwinded.
‘Sir?’ He looked round at us, eyes wary, taking in the pile of trunks.
‘Bring our gear along to the officers’ accommodation, please.’ The Second Mate led us forward, beneath the monolithic blue funnel that reared above us.
‘Time you buggers arrived.’
The preoccupied Scot had shed his crumpled suit. He wore instead a threadbare reefer uniform, the three gold bars on his sleeve interlaced with a diamond. He seemed to have grown taller and younger, uncoiled from the stooped self-effacement of his civilian anonymity in the Shipping Office. The small, neat black knot of his tie nestled under a starched detachable collar and bespoke a precise man. The Scots accent was muted, yet carried a weight of authority and one noticed for the first time a pair of powerful shoulders. He produced a filled pipe, tamped it and lit a match, eyeing us over the undulating flame. He was blocking our entry into the officers’ alleyway; we were exposed on the boat-deck and the rain continued to bucket down, despite the expanding patch of blue sky that indicated an approaching shift in the wind. He was provoking a response. I had paid the taxi; it was time rank took on its obligations. We looked at the Second Mate expectantly.
‘I’m sorry sir… slight delay getting our gear together…’
We ‘sir-ed’ the mate in those days, particularly under such circumstances.
‘Bullshit.’
The word fell athwart our hawse like a cannon shot, helped by the explosion of smoke from his mouth. But it was said without malice; he knew full well where we had been and was only letting us know he knew.
‘Come on, get out of that bloody rain…’
* * *
Our arrival displaced the coasting crew. They drifted away, on leave, to courses, or to ship-keep the other ‘Bluies’ loading along the dock. Most of the final cargo supervision here was undertaken by the Company’s own stevedores. One by one the hatches filled, the beams and hatch-boards were shipped, the triple tarpaulins pulled over and Chippy and his mate drove home the hardwood wedges around each coaming. Previously swung untidily outboard clear of the access the hatches in this port of tall, dockside cranes, the derricks were now brought inboard and lowered into their crutches by the Bosun and his ‘Crowd’. We mates occupied ourselves in pre-sailing preparations, familiarising ourselves with the ship. Although an individual, she was one of a numerous class, almost all identical in build and with the richly unpronounceable names of Greek mythology. The Homeric nomenclature was indiscriminate in its choice. Alfred Holt, rating his great adventure into ship-owning akin to the stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey that had thrilled his youth, had named his first Far East bound ship Agamemnon. This heroic strain had been followed ever since and there had always been an Agamemnon, an Achilles and an Ajax in the fleet. Equally valiant were the newer Menelaus and Maron, or the big steamships on the Australian service, the Hector, Helenas and the lovely Nestor. But there were less glorious names like our own and Cyclops, the hideous Gorgon or the Stygian Charon, which carried thousands of unwitting Australian tourists to Singapore and, appropriately, livestock for mass slaughter. There was also the ignominious Elpenor, named after a bibulous swineherd who fell from a roof while sleeping off an excess of wine and broke his neck. ‘The hand of some god was my undoing, and measureless wine,’ he was supposed to have pronounced as his own epitaph; it could have been that of many sailors.
Like the men who commanded them, some of these ships acquired their own nicknames. Ascanius was known as the Ashcan; the Dolius, the Dolly-arse, and a Yankee pilot had unforgettably christened the Adrastus, the A.D. Rastus. The Australian dockers called the Ixion the Nine-to-one-on and their Merseyside brethren referred to the huge, twin-funelled Gunung Djati as the Jam Butty, not merely because of the assonance, but because her all-white topsides were bisected by a thick maroon ribband. She was unique in the fleet in possessing two funnels and being named after a Javanese mountain holy to Muslims. Built pre-war in Germany as the liner Pretoria, she had become the British Government’s troopship Empire Orwell before Holt’s purchased her to fit her for the carriage of Indonesian pilgrims on the Java to Jeddah ‘Hajdi’ service. This run was one of several foreign routes worked by ships exiled far from the ‘mainline’ traffic. Often older ships were pensioned off onto these blue-water services, but all bore the distinctive funnels that had distinguished Holt’s ships ever since, it was said, Alfred Holt had discovered a tin of blue paint in a coaster he re-engined experimentally at the beginning of his career. With the exception of the Glen and Shire Line names, Holt’s had absorbed all their rivals under this splendidly distinctive device.
* * *
The clear fresh weather that replaced the rain of joining day held until the final hatch was almost completed, then disappeared as the last Ford car was rolled over the floor of Guinness cases in No 4 centre-castle deck. As ‘the Crowd’, the generic name for the deck-crew, secured the ship for sea, a warm front rolled a grey blanket of stratus over the Birkenhead sky. Herring gulls wheeled above us, ridge-soaring the updrafts as the westerly gale slammed against the cranes and sheds and the superstructures of the ships, their gapes wide in the strident half-laugh, half-scream of their cry.
