A British Sailor’s Life At Sea People ask me why I went to sea in the first place.
Well, a couple of reasons really, although it was no lifelong desire and only when pressed for an answer to the question posed when I was about 15 years old, ‘What are you going to do when you leave school?’, did I give it any thought at all. Plus, the day I was asked, I had recently seen a war movie about being a sailor and it looked good! The other reason for going to sea was that the careers master at school had an arrangement with British India Steam Navigation Co., and several boys from my school also went to sea with them.
Perhaps he was getting a ‘retainer’ to send lads away, shades of the press gang! I kept in touch with some of these lads but over the years they dropped away out of sight as sometimes friends do. They say that if you have as many true friends that you can count on the fingers of one hand throughout a lifetime, then you are fortunate. We didn’t live anywhere near the sea so that added to the mystery.
The prospect of seeing the world was very attractive as we didn’t know very much about other countries, only what we had learnt from books or at geography lessons at school, there was no internet or widespread TV in those days and you couldn’t ‘google’ questions about other places, you actually had to go and see for yourself.
My mum and dad wanted me to stay on at school and take ‘A’ levels and possibly get a scholarship to university but my mind was firmly set upon going to sea and in the end they agreed that I could go.
It cost them a bit of outfitting me in uniforms and so on and I also had to pay a £50 bond to the Company to ensure that I stayed the course through my apprenticeship. That was quite an outlay for them and I never really appreciated that until much later in life.
I went to sea for the first time in September 1956 as a Deck Apprentice with the British India Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. onboard their cadet training ship “Chindwara”.
I traveled by train to the Company offices in London, then the Company car took me and a couple of other people including a Captain, who was wearing a bowler hat, down to our respective ships. On the way we had to stop at the Mercantile Marine Office in Dock Street for me to pick up my seaman’s documentation. I got back in the car and we carried on down to the bowler-hatted Captain’s ship which was a different one to my assigned ship. He got out and then said “Where’s my hat?”
We looked around in the car and there it was sticking out from under my bum, I had sat on it when I got back in at Dock Street! It was badly squashed, he said something to me along the lines of “If I ever sail with you sonny, you had better watch out” but with a few ‘sailorly’ epithets thrown in.
Not the best first day in a new Company!
He was actually what was called a relieving Captain, not medically fit to go deep sea, but OK to relieve other Captains to take their leave while their ship was in European waters.
He did actually join the Chindwara a couple of years later and said to me, “I know you from somewhere don’t I”. “No Sir, I don’t think so” I replied and he didn’t pursue it any further.
Lucky me.
My wages were 8 pounds, 7 shillings and 6 pence a month, I sent £2 per month home to mum and still managed to have a good time while away on trips around the world. My first trip was to Australia, the ports we called at were Marseilles, Genoa, Suez, Aden, Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Fremantle again and then home round South Africa as Suez had shut due to the first Suez crisis starting while we were away. We called at Las Palmas, Canary Islands for fuel on the way back to London.
What an introduction to traveling, it was fantastic to see all these wonderful places and see how others lived and worked. It was also a very social ship as she carried 39 cadets who did all the ship’s operational and maintenance work as well as studying for our qualifications.
There was always someone to play a game of cards with, go ashore with or just have a yarn with.
My mum in much later years presented me with a box containing all the letters that I had written home during my cadet years and they make quite interesting reading.
They have also been a memory jog to get these memoirs going.
As part of our training we had to keep a daily journal while we were on board the ship. I don’t know where mine went but I wish I had it now. If any of you reading this are in your early (under 50!) years you should seriously consider keeping a diary even if you don’t write it every day.
Our studying was organized into four days of work on deck (although any work done during an apprenticeship can be construed to be study, a lot of this was work to fill in the time such as washing paintwork, not exactly very edifying stuff), and one day actual studying all the things we needed to know to become a navigating officer, it seemed a bit unbalanced but I suppose we got there in the end. Some of the guys, once they had qualified as deck officers, subsequently thought that they didn’t have enough experience as bridge watchkeepers and my first voyage as 3rd Mate highlighted that.
The ship carried an extra Chief Officer and an extra Bosun to teach us, they did their jobs well and Bertie, the Bosun, also taught us a great deal about seagoing that was not on the official curriculum. He was an outstanding seaman and most of the time a pleasure to work with or under, not so if you did something very wrong, then he could let rip and you knew you were chastised.
Bertie saved my life during an unmooring incident.
My leg got caught in a bit of mooring rope that was running out towards the fairlead as the ship left a mooring buoy, he grabbed the bight in one hand and me in the other and managed to slow it down enough to throw me out to the side and safety.
He could not have done this had he not been immensely strong and I would have been passed through a fairlead and dumped into the water, probably being fatally injured at worst and badly injured at best.
Thank you, Bertie, for that hard-bought lesson in looking out for danger while mooring and unmooring operations.
We had a lot of people on board, 39 cadets, 20 or so Officers, about 50 Indian crew and up to 12 passengers. These days a container ship doing the same work of about 50 Chindwara-sized ships would have a crew of about 20 in total.
Anyway, because we had more than 99 persons on board, we were required to carry a doctor.
No self-respecting doctor would take such a job and ship’s doctors were usually ex- army doctors, doctors who couldn’t get a job elsewhere or doctors with an alcohol problem. Our doctor was no exception; he was ex-Indian army, had been a surgeon during WW1 and a bit of a drinker, I can understand that his experiences doing surgery in that era could have easily turned a man to drink.
