“At least though we can get a wee break, for when I telt him we wass low on proveesions, instead of offerin’ food from the big hoose, ass any Chrustian wud do, he chust said we could tak’ a trup ower to Rothesay and stock up.”
Within a short space of time, Macphail had steam up, and the puffer eased out from Berry’s Pier for the crossing to the capital of Bute. Though the rain still swept mercilessly out of a grey sky, the prospect of a change of scenery, the chance of some company, and the promise of a quiet dram, went a long way to brightening the day for the crew.
For once, their optimism was not to be disappointed.
The owner, when Para Handy telegraphed his office to report on their problems and their whereabouts, was sufficiently moved by their plight to wire some money to them at once, care of the Rothesay Post Office.
Though this was probably through a sense of relief at learning that his investment was not lost with all hands somewhere off the Cumbraes, it at least made possible a re-stocking of the Vital Spark’s larder, and a welcome refreshment for the crew before they re-embarked for the return crossing to their berth in Loch Striven.
As the puffer edged in to Berry’s Pier, two things immediately became apparent.
Firstly, the clerk-of-works was to be seen, waiting for them on the pier — and in a very agitated state.
Secondly, the rain had stopped for the first time in four days and though it seemed that the respite would be brief (for dark, laden clouds were rolling in from the south west) it was at least a break from the monotonous deluge which they had tholed for so long.
The reason for the clerk-of-work’s agitation was soon made clear. Dunoon Telegraph Office had delivered a wire from the owner of the big house, advising the factor and the steward that his three sons, with a dozen or more of their friends, would be arriving at Berry’s Pier on a chartered steam launch at six o’clock that evening, intending to spend the weekend at the house.
“You’ll have to move the boat immediately,” cried the frantic clerk-of-works. “They will need to berth the launch here and, besides, we cannot have the loch frontage of Glenstriven marred by the spectacle of a steam-gabbart at the pier.”
Para Handy was with some difficulty restrained by the engineer and eventually was able to point out that he had a cargo for delivery here, it was still aboard, and he had no intention of leaving until it was safely ashore.
“The fact that it iss not,” he concluded, “iss entirely your own fault, Mr Patullo, and I would be grateful if you would chust remember that before you miscall the shup!”
The wretched Patullo wrung his hands. “But we’ve got to get the boat away — and my gang, too, if you’ll give them passage back to Glasgow. The gentry will want the place to themselves for the weekend.”
“Well,” said Para Handy. “Get my cargo off the shup, and we’ll can do that for you. But so long ass my cargo iss aboard — here I stay!”
“But how can I do that,” protested the clerk-of-works. “It may be dry enough to unload ye noo — but the weather for the weekend looks set to continue wet, and I’ve no place to store the cement under cover.
“Captain,” said Sunny Jim suddenly. “I think we can maybe sort this all oot…”
Two hours later the Vital Spark, on passage to Glasgow in ballast with her cargo of cement safely ashore at Glenstriven and the builder’s gang sheltering down in the fo’c’sle from the rain (which had returned with a vengeance), met a smart steam yacht rounding Toward Point and heading westwards past Ardyne.
“That’ll be the chentry,” said Para Handy. “Och, they’ll neffer know we wass there.”
Sunny Jim’s idea had been ingenuity personified. The sacks of cement had been hurried ashore by every manner of means while the rain held off: most slung onto the waiting cart but others taken by wheelbarrow and a few, the last few, even manhandled, up to the waterless swimming-pool.
Mr Patullo had supervised their careful stacking in the empty pool. To clean it out and prepare it for the summer was one of the jobs for which he had been contracted — a job which would have to wait until the work on the new terrace had been completed, hopefully next week when he and his men returned on Monday after the young gentlemen and their friends had gone back to Glasgow.
Meantime the sacks were safe under cover: Para Handy had been happy to lend one of the puffer’s heavy hatchway tarpaulins and this was now stretched across the pool, weighted down on four sides by heavy flagstones.
