A cold winter in Europe - 1973

If you are reading my blogs for the first time, welcome!  However, this is possibly not the best place to start.  I hope you will eventually dip into them all, but if nothing else, please read "and so back to England 1973" before reading this - it might provide a little more context.

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Here I was on an unusually sunny day in September, a few days after my father had returned to Australia, together with a bunch of other hopefuls at an artificial ski-slope at Esher near London.  

A couple of years earlier some Sydney friends had spent a winter working in Saas Fee and having succeeded in making it sound like the most exciting thing on earth, I was determined to find out for myself what it was like.  I had done a little research and after a phone interview, I was now an aspiring candidate for the alpine working holiday of a lifetime.  There was only one small catch - the job required a standard of skill, which my previous efforts on the intermediate slopes at Falls Creek and Perisher might not meet.

The job was described as requiring a standard of competency around the mountain sufficient to be able to operate a T-bar lift, chip ice off machinery and be available at any part of the resort where an extra pair of arms and legs were needed. To ensure that we were capable of carrying out these tasks, candidates were required to demonstrate a level of proficiency as a skier which was at least above that of novice.

I’m sure there are now larger dry slope fields, many of them indoors, but at that time the Artificial Ski Centre at Esher was described as the largest slope in the UK and as I looked down from the top of the slope that afternoon it was a daunting challenge.

I had never considered myself a great skier, but I thought I was competent enough to do the job. The challenge appeared simple. We had to be able to negotiate the slope twice without the help of poles while carrying an empty wooden cable drum supported by a section of galvanised pipe about a metre long pushed through the axis of the drum. We each made our way to the top of the slope and one by one were made to balance the drum and length of pipe in the crooks of our elbows and asked to ski to the bottom. One or two did it as if they had been doing it all their lives.  Others, came to grief - some as they set off, others as they tried to slalom down the hill, and others as they arrived at the bottom, unable to stop.  It was terrifying to watch, and finally it was my turn. I felt like a paratrooper about to make his first jump, with a not so friendly sergeant standing behind waiting to kick me into space.  I took a deep breath and launched myself on to the slope, looking for all the world like someone auditioning for a spot on It's a Knockout. Frank Spencer could not have looked any worse as I flew down the slope, skis pointing in every direction, displaying all the dignity of a tight rope walker in a gale. The only thing preventing my arms from flailing like a windmill was that I was hanging on to the cable drum as though my life depended on it.

I don’t know how I did it but I made it to the bottom of the slope not once, but twice.  Somehow, I managed it without turning my high speed balancing act into an imitation of a cartwheel from a wrecked stagecoach  bouncing randomly downhill. The fellow in charge of the event, shook his head at me and told me it was the worst exhibition of skiing he had ever seen. He could not imagine how I would survive a real ski slope, let alone one high in the Swiss Alps, but he obviously thought I was going to be someone else's problem and as good as his word, I got the job. 

I’m not sure whether I was pleased at this news or not, but at least I had a position to go to. Bob arrived a week or two later and after he had done the rounds of friends and family we were ready for our European crusade.

The September sun was long gone, when on a drab and bitter day in late November, with newly fitted amber headlight reflectors, we set off in the stately Rover for our destiny in Switzerland. We were planning to take our time getting there, in part because we weren’t expected in Saas Fee before the second week of December, and partly because we had not planned on the 1973 Oil Crisis which had started the previous month and was likely to restrict our access to fuel at times.

We took the ferry across from Harwich in East Anglia to Esbjerg in Denmark on the Jutland Peninsula. From there we drove across Denmark to Copenhagen where we spent a night with Riis and Solveig Petersen a young Danish couple who I had sailed with on Dona Clausen when Riis was third mate and Solveig, radio operator.

We spent a couple of nights also in Copenhagen, a lovely town where among other things I introduced Bob to a few more of my former shipmates from Dona Clausen, and they in turn introduced Bob to Messrs Aalberg, Tuborg and Carlsberg, although I don't believe any introduction was necessary. We dived headlong into Danish culture. First, a visit to Helsingør where we visited Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore and stared across Øresund to Helsingborg on the other side of the strait in Sweden. We followed Shakespeare's inspiration with a visit to the local cinema to see Deep Throat and Linda Lovelace, for at that time cultural experiences such as these could only be had in enlightened and progressive countries like Denmark and Holland.

