Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent

by John W Green

  The monotonous routine of the coal run consisted of six days loading at the coal wharf, six days sailing to Colombo, nine days of unloading, and then six days sailing back to Calcutta. Whenever the ship made its way up or down the river Hoogli, with the pilot on board, there was a fixed radio procedure which applied to all vessels navigating the river. This meant that I had to be on radio watch for the whole of the length of the river. Occasionally this provided some relief from the monotony; sometimes there were interesting events or sights as we made our way along the river. As the radio room was next to the bridge house, I had a bird’s eye view of what was happening.

  On one of our trips down the river, the early light of dawn was just making its presence felt and there was a slight mist along the rim, where the river shared a border with the surrounding jungle. The silence and calm were broken only by the lazy thumping of the ship’s engine. It was so calm that the river looked like a giant mirror. As I was gazing at the river bank, there in the quiet morning mist, I saw, and watched for about half a minute, a tiger slowly make its way along the bank of the river. Then, with no apparent movement, it slowly melted into the jungle background without so much as a backward glance, and disappeared from sight. The noise of our ship had disturbed its early morning prowl.

  On another occasion the action was far more dramatic. The pilot was navigating the fully laden Padana down the river: at one of the many bends, he gave the command ‘ten degrees to port.’ The secunny on the wheel either didn’t hear the order correctly, or he just made a mistake, and went to turn ten degrees to starboard. The third mate, who was on watch, hurled himself across the bridge, pushed the secunny off the ship’s wheel and corrected the heading. As we were fully laden, and despite the fact that we were moving quite slowly, the ship had considerable momentum and the change of course took what seemed like an age to take effect as the muddy bank loomed nearer and nearer, ready to grasp, embrace and swallow our misdirected ship. In reality it was probably only a minute before the ship slowly began to turn away from the threatened menacing embrace. It was a really close call, but nearly doesn’t count.

  Just after we had dropped off the pilot on one of our trips to Colombo, when we were about ten miles out into the Bay of Bengal, we passed an unfortunate water-buffalo swimming south (next stop Antarctica). It was on this same run, when we were about halfway to Colombo, that we encountered a huge shoal of porpoises. It seemed to stretch for about half a mile on either side of the ship. The interesting fact was that you could smell them, and they stayed with the ship for about a quarter of an hour. It was quite common - and no doubt still is - to see porpoises or dolphins accompanying ships. Often we saw at least half a dozen or so, swimming in the bow wave of the ship. It was fascinating to see these animals at night when they would shine with a phosphorescent glow, like some loosely attached pale-green parking lights waving about under the water at the bow of the ship.

  In Colombo there were no jetties and the Padana, like other ships, would anchor in the harbour, to load and off-load our cargo from and into smaller vessels. To get ashore it was necessary to use the services of one of a number of small rowing boats known as ‘bumboats’. To summon one these boats during the day, a sequence of flags had to flown from the mast. At night, a sequence of lights was required. When I was about to go ashore with one of the deck officers one evening, because I was already dressed to go and he was still getting ready, he said to me: ‘get them to haul up red over white over red lights.’ I went to the bridge and told the duty secunny to put those lights up, which he duly did. Shortly after this a police launch arrived alongside; they came on board and asked what the problem was, pointing to the lights. It turned out that it should have been white over red over white. When I told the deck officer, all he said was ‘oops!’ I think it was a genuine mistake, and that he was not just trying to set me up, although it was quite customary to play tricks on one another during the long tedious spells at sea.

  It was now the end of May 1954, and this trip turned out to be the last time that the Padana did the ‘coal run’. Also on this trip, when we were anchored in Colombo, there was a French cargo ship anchored nearby, and it was being used to carry French Legionnaires. They must have been packed on board like cattle or like slaves on a slave ship. I don’t know whether it was the cigarettes that they smoked or not, but it had a quite distinctive odour. We later discovered the legionnaires were being repatriated from Indochina, after being defeated by the Viet Minh at the disastrous battle of Dien Bien Phu. When we were ashore in any of the bars where the French Legionnaires were also drinking, the most striking feature about them was that there was not a complete one among them. Each of them, or so it seemed, appeared to be missing either an eye, a hand, an arm, a foot, or a leg.

  Going Native

  After five months of carting coals to Colombo, we were off to Africa again; this time we were to go first to Lorenzo Marques. I suppose the signs were there that indicated the Padana was coming to the end of her useful life, in as much as the voyage took twenty-one days, despite the fact that, for most of the trip, the sea was dead calm. We sailed across the Indian Ocean for days on end: it really was beautiful, especially at night on the first watch (20:00 to midnight). As it was a calm sea and there was effectively no light pollution, the clear black sky with its myriad of points of light and familiar constellations including the Southern Cross, appeared to uninterruptedly and relentlessly rotate about us. Many other things made this trip a memorable one: the phosphorescent streams of star-like points of light, glistening and sparkling in the wake of the ship; the luminescent phosphor sparkling in the ship’s bow wave; and the occasional visiting porpoises illuminating the water alongside and in our bow wave. It was a very long voyage and we only had one glimpse of land, when we passed Diego Garcia - it appeared like a series of dots which, as we approached closer, turned out to be a small line of trees in the middle of nowhere. Later, during the Cold War, this little collection of islands was to become a focus of attention when the inhabitants were summarily expelled, and the islands were taken over by America and used as a submarine and air-base. Why anyone would want to live in such a remote place is difficult to understand, but I guess home is home. I would imagine that Diego Garcia must rank very high in the top-ten league of the most undesirable postings in the American armed services.

