Calmer Waters

 

...Felt her hog and felt her sag, betted when she'd break;

Wondered every time she raced if she'd stand the shock;

Heard the seas like drunken men pounding at her strake;

Hoped the Lord 'ud keep his thumb on the plummer-block...

 Rudyard Kipling: The Ballad of the Bolivar 1892

The Port of Palm Beach, Florida had very little in common with Liverpool Docks or any of the Algerian ports we had recently seen, and on that April morning in 1974 it was surely a long way from the pounding we had received from the North Atlantic gale a week or so earlier during our eighteen-day crossing from Ireland to Virginia. Yet here we were at Riviera Beach, where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream are closer to land than any other part of North America, and life felt pretty good.

If this is your first visit to this site, may I direct you to my earlier episodes which will provide a little more context. I suggest you start with A New Shipmate and then Rough Crossing - or even earlier if you have the time - there is an index on this this page. I hope in time you will read them all!

It had taken us a little more than a couple of days for the 750-mile journey from Newport News, down the James River and into Chesapeake Bay, dropping our pilot somewhere off Norfolk, Virginia before continuing under the impressive Chesapeake Bay Bridge and turning right into a relatively gentle Atlantic Ocean. We made our way down the coast and across the great bight between North Carolina and Florida and into the still waters surrounding Palm Beach.

There had been no time for sight-seeing or shore activities in Newport News. I had a ship's steering-gear to recondition and service among other things - and after the hammering of the last two weeks, it was important to all of us that we catch up on a little sleep.

Now it was different. We were in Florida! The weather was a balmy 27 degrees C (80 deg F), and we had a couple of days at least while cargo was loaded for our charter, and we were going to make the most of it. 

The Port of Palm Beach lies within the well protected Lake Worth Lagoon separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the barrier beaches of Singer Island. With only a few exceptions, the dock area is never the most attractive part of any city's environs, and Palm Beach was no exception. As soon as we had the opportunity, we took a cab across to the ocean-side of the lagoon and were soon acting like wealthy tourists as we baked on the beach in the Florida sunshine and later gorged ourselves on a colossal chateaubriand washed down with a fruity Saint-Émilion neither of which we could afford, but after the discomfort of the past couple of weeks, the outlay for which was swiftly justified. This is what we came to sea for!

And, for the next few months, we shared what I can only describe as some of the most enjoyable and stimulating times of my days as a seafarer. I don’t propose to present a voyage tour of all our travels during what was for us, golden days. It would possibly make interesting historical reading to my immediate family (by no means am I assured of that, by the way) but to anyone else it would be a meaningless indulgence.

Having said that, I must point out that one of the treats of a dry cargo charter (a more formal way of describing tramping) is, nautically speaking, to take the road less travelled.

We had great times in busy ports like Houston, (including an introduction to baseball at the Astrodome, drinking beer, eating hotdogs and rooting for the home team); New Orleans (memories of Pete Fountain’s Bar on Bourbon Street among many others) and not least, Trinidad at Carnival time. But it was out of the way places like Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua; Vera Cruz in Mexico; and the islands of St Lucia, St Vincent and especially, Barbados where we truly felt this ought to go on for ever.

Our Caribbean and South American experiences without a doubt caused our decided lack of interest in cruise ships many years later. The appeal of a vacation shared with a floating city of boomer superannuants and young partygoers, as tempting as the marketing may appear, is missing for us. It is not going to evoke memories of these times.

There were a couple of milestones which took place during those halcyon days.  At precisely 10 am on Sunday, 19^th May 1974 (which not coincidentally was Pauline’s birthday), we both gave up a disgusting habit of many years as two hundred “international passports to smoking pleasure” were consigned to a watery grave (my apologies in retrospect for the marine littering). Pauline was not much more than a social smoker, but for me, who had consistently puffed my way through a pack Stuyvies every four-hour watch for the past eight years or so, it was a significant achievement, and one for which 50 years later, I continue to regard as a breakthrough.

The other milestone, I’m very pleased to say, was equally as long-lasting and very much more gratifying. On a Monday evening in late July, we boarded a British Airways Boeing 707 at Trinidad’s Piarco International Airport and, after a brief stop at the nearby island of Antigua, we were several hours later, sleep deprived and stiff, in a black cab making our way through the congested Monday morning traffic of a damp and drizzly London, headed for St Pancras station and the train to Nottingham. We had just two weeks to plan, organise and deliver a wedding - ours.  