We had started our European journey by travelling across Denmark because I wanted to see the land which I had recently heard so much of and because I wanted to see again some of the friends I had made since joining Clausen Company. I also wanted to explore other work opportunities and while in Copenhagen, I went to see another well-known and fast-growing shipping group, Lindinger. They were new to shipping with about ten vessels in their fleet having only recently embarked on a major building and recruitment program. Lindinger had been described to me as a “bukser selskab” (literally a trouser company), a name given to a company with no prior links with shipping (for example, a clothing manufacturer) who had taken advantage of the Danish Government’s generous tax concessions by entering the shipbuilding business. This was beneficial to me, (not to mention a whole industry of ship builders and engineers) and I was offered a job on the spot. I agreed to sign on as First Engineer on Lindinger Amber due to sail from Liverpool to North Africa sometime in late January. My thinking at the time was that if the Saas Fee adventure failed to materialise (or if the predictions of my ski-ing examiner proved true), if nothing else, I would have something to do. Ah, the heady days of full employment for all!

Now at this point I have to confess that as much as I was enjoying the adventure, and of course the pleasure of Bob's amusing company, my thoughts kept returning to Pauline and the fact that I had already decided I was going to marry her (a thought I had not actually at that point shared with her). Not long after the meeting with the folk at Lindinger, I called her long distance to say hello - not something done lightly in those days before mobile phones and made more difficult by the fact that she had no phone at her mother's house where she was living.  Having established contact - she in her crowded office at work; me in a telephone kiosk outside Tivoli Garden - I told her that I was going back to sea in the new year and the Danes being more liberal than their British counterparts in their attitude towards officers’ wives and partners on board ship, I asked her if she would like to come with me. “But I have a good job at the Co-op" she said, "I can’t possible leave that!” I asked her to think about it and she said yes OK, she would think about it.

After about a week in Denmark we drove to Gedser, the southernmost town in Denmark on the island of Falster, where we crossed on the ferry to Rostock in East Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR).

The countryside was thick with snow and the roads were icy as we drove around Rostock looking for a way out. Our destination that day was Berlin and we thought we were well on way when we saw a motorway sign pointing to “Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR”. Pretty soon we were speeding through the night along a spanking new motorway, thinking – this can’t be bad. We had about 200 km to drive to our destination and it was going to take no time at all on motorway like this. I can’t remember how long we were humming along in the dark down this lovely new road which I have since discovered is now the E55 Euro route. 
The traffic became lighter and lighter and soon ours was the only vehicle travelling in either direction. Then all at once, the motorway stopped. By that I don’t mean that we came across one of those “end of motorway” signs, or anything like that. I mean it just stopped and we were driving along a hard gravel surface with no markings, no median strip and clearly no longer harbouring any pretence of being a road. Fortunately we were able to quickly come to a stop, or who knows where we might have finished up that night – in a field presumably, or worse someone’s back garden. 
And there we were - in the middle of a freezing winter’s night, surrounded by snow and ice, in East Germany – stuck at the end of the Autobahn to Nowhere.

With great deal of circumspection, we turned our stately and capacious Rover around, and ever so carefully retraced our steps, until we were able to bump back up on the tarmac of the motorway again. We did have a map, but regrettably our road wasn’t marked on it, so when we arrived back at the last exit point several kilometres back in the other direction, we still had no idea where we were.

Happily, we did not have to drive around for very long before we found another road and a signpost with the familiar “Hauptstadt der DDR”direction. This time we had a road to follow which took us through numerous towns and villages and eventually delivered us into Berlin en route to our final destination that night, West Berlin. We drove to Checkpoint Charlie, the name given by the West to the best known Berlin Wall crossing point between East and West Berlin. It was here that we were subject to a rigorous search of our vehicle by the Volkspolizei, the East German police, otherwise known as the VP. They looked under the car with mirrors on trolleys and under the bonnet. They opened the petrol cap and shone a torch inside and went through our entire luggage until they were satisfied that we weren’t trying in any way to carry anything back into the West that we hadn’t taken in with us. Once we were allowed to pass, we drove to the western sector of the wall where the West German border police had a cursory look at our passports and waved us through thus ending forever our links with socialist realism. We spent a night in West Berlin (enjoying the nightlife) and left the next day for Munich, where we did more exploring of the local social scene and the delights of the Bavarian Bierkeller.