“I’ll can get that back from you next week sometime Mr Patullo, for we’ll be passing through the Kyles on our way to Furnace sometime afore next Thursday.”
It was, however, a stoney-faced estate factor who met the Vital Spark when she arrived at Berry’s Pier early the following Wednesday afternoon to recover her property.
“Is Mr Patullo no’ weel, then?” asked the Captain from the wheelhouse window, as the crew lashed the heavy tarpaulin to the eye-bolts at the fore end of the main hatchway.
“Not ill, Captain. Just — shall we say — in disgrace. I don’t think you’ll be seeing him in Glenstriven again.
“It probably was not entirely his fault, but the master can be very unforgiving at times. You see, the weather turned better on Saturday and the young gentlemen decided they would have a swim. So they opened the stop-cock to fill the pool — without looking under the tarpaulin first.
“I’m afraid we now need a new pool, as well as a new terrace.”
And he inclined his head solemnly, pivoted on his heels and walked away.
Para Handy turned towards the deck below him with an agonised expression: “Jum!” he shouted: “Jum!!! I need to talk to ye!”
The deck was deserted, but the fo’c’sle hatchway had just crashed shut with an echoing thud.
FACTNOTE
Duncan Cameron Kennedy of Glenstriven ordered the building of the ‘big house’ on the estate in 1868. It enjoys a magnificent setting high above the loch, looking due south across the sheltered waters. I must confess that it has never had a swimming pool — though there were plenty of them in the resorts such as Rothesay, whose first ‘salt water swimming baths’ were opened in the 1870s.
In 1872 Walter Berry, a Leith merchant, acquired Glenstriven estate and it was he who commissioned the construction of the pier which bore his name. There were more than 80 piers on the Firth at the height of the steamer and puffer traffic. Most of those on the Renfrewshire and Ayrshire side of the Firth were built by the Railway or Shipping Companies: most of those on the Argyll coastline either by the local community or for it by a wealthy landowner — such as, for instance, the wooden pier erected at Lamlash by the Duke of Hamilton in 1888.
There were some wholly privately built and owned piers of which Berry’s was one: it was one of the very few, however, which were large enough to accommodate steamers. Most of the private facilities constructed for the big houses, or for the isolated farms and estates, were merely jetties or slips designed to allow goods, livestock or passengers to be ferried to or from the shore on a flitboat.
Of the original Berry’s pier nothing now remains except a few stumps of the old uprights. It was never used for scheduled services, but as a destination for occasional special excursion or charter parties and there is a splendid photograph of one such group, coming alongside aboard the paddler Diana Vernon, in the book Clyde Piers published by Inverclyde District Libraries. Though it is difficult to be categorically certain (the photograph is a little indistinct as to detail) it seems as if all passengers aboard the steamer are men, and most look to be wearing some sort of uniform. There is a small welcoming party at the head of the pier, including a number of ladies.
The pier at Otter Ferry on the east side of Loch Fyne was also originally built as a private facility for the large house which stands at the shore end. There was an established local ferry service across to Lochgair from a stone jetty at the tiny hamlet of Otter Ferry a few hundred yards to the south — a service which had been running for many years before
the pier was built in 1900. In contrast to the pier at Loch Striven however, that at Otter Ferry was for some years a port-of-call for steamers on scheduled services. Even today the structure seems to remain remarkably intact, though the last cargo was unloaded there just after the Second World War and the last passenger steamer called in 1914!
29
The Pride of the Clyde
Daybreak always has a hushed, cathedral-like quality about it but this particular dawn had broken in a spectacular silence accentuated by the visual crescendo of light streaming in from the east: first a delicate bluey rose, then a brightening but still pale off-white, and finally a dramatic, blinding golden sunburst which chased the last vestiges of the retreating night across the western horizon and into oblivion.
Seen from the uninterrupted vastness of the ocean that palette of colour would have been quite overwhelming. Even from the upper reaches of the Clyde, where it was set against the gaunt silhouettes of the stone tenements of Govan and Plantation, it was unforgettable.
