Para Handy sighed.
“There is no justice, is there? We went sober to our beds and lost our chobs. That chentleman probably neffer went to his at aal last night and not only did he catch his ship, it wass his wife that he has to thank for that.
“If that had been Mery and me, I doot the mustress would have gone aboard and left me at Ro’say pier wi’ a label roond my neck printed, ‘Not wanted on Voyage’.
“And you know, she would have been quite right!”
FACTNOTE
Blackpool has been a favourite holiday destination for generations of lowland Scots and its ‘Golden Mile’ with its end-of-the-pier-shows, the tower, the ballroom, the funfair, have entertained millions and still attract the summer hordes at the end of this century. I wish the Clyde resorts had been as fortunate in fine-tuning and marketing their appeal for them we might still have had steamer fleets!
Of all the famous Clyde names, only that of the veteran Iona comes close to eclipsing the legendary Columba.
She was the third steamer of that name to be built for the Hutcheson fleet at the Govan yard of J & G Thomson in a space of just nine years!
The first Iona, launched in 1855, put in just seven seasons on the Clyde when her speed and manoeuvrability were noticed and she was bought by the American Confederate States for service as a blockade-runner in the Civil War. Ignominiously, however, she never got past the Tail o’ the Bank, being run down by the steamship Chanticleer off Greenock when she was running without lights. As soon as she had been sold to the Americans a second Iona had been ordered from Thomsons yard, but this one never even entered service before she was snapped up by agents of the Confederacy. She got a little further on her voyage to America than her predecessor, though not much: she foundered off the island of Lundy in a Bristol Channel storm.
I suppose we only had a third Iona actually on the Clyde because the American Civil War was coming to its end as she was being completed!
She was the largest vessel on the river at the time of her launch and for style and opulence she was not to be surpassed till 1878 when David MacBrayne, now controlling director of the Hutcheson fleet, ordered (again from Thomson’s Govan yard) the incomparable Columba, a full one-fifth again bigger than Iona but very much based on her proven, successful design.
Columba had a long career as MacBrayne’s adored flagship before going to the breakers in 1936 at the venerable age of 58, but here she had to give best to Iona which had seen an astonishing 72 years service when she, too, went for scrap that same year.
Who could have foreseen a hundred years ago that industrial, commercial Glasgow would indeed become a serious holiday destination — though Para Handy and his wife did not have the lure of such delights as the Burrell Collection or the restored Merchant City or the Mackintosh legend to tempt them!
THE ELEGANCE OF HORSEPOWER — The suspicion is that this photograph was commissioned from the MacGrory brothers on the day that its Campbeltown owner-driver took delivery (probably by a steamer and possibly even by a puffer) of this handsome Hansom-cab, a fashionable conveyance designed in the mid-19th century by its eponymous inventor Joseph, but in fashion till well into the early years of the 20th century.
44
Santa’s Little Helpers
I encountered Para Handy and Hurricane Jack quite unexpectedly as they emerged from the Buchanan Street doorway of the Argyll Arcade late on Christmas Eve, the Captain’s oldest friend clutching a large rectangular parcel wrapped in shiny brown paper printed overall with the name of the shop on which every schoolboy’s hopes would that night be concentrated — the Clyde Model Dockyard.
“Last minute shopping indeed, Captain,” I exclaimed : “and from the Clyde Model Dockyard itself! Who is the lucky lad?”
Para Handy, looking rather embarrassed, just mumbled something unintelligible and made to move off but Hurricane Jack, laying his burden carefully on the pavement, straightened up with a sigh and remarked pointedly, “It iss real thirsty work, this shopping business : and a rare expense ass weel : I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
Sensing a story, I persuaded the two mariners to join me for a seasonal dram in a convenient hostelry in neighbouring St Enoch’s Square. But it took a second glass to start the flow of the narrative, and then a third before the whole sorry tale was unfolded for me.
It had all begun three days previously…
A freezing fog had enveloped the lochside village all day, and darkness was rapidly closing in on the short December afternoon when the indistinct silhouette of a steam-lighter loomed out of the gloaming and the fully-laden little vessel eased its way into the basin at the Ardrishaig end of the Crinan Canal.