Bob was a great travelling companion and we shared a lot of laughs. He and I had met about four years earlier when we were engineers on the SS Francis Drake. Bob was from Plymouth and after getting to know each other as shipmates we also became housemates in the early 1970s. For some reason we started calling ourselves Smithers and Saunders and effecting a toffee-nosed upper class British military accent, “I say Smithers, jolly close call that, what –stiff upper lip eh?” Well, we thought it was funny.

It was somewhere between Berlin and Munich or maybe it was between Munich and our next destination Milan, that we started to find that capacious and stately that the Rover may have been, it was certainly no longer as reliable and trustworthy as we would have liked. She broke down a couple of times in the hills and we frequently found the formerly healthy sounding six cylinder engine running with only five, four or sometimes just three cylinders firing. Of course, it was bitterly cold, and one night when we had to sleep in the car, we woke the next morning to find our beer and wine rations (kept in the boot, purely for medicinal purposes) frozen solid. Worse, the water in the radiator, despite the fact that we had poured liberal amounts of anti-freeze compound into the system, had also frozen.

We hadn’t intended to travel as far south as Milan; Switzerland was after all our destination, but a look at the map seemed to indicate that there was a lot more downhill than uphill by diverting to Italy (and parts of Switzerland are of course, seriously uphill). There was also more chance of finding a Rover dealership in Milan. So, a few hours out of Munich and after the aforementioned rough night in the car, Saunders and Smithers decided to continue on to Milan where they were able to get some repairs affected to the capacious, stately and extremely unhealthy Rover.

I remember little about Milan except it being wet, but since we were sleeping in the car at this time, I think it was a preferable environment to having several feet of snow piled up outside the door. We did however manage to get some repairs done to the car and were thus able to proceed in our stately way north, via the Simplon tunnel (which meant putting the car on a train for part of the journey) and thence to our final destination at Saas Fee in Switzerland.

It was early December when we arrived, and to our amazement there was little or no snow, and apparently little or no chance of employment for at least two or three more weeks. We didn't even bother to stay overnight.  We had both had enough.  Bob was happy to return to the UK and thence to Australia; and I was keen to find out whether Pauline was going to run away to sea with me or not. So, we left.

After a brief stopover in Paris we headed west to Dieppe and then on the ferry to Dover. There is not much memorable about the trip home, except that we had about exhausted all our funds by the last French motorway toll booth and were able to manage only a few relatively small Danish øre which we pitched into the automatic collection basket, and drove on to the sound of ringing bells and flashing lights – quite an exit, I thought at the time.

Bob returned to Sydney not long after, sadly leaving his ski-boots in the back of the Rover never to see them again. What followed for me was a highly enjoyable Christmas with Anne and the family in Nuthall – my first winter Christmas since 1955 and on 5th January 1974 I set sail as First Engineer on MV Lindinger Amber from Liverpool to Algeria, carrying of all thing a cargo of refined lubricating oil.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention - Pauline said yes. 

She wouldn’t be able to join me until the second voyage in mid-February so this first trip I had to do on my own and I can't wait to tell you what happened next...