The Captain and crew of the steam-lighter coasting quietly down river with the current after an early start from Windmillcroft Quay were not unappreciative of this natural wonder unfolding before their eyes.
“Man, Dougie,” said Para Handy reflectively: “if only it wass possible to tak’ a picture of that and pit it in the paper, to let folk ken what they wass missin’, the world and his wife wud be oot their beds betimes, and you wudna be able to move on the river for the crowds come to see it!”
It was June, and the Vital Spark was headed for the Kyles with a mixed cargo consisting of assorted building materials for Colintraive, hotel furnishings for Tighnabruaich, and fencing wire for Kaimes.
A mile or so past Renfrew Ferry an immaculately-groomed launch of the river pilot service, speeding upstream, closed in on the puffer.
“Steam-lighter ahoy! Where on earth do you think you’re off to?” shouted a uniformed figure, leaning from her wheelhouse window and gesticulating frantically. “The river’s closed at Clydebank: you can’t go any further downstream now till the afternoon! D’you puffer captains never even bother to read the navigation bulletins posted on the quays, or published in the Glasgow Herald?”
“No,” replied Para Handy, with commendable but (in the present circumstances) ill-advised candour. “Never. Why?”
The master of the cutter turned an interesting purple colour.
“Because if you did, you’d have known that this is the morning the Lusitania’s being launched from John Brown’s yard. The river’s closed to all traffic between the Cart and Dalmuir from eight o’clock till two o’clock! Now get in to the bank and stay there! Or do you want me to arrest the boat?”
“I wudna put you to the bother,” replied Para Handy in a rather more placatory tone, and he put the wheel over and headed the puffer for the Renfrewshire shore.
The towering cranes of the world-famous Clydebank yard were now in sight, poised above the monstrous hull which had been growing beneath them for the past 15 months. Here had taken shape, and today was now ready for launching, the largest and most luxurious ship ever yet conceived by the designers, or created by the craftsmen, who between them had made the name of the Clyde and the reputation of its workers synonymous with shipbuilding perfection.
The river bank on the Renfrewshire side opposite the yard was black with crowds come to see the spectacle. From their modest vantage point actually on the water, however, the crew of the puffer had a grandstand view of the whole proceedings, and once the Vital Spark had been made fast to a convenient marker post they settled on the hatch-coaming with hastily-brewed mugs of tea and an early dinner of bread and cheese.
Stands “for the chentry”, as Para Handy put it, had been placed facing the bow of the ship, immediately behind the platform for the launch-party. The men who had built her were crowded along the slipway the whole length of her hull, with a favoured few perched on the foredeck and as yet unfinished superstructure of the new liner.
The slip on which her foundation keel had been laid down and on which she had then been painstakingly raised over the preceding months — vertical rib-upon-rib, riveted plate-upon-plate — was placed at an acute angle to the river channel.
The Clyde itself was an artificial creation, a once sluggish stream dredged and broadened to its status as a birthplace for ships, a mecca for trade. At this point on its journey towards the sea it ran, despite the work of generations who had made it fit for an international commerce on which it depended, through a channel which was narrower, bank-to-bank, than the length of the hull which was about to slide into it.
Only the subterfuge of that angled slipway made the very launch possible and even with that heavy drag chains would have to be deployed to bring the enormous hull quickly to a stop, in order to prevent her running ashore on the opposite bank.
A small flotilla of tugs stood by to capture the vessel and then to manoeuvre her into the adjacent fitting-out basin where she would be transformed from an impressive but inanimate hulk into a living being, a ship (like all ships) with a personality and indeed a soul.
“Brutain’s hardy sons,” said Para Handy with some emotion when at 12.30 precisely Lady Inverclyde christened the ship in the traditional manner. To the roaring approval of tens of thousands of spectators, drawn from all walks of life but united by a pride in what had been achieved, the majestic hull took spectacularly to the water. In the process Lusitania, just as every ship before and since has always done, curtseyed sweetly and gracefully to the lady who had named her, and sent her forth to fulfil her destiny.
