“The upshot of it aal iss that he iss buying a complete set of signal flags for the Vital Spark, and I have to learn how to use them, and then they say I must teach you laads the whole whigmaleerie ass weel!”
“It iss a liberty!” exclaimed the Mate. “The Vital Spark hass never been in any trouble! You’ve aalways had a grand voice for bellowin’ wi’, Peter, and that’s all the signals we’ve needed aal oor years at sea.”
Liberty or not the owner’s instructions had to be complied with and Para Handy duly presented himself the following morning at the Glasgow offices of the Maritime branch of the Board of Trade, unaccustomedly scrubbed and shaved, and kitted out in his one good pea-jacket.
“I don’t like it, boys,” he said as he left the puffer. “But I will not let the vessel down. A MacFarlane will neffer disgrace himself or tak’ the easy way oot when it comes to representing the reputation and the good name of his shup!”
The class itself was held in an empty bay of a warehouse at the Stobcross Quay on the north bank of the river — a dusty, drab, dreich and draughty venue where were assembled some two dozen unhappy seamen, almost all skippers of steam lighters and quite without exception as resentful as Para Handy about the liberty taken in inflicting the classes upon them. Their tempers were not improved when they discovered that they would be introduced to the new mysteries, not by some veteran old salt, but by a fresh-faced youth in a grey suit and a white shirt with an Eton collar and a flower in his button-hole.
There were few of his fellow-sufferers with whom Para Handy was not well-acquainted. One however — the skipper of Hay’s puffer Spartan whom the Vital Spark had by coincidence encountered on her way up river the previous day — was a particular bete-noire of the usually placid Captain.
“The side of the man!” complained Para Handy to his crew when he returned to the puffer for his dinner at the end of the morning session. “Aye noddin’ and makin’ oot he knows it aal already, and then runnin’ errands for the young whippersnapper that’s takin’ the cless when he needs new flags or whateffer.
“I always thought John Hay made a big mistake when he put Alec Bain in cherge o’ the Spartan and my Chove now I know I wass right!”
“But whit aboot the class, Captain?” asked Sunny Jim. “Whit d’ye huv tae do?”
“You may well ask, Jum. Jumpin’ through girrs! They have wan flag for each letter o’ the elphabet but of course if you wass to use them to spell oot ony messages it wud take foreffer, so they have devised a sort of a code. You put chust two of the flags up the halyard at wance and effery pair means a different message to aal the ither pairs, and you find oot whit it is by lookin’ it up in this list.” At that point the Captain pulled a closely-printed sheet of paper from his jacket pocket and waved it in the air. “It’s aal so unnecessary! We have managed chust fine for years withoot ony o’ this rubbish!”
Sunny Jim still looked mystified.
“Let me try to explain the way of it, Jum,” continued Para Handy. “If we were runnin’ oot of coal, for example, what would we do aboot it at present?”
“It all depends on the cargo we’re cairryin’ at the time,” said Jim, puzzled but trying to be helpful. “Ah mean, if it’s coals we’re cairryin’ then ye jist send me tae the hold wi’ a few sacks tae fill, for neither the merchant nor the owner’ll ever fin’ oot aboot it an’…”
“No, no Jum,” said the Captain hastily, “that’s not what I mean at aal. What do we do if we’re gettin’ short and we’re at sea and we’re not cairryin’ coals…?”
“Weel, then ye’d jist bellow on the next puffer we meet and get the len’ o’ a bag or twa that wud see us safe to the nearest harbour,” said Jim.
Para Handy beamed. “Precisely, Jim,” he said. “But these dam’ Board o’ Trade regulations want us to put up flags for aal the world to see.” He consulted the printed sheet: “The two flags you wud need fur that situation are the G and the Y — and they mean Can you spare me coal?”
“Whit genius thocht yon up!” snorted Macphail. “I can jist see Williamson stoppin’ the King Edward in her tracks tae gi’e me a few shuvvles of the best Ayrshire nutty slack somewhere between Lochranza and Campbeltown, in the middle of the Gleska Trades weekend!”