‘All old Blue-Flue bosuns,’ remarked the Mate casually, glad to see the last dockers off his ship, ‘waiting to crap over my decks…’ He looked ruefully at the begrimed teak planking and shook his head slowly. ‘Go and test the steering gear.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Across the oil-slicked and polluted water of Vittoria Dock Clan Ranald’s lascars were getting her derricks down. She too would be sailing on the evening’s high water.
The last dribbles of cargo came aboard, consisting of valuables to be locked away in the ship’s strongrooms; the personal effects of a Ghurka officer arrived in an army truck, a single, unspecified
crate in a van, delivered by two bewildered, donnish young men and consigned to the University of Singapore.
‘What’s in dat, den?’ asked an inquisitive seaman leaning on his broom as two dockers pushed it behind the massive steel doors of the poop locker. One of the young men stepped forward to explain. It was obviously an enthusiasm of his.
‘Hey, Wack, gerron wiv it, eh?’ The Bosun’s Mate, sometimes known by the ancient term of ‘Lamptrimmer’, chased the man’s unwilling feet along the deck with the jet of his wash-deck hose, making sure I was splashed as I went aft to test the steering gear with the Second Engineer. We spent the forenoon in such tests and checks. Above the bridge the radar scanner had begun to rotate and there were new noises about the ship.
At lunch Captain Richards appeared for the first time, accompanied by his wife and a shy, doe-eyed daughter.
‘You know what they say about Welsh girls, don’t you?’ whispered the Third Mate, nodding in the direction of Miss Richards.
‘No, what?’
‘Pious in chapel, astute in the market and frantic in bed…’ His voice was a fair imitation of the Bosun’s aspirated accent and his eyes twinkled as we giggled obligingly, attracting a glare from China Dick. The new midshipman, just beginning to enjoy the raw masculine banter, allowed his grin to linger a second too long and coloured violently.
After lunch our dozen passengers embarked and we were occupied with the inspection, a departure ritual second only to signing-on, but this one a family affair. Senior staff of the Company, including one of the managers, walked round the ship with the Master, the Chief Engineer and the Chief Steward. All three were in spotless uniforms and, similarly attired, we stood respectfully at various points about the ship and shook hands, opened doors or answered questions in deference to those who paid the assembled pipers. If signing-on had been the bureaucratic start of the voyage, this was its spiritual kicking off point.
At dusk the oily water of the dock was churned to a yeast by the appearance of a covey of Rea’s tugs. Apple garth and Reagarth were to attend Antigone; the others stopped off the Clan Ranald. At 1800 the pilot boarded and we were called to stations by a single long blast of the Mate’s whistle.
I escorted the Master’s wife and daughter ashore, read the departure draft and dipped the hydrometer in the bucket of dock-water hauled on deck for me by the Junior Midshipman. He thought he was doing penance for his lese-majesty in the saloon and I explained: ‘The density of dock or river water is sometimes less than that of pure sea-water. If we were loaded to our marks, we’d be allowed to submerge them by a calculated amount, so that when we got into the open sea the greater buoyancy of the salt water would raise the ship to her Plimsoll line…’ He frowned. The physics lab transposed uneasily to the windswept deck of a ship in the gathering darkness of sailing day, the bucket of grimy water between us an unimpressive piece of scientific apparatus.
‘You see,’ I pressed on, ‘it takes just over three hundred tons of cargo to sink this ship an inch in the water. We call this figure “tons per inch immersion”, or TPI…’
I waited for intelligence to kindle above the acne.
‘But we’re not loaded to our marks…’ he said uncertainly.
‘No, quite right, but we’re obliged to record the density of the water in which we read our departure draft and display the form in the mates’ alleyway just so that your mother knows that you aren’t about to drown.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s a Board of Trade requirement.’
He frowned. ‘You mean a Department of Transport requ…’
‘Smart-arse… that’s what the Government currently call it. Last year it was the Department of Trade, next year it’ll be the Ministry of Transport. It’s all very confusing, so Jack calls it the Board of Trade, then we all know what we’re talking about. Okay?’
‘Yes sir.’
He had not noticed the last ropes were being let go for he jumped when the Supertyfon siren blasted the news of our departure over the indifferent roofs of Birkenhead. A clatter of pigeons whirred up against a small patch of fading daylight that showed briefly through the thick clouds: shadows began to angle across the deck as the shore lights slid past. The two tugs hauled us out of our berth and then above us, leaning over the bridge-wing, we heard the Pilot.