We had been nearly six months on Hyacinth and with previous accumulated leave we had enough time and money to get married, have a get-together with family and friends and have a short holiday, before heading back to sea and whichever of their fleet, Messrs Rederiet Lindinger A/S decided needed a new First Engineer.

The wedding was a triumph. There were times over the two weeks leading up to it when we thought it was going to be anything but that. The first challenge was finding a church where we could be married. We soon learned that one doesn’t just lob up at the church door and say can you marry us next week. After numerous disappointments, we finally came to a lovely old church built in the 1870s, the Lower Parliament Street Methodist Church where a charming old cleric agreed that he would carry out the service for us on 10^th August. As it turned out, he retired from ill health the following week and it was to be his last wedding service after what we later learned was a long and highly respected career in the Ministry. We both later felt that he surely put as much empathy into the ceremony as he had no doubt done over 40 years of service. It felt very personal.

We were joined by friends and family on both sides. My old school friends from Cairns, Mal and Ian and their wives, Kay and Ellen were there and Pam and my best man, John from my Sydney days. My mother made the trip from Brisbane and there were aunts, uncles and cousins in abundance.

There was a small hiccup when I gave my cousin Donald, the job of filming the event using my recently acquired Kodak cine camera, complete with film cartridge – except that sadly, I had forgotten to include the cartridge, so the entire event was “filmed” with the most important element of the production missing.

The wedding service took place during the middle of the afternoon, giving ample time to recover from the preceding night’s round of Nottingham pubs with the Australian contingent. I’m told that Pauline had a more subdued “hen night” – I am not persuaded to believe this.

The reception was held at the Strathdon Hotel, one of the newer hotels near the city centre and when the speeches and wine eventually dried up, I put another fifty pounds on the bar which remarkably kept everyone lubricated until at least 11 o’clock, such was the buying power in 1974 when the price of beer was about 20 pence per pint. We even had a couple of Rolls Royce limousines which cost us the princely some of twenty pounds.

It was a bloody good shindig, one that we have never forgotten, and we made certain that we were the last to leave.

We had determined that after the wedding we would head off to Australia where Pauline would meet more of my family and see my homeland. Before that however, we decided it would be fun to take the two mothers on a little trip, so for the next week we enjoyed a driving holiday through the southwest of England with Maisie and Eileen. On the surface, it may seem like an ordeal with two mothers with completely different personalities all squeezed into a little rental car driving around historic towns and villages from Ludlow to Lands End. I’m not saying it wasn’t without its moments – and there is no doubt that my extroverted mother could be hard work at times – but we got through it, and no one suffered any long-term effects.

Green Island is a small coral cay some 25 to 30 km off the coast of Cairns right in the heart of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. As a younger person, growing up in Cairns, a casual response to the question of where one might be going for a holiday might be, “Oh, we’re not doing much this year, just going over to the Island for a couple of days.”  In other words, it wasn’t anywhere special, to anyone living in a town like Cairns – and yet, here were Pauline and I, with potentially the world at our feet, opting to fly 12,000 miles from Nottingham to spend a few days on the Island. It was special to us.

In 2024, Green Island has a luxury five-star hotel and is likely to set you back about $4,000 for a week on the island. In 1974, we stayed in cabins which were built 30 years earlier and paid $40 a night. It was the perfect place to honeymoon with little to do other than take a one-hour walk on fine coral sand right around the island, stroll through the interior of the island through the coconut palms and vine-thicket rain forest, wade in the shallows in sparkling clear water amid teeming colourful aquatic life, drink our share of local beer and gorge ourselves everyday on enormous tropical fruit breakfasts and dinners which included huge serves of freshly caught coral trout, red emperor, sweet lip, snapper, Spanish mackerel and prawns the size of crayfish.

Each morning around 10 o’clock a hoard of day-trippers would arrive by launch from the mainland, and the beaches and the resort bar and the glass-bottom boats were soon crowded. To say crowded is probably an exaggeration – it wasn’t like they had arrived on an ocean liner – the Hayles launch carried around 250 or so passengers, and during the peak period when there were two launches running, we might have had 500 or so people on the island. At 3 PM the same boats would carry them all back to Cairns and we were once again a small group of marooned islanders with our own private beaches and private cabins. It was heaven.

