Report on board S.S. Mahout 1400 GMT Birkenhead Friday latest. I don’t remember much about the journey to Birkenhead except it was raining. It would have been one of my first train journey’s alone as a sixteen-year-old boy off to sea. In 1957 the options for getting across the river Mersey were by ferry or by the tunnel. Probably used a taxi and the tunnel to arrive at Birkenhead docks. The ship was berthed in the Vittoria docks, the main dock for ships trading with the Far East. Clan Line, Blue Funnel and Brocklebanks all used this dock. The entrance to the quay where the ship was moored was through a warehouse so I gingerly went through a large door into a world of noise and apparent chaos. Stack of boxes, steel pipes, tractors, cement blocks all lay around in this vast space. There were dockworkers everywhere loading tractors with goods and driving them out to the quay. “Get out of the way, you stupid sod”, shouted a man by the door to the quayside. “You will get...
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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 ...