“Chust so, Dan,” said Para Handy. “But —” burrowing once again into the mysteries of the leaflet, “— we could maybe try flyin’ the R and the H — Can you supply me with anyone to take charge as engineer? It wud make a pleasant change to have wan! Or maybe we wud put up the B with the J which accordin’ to the list wud mean: Engine broken down, I am disabled. Not too unlikely for the Vital Spark on the days you’re in bad trum, eh Dan?”
For the sake of peace and harmony it was probably just as well that that was the point at which Para Handy had to leave the boat to attend the afternoon session at Stobcross.
It was nearly seven o’clock before he returned, trudging along the wharf with his head down in dejection and his hands in his pockets. “Don’t ask me a dam’ thing till I’ve had my tea,” he said as he stepped aboard. “I’m chust at the end my tether!”
“If I thought this mornin’ was bad, boys, you should have seen this afternoon!” he commented quarter of an hour later after having disposed of a plate of fried herrings and two mugs of tea sweetened with condensed milk.
“I chust hope that the owner hass more sense than he hass money and iss not thinkin’ of puttin’ wan of these godless wireless contraptions on the shup, for that iss what yon young fella wass tellin’ us aal about this afternoon. I do not like the sound of it aal, boys, it mean the end of the independence we aal enchoy in the coasting tred!”
“What is it, then?” asked Sunny Jim, who had heard the word bandied around in the past two or three years without having any real idea of what was involved.
“It iss almost impossible to believe,” said the Captain, “but it iss chust like the telegraph, except there iss no wires to it, and your shup could be in the muddle of the Minch and the office could send you orders ass nate as anything.”
“But how…” began the Mate.
“Dougie, I do not know, that’s the plain truth of it. But it iss two boxes filled wi’ electrucity, wan for pittin’ messages oot and wan for bringin’ them in. It iss chust ass if you have a collie dug that big its tail iss in the office and its heid iss on the shup. So if you stand on the tail in Gleska, the heid will howl on the vessel: and if you pat its heid on board the Vital Spark, its tail wags in Gleska.
“I’m tellin’ you, I will have nothin’ to do wi’ it. If he tries to put wan of them things on the Vital Spark then I am takin’ a chob ashore.”
Fortunately, things did not come to this pass. The following morning, half an hour before the puffer left Glasgow bound for Skipness in Kintyre, a horse-drawn van clattered onto the quay and delivered a large black tin box addressed simply to ‘Steam Lighter Vital Spark’.
On examination this was found to contain a complete set of 26 individual flags, one standing for each letter of the alphabet, complete with halyards and cleats for the mast together with a hard-bound copy of the printed set of codes from which Para Handy had quoted the previous day.
“No wireless, thank Cott!” exclaimed the skipper with some relief, “though these dam’ things iss bad enough. Jum!! Put up the new halyards seein’ they’re here, and take all the rest of this rubbish to the fo’c’sle. We’ll maybe peruse it at our leisure some ither time,” he concluded dismissively, and the crew thought that they had probably seen and heard the last of the hated signal flags.
Not quite.
Two days later, as they were returning to Bowling having delivered their cargo of roadstone to Skipness, the Vital Spark came through the narrows at Colintraive and Para Handy spotted the Spartan in the middle distance, headed towards them, and very low in the water with a full cargo of unknown identity.
“Jum!” shouted the Captain. “Away you down to the fo’c’sle and bring oot the flags for S and P, and K and Z: and run them up
the signal halyard ass fast as you can!”
“What’s that aal aboot, Peter?” asked the Mate, puzzled, as the mysterious signal fluttered in the breeze.
“Och, chust a chance to get back at that man Bain and his fancy ways at the cless the ither day.
“It’ll gi’e him somethin’ to pause and consider aboot if no more than that — but maybe he’ll be late goin’ to wherever he’s goin’ — and serve him right! You see, I ken fine that he hassna the wireless, for he said Hay’s wass not puttin’ them in aal the shups because of the cost. But he doesna ken whether we have the wireless or not.
“S and P means Have received orders for you not to proceed without further instructions: and K and Z means Anchor instantly.
“If we’re lucky, he may well do chust that — and I’d like to be in John Hay’s office if Bain goes ashore at Colintraive and telegraphs to get those instructions.”