I haven’t been back to the island since then – I suspect I would be disappointed.

All good things must end, I had a job to do and needed to return to work – not the least, because we were running out of funds.  We returned to Sydney and stayed for a few days with my old shipmate from Francis Drake, Bob, of whom I have written in previous chapters and his girlfriend, Pauline at a lovely two-storey terrace house in Balmain that they were renting at the time (Bob and Pauline would later be our long-term North Epping neighbours - but that was all 10 or 15 years down the track).  The funds were by now in need of topping up, and since I still had a current taxi-driver licence, I was able to grab a few night shifts with ABC Cabs (maybe I’ll tell you about my brief career as a cab driver in another chapter).

My employers in Copenhagen had originally planned for me to join the newest ship in the fleet, Lindinger Jade on her way to Mombasa, but a lengthy bout of influenza for Pauline meant we weren't going anywhere for a while so I reluctantly turned it down. We didn’t want to wear out our welcome however, and when about ten days later,  Copenhagen wired me saying that the first engineer who had replaced me on Hyacinth had come down with appendicitis, and was I able to return to my old ship, I jumped at the chance. 

On a bright spring morning a few days after my 29^th birthday, we boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles and after a couple of stop overs at airports in Central America, arrived hot and exhausted at Panama City where we were soon welcomed back on board - back in the same cabin that we had left a couple of months earlier. Not much had changed, the frikadeller were as tasty as always, the Pabst Blue Ribbon was cold, the cabin hadn’t got any larger (I had) and the TV reception was still pretty much non-existent most of the time.

Hyacinth was getting ready to leave for Puntarenas on the western coast of Costa Rica and was taking on fuel in Panama ready to depart within hours.

I checked the spare parts inventory with 2^nd engineer Erik, and before long we had cleared customs, cast off and were making our way south across Panama Bay towards Azuero Peninsula where we would turn west and follow the shoreline along the Central American isthmus for the next two or three days to our destination. There was just enough time for Pauline to get seasick and get over it, before we turned around and made the voyage east back to Panama and through the Canal for the homeward trip to US ports in the Gulf of Mexico.     

The next five months seemed to take no time at all. I would almost call it uneventful, but it never was. We were determined not to take any of this for granted, knowing that some day (like now) this would be a distant memory. There were indeed many highlights, too many to mention without stretching this into an overlong running commentary - but here's just a few:

·        A brief bout of illness in Georgetown Guyana where I developed the most painful stomach cramps I’ve ever experienced, exacerbated by a long and painful ambulance ride from our berth up the Demerara River in Guyana to the main Georgetown Hospital where I was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection (OK, not exactly a highlight);

·        A delightful Christmas in St Croix, Virgin Islands followed by an equally enjoyable New Year in San Juan, Puerto Rico;

·        A week in drydock in Willemstad, Curaçao enjoying the delights of Dutch Caribbean cuisine and Amstel beer;

·        Not least – enjoying the pleasures of our own floating hotel. It wasn’t the Queen Mary and certainly not my daddy’s yacht (we never had one), but we had the Monkey Island (the space on top of the bridge) to ourselves most of the time, and this was indeed the Caribbean.

Lest there be any mistake – I was working as well – keeping watch twelve hours per day (six on, six off), ensuring in between watches that those troublesome maintenance tasks and pesky spare parts were always to hand should they ever be needed.

It is also true that Pauline didn’t just laze around recovering from sea sickness, reading Dennis Wheatley, or sending postcards home. She was signed on to the manifest as a “supernumerary” and that meant that if there were jobs to be done whether typing the Captain’s reports or cleaning the heads – sea legs permitting, she was up for it.

Eventually of course, it was time for to go home. So on a stormy evening in late March of 1975, we boarded a National Airlines flight from Miami and after some serious turbulence soon after taking off into the South Atlantic, we headed home to the UK to take some leave and think about what was next in store for us.

