So you want to go to sea son?

 

You are 16 years old and what is called a late developer.

This means you were hopeless at school and averaged out near the bottom of the three classes for your year in grammar school. However after 4 years of hard slog things started to improve. X’s and Y’s in maths started to have some meaning other than some sci-fi objects! However the cultural part of the curriculum did not go well. Thrown out of arts class for painting stick figures in a portrait class of a half clad lady and sent to woodwork class was the first hint that perhaps higher education might elude me. Worse our class managed to change a serious Thomas Eliot play into a comedy due to a series of mishaps on stage. Nevertheless the English literature teacher thought it was a worthy effort and awarded us the class year prize!

Good enough at rugby to get to the Yorkshire schoolboy trials but not good enough to get more than your younger brothers share of GCE examination results.

A future prospect of 2 more years in senior school with the possibility of university and three more years was not appealing in 1957, so what then?

With 2 generations of seafarers on both sides of the family perhaps a career at sea with its practical down to earth approach might suit.

After a failed attempt to enter the Royal Navy (that is another story) it came down to the Merchant Navy as it was called in those days.

Father got me into Thos. and Jno.  Brocklebanks of Liverpool, a part of the cargo branch of Cunard operating a liner service between Europe and India and the USA. Of course this was all gobbledygook to me at the time meaning I understood nothing at all.

In the 1950’s there were two main channels to a career at sea. Go to private cadet training boarding schools such as Pangbourne, HMS Worcester and HMS Conway. Yes they were very much modelled on the Royal Navy and expensive but provide knowledge and competence to start as an apprentice officer on a ship.

The alternative and less expensive approach for parents was to send their sons to sea as apprentice officers contracted to the ship company for a period of 4 years. Essentially you would learn on the job at sea.

The contract is called an indenture and has been around for centuries. It is a legal binding document primarily used to contract labour to an employer. In this case a 16 year old boy to a shipping company.

Historically they we often cut in two, the employee taking one part and the employer the other to safeguard the document. 

However that custom did not apply in later years but the document was written on parchment or heavy linen based “paper”. The wording also reflected the legal nature of the contract and there is little difference between the document of my grandfather in 1894 and mine from 1957.

 

Grandpa's indentures

 

 

 

My indentures

 

The wording is stern and clear guidelines as to what a young teenager should not do. You will not frequent taverns or alehouses and in return you will be trained in the major elements of seamanship for a yearly sum of £132 in the first year rising to £210 in the fourth and final year. Grandpa’s equivalent sums were £5 and £15 respectively.

So what was it like to go on your first voyage as an apprentice officer in the 1950’s. Well that is another story.