After over 60 years, and although these memories still shine bright, I am not totally certain of their chronological order, or which ship I was on at the time.
I joined my first ship in Ardrossan, Scotland in January 1959. I was 16. A first memory is of going into a bar and not understanding a word of what the Scottish barman was saying when I ordered a half pint of bitter. That resulted in him drawing the half pint and then putting a shot of whisky beside it.
Apparently, I had agreed to a ‘Half and Half.’ A first lesson!
It was a pretty wet and dismal night, and I was glad to at last arrive on board my first ship for my first trip to sea. The captain’s name was Ivan Jefferies, known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ by all on the company’s ships, and a name that suited him.
The Chief Officer (First Mate) took me to the captain’s cabin so that I could report myself ‘Aboard’ to him. I don’t recall him even acknowledging me and there was certainly no welcome aboard. I guess a lowly first trip deck apprentice was very much the lowest of the low.
The First Mate, who ruled us apprentices’ lives was okay, and the Second and Third Mates also, along with my own colleague apprentices, made for pleasant company, and were easy to work with.
The biggest surprise was the crew, all from Liverpool, so ‘Scousers’! They were all ‘hard’ men and to a young and naïve 16-year-old their sense of humour was pretty outrageous.
But we cadets were cheap labor to shipowners, so although we were supposed to be learning to be officers the reality was that we spent much of our time working as a part of the deck crew and quickly discovered that in spite of our very lowly status, as long as we accepted this, and showed a willingness to be a part of their work, they could be incredibly generous and helped us to work with them and understand just what a sailor’s work was all about.
The greatest benefit of that was to put us in a position later in our seagoing life, when directing a crew, that we had done the work we expected them to do, whatever it happened to be. I thought it was a pretty good system.
A mix of related memories
When my eldest son ‘discovered’ The Beatles’ music, as a teenager, he flat out refused to believe that his father knew of the Beatles and their music way before he was born! I guess dads weren’t supposed to be ‘with it.’
It must have been when they first came out and their signature haircut became a new fad. I was the apprentice on watch on the bridge as our vessel approached Brunsbüttel locks, the entrance to the Kiel Canal, the waterway leading to the Baltic Sea.
The young seaman who came into the bridge was sporting a Beatles haircut, which, for reasons I never understood, incensed our captain, who ordered him ‘off my bridge’, then turned to me to take over the wheel. There were very few occasions when any apprentice was trusted with steering a ship and certainly not during docking and maneuvering in confined waters. I guess it was just a question of once having given the order he wasn’t about to admit to his officers on watch, or to the German pilot, that he could possibly be wrong.
Steering a ship is not necessarily a big deal and as I was subject to a continual stream of helm orders from both captain and pilot until we were in the lock and tied up. It was surprisingly easy. I think the next time I actually steered a large vessel into a lock was when I began my job as a helmsman on the Manchester Ship Canal, some 10 years later.
Another memory that often pops up is from Singapore, exploring the Tiger Balm Gardens and having to visit a toilet. As I looked up and almost in my face was a spider’s web, with the biggest spider I had ever seen in my life, sitting there!
And one more from Singapore—this was my first trip to sea, when Lee Kuan Yew, the creator of modern Singapore, was elected. We were told we should not go ashore as some were expecting riots, should his party win. He did win and there was no rioting.
And on the same ship anchored overnight in a Musi River in Indonesia (apparently there are two), we had local fishermen appearing as soon as we anchored and asking to trade empty paint tins (I still don’t know why), for buckets of huge prawns. I know we got the better deal! Our Chinese ship's cook produced some incredible dishes for us.
I am so fortunate, as I recall only good memories.