Fourteen months later the Vital Spark was lying against the easternmost extremity of Greenock’s Princes Pier, ready to load a flitting for Furnace once the scheduled steamers had left.
In their more favoured berths ahead of her the King Edward and the Lord of the Isles impatiently awaited the arrival of the train from Glasgow St Enoch station and their cargo of on-going passengers for Campbeltown and Inveraray respectively.
Anchored in the middle reaches of the Firth at the Tail o’ the Bank, however, was a vessel which commanded the attention and the respect of everyone within eyesight, to the total exclusion of everything else that lay or moved upon the firth.
Lusitania had, just the previous day, come down river from the fitting-out berth at John Brown’s Clydebank yard: and was next morning to embark upon her speed trial over the measured mile at Skelmorlie, and her general proving, before being officially and formally handed over to Cunard.
The crowds massed on Greenock promenade and further along the western shores of the Firth towards Gourock almost matched those which had witnessed her launch the previous summer.
In due course the train, an inconsequential minute and a half late, came in from St Enoch: the Campbeltown and Inveraray steamers loaded, and departed.
Para Handy rose from the pierside bollard from which he had been watching the world go by and stretched luxuriously.
“Boys,” he said. “let us chust warp her up to the railway yerd chetty, and get this fluttin’ aboard: and then we can go…”
“Excuse me,” came a quiet voice from behind the Captain, “but I wonder if I could ask a favour of you ?”
As the puffer eased alongside the liner, edging in towards the floating pontoon at the foot of the companionway stairs which soared, seemingly into space, towards the entry port umpteen decks above them, the Lusitania’s hull was like a wall of sheer black cliff, dwarfing them into total insignificance.
Their passenger smiled his thanks.
“The least I can do,” he said, “is invite you to have a quick look through the ship before she sails. If you’d like to.”
An authoritative nod sent two seamen scurrying from their posts on the floating jetty at the ship’s side to take up watch on the puffer’s deck and secure her safely, bow and stern. With the First Officer of the Lusitania — for it was he — leading the way, the crew of the Vital Spark, moving as if in a dream, began to climb the compani
onway towards the upper decks of the liner.
“I can’t thank you enough,” said the First Officer to Para Handy as they stepped through the portway and into the First Class Reception Foyer. “Most embarrassing if I’d been stranded on the pier at Greenock! They knew I was due off that train and there should have been a launch to meet me.
“There should be a lot of people in a great deal of trouble…
“But it has been such a pleasure for me to meet you gentlemen and be reminded of my own beginnings as a hand on the old Hay’s puffer Inca all those years ago…”
Even Para Handy was — almost — speechless, as wonder after wonder unfolded in front of their eyes.
The First Class Smoking Room, panelled in walnut with an open fireplace and an ivory ceiling: the First Class Lounge with its intricate carving and stained-glass domed roof: the Foyer, magnificent in wrought iron and with the gates of the first electric lift ever installed on a ship at sea: staterooms with marble baths en suite, carpets into which the feet sank at each step: works of art crowding every wall, carvings and statuary featuring on stairways and in corridors.
And, towards the stern of the great ship, spacious Third Class accommodation for the emigrant traffic which made the facility offered on board the poor Vital Spark seem like the very worst deprivation on the most notorious slaver in maritime history.
“Dinna you daur touch a thing,” Para Handy commanded Sunny Jim in a piercing stage whisper, “for I’m sure I dinna ken when you last washed your haun’s. At least we got rid o’ Macphail!”
Indeed the Engineer, in a paradise all his own, was on a tour of the ship’s pioneering high-pressure turbines and her 25 boilers, courtesy of the Fourth Engineer, commandeered for such duty by their considerate host.
“I wish I could thank you properly,” said that gentleman 20 minutes later as he ushered the crew back towards the waiting puffer: and reached instinctively for his notecase.
Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 21