In the wheelhouse of the Vital Spark Para Handy breathed a sigh of relief as he bent down to call into the engine-room at his feet. “Whenever you’re ready, Dan,” he said, and with a rattle and a clank the propeller-shaft stopped turning and the puffer drifted the last few feet onto the stone face of the quay.
“My Cot,” said the skipper, as Sunny Jim leapt ashore with the bow mooring rope and slipped its bight over the nearest stone bollard, “I wass neffer so relieved to see the shup safe into port. Ever since we came round Ardlamont I have been frightened that every moment wud be our next.”
Indeed it had been an uncomfortable passage up Loch Fyne, for it was there that the weather had closed in on the puffer and Para Handy had steered his course towards Ardrishaig more by instinct than anything else in fog which restricted visibility to less than fifty yards.
“It’s chust ass well that Dougie iss not here,” said Hurricane Jack, materialising out of the gloom on the cargo-hatch just forward of the wheelhouse. “A fine sailor when we are safe in port but tumid, tumid when we are at sea.”
It was four days before Christmas and Dougie the family man had bargained with the bachelor Jack to stand in for him on this unexpected last-minute charter to Inveraray with a cargo of coals. Not that the Mate himself was particularly keen to spend the festive season cooped up with ten screaming children in a tenement flat in Plantation, but the Mate’s wife was determined that he should do so, and she was certainly not a lady to be argued with lightly by anyone, and least of all by her husband.
Once the puffer was safely berthed, Para Handy went ashore and up to the Post Office to send a wire to McCallum, the Inveraray coal merchant, explaining why his cargo had been delayed.
McCallum’s response, delivered to the Vital Spark half-an-hour later by a diminutive telegraph boy, proved that the spirit of the season of peace and good will to all men had not reached certain quarters of Upper Loch Fyne.
“You wud think that we was responsible for the fog,” complained the Captain as the crew made their way up the quayside towards the Harbour Bar. “Well, all I can say iss that he will get his coals tomorrow if it lifts, but I am not prepared to risk the boat chust to keep Sandy McCallum’s Campbell customers happy.”
Next morning the fog had indeed dispersed and the puffer made an early start for Inveraray. Since one and all were anxious to get home in time for Christmas, the unloading of the coals was achieved in record time. As soon as the cargo was safely ashore in the early afternoon, and carted to McCallum’s ree, the crew prepared to set sail at once without even a cursory visit to the bar of the George Hotel.
However, just as Sunny Jim was loosing the last mooring rope, the owner of the Hotel himself appeared on the quayside, quite out of breath, and carrying a large cardboard box.
“I heard you were at the harbour, Peter : I wonder if you would do me a kindness,” he asked, “and deliver this for me? It’s my nephew’s Christmas present — my sister’s laddie — and it should have gone up to Glasgow yesterday on the steamer, but with the fog the Lord of the Isles turned back at the Kyles and I’ve no way of getting it to town in time other than with yourself.
“My sister’s house is just off Byres Road, and I’ll give you the money for a cab…”
“Would you take a look at this!” cried Hurrican
e Jack fifteen minutes later, emerging from the fo’c’sle with the box — minus its lid — cradled in his arms, and an excited grin on his face.
Para Handy was about to protest at the cavalier way in which Jack had satisfied his curiosity, but when he saw the contents of the box for himself, he peremptorily summoned Sunny Jim to take the wheel and hurried for’ard to join his shipmate.
The box contained a magnificent train-set — a gleaming green and gold locomotive, three pullman coaches, and a bundle of silver and black rails.
“My chove,” said the Captain enthusiastically. “Iss that not chust sublime, Jeck! There wass neffer toys like that when I wass a bairn and needin’ them, or if there wass, then I neffer saw them.
“I’m sure it wouldna’ do ony herm if we chust had a closer look at it aal…”
In no time at all, the rails — which formed a generous oval track — had been laid out on the mainhatch, the carriages set on one of the straight sections : the two mariners were peering curiously at the engine itself.
