Where You Stand and Prejudice (2016)
Where you stand and prejudice.
I have written before on the Newfoundland aphorism of “where you stand depends where you sit.” With that saying in mind here are some of my thoughts on that most contentious of subjects - prejudice, - racial or ethnic, take your choice. I look to where I came from, my origins, and then look at what affects my life today. I come to the inevitable conclusions that prejudice is illogical , not Christian, and most certainly not productive.
My Grandfather, William Hogan, and Grandmother, Mary Ellen, were part of the Irish diaspora that took place in the latter part of the 19th Century. William Hogan was born in 1857 in Cappoquin and Mary Ellen in 1860 in Cork. The Great Irish Famine took place over the years 1845 - 1852 when approximately one million died; the Irish population fell by 25% due to death and emigration. Ireland’s rural population had rapidly grown in the Nineteenth Century. This was because a large family was an insurance of continued sustenance in later life – children would take care of their parents. However, this also meant that large families needed large amounts of food and the land situation in Ireland was not geared to support families in this respect. Potatoes were the staple diet of the rural population of Ireland. However, this crop was very vulnerable to disease and no cure existed in Ireland for the dreaded ‘potato blight’. Even if a cure had existed, the people on the land would not have been able to afford it.
This terrible passage of time made a permanent change to that country’s demographic, political, and cultural landscape. My Grandparents were born into difficult times but survived and thrived, they became a family in England.
Between 1846 and 1850, the population of Ireland dropped by 2 million which represented 25% of the total population. This figure of 2 million can be effectively split in two. One million died of starvation or the diseases associated with the famine and one million emigrated to North America or parts of England, such as Liverpool, and in Scotland, such as Glasgow. Many found that the areas where they settled in Britain were not welcoming as the Irish were seen as people who undercut wages. Therefore, employers in mainland factories were willing to employ the Irish at the expense of the English/Scots. However, many of the Irish who settled in industrial cities were completely unprepared for work in factories having spent their time working in a rural environment
But William Hogan was a Blacksmith and had followed in his father’s footsteps who was also known as William Hogan. He was listed in Slater's Business Directory of 1881 as a Blacksmith based upon Cappoquin, County Waterford. This town is in the west of the county on the Blackwater River at the foot of the Knockmealdown Mountains. It was, and is, an agricultural rural town with some orchards and a good river with salmon and trout. My Father told me that Grandfather made the great wrought iron gates to Mount Melleray, the Cistercian Trappist Monastery; these gates stand until this day as a testament to his skill and good workmanship. But it would be naive to think that my Grandfather did not face considerable hardship; the effects of the Famine were greatest on rural communities such as Cappoquin. The town’s population decreased by 20% following the famine.
In 1886 we find William Hogan, and a good friend from Ireland, Cornelius O’Leary, serving in the British Army and on active service in Cairo, Egypt. They are both in the Royal Artillery and my Grandfather is a Blacksmith with that Regiment. These men did what many men did - they took the Queen’s shilling and thereby gained employment, they were clothed, they gained shelter, they did not go hungry. There is a modern parallel to this, the Gurkhas, they take the present Queen’s shilling. There is another important similarity, the soldier [or sailor] puts his life on line as the Gurkha faces the Taliban or similar enemy; the 19th century serviceman faced many more potential enemies in exerting Pax Britannica and protecting British interests.
In 1885 the Mad Mahdi and his followers killed, and then beheaded, General Gordon in Khartoum and slaughtered the garrison. The Mad Mahdi [or Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah to give him his proper name] was a Islamic zealot who proclaimed the Second Coming of the Prophet and started a major religious revolt in the Sudan that potentially threatened Egypt. The Suez Canal had been opened in 1869 after a decade of construction and, although Britain had not initially supported the project, it had quickly become key to the Empire’s interests. Hostilities [and revenge] continued until the Jihad was finally defeated in 1898. It really is a case “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”. And now, in the present era, we have the Muslim Brotherhood taking up the radical Islamic role in Egypt. So my Grandfather was there in the British military forces facing the radical Islamic threats from the Sudan.
It would appear that Grandfather had seriously considering his future as he secured a recommendation from a Master Artificer in his Regiment [ a Senior NCO in the Royal Artillery] this was Mr.J.Horne. This reference addressed his role as as a Blacksmith in the Regiment so, together with his Army Record Book, it would have been be a great asset to an Irishman seeking employment in England particularly in a military establishment such as Her Majesty’s Royal Naval Dockyard in the Medway.