  The euphoria we felt on seeing land soon disappeared as the second part of this voyage got underway. We were getting close to Madagascar when the Captain was taken ill. It was suspected that he might have appendicitis, so we changed course and eventually anchored off Diego Suarez, the most northerly port in Madagascar. I sent several radio messages to the local shore station there, telling them that we were in urgent need of medical assistance. I even tried using some of my schoolboy French, but all to no avail. They effectively ignored us. Fortunately the skipper told us that he was feeling better and thought he was fit enough for us to continue, so we resumed our journey to Lorenzo Marques.

  Our troubles were not yet over. We were just over one day’s sailing from our destination when the ship developed a problem in the engine room. The weather was no longer quiet, the sea was no longer calm and the waves were about six feet high. The problem actually was not in the engine room but in the propeller shaft, where the governor on the shaft had failed. Because of this, every time the propeller came out of the water, the ship shook itself in the manner of wet dog emerging from the sea. The whole ship shook and shuddered alarmingly. The engine revs had to be reduced in order to try to stop the shuddering and juddering, to prevent the ship from damaging itself. However, this meant that it became impossible to keep the ship heading into the waves, and this resulted in the ship rolling about all over the place. All of the deck officers had a go at being helmsman; I even had a go at trying to keep the ship facing into the waves, but it was just not possible. In reality if the Indian secunnys who were well experienced at steering the ship couldn’t manage it, there was
no way any of us could have done it. The ship was in Delagoa Bay, the shores of which were very rocky and it was a bit of a ships’ graveyard. The skipper, who was now much improved, decided to send a message to the agents, first to let them know we would be late in arriving and secondly to inform them of our plight.

  I am not sure if it was the problem with the engine that had altered the ship’s mains supply, but when I switched on the main transmitter it blew up. So I switched over to the auxiliary or standby transmitter ... bang! That went out also.

  I had been on the ship nine months by now and knew my way around most of the ship’s nooks and crannies, except the engine room, and on one of my exploratory investigations I had discovered an old lifeboat transmitter in a storage locker. These transmitters only had a line-of-sight range, which would be about 25 miles. It was here that some of my RAF training came into play. I decided to hook up this lifeboat transmitter to the main aerial and tune it to the ship’s aerial, to get a longer range. I proceeded to have a go at ‘jury rigging’ it. The captain became very interested in what I was doing. Despite his recent medical problem, he ended up sitting cross-legged on the radio-room floor cranking the tiny handle of the little yellow kidney-shaped transmitter which was about the size of a small case, while I tapped out the message on the button that acted as the Morse key. Fortunately I still had a working radio receiver and I was able to get a message to Lorenzo Marques, and to confirm it, at a distance of just over 75 miles.

  Later that day, because none of his engine room officers had been able to repair the fault, the Chief Engineer crawled down the propeller drive shaft tunnel, which was a very confined claustrophobic and hot environment: he spent almost twenty-four hours non-stop in there, but he managed to repair the fault.

  When he came out, he looked as if he had lost stone in weight, and he said he was starving. It was the middle of the day but the captain said: ‘what do you want for breakfast Chief?’ ‘A dozen egg omelette Skipper,’ he replied, and that is exactly what he had. The man was a hero.

  I had got know the Chief Engineer quite well. Many an evening I would sit chewing the rag with him, because it so happened that when we were in certain time zones, my watches gave me free time that coincided with the Chief Engineer’s off-watch time. We would order a case of 24 sodas, and between us we would work through a bottle of whisky, or at the very least the best part of it. Interestingly he had a remarkable talent that I have never seen anyone else perform. On at least half a dozen occasions when I had left, about midnight, he would be sitting in a chair near his open cabin door, asleep in an alcohol-induced slumber, holding a half-filled tumbler of whisky and soda. The next morning, when I passed his cabin to go on watch at eight o’clock, he would still be sitting there asleep, with the half-filled glass still in his hand. I mentioned this to another of the engineering officers at one time, who said the Chief was well known for doing this, and was known as ‘the Chief who could hold his drink’. To this day I still remember his favourite saying: ‘by and by every day will be just like Sunday and every Sunday just like Christmas Day.’

  The second engineer was also was quite a character. He had a particularly amusing party piece, perhaps not so amusing to cat lovers. He would play the ship’s cat. That is, he would dress up in his tartan kilt, put the cat under his arm, and then put the tip of the cat’s tail in his mouth. Before the cat could scramble free, he would walk up and down biting on the tail, and the cat would oblige by doing quite a realistic a bagpipe imitation.

