More memories.

[Farmer John]

This is an appeal for more detailed memories, especially from those who have a long career, no matter what part of the ship you spent your time in. I really enjoy the good yarn that tells in detail about how things were done, why things were done and who did them.

One thing I remember well (no surprise here) is chipping rust. I think on my last trip there was one whirly hammer, but it wasn't that popular and I wouldn't be surprised if it gave you white-finger as well a destroying your hearing. Then you paint it, woe betide anyone who missed bits.

What the hell is it I remember doing for the lecky, you swithed something one and then gradually increased it by turning a knob, was he just jerking our chain?

Taking deep tank temps and ullages, not that much fun when you were shipping greenies and you had to go for'd to do the job. All those thermometers in brass tubes, wipe off the palm oil, make your hands lovely and soft.

Details like that are easy to lose, but they do the memory thing for me. Tightening down deep-tank lids with just hand podgers, like doing the nuts on a cylider head on your car, start in the right place, then do them again.

Topping derricks, a distant memory, chain stoppers, feeding wire ropes round the winch drums, all these things I half remember.

[BobClay]

Can I tell you about the Weybank which was my first deep sea ship on my own as a sparky. I wasn't completely green when I went to sea as a sparky, cos I did a couple of years as an engine room rating before I went to college and got my ticket.

Anyway, we ended up in Calcutta, literally for weeks discharging cargo and back loading. During this time one of the deck cadets decided he wanted to buy a parrot. So a bunch of us went up to the bird market in Calcutta, (a place I have to admit fills me with horror now) and he bought this peculiar looking bird in a cage and gleefully bought it back to the ship. Thinking, for all I know, he'd teach it to talk and do a Robert Newton with Cap'n Flint on his shoulder about the ship in time.

Alas it didn't quite work out like that.

Whatever drugs the market boys had been feeding this bird wore off after a few hours, it became a f**king velociraptor, screeching and screaming and bouncing off the walls of the cage like a creature risen up from hell. In the end, the cadet took the cage out on deck and let it go (it was clearly wild) and it flew around the ship like a Messerschmitt fighter piloted by a demented harpy scaring the living sh*t out of everybody, before flying off into the sunset I suspect in search of some kind of nuclear weapon with which to exact revenge on human beings in general.

Can't say I blamed it that much.

[billyboy]

Originally Posted by BobClay

Can I tell you about the Weybank which was my first deep sea ship on my own as a sparky. I wasn't completely green when I went to sea as a sparky, cos I did a couple of years as an engine room rating before I went to college and got my ticket.

Anyway, we ended up in Calcutta, literally for weeks discharging cargo and back loading. During this time one of the deck cadets decided he wanted to buy a parrot. So a bunch of us went up to the bird market in Calcutta, (a place I have to admit fills me with horror now) and he bought this peculiar looking bird in a cage and gleefully bought it back to the ship. Thinking, for all I know, he'd teach it to talk and do a Robert Newton with Cap'n Flint on his shoulder about the ship in time.

Alas it didn't quite work out like that.

Whatever drugs the market boys had been feeding this bird wore off after a few hours, it became a f**king velociraptor, screeching and screaming and bouncing off the walls of the cage like a creature risen up from hell. In the end, the cadet took the cage out on deck and let it go (it was clearly wild) and it flew around the ship like a Messerschmitt fighter piloted by a demented harpy scaring the living sh*t out of everybody, before flying off into the sunset I suspect in search of some kind of nuclear weapon with which to exact revenge on human beings in general.

Can't say I blamed it that much.

[Tom Alexander]

Going through the Panama Canal -- down in the injun room taking soundings of the deep tanks filled with HFO --- Mercator gqauges located on the bulkhead about 3 feet away from the boilers --- 135 degress Fahrenheit there -- bugger if they didn't take the correct reading the first time. Pump it up all over again. Came out of there looking like you'd been in the shower for 15 minutes.

Don't even ask me about the whirly hammer!!!!!

[Farmer John]

Tom, tell us about the whirly hammer. You owe it to your public.

[billyboy]

yes yes the Hirley Wammer Thomas....sounds interesting that.

[Tom Alexander]

Don't tell me you haven't spent the whole day chipping decks with the whirly hammer, sweating like a pig in the tropical sun, covered in rust dust so badly that you can taste it for days afterwards? At least we did get safety goggles, although a decent dust mask wasn't even thought of in those days. Did the best you could with a scarf, or a big handkershief.

