Another Voyage Commenced

The “Eastern City” arrived in Cardiff on November 19^th 1954 with a full cargo of iron ore for the Llanwern Steel Works and thereby completed my second voyage on this tramp ship. We paid off the crew but again I did not leave the ship; I was required to stay and prepare for the next voyage with the officers. It does not take long to discharge 10,000 tons of ore when each bite of one of five grabs takes 40 tons of the very heavy rocks.

So there I was just 17 years of age and having to grow up in a hurry but in retrospect, it did not concern me. I had left home in February that year and briefly visited Falmouth in August and not gone home. This time my Father was not at home but at sea too in the North Atlantic supervising the shakedown of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Vessel “Retainer” with NATO Navies and the Royal Navy. I think he was in Norway at this time. My Mother, who I missed so much [and so quietly] had died two years earlier. There was just a housekeeper there and Keith was away with relatives. Jack, my elder brother, was running a dockyard power station in Singapore. The “Eastern City” was my home in many ways.

The previous trip had been fun in many ways with the usual set backs at times. I had met Margaret in Falmouth, and although not serious, she had dumped me for a Brylcream Boy [a lad in the RAF] according to Keith. C’est la vie! Marica in Yugoslavia never did write but then that lass was living behind the Iron Curtain. Margarita in Brazil was just a friend, although a very pretty friend, and she lived in the world of a coffee plantation.

And so I lived in a very small cabin with a door that opened out to the boat deck and the sun, the stars the wind and any weather. I was fed, I did my own laundry, I was paid just over six pounds per month and worked like the devil. I was also a pupil, I had to learn about azimuths and amplitudes, what star was in which part of the heavens, how to do a Liverpool splice, tie a carrick bend, do spherical trigonometry. It was great, I was respected and gaining a place in doing something that was really worthwhile. So were a lot of other lads like John Hopkins on the “Atlantic City” – we were to meet in September the following year, 1955.

We had arrived November 19^th and paid off and then on the 22^nd November the cargo was completely discharged and we opened articles for another voyage and started to sign on a new crew. Now Smith’s of Cardiff, the ship owner, had a reputation for long voyages of anything up to 2 years and we had difficulty getting a crew from the Federation. We had a load of scallywags from Tiger Bay but could not quite make up a full complement. We resorted to shanghaiing three poor Maltese lads from Gozo, real poverty farmers, and they awoke off Hartland Point thinking that they were dying as we punched away in gale force winds to America and thence Japan. Again I was the senior apprentice and again Mortician Davis mournfully told me of my duties. And so commenced another voyage of hard work and discovery with stories to tell.