William Hogan belonged to an Irish cadre of tradesmen and artisans who wanted to continue in their world of skills and professionalism - he wanted to remain a blacksmith, and he did, and records show that he was listed as ‘Blacksmith, Her Majesty’s Gun Wharf, Chatham Dockyard.’ He married Mary Ellen O’Leary in Chatham, Kent. in 1883, and that is the start point for this branch of the Hogan family in England.
In the 19th century Chatham was a major naval port that had evolved since Tudor times and over four hundred years the Dockyards had built 500 Royal Naval vessels including the launch of HMS “Victory” in 1765. At this height of activity there were 10,000 skilled artisans in an area of over 400 acres. At the time of William Hogan coming to England the Dockyard was completing four new docks between 1862 to 1885 and its capacity increased to building 2 naval ships each year. Chatham built its first iron battleship in 1863. My Grandfather had left a quiet Irish rural town and entered the boiling cauldron of industrial and military activity in England with a young wife. It was a crossroads for the Hogan family.
Take a moment to consider what my Grandparents faced in this move from Ireland. Since the 12th Century the official view of the Irish people beyond the Pale in Ireland [ In the nominally English territory of Ireland, only the Pale fell genuinely under the authority of English law] was as follows:
“They use their fields mostly for pasture. Little is cultivated and even less is sown. The problem here is not the quality of the soil but rather the lack of industry on the part of those who should cultivate it. This laziness means that the different types of minerals with which hidden veins of the earth are full are neither mined nor exploited in any way. They do not devote themselves to the manufacture of flax or wool, nor to the practice of any mechanical or mercantile act. Dedicated only to leisure and laziness, this is a truly barbarous people. They depend on their livelihood for animals and they live like animals”
In Liverpool, where many Irish immigrants settled following the Great Famine, anti-Irish prejudice was widespread. The sheer numbers of people coming across the Irish sea and settling in the poorer districts of the city led to physical attacks and it became common practice for those with Irish accents or even Irish names to be barred from jobs, public houses and employment opportunities.
And then we have this comment by one of the most famous politicians of Queen Victoria’s reign, Disraeli, quote
“The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.” [Disraeli in 1836]
unquote
But, as it so very evident, the Irish surmounted the onslaught of racial prejudice by reaching the most powerful position in the world - the Presidency of the United States, JFK, and by becoming a nation that is a gem in the rich free world of Western Europe.
There are footnotes to the story of the Irish emigrant, Mary Ellen Hogan [nee O’Leary], my paternal grandmother. She lived to see her son, my Father, decorated by the King of England at Buckingham Palace for bravery in a blitz on Plymouth Harbour. [Picture this small neat lady all in black with white Irish lace at her throat in the front row in this grand chamber]. And then her final resting place is close to the son of another emigrant, James McCudden VC, DSO & Bar, MC & Bar, MM, CdG who served in the Great War and rose from Air Mechanic to Major.The 7th highest scoring fighter pilot of the Great War. He was 4th highest scoring fighter pilot from the British Empire and received more medals for gallantry than any other airman of the British Empire. He died in a flying accident and not in combat. On July 9th 1918, his aeroplane suffered engine failure after taking off and he was killed in the accident.
My father-in-law was a quintessential Englishman from Somerset who loved rugby and had played on the wing for that county. His sporting hero? Another rugby winger - Tony O'Reilly, who with charm and hard work, had seen his career span successes from Irish international rugby hero to chief executive of one of the biggest names in corporate America, H J Heinz, to being a Fleet Street tycoon. It seems that prejudice against the Irish had dissipated from the general consciousness by the mid 20th century. Overtly that may be the case by the 1950’s, but covertly? the British Government still sent MI5 to see my Father and ensure he was not talking to Irish Republicans.
In 1968 I reached a watershed in interpersonal relations outside of my family. Up to that point my working life had been compartmentalized with interaction with other nationalities and races confined to the workplace. This had most certainly been the case in South Africa where apartheid ensured separation with interaction ceasing as work ceased. It was the most uneasy situation, strangely the workers rights were protected but beyond that all interaction ceased. If the person had no job and was non-white then it was a most horrendous situation for them. Tina found South Africa impossible very early in our venture there and so we returned to the United Kingdom. And so it was that my next post was based upon Ras al Khafji in the Neutral Zone, a buffer administration between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirate of Kuwait.
Saudi Aramco has discovered over 100 oil and gas fields in the Kingdom. Among them is Ghawar, the world’s largest onshore oil field, and Safaniya, the world’s largest offshore field. Ras al Khafji was the main service port for Safaniya. I secured a post with one of the marine service companies, S.V.Collins, a Texan who had dredged diamonds in the South Atlantic.