“ ‘Marklin, Made in Chermany’,” said Para Handy, reading the trademark stamped on the underside of the chassis. “Clever duvvles, but I canna see the key and I canna imachine chust how on earth we’re meant to wind the damn’ thing up.”
Hurricane Jack took the engine out of the skipper’s hands and looked closely at it. “This isn’t a clockwork injin at all, Peter,” he said at length, reaching to the box and taking out of it a small tin which he opened to reveal a number of round white objects like miniature nightlights. “It’s wan o’ they real steam ones. You put some watter in the wee biler, and then you light wan o’ these meths capsules in the firebox, and off she goes.
“I’m sure it wouldna’ do ony herm if we chust tried her oot chust the wan wee time…”
However, despite their best efforts, neither Para Handy nor Jack had any success in getting the model engine fired up.
“Can I not have a shot at it please, Captain?” called Sunny Jim plaintively from the wheelhouse, whence his view of proceedings down on deck was frustratingly limited.
“Haud your wheesht and mind the wheel, Jum,” replied Para Handy brusquely, “and leave this business to men who are old enough to ken what they’re doin’. But you could maybe give Dan a call and ask him to come up here for a minute.”
It was of course the puffer’s engineer who finally cracked the problem of propulsion and in a few minutes the little train was chuffing importantly around and around the oval track, the three seamen on their hands and knees, spellbound, beside it.
Jim’s repeated pleadings to be allowed to join in the fun were totally ignored.
“Is that aal there is to it?” Jack asked after a while. “I’m sure she wud run faster withoot all they carriages…” An experiment which was soon put to the test, and as soon shown to be true. Even that improvement, however, palled after a few minutes more.
“I’m sure and she wud be able to go faster if we took her aff the rails,” suggested Para Handy : “and she’d certainly be able to go further…”
Moments later, with Para Handy on his knees at the after-end of the mainhatch and Jack at the fore-end, Macphail having retired to his lair with a snort of derision, the rails had been packed away and the little locomotive was racing to and fro the full length of the hatch, set on its way by one of the mariners, and then caught at the far end by the other, turned about, and sent on the return trip.
“Careful, Jeck,” cried Para Handy : “dinna drop it, whatever you do!”
“Can I no’ come doon and have a wee shot wi’ it?” pleaded Sunny Jim again from the wheelhouse, and in that one fatal moment the damage was done.
Para Handy turned irritably to remonstrate with his persistent deckhand and as he did so the little engine, racing back from Hurricane Jack’s end of the hatch, hurtled off it as it reached the momentarily unattended after-end, bounced once on the deck and, in a gleam of green and gold, soared over the low bulwarks of the puffer and sank, with one briefly echoing plop, into the salty depths of Loch Fyne.
“Jum!” yelled Para Handy accusingly. “Wull you chust look and see whit ye’ve been and gone and done noo…”
“An expensive high-jink, Captain” I said as we parted company on the corner of Argyll Street and Union Street. “But so long as you deliver the new set safely, and so long as neither giver nor receiver ever find out that you had to buy it, or why…”
“Chust so”, said the Captain somewhat shamefacedly, and he and Hurricane Jack went off in search of a cab while I made my way back to the newspaper office.
It was several weeks before the Vital Spark was in Inveraray again but one February morning she lay at the outer end of the pier loading a cargo of pit-props.
Just after mid-day the owner of the George Hotel came down the quayside and called to Para Handy, who was supervising the work of the derrick from the deck. Dan Macphail was at the winch and Hurricane Jack and Sunny Jim were up on the pierhead roping bundles of the timber together.
“I just wanted to thank you for delivering that Christmas gift in Glasgow for me, Peter,” the hotelier shouted. “Very much appreciated, and the laddie just loved his train.
“Funny thing, though : I must be losing my memory I think, for he wrote me such a nice letter about the train set and its fine red engine when I would have sworn blind that I had bought him a green one.”
“Aye,” Sunny Jim began : “But the toy shop wis sold richt oot o’ the greeeeeaaaAAAAAH…!”