…and so back to England - 1973

It was sometime around the middle of 1973 that I contacted my father, who had recently retired and was living alone in a small duplex just south of Cairns. I was soon to be leaving the Danish livestock vessel MV Dona Clausen after completing six months' voyage time. I had joined her in Singapore earlier in the year and, after a few trips carrying cattle and sheep from Australia and New Zealand to South America and the Middle East, and a promotion to first engineer, I was ready for some leave. Dona Clausen was a good ship and the Danes make pleasant shipmates once one becomes accustomed to their partiality for smoked fish, lard and akvavit.
I made many good friends. Among them was Holger, my predecessor as first engineer, a droll and self-deprecating fellow from whom I learned much about the Danish character.  My attempts at learning Danish were a continuing source of amusement to him.  Although not exactly a zealot when it came to hard work, he was a very good engineer who understood the idiosyncrasies of our cranky and temperamental Götaverken engine better than anyone. He was also a chronic alcoholic. A condition of his employment required that he receive a daily dose of disulfiram (known as Antabuse).  The effect of the medication being that even the slightest alcohol consumption produces acute symptoms of nausea, headaches and illness. This was administered every morning by the chief engineer and as a result, Holger was never anything other than strictly sober, which is more than I could say for some of my other shipmates.
I would frequently read my Teach Yourself Danish book to him.  “Mit navn er Jens Hansen. Jeg er en mand.  Der er mange mennesker i Danmark der hedder Hansen.” (My name is Jens Hansen. I am a man. There are many people in Denmark named Hansen). I would go on, in what resembled his native language in only the most remote fashion, to describe Jens and his kinfolk in detail and as I did, Holger would puff on his pipe, nod his head and say in his melodious Scandinavian English, “I like the Hansen family.”It was while I was serving on Danish ships that I discovered my love of frikadeller, a flat pan-fried dumpling of minced pork, or occasionally beef, served with boiled potatoes and cooked red cabbage (rødkål).  There are many recipes around - this is a good one. Delicious!
But I digress, and need to return to my story. It was in Sydney, just a few weeks before I was to go on leave that I phoned my father.  Dad had suffered a stroke a year or two earlier, and had recently retired at the age of 61 (just a youngster).  It had been some time since we had last been in touch with each other and I suggested to him that it might be nice for us to have a holiday somewhere.  He thought so too.  I had in mind a couple of weeks on the Gold Coast, or maybe somewhere in the South Pacific – Fiji perhaps.
“I would like to go to England,” he said. He had not been there since the family had emigrated nearly 20 years earlier, and although his mother and his only sister had passed away, he had three nephews who he hadn’t seen since their childhood and he was long overdue a journey back to the Old Dart. “Right you are then,” I said.  And so it was that in July 1973 we were together on QF1 bound for London Heathrow.
Dad was planning to stay about six weeks after which I had arranged to catch up with Bob Pope. Bob and I had agreed to get together later in the year to do a bit of touring around Europe and maybe get some winter work in one of the alpine ski resorts. He and I had sailed together on Francis Drake some years earlier, and we had become good friends.  We had shared a house with three or four other guys in Artarmon for several months when I worked in Sydney in the early 1970s (more about that another day, perhaps).
Dad was born in London and although he grew up around Norwich and later moved to Nottingham, he always considered London his home town and nothing gave him more pleasure than singing a few choruses of Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner. So we spent a week together in London where he enjoyed the opportunity to revisit a few landmarks.
His father had been a victim of the Great War.  After seeing service at the front, he was sadly killed when his rifle exploded in his face at Aldershot Rifle Range in 1915 when Dad was just a baby. It wasn’t until many years later, when service records became more accessible through the internet that I learned that my grandfather and his two brothers, George and Ernest all saw action and of the three brothers only one would survive the war.  Dad knew little about his childhood.  He was born in Streatham in the south west not far from Kennington Oval.  He had an elder sister and the children spent most of their childhood living with aunts and uncles while my grandmother worked as a lady's maid (they called it being in service).
We wanted to look for my grandfather's grave, so based on Dad’s hunch we spent a day at Lambeth Cemetery.  Lambeth Cemetery is a huge necropolis with about a quarter of a million graves and we walked around without success for two or three hours looking at headstones and monuments. Late that afternoon, we found our way to the records room, and a kindly warden let us spend more time looking through dusty archives.  Amazingly, and almost at random, shortly before the cemetery gates were to be locked for the day, we found the record we were after.  To this day I don’t know how, but I picked up a book of burial records, and there it was staring out at me from the page – Sapper Arthur John George Williamson, 3rd Field Company, Royal Engineers, who died aged 32 on 15 December 1915 – remembered with honour.   We located the grave shortly after that and my father and I stood for several minutes in front of the simple white headstone. 
Tears filled his eyes as he realised, for the first time in his life that it was not just the Arthur part of his name that came from his father, it was also the John and the George, and I remember thinking how glad I was that we had come together to England to share this moment. Of course, now it is much easier to find a war grave. The excellent Commonwealth War Graves Commission website ensures that none of the nearly two million people who gave their lives in these terrible wars will ever be forgotten.
From London we took the train from St Pancras Station to Nottingham where we were welcomed by my mother's sister, Doreen and my Uncle Gordon. As ever they were gracious and openhearted hosts and they continue to have a special place in my life.
My father had been in the motor industry all his working life and at one stage before he emigrated, he had run his own business - a motor service garage on Castle Boulevard.  It obviously didn't make him wealthy otherwise we would have all been sharing some of it today.  He later worked for George Brough at Bulwell.  The Brough Superior was one of the great motor cycles, and I think Dad was very proud to have been the workshop foreman associated with this iconic name.
One of Dad's wartime friends with whom we spent some time during our stay had a lovely 1963 Rover which had been sitting in his garage for a couple of years.  He very graciously sold it to me for much less than it was probably worth and as a result, Dad and I were provided with a reliable (and elegant) set of wheels in which to do our touring.  It proved to a great asset over the next 12 months particularly when I took it to Europe later in the year.
It was a lovely old car, with beautiful woodwork inside and  leather upholstery throughout and was the type of vehicle that made one want to use phrases like "tooling around" and "motoring".  It had a lovely AA Badge mounted on the radiator and I dearly wanted to see an AA Man riding towards me on his motorcycle and sidecar so I could give him the raised hand salute as he touched his cap to me as he rode past. Sadly that didn’t happen, but we had a wonderful time in it, particularly driving through the Scottish Highlands as far as the Isle of Skye. 