Sailing for the Golden Fleece - Fanny Duck (Part 1)

April 1968 – one of the hottest days on record for this time of the year in Brisbane.  A smart-looking grey-green ship, a plume of fine white smoke wafting from its orange funnel, slips her moorings from Hamilton Wharf and slowly drifts towards the middle of a listless Brisbane River. At a ship’s length or more from her berth, a couple of small brawny tugs gently haul on her bow, turning her through 180 degrees until she faces downstream towards Moreton Bay and the mouth of the river, some 30 km away.  The remains of a few paper streamers which had, until a minute ago connected passengers and well-wishers on the shore are now floating in the wind against the outward side of the ship or drifting into the water to be consumed by the wash from the large bronze four-bladed propeller which has begun purposefully churning a metre below the surface of the water.

This is the cargo passenger vessel SS Francis Drake. With 120 passengers aboard and 150 tons of refrigerated cargo, she is bound for the Philippines on the first leg of her scheduled two-month round-trip to the Far East.

I’m seeing none of this – I’m on the bottom plates of the engine room, several metres below the water line, alongside my new shipmate, Fifth Engineer Jimmy Leong as we stand at the controls of the large Vickers Armstrong steam turbine engine which will push us along, once we are in the open sea at a comfortable 15 knots.

It’s hotter down here. Four inches of insulated lagging doesn’t stop radiant heat from the pipes delivering superheated steam from the large water tube boilers above my head to the high-pressure turbine of the main engine. Like ships’ engine rooms everywhere, it is always a good deal warmer here than on the bridge.

I’m the other Fifth Engineer and I stand next to Jimmy watching his every move in what, for the moment, is a spotless white boilersuit. Jimmy is more senior than me and has charge of the watch, a fact for which I am most grateful, this being my first “SS” after previously serving only on “MVs”.

After the compact single deck machine space of MV Viajero, the multi-levelled engine room here is cavernous. Alongside the turbine propulsion unit, the space also houses auxiliary turbine-operated AC generators, refrigerating compressors, air compressors, purifiers and a condenser which converts low pressure exhaust steam from the turbine to condensate which is returned as feedwater to the boilers.

There is a lot for me to learn about steam propulsion, not the least of which is that unlike the internal combustion cycle which describes a diesel engine, the steam turbine combustion takes place externally in the boilers. All that aside, and in contrast to some of the other ships I’ve been on over the past couple of years, I’m in a clean engine room, no less noisy than any other I’ve seen, with a high-pitched gear box connected to the propeller shaft whining in my ears and making conversation almost impossible without shouting directly into someone’s ear – but most definitely cleaner – and no fuel valves!

So what brings me here?

Three months ashore, working as an estimator for a large engineering construction company in downtown Brisbane had been enough for me. After a couple of years sailing around the world on British cargo ships, which included a spectacular year on the Amazon River, I clearly wasn’t ready to settle down and behave like a grownup, so when the opportunity arose, via a lunchtime stroll into the offices of H C Sleigh the operators of Dominion Line, I jumped at it and here I am. 

There is a lot more to get used to than just the technical stuff. The wearing of uniforms (not just one) is a far cry from the relaxed attitude of Baron Jedburgh and Viajero where the focus was on comfort and minimal trips to the ship’s laundry.

I’m also getting used to more people on board. In addition to the passengers, we have a large crew which includes deck officers, engineers, catering staff, administrators and passenger service providers plus a Hong Kong Chinese crew. Over the course of the next year, there are regular changes to personnel as crew members take leave, or transfer to other ships in the fleet, so I will never get to know everyone the way I have done on previous ships. In my whole time on board, I don’t recall exchanging a single word with the Ship’s Captain or the Chief Mate. 

We have our own engineer’s mess, where staff on duty are catered for – the rules being that in order to use the duty mess you must actually be on duty, and you must be wearing a clean boilersuit. I was not the first person to be turned away from the mess for looking like I had just come out from under the bilge plates – which I probably had. Otherwise all ship’s officers are required in full uniform in the ship’s dining room at their assigned tables which includes passengers – so best behaviour, best table manners.

Francis Drake is anything but a young ship. Built in 1947 at the Vickers Armstrong shipyard in Newcastle, UK as the SS Nova Scotia for the Furness Warren Line she operated for 15 years alongside her sister ship SS Newfoundland between Liverpool and the Canadian ports of Halifax, New Brunswick and St John’s, Newfoundland. The two vessels were sold to Dominion Navigation Co in the early 1960s and after extensive fitout and modification which included extended accommodation, air-conditioning and capacity for refrigerated cargo, they were relaunched into service in the Far East and Australia as Francis Drake and George Anson.  

