He decided to stay at a hotel in Cardiff courting Mother Booze and the barmaid until his locker was empty. ‘I may be getting on in years,’ he said to me on joining the ship, ‘but there’s not so many who can stand on their heads when they’re over 70!’ He promptly stood on his head to prove the point and took five shillings off me before returning to the pub.
On this voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia, we keep close to the Welsh and Irish shores and right under the shadow of the beautiful cliffs and caves around Mizen Head, where the sweet scent of the wet turf is wafted seaward. The third officer keeps himself busy in his spare time on the 12-day passage with his hobby of ‘laundry work’. His cabin is festooned with yellowish rags that were once his clothes, but are now too far gone and tatty for the poor old chap to expose to the public view. At sea he wears homemade white canvas trousers and socks upon which he has sewn patches.
We arrive at Halifax in the early morning and commence loading some of the few thousand tons of flour we are to take to France. As often happened, by the time evening came the old third mate, whose cabin is opposite mine, has had many imaginary visitors to see him.
‘Good evening, Captain!’
‘Oh good evening, do come in and have a drink,’ he would reply to himself. A glass would chink, and then he would ramble on to his imaginary old shipmates about strange happenings and past voyages when he had been master of Nova Scotia schooners and brigs in the Spanish and South American dried fish trade. He would speak of shipwrecks and mutinies in which his wife, who had borne him 11 children, had taken an active part. He remembered the schooners Rose Marie and the San Juan; the brig Modiste, abandoned at sea; and the Mystery, which was lost by fire. His body is scarred by make-believe wounds from bullet and knife. Poor old chap – I liked to listen to his stories because sometimes I imagined I might just be hearing the truth. He went ashore later that night; the police brought him back to the ship just before we sailed. He seemed quite unconcerned, smoking his vile old pipe and totally out of his mind.
The cargo being loaded and the hatches battened down, a gang of naval ratings work for a couple of days making chocks and then securing the four 80-foot motor launches we load on deck. These are the M. L. Boats,i ‘Joy Yachts’ or ‘Petrol Punishers’ as they are nicknamed. About 550 of these boats were built, mostly in Canada and Bayonne in New Brunswick, but they were not particularly successful because their petrol consumption was around 50 gallons per hour for a speed of 19 knots. Not only that, they were very costly to build, had insufficient beam for their length, and lacked any strength in a seaway. I know a little about their construction because I later lived on and looked after one of these launches that had been converted into a yacht.
We leave Halifax shortly before a terrific explosionii in the harbour. Our destroyer escort is picked up 200 miles west of the Scilly Isles but lost an hour later in thick fog, only to next be seen inside Portsmouth harbour. The French ports being too congested to receive more ships, we lie at anchor for ten days in the Solent before finally crossing the Channel and discharging our cargo of flour in Calais. We are then sent back to Cardiff for bunkers.
The shipping company manager hasn’t forgotten me. I am informed that an ‘older servant’ of the company is here to relieve me and that he has agreed to sail without a third officer. Good luck to him; unfortunately the ship was sunk on her next voyage, so I wasn’t too sorry to be out of it. The last I saw of the old third mate was in the pub shortly after he had discharged himself from the ship. ‘They may get an older man than me,’ he told me, ‘but by God they won’t find one tougher!’
The 18 months from the middle of 1916 to the beginning of 1918 are the most pleasant and happy times I have in my 20 years at sea. Our steamer is a poor class tramp of about 4,000 tons, but she has been built for a special trade and with a good speed, which are the very reasons for her being requisitioned as a Military Transport to ferry troops and war material across to France.
She has the worst accommodation of any ship for her size I have ever sailed in, but one can put up with that easily enough if the other conditions are fairly good. She is commanded by an easygoing Irishman who leaves things pretty well to his officers once he has found them to be trustworthy and conscientious. A really competent tramp steamer shipmaster is a man in a hundred. He must have a strong nerve, a brain of no mean order, and be a thoroughly good businessman.
We are kept busy all the time apart from the periods of unavoidable delays. We make 112 trips across the Channel in 18 months, firstly from Avonmouth to Rouen and then from either Portsmouth or Southampton to most of the Channel ports in France. The cargoes are a miscellaneous jumble of war material, from motor lorries, cycles, steam wagons, disinfectors, and railway wagons, to guns, provisions, and troops. We make the return passages either light ship or with scrap from the battlefront such as damaged guns or wrecked lorries and wagons. At a later stage the ship carries over 300 army tanks, 30 per trip, from Portsmouth dockyard to Le Havre. Occasionally we load big and beautifully fitted out hospital Pullman cars, four of them to a complete train that were stowed one on each side of the fore and main decks. Nearly all this war material, except the tanks and trains, is loaded and discharged using the ship’s own gear, no mean feat with some of the lorries weighing over ten tons and with our heavy lift derrick being more or less a homemade affair. I think we held the record for doing no damage whatsoever to a single machine during the whole period.
Most of the other vessels running in conjunction with us are sunk either by mine or torpedo, and some with a tragic loss of life. It isn’t until April 1917 that we have any naval escorts. We never see a submarine, but do pass one or two floating mines a little too close for comfort. It will make little difference if we run into trouble; our decks are so cluttered with lorries and so forth that getting to the lifeboats quickly, either from the crew quarters forward or the troops quarters aft, is virtually impossible.
However happy these times are though, the wages still do not do justice to our work:
A moment please! The third officer’s wages on this Military Transport are five shillings more per week than the Arab firemen who, except for the donkeyman (Serang) cannot even speak English! The chief officer, a position just now of very considerable responsibility and this being a troop carrier with cargoes of great value – well, he receives just five shillings a week more than his Chinese steward who waits on him! I simply ask you if that is fair? And now you will see what I meant when I said the mercantile marine should have made money while they could! The homogeneous collection called British subjects who manned the ships did well enough getting practically the same pay as the certificated ship’s navigating officers, the engineer officers being the same. I ask you confidentially, ain’t it sweet? Really I feel ashamed to tell you such things, because naturally you will wonder what kind of men we are to be only worth such a wage! Well, I simply don’t know – we don’t bother about it, that’s all. We have no organisation or anything; we must simply must take what is given us.
The winter of 1917 is a severe one with many gales and great submarine activity. The chances of collision and stranding are decidedly odds on with the navigation lights on the ships unlit and with the lighthouses ashore extinguished. We have one or two horribly narrow squeaks from the former. In one month alone there are 16 collisions in the English Channel, and between February and May, 1,600,000 tons of shipping are sunk.
I feel really sorry for the soldiers when we are sailing as a troopship from the Bristol Channel in these gales. By the time we are off Trevose Head in Devon, most of them look to be more ready for a hospital than fighting in the trenches in France. Even the military