[sibby]

A bosun I sailed with on Bamenda Palm in the sixties, his name was Norman O'brian from Liverpool, bought an African grey parrot for his kids. Norman had a stock answer for everything if you wanted something -uck off. One day about five of us were sat in his cabin having a beer when all of a sudden we heard his voice say -uck off. We all looked at him and he said it wasn't him, you guessed it, it was the parrot, poor Norman panicked,he said if he took it home to the kids his wife would do her nut. He spent the rest of the trip trying not to F and blind in his cabin. He did take it home.

[sibby]

I used to prefer the windy hammer for chipping better than banging away with a chipping hammer.

[BobClay]

I love the idea of a parrot that swears !! That's got to be the very definition of humour. I've only experienced one that did, in a pub in my home town. It actually made the national press for its bad language.

It's favourite saying was when someone came through the door: "You can f*ck off for a start." There's no doubt in my mind the landlady, whom I knew quite well, had trained it to do that. It had all the locals in hysterics every time.

And how could you take offence ? .... it didn't really know what it was saying. (Or did it ?)

[woodend]

One memory I know I haven't shared on here was when I was Senior Second Mate of the ACCRA. I had been there over a year when this incident happened. When the clocks were due to change overnight I sent out the 'clock chits' to the heads of department Captain, Chief, Purser, Chief Steward, Sparks, Engine Room etc. I would write the chits out, sign them, find a tame Apprentice and despatch them. Simple except on this particular day I couldn't find an Apprentice for some reason or other. I thought what the heck I will take them round myself. That is where the fun started! No problem at all with the principal department heads, a few words with each and on my way again. The Chief Steward was obviously 'entertaining' when I knocked on the door as I was 'told to 'come in my Boy!' He just about had apoplexy when I walked in. I was still chuckling at this when I made my 'deliberate?' mistake. I got in the 'engineers lift', the entrance to which was in their communal bath room. I pressed platform and down in the bowels of her we went until somewhere we stopped obviously not too far from a boiler. I waited quite a while before pressing the alarm bell but gradually the sweat started. Off came my jacket and tie, Then virtually everything else. The lift then rumbled back into action and down to the platform it went. When the lift doors opened there was virtually every Engineer, Fridge man and Electrician waiting for this sweat ball!. 'We have waited over a year to catch you' I was told but at least after dressing again I was taken by the Chief for a very cold beer and the Engineers were on the right time next morning.
Happy Days.

[Pat Kennedy]

One particular memory has stuck in my mind for over fifty years, and thinking about it now still brings a lump to my throat.
I was coasting Blue Funnel's Ascanius as JOS in 1960. We joined her in Rotterdam and there were a few of the deep sea crowd who wanted to stay in her for the coastwise trip. One of them had bought a little baby monkey in Java, and he kept it in his cabin most of the time but allowed it out on deck when the ship was at sea.
It was a lovely little thing, named Jacko, and it quickly became a pet of all hands. It would often get into your room and cause some havoc, it particularly liked eating cigarette papers and boxes of matches, and scattering your baccy all over the place.
Out on deck, he would often scamper aloft and chatter away from the crosstrees or the top of sampson posts,(called Columns in Blue Flue) and thought nothing of running down topping lifts and stays and then racing away at smoko to take command of the messroom and share the tabnabs,.
We sailed from Rotterdam to all the usual European range ports, and then, unusually for BF, transited the Kiel canal and went to Gdynia in Poland. After a few days there we set off for Copenhagen. A couple of days there and we sailed for the next port, Aarhus.
It was when leaving Copenhagen that it happened. Jacko had climbed up the foremast as we went to stations and sat on the rim of the crow's nest.
As we finished stowing the mooring ropes and began to leave the focsle head, Jacko leaped onto the forestay and scuttled down at speed. To everyone's horror he lost his grip and went over the side. We caught a glimpse of him frantically waving his little arms as he was swept along the stbd side to oblivion.
Grown men were openly sobbing as we proceeded aft, it was one of the most gut wrenching things I ever saw.
Pat

[Tom Alexander]

Grown men sobbing -- leaving New Westminster, B.C., one misty, rainy, cold night. Most of the deck crew were from Islay and as we singled up and cast off to leave to return to the "old" country, there was a solitary piper in full regalia piping a lament on the quay.