The ship’s operator and my employer is H C Sleigh & Co, an Australian firm of shipowners and petroleum products, mostly known for the large merino sheep logo which identifies the Golden Fleece brand of products.

She’s no youngster, but thanks to the refit a couple of years ago, she’s clean and seaworthy and despite the requirement for a little more spit and polish than I’m used to, I no longer have to think about putting condensed milk straight from the can into my tea when the fresh milk runs out as we did on Baron Jedburgh.

As I mentioned earlier, wearing of uniform is a requirement whenever we’re in any of the public areas - number nines, number tens, mess undress; I’m rather surprised they didn’t ask me to wear a sword!

 I’m the only new person on board.  I’m replacing the third engineer who has been transferred to another ship. As a result, all the other engineers were promoted which left a requirement for a junior watchkeeping fiver – me.  They are a good bunch.  The third and fourth engineers are from Hong Kong while Jimmy, my fellow fifth engineer on the 4 to 8 watch is Singaporean.

Graham, the second engineer is not much older than me. A softly spoken, Melbournian, this is his first voyage as second, but not his first trip on Fanny Duck as the ship is affectionately known.  He’s a talented engineer, knows the ship well and has a relaxed and calming manner which is in stark contrast to his boss, the Chief Engineer who on the rare occasions when he is seen, looks like he’s ready to fire someone – we keep out of his way.

There are two other characters in the engineering accommodation. My next-door neighbour on one side is the Electrical Engineer, Jimmy Warburton.  Jimmy is a cool guy, whose prized possession is a state of the art, reel to reel audio system which takes up most of the space on his desk and is a source of envy to all. Jimmy is also a passionate St Kilda supporter and no hospitality session with Jimmy is complete without tales of Allan Jeans, Carl Ditterich and the 1966 Premiership.

My other neighbour is the Refrigeration Engineer – a curly-haired former Orient Line graduate from Plymouth.  Bob Pope will become a good friend and after our sea-faring days, we will, at various times be work colleagues, housemates and fellow-travellers through a European winter in an old 3-litre Rover. We will later live within a few hundred yards of each other in the same Sydney suburb where we’ll enjoy many family barbecues reminiscing and telling tall stories about these times. All that is in the future, today Bob is another cool guy who has an extensive collection of knock-off vinyl LPs from Taiwan with a strong focus on The Rolling Stones, The Who and Joe Cocker – all good stuff.  Bob recently transferred to Francis Drake from her sister ship George Anson, so he already knows his way around, and quickly introduces me to the ship’s many social activities.

Finally, in introducing my shipmates I can’t forget the female members of crew. The ship’s executive officers includes a nursing sister, a writer (who is really an assistant purser), a shopkeeper and a hairdresser. They are a cheerful and friendly group and, as I learn over the next few months, a pleasure to sail with and great fun on a shore run.

Unlike a cargo tramp, we know exactly where we’re going and when we’ll be there. Starting the voyage from her home port of Melbourne a couple of weeks before I joined, she stopped on the way for two or three days in Sydney, before heading north to Brisbane the last of her Australian ports. She is now enroute to Manila, Hong Kong, Keelung (Taiwan) and Yokohama (Japan).  The return trip south stops at Guam and Rabaul before heading back home to Melbourne and preparation for the next round trip.

I never actually intended that these stories turn into a series of travelogues. My focus has been in seeking to paint a picture of life on board, to talk of the many wonderful characters I enjoyed sailing with (and one or two I didn’t) and in some small way share a few of the experiences as they happened.

Having said that, I think there’s more to tell, but I don’t want to test your patience so I’m going to leave it for my next chapter – which I’m looking forward to writing (I hope you share the sentiment).

The Apprentice

 In early December 1965, I finished five years of servitude as an apprentice fitter and turner at the local brewery.  I’m exaggerating I know, although there were times when it felt like I was under a form of feudal bondage, and the documentation that I signed in the presence of my father five years earlier used such dramatic expressions as "...wilful disobedience of lawful commands of the employer, his managers, foremen and other servants having authority” and stressed the need to avoid being “...slothful, negligent, dishonest or in any other way guilty of gross misbehaviour” under penalty of discharge of services; it was, all the same, a great place for a young man to learn an engineering trade and I look back with affectionate memories on that time in my life. The work was hard, the study hours were long and played merry hell with that young man’s social life, but the diversity of the work and the practical experience would ground me in so many ways over the following years. 