He liked to get his afternoon tea served in a teapot as all the Officers did in those days. The difference was, his tea was neat gin and he poured it into a cup and added a bit of water and drank away, thinking that no one would notice his habit! In July 1957 we were going down the Red Sea and one of the Cadets went down with what the doctor diagnosed as heat stroke, it was exceedingly hot at the time.
He ordered him to be put in a chair on the boatdeck, draped in wet sheets and cooled down with electric fans blowing on him.
This was fine for heat stroke but the poor lad actually had pneumonia and was landed ashore in Aden in a very bad way.
He did recover and came back on board again after a few weeks.
Luckily, Aden was close at the time and were able to diagnose him properly at the army base, and get him back to good health again. I actually made contact with this fellow again in December 2010 after 50 years, he’s living in Australia now.
The doctor left after a couple more trips to retire, thank goodness.
Knowing what he was like tended to keep everyone very healthy without having to go to his surgery!
In May 1959 we got a very unusual cargo which was loaded in Mombasa for European ports, a large selection of wild animals for various zoos including Paris and London zoos.
There were a couple of dozen zebras, 3 young giraffes, several antelopes of different types, a couple of leopard cubs, monkeys and some wild warthogs among them.
These were all in cages kept on deck and we cadets had the job of feeding them and cleaning out their cages under supervision of one of the three keepers accompanying them.
These keepers were more or less continuously engaged in providing animals for zoos, they would get orders from various zoos in Europe, then travel to East Africa and set about catching the order, keeping the animals near Nairobi until a whole shipment was assembled.
They would then be shipped down to Mombasa on the train and loaded aboard ships, the keepers accompanying them to the delivery point in Europe before starting the cycle over again. It was quite an interesting job.
During the voyage back north one of the warthogs got out and jumped over the rail into the sea, not to be seen again, unfortunately.
The zebras used to kick violently whenever a rake was introduced into the back of their cages to rake out the muck and we were warned never to stand in line with the rake as one of the African helpers in Nairobi had a rake kicked right through him, ending his life.
No need to tell us twice about that.
The young giraffes were very endearing; they were kept in tall cages with a lid on and the top part open so that they could stick their necks out.
One of them learnt to swipe your cap off your head in its mouth and put it up on top of the cage lid, then when you tried to climb up to retrieve it, the giraffe would bunt you and try to knock you off, it was quite a game and one could say they were really very playful.
A leopard cub clawed one of the keepers quite badly one day and he developed tetanus, we were sort of surprised that they had not been vaccinated against it but there you go, he was quite sick for a while but turned out to be one of the doctor’s success stories and fully recovered.
We were sorry to see the animals offloaded eventually as we had become quite attached to them.
Many trips, events and sporting matches were arranged for us, through these we got to see game reserves, Table Mountain, vineyards, best beaches, etc. and played rugby, football, cricket and hockey against other ships and some shore establishments.
Now and again we were invited to dances laid on for us and got to meet some of the local girls.
Looking back, it was just a great time.
We carried a whaler (rowing and sailing boat) and two sailing dinghies and we all learnt to sail. I still enjoy sailing very much although nowadays it has to be in a bit more luxury than dinghies and whalers.
Luckily the memory tends to forget the bad times such as freezing, all-night work for entering Antwerp port in January, working in the heat of the Red Sea in summer, endless lookout duty in the middle of the ocean, cleaning out bilges after grain cargo, handling wet animal hides (an exceedingly stinking job, the stink hanging around for days afterwards) and so on.
The camaraderie was brilliant and it was a good grounding for life in many ways.
I was made CPO for my last trip on board, that is Chief Petty Officer and it meant being the senior cadet on board and being responsible for general organization and discipline among the cadets, quite a responsible position but one that I enjoyed very much.
I obtained my Second Mates Foreign Going Certificate number 88249 in July 1960 at the age of 20, the minimum age for taking the exam.
This was the key to a career at sea and meant that I was now a fully qualified Navigating Officer.
It was a great feeling and the culmination of a 4 year apprenticeship and 3 months study at King Edward 7th Nautical College in London.
The written exams took about 3 days and there was an oral examination conducted by Board of Trade examiners, crusty old ex-Captains who seemed to like to scare the what’s it out of all the candidates.
Written subjects included navigation, seamanship, ship stability, math, physics, English, chart work and so on…all relevant subjects to being in charge of a navigational watch on board a foreign-going ship.
The oral exam was the most intimidating experience any of us had ever had.
One tale going round was when the examiner asked a candidate, ” You are at anchor close to shore and the wind increases, what will you do?”. He answered “Drop a second anchor, sir”. OK. ” The wind increases some more, what will you do now?” Answer, “Put out another anchor Sir,” Examiner now roars “Where are you getting all these anchors, boy!?” Candidate, without properly thinking his answer through says “Same place you are getting all this wind, Sir” Needless to say the Candidate failed on that attempt!
Would I do it all again?
Well, not under conditions on ships as they are now, the pay is relatively poor, contracts much longer, no time in port and a variety of nationalities on board any given ship.
Under the old circumstances, yes, every time!
A British Sailor’s Life At Sea Written by Mervyn Hutton
