Yet even a healthy memory changes in time. Whenever a past event is recalled into our consciousness it is reconstructed, not simply fetched wholesale. Although we may think we’re remembering the same thing each time, we’re probably not. With each revisit we unconsciously strengthen, embellish or prune those synaptic connections, delicately shifting the nature of the memory we’ve constructed. Our memories are not hardwired, but, like our bodies and our life stories, shrink, alter and grow as we do.
Exposure therefore presents itself to us as both a statement and a question. There’s the external event – a turn of fortune that acts outside of our human control to freeze or burn us. Then there comes the forming of our character’s response to it. Our memory of it. Our answer to the question posed by fate. Will it make us shrink, alter or grow?
The answer lies in the application of our existing selves to the challenge of new experience, and the exposition of our evolving human nature shown in the subsequent response.
HISTORY
The Adventurers: James & Owen Joseph McGann, 1901–1920
Thirty-first of March 1901. A census form reveals Eugene McGann, 42, Mary, his wife, 40, and their two boys, James, 19, and Owen Joseph, 17, living in a court dwelling in Whitley Street, part of Liverpool’s north-end Irish enclave. In another year, Whitley Street will be demolished, and they will be evicted. This family has only ever known the sub-let Irish potato plots of Roscommon or the pestilent Liverpool hovel. Their lives, despite occasional bursts of destitute flight, have kept to a familiar and narrow horizon.
Yet change is coming. The McGanns will soon undergo a mental and physical exposure to world events. The force of this malady will threaten the lives and forge the characters of its two youngest members. Before the century is much older, the essential core of both brothers will be assaulted by the icy blast of cold experience. This chapter is their account.
Back in Whitley Street, things looked pretty much as they did when the McGanns first arrived in England in 1864. Yet a closer look at the census form reveals the first stirrings of the changes they were soon to be exposed to. In the column that records occupation, Eugene is listed as a ‘Marine Fireman’. This strange new occupation belonged not to the docks, but to the dank belly of Britain’s great fleet of merchant steamships; coal-powered vessels that plied their trade from the great port on the Mersey to every corner of the globe.
Eugene was a merchant seaman. The McGanns had begun to look further afield for work – away from the casual fortune of the dock gang and the emigration runner. In order to survive, they’d turned their attention to the oceans that fed their city and the world that lay beyond them. James and Owen Joseph would soon follow. The ghetto-bound McGann family had ventured out to sea. They would do so for three generations.
*
The British merchant fleet was the preeminent powerhouse of world trade in this era. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain controlled a third of all the world’s shipping. The decline of sail and the rise of the great coal-powered steamships in the late Victorian decades further consolidated the United Kingdom’s position, with a full 50 per cent of global steam-shipping flying the British flag by the time the McGanns were sitting in Whitley Street. Britain’s steam fleet was the largest and most modern in the world.
So what kind of work did these seafaring McGanns do?
Metal steamships had first been developed as a replacement for wood in the early nineteenth century. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, iron, and later steel, would come to offer a more capacious and less maintenance-heavy alternative. This coincided with a revolution in propulsion with the development of the steam engine. The first domestic steam-powered vessel appeared on a Scottish canal in 1801, and by 1845 Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s giant steamship, the SS Great Britain, was making its maiden voyage across the Atlantic.
The early steamships used large paddle wheels on their port and starboard sides to propel them. However, strain would be placed on the engines if one wheel lifted out of the water and another was submerged by the action of rough seas. In the 1840s, they were replaced by steam-driven screw propellers placed at the stern. This was much more efficient, and the Great Britain would be the first of many screw-driven iron vessels to cross the ocean.
The introduction of metal and steam didn’t spell the immediate end for sails. A stock of coal wouldn’t take a ship very far, so if a journey involved weeks away from reliable supplies, then wind power could provide a free and limitless alternative. The decline of sail would really come after the invention of the triple expansion engine in the 1870s. It greatly increased fuel efficiency by allowing the steam from ships’ boilers to be used three times for engine propulsion before being recycled for heating. A ship could now travel long distances without needing to replenish fuel stocks.