So there I was taking over from a Venetian Captain, Giuseppe Tramontano, with a large group of men where race, ethnicity, and nationality were all blurred. We all had to work together, eat together, and live together out in the desert on the coast. I had Baluchis from Baluchistan where a forgotten conflict still goes on because Iran [then it was Persia] Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India all wanted a piece of their land. Then there were Omanis, Kurds, Iranians, Iraqis, and many stateless Palestinians. The main player was the Saudi Arabian company ARAMCO, run by the Saudis and a city full of Americans, then there was the Arabian Oil Company, AOC, a Japanese/Saudi conglomerate, and the Arabian Drilling Company, ADC, a French offshore drilling company. Race, religion, culture, language, were all there to confound things but it did not. There was this common purpose - black gold - oil - but all these men were working for their families. Hard work was always there but there was also good humour, tolerance, and respect for the other man. For me the main support came from the London River Men. These were all former tug men on the River Thames where the advent of containers and changes of trade changed the Port of London. Gone were the lighters and barges with the bustling tugs. The tugs and their tasks in the Arabian Gulf were a godsend to these hard working men and they loved the job. Now this hard working group came from the East End of London a melting pot of immigrants since the Middle Ages. They allied hard work with unbelievable humour and tolerance. The Americans thought the world of these guys, but, most importantly their crews from the Oman, Yemen, etc though these London River Men the best and responded in every positive way. It was a wonderful experience.
And then there was Fred Bailey. I don't know when Fred was born, I guess sometime about 1910 or thereabouts in Kentucky. He was a real "good ole boy drinking whiskey & rye" - a real redneck bozo you might say. He made being non-PC an artform! Fred was your quintessential North American engineer - he cut his teeth on Ford pickups, and Oshkosh rigs- he could fix anything that had an engine. He understood sidebooms, backhoes, cranes, draglines, and all the wonderful machines only Americans can make - he would make Bob the Builder look like a real beginner.
I worked with Fred getting equipment back out of Iran behind Kharg Island, sorting a rig snarled by a violent katabatic wind at the head of the Gulf and so on. It was only natural that Fred should come with me to the Gulf of Mexico to Morgan City up the Atchafalaya River [a tributary of the mighty Mississippi] to bring two small supply ships to the Middle East via Barbados, St. Helena, Cape Town. and finally Jazirat Shaik Shouab with a crew of Arabs but that's a story for another day.
Fred's arms were terribly scarred with burn tissue that flaked powder. I found out that he got these scars saving a young Arab lad from as asphalt fire when building an airport runway in Saudi. It turned out the lad was one of the sons of Big Jaloee, the Lord High Executioner for the Saudis. [It's rumoured he used a Crusader sword but stories do get embellished at times...] But one thing for sure Fred didn't know who was the lad's father - he was a poor unfortunate boy who would have died but for Fred. So there you have it, this “Confederate” redneck puts his life on line for an Arab boy of Nubian origin, you do not get any more Christian than that.
The Khafji post was so radically different to working in South Africa that the memories of those times are indelibly printed in my mind. I remember each and every name - Omar, my Operations Clerk from Palestine, Boutros, out Butler from Iraq [a great guy who the Rivermen renamed Jeeves - he loved it!] , Haider, from Baluchistan, a driver who could fix any motor, Salem, of Nubian origin, a seaman and son of a Saudi slave, [with a wonderful sense of humour,] Saquer Shahin, an Omani, a former dhow captain, he sailed as bosun with me, a great guy, Aboud Yassin, cook [no a real chef!], from Nablus in the West Bank of Israel, Eustace Champagne, Barge Master, from Louisiana, Hiro Mirchandani, a Parsee and our Chief Accountant, and I could go on and on to over 100 names. I can recall their faces and their names. When I took over from Captain Giuseppe Tramontano, who was returning to Getty Oil, he was obviously held in high regard and was known throughout by everyone as “Cap'n Joe”. I am proud to say that by the time I left to join Cunard and the North Sea battle for oil that I was known as “Cap'n Mike.”
When Sammy Collins took me on he said simply that “You are a Master Mariner and that’s what I want from you - to do all the marine stuff.” It was a joy and that experience has been with me ever since.