Noticing with impish delight, as the two boats converged, that the unfortunate Spartan was indeed preparing to let go her anchor, Para Handy doffed his cap and waved cheerily to Bain, ignoring the other man’s efforts to shout questions with a polite tap on his ear and an apologetic shrug.
The Vital Spark passed her at Macphail’s best seven knots, and swung westwards round the tip of Bute and out of sight.
FACTNOTE
I picked up a copy of the 1904 edition of Signalling for Board of Trade Examinations for a few pence in a secondhand bookshop a few years ago. The little handbook, produced by the nautical publishers James Brown & Son of Glasgow, dates from the time of the watershed between the old and new ways of communication at sea.
There is a whole range of coded flag messages and those given in the story are all genuine. However, in 1899 Marconi had presented his paper on Wireless Telegraphy to the Institution of Electrical Engineers. It too is reprinted in the handbook and as it was published, the very first wirelesses were being installed in ships — though needless to say not in the humble puffers!
There were six shore telegraph stations set up by the Marconi Company to handle wireless communication to and from ships in the Atlantic, and 10 shipping companies including the ‘big names’ such as Cunard, Norddeutscher Lloyd, American Line and the French CTG, had specified wireless facilities on at least some of their passenger liners. Nevertheless, the total number of ships in the world’s merchant and naval fleets so equipped (according to Marconi’s own list in 1904) was still less than 50 though, of course, it would soon be being added to daily as first the convenience and then the necessity of the new technology became understood.
The James Brown handbook also details methods of ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore signalling using lamps, semaphores and quite complex (but widely understood) combinations of other masthead paraphernalia — cones, balls, cubes, coloured lights etc. The messages conveyed in signal code ranged from the banal to the dramatic and all points in between.
Thus inconsequential communications such as Pay attention! or Has the mail arrived? or My chronometer has run down appear in Brown’s handbook alongside rather more pressing messages which include War has been declared, I must abandon the vessel, Beware of torpedos and We are dying for want of water — all conveyed by a pre-arranged combination of flags.
Puffers, even at the end of their long career on the Clyde, were rarely fitted with wireless transmitters. Skippers in West Highland ports had to telephone their Glasgow head offices for further instructions about their next ports of call. Inevitably this could lead to some hilarious interchanges when a city clerk, looking out of his office window at a calm, clear and cloudless sky, refused to believe the circumstances reported by some beleaguered skipper trapped perhaps in Stornoway by severe gales, or else marooned in Campbeltown in a thick fog.
25
Hogmanay on the Vital Spark
It was mid-day on Hogmanay, and in the front bar of the inn at Lochgoilhead the crew of the finest vessel in the coastal trade were being ‘treated’ by the local merchant whose consignment of best Ayrshire coal they had just finished unloading.
Para Handy put his empty glass down on the bar counter with unnecessary ostentation, peering into it as if incredulous that it could have held such a small and quickly-taken dram.
“My Chove, I wass needin’ that,” he said with some conviction. “Coupin’ a cargo of coalss iss no’ the best of chobs in weather like this.” Indeed a snell north-easterly wind was sending a thin flurry of snow drifting across the windows that looked out onto the loch, and the aspect was of unrelieved shades of grey.
“Best respects to you Mr Carmichael, and the compliments of the season,” the skipper continued, “but if there’s nae mair business to be attended to” — fiddling with his empty glass as he spoke, more in hope than anything else — “I think the lads and me should be getting on our way, for it’ll be a long cold trup, bitter cold, before we’re in Glasgow tonight!”
“All right Peter,” smiled Carmichael, signalling to the barman. “I can take a hint. Set them up again, Wullie!”
Surprisingly, given the day it was, the party had the bar to themselves, with one exception.
If the small man at the table in the far corner, nursing what looked suspiciously like a glass of ginger beer, was aware that he was the object of the crew’s curiosity, he gave no sign of it but could not have been surprised. Strangers in Lochgoilhead at this time of year were as unexpected as a snowflake in June.
“He’s no’ a traiveller, for sure,” offered Dougie when Para Handy, in a very audible stage whisper, invited ideas about the identity of the mysterious stranger. “For he’s got no cases and you never yet saw a traiveller withoot his samples.”
