Alexander the Great which now looks to be in need of builders. Suddenly, we are transplanted from the sandy waste of the desert to the Khedive Gardens – Kew Gardens in summertime – which are a blaze of colour and sweet with roses; here and there are miniature ponds and waterfalls, and some genuine green grass.
The catacombs smell as musty as a disused forepeak, so we drive back to the Boursev with its fine shops and crowds of Australian troops. Sitting for 20 minutes at an outside café table will give you every opportunity for inspecting the wares of as many hawkers; several of their goods are of a kind quite unobtainable in Woolworths. The hawkers are one of the main features of Alexandria; they even spread themselves out to the ships in the harbour from the moment the anchor goes down until she sails.
Jock McPherson is a full-blooded Arab who claims to have come from Greenock. He will sell you anything from a box of cigarettes, where only the top two layers can be smoked, to a bottle of whisky that proudly bears the label ‘as drunk by the Royal Family’. I have my doubts as to whether the royal family will have ever drunk methylated spirit of the poorest quality. There is nothing Jock will not do or sell if there is enough profit in it, from scaling the ship’s boilers to painting her complete hull. These people would have the skin from their mother’s corpse if it were saleable, but I should say their business methods are a little more above board than many of our London ‘financiers’ or shipowners. At least the Arab will not cheat his own employees quite so much.
We sail from Alexandria and return to Gibraltar to land the naval gun crew and the gun which, because of their scarcity, will be transferred to another eastbound ship. It is now the middle of January and we are heading west in ballast across the Atlantic, bound for the dreaded Canada once again. A winter’s passage in this class of tramp, or should I say government store ship, is never going to be pleasant.
It takes us 19 days to reach Saint John in New Brunswick. There is no heating in the cabins and our bunks lie close to the bare steel of the ship’s side. In the Bay of Fundy the actual temperature is not as low as in other parts of eastern Canada, although with it being very damp any temperature below zero feels that much colder. No one has been fitted out with any warm clothing for these Artic conditions.
The weather grows colder and colder as the vessel punches up the bay in the north-westerly gale and the blinding snowstorms. The seas are steep and high with the spray freezing instantly as it falls onto the deck and the open bridge. Life must be very hard on the timber schooners and small barques that are also beating their way up into the bay. With the temperature ten degrees below zero, the ship becomes a white mass of ice and snow. Before we can anchor, a stream of boiling water must be played onto the hawse pipe and windlass. Chunks of ice have to be broken out and passed through the manhole door of the frozen freshwater tanks in order to get some water. Just think, three weeks ago it was almost hot in the Mediterranean…
The captain faces being hauled over the coals for a ‘questionable expense’ – buying some cheap paraffin oil stoves, which smell exactly like cheap oil stoves often do. These expenses must be reduced if the shipowner is to pay his shareholders their 150% dividend, but at least we are that little bit warmer.
You can guess that my opinion of Saint John is simply not printable when I tell you that whilst ashore one evening I slip over on the confounded slippery streets and break a good bottle of whisky. I am glad to be departing from this port after we have loaded a cargo of ammunition, oats, and hay. The ship – her decks piled high with a solid frozen mass of rubbish and coal dust – looks wretched under the clear moonlit skies that accompany these intensely cold nights. It is really beyond a joke to come off watch from the bridge and to see one’s frozen oilskin standing upright on its own after taking it off.
Three days later it becomes comparatively mild and the ice starts to melt. We have one bit of trouble on the homeward passage when a Spanish fireman hit a Russian over the head with a fire axe; caught up in the resulting melee were a Mexican, a Swede, a Greek, and a Malay. This cosmopolitan collection is typical of the British mercantile marine in the time of war. These so-called seamen are paid £8 per month, which is exactly the same as a certified and experienced British third officer, but the officers don’t have a trade union!
The daily press is quite concerned about the ruinously high rate of wages being paid. One newspaper actually stated that a ship’s crew had recently signed on with the enormous wages of £8 and ten shillings per month, the highest wages ever given to seamen in the history of the British mercantile marine. It thus raises the question as to how the company can possibly continue to reward its shareholders with their 100% dividend. No mention is ever made of the vastly increased cost of living, or the wretched position of the poor ship’s third officer, who has little choice but to continue working for the same wages as the seamen. Politicians talk of merchant seamen as being the ‘jugular vein’ of the nation, providing of course they keep on working properly and do not make too many wage demands.
By the beginning of 1916, ship owning had become a highly profitable business with generous dividends being paid to the shareholders. Mr Bonar Law,vi who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, had invested heavily in shipping and found his shipping dividends to be most gratifying. At least he had the courage to say so in his speech to the House on the subject. ‘I don’t like talking about my shipping investments,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed of them. My investments have been in ten different companies under different management. It is true they were all in tramp steamers, but I am not quite sure if they make more profit than the liners. The sum invested in these ships was £8,110. In 1915, the dividend was £3,624, and in 1916 I received £3,874.’
He continued his speech by telling the House that when one of the tramp steamers in which he had invested £200 had been sunk or sold, although he couldn’t remember which, he had received a payment of £1,000, despite having been previously paid a very handsome dividend. He also mentioned ‘a division of surplus capital’ from a shipping company that earned him £1,050 from an initial £350 investment.
Freight rates were tremendously high in 1916. In one instance, the value of cargo being shipped from England to the States was $1,050 yet the freight charge was $2,500. The shipowners netted between 100% to 400% return on their capital at the expense of the sea staff, who took most of the risks for wages that were insignificant when compared with the huge profits being made. When taking the cost of living into account, the wages from the captain down to the lowest paid seaman were not one penny more than in pre-war times. The men of the mercantile marine will receive no pension for war disablements because we are civilians and not soldiers, but a certified officer is of far more importance to the country than a soldier. The alternative would be to recognise the mercantile marine as a fighting force and then we would have the benefits of gratuities and pensions.
During this profitable yet dangerous period of the war, an appeal was sent out by the Merchant Service Guildvii to every shipowner in the country to raise a fund for their employees interned in Germany. The result of this appeal revealed the true generosity of these prosperous war profiteers towards their seagoing employees; the sum of £471 and eight shillings was collected, a miserly three pence per each dependent. The shipowner chose not to play the game then, has not done so before, and has not done so since, and that is the end of it. I apologise for having broken out with this tirade against the shipowner, for it may not interest you in the slightest and it does little good. A certain type of shipowner will only laugh at what I have said, suggest that I am a crazy fool, and go on overloading his ships and underpaying his employees just the same.
There being 40 steamers at anchor in Le Havre roads upon our arrival, we receive orders to proceed to Dungeness West roads through the Folkestone Gate, a narrow wartime channel through which all ships must pass to enter or leave the Dover Straits. It is surprising how many vessels can accumulate when the traffic is held up for a few hours. I have seen 150 merchant ships