I have already mentioned that Dad had suffered a stroke a few years earlier, and for many months as he recovered he was unable to speak or write.  Part of his rehabilitation process included re-learning the alphabet and I well recall a time when he was briefly with me in Sydney, when he would read aloud from simple little children’s books like Noddy and Mr Men. Many years later this re-learning process was described to me as having English as a second language, when you don’t have a first one.
Thus it was that Dad would say, as we tooled our way through the byways of Britain, “Shall we stop for a snick?” or “a sing-witch?”  He meant of course that we should stop for a snack or a sandwich.  If he couldn’t think of the word, he would either make one up, or stammer over it for a while and then say; “bugger” or something more colourful, and the right word would then come out.
One memorable day we met Dad’s nephews and their families. We all had a wonderful afternoon and as we were saying our goodbyes, my cousin Peter and his lovely wife Anne asked us to join them at their home the following week for Sunday lunch. Anne and Peter had two children and more significantly (for me anyway), Anne had a younger sister. Anne had spoken about us to Pauline during the week saying, “Oh Pauline, you must come and meet Pete’s relatives from Down Under, they are lovely.” (well she was only human.)
So it was that the following Sunday I met the young lady for the first time. 

 I later learned she had been out with her girlfriends the night before and had arrived home in the small hours of the morning. So it was a quiet and subdued Pauline that I met that Sunday, but she looked pretty good to me. (She still does some forty years or so later!)
We had a great lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and before we left Pauline agreed that since there was much of Nottingham we had yet to see, she would find time the following weekend to help us explore it (by us, I naturally meant me). This was followed over the next week or two by a couple of dinner dates and a game of squash rackets which I greatly enjoyed, not particularly because of any great skill on either part, but because the sight of Pauline in shorts was on the whole, rather pleasant.

As life changing as I knew then, that these events were to be (oh yes, I knew I was going to marry her as soon as I met her), there was still the question of the European Odyssey. This was an event that Bob and I had planned for some time, and there was still some preparation required. There was, for example the question of becoming an expert skier - oddly considered a pre-requisite for gallivanting around ski resorts with an ice hammer or assisting well-heeled high altitude holiday makers on and off T-bars.

So it was that on a particular day in September, a few days after Dad had returned to Australia, I found myself, along with a bunch of other hopefuls at an artificial ski-slope at Esher near London.  And that my friends, is where I will leave today's story in the hope that you will come back again for more... 

Welcome to Brooklyn - 1966

I have always said that Devis was the happiest ship I ever sailed on, and it’s probably true; but Viajero was not far behind. Certainly, of all the places I have been on earth, the Amazon experience is up there with the best of them. Viajero was built in Hamburg in 1957, powered by an eight cylinder four-stroke 1500 horse power MAN diesel engine which after the brutish B and W engine on Devis was a pleasure to behold.