Now before I talk about my life today let me take another look at that little port in the Arabian Desert adjacent to the world’s largest deposits of offshore oil. What did all those men have in common? What was it that enabled them all to live in harmony? It certainly was not religion, there were all the branches of Christianity from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, Islam [of course] including Sunnis and Shias, Shinto, Buddist, we even had Zoroastrians from one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. It was founded by the Prophet Zoroaster in ancient Iran approximately 3500 years ago. No Jews, but when Yehudi Menuhin, one of the most famous 20th Century Jews, landed in Kuwait with aircraft problems he was entertained most royally in the VIP suite by dignitaries until the plane was fixed. No, religion did not figure except to punctuate the day with the calls to prayer.
The most common thing is that all of these men were paid in US dollars. They were paid well according to the need for money that they would have had in their place of origin, their homeland, so obviously the Americans and Europeans would be high salaries whereas the Yemenis and Pakistanis at the bottom of the pile. But a caveat there, the man would also be paid according to his worth and/or risk that he faced eg a commercial diver high pay etc. The work was hard, often dangerous, the heat sometimes scorching, I testify to the enormous camaraderie but that sometimes hides the intensity of the work at times. There was no barrier to anyone gaining promotion - if you could do the job - that’s what mattered.
But the most common thing these men had in common was also kept in the back pocket, in a manner of speaking, and that was a picture of their family, those who they loved,. Those for whom they worked so hard that was the common denominator. All these men had wives or sweethearts, many had parents that were dear to them, children were cherished, quite often these men had a community depending on their support. A measure of this could be found in the actions of the London Rivermen - if they had the rare break they would be across the desert to Kuwait to buy jewelry or fine clothes from the souk for their loved ones. If you had a trip to Bahrain then it was pearls. The family was paramount, wives loved and honoured in recognition that theirs was a most responsible position and often the most difficult task.
My career moved thence to the last years of the 20th century -
- With Cunard I worked closely with the Shell Group off Nova Scotia, Norway, France, the Shetland Islands and Newfoundland. It was always pushing the limits of men, ships and rigs,
- With Bos Kalis Westminster and the Ali Reza Group, it was the development of ports and pilotage throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
- With the Irish Government in developing and operation fishing ports and services to the growing fishing industry including marie education..
- In the 1980s the Canadian Government restructured the East Coast fishing industry and the lead company became Fishery Products where I was Operations Manager of a fleet manned by 875 fishermen operating trawlers, gill netters, scallop dredgers, seining on the Grand Banks, and fishing for shrimp in Ungava Bay and Davis Strait. The post required cooperation with the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG), the Canadian Department of Fisheries & Oceans (DFO), the United States Coast Guard (the International Ice Patrol, Groton, Connecticut), the Fishermen Food & Allied Workers Union, the Marine Institute, St. John's, Memorial and Dalhousie Universities, and, most importantly, every Skipper or Captain. I did annual voyages with each of the fishing campaigns.
- During the final decade of the 20th Century I managed the ferry fleet providing the vital internal transport system of the Shetland Islands, a subarctic archipelago of Scotland that lies northeast of the island of Great Britain and forms part of the United Kingdom where the North Sea meets the might of the stormy Atlantic Ocean..
I still look back to that time in Ras al Khafji as the watershed. It was the time that I realised the full extent of marine knowledge that I had gained, and could use, but I had gained something even more important. Christianity teaches us that all men are equal in the face of God - I had found that to be true. I could work with all men and women on the basis of experience and mutual respect. Prejudice has no place in seafaring.
And now? Now that we are well into the 21st century and I am retired? Now that I am, well. Old? Of course I am old, I am 79 in October. Well, have I changed my views on prejudice? The simple answer is no. How could it?
The most important thing in my life is my darling wife, Tina. and she has a terminal illness and since August last year has been under the care of one Dr Mohammed Seklani. He is kind, considerate, very competent, has her trust, and listens, he really listens. I asked this Consultant one day where he came from and he answered with sadness that he had no country - that he was a Kurd. He then added that England had taken him in. Mohammed is one of many people who now work in the NHS and Britain is their home. In the past year I have met Doctors and Nurses from all parts of this big blue planet who care for us when we are sick and/or old. I saw my old RN sailor friend, Jack, in his last days blind and helpless, treated with gentle care and dignity by a Sister from Kerala. And as I write I have been told that I am clear of a cancer that killed my brother and that is due to a Consultant called Ewan Wilson who is a specialist in melanoma at the BRI. Ewan is a rugby fan [like me] and was a pretty good player, he played for the West Indies Seven and the same team as the great JPR Williams. Yes, he is an Afro Caribbean.