“And he’s no’ a towerist,” affirmed Sunny Jim, “for they all go away tae hibernate efter the September weekend.”
The barman leaned across the counter. “I was going to speak to you about him, Peter, to see if you could do me a sort of a favour wi’ yon man. He’s no’ exactly a towerist, chust a sort of an Englishman that’s been biding here for the past week and he’s desperate keen to get back to Glasgow noo — but wi’ the ice and that, Mackinnon’s trap couldnae get up the hill to connect him wi’ the charibang at the top of the Rest this mornin’, and there’s no a steamer till efter the New Year. So he’s kind of stuck.”
“What d’ye mean ‘no exactly a towerist’?” asked the captain.
“Nothin’ really, Peter,” said the barman: “chust that at this time o’ year ye dinna expect ony o’ them.” And reaching to the shelves behind him for the bottle, he poured another generous dram into the skipper’s glass. “It would be a great kindness if ye could tak’ him wi’ ye on the Vital Spark.”
“My Chove, Wullie,” said Para Handy, eyeing his refilled glass suspiciously. “You’re surely awfu’ anxious tae get rid o’ him. Whit’s wrang wi’ him?”
“Not a thing, Peter, not a thing: chust tryin’ to do him a kindness, it bein’ the time o’ year it is.”
“That’s right,” chipped in Carmichael. “He’ll pay his passage – and I’ll donate a bottle to keep you warm on the way up river.”
Para Handy studied the little man surreptitiously. He looked harmless enough, but this was Hogmanay, not Christmas, and the generosity of both barman and merchant were uncharacteristic to say the least.
“What d’ye think, Dougie?”
“Whatever you think yoursel’, Peter,” said the mate agreeably.
“Just dinna let Mr MacBrayne find out you’re in opposition for he’d be sair vexed wi’ you,” snorted Macphail — but the bargain was struck, and the little man was beckoned to join the group.
“Mr Clement, this is Captain Macfarlane,” said Carmichael, “and he’s agreed to take you to Glasgow. On the conditions that you and I discussed earlier,” he added with some emphasis. “So remember to keep to them.”
Two hours later the Vital Spark, riding light and making her best speed with a following tide, had Kilcreggan to port with every chance of making her berth at the Broomielaw
before darkness fell. To speed their getaway from Lochgoilhead they had not taken time to stow the puffer’s dinghy, which was now bobbing in her wake at the end of a tow-line.
Carmichael’s bottle stood — unopened — on the top of the wheelhouse cubby pending their arrival in Glasgow: and their passenger, who had not uttered a word since leaving the bar at Lochgoilhead, other than to agree his passage fare of a florin with the skipper, was perched shivering in the bows, seated on top of his sole piece of baggage — a large tin trunk — with his coat collar vainly turned up against the cold.
“Jum,” said Para Handy, “Go and tell that man tae come in oot o’ the cauld: he can come in here wi’ us, or doon tae the engine-room wi’ Macphail, but I’ll no be responsible for him catching his daith by stayin’ oot there.”
“Ye’ll no’ send him doon here,” protested a voice from beneath Para Handy’s feet, but the problem did not arise, as the Englishman squeezed into the wheelhouse two minutes later having, with the help of Sunny Jim, moved his tin trunk from the bows to the stern.
“Yon trunk’s some weight,” protested Jim. “What have ye got in there — it’s no’ a keg of whusky, eh, this bein’ Hogmanay?”
“Whisky!” cried the man, “I would sooner carry dynamite about with me for it’s a sight less harmful than that devilish drink!” And throwing back the lid of the trunk he revealed a great stack of leaflets, seized a handful and thrust one into the skipper’s hands. “Whisky! It’s an abomination and a curse, fountain of all the evil in this wicked world!”
“My Cot,” said Para Handy. “He’s wan o’ they teetotallisers so he iss!”
Sure enough, the leaflet proclaimed in large print ‘Clement’s Campaign: Down With The Demon Drink!!!’ and went on to describe in gory detail the horrors apparently attendant on the consumption of the merest drop of alcohol in any form.
Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 18