I wrote about my first few days at the brewery in an earlier post (The First Job - Cairns 1960). Today I want to round that off and talk about my last year there and look back on the experience a little more holistically (if that’s possible).

I was not everybody’s favourite apprentice during that last year. At one point, I was obliquely involved in an industrial relations dispute, the result being that I was regarded by some as a young agitator spending too much time hanging around the wrong group and not enough time getting on with work. In those early nineteen sixties with the war still a recent memory for anyone over 40, there was a core of fedora wearing, trade unionists whose appointed task it was to improve underpaid, unfair and unsafe working conditions. They were by no means all paragons of virtue and morality; some just liked the power or wanted a fight – but even at that tender age (or maybe specifically at that age), I was all for a good wage for the worker. 

These were the days of the True Believer, and it was important to choose sides.  There were many of the population who cherished Queen and Empire and were admirers of long-time conservative Prime Minister Bob Menzies; and there were others who had been advocates of former Labor leaders, John Curtin and Ben Chifley and who continued to support the right of the working man to lay down his tools and walk off the job (often straight to the pub) for higher pay and safer conditions. 

This is all of course, an over-simplification. My own father, workshop superintendent at the local City Council workshops; a man who had served his own apprenticeship many years earlier as a motor mechanic working in England between the two wars and later owned his own garage under the shadow of Nottingham Castle, was as he described himself – “right down the middle”.  Throughout his life, I never knew which way he voted in any election. When I asked him, he would say, “it’s a secret ballot for a reason, son – no one needs to know.”

Unlike my father, Bill Stone made no secret of where he stood.  He was a returned serviceman, a senior engine driver and the local organiser for the Federated Engine Drivers and Fireman’s Association.   Bill was always well dressed in tailored short sleeved shirt, short trousers, tropical style long socks and was rarely seen without his grey felt narrow-brimmed hat.  In contrast with his fellow engine drivers and boiler attendants, Bill was never seen in a pair of overalls or a boilersuit. He was an articulate man who along with his co-workers, maintained an engine room that was spotless and grease-free.  Ammonia compressors used for refrigeration; great horizontal piston machines with flywheels half as big again as any man;  chattering high speed vertical engines and a great English Electric diesel powered generator - all of them high gloss cream in colour such that with its green walls and polished red floors the whole area could have hosted a Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Queensland Country Women's Association were it not for the noise of the engines and the occasional fugitive whiff of escaped ammonia.

Bill epitomized the no-nonsense, plain-speaking Labor supporter of the 1960s.  He was a loyal, hard-working man whose motivation in life was to want nothing more than a university education for his children and a fair share of the fruits of his labours.  He went on to become the federal secretary of his organisation and was later awarded an Order of Australia Medal for his services to trade unionism. The dispute which took place toward the end of my final year progressed into a prolonged and at times bitter strike.  In accordance with our Terms of Indenture, apprentices were not permitted to stop work, but I was conspicuously sympathetic of my comrades, and this did little for my career enhancement.

The chief engineer, Michael Kerry (Mick) Hawney was not my greatest fan, although years later we gained a lot more respect for each other. Mick went on to become something of an icon in the Australian brewing industry and would play a significant role in the development of the Yatala Brewery in Southeast Queensland in the 1980s which later became one of the largest and most efficient breweries in the country – it still is. Mick helpfully mentioned to me that it would in my best interest to look elsewhere for employment once my five years was complete - it was wise advice. 

There was plenty of work for a qualified man in those days and it did not concern me at all that I might soon be unemployed.  Tradesmen earned a respectable income in those days – at least twenty pounds for a 40-hour week plus overtime and there was always plenty of overtime. 

As things turned out, I was able to depart gracefully when shortly before my last week as an apprentice, a family friend who was also an executive at the Cairns Harbour Board, asked my father whether I might be interested in a seagoing career. It so happened there was a British ship in port which was short of an engineer and if I was up for it, there was a job as an engineers’ assistant, with the potential for promotion to engineer when a position became available. 

Was I interested? You bet I was!