With the decline of sail, the lives of sailors would change profoundly. No longer were men required to labour with rope, pulley and canvas in the exposed elements. Steam propulsion now impelled them to toil away in the dim-lit, blazing hot cacophony of a ship’s boiler room, stoking the furnaces with the coal necessary to boil the water that turned the screw. The close-knit team of men who undertook this grim task were known as the ‘black gang’ – a reference to the sweat-caked coaldust that covered every inch of their flesh. The McGanns were now members of this coal-black maritime family.
A black gang consisted of two main types of worker – a fireman and a trimmer. The fireman was in charge of stoking the coal-fired furnaces to produce steam and maintaining these fires over the long voyage. This was Eugene’s job, and it would later be the principal occupation of both of his sons. This work involved far more than simply throwing coal into a furnace. Ships’ boilers were huge and temperamental beasts. Each one consisted of multiple furnaces and their accompanying pressure gauges and ash pits. Once the fires had been fed, they had to be carefully maintained throughout a shift or watch so that they maintained steam with the hottest, cleanest flame and steady pressure. This was physically demanding work, requiring constant attention and skill in very hot conditions.
In order to keep the furnaces stoked, firemen needed a constant supply of coal. This was the responsibility of the trimmer. A trimmer worked in the coal bunkers and handled the loading, storage and distribution of coal to the firemen. They would use shovels and wheelbarrows to ferry coal around, ensuring that enough was always at a fireman’s feet, and also making sure that the great stacks of coal were evenly distributed or ‘trimmed’ throughout the vessel so that the ship didn’t list to one side with the uneven weight – hence their name. James and Owen Joseph were employed as both trimmer and fireman during their maritime careers, and recent work by maritime history author Richard de Kerbrech provides a fascinating insight into their lives.*
At sea, the black gang would be divided into three sub-gangs that worked the boilers in round-the-clock shifts to keep the engines running constantly. Each gang would do two stretches of four hours per day, with eight hours off between. It was a troglodyte existence. Passengers would very rarely see a fireman or trimmer, as they were confined to the depths of the ship close to their work. Temperatures in a boiler room could reach fifty degrees Celsius, and on the big liners the different boilers kept their work synchronised by use of a timing mechanism that blared out a shrill alarm every ten minutes or so to indicate when the stoking cycle had to be repeated. The time interval shortened if the ship had to go faster. It was the equivalent of the merciless drummer that beat out a rhythm for the slave oarsmen on a Roman galley. If a fireman needed to defecate during this busy shift, then often the only option was to do so on their coal shovel, and dispose of the waste in the furnace. Hygienic, if not exactly genteel …
To endure these conditions, the men drank gallons of honey water and oatmeal and ate like horses between shifts. A particular treat was known as ‘black pan’ – plates of food scraps left by the passengers upstairs, which might be plentiful in seasick weather. Yet despite these feasts, e
ven the fittest would be close to collapse by the end of four hours. Charles Lightoller, officer and famous Titanic survivor, described the condition of the black gang at the end of a typical shift:
It was no uncommon sight to see a man, sometimes two, three or even four in a watch, hoisted up the ash shoot with a bucket chain hooked roughly round under their arm-pits, to be dumped on deck unconscious. A few buckets of water over them and then they were left to recover.
It seemed that the life of my ancestors at sea offered no more respite from toil and squalor than the life they’d left. Yet it would be strangely familiar to them. This was because the black gangs of the global steam age were dominated and controlled by the Liverpool Irish. The great shipping lines insisted on employing these men because, although they could be hard to handle – with a reputation for being violent, militant, drunk and insular – they were equal to the immense physical and mental demands made of them. They did the job that others couldn’t.