Pier One, Brooklyn - 45 years younger and about 20 kg lighter

I arrived in at Pier One, Brooklyn on a cold day in November 1966 as the most junior of the four engineers on board. Geoff Laws, the new third engineer from Keighley in Yorkshire had arrived a day or two earlier on Queen Mary and it wasn’t long before I joined Geoff and the second engineer, Frank Stinchcombe from Bristol in the regular haunt for all Booth Line engineers when in Brooklyn, a local bar and grill about 50 yards from the dock gates.

I sailed with many extraordinary individuals during my time at sea, but of these, Frank was probably the most remarkable. Known to all as The Saint, he was about 45 years old, as skinny as a rake with a face only a mother would love and could mix a Cuba Libre like no one I have met before or since.

(I urge you to follow the Perfect Cuba Libre link, to learn how to make and mix the perfect rum and coke, Stinchcombe-style).
All deck and engine room officers that joined Booth Line for the Amazon service signed on for a year (four round trips from New to Iquitos).  Frank had done two trips and had been on board for six months. It was in New York that all major repair and maintenance work was done during the one or two weeks it took to provision and load the vessel prior to the journey south.
The ship's engineers had a great working relationship with the Brooklyn dockside maintenance crew. I can’t remember the names of the local guys, but it was my first time in the US and where better to begin an education in US culture than Brooklyn, New York. The local bar was called Otto’s and it was here that I became familiar with their signature dish, an epicurean delight known as an ale and chicken dinner (a pot of Schlitz beer with a pickled egg chaser). It was considered de rigueur to drop one's egg shells on the floor where it would quickly become lost among the sawdust and other particulate matter which collected beneath our bar stools.

Booth Line had half a dozen or so ships running up the Amazon from New York. All the ships had Spanish names beginning with “V” (Viajero, Venimos, Veloz, Vamos) The three month run would take us south through the Caribbean on to Belém at the mouth of the river and 3,000 miles along the river to Iquitos in Peru. We would be spending six weeks on the river each trip, and I couldn't wait.
First we would be dipping into the Caribbean islands and our first port was to be St Kitts. I was excited at the prospect of visiting these island nations for the first time. As a stamp collector in my youth names like Barbados, St Vincent, Dominica and Grenada filled me with visions of pirate ships, plantation owners, sun, palm trees and of course, cricket.
Only a few years had elapsed since the very first tied cricket test in Brisbane in 1960 between Australia and the West Indies and the images of the smiling black giant, Wesley Hall, crucifix swinging from his neck as he thundered in to bowl is one that all cricket lovers remember. I was then in the second week of my apprenticeship as a mechanical fitter at the local brewery (The First Job - Cairns 1960) and the memory of us all clustered around the tiny transistor radio which hung from a nail in the workshop storeman's little room, listening to the ABC commentary is as vivid today as it was then. Now I was on my way to the West Indies and the home of cricket, rum, and calypso.
Viajero was quite a small vessel and it was the first ship I had sailed on where all the accommodation was in the after part of the ship rather than midships.  This provided better access to the cargo from smaller wharves with limited unloading facilities typical of the small islands and river ports we would encounter, but it made the going a little rough in poor weather and we certainly encountered quite a bit of that in our first couple of days out of New York as we headed south through blustery North Atlantic conditions.
Viajero had a Barbadian crew and the warmth of their personalities and their love of music and celebration was everything I had expected. We had a steel band and once we were away from the constraints of the work and the weather, we were able to watch them fashion their instruments from cut down 44 gallon (200 litre) empty fuel drums.  The bass pans were made from the whole drum and tenor and baritone pans were made by cutting the drum in quarters and halves.  As the weather became warmer, the band could be found on the poop deck every afternoon playing songs like Peanut Vendor and My Pussin - songs that made you want to dance and clap your hands. The third engineer, big Geoff did just that – he was always there, leaning against the capstan banging a couple of claves together in time to the music and generally making sure he was part of the fun.
I had the feeling that I was going to enjoy the next twelve months - I wasn't disappointed.

To read more - jump ahead to A Really Big River.