maritime

  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 ...

  Living with Grandpa Grandpa had always been a part of the family. We lived in his big red brick house that was built in the 1920’s most probably from the proceeds of many successful voyages as Captain. As his wife died our young mother decided to look after him and it was therefore natural that we all lived together once he had retired. Grandpa or Gramps as we called him was my mother’s father. Born in Lincolnshire in 1879, his father was a coastguard based in Sutton Bridge, he grew up around the sea. He went to sea in 1894 at the age of 15 and spent the whole of his life at sea working for a shipping company out of Whitby, Yorkshire and settling in the fishing village of Robin Hoods Bay. He retired as Captain and it as a pensioned seafarer that I knew him until I went to sea at the age of 16 in 1957. Throughout his seafaring career he saw 2 World Wars with many adventures and incidents. For instance in the 1 st . World War he told me a tale of being bombed. He was on a sma...

  The “Stonegate” incident [1] A story of 3 ships and 3 captains in the Second World War by John Douglas, Yorkshireman and ex seafarer. Background My father and grandfather were both seamen in the Merchant Navy at the outset of the Second World War yet neither of them talked much about their experiences. It was much later that my mother provided some insight to their exploits in this period. It started with one document and two photographs: A bound copy of the London Illustrated News dated Saturday November 11 th . 1939   (1) , an original signed copy of the German pocket battleship “Deutschland” (2) and a photocopy of a newspaper cutting with the caption “Mannen med brillene er Captein Randall”   (3) ! My mother handed them to me and then gave her version of events in October 1939 concerning my grandfather, Captain F.G.W. Randall, and my father Second Officer George Douglas, both on the cargo ship ...