‘Dead slow astern, sir.’
The order was repeated faintly and there came the jangle of telegraph bells, the hiss of the compressed air turning the diesel to ignition and then the rumble of the Burmeister and Wain.
‘We’re off.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Right. Chuck that lot over the wall.’ He hesitated. ‘Back where it came from,’ I explained.
‘Yes sir.’
‘And for goodness sake say “aye, aye, sir”.’
‘Yes sir.’
We towed out through the East Float, paused in the Albert Lock, then continued astern into the Mersey. The dark water of the river was ‘standing’; it was exactly high water slack. As we cast off the tugs and squared away to proceed down-stream, a hunter’s moon emerged from behind the clouds, briefly silhouetting the famous skyline on the opposite bank: the Custom House, the Cunard Building and the strange, aquiline cormorants atop the Royal Liver Building. It was unkindly said of these that they only flapped their wings when a virgin passed beneath them.
Beyond the waterfront the exciting heart of the city beat with a new vigour quite divorced from the commercial stolidity of the business quarter. Liverpool had, for a while, eclipsed London as the source of a generation’s identity. It was the era of the Beatles and the ‘Mersey sound’. We had Liverpool in white-painted letters around our cruiser stern. It gave us a vicarious authority, a passport more potent and better understood than the tired old ensign that tore at its halliards aft. But this was also an era of strikes, of dockside discontent and social malaise. Already, on that evening of departure, the seeds were germinating for Liverpool’s sad decline.
A brightly lit Mersey ferry dodged under our stern. We caught a glimpse of long hair streaming in the wind as two girls waved saucily at us. They had a transistor radio between them and the thin strains of Lennon and McCartney came to us before the wind snatched them away.
‘Hey, give the judies a wave, then,’ said a seaman cheekily, coming aft from his station.
As we increased speed and the shores of Bootle and New Brighton fell astern, we were exposed to the full fury of the gale as it tore across the shallows of Mockbeggar Sands. I dismissed the Junior Midshipman and he went off to the half-deck to occupy himself with the newly acquired skill of rolling his own cigarettes. I joined the Mate on the bridge where he had just arrived from the forecastle, his station for leaving and entering port.
‘Pour us a cup of tea, Laddie.’
On the starboard bridge-wing, behind the bellied stretch of the canvas dodger, Captain Richards and the Pilot leaned on the teak caprail. I took the mug of tea to the Mate, who stood at the wheelhouse door. I sensed a sea-change as profound as the strange transmogrification that had occurred on his first coming aboard. He stared astern, his face a pale oval in the gloom.
‘Farewell Lancashire,’ he intoned with an exaggerated, melancholic solemnity that I was to learn was characteristic of him, ‘where the moors come down from the hills and the whores come down from the mills.’
I knew, for all the crudity of the familiar doggerel, that I was about to share a watch with a romantic.
Our passage seawards was a long curve north and then westwards down the deep-water channel that was maintained by submerged training walls and marked by a line of flashing buoys. The ebb tide was now away, carrying us rapidly downstream and augmenting the power of our thundering diesel-engine. On the horizon the revolving beams of the Bar lightvessel stabbed the darkness. The deck moved under our feet as the ship began a gentle pitching, and spurts of white water foamed out from her bow. Out of the windy darkness the red and white lights of the cutter cruising on the pilot station emerged f
rom the cluster of lights marking the ships anchored on the Bar awaiting berths. Antigone did not slow; we would carry our pilot as far as Holyhead.
Pilots never superseded the ship’s own staff. They were logged as ‘advising’ the master; but companies like Holt’s appropriated their own pilots to assist their ships in and out of ports like Liverpool, London and Glasgow. These ‘Choice Pilots’ were regarded by many shipmasters as Company spies, boarding inward vessels to see whether the master was in liquor and reporting secretly to their respective headquarters if they thought him incompetent. Pilots, though experienced deep-water mariners often in possession of master’s certificates, had rarely served in a higher capacity than first mate and were therefore viewed with some suspicion by men in command of ships, whose lives were utterly committed to the sea. Pilots were victims of one of those odd, deep-rooted prejudices that flourish at sea, regarded as mere amphibians who had dodged the issue. But caution and Company rules obliged a master to ship a pilot where port regulations did not, and usually their services were sterling.
As the pitching hull of the lightvessel fell astern, the water streaming from her hawse-pipe as she pitched at her mooring, the bridge reverberated to the triple ring of ‘full speed away’ on the engine-room telegraph. Antigone cleared Liverpool Bay and headed out into the wild Irish Sea.