Written by James Hammond
Armed with a scrape-by Degree in Mechanical Engineering I set out to get a job. That was the plan, academia was o.k. but I just wanted a job, to earn. Trouble is the industries I fancied proved difficult and the ones that weren’t so difficult I didn’t fancy. Eventually I settled on the idea that I needed real hands-on basic experience and decided to join the Merchant Navy just for a year or so (which ended up being twelve). I soon found out that a degree in engineering didn’t cut it, and on application and initial interview I was rejected. However, I was lucky in that the Board of Trade Examiner of Engineers (who become a colleague twenty years later) knew of a shipping company hiring graduates for an Alternative Cadetship scheme. He made the call for me without my knowledge – and also returned my 12/6d fee as I was so out of my depth – most welcome).
So before long I found myself rising at 05.00h, walking the two or three miles to the railway station to travel twenty miles to start work at 07.20h. But I was earning! The graduate scheme was of course totally unlike modern schemes where you get slotted in somewhere up the ladder. This was two years working round the bottom of the ladder before you were allowed onto the first rung.
I was assigned to the makers of large slow-speed marine diesels and the scale of the engineering amazed me. The excitement I felt then is still with me. I was fortunate to be put into the care initially of Jimmy W., a fitter in E shop (sub assemblies). I think he was mourning the loss of his previous apprentice, judging by the glowing references to him he would make now and again, but he was very patient.
By all appearances Jimmy was just an ordinary working man, very good at what he did but in occasional conversations at tea break (only one per day, in the afternoon) he told me that during the war he had been a Third Engineer Officer with Eagle tankers mainly ferrying petrol from New York to Malta. There was no bragging about his experiences. The main topics of sparse conversations tended to be things like how he could not get study materials – books, writing paper and so on, or leave to get to college or marine engineering school, sit the Board of Trade Examinations etc., so that he could progress his career at sea. Another tale related was being refused permission to go ashore in New York to buy a new pair of engine room boots, and having to continually repair the irreparable pair he had.
Even now, as then, I am amazed by the normality whilst surrounded by imminent danger. Jimmy only mentioned the danger once, and this involved a collision between ships at the entrance to Valletta harbour. Virtually the whole ship’s crew was taken ashore for the Board of Trade Enquiry before discharging cargo (yes, even in war the Civil Service protocols must have priority). Jimmy and a Deck Officer were left on board. Then an air raid erupted. Jimmy went to his toilet and waited for the inevitable, which thankfully did not come. There was never a mention that he wanted out of the Merchant Navy, and in fact the Merchant Navy never suffered from lack of volunteers.
It was at the end of my sea-going career in the Merchant Navy that I came into contact with Sam G., a very quiet, measured man. Sam was the Chief Officer but in (again sparse) conversation Sam related that he had been a Naval aviator and had commanded a destroyer at one time, but no actual war stories as such and I guess the latter command could have been after the war. There were no age restrictions on serving in the Merchant Navy, and Sam was difficult to age being a very sprightly character, so I just don’t know.
The ship we were on was undergoing extensive hull repairs in Florida and as part of the shipyard hospitality we, the senior officers and superintendent were treated to a slap-up dinner at a pretty upmarket rooftop restaurant on a prominent building a couple of miles away over the river. It being a nice evening we decided to stroll there. A uniformed armed guard stopped us at the entrance to the building in a friendly way as he seemed to recognise some of us. It transpired that earlier that day a crew member had died aboard the ship from a heart attack and the guard was actually the undertaker in his day job. Armed guard at night, undertaker by day sounds like a job creation scheme.
The guard asked us where we had parked our car and when told we’d walked he was horrified. “You can’t walk down there, you’ll get murdered, even the police don’t go down there unless they’re in an armoured car,” etc.. There was a police station on the road to the shipyard which looked like some kind of fort with few or no windows. We had a nice meal during which the discussion turned to Sushi and what we thought of it. Sam never lifted his head from eating and remarked, “We should have nuked the b*****s when we had the chance,” which dampened the conversation somewhat. Everyone else at the table was much younger than Sam and even back at the start of the eighties this seemed outrageous; but no one knew how Sam or his contemporaries had been directly impacted by the war.
Dinner over, most of us elected to move on and see more of the city (by taxi). Sam walked back to the ship alone.
(To be continued with Part 3 tomorrow – you can read Part 1 here.)
Very interesting. We do have modern day heroes though, fighting with the mind and the pen.
“Sam walked back to the ship alone.” Even though the night guard said “You can’t walk down there, you’ll get murdered, even the police don’t go down there unless they’re in an armoured car, etc.”… Those men of the old school like Sam didn’t easily get frightened.