  Not long after the Chief had fixed the governor, it became possible to increase the engine speed and steer the ship. We had drawn much closer to the shore: the rocks were quite visible, less than three miles away, and we were all pleased to be sailing away from them. When we arrived in Lorenzo Marques the next morning, after the captain had gone ashore to deal with the company’s business, all the officers - almost to a man - went ashore. If truth were known, we all had had our doubts about ever reaching port. We took over one of the bars near the harbour and got seriously drunk on onion beer. It may sound disgusting, but it turned out to be not too bad ... after the first few. That day we lived on the free bar snacks and lots of beer, only returning to the ship about midnight.

  After three days, during which we unloaded and loaded our cargo and had the transmitters repaired by the local Marconi people, we started again to make our way up the east coast of Africa, with brief two-day stops to pick up cargo at Mozambique, Nacala, Port Amelia, Ibo and finally at Mombasa, before heading back across the Indian ocean and the Arabian sea, to Cochin on the west coast of India and then round the tip of India and Ceylon, up the Bay of Bengal, and once again to Calcutta, where we collected a cargo for Colombo - not coal this time, thank goodness.

  When we were in Colombo this time, I was in town near the port when two American ladies came up to me and said: ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘I should hope so,’ I replied. ‘I am English.’ They went on to ask me directions and I was able to give them a detailed answer. I had been on a tramp-ship for nearly a year and I suddenly realised that I had started to go native. Gone were the days when I would venture ashore looking like Lieutenant Pinkerton from Madam Butterfly. I took stock of my attire: I was dressed in bright yellow shorts which were more like swimming trunks, a blue-and-white floral shirt with locally bought native flip flops, and I was wearing round green-tinted sunglasses with a wire frame, which I had bought in Japan and which looked very oriental: they made me look a bit like Hirohito. Together with what passed for a haircut that had been done on board by an Indian crew member, I suppose it was quite understandable that they were surprised when I said that I was English.

  On the Way to Mandalay

  Leaving Colombo, this time we journeyed north-east to Burma, to pastures new. Well, not so much pastures as paddy fields. We were headed for Moulmein to collect a cargo of rice. When we reached Burma we sailed up the river to Moulmein and anchored near the warehouses and small jetty. To get to and from the shore, again it was necessary to call upon the services of the bumboats. We spent almost two weeks loading our cargo, during which time, on one day, I was fortunate enough to be taken on a ‘personal guided walking-tour’ along Pagoda Ridge. We went into all the pagodas; they were very impressive and quite beautiful.

  Another impressive feature of the area was the nature of the sunsets. Possibly it was the extensive area of green vegetation, but whatever the reason, at sunset the sky - with a large orange setting sun - took on a tint of apple green. It was quite easy to see how this would be the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’ which starts -

  By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,

  There’s a Burma Girl a-settin and I know she thinks o’ me;

  For the wind is in the palm-trees and the temple-bells they say:

  ‘Come you back you British soldier come you back to Mandalay!’

  Most evenings at sunset the second mate and I would lean over the side of the ship’s bridge just watching the sunset, by the old Pagodas and look lazy at the sea.

  We did have a little problem in Moulmein when, one night under the cover of darkness, a couple of local ‘entrepreneurs’ paddled out to the Padana. One of them must have climbed up the anchor chain and undone one of the hawsers that were used when we tied up alongside. As we were at anchor, the rope was not in use. The uninvited guest must have passed one end down to his accomplice in the boat, and they were in the process of carefully and quietly pulling the heavy rope off the ship. But not quietly enough, because the deck officer on watch became alerted to what was going on and informed the captain, who instructed the officer of the watch to have an anchor link dropped into their boat. This order was duly carried out, and it resulted in a very large hole in the bottom of their boat which then rapidly sank in what was quite a fast-flowing river. The occupants of what had once been a boat were pulled on board the ship and handed over to the local police. The un
expected outcome of this was that the captain was called to account over the incident and compensation had to be paid to the ‘two men in a boat’.

  After Moulmein the ship’s orders took us to Rangoon, where we anchored out in the harbour. One evening I went ashore on my own, as I occasionally did, and in a bar I happened to meet up with some other merchant navy officers from one of the ships which had berthed alongside. Well I was drinking and chatting, and swapping experiences with three of them, and, a bit like Cinderella, I failed to keep my eye on the clock. The bumboat service stopped at midnight, and that had long since passed. Fortunately the radio officer of this berthed ship said that I could kip on the sofa in his cabin, which I did. Unfortunately during the night I was bitten all over by mosquitoes, and my new-found friend had omitted to tell me that the ship would be sailing at six o’clock in the morning, so I had to be off by five-thirty.

  I managed to hire a bumboat just after six o’clock, and made my way back to the ship. In the early morning light, the mist was skirting the edges of the harbour as I had often seen it do on the river Hoogli. As the bumboat approached the Padana, I saw about half a dozen of the Indian crew leaning over the rails. I noticed them giving each other knowing looks and there were some comments, in Urdu, passed between them, possibly along the lines of ‘dirty little devil’, but my night out had been perfectly innocent. There had been no pestering pimps or ‘freelance operators’ that would have required me to take Dad’s advice.