It was to be the end of five years of travelling the kilometre or so to work from my parent's home at the northern end of Draper Street. For the first couple of years I made the journey on my old Malvern Star bicycle, then later a selection of motorcycles each one slightly bigger than its predecessor, and finally a slightly worse for wear aging Holden sedan. 

Much had happened during those five years, both personally and in the outside world. Many happy memories; some very sad ones. Here’s just a few – there were many more.

·    Gathering around the open hatch door of the workshop storeroom with several other workmates listening to the cricket on storeman Lionel’s radio when Richie Benaud’s Australians and Frank Worrell’s West Indies tied that magnificent Test Match at the Gabba during the very first week of my apprenticeship in 1960.

·    Selling tickets to friends and family in the Annual Brewery Social Club Melbourne Cup sweep and then listening with excitement to that same transistor radio as the race was run and won.  In 1963, I sold the winning ticket (Gatum Gatum) to a friend, but I have no idea now what the prize money was – it seemed like a lot at the time.

·    The death of a former schoolmate and fellow apprentice who was tragically killed in an accident at work which, even more than fifty years after the event, is painful to recall.  A young 20-year-old life, gone – never to experience the joys of living and loving, and children, and grandchildren. What a waste. 

·    Worrying whether my birth date would be drawn from the ballot in 1964 meaning conscription to serve in the Australian Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. I missed out, others were not so fortunate.

·    Going on road trips with a team of brewery fitters to one or more of the brewery owned hotels to carry out construction work – including a memorable visit to the Mount Garnet Hotel in November 1961 where I had the unpleasant job of painting the inside of a recently installed corrugated iron water tank with bitumen cement, which burned my eyes and nose for hours – and later listening and sharing an underage glass of Cairns Draught as Lord Fury won the Cup.

·    Six months working in the drawing office under the watchful eye of one of Mick’s engineers, Eddie Patton, who taught me more about the need for neatness and accuracy than I ever learned at school. Eddie had an unfortunate speech impediment and would often seem to finish a sentence on a Monday morning, where he appeared to have left it the previous Friday, with a short, “…and also Michael, how are you this morning?”  Eddie was a gentle man and a clever engineer, who later became the Chief Engineer at the Rockhampton Brewery.

·    Fitters, and boilermakers, and other maintenance and construction workers who looked after each, told tall tales and made me laugh – and sometimes want to cry. Howard Chalk (a funny man, without any doubt the most artistic craftsman ever to don a welding mask); Frank Tanswell (fitter and part-time crocodile hunter); John Scheinpflug; Gordon Dilger (no one could strip down, repair and reassemble an engine and not spill a single drop of oil, or get the slightest particle of swarf or dirt on himself or his immaculate working clothes quite like Gordon), Ted Dowker; Alan McKenzie; Ken Northey; Noel Cook (a source of jokes and parody songs, that I continue to force upon my exhausted family today); Bobby Ward (always with a smile on a face that said, “I’ve been slapped about a bit”), John Ranford, Jim Read, Brian Fitzsimmons (who played hooker for the Australian Rugby League team in 1967 during the time when good scrimmaging was an art form).  Most, if not all of them are gone now; but so much of what I learned and took into later life and experience came from working alongside these men.  

·    I must not forget Paddy O’Brien, whose tales about “the small ships” that he served on during the war, were legends around the shop floor – if only 10% of them were true…

·    Gordon Williams, the workshop foreman and godfather figure to all the apprentices. Gordon had also served on small ships, but his only comment about his war service was that he spent most of it seasick. If anyone taught me how to hold a bastard file properly or not get carborundum in my eyes while using a grinder, or how to stand over a fast-rotating lathe or a pulsing shaper without losing a finger, it was Gordon Williams – we all loved that man.

This was my five years of servitude – I may not have always loved it at the time, but with hindsight, I had no idea how good it was.

Thus it was that on the 5th of December 1965, exactly five years to the day that I had started as a fresh-faced schoolboy, I punched my Bundy Card for the last time and walked out of Northern Australian Breweries as a qualified mechanical fitter and turner, ready for the next stage of my life.

This was the chance I had been waiting for, and within a few days I had signed on as a crew member on the MV Baron Jedburgh. I was its most junior of junior assistants. My official title was donkey-greaser, and my job was to assist the ship’s engineers as offsider and general factotum.

Stay tuned for A Ship of My Own.