maritime

 Acklam Hall Grammar School I remember the day the term 11 plus was mentioned. It was one spring day and dad said “son”, he always called me son, your 11 plus exam is soon. Are you prepared? Well, the answer was no, I had not even heard of it. Apparently, it is a written exam. The results of which determined whether you follow a route to university education or secondary school and a trades career like plumbing or building.   A sort of intelligence test as they called them in the 1950’s. The day arrived and we were given a pamphlet full of questions. Of which we had a set period of time to complete. You need to remember that in the 1950’s the UK was not metric, far from it. It had its own weird set of standards. For instance, money, pounds, shillings, and pence. 12 pennies to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound plus half pennies and farthings. Worse was length with fractions of an inch, feet, and yards stop. 3/8 of an inch, 2 feet, 6 inches, etc. Then there was weights a...

  My mothers early years - written by my brother Peter Douglas We were in my Father’s Day cabin.   He wanted me to meet the officers prior to the ship sailing across the Atlantic.   Mother had died 3 years before and I had already travelled on a couple of voyages with my shipmaster father.   This promised to be as exciting as the others. No doubt Dad hoped that somewhere I would find someone who was prepared to put up with what he called my feisty nature and marry me before my 30th birthday.   There wasn’t long to go.   Maybe there would be someone in Savannah our first stop, someone like Rhett Butler the hero in the new book I was reading.   The Chief Engineer was like so many other engineers I had met, a dour Scotsman, the First Mate a Geordie, and the Wireless Operator from Hull.   The second mate was on watch, but my father called the Third Mate up from supervising the last of the cargo loading.    Mum is in the middle and Dad ...