There was a certain poetic justice to this. The appalling social conditions that had weaned the men of my family were now a perfect qualification for the hellish demands of coal-fed maritime propulsion. The soot-black heart required to pump the mercantile blood of empire around the veins of its shipping lanes could only be regulated by a community long disparaged as a pestilential curse. The empire’s lepers had become its hidden pacemaker.
Mind you, regulating the black gang itself wasn’t so easy. Maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham described their difficult and often violent temperaments:
Hideous conditions nurtured a breed of ruthless men. On British ships, they were invariably Liverpool-Irish … drunken stokers, sometimes wheeled in barrows back on board ship, used to embark upon fearful battles, going after each other with slice bars, tongs, shovels, anything that came to hand. Mates had a standing order when the black gang fought: close the hatches and stand clear.
Yet the black gang were immensely proud of their ability to keep a steady head of steam, no matter what. They were a rough brotherhood, forged in heat, dirt and common heritage.
Being a black-ganger meant embracing an itinerant and hand-to-mouth existence. Voyages could be months long, and between jobs a fireman or trimmer was rarely retained. This was the age before social welfare; so once ashore, a seaman had to get himself on another voyage quickly, especially if he had a wife and large family to support back in Liverpool. Black-gangers were paid off at the end of each job, but this could quickly be squandered. Southampton resident Alfred Fanstone observed firemen coming off a voyage in those days: ‘They all came home like walking skeletons … and they had one glorious booze up, which led to fighting, and then off they went again.’
As a precaution against their own natures, married men could opt to have part of their wages allotted to their families in advance. This system had been introduced because many crewmen would pawn their best clothes when going to sea in order for their families to feed themselves in their absence. They’d then reclaim the clothing when they were paid off.
This wasn’t yet a concern for James or Owen Joseph. In the first decade of the twentieth century they were single men, and despite the rough conditions of their life, their world was expanding, exposing their minds to the bright light of new experience. James and Owen Joseph would routinely circumnavigate the planet in an age when others of their social class were confined to their immediate streets or fields. Once ashore, their exposure to the blazing Antipodes or the humid, fragrant tropics must have baptised their senses with a fresh synaptic burst of new memory. How would they respond? How would it influence their actions?
For Owen Joseph, the introduction to this new world was a baptism of fire. I first found him at sea in 1904, three years after the census in Whitley Street. He was employed as a young trimmer on the SS Tropic, making its maiden voyage from Liverpool to Australia. It was an eventful journey. When the ship finally reached Australia on 3 September, the Adelaide Advertiser described its ordeal: ‘On August 13 a terrific west gale, with squalls of hurricane force and mountainous seas was encountered, lasting 48 hours.’
I try to imagine it. Mountainous seas, experienced deep in the fiery confines of a boiler room. Young Owen Joseph, his world rocked almost to vertical by the forces of the storm, struggling in the failing light as the coal spills and shifts, and the men shout curses and orders. He’s unable to see the enemy that shakes him – adrenaline driving him onwards through the fear and the cries and the darkness. One imagines that the fitful attempts at sleep between the chaos of working in a storm for two solid days would torture the young mind even more than the work.
Was it here that Owen Joseph first developed a need to absent himself from the close confinement of others when his life required it?
When the voyage was over, Owen Joseph emerged into the bright light of New South Wales, newly paid off, his few possessions in his sack. Sydney’s cramped dockside dwellings beckoned, as did the bars and brothels that offered to relieve him of his wages. If a black-ganger found himself paid off in a distant port, he’d look for a new ship to take him back to Liverpool, or else onwards around the world.