“Sorry, Jim” said Hurricane Jack loudly and pointedly, lifting the metal-shod heel of his heavy boot from where it had crashed down onto the toe and instep of the deckhand’s left foot. “Ah didna see you there…”
FACTNOTE
The Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade, the L-shaped indoor shopping mall which links Buchanan Street and Argyll Street, was so much part of the myth and folklore of West of Scotland schoolboys of my own and previous generations that it almost comes as a surprise to find that it doesn’t have an entry in the Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland.
The Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade, the L-shaped indoor shopping mall which links Buchanan Street and Argyll Street, was so much part of the myth and folklore of West of Scotland schoolboys of my own and previous generations that it almost comes as a surprise to find that it doesn’t have an entry in the Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland.
Argyll Arcade today is inhabited by nothing but wall-towall jewellers, but go back a generation and it housed a wide range of shops of which the Model Dockyard was the undisputed mecca.
Its window displays were legendary, the stuff of magic, dreams of the unattainable. Before plastic came to destroy the quality and character of toys the magic names of Hornby, Meccano, Trix, Mammod, Dinky, Basset-Lowke, Marklin, Frog and other legends of railways, roadways, airways and seaways in miniature dominated that plate-glass paradise and its groaning shelves.
At Christmas, even in the decades of continuing shortages which stretched well into the fifties, the Dockyard somehow managed to acquire stock which eluded lesser contenders, and scrums of anxious youths fought for places at the windows to see what was available before rushing home to pen anxious lists for their own personal present providers — before the limited, but quite priceless, stocks ran out.
I was living many miles from Glasgow when the Dockyard finally closed: victim presumably of the mass-produced, mass-marketed toys which for all their greater availability in shopping malls everywhere — and their relatively greater affordability — seem inconsequential and insubstantial trivia in comparison to those earlier delights.
Those who remember the solid chunkiness of a postwar Dinky Toy taxi-cab (any colour you wanted so long as it was black and green or black and wine) with its uniformed driver seated in his cab, open to the elements: or the challenge of getting the best from Meccano sets with which everyone else seemed to be so much more adept than you were: struggling with balsa-wood ship or aeroplane kits: the acrid smell of modelling pain
t and varnish: the surprisingly versatile rubber Minibrix, precursor of Lego and a valuable adjunct to Hornby Gauge 0 train layouts.
Those who remember such delights will never forget them, and will only regret that the toys which thrill their own children seem at once made so slipshod and slapdash (though technically out-of-sight), and so ephemeral (though imperative possessions for their one brief hour of fashionable fame) by comparison.
45
The Black Sheep
The disdain with which the Deck Officers of many of the crack paddle-steamers, and the officials at the more fashionable Clyde resorts, treat the puffers which cross their paths and frequent their harbours is as nothing compared with the calculated and insulting pretensions to superiority which are often directed at the little boats and those who work on them by the private yachts which they encounter — and the larger the yacht, then usually the larger the degree of derision with which they are treated.
Such opprobrium, however, comes not from the owners of the yachts but from their crews. This is particularly cruel, for as often as not these crewmen are of the same stock and background as the crews of the puffers, and the gabbarts and steam-lighters, which are the butt of their jibes and sneers.
I suppose it is merely symptomatic of the inadequacies of human nature that many who succeed in ‘bettering’ themselves, whether financially or socially, should then desire to kick away from beneath them the ladder by which they climbed to such new and giddy heights — and to pretend that they never had anything in common with those less fortunate occupants of the lower rungs of that same ladder (namely their former colleagues and equals) at the same time.
And no individual can be more cutting in these circumstances than one who only pretends that he has improved himself, but knows full well that, despite superficial outward appearances, he has in fact signally failed so to do.
Para Handy, fortunately, was a man of a kindly and forgiving nature, and though he could be hurt by the unfeeling comments of former acquaintances who had moved on from the rigours and frustration of the coastal cargo trade, he was not prone to harbour grudges and was more likely to forgive and forget than to remember and plot revenge.
Complete New Tales of Para Handy Page 33