Lance Sergeant Beharry was formally invested with the Victoria Cross by the Queen on 27 April 2005. Johnson Beharry is the first recipient of the Victoria Cross since the posthumous awards to Lieutenant Colonel H Jones and Sergeant Ian Mackay for service in the Falklands in 1982. At the time of his award, he was one of only ten living VC recipients. He is from Grenada in the West Indies.
And now we have another West Indian lad , Kidane Coudsland. At 11, Kidane Cousland could not read, and he left school aged 15 with just a handful of GCSEs, then he joined the army. Now the 24-year-old has graduated from Sandhurst at the top of his 200-strong class. On the 15th April 2016 Kidane Cousland, 24, was given the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, beating candidates from Oxford and Cambridge to finish at the top of his class. Dressed in ceremonial uniform, he was handed the honour by his Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, from the Kingdom of Bahrain - one of the nations that also sends its officers to train at Sandhurst.
So prejudice is clearly illogical for in life we are touched by human compassion when we are in most desperate need. We do not heed the colour of the hand that soothes the brow. We do not heed anything when we need solace except that it takes away the pain. We cheer when out team scores the winning try for they are on our side. Actually it was all summed very well by Shakespeare as follows
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.”
And so, picking up where I started with the Newfoundland aphorism “where you stand depends where you sit”, it will be apparent that for me to be prejudiced would be irrational. If you examine the simple definition of prejudice ie preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience - then look at my life you will see why I say ‘irrational’. But [ah yes there is always a “but”] there is a problem and I do not know the answer.
In this essay I referred to this blue planet that we live on. It is not surprising that it is blue because 71% of the surface of Earth is covered with the oceans where I have followed my profession since I was a boy. The Earth is also covered by a thin layer of gases that we call air composed of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, 0.03% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases. This thin gaseous layer insulates the Earth from extreme temperatures; it keeps heat inside the atmosphere and it also blocks the Earth from much of the ultra-violet radiation from the Sun. Clouds form when water vapor (water that has evaporated from the surface of the Earth) condenses (turns into liquid water or solid ice) onto microscopic dust particles (or other tiny particles) floating in the air. This condensation (cloud formation) happens when warm and cold air meet, when warm air rises up the side of a mountain and cools as it rises, and when warm air flows over a colder area, like a cool body of water. So now we come to the biggest con ever pulled on mankind and it is based upon one component of our atmosphere - carbon dioxide. Note well - carbon dioxide is not one percent of the air we breathe, in fact it is not even half of one percent, it is 0.038%. Now the theory promulgated by Al Gore etc is that CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas and if you do not reverse things then you are on a handcart to hell! New York will sink beneath the waves and Gibraltar will crumble.
For the love and honour of God, give me a break! First of all CO2 is essential to life itself and if it drops then deserts grow and mankind dies, Secondly there is absolutely no way that we can discern mankind’s input into the atmosphere from CO2 from natural sources. And so the world, lead by the US, is pursuing policies predicated on a theory that cannot be proved. These policies condemn the Third World to more cycles of poverty, pain, hunger,and suffering.
I had hoped that the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States with his African ancestry would bring a deeper understanding of the issues that sustain the poverty and hunger in the Third World but I was wrong, so very wrong. He has signed the Paris Protocol, an agenda to increase use of energy resources such as wind and solar, and decrease the use of more affordable, reliable, and efficient energy from coal, oil, and natural gas. The Obama administration already has pledged billions of dollars to developing nations to “combat” climate change. The administration has pushed for building more expensive and intermittent renewable energy sources when more than a billion people live without any reliable electricity. C’mon. Mr President, think!
A better name for the Paris Protocol, then, would be Transfer of the Wealth of Nations. Large wealth transfers not only waste a lot of other people’s money, but more importantly they ignore the underlying problems that trap countries in low levels of growth and depressing standards of living. You cannot believe how sad it makes me feel.
Anyway, let me take you back to 1955 and I am an apprentice lad on board tramp ship crossing the Atlantic in very bad weather. The boatswain, an old Swede, named Ulf Larsson, has us all under the foc'sle head splicing ropes and stitching canvas. He enjoys this, a captive audience whilst he’s making a new boat cover. He detests politics and religion. He states “They should take all politicians and dominies and put them on an old ship and sink it!” He had spent nearly 3 years as a Japanese Prisoner of War.
Maybe he had a point. More wars have been fought in the name of God than any other cause and politicians account for the balance. In my mind prejudice is not the cause of wars but the result of conflict. Maybe the answer to the Newfoundland aphorism is don’t sit around so much.
Comments