Before the First World War, both James and Owen Joseph were familiar lodgers in Sydney and the other Antipodean ports. In August 1909, James arrived in New South Wales as a trimmer on the SS Afric, via Cape Town and Melbourne. At the same time, his brother Owen Joseph was working a remarkable passage as a fireman on the SS Oravia, heading back to Liverpool from Callao in Peru, via Iquique, Antofagasta, Valparaiso, Port Stanley in the Falklands, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, St Vincent, Lisbon, Vigo, La Coruña and La Pallice. The brothers never worked together, but instead zigzagged across the oceans of the world, often at opposite ends of it. As the Edwardian age drew to a close, their bachelor lives were as rough and free as any McGann before them, and probably freer than most who came after. In their own shaky hand they began to sign their names on crew manifests, rather than the customary ‘x’. They’d learned to read and write; new synaptic networks flourishing in young brains gorged on new experience. Although they were poor, they were masters of their own destiny and members of an adventurous fraternity. A new kind of family.
It would soon be the only family they had. In January 1910, their father Eugene died in Liverpool of phthisis pulmonalis – an antiquated term for tuberculosis. Just a year later their mother Mary would follow. The boys were now orphans.
They quickly returned to their new family. I found Owen Joseph in Sydney in early 1912, arriving on the steamer SS Karori from New Zealand. Meanwhile, James was leaving South Africa on the Kinfauns Castle bound for Southampton, arriving in the Hampshire port on 23 March. In spite of the recent death of Edward VII and the passing of their own parents, the world must have felt as rigid and secure as the maritime hierarchy they toiled under. Their lives were poor and tough, but they had their place. The twentieth century had so far shown no intention of disrupting the steady assumptions of the age that had preceded it.
So far.
A bittersweet privilege of historical hindsight is the ability to gaze back at lives lived in blissful ignorance of events about to unfold. It might be the Pompeiian citizen waking to hear Vesuvius rumbling; the American president waving from a Dallas car; or the Austrian archduke alighting in Sarajevo. We don’t see history coming until it’s pitched us into its icy water. As Owen Joseph McGann arrived in Sydney, his world had just two years left before a colossal war would rip its assumptions to pieces.
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As kids, we only had one picture of my paternal grandfather. But what a picture it was. He’s posing in a photographer’s studio in full army uniform, ready to go off to the Great War. Many British families have a similar photo: the optimism of the new recruit, before slaughter took their bravado away. Yet there’s a glaring anomaly in the image that marks it out from the standard Kitchener fare. Owen Joseph is wearing the wide-brimmed hat and khaki of the Australian infantry.
‘He jumped ship in Australia, and signed up early in the
war,’ said Auntie Mary.
After that, he’d apparently been posted right back to a training camp near Liverpool, where the superior pay, easy discipline and healthy rations of the Aussies made him the envy of the British recruits from his old neighbourhood. ‘They were so jealous, some of the lads thumped him for bragging!’ said my uncle Jim.
I was curious. How did Owen Joseph end up in the Australian infantry? How did exposure to that awful war mark him? Where did he serve? Was it the gruesome cauldron of Gallipoli, or the churned mud of France? Would his exposure to that experience be as colourful as the uniform suggested?
Actually it would, although not in the way I’d imagined …
The earliest record of Owen Joseph’s military service is the ‘attestation paper’ he signed on his enlistment into the Australian Imperial Force at Warwick Farm, New South Wales, on 15 September 1915. He’d been staying with his brother James in Kent Street, Sydney, down by the harbour. He’s signed proudly as ‘O. J. McGann’. The war has already been raging for a year, so it’s not the hasty impulse of a fresh-faced recruit. He knows what awaits him. Did he jump ship to sign up like Mary said? It seems plausible. Both brothers plied their trade in Australian waters, and so Owen Joseph may simply have decided that enough was enough, and his country needed him back in Europe.
Whatever the reasons, Owen Joseph was now a private in the 2nd Battalion of the Australian infantry. He set sail on a troop ship to England and, just as Auntie Mary said, he was posted to a training camp in Warrington, near Liverpool. However, things soon took on a much less heroic tone. After just eighty-three days in the Aussie Army, Owen Joseph went walkabout: nine days absent without leave in early December. A disciplinary charge form reveals his docked pay as punishment.
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